Authors: Hilary Norman
‘She wouldn’t be calling me if she weren’t desperate,’ she told Claudia – physically so much like their father, with her pale olive skin, brown eyes and smooth,
dark hair, cut in a bob that swung with every movement.
They were sitting on the porch drinking Cokes while Claudia’s husband Daniel Brownley barbecued on the deck, their boys horsed around in the water and Sadie – the wire-haired
dachshund who had come to the Brownleys three years before – flopped in the shade, her brandy-coloured eyes darting back and forth between the youngsters and the chicken legs on the barbecue.
(Harry and Sadie got along famously, and Harry liked to travel and thoroughly
dis
liked Grace’s packing any size bag and leaving home without him, but she had to attend a seminar on
Key Largo that Monday – and Lord only knew that a hotel banqueting suite filled with shrinks was no place for Harry – and so he’d been left in the tender care of Teddy Lopez.)
‘Do you want to go home?’ Claudia asked, keeping an eye out for Robbie, her youngest at six, who tended to overstretch himself in every activity in the vain hope of keeping up with
Mike, his eight-year-old brother.
‘I would if I thought there was much I could do to help,’ Grace said. ‘But if Cathy’s in custody, I won’t be allowed to talk to her, and though of course I’ll
try Frances again later, I don’t think it’s a psychologist she either wants or needs.’
‘What does she want?’
‘An ally. Someone to prove that her niece is innocent.’ Grace gave a small sigh of regret. ‘I’m no miracle worker. I wish I were.’
They had gritted their teeth that morning and tried calling their parents’ home in Chicago to check on Ellen’s condition, but there’d been no answer, and for
a while the sisters had sat quietly – too quietly – allowing irrational guilt to ebb and flow, until Daniel had put a finish to it, at least for the time being.
‘You want to go to Chicago?’ he’d asked them, straight out.
As an architect, Daniel Brownley – a tall, angular man with myopic green eyes and slightly rounded shoulders from years spent hunched over plans – tended towards straight, clear
lines in thought and deed as well as in his designs. It wasn’t that he didn’t fully comprehend and empathize with the convolutions of hearts and souls, but for Daniel, if there was a
true, linear approach to a problem, then that was what he chose to try first.
‘Not really,’ his wife had answered.
‘Not in the least,’ Grace had said, for her own part.
‘Do you figure you ought to be helping Frank out?’
‘No.’ Grace led that time.
‘Ditto,’ Claudia followed.
‘Is there something you could be doing for your mother?’
‘Hard to tell, unless we talk to Papa again.’ Claudia, for one, had no more clear-cut answers.
‘So you’ll try calling him again later or tomorrow,’ Daniel had concluded, practical as always, ‘and in the meantime you can help me hide the boys’ Easter
eggs.’
‘How about we hide them in the house this time?’ Claudia suggested.
‘I don’t think so,’ her husband disagreed. ‘They’ll smash things, we’ll get mad and then we’ll feel guilty and they’ll hate us.’
‘But they already know all the hiding places outdoors,’ Claudia pointed out. They’d been playing the same game since Mike’s third Easter.
‘So they’ll feel smart for finding them so easily,’ Grace had said.
She left next morning without having reached either Cathy’s aunt or Frank Lucca, but arrived at the Westin Beach Resort on Key Largo with enough time to spare before the
start of the seminar to try calling Sam Becket in Miami.
To her surprise, she got him first time.
‘Glad you called,’ he said.
‘How come you brought Cathy in?’ Grace got straight to the point. ‘Has something happened since Friday night?’
‘Not really,’ Sam answered, ‘except for my sergeant, captain and chief all deciding that her recent history was grounds for asking her a few more questions.’
‘That’s it?’ Grace was angry and sounded it.
‘That was the reason for wanting to talk to her some more.’
‘And you still don’t have a shred of hard evidence against her?’
Sam’s sigh came across the phone line. ‘She hasn’t been charged with anything, Grace.’
‘Not yet,’ she said, coolly. ‘I take it she’s been released?’
‘She was never arrested.’ He paused. ‘She’s in the hospital right now.’
‘What happened?’ Grace gripped the phone more tightly. ‘She’s okay,’ Sam said hastily. ‘She got sick to her stomach during questioning, then passed out, so we
got her over to Jackson Memorial right away.’ He paused. ‘Her aunt got very upset, wanted to move her to a place in Coral Gables, but we compromised on a private room at Miami
General.’
‘I hope that wasn’t too much trouble?’ Grace said coldly. ‘No one was anything but gentle with her,’ Sam said. ‘My dad went in to see her, and he tells me
she’s going home tomorrow. Check with him if you don’t believe me.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting you got out the rubber hoses, Sam.’
‘I know you weren’t,’ he said, quietly. ‘Believe me, I hated every second of that questioning. No one enjoys this kind of case – no one on our team,
anyway.’
Grace believed him.
In the knowledge that David Becket would most assuredly be taking good care of Cathy and that there was no purpose to be served by her speedy return to Miami, Grace headed for
the conference room on the first floor, and the first session of the day – a lecture and debate on Factitious Disorder by proxy. The disorder – also commonly known as
Münchhausen’s Syndrome by proxy, or MSBP – was a highly complex, emotive syndrome for all concerned, not least for the psychiatrists and psychologists confronted with both the
sufferers and their young victims; in the past five years Grace had personally encountered two children abused and endangered by their mentally sick mothers.
‘Grisly stuff,’ a male voice said just behind her during the recess as she grabbed a much-needed cup of coffee.
She turned around. A tall, slim man of around forty-five, in a rumpled beige linen suit, stood looking at her. His name tag read Dr Peter Hayman.
‘As often as I hear the stories,’ he said, ‘they still give me the chills.’ His eyes, behind slightly tinted spectacles, were brown and couched in sun, laugh or frown
wrinkles. ‘Peter Hayman,’ he said.
She put down her cup and saucer and shook his hand. ‘Grace Lucca.’
‘I know.’
‘How come?’ She hadn’t pinned on her name tag. She’d never liked being labelled unless there was a good reason.
‘You’ve been seeing the child in the Robbins murder case, Dr Lucca.’ Hayman caught the wariness in her eyes and explained: ‘Your name was in one of the
newspapers.’
‘Which one?’
‘I’m not sure. Could have been the
Herald
.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘Maybe the
Sentinel
.’
‘I’d be mad if it was in either,’ she said.
‘I know.’ Hayman spoke quietly, with implicit understanding. ‘Poor kid has more than enough on her plate without that kind of intrusion.’
‘Yes, she does.’ Grace paused, frowning. ‘Was there a photograph of me?’
‘Where?’
‘In the newspaper. You seem to have recognized me.’
‘You’re very cautious, Dr Lucca.’ Hayman smiled.
‘Where privacy is concerned, yes, I am.’
‘There was no photograph,’ he said. ‘I noticed your name on the registration list when I collected my name tag, and made it my business to ask about you.’
‘Why did you do that?’
Peter Hayman glanced around. ‘Could we go somewhere a little less jammed?’
‘Where did you have in mind?’
If Hayman found Grace’s continuing caution offensive, he didn’t show it.
‘Just a swift stroll – get out of the air conditioning for a few minutes, maybe? Someplace less noisy where we can talk without being overheard.’
‘What is it you want to talk about, Dr Hayman?’
He took a moment before he answered. ‘An old case of mine.’ He seemed to search for the appropriate words. ‘One that’s thrown up a few possible parallels with the Robbins
case that I think you might find interesting.’
‘What kind of parallels?’ Grace was suddenly off-balance.
‘This is something that might help,’ Hayman said.
‘Help who?’
‘Cathy Robbins.’
As it turned out, there was no time left for further conversation before the end of the coffee recess, so it was lunchtime before they took their stroll outside the hotel,
through shady mangroves down to a boardwalk overlooking Florida Bay. It was a perfect Keys afternoon, warm and balmy with a light breeze, the shallow water a tranquil vivid blue; a setting
infinitely more suited for day-dreaming or siesta than for discussions about murder.
Peter Hayman came to the point. In his capacity as a psychiatrist, he explained, he had, a few years back, been asked to see a young patient on the Florida west coast – somewhere in the
vicinity of St Petersburg, he said with careful vagueness – accused of shooting his parents.
‘No one’s accused Cathy Robbins of any crime,’ Grace asserted crisply.
‘Not yet,’ Hayman said, calmly. ‘But reading between the lines, there seems every possibility that they might, given time.’
‘I think you’ve read too much between the lines.’
‘Maybe. I still see no harm in sharing a few facts with you that strike me as salient. Taking confidentiality into account, that is,’ he added.
Grace kept silent.
‘Would you like to sit down?’ Hayman asked.
‘I’m happy to stand,’ she said. ‘We’ll be sitting all afternoon.’
‘I often wonder why they don’t take seminars like ours out to the beach,’ the psychiatrist mused. ‘All those cold, air-conditioned rooms, everyone uncomfortable as hell,
with paradise right outside the window.’
‘Too comfortable. Hard chairs and cold air keep us awake.’
‘Not always.’ Hayman smiled.
‘You had something to tell me?’
He wasted no more time. The young man in his case, he told Grace, had fallen under suspicion because of general behavioural problems and because he was known to have taken illegal drugs, but as
Hayman had come to know him, he’d come to the conclusion that those violent acts – even taking drugs into account – were completely at odds with his character.
‘The two obvious major differences between that case and what I know about the Robbins case,’ Hayman said, ‘are that my patient’s parents both survived, and that the
father was affluent and locally influential enough to keep the affair out of the public arena.’
‘I’m puzzled that you seem to feel you know so much about the Robbins case.’ Grace’s antennae were bristling with fresh suspicion. ‘I don’t believe that too
many details about the family have appeared in any newspaper.’
‘No, they haven’t,’ Hayman agreed. He registered her cold expression. ‘I’d better come clean.’
‘I’d say so, if you want to continue this conversation.’
‘I’d like to.’ The psychiatrist paused. ‘It’s very simple. I read and saw and heard just enough about the case and the young woman concerned to strike some chords
in me. On the strength of that, I made a few calls to Miami, asked the right people a few questions.’
‘Which people?’
‘I can’t answer that.’ He shrugged. ‘I can confess to you that my interest is in part quite selfish, inasmuch as it relates to a subject I’m currently researching
in some depth – in fact, if you hadn’t shown up here today, Dr Lucca, I was thinking of getting in touch anyhow.’
‘Go on.’ Grace’s curiosity, if nothing else, was piqued.
‘Obviously I can’t give you any precise details about what I did, ultimately, come to learn about those west coast shootings.’ Hayman paused again. ‘But I can tell you
that I came to realize that what I was dealing with was a very strange variant of Factitious Disorder by proxy – MSBP, as I still tend to call it.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘A mother who – rather than creating symptoms of
physical
illness in her child so that he might have to undergo tests and treatments – deliberately fabricated her
son’s psychosis.’ Hayman saw from her fascinated, horrified expression that he’d more than captured Grace’s attention. ‘It took me a while, too, I assure you, Dr
Lucca.’
‘But what are you saying about the shooting?’ she asked, confused and appalled. ‘That the son was driven by his mother to attack her and his father? Or that the mother pulled
the trigger herself and set it up to look as though her son had done it?’
‘I can’t really answer those questions,’ Peter Hayman said, ‘other than to tell you that the MSBP element started long before the shootings.’
‘The mother making it look as if her son was mentally sick?’
‘In that instance, yes.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not saying that it necessarily has any relevance at all to your Miami scenario – just that something about the case
rang some warning bells in my head.’ He paused. ‘There was a great deal of suffering for that family – the teenager involved went through all kinds of hell. I just felt it
wouldn’t hurt to share my experience with the psychologist caring for Cathy Robbins.’
‘Except, of course, that in her case both her parents are dead.’
‘Doesn’t make it impossible,’ Hayman said.
‘Your mother’s mad at you,’ David Becket told Sam when he dropped by for a cup of coffee on Sunday evening.
‘Ma’s always mad at me,’ Sam said easily.
‘Your father’s the one who’s really mad at you,’ Judy Becket said.
‘What’s up with you, Dad?’ Sam asked, surprised.
David shook his head and grunted.
‘Dad’s mad at you because of the girl in the hospital,’ Saul Becket informed his older brother. ‘He told Ma not to say anything to you about it, but you know
Ma.’
Sam was aware that Judy was still claiming to be pissed with him for being too busy to make it to the Seder the previous Friday, but he was also aware that she understood perfectly well that if
he could have made it in time, he would have. His father’s anger was a rarity.
It was just after ten o’clock, and they were all sitting around the living room in the house in Golden Beach that the Beckets had lived in for more than twenty-five years. The TV was
turned down low because David wanted to watch the news but Saul was supposed to be working on a school assignment. There was a shabbiness about the room that Judy – a petite, trim woman with
brown, silvering curly hair and intelligent hazel eyes – sometimes complained about, but the truth was she loved every soft, snug inch of the battered old furniture she and her husband had
lived with since before they’d become parents. Every scuff and scratch on Judy Becket’s mahogany cabinets and bookcases reminded her that she and David had brought up two happy sons
who’d always felt free to enjoy their home rather than treat it as a showcase.