Then Chloe made an audible gasp. “I was looking at a book,” she said, astonished that a memory had actually come to her. Grace got Mitch’s attention as she tapped her finger on the drawing of a blue rectangle clutched in the hand of the little girl upstairs.
“The title of the book,” Grace said hurriedly. “Can you see it in your mind?”
Chloe shook her head.
“No,” she said. “The cover is blue … and there are boats … boats in the water.”
She spoke in a dreamy, faraway voice, almost a whisper. Grace turned to Mitch, who stared back as if disbelieving his own eyes and ears.
“You’re doing so well,” Grace said brightly. “What else can you tell us about that book? What else do you remember?”
At that Chloe’s eyes flew open, her gaze fixed on the picture she’d drawn. She put her finger on the toaster, tracing the black and gray crayon lines of smoke spreading out in all directions.
“Burned it all up,” she said in a trancelike voice, similar to the one Penny had used in the room flooded with ammonia.
Grace was puzzled. “Burned what up, Chloe?”
“It all burned … burned it all up … but she didn’t go away.”
“Who?” Grace asked. “Who didn’t go away? Who burned it up? What burned?”
Instead of answering, Chloe tapped the table rhythmically with one hand … tap … tap … tap … and with each tap she said the name of a place: “Michigan … Florida … Key West…”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“I’m bad,” she said.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“I’m a very bad girl.”
“Chloe?” whispered Grace.
“Alabama … Alaska … Charlotte … Chicago … bad girl … very bad girl.”
“Chloe, can you hear me? Answer me, darling!”
Grace’s voice cut through some fog, reached some place in her daughter’s mind. Chloe blinked once, blinked twice, before her face went slack. She lowered her head, avoiding Grace’s probing stare. When her daughter peered up at her, Grace knew without a doubt that Chloe was gone. She sat in her chair with her shoulders pulled back, chest out, head cocked to one side, looking rather annoyed.
“Hello, Eve,” Grace said, feeling a pit in her stomach.
“Mother,” Eve said, making her greeting extra saccharine for effect. “Are we to have lunch here?” Eve, blinking rapidly with her tongue sticking out, indicated her displeasure, before her gaze shifted to the drawing on the table.
“What’s this?” she said, knocking her knuckles on the picture.
“You tell me,” said Mitch, coming forward—still recording, Grace could see. “You just made it.”
Eve’s whole face screwed up.
“Don’t mess with me,” she said darkly. “I think I’d remember drawing this.” She sent him a look of disdain as she put her finger on the dead woman in the basement. “Are you going to play head games with me just like Palumbo did?”
“No,” said Mitch. “I’m not. I promise.”
Grace sent Mitch a look as if to say: How could this be made up?
“Then who drew this?” answered Eve defiantly. She was behaving more frightened than upset, but that was understandable to Grace. To disassociate from the self meant to lose that time. To slip out of one’s conscious personality and return to it later was naturally disorienting. For Eve, it was as if she’d blinked and the drawing had suddenly appeared.
“Do you know a girl named Chloe?” Mitch asked.
“Are you saying an alter of mine drew this?” Eve answered, skeptical.
“I’m not entirely sure who made it,” said Mitch while rolling up the paper to keep it safe—and Grace thought that was the truth, at least in part.
Eve turned her attention back to her mother.
“I think I’ve lost my appetite,” she said.
Grace was feeling the same. She kept thinking about the smoke billowing out from the toaster in the drawing and what Chloe had said.
Fire. Burned it all up. Didn’t go away.
She didn’t know the meaning of the places Chloe had recited, still didn’t know what the rhythmic tapping was about either, or that damn book she couldn’t find at home, but she did understand a thing or two about fire. And only one person Grace knew of had a pyromania problem.
Maria.
CHAPTER 29
THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CHANGED, the start of your journey and ours into DID, was a sunny Saturday in September when you were thirteen years old. The scene is one that will definitely feature prominently in my film. Picture the shot: