When She Was Bad: A Thriller Read Online Free Page B

amputated?”
    “No, ma’am—that happened before.”
    “Before what?”
    “Before I can remember.”
    “What about your hands?”
    He looked down at the small, dreadfully scarred appendages hanging at his sides as though he’d never seen them before. The flesh had melted away from the inner surfaces of the fingers, leaving the hourglass shape of the bones distinguishable beneath the shiny scar tissue; livid white patches of unlined, grafted skin stretched tautly across both palms. Ultimately, though, the plastic surgeons had done their job well: those deformed hands not only functioned, but were as inexorable as claws or talons once they’d grabbed hold of something—it was letting go that they found difficult. “Also before.”
    “Aren’t you curious?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I know what happened.”
    “But you just said you didn’t know.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “Are you playing games with me, Mr. Maxwell?”
    Lyssy gave Dr. Al a helpless glance, as if to say, I’m doing my best here. Dr. Al nodded encouragingly. Lyssy turned back to Trotman. “You asked me if I remembered, ” he explained earnestly. “I don’t remember much of anything that happened before I came here. But Dr. Al told me some of it. When I was sixteen, I guess I tried to put a fire out with my bare hands. Not the smartest move, hunh?”
    Trotman turned to Corder and gave him a raised-eyebrow What are you still doing here? glance. He nodded. “We’ll be next door if you need us.” Wally followed him into the adjoining conference room.
    “Have a seat, Mr. Maxwell,” said the psychiatrist. Two molded plastic chairs, identical to the ones stacked in the smaller room, faced each other at a forty-five-degree angle at the end of the conference table, the top of which was made of some black, unreflective space-age polymer, like the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lyssy took the end chair; Dr. Trotman tucked the back of her skirt under her as she lowered herself into the other one. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
    “Not at all.”
    “Let’s begin with your name.”
    “Begin what?” Dr. Al would have smiled patiently at that; Dr. Trotman glanced up sharply from the notebook in her lap. “Sorry,” said Lyssy, mock-chastened. “My name is Lyssy.”
    “Full name?”
    “Ulysses Christopher Maxwell.”
    “Do you know what day it is?”
    “Monday.”
    “Date, month, year?”
    He got that right, too, adding shyly, “My birthday’s on Wednesday—I’ll be thirty-two.”
    “Happy birthday in advance. Can you tell me where we are right now?”
    “1-South—the conference room.” She waited. “Oh, you mean the hospital? It’s the Reed-Chase Institute.”
    OX3, the psychiatrist noted on the pad—oriented times three. “Do you know why you’re here?”
    Dial down the grin, ratchet up the earnest factor—it was very important to Lyssy that she understand. “When I was little, my parents abused me real bad—I mean, badly. And there are some people, I’m one of them, who when they’re little and bad things happen to them, their mind tries to protect itself by splitting up into all these different identities. And the different identities, they all think they’re separate people, and the real person doesn’t have any control over them. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what they’re doing.”
    “I see.”
    “And in my case, some of those alters were really psychologically disturbed because of what had happened, the abuse and all, and so they went on to abuse other people. Dr. Al says that happens a lot, that abuse gets passed along. And, and, and they—Well, they’re gone, now, the others—there’s just me. But lots of people, they don’t believe in such a thing as multiple personalities—they think I’m a bad person, and that if I get out, I’d do bad things. But I wouldn’t, I couldn’t—I don’t even like to think about bad things.”
    “I