Mind Games (25 page)

‘What a pity,’ Judy said, quietly. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’ She turned away and moved back into the crowd. Grace looked at Sam, saw the anger in his eyes, reached
out and briefly squeezed his hand. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, softly. ‘Don’t get upset.’

‘She keeps this up for too long,’ he said, ‘I’ll be telling her what I think.’

Grace smiled. ‘Give her some time.’

‘You have to stay and see Dad before you leave, Grace.’

She glanced across to where Sam’s father sat surrounded by a cluster of affectionate-looking well-wishers, and saw that Judy was back by his side.

‘Not today, Sam. Just give him my love – I’ll see him soon.’

She gave him no more chance to argue, just kissed his cheek, told him again how glad she had been to be there, and slipped quietly out of the hall. Back in the Mazda, she took a few moments to
calm down, turning on the air-conditioning, switching her cellular phone back on, trying not to dwell too long on all the increasingly complicated feelings that Sam Becket was stirring up in
her.

The message icon was on display. Glad for the distraction, Grace pushed the buttons for retrieval and, a few seconds later, heard Claudia’s voice.

‘Grace, it’s me. I’m sorry to have to leave a message this way, but I don’t know what else to do.’ Pause. ‘Papa called me,’ she said.
‘Mama’s gone.’

Grace – having gone home to pick up Harry – was jumpy on the drive down to Islamorada. She knew it was the news affecting her, probably combined with the potent mix
of emotion that the barmitzvah and kiddush had stirred up in her, but two or three times on the journey she had the uneasy sense of being watched again – the same kind of feeling she’d
experienced in Saks two weeks ago when she’d thought, for just a moment, that it had been Cathy watching her. It had been nothing then, and there was no one tailing her today, either. She
checked a few times in her rear-view mirror, and the car behind her for a long while was a small VW being driven by an old man, and then there was a blue truck with a youngish woman at the wheel.
Grace shook herself out of it, told Harry that she was getting paranoid, and he wasn’t to worry about her because they said that was one of the things that happened to psychologists over
time.

They were at the Brownley house by mid-afternoon. Daniel had just gotten back, too, from some business in Tampa, and Mike and Robbie were on their way home, being brought by a
friend’s mother.

Claudia was putting on a brave face, keeping busy in the kitchen, telling Daniel she didn’t need help, telling him to go upstairs, take a shower and relax a while and leave her to put
together a snack, but inside Grace knew she was a mess.

‘He’s called three times,’ Claudia said as she sliced cheese, while Harry and Sadie, the dachshund, hung around waiting for pieces of food to fall down. ‘He wants us to
come home for the funeral – he keeps saying we have to make things right between us.’

‘Words,’ Grace said.

‘He sounds as if he means it, Grace.’

‘Sure he does. He was always able to do that when it suited him.’ Grace took a kitchen knife and stabbed at a large red pepper. ‘He’s pushing your buttons,
Claudia.’

‘Don’t you want to go back for the funeral?’ Claudia asked softly.

‘Want to?’ Grace put down the knife. ‘Of course I don’t
want
to. I don’t want to go back to Chicago, I don’t want to see Frank, and I certainly
don’t want to watch my mother being put into the ground and have to deal with all those emotions.’ She sighed. ‘But I guess I’m going to do it just the same.’

‘Thank God,’ Claudia said and slumped on to one of her stools. ‘I was so scared you were going to say no, and I might have to go back alone.’

‘I’d never let you do that.’

A shadow of a smile tugged at her sister’s mouth. ‘I guess I knew that.’

Grace took Claudia’s hand, drew her off the stool and over to the kitchen table. They both sat down, still holding hands.

‘Poor Ellen,’ Grace said. Suddenly, she realized that she didn’t even know exactly what had killed her. ‘Did Frank say what happened? I mean, was it the cancer? I thought
he said they’d caught it all.’

‘Heart attack,’ Claudia told her. ‘He said it was very sudden. There was no warning. One minute she was there, the next she was gone.’

‘Better for her,’ Grace said, softly.

‘It must have been a big shock for Papa,’ Claudia said.

The bigger the better
, Grace thought.

‘I wish it had been him,’ she said.

‘Don’t say that, Grace.’

‘Why not? You know how I feel.’ Grace paused. ‘At least she doesn’t have to live with him anymore. That’s something.’ Claudia’s dark eyes filled.
‘I guess it is.’

‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Grace got up and put her arms around Claudia’s shoulders. ‘You cry – you let it out.’

For a moment, Claudia drew back a little and looked up into Grace’s face. ‘What about you? Don’t you want to cry too?’

‘No,’ Grace said, and pulled her closer again. ‘Not yet anyway.’

‘How do you feel?’ Claudia asked against her shoulder.

‘I don’t know, Claudia.’

It was the truth. Grace didn’t know how she felt. She couldn’t seem to feel anything much. Oh, she understood the reasons behind that all too well. Denial.
Blocking. All the usual stuff she’d spouted for so many years to and about patients. That didn’t help her now.

Not for the first time, Grace was aware that her situation was far more complex than Claudia’s. Her sister was the victim – the more obvious victim, at least – of both their
parents. Of Frank, physically, and of Ellen, his accomplice through her silence. Claudia was entitled to hold on to her hate and fear, Grace felt strongly. Claudia ought, by rights, to have been
the one not wanting to go back for the funeral – and she sure as hell didn’t have to consider going for Frank’s sake. But it was different for Grace. She had never actually been
abused. Her personal suffering had come from seeing what Claudia had gone through, from the guilt she herself had felt about being spared, from the atmosphere of misery, rage and fear that
permeated their childhood home. That was all Grace had had to get over after they’d left Chicago, while Claudia had needed to get past years of terror, shame and betrayal. And that was why
Grace still felt thrust now, after all those years, into the position of having to make all the decisions about their level of participation in Ellen Lucca’s funeral arrangements and their
father’s future.

‘There are a lot of things happening now,’ Grace said later after dinner, once the boys had taken Harry and Sadie up to bed and the three adults could finally talk
in peace, ‘that I never thought would happen.’

‘Such as?’ Daniel asked. They were out on the deck, citronella candles flickering all around to ward off the mosquitoes. Daniel had opened a good bottle of Chianti, and all three of
them had by now drunk more than they were accustomed to.

‘Frank, the bully, begging us to come back when he first told us Ellen was sick.’ Grace paused for a second, conscious that it was probably the wine loosening her tongue. ‘The
way my feelings haven’t changed at all, about him, especially – but about Ellen, too.’

No one else said anything.

‘I’d never really thought about either of them dying, or about how that might make me feel,’ she went on.

‘I had.’ Claudia’s voice sounded harsh in the soft night air. ‘After we left Chicago – before I met you, Dan’ – she smiled gently, briefly, at her
husband – ‘I often used to imagine Papa dying.’ She turned her head away from them both, so they couldn’t see her face. ‘It was always a painful death I pictured for
him. He was always pleading for our forgiveness.’ She paused. ‘And when I imagined Mama’s dying, she was always begging, too – begging me to forgive her for not taking my
side against Papa.’

She turned back, and in the flickering light her face looked full of pain. Daniel put out his left hand, touched her arm, let his hand stay there, just touching, nothing more. Grace knew that
Claudia would be all right so long as she had Daniel.

She woke up early, while everyone else was still asleep – Claudia and Daniel probably sleeping off the effects of the Chianti. Her head ached a little, but otherwise her
worst symptom was nervousness because of the call she knew she had to make – the one she’d put off the previous night.

Frank answered groggily. Grace had known he would be out of it. She supposed she’d chosen early morning because he’d always been a slow starter, would be less able to fight back.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘Took your time.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I drove down to be with Claudia when I heard. It got pretty late, so I thought I’d wait till morning.’ She paused. ‘Claudia said it happened
suddenly. I’m sorry.’

‘So when are you coming?’

‘When’s the funeral?’ Grace couldn’t believe how detached she felt. She’d experienced greater emotion talking to absolute strangers about funeral arrangements than
she did now with her own father.

‘I don’t know,’ Frank said. ‘That’s what I need the two of you to fix up. The funeral, and your mother’s will, and that kind of thing.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ Grace said.

‘Why not?’

‘We both have commitments,’ she told him. ‘If you let us know when the date’s set, we’ll do our best to be there.’ Her pause was very brief, her voice quite
hard. ‘If anything comes up that you really need our help with – and I mean really need – then please call me, not Claudia.’

‘Now you’re telling me I can’t call my own daughter?’

If the memory of his ugliness had ever gone away, the meanness in his voice would have brought it all flooding back.

‘I’m your daughter, too,’ Grace said. ‘I mean it, Frank. You call me. Leave Claudia alone, for once in your lousy life.’

She put down the receiver. Her detachment had gone, and her hands were trembling. But at least the decisions had been made.

Even at that emotionally charged time, Cathy was still looming large in Grace’s mind. Perhaps remembering their own past was highlighting the poignancy of Cathy’s
predicament – another abused, traumatized child in need of all the friends she could get. Grace left Islamorada after breakfast and then, on the spur of the moment, took a chance on Peter
Hayman being at his house on Key Largo, and being both willing and able to see her.

He was there, seeming delighted to find Grace and Harry on his doorstep, and within minutes they were all sitting out on the screened porch overlooking his palm and orchid garden. The air was
too heavily perfumed, and if Grace had known him better she would have requested a move to the ocean-facing side of the house, but she was an uninvited guest and so she said nothing, while Harry,
uncomfortable, too, stayed low and almost glued to her right foot.

She drank some of the coffee he brought for her and, careful not to divulge any information that Sam had given her in confidence, brought Hayman up-to-date on their John Broderick-related
theorizing.

He sat quietly, listening until Grace had come to a halt.

‘Have you also considered that you may be entirely wrong?’ he asked at last, gently. ‘That Cathy may, after all, be guilty?’

‘Of course I’ve considered it,’ Grace answered. ‘But I don’t believe she is.’ She could hear Harry panting. She reached down and fondled his ears for a
moment, and resolved not to stay too much longer for his sake.

Hayman stood up, wandered over to the screen, gazed out into the semi-tropical garden. ‘I’m troubled, Grace,’ he said without looking back at her. ‘It concerns me that
maybe I was wrong to have found even the most tenuous of similarities with that old case of mine.’ He turned to face her. ‘Maybe I planted utterly fallacious notions in your
mind.’

‘Maybe you did,’ she conceded calmly, ‘but with the life of a fourteen-year-old girl at stake, I’m not prepared to take the chance that you were not wrong.’ She
paused. ‘Anyway, I’ve moved some distance from the Münchhausen’s notion, so that needn’t trouble you.’

‘Okay.’ He paused, apparently taking a moment to accept her point-of-view. ‘Simple question. Do you know what John Broderick looked like? Do you have a photograph of
him?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Grace told him about Cathy’s bedroom in the Robbins home, about the family photographs she’d seen which had excluded the man Cathy always referred to
as her first father.

‘Mightn’t it be an idea,’ Hayman suggested, ‘to get hold of one? If you’re staying with this theory that he might still be alive?’ He smiled. ‘I mean,
Grace, you wouldn’t know the guy if you fell over him.’

‘That’s true.’ She considered the best way to obtain such a photograph. Lafayette Hospital were bound to have a snapshot on file, but they were unlikely to release it to her,
which meant she’d probably have to ask Sam to deal with it. She saw no reason for him to object – for all she knew, he already had one. ‘I’ll get one,’ she said to
Hayman. ‘I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it myself.’

‘Maybe because you know he’s dead,’ he said, gently. ‘You just aren’t ready to admit it yet.’

He remarked as Grace was leaving, about a half-hour later, that she was looking rather tired. She told him she’d had some bad news, but did not elaborate. He said he was
sorry to hear that, but asked for no details, for which Grace was grateful. He did, however, mention once more, that his invitation was still open for her to join him for a day or two’s R and
R aboard his boat.

‘Don’t forget, Grace, will you?’

‘I won’t,’ she said.

‘You mustn’t make yourself sick. You won’t be any use to anyone then.’

‘I know.’

They shook hands. Grace noticed that he held on just a little longer than he needed to. She wondered, for a brief moment, if she might have sent out some misleading signal by just showing up
unannounced, but there was nothing else, no intense look in his brown eyes. Just simple care and concern.

‘See?’ she said to Harry as they headed back on the Overseas Highway towards the mainland. ‘That’s another thing that comes from being a psychologist.’ She reached
across and ruffled the top of his head. ‘You start reading ten times as much as there really is into a simple handshake.’