lake in the trunk of his car. Jill and Danny and his wife first. He took the bodies out to a duck blind and collapsed it on them. Then he came back for Valerie and Nicholas. Before he had a chance to dispose of their bodies, something spooked him, no one knows what, and he just let the brake go on the car and ran it into the lake. It was probably the cold water that saved Nicholas, slowed the bleeding. He lay, half-conscious, with his sister's body for hours, until some kids spotted the partially submerged car."
Trissa clung to Augusta for support. Both women's cheeks glistened with tears.
"We didn't do well by Nicholas even then. His physical wounds healed. A miracle, they called it. But grief and self-blame overwhelmed him, and he plummeted into a depression so severe that he had to be hospitalized to prevent him from harming himself.
"In that hospital, someone thought to try to work another miracle on him, and he underwent a series of experimental shock treatments. Imagine! On a thirteen year old! The treatments erased all memory of his childhood. Under the guardianship of the courts, he became a pawn, a guinea pig, treated with their drugs, experimental therapies, and shock treatments, until all but the most basic of his childhood memories were obliterated. He ceased to be Nicholas Brewer.
"That's when he became Cole. They thought to give him a new identity, a new life. But it didn't work. The memories return in bits and pieces. As Cole, he snatches on to them, like a lifeline. When he was eighteen, legally ready for the world, and no longer their responsibility, they released him. It was amazing that he was able to function at all.
"I came to know him because I work at a hospital where his father was committed for a time. When he remembers, Cole visits his father regularly. It seems a punishment he must put himself through. To keep himself remembering. And then one day, he'd just stop coming. For months we would hear nothing, then we might get a letter or a phone call from him, giving a new address, a new pseudonym. Cole Baker. Cole Baxter. Cole Burke."
"Nicholas Brewer."
"No, Nicholas is the name of the child Cole wishes he never was. He would never use that name, when he remembers."
"Might he someday become like his father? Is he dangerous?" Augusta asked.
"Augusta! No! How could you think that? He couldn't. I know Nicholas. He would never hurt -- could never hurt anyone like that." Trissa wanted to be with him at that very moment. She wanted to hold him and never let him go. It was more than his being sent to save her. They were sent for each other. No one else could understand each other's secret sorrows so well.
"I believe you are right, Trissa. Duncan Brewer is psychotic, completely dysfunctional. It is a disease for which the recovery rate is a scant five percent. Cole's disorder was not passed on from his father but induced by his father's abuse and, I'm convinced, the shock treatments -- though many would dispute me on that. For all I've known of Cole, he would sooner die than be the cause of another's suffering. His whole life shows that pattern. The many ways he tried to protect his brother and sisters, taking beatings for them, covering up for them against their father.
"But he does fear it -- becoming like his father. In the past, he has isolated himself from human contact so that no one would get close enough to become a victim should that happen."
"But Dr. Fitapaldi," said Augusta, "Nicholas is a charming, personable man. He has become a part of my family. He married Trissa."
"Yes. That surprised me. But then I never really met Nicholas."
"What do you mean?"
"Nicholas was lost. To the tragedy. To the shock treatments. Cole had buried all that was painful to him, the fact of being Nicholas too, long before I met him. It was the only way he could survive all that abuse, the memory of all that pain, to shut it off in various compartments so that Nicholas has a little, Cole a little more. As if he sensed that knowing the horrible whole of his tragedy would destroy him, he's sheltered his sanity in the only way he could."
"Sanity?" asked Augusta shakily. "Does he need... must he be..."
"Locked away? He is not insane, Mrs. Blackburn. Though I am sure such a life as he