Mind Games (26 page)

The terrier gave one of his grunts, settling contentedly down on the seat beside her. Grace knew they were both looking forward to going home.

Grace and Claudia flew out of Miami International on Wednesday morning, arrived at O’Hare in Chicago early afternoon and took a cab to their hotel. Daniel had wanted to
come, but Claudia had told him that he’d be helping her more if he stayed home with the boys, and Daniel knew she meant it. Claudia had left the travel arrangements to Grace, who had decided
to follow her own instincts. The Lucca family had lived in Melrose Park all their lives, had moved into a pleasant row-house in the days when Frank had made a better-than-decent living from his
suburban grocery store – before he’d begun substituting quality for profit, gradually falling out with and losing all his and Ellen’s best customers. They’d managed to stay
in the house after
Lucca’s
had closed down, and Grace knew that their mother had worked hard to keep things together. She wished now with all her heart that she could have
loved and admired Ellen for that, but all the sweated labour in the world could not, would never, make up for the fact that she had stood by and done nothing while her husband had abused
Claudia.

Which was why, Grace supposed, she had made up her mind that if she and Claudia were going to pay their respects to Ellen Lucca, they were not going to stay anywhere near the Melrose Park house.
They were going to a fine hotel, to the Mayfair Regent, to an elegant, intimate place with views over Lake Michigan, where the rooms were packed with indulgences and the bar had a fireplace.
Claudia had balked at it when Grace had told her, had suffered an instant attack of the guilts, but Grace had stood firm.

‘I’m not going to analyse the way I’m dealing with this,’ she told her sister. ‘I’m not a psychologist where this is concerned – I’m just a woman
who happens to be able to afford a decent place to stay, and what I want when we get back from the wake and the cemetery and from anyplace near Frank Lucca, is to have the most comfortable room,
the best-smelling bath I can get, and the biggest, straightest Scotch to go along with it.’

The last couple of days prior to their departure had been hard on Grace because she had learned that the date of the funeral was to clash with the State Attorney’s
presentation of the case against Cathy to the grand jury. Jerry Wagner maintained – and Sam Becket said that, in his experience, Wagner was right – that there wasn’t a damned
thing Grace could do at this stage to help her patient. That didn’t stop Grace from wanting at least to be around for Cathy. But in the event, all she’d been able to do was speak to her
on the phone. It had been an unsatisfactory, even distressing conversation, largely one-way. Cathy who now knew that David Becket’s recovery had done nothing to improve her own situation,
said she understood about Grace having to leave town for her mother’s funeral, and that she was sorry for her loss. But she had sounded so listless, so
flattened
, that Grace’s
fears for her had grown.

‘I’ll call,’ Grace had promised, ‘to find out what happens.’

‘We know what’s going to happen,’ Cathy said.

‘Perhaps,’ Grace said, forcing a positive note into her voice, ‘but whatever goes on this week, Cathy, you have to remember that this is just the beginning. It’s early
days – Mr Wagner and his team – all of us – we haven’t been able to really start fighting for you yet.’

‘Sure,’ Cathy had said. ‘I know.’

And she had put the phone down.

Grace and Claudia, with Frank Lucca and a handful of friends, said their farewells to Ellen on Thursday morning, participated in the rituals. Grace couldn’t really know
what was going on in her sister’s mind, but she did know there was both too much and too little going on in her own. Too many still-vivid bad memories and unresolved recriminations. Too
little love and no genuine forgiveness. It was, she guessed, simply too late to make peace with their mother, and she thought Claudia knew that as well as she did.

Frank had altered physically, was ageing badly. He had, Grace allowed, been quite a good-looking man when he was younger, thrusting and vigorous, but now his hair was almost gone, his skull
unbeautifully shaped, his nose seemed larger, and the sourness, the meanness, of his spirit seemed to have been sucked out of his brain right into his dark eyes and weak mouth.

He wept when they lowered his wife’s coffin into the ground.
Crocodile tears
, Grace thought, uncharitably, seeing them trickling down his cheeks; but later, when she was safely
away from him again, she thought that perhaps they might have been genuine. Ellen had been a good wife to him, after all, had stood by him, even against her own daughters.

‘You’re the shrink or the mother?’ one of Frank’s neighbours asked Grace after the burial, back at the house in Melrose Park. She was thin, wearing black satin, and she
smelled of salami.

‘I’m the shrink,’ Grace answered. ‘Grace Lucca.’

‘Your father was very sad that you and your sister didn’t come to see your mother while she was still with us, God rest her soul.’

Grace resisted an astonishingly violent urge to spit in her eye. ‘It was impossible for us to come, unfortunately.’

‘Your mother was a wonderful human being,’ the woman told her.

‘I’m glad you thought so,’ Grace said, and turned away.

‘I behaved badly today,’ she said to Claudia, later, back in their suite at the hotel. ‘I didn’t mean to – I intended going along with it all, no
matter what, but I just couldn’t stand it.’

‘You didn’t do anything so terrible,’ Claudia said.

‘Didn’t I?’ Grace asked, vaguely. ‘Then maybe I just wanted to.’

They had both taken hot showers, wrapped themselves in hotel robes and ordered dinner from room service – fillet steaks, which they’d eaten ravenously, and Bordeaux, which they were
still drinking now, slumped in front of the TV, drained but immeasurably relieved that it was over. There was a kind of a fog over the whole, awful day; detachment had now returned to Grace. There
had been no surprises. No acts of contrition from their father; on the contrary, he had made it abundantly clear to anyone who would listen – not that there’d been many there –
that he felt Claudia and Grace had let both him and Ellen down badly.

‘Is it very sinful,’ Claudia asked now from the depths of her armchair, ‘for me to be enjoying myself this evening?’

‘Is that a serious question?’ Grace asked from the sofa.

‘Afraid so.’

‘You know my answer,’ Grace said. ‘You’re an honest person, Claudia, not a hypocrite. You’re not capable of faking grief, and I don’t think either of us is
feeling it, are we?’

‘I can’t grieve for Mama,’ she admitted. ‘But I do feel very sad.’

‘So do I.’ Grace was holding a coffee cup, comforted by its smooth, snug feel in her hands. ‘But I think that’s about the past, isn’t it? I think maybe we’re
mourning what might have been.’

‘I suppose we lost her years ago,’ Claudia said, softly.

‘Ellen lost us,’ Grace said. ‘She threw us away.’

They sat up talking for a long while, the way they usually did when they were alone together, but by morning, as they boarded their flight back to Miami, Grace had the sense of something
fundamental having shifted between them. ‘Closure’ was a fashionable word these days. Men and women sought it after a love affair had ended, or a marriage had gone sour; victims were
told they would feel better if they found a way to achieve it for themselves.

Closure.

Grace was the sister who had talked about her lack of emotion with regard to their mother’s death. Claudia, historically, was the more easily upset, the more needy sister. And yet, as they
parted in Miami that Friday afternoon, Grace was aware that Claudia was the one who had achieved closure, who had somehow come of age during the last twenty-four hours. So far as she was concerned,
from now on, all the family she needed – would ever need – was in Florida. As for Grace – supposedly the stronger sister, the leader – she just felt empty. There was a cold
void inside her now that had, she guessed, previously been filled with the slow-burning heat of old anger. Ellen was gone forever, and Frank had assuredly lost the power to so much as disturb
her.

But she would have been a liar if she’d said she felt peaceful about that.

As anticipated, the grand jury had indicted Cathy and the prosecutor had filed papers to have her bound into the adult court for trial. In addition to which, she had now been
formally charged with the Flager killing and the attack on David Becket. The next time Grace could see her, Jerry Wagner’s assistant, Veronica Blaustein, said, Cathy would be in the Female
House of Detention a few blocks from the Flagler Dog Track in the City of Miami.

On the Monday following Ellen’s funeral, when Grace called to try to arrange a visit, she was informed that Cathy was unwell and refusing visitors. Probably, Grace figured, she was meant
to take that on the chin and melt away, but she hung in until finally they let her talk to Dr Parés, one of the facility’s physicians. His voice was soft and lightly accented, and
Grace was relieved to find him clearly concerned about Cathy’s welfare.

‘She is very depressed, Dr Lucca,’ he told her. ‘She has been weeping a great deal.’ Parés paused. ‘I’m afraid she feels both abandoned and
betrayed.’

‘What are you doing for her?’ The idea that prison policy might be to pump troublesome inmates full of state-approved medication to keep them in line alarmed Grace, especially in
view of what Cathy’s own father had done to her as a young child.

‘There isn’t much I can do,’ Dr Parés answered. ‘It’s early days. I have tried my best to reassure her – not an easy task, as you can well
imagine.’

‘Have you prescribed medication?’ Grace couldn’t resist asking.

‘She will be offered two milligrams of diazepam before lights-out to help her rest,’ the doctor answered, a touch stiffly.

‘Can you try to persuade her to see me, Dr Parés?’

His hesitation was brief but unmistakable. ‘It could be difficult.’ He paused. ‘You are, after all, one of the people Cathy feels most betrayed by.’

Grace was dismayed, but not surprised. Her own sense of guilt, irrational as she knew it was, had been intense since Harry had dug up the murder weapon, and had worsened considerably during the
last week.

‘I just want to help her,’ she told the prison physician. ‘I believe that Cathy’s innocent – I want to be her friend. If there’s anything at all you can do to
get that across to her, I’d be very grateful.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said, more gently. ‘It’s hard for me to believe her guilty, too. Though appearances, as we know, can lie.’

Grace knew, of course, that he was right about that. She knew, too, that she was sinking ever deeper into the trap she had sensed from her first meeting with Cathy a little over five weeks
before. The girl was a patient and victim, but she was also a multiple murder suspect. Of all her numerous patients, Cathy was the one Grace knew she needed to be most vigilant about keeping in
emotional perspective – keeping her thoughts about her as clearly labelled as the notes in the buff-coloured folder in her cabinet –
ROBBINS, C.
– and
considering those thoughts only immediately before, during and after a session. But the truth was that Cathy was now on Grace’s mind day and night, even creeping into her dreams as she slept;
and, even more unpardonably, she was, from time to time, starting to impinge on Grace’s sessions with other patients.

What she ought to do, Grace was beginning to realize, was to consult with another Miami psychologist, perhaps even consider handing over Cathy’s case to a more detached third party.

Cathy would feel even more betrayed if Grace passed her on – but then, according to Dr Parés, that was how she already felt. And what if – however much Grace hated
contemplating the possibility – but what if she
was
guilty? Mightn’t she then be far better off with a psychologist who was willing to accept that truth, someone who would
start right out tracking the best way to help Cathy from that perspective? As a potential psychotic. As a multiple killer, not to mention a matricide.

‘Maybe it’s time,’ Grace said to Harry, her faithful confidant, just before lunch, ‘I started really taking those possibilities on board.’

He sat very still, his bright, dark eyes fixed on hers.

He had nothing to say. He knew she was only casting around. Snowing herself. Grace knew that too.

There was no way she was going to give up on Cathy.

On Tuesday morning, David Becket called Grace. Sam had told her that his father was now back home full-time and getting cantankerous. His familiar voice sounded as warm as it
had ever been to her ears.

‘Last time you and I had a real chance to talk,’ he said, ‘it was about that son-of-a-bitch, so-called physician father of Cathy Robbins.’

‘I guess it was,’ she said.

‘Next thing I knew – well, you know what happened then.’ David paused. ‘Sam told me about your mother, Grace. I’m sorry.’

She hadn’t seen Sam since the barmitzvah, but they’d talked on the phone, and she’d told him about the visit to Chicago. He had asked what she needed, or if she wanted to be
left alone, and she’d answered that there was nothing she needed, but that she didn’t especially want to be left alone either. One of these days, Grace had thought, she might even tell
Sam the whole miserable story of her childhood – if, that was, they ever found the time and space.

‘Thank you, David,’ she said now, into the phone. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Getting fitter every day. Driving Judy crazy, wanting to do more than she thinks I should.’ He paused again. ‘I gather she cold-shouldered you because she knew you were
backing Cathy?’

‘I understood why.’

‘Well, I didn’t understand, and I’ve told her so.’