Authors: Hilary Norman
‘Let’s go.’
The problem was she had to pass her parents’ bedroom to get there. Grace didn’t need to be told which room it was – it was obvious from Cathy’s body language, by the way
she stopped breathing and averted her face and accelerated past the tall, white door, that that was the place she was not ready – might never be ready – to go back into.
Her own room was at the end of the corridor. She opened the door, went in fast and sank down on the single bed.
‘Want the door closed or open?’ Grace asked, standing just inside.
‘Could you close it, please?’
Grace shut it quietly. ‘If you do want some time alone, I could wait right outside.’
‘No,’ Cathy said. ‘Maybe next time.’
It felt like an intrusion. That was curious, Grace thought, considering that her entire professional life was exactly that, an ongoing invasion into other people’s privacy, a gradual
process of worming her way into a patient’s mind. Frankly, though, no matter how skilled at that she might have become, what she achieved at the end of the day was mostly edited highlights
– the parts that the patient
chose
to show her. Cathy Robbins might have just invited her into her bedroom, but the visit to the house had still been at Grace’s suggestion, and
she was acutely aware that she was now treading on intensely intimate territory.
It was a fairly typical fourteen-year-old girl’s bedroom. Remnants of childhood. A Raggedy Ann doll in a small chair. A collection of cuddly animals. A set of Laura Ingalls Wilder books.
Evidence of growing teenage influence. Two posters, one of Brad Pitt, another from the movie
Titanic
with Leonardo di Caprio. A stack of CDs that seemed to embrace ballet, rock and rap.
The running trophies that Sam had mentioned. Photographs. Of Marie and Arnold and of herself. One of her with a dark-haired, pretty girl.
‘Who’s that?’ Grace asked.
‘My friend, Jill.’ Cathy paused. ‘She came to see me on Sunday, after you left. She stayed about a half-hour, and then her dad came to take her home.’ Bleakness touched
her eyes. ‘We’ve talked on the phone a few times since then, but I don’t think her parents want her seeing me right now.’
‘That’s a pity.’
Cathy shrugged.
Grace looked back at the photographs. ‘Do you have a picture of your first father?’ She recalled that was how Cathy had referred to him.
‘No.’ She was still sitting on the bed, staring around the room. ‘They took my diary.’
Grace stayed where she was. She had hardly moved since closing the door. It was enough that she was in here with Cathy, ruffling the atmosphere a little; she didn’t want to stir it up too
much, not at this time, anyway.
‘Why would they want my diary, Grace?’
‘I don’t know.’ Grace paused. ‘Was there much private stuff in it?’
‘Not really,’ Cathy said. ‘I keep my journal on my computer.’
‘Is that here?’ Grace couldn’t see any computer equipment.
She shook her head. ‘I took it with me to my aunt’s house. It’s a notebook model.’
‘I’m sorry they took the diary,’ Grace said.
‘No big deal.’ Cathy stood up, wandered over to the window, looked out over the backyard. ‘I guess I’ll never get to live here again, will I?’
‘I don’t know. Would you like to?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Do you think your aunt might be willing to move?’
‘No.’ Cathy was still looking out of the window. ‘I asked her. She said she couldn’t bear it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said again.
‘Maybe she’s right. I don’t know if I could stand it either.’
Grace looked back at the photographs of Cathy with her mother and Arnie. They looked happy. She wondered about the absence of a photograph of her biological father, and decided he was a subject
worth trying to address again.
‘You told me you don’t remember much about your first father.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Did your mother talk much about him to you?’
‘My mother never talked about him.’ Cathy turned around, looked straight at Grace. ‘He made her unhappy, I know that.’
‘What about you? Did he make you unhappy?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Cathy bent down and picked up Raggedy Ann. ‘Aunt Frances told me about Mom being miserable. She never said anything to me herself.’
‘Didn’t you ask her?’
‘A couple of times.’ She tugged idly at a few strands of the doll’s stringy red hair. ‘Mom said she wanted to forget about it.’
‘What else did your aunt tell you about it?’
‘Not much.’ She dumped Raggedy Ann back on her chair, and the doll tilted over to one side. ‘I’d like to leave now.’
‘This room or the house?”
‘Can we just go, please, Grace?’ She looked at her pleadingly.
‘Of course we can.’
Grace realized suddenly that she was standing in front of the door, and that maybe Cathy might feel trapped. Quickly, she stepped to one side and opened the door. Cathy started out past her,
then stopped and turned, went back to the doll, bent down and straightened her. As she passed Grace again, already bracing herself for the walk back through that corridor, there were tears in her
eyes.
Grace wondered, as they left the house, got into her Mazda and buckled up, if the visit had helped or hindered Cathy. She was always questioning her own ideas and decisions,
especially during the difficult early weeks of getting to know her patients. She asked loaded questions, raised taboo subjects, watched new walls go up, saw all kinds of distress, and frequently
experienced dreadful guilt. There was no escaping the fact that bringing Cathy home had, at least temporarily, made her feel a whole lot worse rather than better. And yet Grace knew, just as
decisively, that it had had to happen sometime, and she also knew that this was probably just the beginning.
Not your fault, Lucca
, she could almost hear that old tutor telling her, in one
of her gentler moments.
You didn’t create the unhappiness in Cathy’s family. You didn’t murder her parents.
No, of course Grace had not done those things. But she had
chosen her profession. She had chosen to meddle in people’s lives and minds.
She didn’t waste much time these days questioning her motives for having become a psychologist. She did know, absolutely, that there was not even a hint of prurience in her curiosity about
people – but she was, undoubtedly, a deeply curious woman who wanted very much to help.
There were times, however, when Grace was not at all sure that she succeeded.
Grace had promised to call Sam Becket after seeing Cathy, in case the visit to the house had thrown up something relevant to the investigation. At least, she was grateful to
realize, she could tell him in all honesty that she’d found out nothing to help the department in any way.
‘Would you mind,’ he asked, ‘if I dropped by to see you later?’
‘Of course not. Why?’
‘I have some findings of my own that might just help you.’
At a quarter past eight that evening he called again to say that he’d been held up by some urgent work. ‘I guess we ought to leave it for another time.’
‘That’s up to you,’ Grace told him, ‘but I tend to be a late-night person.’
‘How late is late?’ Sam asked.
‘Any time up to midnight.’
‘I hope it’s going to be a lot earlier than that,’ Sam said.
It was almost eleven-thirty when he finally knocked at her door.
‘Are you hungry, detective?’ Grace asked, sizing him up. ‘You look hungry.’
And exhausted
, she thought but did not say, noting the sagging broad shoulders, tired
eyes and unshaven jawline.
‘As a horse in the Sahara,’ Sam said. ‘I only remembered an hour ago that I was supposed to have dinner with my family this evening.’ He grinned wryly. ‘My
mother’s pretty mad at me.’
‘She must be used to it by now,’ Grace said, ‘with a doctor for a husband and a cop for a son.’ She paused. ‘How’d you like to share some
Cacciucco
with us?’
‘What’s
Cacciucco
and who’s us?’
‘Us is me and Harry.’ Right on cue, the West Highland came trotting into the entrance hall. ‘This is Harry.’
‘Hey, Harry.’ Sam bent down and put out a hand, and the dog came and sniffed at him. ‘Do I pass muster?’
‘Most people do,’ Grace told him, and led the way into her kitchen, which, like the food she best loved cooking, evoked the Italian half of her heritage. She might have written off
her father a long time ago, but her ancestry had always fascinated her.
‘Sit down, detective, and I’ll show you what
Cacciucco
is.’ She indicated the big rustic wooden table with its matching hand-carved chairs.
‘Thank you, doctor.’ Sam sat down wearily, watching Grace go to the stove and light the gas under a large copper casserole. ‘I know you said you were a late-night person, but
surely you must have eaten dinner by now?’
‘That was hours ago,’ she said easily. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of midnight snacks?’
‘Heard of them?’ Sam said. ‘Hell, doctor, I wrote the recipe book.’
Grace smiled. ‘If we’re going to share a midnight snack, do you think we might graduate to first names?’
‘Suits me.’
He smiled back, saw her lift the lid off the pot and give things inside a gentle stir. It was hard not to register how cool and sexy the psychologist looked in her lightweight denim jeans and
pale blue cotton T-shirt. He hadn’t really noticed the delicate, feminine curves at their previous meeting. He did recall noticing everything that hadn’t been covered up by her business
suit – the good face with its cool-
un
cool blue eyes, the almost-Deneuve-nose, the warm lips and the long legs – but the twin topics of their conversation, homicide and grief,
had hardly been conducive to that kind of thinking.
‘It sure smells good,’ he said, turning his attention to her cooking and sniffing the air. ‘Fish soup?’
‘It originated as a poor man’s fish soup, but I think it tastes pretty damn good, too.’ She grinned. ‘See what a modest cook I am?’
‘When you’re right, you’re right,’ Sam said. ‘That’s one of my mother’s sayings. Though when it comes to me and her, it’s not often me who’s
right, at least not according to her.’
‘Better not tell her you’re eating my dinner instead of hers,’ Grace said.
‘Damn right,’ Sam said.
Fifteen minutes later, the kitchen table simply laid, glasses filled with Chianti and his first taste of Grace’s fish stew en route to his famished stomach, Sam began to
feel restored.
‘So how Italian are you?’ he asked.
‘Half Italian, half American. How about you?’
‘Nothing Italian about me,’ Sam said.
Grace dipped a hunk of bread into the thick, aromatic soup. ‘You don’t mind my asking, do you? Only I remember your father mentioning you – his son – a couple of times,
and I knew you were a cop, but that’s all.’
‘You mean, he didn’t say what colour I was?’ Sam teased. ‘Actually, I don’t think it would ever occur to him. I think he stopped noticing I was black a couple of
years after he and Judy adopted me.’
‘When was that?’
‘1972. When I was eight years old. About a year after my parents and sister died.’ He paused, swallowed some more wine, looked across the table at Grace, saw empathy in those keen
blue eyes, and figured he didn’t mind expanding a little. ‘We lived in Coconut Grove – my father was a cop, too, with good friends up in Opa-Locka. March 24, 1971, my daddy,
off-duty, decided we should all take a drive up and see them. That just happened to be the day after a police sergeant up there had shot a black bystander at a robbery. A riot started that
evening.’
Grace thought about all she’d been told about the great Miami riot of 1980, the by-all-accounts terrifying ugliness that she and Claudia had missed by less than a year. ‘You got
caught up in it?’
‘Not exactly,’ Sam said. ‘We were still at our friends’ place when it started to get bad. I remember they wanted us to stay, but my father was determined to get back
home. He said he was going to stay clear of trouble, go a long way around if he had to, but you know how it is with a riot – the trouble spreads, fans out like fire.’ He shrugged.
‘Anyway, we did get caught up in it, on the outskirts.’
Grace waited silently.
‘I never saw exactly what happened,’ Sam went on. ‘I’d fallen asleep next to Angela, my little sister, in the back of the car. I only woke up for about a second before it
happened.’ His eyes darkened, his voice grew quieter. ‘I heard people yelling – then suddenly my father swore and my mother gave a kind of a scream, and something hit the
windshield – I found out later it was a stone.’ He paused. ‘I guess my father lost control of the car. We smashed into a tree. He and Angela were killed outright. My mother died a
few hours later.’
Grace thought about a seven-year-old boy hurtled into so much horror and grief, and felt her heart contract. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I had some cracked ribs and a busted leg, but that was all.’ He gave a small, bleak smile. ‘David Becket was doing volunteer work at the hospital up there when we were brought
in. He took care of me in the hospital, and a few days later his wife Judy came in to visit with me. They found out I didn’t have any family left to speak of, and asked me if I wanted to go
live with them.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Almost,’ Sam said simply. ‘David always said it was like love at first sight for them both. They fostered me for just over a year, and then they adopted me. I’m the
descendant of a runaway slave from Georgia; David’s and Judy’s parents escaped from the Nazis in Europe – maybe that gave us something in common, I don’t know.’
‘Did you have many problems?’ Grace asked.
‘Some, of course. Changing schools – changing lives. Pretty heavy stuff for a kid.’ Sam’s eyes were hazy with recall. ‘They talked to me a lot during the year they
were fostering me about the bad stuff they knew we might all hit up against if I became their son. Judy was more down-to-earth about it. David was an idealist. To him, there was really nothing to
consider, certainly nothing we couldn’t surmount if we were together.’