Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

This is the time to talk about Raymond Andrew Joubert. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to do my best. So pour yourself another cup of coffee, dear, and if you’ve got a bottle of brandy handy, you may want to doctor it up a bit. Here comes Part Three.

I have all the newspaper clippings beside me on the desk, but the articles and news items don’t tell all I know, let alone all there is to know-I doubt if anyone has the slightest idea of all the things Joubert did (including Joubert himself, I imagine), and that’s probably a blessing. The stuff the papers could only hint at and the stuff that didn’t make them at all is real nightmare-fodder, and I wouldn’t want to know all of it. Most of the stuff that isn’t in the papers came to me during the last week courtesy of a strangely quiet, strangely chastened Brandon Milheron. I’d asked him to come over as soon as the connections between Joubert’s story and my own had become too obvious to ignore.

“You think this was the guy, don’t you?” he asked. “The one who was in the house with you?”

“Brandon,” I said, “I know it’s the guy.”

He sighed, looked down at his hands for a minute, then looked up at me again-we were in this very room, it was nine o'clock in the morning, and there were no shadows to hide his face that time. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “I didn’t believe you then-”

“I know,” I said, as kindly as I could.

“-but I do now. Dear God. How much do you want to know, Jess?”

I took a deep breath and said, “Everything you can find out.”

He wanted to know why. “I mean, if you say it’s your business and I should butt out, I guess I’ll have to accept that, but you’re asking me to re-open a matter the firm considers closed. If someone who knows I was watching out for you last fall notices me sniffing around Joubert this winter, it’s not impossible that-”

“That you could get in trouble,” I said. It was something I hadn’t considered.

“Yes,” he said, “but I’m not terribly concerned about that-I’m a big boy, and I can take care of myself… at least I think I can. I’m a lot more concerned about you, Jess. You could wind up on the front page again, after all our work to get you off it as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Even that’s not the major thing-it’s miles from the major thing. This is the nastiest criminal case to break in northern New England since World War II. I mean some o this stuff is so gruesome it’s radioactive, and you shouldn’t plink yourself down in the fallout zone without a damned good reason.” He laughed, a little nervously. “Hell, shouldn’t plink myself down there without a damned good reason.”

I got up, walked across to him, and took one of his hands with my left hand. “I couldn’t explain in a million years why,” I said, “but I think I can tell you what-will that do, at least for a start?”

He folded his hand gently over mine and nodded his head.

“There are three things,” I said. “First, I need to know he’s real. Second, I need to know the things he did are real. Third, I need to know I’ll never wake up again with him standing in my bedroom.”

That brought it all back, Ruth, and I began to cry. There was nothing tricky or calculating about those tears; they just came. Nothing I could have done would have stopped them.

“Please help me, Brandon,” I said, “Every time I turn off the light, he’s standing across the room from me in the dark, and I’m afraid that unless I can turn a spotlight on him, that’s going to go on forever. There isn’t anybody else I can ask, and I have to know. Please help me.”

He let go of my hand, produced a handkerchief from somewhere inside that day’s screamingly neat lawyer’s suit, and wiped my face with it. He did it as gently as my Mom used to when I came into the kitchen bawling my head off because I’d skinned my knee-that was back in the early years, before I turned into the family’s squeaky wheel, you understand.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll find out everything I can, and I’ll pass it all on to you… unless and until you tell me to stop, that is. But I have a feeling you better fasten your seatbelt.”

He found out quite a lot, and now I’m going to pass it on to you, Ruth, but fair warning: he was right about the seatbelt. If you decide to skip some of the next few pages, I’ll understand. I wish I could skip writing them, but I have an idea that’s also part of the therapy. The final part, I hope.

This section of the story-what I suppose I could call Brandon’s Tale-starts back in 1984 or 1985. That was when cases of graveyard vandalism started popping up in the Lakes District of western Maine. There were similar cases reported in half a dozen small towns across the state line and into New Hampshire. Stuff like tombstone-tipping, spray-paint graffiti, and stealing commemorative flags is pretty common stuff out in the willywags, and of course there’s always a bunch of smashed pumpkins to swamp out of the local boneyard on November lst, but these crimes went a lot further than pranks or petty theft. Desecration was the word Brandon used when he brought me his first report late last week, and that word had started showing up on most of the police crime-report forms by 1988.

The crimes themselves seemed abnormal to the people who discovered them, and to those who investigated them, but the modus operandi was sane enough; carefully organized and focused. Someone-possibly two or three someones, but more likely a single person-was breaking into the crypts and mausoleums of small-town cemeteries with the efficiency of a good burglar breaking into a house or store. He was apparently arriving at these jobs equipped with drills, a bolt-cutter, heavy-duty hacksaws, and probably a winch-Brandon says a lot of four-wheel-drive vehicles come equipped with them these days.

The breaks were always aimed at the crypts and mausoleums, never at individual graves, and almost all of them came in winter, when the ground is too hard to dig in and the bodies have to be stored until the deep frosts let go. Once the perpetrator gained entry, he used the bolt-cutter and power drill to open the coffins. He systematically stripped the corpses of any jewelry they might have been wearing when they were interred; he used pliers to pull gold teeth and teeth with gold fillings.

Those acts are despicable, but at least they’re understandable. Robbery was only where this guy got started, though. He gouged out eyes, tore off ears, cut dead throats. In February of 1989, two corpses in the Chilton Remembrance Cemetery were found without noses-he apparently knocked them off with a hammer and a chisel. The officer who caught that one told Brandon, “it would have been easy-it was like a deep-freeze in there, and they probably broke off like Popsicles. The real question is what does a guy do with two frozen noses once he has them? Does he put “em on his keychain? Maybe sprinkle “em with nacho cheese and then zap “em in the microwave? What?”

Almost all the desecrated corpses were found minus feet and hands, sometimes also arms and legs, and in several cases the man doing this also took heads and sex-organs. Forensic evidence suggests he used an axe and a butcher-knife for the gross work and a variety of scalpels for the finer stuff. He wasn’t bad, either. “A talented amateur,” one of the Chamberlain County deputies told Brandon. “I wouldn’t want him working on my gall-bladder, but I guess I’d trust him to take a mole off my arm… it he was full of Halcion or Prozac, that is.”

In a few cases he opened up the bodies and/or skull cases and filled them with animal excrement. What the police saw more frequently were cases of sexual desecration. He was an equal-opportunity kind of guy when it came to stealing gold teeth, jewelry, and limbs, but when it came to taking sexual equipment-and having sex with the dead-he stuck strictly to the gentlemen.

This may have been extremely lucky for me.

I learned a lot about the way rural police departments work during the month or so following my escape from our house by the lake, but that’s nothing compared with what I’ve learned in the last week or so. One of the most surprising things is how discreet and tactful small-town cops can be. I guess when you know everybody in the area you patrol by their first names, and are related to a good many of them, discretion becomes almost as natural as breathing.

The way they handled my case is one example of this strange, sophisticated discretion; the way they handled Joubert’s is another. The investigation went on for seven years, remember, and a lot of people were in on it before it ended two State Police departments, four country sheriffs, thirty-one deputies, and God knows how many local cops and constables. It was right there at the front of their open files, and by 1989 they even had a name for him-Rudolph, as in Valentino. They talked about Rudolph when they were in District Court, waiting to testify on their other cases, they compared notes on Rudolph at law-enforcement seminars in Augusta and Derry and Waterville, they discussed him on their coffee-breaks. “And we took him home,” one of the cops told Brandon-the same guy who told him about the noses, as a matter of fact. “You bet we did. Guys like us always take guys like Rudolph home. You catch up on the latest details at backyard barbecues, maybe kick it around with a buddy from another department while you’re watching your kids play Little League ball. Because you never know when you’re going to put something together in a new way and hit the jackpot.”

But here’s the really amazing part (and you’re probably way ahead of me… if you’re not in the bathroom tossing your cookies, that is): for all those years all those cops knew they had a real live monster-a ghoul, in fact-running around the western part of the state, and the story never surfaced in the press untilJoubert was caught! In a way I find that weird and a little spooky, but in a much larger way I find it wonderful. I guess the law-enforcement battle isn’t going so well in a lot of the big cities, but out here in East Overshoe, whatever they’re doing still seems to work just fine.

Of course you could argue that there’s plenty of room for improvement when it takes seven years to catch a nut like Joubert, but Brandon clarified that for m e in a hurry. He explained that the perp (they really do use that word) was operating exclusively in one-horse towns where budget shortfalls have forced the cops to deal only with the most serious and immediate problems… which means crimes against the living rather than against the dead. The cops say there are at least two hot-car rings and four chop-shops operating in the western half of the state, and those are only the ones they know about. Then there are the murderers, the wife-beaters, the robbers, the speeders, and the drunks. Above all, there’s the old dope-ola. It gets bought, it gets sold, it gets grown, and people keep hurting or killing each other over it. According to Brandon the Police Chief over in Norway won’t even use the word cocaine anymore-he calls it Powdered Shithead, and in his written reports he calls it Powdered S******d. I got the point he was trying to make. When you’re a small-town cop trying to ride herd on the whole freakshow in a four-year-old Plymouth cruiser that feels like it’s going to fall apart every time you push it over seventy, your job gets prioritized in a hurry, and a guy who likes to play with dead people is a long way from the top of the list.

I listened to all this carefully, and I agreed, but not all the way. “Some of it feels true, but some of it feels a little self-serving,” I said. “I mean, the stuff Joubert was doing… well, it went a little further than just “playing with dead people,” didn’t it? Or am I wrong?”

“You’re not wrong at all,” he said.

What neither of us wanted to come right out and say was that for seven years this aberrant soul had gone flitting from town to town getting blowjobs from the dead, and to me putting a stop to that seemed quite a bit more important than nabbing teenage girls who’ve been shoplifting cosmetics at the local drugstore or finding out who’s been growing goofy-weed in the woodlot behind the Baptist church.

But the important thing is that no one forgot him, and everyone kept comparing notes. A perp like Rudolph makes cops uneasy for all kinds of reasons, but the major one is that a guy crazy enough to do things like that to dead people might be crazy enough to try doing them to ones that are still alive… not that you’d live very long after Rudolph decided to split your head open with his trusty axe. The police were also troubled by the missing limbs-what were those for? Brandon says an uncredited memo saying “Maybe Rudolph the Lover is really Hannibal the Cannibal” circulated briefly in the Oxford County Sheriff’s Office. It was destroyed not because the idea was regarded as a sick joke-it wasn’t-but because the Sheriff was afraid it might leak to the press.

Whenever one of the local law-enforcement agencies could afford the men and the time, they’d stake out some boneyard or other. There are a lot of them in western Maine, and I guess it had almost become a kind of hobby to some of these guys by the time the case finally broke. The theory was just that it you keep shooting the dice long enough, you’re bound to roll your point sooner or later. And that, essentially, is what finally happened.

Early last week-actually about ten days ago now-Castle County Sheriff Norris Ridgewick and one of his deputies were parked in the doorway of an abandoned barn close to Homeland Cemetery. This is on a secondary road that runs by the back gate. It was two o'clock in the morning and they were just getting ready to pack it in for the night when the deputy, John LaPointe, heard a motor. They never saw the van until it was actually pulling up to the gate because it was a snowy night and the guy’s headlights weren’t on. Deputy LaPointe wanted to take the guy as soon as they saw him get out of the van and go to work on the wrought-iron cemetery gate with a spreader, but the Sheriff restrained him. “Ridgewick’s a funny-looking duck,” Brandon said, “but he knows the value of a good bust. He never loses sight of the courtroom in the heat of the moment. He learned from Alan Pangborn, the guy who had the job before him, and that means he learned from the best.”

Ten minutes after the van went in through the gate, Ridgewick and LaPointe followed with their own headlights out and their unit just barely creeping along through the snow. They followed the van’s tracks until they were pretty sure where the guy was going-the town crypt set into the side of the hill. Both of them were thinking Rudolph, but neither one of them said so out loud. LaPointe said it would have been like jinxing a guy who’s throwing a no-hitter.

Ridgewick told his deputy to stop the cruiser just around the side of the hill from the crypt-said he wanted to give the guy all the rope he needed to hang himself. As it turned out, Rudolph ended up with enough to hang himself from the moon. When Ridgewick and LaPointe finally moved in with their guns drawn and their flashlights on, they caught Raymond Andrew Joubert half in and half out of an opened coffin. He had his axe in one hand, his cock in the other, and LaPointe said he looked ready to do business with either one.

I guess Joubert scared the hell out of them both when they first saw him in their lights, and I’m not a bit surprised-although I flatter myself that I can imagine better than most what it must have been like, coming on a creature like him in a cemetery crypt at two in the morning. All other circumstances aside, Joubert suffers from acromegaly, a progressive enlargement of the hands, feet, and face that happens when the pituitary gland goes into warp-drive. It’s what caused his forehead to bulge the way it does, and his lips to pooch out. He also has abnormally long arms; they dangle all the way down to his knees.

There was a big fire in Castle Rock about a year ago-it burned most of the downtown-and these days the Sheriff jugs most serious offenders in Chamberlain or Norway, but neither Sheriff Ridgewick nor Deputy LaPointe wanted to make the trip over snowy roads at three in the morning, so they took him back to the renovated shed they’re using as a cop-shop these days.

“They claimed it was the late hour and the snowy roads,” Brandon said, “but I have an idea there was a little more to it than that. I don’t think Sheriff Ridgewick wanted to turn over the pinata to anyone else until he’d taken at least one good crack at it himself. Anyway, Joubert was no trouble-he sat in the back of the cruiser, chipper as a chickadee, looking like something that had escaped from an episode of Tales from the Crypt and-both of them swear this is true singing “Happy Together,” that old Turtles tune.

Ridgewick radioed ahead for a couple of temp deputies to meet them. He made sure Joubert was locked up tight and the deputies were armed with shotguns and plenty of fresh coffee before he and LaPointe left again. They drove back to Homeland for the van. Ridgewick put on gloves, sat on one of those green plastic Hefty bags the cops like to call “evidence blankets” when they use them on a case, and ran the vehicle back to town. He drove with all the windows open and said the van still stank like a butcher’s shop after a six-day power failure.”

Ridgewick got his first good look into the back of the van when he got it under the arc-lights of the town garage. There were several rotting limbs in the storage compartments running along the sides. There was also a wicker box, much smaller than the one I saw, and a Craftsman tool-case full of burglar’s tools, When Ridgewick opened the wicker box, he found six penises strung on a length of jute twine. He said he knew it for what it was at once: a necklace. Joubert later admitted that he often wore it when he went out on his graveyard expeditions, and stated his belief that if he’d been wearing it on his last trip, he never would have been caught. “It brung me a power of good luck,” he said, and considering how long it took to catch him, Ruth, I think you’d have to say he had a point.

The worst thing, however, was the sandwich lying on the passenger seat. The thing poking out from between the two slices of Wonder Bread was pretty clearly a human tongue. It had been slathered with that bright yellow mustard kids like.

“Ridgewick managed to get out of the van before he threw up,” Brandon said. “Good thing-the State Police would have torn him a new asshole if he’d puked on the evidence. On the other hand, I’d have wanted him removed from his job for psychological reasons if he hadn’t thrown up.”

They moved Joubert over to Chamberlain shortly after sunrise. While Ridgewick was turned around in the front seat of the cruiser, reading Joubert his rights through the mesh (it was the second or third time he’d done it-Ridgewick is apparently nothing if not methodical), Joubert interrupted to say he “might have done somefing bad to Daddy-Mummy, awful sorry.” They had by that time established from documents in Joubert’s wallet that he was living in Motton, a farming town just across the river from Chamberlain, and as soon as Joubert was safely locked up in his new quarters, Ridgewick informed officers from both Chamberlain and Motton what Joubert had told them.

On the way back to Castle Rock, LaPointe asked Ridgewick what he thought the cops headed for Joubert’s house might find. Ridgewick said, “I don’t know, but I hope they remembered to take their gas masks.”

A version of what they found and the conclusions they drew came out in the papers over the following days, growing as it did, of course, but the State Police and the Maine Attorney General’s Off ice had a pretty good picture of what had been going on in the farmhouse on Kingston Road by the time the sun went down on Joubert’s first day behind bars. The couple Joubert called his “Daddy-Mummy'-actually his stepmother and her commonlaw husband-were dead, all right. They’d been dead for months, although Joubert continued to speak as if the “somefing bad” had happened only days or hours ago. He had scalped them both, and eaten most of “Daddy.”

There were body-parts strewn all over the house, some rotting and maggoty in spite of the cold weather, others carefully cured and preserved. Most of the cured parts were male sex-organs. On a shelf by the cellar stairs, the police found about fifty Ball jars containing eyes, lips, fingers, toes, and testicles. Joubert was quite the home canner. The house was also filled-and I do mean filled-with stolen goods, mostly from summer camps and cottages. Joubert calls them “my things'-appliances, tools, gardening equipment, and enough lingerie to stock a Victoria’s Secret boutique. He apparently liked to wear it.

The police are still trying to sort out the body-parts that came from Joubert’s grave-robbing expeditions from those that came from his other activities. They believe he may have killed as many as a dozen people over the last five years, all hitchhiking drifters he picked up in his van. The total may go higher, Brandon says, but the forensic work is very slow. Joubert himself is no help, not because he won’t talk but because he talks too much. According to Brandon, he’s confessed to over three hundred crimes already, including the assassination of George Bush. He seems to believe Bush is actually Dana Carvey, the guy who plays The Church Lady on Saturday Night Live.

He’s been in and out of various mental institutions since the age of fifteen, when he was arrested for engaging in unlawful sexual congress with his cousin. The cousin in question was two at the time. He was a victim of sex abuse himself, of course-his father, his stepfather, and his stepmother all apparently had a go at him. What is it they used to say? The family that plays together stays together?

He was sent to Gage Point-a sort of combination detox, halfway house, and mental institution for adolescents in Hancock County-on a charge of gross sexual abuse, and released as cured four years later, at the age of nineteen. This was in 1973, He spent the second halt of 1975 and most of 1976 at AMHI, in Augusta. This was as a result of Joubert’s Fun with Animals Period. I know I probably shouldn’t be joking about these things, Ruth-you’ll think I’m horrible-but in truth, I don’t know what else to do. I sometimes feel that if I don’t joke, able to stop. He was sticking I’ll start to cry, and that it I start to cry I won’t be cats in trash barrels and then blowing them to pieces with the big firecrackers they call “can-crushers,” that’s what he was doing… and every now and then, presumably when he needed a break in the old routine, he would nail a small dog to a tree.

In “79 he was sent away to Juniper Hill for raping and blinding a six-year-old boy. This time it was supposed to be for good, but when it comes to politics and state-run institutions-especially state-run mental institutions-I think it’s fair to say that nothing is forever. He was released from Juniper Hill in 1984, once more adjudged “cured'. Brandon feels-and so do I-that this second cure had more to do with cuts in the state’s mental health budget than with any miracle of modern science or psychiatry. At any rate, Joubert returned to Motton to live with his stepmother and her commonlaw, and the state forgot about him… except to issue him a driver’s license, that is. He took a road-test and got a perfectly legal one-in some ways I find this the most amazing fact of all-and at some point in late 1984 or early 1985, he started using it to tour the local cemeteries.

He was a busy boy. In the wintertime he had his crypts and mausoleums; in the fall and the spring he broke into seasonal camps and homes all over western Maine, taking anything that struck his fancy-'my things,” you know. He apparently had a great fondness for framed photographs. They found four trunks of them in the attic of the house on Kingston Road. Brandon says they are still counting, but that the total number will probably be over seven hundred.

It’s impossible to say to what extent” Daddy-Mummy” participated in what was going on before Joubert did away with them. It must have been a lot, because Joubert hadn’t made the slightest effort to hide what he was doing. As for the neighbors, their motto seems to be, “They paid their bills and kept to themselves. Wasn’t nothing to us.” It’s got a gruesome kind of perfection to it, wouldn’t you say? New England Gothic, by way of The Journal of Aberrant Psychiatry.

They found another, bigger, wicker box in the cellar. Brandon got Xeroxes of the police photos documenting this particular find, but he was hesitant about showing them to me at first. Well… that’s actually a little too mild. It was the one and only place where he gave into the temptation all men seem to feel you know the one I mean, to play John Wayne. “Come on, little lady, jest wait until we go by all them dead Injuns and keep lookin” off into the desert. I’ll tell you when we’re past.”

“I’m willing to accept that Joubert was probably in the house with you,” he said. “I’d have to be a goddam ostrich with my head stuck in the sand not to at least entertain the idea; everything fits. But answer me this: why are you going on with it, Jessie? What possible good can it do?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, Ruth, but I did know one thing: there was nothing I could do that would make things any worse than they already were. So I hung tough until Brandon realized the little lady wasn’t going to get back into the stagecoach until she had gotten her look at the dead Injuns. So I saw the pictures. The one I looked at the longest had a little sign saying state police exhibit 217 propped up in the corner. Looking at it was like looking at a videotape someone has somehow made of your worst nightmare. The photo showed a square wicker basket standing open so the photographer could shoot the contents, which happened to be heaps of bones with a wild collection of jewelry mixed in: some trumpery, some valuable, some stolen from summer homes and some doubtless stripped from the cold hands of corpses kept in small-town cold-storage.

I looked at that picture, so glaring and somehow bald, as police evidence photographs always are, and I was back in the lake house again-it happened right away, with no lag whatsoever, Not remembering, do you understand? I’m there, handcuffed and helpless, watching the shadows fly across his grinning face, hearing myself telling him that he is scaring me. And then he bends over to get the box, those feverish eyes never leaving my face, and I see him-I see it-reaching in with its twisted, misshapen hand, I see that hand starting to stir up the bones and jewels, and I hear the sounds they make, like dirty castanets.

And do you know what haunts me most of all? I thought it was my father, that was my Daddy, come back from the dead to do what he’d wanted to do before. “Go ahead,” I told him. “Go ahead, but promise you’ll unlock me and let me out afterward. Just promise me that.”

I think I would have said the same it I’d known who he really was, Ruth. Think? I know I would have said the same. Do you understand? I would have let him put his cock-the cock he stuck down the rotting throats of dead men-into me, if only he would have promised me I didn’t have to die the dog’s death of muscle-cramps and convulsions that was waiting for me. If only he would have promised to set me free.

Jessie stopped for a moment, breathing so hard and fast she was almost panting. She looked at the words on the screen-the unbelievable, unspeakable admission on the screen-and felt a sudden strong urge to delete them. Not because she was ashamed for Ruth to read them; she was, but that wasn’t it. What she didn’t want to do was deal with them, and she supposed that if she didn’t delete them, she would have to do just that. Words had a way of creating their own imperatives.

Not until they’re out of your hands, they don’t, Jessie thought, and reached out with the black-clad index finger of her right hand. She touched the delete button-stroked it, actually-and then drew back. It was the truth, wasn’t it?

“Yes,” she said in the same muttery voice she’d used so often during her hours of captivity-only at least now it wasn’t Goody or the mind-Ruth she was talking to; she had gotten back to herself without having to go all the way around Robin Hood’s barn to do it. That was maybe progress of a sort. “Yes, it’s the truth, all right.”

And nothing but, so help her God. She wouldn’t use the delete button on the truth, no matter how nasty some people including herself, as a matter of fact-might find that truth to be. She would let it stand. She might decide not to send the letter after all (didn’t know if it was even fair to send it, to burden a woman she hadn’t seen in years with this ration of pain and madness), but she would not delete it. Which meant it would be best to finish now, in a rush, before the last of her courage deserted her and the last of her strength ran out.

Jessie leaned forward and began typing again.

Brandon said, “There’s one thing you’re going to have to remember and accept, Jessie-there’s no empirical proof. Yes, I know your rings are gone, but about them you could have been right the first time-some light-fingered cop could have taken them.”

“What about Exhibit 217?” I asked. “The wicker box?”

He shrugged, and I had one of those sudden bursts of understanding the poets call epiphanies. He was holding onto the possibility that the wicker box had just been a coincidence. That wasn’t easy, but it was easier than having to accept all the rest-most of all the fact that a monster like Joubert could actually touch the life of someone he knew and liked. What I saw in Brandon Milheron’s face that day was perfectly simple: he was going to ignore a whole stack of circumstantial evidence and concentrate on the lack of empirical evidence. He was going to hold onto the idea that the whole thing was simply my imagination, seizing on the Joubert case to explain a particularly vivid hallucination I’d had while I was handcuffed to the bed.

And that insight was followed by a second one, an even clearer one; that I could do it, too. I could come to believe I had been wrong… but if I succeeded in doing that, my life would be ruined. The voices would start to come back not just yours or Punkin’s or Nora Callighan’s but my mother’s and my sister’s and my brother’s and kids I chummed with in high school and people I met for ten minutes in doctors” off ices and God alone knows how many others. I think that most of them would be those scary UFO voices.

I couldn’t bear that, Ruth, because in the two months after my hard time in the house by the lake, I remembered a lot of things I had spent a lot of years repressing. I think the most important of those memories came to the surface between the first operation on my hand and the second, when I was “on medication” (this is the technical hospital term for “stoned out of your gourd”) almost all the time. The memory was this: in the two years or so between the day of the eclipse and the day of my brother Will’s birthday party-the one where he goosed me during the croquet game-I heard all those voices almost constantly. Maybe Will’s goosing me acted as some kind of rough, accidental therapy. I suppose it’s possible; don’t they say that our ancestors invented cooking after eating what forest fires left behind? Although if some serendipitous therapy took place that day, I have an idea that it didn’t come with the goose but when I hauled off and pounded Will one in the mouth for doing it… and at this point none of that matters. What matters is that, following that day on the deck, I spent two years sharing space in my head with a kind of whispering choir, dozens of voices that passed judgment on my every word and action. Some were kind and supportive, but most were the voices of people who were afraid, people who were confused, people who thought Jessie was a worthless little baggage who deserved every bad thing that happened to her and who would have to pay double for every good thing. For two years I heard those voices, Ruth, and when they stopped, I forgot them. Not a little at a time, but all at once.

How could a thing like that happen? I don’t know, and in a very real sense, I don’t care. I might if the change had made things worse, I suppose, but it didn’t-it made them immeasurably better. I spent the two years between the eclipse and the birthday party in a kind of fugue state, with my conscious mind shattered into a lot of squabbling fragments, and the real epiphany was this: if I let nice, kind Brandon Milheron have his way, I’d end up right back where I started headed down Nuthouse Lane by way of Schizophrenia Boulevard. And this time there’s no little brother around to administer crude shock therapy; this time I have to do it myself just as I had to get out of Gerald’s goddam handcuffs myself.

Brandon was watching me, trying to gauge the result of what he’d said. He must not have been able to, because he said it again, this time in a slightly different way. “You have to remember that, no matter how it looks, you could be wrong. And I think you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re never going to know, one way or the other, for sure.”

“No, I don’t.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“There’s still an excellent chance that I can find out for sure. And you’re going to help me, Brandon.”

He was starting to smile that less-than-pleasant smile again, the one I bet he doesn’t even know is in his repertoire, the one that says you can’t live with “em and you can’t shoot “em. “Oh? And how am I going to do that?”

“By taking me to see Joubert,” I said,

“Oh, no,” he said. “That’s the one thing I absolutely will not-can not-do, Jessie.”

I’ll spare you the hour of round-and-round which followed, a conversation that degenerated at one point to such intellectually profound statements as “You’re crazy, Jess” and “Quit trying to run my life, Brandon.” I thought of waving the cudgel of the press in front of him-it was the one thing I was almost sure would make him cave in-but in the end, I didn’t have to. All I had to do was cry. In a way it makes me feel unbelievably sleazy to write that, but in another way it does not; in another way I recognize it as just another symptom of what’s wrong between the fellers and the girls in this particular square-dance. He didn’t entirely believe I was serious until I started to cry, you see.

To make a long story at least a little shorter, he got on the telephone, made four or five quick calls, and then came back with the news that Joubert was going to be arraigned the following day in Cumberland County District Court on a number of subsidiary charges-mostly theft. He said that if I was really serious-and if I had a hat with a veil-he’d take me. I agreed at once, and although Brandon’s face said he believed he was making one of the biggest mistakes of his life, he stuck by his word.

Jessie paused again, and when she began to type once more she did so slowly, looking through the screen to yesterday, when last night’s six inches of snow had still been just a smooth white threat in the sky. She saw blue flashers on the road ahead, felt Brandon’s blue Beamer slowing down.

We got to the hearing late because there was an overturned trailer truck on I-295-that’s the city bypass. Brandon didn’t say so, but I know he was hoping we’d get there too late, that Joubert would already have been taken back to his cell at the end of the County Jail’s maximum-security wing, but the guard at the courthouse door said the hearing was still going on, although finishing up. As Brandon opened the door for me, he leaned close to my ear and murmured: “Put the veil down, Jessie, and keep it down.” I lowered it and Brandon put a hand on my waist and led me inside. The courtroom…

Jessie stopped, looking out the window into the darkening afternoon with eyes that were wide and gray and blank.

Remembering.