Mind Games (15 page)

‘A Dr John Broderick,’ Grace answered. ‘Cathy’s natural father.’

He came back to her within the hour.

‘Details I’m going to have to wait for,’ he said, ‘but I thought you’d probably want whatever I could get right away.’

‘All tidbits welcome.’ Grace grabbed a pen.

‘What I have is very ugly,’ he cautioned.

‘Ugliness is what brings half the people I see to me,’ she reminded him.

‘Poor Grace,’ the doctor said.

She called Sam just after nine a.m., having hardly slept all night.

‘John Broderick,’ she said.

‘What about him?’

‘Has anyone – have you – checked into his suicide?’ She paused. ‘You said he drowned, Sam, but I heard from someone else that he was just presumed
drowned.’

‘Who’d you hear that from?’

David had asked Grace not to tell his son about their conversation in case Sam thought they were meddling in police business.

‘That’s not important,’ she said, hoping he wouldn’t get heavy. ‘I just want to know if there was an actual body.’

‘Why would you doubt it, Grace?’

‘I’m not sure. I’d just really appreciate knowing.’

Grace took an hour at lunchtime – she didn’t really have the time to spare, but she needed to get out of the house, clear her head, be among people whose problems
she didn’t have to worry about. Nameless people.

She thought about getting in the car and driving up to the bustling Aventura Mall, but she really didn’t have enough time for that, so she took a stroll across Kane Concourse and went to
the Bal Harbour Shops with which she had a love-hate relationship; their lovely, if phoney, tropical garden setting made the stores amongst the most comfortable in which to wander, but their
swankiness and, for the most part, sheer unaffordability, often put her hackles up. Still, Saks was still Saks, and Neiman Marcus was always worth a wander, and having to pass Chanel and Gucci and
Hermès and Tiffany en route was, Grace had to admit, no great hardship.

It was what she needed today for a change of pace. Locals and wealthy tourists doing what they loved above almost anything: shopping. It all looked, on the surface at least, so gloriously
uncomplicated. Grace knew better, of course, knew that if she chose to, she could sit in one of the cafés or restaurants and absorb an almost limitless psychologist’s
Festspiel
– demonstrations of marital conflict, addiction, self-gratification and inferiority complexes – but today all she wanted was to gaze into some pretty windows, look at
some tempting displays, get a decent cup of coffee and shut down.

It would have worked perfectly well, but for the curious feeling Grace had that someone was watching her.

It struck her the first time when she was wandering around the lingerie department in Saks and had a sudden, strong sense that someone’s eyes were boring into her back. She turned around
from the glorious, wildly priced racks of négligées, saw a small throng of people, but no one actually taking any notice of her whatsoever, shrugged off the feeling and turned back
again.

Fifteen minutes later, sitting on what they called the sidewalk outside Coco’s, having a sandwich and espresso, the sensation hit her again. Grace turned around in her chair, moving more
quickly this time, and saw – thought she saw – a young woman about fifteen feet or so away, stepping on to the down escalator and out of sight. Grace thought she was young from her
contours and the swiftness of her movements. She had long blonde hair. She thought, though she knew it was more than unlikely, and she hadn’t really seen her clearly, that it might have been
Cathy Robbins.

Sam called back that afternoon.

‘No body,’ he said without preamble. ‘But —’

‘No body?’ Grace’s heart-rate sped up.

‘Don’t get excited. There are too many buts.’

‘Such as?’

‘One: a suicide note, which is still on file up in Pensacola.’ Sam sounded matter-of-fact, like he was ticking items off a list. ‘Two: three independent witnesses saw Broderick
taking out his sailboat on a day when storm warnings were being broadcast non-stop. Three: he may not have been found, but his boat was. Capsized.’

‘But no body,’ Grace said quietly.

‘Grace, what exactly is your angle on this?’ Now he sounded distracted, almost impatient. ‘You know enough about the ocean. You know it devours people, especially if
they’re crazy enough to go sailing in a major storm – or determined enough to die.’

Or if they want it to seem as if they want to die.

‘You’re right,’ Grace said. She could tell there was no point in pushing him any farther, not today at least, with him in such an unreceptive mood. ‘Are you okay,
Sam?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ he said.

‘Any progress with the investigations?’

‘Nothing worth talking about.’

Time to go.

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said.

On Sunday afternoon, Sam was in Sarasota.

It was the Florida city many people loved best, and up until nine years ago Sam had liked it a lot too, not least because it hosted so much fine opera. But it had become the place on earth he
most dreaded visiting. It was the city that Althea had chosen to move to after their divorce.

It was also the place she had elected to bury their son.

Her mother lived there, and one of her sisters, and Sam had certainly heard Althea say, over and over again, that one day, when Sam had had his fill of Miami crime (she had always had that
tendency – one that really pissed him off – when she was mad at him, to make it sound as if he got some sick fix from his work), she hoped they would move there too. But the
cold-blooded immediacy and obstinacy of the decision Althea had made right after Sampson’s death had shocked Sam way beyond words. He knew – oh, Christ, of
course
he knew
– that the icy spikes of her cruelty had been fashioned out of unbearable grief and despair, but the savagery of her decision – from which she had absolutely refused to shift, and from
which he could not have succeeded in shifting her without prolonging an agony that was already unendurable – to bury their son over two hundred miles away from him was something he would
never be able to forgive.

He had tried, on the first and second anniversaries of the accident, to reopen some small channel of communication between them, and he’d tried it again, last year, on what should have
been Sampson’s eleventh birthday, but Althea hadn’t wanted to know. Where Sam Becket was concerned, she just wanted to hate. It was, Sam had grown to suppose, what kept her going.

Which was why he was there this afternoon, so late in the day and entirely alone. Because he had wanted to avoid seeing his ex-wife and her family. What he wanted, today, nine years exactly
after that drunk had wiped out all his and Althea’s hopes and dreams, was to be alone with his son.

He was safe. They had come and gone. The flowers testified to that. White roses for purity. Delphiniums and cornflowers, because Sampson’s favourite colour was blue.

Sam never brought flowers. He brought seashells. Right from the start of his brief life, Sampson had loved water. Sam could still close his eyes and recall the feel of his baby son in his arms
as he sat with him on the beach, right up close to the water, so that Sampson could feel the splashes and watch the rippling waves and hear the ocean’s voice. Sampson had loved seashells, so
from time to time during the year his father wandered the beaches looking out for shells of special beauty or colour, and collected them for the next time he could bring them here to his
son’s grave.

‘Look what I brought for you today, son.’ He fished around in his pockets. ‘I got two nice tulips and a crown conch.’ He squatted beside the grave and laid the shells
down.

He had bought a book years ago to help him identify shells for Sampson, and the hollowness inside him that never entirely went away was a stark reminder that these tiny offerings were something
he continued with for his own sake, not his little boy’s. But still, it did no one any harm, and it gave him a bean or two of comfort now and again.

He put down a gleaming, brownish dappled Cowrie, followed it with a small moon shell, and then reached his right hand in his pocket for the final time. ‘And here’s the one I like the
most. The book says it’s common, but I never found one this pretty before.’ He laid down a small, smooth, soft rose-coloured shell. ‘It even has a pretty name, Sampson. Janthina
– isn’t that a neat name?’

He didn’t know how long they remained on the grave after he’d gone, but there was never a trace of them from visit to visit. Maybe the oddness of the seashells offended whoever
tended the cemetery, or maybe it was Althea herself who removed them, knowing they came from him. Whatever, Sam knew he was going to keep on bringing the tiny tributes to a beautiful child who had
possessed an eye for the wonders of nature at such an early age.

The other thing Sam did, each time he came to the cemetery, was sing.

Sampson had liked his daddy’s voice.

He always sang the same thing. A few verses from the ‘Carousel’ soliloquy about a father dreaming of his unborn child. He sat down on the grass beside the headstone and sang very
softly, and he never made it very far because it choked him up, but that didn’t matter because he knew Sampson couldn’t hear him anyway. And it was okay for a father to get choked up
over his son’s grave.

If they’d buried him in Alaska, they couldn’t have stopped Sam from doing that.

On Sunday afternoon, Grace was home, going over and over the information David Becket had given her on Friday. Oh, she’d had plenty else to occupy her mind since Sam
Becket had given her the brush-off on Saturday – a thirteen-year-old anorexic, a hyperactive third-grader and a juvenile pyromaniac-in-the-making, to name but three – but Cathy
Robbins’ childhood was still holding sway over the rest.

When Peter Hayman called, just after two o’clock, it was hard to stop herself from calling it fate. She knew, of course, it was just a coincidence that the doctor had decided to call her
at exactly the moment she was feeling about to explode if she couldn’t share her thought processes with someone else – but it didn’t feel that way at the time.

He wanted to ask her how things were progressing.

Grace wanted to tell him.

‘Want to drive down?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know where you are.’

‘About a mile from where we met,’ Hayman said. ‘On Key Largo.’

He lived at the ocean end of a small residential road that ran beside one of more than a dozen or so inlets in south Key Largo. Most of his neighbours lived in modern,
expensive-looking, impeccably designed houses, many of them with handsome cruisers moored right in their backyards, but Hayman’s house was an old timber three-storey affair, loaded with
enough atmosphere to make the grade as a movie set. Huge old ceiling fans and local art on the walls, rattan furniture inside and out on the screened porches that ran all the way around the house,
a small, semi-wild palm and orchid garden out back, and what Hayman said was a regular afternoon visitation from a bunch of herons and pelicans looking for hand-outs on the ocean side.

‘How long have you lived here?’ Grace asked, once they were settled on one of the porches, sipping homemade lemonade.

‘A few years now.’ Hayman leaned back comfortably in his rattan chair, his brown hair flopping over his forehead, the straw hat he’d been wearing on Grace’s arrival
laying on his right knee. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Very much.’

‘The neighbours wanted to see it pulled down because it was too out of keeping with their houses, but I persuaded the zoning people to let me put the place right and keep some flavour in
the road. I guess they’re getting used to it – some of them even speak to me now and then.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Grace said, looking around. ‘I think you’ve done a wonderful job.’

Hayman shrugged. ‘Once I’d decided to quit seeing patients on a daily basis and concentrate more on my studies and writing, there seemed no reason not to move to where I really
wanted to be.’ He adjusted the spectacles on his nose and smiled. ‘I’m a bit of a sailor. I thought about heading all the way down to Key West, but then I figured that was less
practical if I still wanted to see the occasional patient and mooch around bookstores and libraries on the mainland.’

‘You remind me of my sister’s husband,’ Grace said. ‘They live up in Fort Lauderdale half the time, and down on Islamorada the rest. Daniel’s an architect, but his
great passion is fishing, so now he can spend as much time as he likes doing what he loves where he wants.’

‘Does your sister feel the same way?’ Hayman asked.

‘Claudia loves it. So do the kids – they have two boys.’ Grace looked around, aware that she was already starting to be lulled into relaxation by the lush peace wrapping itself
around her. She often found the Keys almost darkly seductive, tended to feel a little too removed from reality for her personal taste, so that returning to the jangling commercialism of Miami felt
almost as reviving as a welcome cool shower.

‘This is a very pleasant surprise for me, Dr Lucca,’ Hayman said.

‘You don’t mind my intruding then?’

‘Far from it.’ He paused. ‘Though glad as I am to see you again, we both know you haven’t driven down here to talk fishing or sailing.’

She took another sip of lemonade, then set her glass down on the wicker table. ‘I’ve learned some things about Cathy Robbins’ past – disturbing things – and they
seem to have sparked off some wild ideas.’ She looked directly at him. ‘Some of which relate to the theory you and I were discussing last week.’

‘So you thought another conversation might clarify things?’

‘Or spark something new.’ Grace hesitated. ‘Even though none of this information has stemmed from my talks with Cathy, I don’t need to tell you how confidential this has
to be.’

‘No, Dr Lucca,’ the psychiatrist said, ‘you don’t.’