“Where’s Penny? May I talk to her? We were having an important conversation.”
Eve shrugged her shoulders. “How should I know?” she answered in a singsong voice. “I’m not her keeper.”
“Do you know Penny?”
Mitch had experience with DID patients who could communicate with their alters, but oftentimes the patient wasn’t aware they had alternate personality states.
“I know who Penny is, of course,” said Eve. “We have the same mother, after all. But this is no place for a girl like her. Really, it’s quite awful in here.”
Eve had spoken confidently of Penny’s existence, as if the two inhabited different bodies. Her response was consistent with what was in her case file. Eve knew she had DID and viewed Penny as one of her alters. In fact, all of the alters, Eve, Ruby, and Chloe, shared the same backstory. They’d grown up in Swampscott, had two brothers named Jack and Ryan, and a father who had died. If asked, each would say that they were abandoned in a park as a young person, and that Grace and Arthur Francone had adopted them.
Mitch cursed himself. He had pushed her hard on what happened that night, and surprisingly his probing, not the attack by the guards, was what had pushed Penny away. She was protecting something, that’s the feeling Mitch got. He knew the barriers between alters could be as fortified as a border crossing, and as thin as a membrane. A rush of sympathy overtook him. What a horribly disorienting, isolating, and confusing condition it must be, he thought. The intermingling of different voices, different personas within a single consciousness, redefined the notion of self and had to be a hellish way to go through life.
Convincing as the switch had been, Mitch reminded himself that these alters might be nothing more than an elaborate invention. Until he made his own diagnosis, his sympathies must not occlude caution and careful observation.
“So, Eve, tell me, do you know why you’re here?” Gut instinct told Mitch to embrace Eve rather than push for Penny’s return.
“I do.”
“Can you tell me?”
“Pretty sure you have a thing called a file on me. Have you read it, Doctor?” She smiled wickedly.
“I have. I just wanted to hear it in your words, get your take on what happened.”
She appeared skeptical, a clear signal to Mitch that he had best move on to another topic.
“Penny was here, not long ago. Did you know that?”
Again nothing.
“She said she remembered something from that night that brought you here, but she didn’t say what it was. Do you know what she remembered?” Mitch allowed a bit of desperation to leak into his voice, playing, he hoped, to Eve’s ego.
“Maaaaaaybbeee.”
The way Eve studied Mitch, a coquettish glimmer in her eyes, made him shudder. It was an alluring stare, one brimming with a poise that was startling to see in a seventeen-year-old girl just coming into her own.
“Can you tell me?”
“I think you’d best ask Penny.”
Seeing the circular nature of this conversation, Mitch switched tactics.
“Do you remember the night you were arrested?”
“Hard to forget.”
“So you know what happened, why you’re here?”
“The file,” she said, as if he was the one who needed a reminder.
“Was someone in the apartment with you that night?”
There was nothing in the police report to indicate someone else was involved with the murder. The police had found Penny alone with Rachel in the lower-level apartment of a multifamily home in Lynn. Mitch speculated that one of Penny’s alters had leaked into her subconscious, giving her the impression that another person was present. But that theory needed to be verified.
“I can’t remember much from that night,” Eve said flatly. “A bunch of cops piled on top of me and they took me to jail.”
“You don’t remember killing Rachel Boyd?”
“I do not. And I told the police that, but they didn’t seem to believe me.”
Mitch wasn’t sure what to make of Eve’s conviction.
“Do you know who Rachel Boyd is?”
“I’m told she’s my birth mother.”
“But you’ve never spoken with Rachel before?”
“No.”
“You exchanged messages with her online via Facebook. Do you remember that?”
From her case file, Mitch knew that Rachel made the initial contact, but didn’t know how she’d learned Penny’s identity. He made another mental note to get that detail from Grace.