Every Single Secret(74)
“She needed the money,” Heath said simply. “And they gave her a lot of it. They brought me here, up the mountain, to live with them in this house. I stayed upstairs, never leaving the grounds, under their constant surveillance. Cecelia became my mother.” He hesitated. “The doctor, my father. I believed Cecelia and the doctor were married, that they were my actual parents, and we were a real family. The doctor and Cecelia weren’t abusive, physically or in any other overt way. They simply withheld certain natural human interactions that might corrupt the research.”
“But I thought they wanted to help you.”
“We were helping him,” Cerny said. “By gathering information. Collecting data that would be used in all future research on psychopathy. We had to be very careful, very deliberate in our methods.”
Heath let out a long exhale.
“What does that mean?” I asked Cerny. “What did you do to him?”
“No one was allowed to touch me,” Heath said. “No hugs, no kisses, no gesture that could be considered affectionate in any way. My conditioning was to be strictly reward based. B. F. Skinner, all the way. Anything outside the parameters could skew the results.”
I interrupted. “And you were going to publish a paper—”
“A book,” Cerny said. “A groundbreaking work that would change the course of psychology forever.”
I couldn’t stifle my laughter. “And you actually thought the scientific community was going to accept a book like that with no objections? That they would look the other way and let you get away with what was clearly a breach of ethics and guidelines and God knows what else?”
“Scientists understand that the greatest minds must bend the rules to achieve their ends.” He pushed up his sleeves. “I was a well-regarded psychologist with my past practice. And I continued to see a few patients down in Dunfree, in order to maintain my license. I knew, though, when the mental-health community saw what Cecelia and I had accomplished, when they read about our findings with Sam, I would be named among the greats like Freud, Piaget, Pavlov.”
“But you didn’t write the book. You ended up leading couples’ retreats. What happened?”
His eyes clouded and he glanced at Heath. “A scientist can’t draw a conclusion without analyzing all the data.”
“And your data ran away before you could do that.” I turned to my fiancé. “So that’s why we came? So he could finish his book? Somehow I don’t believe that. There’s more, isn’t there? There has to be more. What about the nightmares?”
Cerny chuckled softly. “Oh, Daphne. What a perfect match you are for our boy. Tell her, Sam. Tell her the real reason you brought her to Baskens.”
Heath regarded him coolly. “She needs to see the tapes first.”
“Tapes?” I said.
“I don’t think that’s—” Cerny said.
“I want her to see,” he said. “I want her to understand everything.” He turned to me. “You’re right, Daphne. That’s part of the reason why I came back to Baskens, because the doctor wanted to find out how his experiment turned out. But also because of the nightmares. That’s why we set it up the way we did—as a couples’ retreat. I had to get you up here with me, and there didn’t seem to be any other way.”
“So what else do you need to tell me, Heath?” I asked. “What is the truth?”
“It’s on the tapes,” he replied simply.
Cerny cut in. “The tapes Cecelia and I made of him when he was a boy. Our research. When he lived here with us at Baskens. He brought you here because he wanted you to understand what he is. Why he is.”
My gut twisted. I could still taste a trace of the vomit in my mouth from earlier. Cerny reached for his iPad from a nearby table. Held it out to me. I didn’t move.
“I don’t want to watch them,” I said. My voice was shaking, and I realized I was afraid. Afraid in a way I’d never been before.
“Heath wants you to know who he is,” the doctor said. “He needs it.”
I took the iPad, swiped the screen, and the keypad came up. I met Cerny’s gaze.
“Cecelia’s birthday,” I said. “5-3-53.”
“Clever.” His eyebrows lifted. “Like I said, a perfect match.”
I tapped in the code with trembling fingers. I found a file labeled “Sam O’Hearn” and opened it, and the screen filled with folders. Each was labeled an age, beginning with four all the way to sixteen.
I clicked on a folder at the top of the screen labeled Age 4. Another window opened then, this one stacked with video files. I selected one on the top row, and a video player filled the screen. A wide shot of one of the rooms in the apartment—the one on the end with the kitchenette, chalkboard, and gilt-framed mirror. Only, in the video, the room was fully furnished with a gleaming table and chairs, lamps, and scattered vases of hydrangea. A rich Persian rug covering the scratched wood, and the walls hung with paintings. The room looked elegant and lived in. It looked like a home.
A small boy ran around the perimeter of the room under the watchful eye of a woman, seated in one of the chairs at the table. She was dressed in a light blouse and slim dark skirt, her hair gathered neatly into a twist. She held a yellow dump truck. The boy, motoring around the room like a battery-powered toy, was a blur of stocky legs and floppy black hair.