“My husband,” she said, sarcastic. “My excitable, brilliant, bossy, and arrogant husband, who stole dozens of medicines from the hospital my parents helped build.” She went around the table, got on the ground, and peered under a chair. I struggled to a sitting position. “Oh, he’d come back from a satanic-abuse-causes-MPD conference and he’d talk for hours and wouldn’t sleep for days. And I loved his manic phases, I really did.” She was reaching under the chair. I tried to stand, but couldn’t from this position. I fell back to the side and rolled my forehead onto the floor, and tried to use my forehead as leverage to stand. “But then your mother came to him for depression, and oh, did he do a number on her. It was obvious she hadn’t killed Dawn Young, but my Clifford wanted it to be, he wanted his own case, just like the famous psychologists, and he poked and interrogated until he got his way. He duped his brother. He duped a lot of people.”

What Father Greg heard my mom say—I will take my knife and cut you open. Does that make your cock hard?—it made sense. Cliff abused her until she gave him the confession he wanted.

“Got it,” Alice said, sitting up, a look of accomplishment in her crazed eyes. “What a goddamn twist of irony when it’s the head doctors who are the crazy ones, eh?” She unwrapped the syringe, stuck it in the vial, and tipped it upside down. As she drew liquid into the syringe, I made it to my feet and threw my body at her awkwardly. We both went down. I was back on my side, and she scurried away to a safe distance.

I was on my forehead again, butt in the air, trying to rock into a standing position, but she pushed me over. We both spotted the syringe, and she grabbed it. She stood, came at me, and kicked me in the stomach. Knocked the wind out of me. “You and your idiot mother. I couldn’t believe she had the nerve to call me and tell me she knew what he’d done.” She kicked me in the stomach again. “Well, I couldn’t have it.” She came around behind me and kicked me in the back.

As I was trying to catch my breath, a jab got me in the arm. I rolled onto the syringe, cracked it, the needle snapping, tearing my skin.

“Alice?” from the kitchen speaker again.

“What a pain in the ass he is,” she muttered, studying the syringe. “Good,” she said, “enough to slow you down.”

She was right. My arm felt warm, and it was spreading quickly. The pain in my stomach and back was dulling.