Mind Games (5 page)

‘Which I won’t do till I hear from you.’

The message ended. Newly alarmed, Sam punched out the number. Judy Becket picked up on the first ring.

‘Ma? What’s wrong?’

‘What should be wrong?’ Cool as a cucumber.

‘Ma, you just left a message saying—’

‘So you were there,’ she pounced on him.

‘I just got in,’ Sam defended.

‘Very convenient.’

‘Ma, what’s the matter? Telling me to call any time up till three in the morning – you almost gave me a heart attack.’ He paused. ‘Is Dad all right?’

‘Your father’s fine – it’s me you should be worried about.’

‘Why? Ma,
why
?’

‘Making me stay up half the night.’

Sam’s worry dissipated instantly. ‘What do you want, Ma?’

‘I need to know about Friday.’

‘Friday?’ He was momentarily confused. The coming weekend was Easter, which meant they were four days from Good Friday, but liberal as his mother was, he felt sure she wasn’t
referring to that. Yet in the more than fifteen years since he’d left home, during which time he’d gotten married, become a father and gotten divorced, he couldn’t recall the
Jewish Sabbath ever being a big issue with his parents.

‘You’ve forgotten.’

‘Apparently. What’s happening on Friday?’

‘Just a little thing like Passover,’ Judy said, ‘nothing important.’

Sam winced. ‘Seder night.’

‘Bingo,’ his mother said. ‘Give the boy a prize.’

‘I don’t know if I can make it Friday.’ He steeled himself.

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ Sardonic.

‘You know how it is, Ma.’

‘I should do by now.’ A pause. ‘And I wouldn’t be making such a fuss if it mightn’t be the last chance for us all to get together before Saul’s
barmitzvah.’

‘Saul’s barmitzvah’s almost a month away, Ma.’

‘But he’s reading the Four Questions on Friday night.’

‘He always reads the Four Questions.’

‘This is different,’ Judy Becket insisted. ‘He wants you to be here to hear him, give him confidence.’

‘Saul has plenty of confidence.’

‘You haven’t seen him lately. He’s nervous, Sam.’

‘That’s normal, Ma. Everyone gets nervous before their barmitzvah.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Sure I did.’

‘So will you come?’

She always did that to him, let him think she’d moved away from a topic, then veered suddenly back, nailing him.

‘I’ll try, Ma.’

‘You know how important Pesach is to your father.’ Another tack.

‘Of course I know,’ Sam said, fighting to stay patient, ‘but I’m dealing with a double homicide right now, and a young girl’s been orphaned, and Dad knows all about
her, just ask him – so chances are I may not get to you till late on Friday.’

‘Can’t you —?’

It was time to hang tough, so he rode straight over her. ‘But I’ll try to make it in time for the after-dinner singing, okay?’ He paused, taking in the disapproving silence.
‘Okay, Ma?’

‘Okay.’ There was a shrug in the word.

‘Will you go to bed now?’

‘I’ll go to bed, but I don’t suppose I’ll sleep.’

‘Then at least you’ll rest.’ He remembered something. ‘Would you tell Dad in the morning that I met with Dr Lucca?’

‘That’s the child psychologist, isn’t it?’ Judy asked.

‘Uh-huh. Tell Dad I liked her.’ He paused again. ‘And don’t forget to switch the phone back on in the bedroom, Ma.’

‘I’ve been a doctor’s wife for twenty-eight years, Samuel Lincoln Becket, and I still have all my faculties, thank you very much.’

Sam smiled into the phone.

‘Good night, Ma.’

He went back to the roof. The tamale was cold, so he drank the rest of the beer and lay down on the beach lounger he often used as a bed on warm nights. He loved this
semi-dark, this living, breathing night, felt less lonely up here than down in his far more comfortable, air-conditioned, but oh-so-empty bedroom.

He stared up into the neon-and-star canopy and thought about Cathy Robbins and all the horror she’d woken up to that early morning, and then he thought about Dr Grace Lucca and the small
shock of
something
that had stirred him when she’d first walked into the department. All that Scandinavian poise and cool balanced out so well – so
damned
well –
with something much warmer lurking underneath the surface. And calm, too, even in the midst of her outrage. That was, he supposed, what made her the good child psychologist his dad said she
was.

Sam went on night-sky-staring and let the day slip away, let himself think, instead, about the woman who had become his mother so many years ago, about the many parts of her. That little show of
archetypical Jewish mom belonged to the genuine chicken-soup side of her, the side that had wept right through his barmitzvah and graduation, but it wasn’t the real Judy Becket, not the one
kept carefully tucked out of sight for the most part, emerging only in redoubtable splendour at times of need. The one who had kept a constant iron vigil at his ICU bedside after he’d been
shot for the first time, not shedding a single tear until he was off the critical list. The one who had, above everyone – even David, his beloved adoptive father – refused to let him go
under when Sampson had died and Althea had blamed him for their loss. Judy Becket was a strange, remarkable woman in so many ways. It was only in untroubled times that she allowed herself to wear
the mantle of fretful mother, and even if she was a
nudnik
at times, Sam loved and respected her all the more.

The pain of that greatest of all losses was still with him, would never go away, not if he lived five hundred years, but the loneliness seldom really troubled him now. He filled his life to
bursting – with work, mostly, and family, and, when time allowed, with opera – so it was only on those nights when he couldn’t get to sleep in his empty bed that it drove its
awful, nagging ache into his bones. And it wasn’t much to do with not having a woman beside him – Lord knew he’d experienced loneliness of a different kind often enough with
Althea lying stiffly awake, an inch or two away in physical terms, but a thousand spiritual miles apart. It was missing Sampson. It was the absence of a child – of his son – in his
home. That small, light, compact body whose physical warmth and whose spirit, even in sleep, had seemed to heat Sam Becket right through to his core.

Loss.
It wasn’t the word for being deprived of Sampson Becket.

Maybe the word just hadn’t been invented.

Grace had just returned from an emergency session with an eight-year-old assault victim when Sam Becket called again.

‘I spent the morning at Frances Dean’s house.’

‘And?’ She felt the tension rise inside herself.

‘And nothing.’

‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Grace said.

‘Me neither.’ Becket sounded tired.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Unless you like making a bereaved sister feel like a suspect.’

‘How was Cathy?’

‘In bad shape.’ Becket paused. ‘Would you see her again?’

‘Does she want to see me?’

‘Her aunt seems to think so.’

Grace took no more than a moment.

‘Then of course I’ll see her.’

She worried as she drove over the MacArthur Causeway on her way to Coral Gables. There was nothing too unusual about that; she always worried in the early stages of dealing
with traumatized youngsters, and it was a soundly based, perfectly rational fear. The fear that no matter how gently she went about her business, she might end up just stirring the pot, forcing the
terrors clinging to the bottom and sides up to the surface too soon, whereas maybe if she left things alone, the stew might taste duller for a time, but at least it might still be edible. Grace
might have pulled up Detective Becket for talking about ‘coping’ the day before, might have pointed out the dangers of blocking, but there were times, she knew, when a certain amount of
suppression of agony was just what helped drag a human being through a crisis.

She had to accept that, because she had done it herself. Grace had suppressed and blocked and blanked out and ‘coped’,
and
survived – and emerged with a life more than
worth living.

Nothing looked any different in Frances Dean’s tidy, elegant living room, but the woman herself looked ten times worse than she had less than twenty-four hours
earlier.

‘The police won’t leave us alone,’ she told Grace, keeping her tremulous voice low so that her niece might not hear. ‘They were here all morning, searching the
house.’ Her grey-blue eyes widened. ‘Searching my home, as if I might have something to hide. Marie was my sister, for the love of God – my
sister.
’

‘It’s just routine,’ Grace told her gently. ‘Loss of privacy’s one of the terrible things about this kind of investigation, Mrs Dean. The police don’t have
any choice – they have to examine every detail.’

‘What sort of detail?’ the other woman protested, twisting the lace handkerchief in her hands. ‘Marie and Arnold were murdered in
their
house, not mine – in
their
bed
—’ She made a small, trembling, reflexive gesture with her right hand that might, Grace thought but was not certain, have been a signing of the cross. ‘They
think I might have killed them, don’t they?’ She stared wildly at the psychologist. ‘They do think that, don’t they?’

‘No, they don’t.’ Grace spoke decisively. ‘I’ve talked to Detective Becket, and I know he doesn’t think anything of the kind. It’s normal procedure, as
I said. You and Cathy are the closest surviving relatives, and she was in the house when it happened – they have to go through these motions.’

‘It’s going to be too much for her,’ Frances Dean said, abruptly. ‘I’m afraid it’s going to break her.’ She shook her head desolately. ‘It’s
so unfair. All those years of misery her mother and she had to —’

She stopped, clearly regretting her words. Grace waited a moment for her to go on, but it was obvious she’d clammed up. ‘What misery?’ she prompted, very gently.

Another shake of the head. ‘Too much to tell. Too much, and irrelevant anyway.’ The older woman’s chin came up a little and she looked directly into Grace’s face.
‘I woke up last night, late – I guess I must have slept a while for once —’ Her voice grew even more hushed. ‘I woke up and Cathy was standing next to my bed looking
down at me. She didn’t say anything, she wasn’t crying, she just stood there and stared – not really
at
me, more
into
me, if that makes any kind of
sense?’

Grace nodded, said nothing.

‘The child is almost destroyed,’ Frances Dean went on, quietly but desperately, ‘and if those people keep on coming back and trying to make her go over it and over it, I
don’t know what —’

She stopped, suddenly, her face turning towards the doorway, and Grace, too, heard the soft tread of Cathy approaching. Swiftly, she reached out and touched Mrs Dean’s hand. ‘Any
time you want to talk.’

Cathy came in. She was wearing jeans again, with a loose-fitting white cotton blouse and loafers.

‘Hello, Dr Lucca.’ She paused. ‘Grace.’

Grace smiled up at her. ‘Hello, Cathy.’

The girl’s aunt stood up. ‘I’ll leave you to talk.’

Cathy stayed where she was.

‘Would you mind if we went for a walk, Grace?’

‘I’d like that,’ Grace said.

Cathy looked towards her aunt. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Aunt Frances?’

Frances Dean managed a small smile. ‘Why would I mind? A little fresh air might do you some good. We were going to go out this morning,’ she explained to Grace, ‘but then the
police came.’

They walked along Granada Boulevard, strolling, taking their time, passing the big, handsome houses and their exotic gardens, made a left on to Coral Way and then turned on to
the path that ran beside the Coral Gables Country Club. It was warm and balmy; just ahead of them a pair of cyclists were wheeling their bikes along the road, and on one of the grey concrete tennis
courts two couples were playing and laughing. It was a normality that felt oddly out of reach even to Grace. Cathy walked in a calm enough straight line, her arms swinging a little, her hair loose
around her shoulders, her face betraying nothing, but it wasn’t hard to sense the wall of horror that moved with the teenager everywhere she went.

‘I can’t seem to escape,’ she said, still walking, not pausing or looking at Grace. ‘I do all the things I have to do – I try to eat what my aunt puts in front of
me, and I go to the bathroom, and I go to bed and sleep some, and then I get up and it all starts again. But none of it feels like me doing it.’

Grace just walked and listened.

‘Detective Becket asked me again if I could remember anything else, but I told him I can’t.’ Cathy stopped. ‘I told him I want to remember, but that’s a lie. I
don’t want to remember anything more, if there is anything.’ Her pupils dilated, darkening her eyes. ‘I get flashes about what I saw.’

‘Flashbacks, you mean?’ Grace asked.

‘Not really,’ Cathy said. ‘They’re faster than that. Over and gone before I even know what they were.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s not just because of what
happened to my parents. I’ve had them for years.’

Grace remembered what her aunt had said inside – something about years of misery for Marie and Cathy.

‘The flashes,’ she said, carefully. ‘What are they like?’

Cathy shook her head. ‘They’re nothing.’

She stopped talking and began walking again, faster now, and beside her Grace increased her stride to keep up. Abruptly, Cathy turned and crossed the narrow road without looking, and a young man
rollerblading had to swerve to avoid hitting her. He called out to her angrily, but she didn’t appear to notice. Grace paused to cross more cautiously, then quickened her pace again to catch
up.

‘I’m sorry,’ Cathy said, not slowing.

‘No problem.’

‘It’s good to be outside,’ Cathy said, then stopped walking again. ‘I’d like to run, Grace. Would you mind if I ran? I know I can’t run away, but I feel as if
it might help.’ Her eyes were very blue in the sunlight, very intense. ‘Would you mind?’