10

THE SPLINTERED PLANCHETTE
X

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  The diary and all its dead secrets were too much for Jillian Henson.  Her overwhelmed emotions were on the verge of breaking.  The next morning Jillian gathered her things and stuffed the journal into her purse.  She sighed aloud as she closed the door on her living room, “I suppose there won’t be any more visits after all, Olivia.”  Jillian finally accepted the fact that she needed help in putting her past behind her in order to move forward.
    Twenty minutes later and she was leaving her parked car.  Entering the Lonnieville Police Department was like barging into the bustle of a hornet’s nest.  Her thoughts were whirling as much as the pounding anxiety in her chest was escalating.  Blue uniforms were scrambling back and forth in the white office.  Behind the raised desk in front of her sat an older man who looked like he could have easily been chewing on a fat cigar.  Without even looking up he grunted at her approaching, “Yep?”
   Holding the journal up in the air, Jillian suddenly went pale, “I – I would like to report a murder.” 
   All heads in the house turned in her direction as the bustle came to a grinding halt.  The desk sergeant looked up for the first time that day, “Say again…?”

   Jillian’s squinted eyes looked baffling at the desk sergeant.  His mouth was moving, but he was obviously not talking to her but to someone else in her direction.  His words sounded like a jumbling of muffled gibberish spoken off in the distance.  It was like a bee buzzing sound.  She felt dizzy.  The book slipped from her hand, and fell in slow motion.  It fell but was nowhere to be found.  As she turned to see to whom the Officer was speaking, an even more horrific feeling came over her at seeing who it was.  She stood there frozen as the man calmly spoke with a blissful expression on his face.
   It was George.  It – was George.  George was there, and very much alive and well.  He was sitting in an office chair beside her, wearing his usual suit and blue tie that he wore as an Insurance agent.  Acting like nothing was wrong, as though he had been sitting there the entire time.
   In that very moment of seeing him smiling at her, Jillian asked him with the most angelic expression, “Did you know that God really has the face of a red Horney Toad, George?”
   “What?”
   “What,” She asked just as confused?
   Though George was looking at her, his voice was replying to the man beyond her, “I loved her long before I even proposed marriage, and I have never regretted our time together since.”  Yet, a second later and his expression began to melt into one of utter confusion as he added, “When – I came home from an out-of-town business trip, what I found looked like her whole world had crumbled apart.  The stovetops were left on, the counters and both sinks were piled with ever dirty dish in the apartment.  The water was running in the bath tub without a stopper, dog feces and urine were everywhere under the kitchen table, and both of Spencer’s bowls were empty.  When I came in the house Spencer never got up to greet me; the dog was lying next to her, whimpering.  Olivia was sitting on the floor in front of the couch with her arms wrapped about her legs rocking back and forth.”   George shook his head, and looked directly at the police officer, “I am telling you, Doctor March I was seriously overwhelmed, and I’m still scared for her safety.”
   The woman looked like her head was going to explode from all the conversation; Jillian turned back to face the police officer, but instead now saw the same man sitting on a stool with a laptop on a side-counter.  His white lab coat was draped with a black and silver stethoscope.  Jillian’s vision skipped a beat like a video missing frames.  Her thoughts were scattered and she struggled to piece things together. 
   The Doctor somehow appeared less grim to her than he did a moment before.  He looked at his patience saying, “It is very sad and unsettling to hear that Olivia has regressed after she had been making so much progress.  George, you mentioned earlier before, that she lost her new job.  Well, we can get an emergency court order to have her admitted today.  We’ll keep her here for observation.  But you need to know it will take some time before she will get to her baseline state as before.”
   Doctor March looked the woman directly in her eyes and asked, as she began twirling her red-hair about a finger, “Can you explain how you came to think of George as the serial killer, Olivia?”
   Olivia answered with a bored tone, “Of course George is not a serial killer.  But that lady walking her dog in my field, I’m not too sure about.   It’s like – removing all the bolts from the hub of a wheel, and replacing a flat tired with the good, and then putting each one of the nuts back on in a star formation.   That’s how my father showed me how to leave the water running.”
   The Doctor shot a glance to George, then after making a notation on his computer, asked his wife pointedly, “Do you realize that you are Olivia, and not you’re sister Jillian?”
   Still twirling her finger about her teased hair, she began to laugh with a straight face, “Of course I realize that.  My parents always got us confused because of our red hair.  Dad said he knew it was me because I seldom smiled.   It makes my head hurt to realize such things now, even the people in that little house are crying from my head aching so much.” 
   March and George both turned to see where she was pointing; they saw a sketch of the University on the diploma where the doctor had earned his degree.
   The woman’s eyes dashed back and forth in-between their thinking faces.  She really did wonder if it was the first time they had ever noticed the tiny people on the wall diplomas or if they were just testing her.  The white coat man glanced over at his computer screen, then added, “I’ve been looking over her medical records and family history, a – Doctor Kremer noted that Olivia was actually the first responder on the scene to find her sister Jillian.  The trauma of seeing that the killer had not buried her like the others must have cemented the onset of her condition.”
   George lightly patted the woman’s hand, answering, “Yes, sir that’s right.  Her twin sister was murdered when they were both fourteen years old.  A year and a half later, Jonas Hartman was convicted of being a serial-killer.  Jillian was the oldest of his five victims.”
   The woman looked exhausted, and began a slow rhythmic rocking, striving to calm herself.  She sat alongside the well-dressed man talking to the doctor.  She knew they were talking about her and she heard their words, but it all seemed incorrect.  Those things were out of context, she told herself; they had to be.
   Doctor March summarized George’s wife’s situation, “Olivia had been diagnosed even before that event.  This latest episode seems to have come on the anniversary of Jillian’s loss as a way of trying to cope or make sense of it, and somehow give everything else some kind of meaning.  To be perfectly honest Mr. Henson I am not sure if this decline will be reversible.  Her thoughts are in constant disarray – like all of the neglected house work you observed first hand.  Like Autism, she’s living in another world of her own making, but everything is splintered together.”
   George gave an almost bored sigh of his own.  Her husband had heard all this before and he was aware of her disorder, but one thing kept nagging at him, “I suppose that ‘makes sense’ seeing that a serial killer doesn’t have remorse and she must have wanted this version of him to kill himself.  But, Doctor, if I can ask, what is a ‘Planchette’?  Olivia kept muttering it over and over, while slapping herself.”
   He smiled at the quiet woman who sat with the blank expression, and then said as a matter of information, “It’s a French word that means ‘little plank’.  A Planchette is the devise that players rest their fingers on when using a Ouija Board.  It is just another symptom of her disorganized thoughts.  The Planchette and even the journal itself, they were all just delusions of her schizophrenia, Mr. Henson.  A part of her internal coping mechanism, nothing more than that I’m afraid to say.”  


CONTINUE Reading... 11


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