Asylum

Chapter 52: The Crazy Wall

Ivan dropped his head again, pushing his arms straight and gripping the edge of the pool tightly as he gazed at the shifting dark surface of the water. I was out of words, nearly out of hope, so I waited, my breathing a ragged mess, but he said nothing, struggling silently with whatever demons or decisions were tormenting him. My feet were starting to fall asleep from the awkward crouch, but I forced myself to remain absolutely still, a rabbit frozen in the bracken as a wolf picked over the criss-crossing confusion of my scent nearby.

Abruptly, he moved, pulling himself to the pool's edge and hauling himself out of the water with a fluid, balletic grace. He leaned over to pick up the towel and wrapped it around his shoulders before he began heading back to the house.

"Come," he commanded briefly, not bothering to look over his shoulder to see if I followed. Cursing my own lack of common sense or even sanity, I did.

The patio door to the master bedroom slid open with a soft whoosh, and I stepped inside after him. Ivan didn't stop walking, but simply tossed his wet towel into the en-suite bathroom on his way out of the bedroom and into the hallway. I wondered if his leaving the lights off was a good sign or a bad sign as I trailed behind him into the study on the other side of the corridor. Probably good, I thought, though when I came up blank for a reason why that might be good, I realized it was just my fear, combined with some probably misplaced optimism, talking.

He stopped in front of his desk and leaned over to switch on the angle-poise lamp. Perhaps now turning on the light was a good sign, I thought desperately, but Ivan's illuminated face was as inscrutable as it had been in the dark. He leaned against the front of the desk and jerked his chin slightly to indicate something behind me.

I turned to look, and gasped.

The office wall was covered with me – pictures and newspaper articles and group photos, some recent, some stretching back into my childhood, some a grainy black and white, some in high-res glorious color, all freshly printed out and assembled and stapled directly onto the drywall.

Mesmerized, horrified, I stepped closer, struggling to take it all in. The pages were mounted seemingly indiscriminately, in no discernible pattern. A photo of me with the mayor at a fundraiser last year hung overlapped a copy of a page from my senior year high school yearbook. A clipping of me playing the cello at Ulrike's wedding at the Cloisters sat next to several newspaper articles covering my parents' funeral, photos of Mormor and me sharing an umbrella as we stood outside Holy Trinity eight years ago. A Times article about Hellström Industries, written after I had inherited my father's share and Mormor had assumed complete control of the company, was tacked up next to a photo of me in full uniform, accepting my diploma from the police commissioner. Next to that – blown up to cover a full page of glossy photo paper – was a close-up shot, of me asleep in his bed.

And sprinkled through it all were brand-new photos of me taken over the past few days – entering and leaving the Hellström Industries headquarters, getting into the town car outside my condo, talking to Chad Harris in front of the church, and most disturbingly, laying flowers atop Mormor's casket in the graveyard yesterday.

All photos of Lärke Hellström, not Alexis Bryant. With the exception of the picture taken while I was sleeping, everything tacked up on that wall represented a piece of the life I'd lived either before I had started working at Asylum, or after Mormor's death.

I turned back to face Ivan. "You knew."