Second Chance

Second Chance

Jonathan Valin
1991

To Katherine, as always
and to Dominick, at last
 
 

1
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I . . . I took the
one to the right, which put me back on Camargo Pike, heading south.

I'd been driving through Indian Hill for better than
ten minutes, trying to find a little side street called Woodbine
Lane. The woman who'd phoned me early that snowy Sunday morning had
said to watch for an antiques shop on the left-hand side of Camargo.
An antiques shop—like a gas station in the sticks. With the snow
blowing and the tires skating along the frozen blacktop I'd had
trouble staying on the road, much less finding her antiques shop.

It would have helped if the side streets had been
clearly marked, but the only signs in that rich, Byzantine
neighborhood were planted along the main drag. Everything else was
private property—unnamed access roads that ran screaming oil into
the woods the moment they spotted you, tar drives that turned their
backs behind gateposts or rested their elbows on hedgerows and glared
through the brambles as you drove by. Nothing as mundane as a name on
a mailbox. Not that I could have seen a mailbox in the snow. It had
started falling as soon as I left the office. By the time I got to
Indian Hill, it was as thick as smoke from a grease fire.

After emerging from the woods onto Camargo for the
third time, I swallowed my pride and went looking for an open gas
station or convenience store with a phone booth—and got absurdly
lucky. Six miles down the pike, almost at the corporation limit, I
spotted a gabled building that looked like a converted residence. If
there was a sign saying "Antiques" in one of its windows,
the snow had covered it up. But there was a parking lot in front and
an access road to its left.

I took a chance and turned left onto the unmarked
road. A half-mile farther on an estate house squatted in a grove of
pine trees-English-style country home, all mullioned windows and
snow-dappled slate, big-eyed and brindled as a cow. I pulled up in a
drive to the right of the house, parked the rusty Pinto beside a new
Mercedes with a physician's plate, and sat there for a moment,
listening to the wind howl and wondering whether I had the right
address or whether the folks inside were already on the phone to the
Indian Hill cops. The lady who'd called that morning had said her
name was Pearson, Louise Pearson. She hadn't mentioned that she or
her husband was a doctor.

As I sat there brooding, a tall woman in a dark blue
Icelandic sweater and khaki slacks stepped out the front door of the
house. She peered at me for a moment through the blowing snow,
hugging her arms to her breasts against the cold. I got out of the
car and waved at her.

"Mrs. Pearson?" I shouted.

She said something that was swallowed by the wind,
but I could tell from her expression that I'd lucked on to the right
spot. I hustled across the snowy yard, through the door, and inside.

The woman smiled knowingly as she closed the door
behind me. "You had trouble finding us, didn't you?"

"A little trouble."

"You don't have to be polite about it," she
said with an abrupt laugh that made me smile too. "Everyone has
trouble finding us. In this weather it must have been murder."

She held out her hand. "I'm Louise Pearson."

"Harry Stoner," I said, shaking with her.

I had realized that she was tall, but up close Louise
Pearson's size and build were startling. She was a statuesque woman
in her late thirties-big-breasted, big-hipped, with short curly brown
hair and a tan, sportive, square-jawed face, a little wrinkled by the
sun around the eyes and at the comers of the mouth but strikingly
attractive in a no-nonsense way.

"Come into the living room and warm up, Mr.
Stoner."

I followed her down a hall into a large, fussy living
room. The walls were covered in pale grey watered silk, the moldings
painted a deeper grey. The furniture was cozy English—chintz
couches, Queen Anne tables and sideboards. On the far wall a wingback
chair sat in front of an open fireplace. Louise Pearson patted the
back of the chair as if she'd put it there especially for me.

"Sit," she said.

I sat.

"Can I get you something to drink? Coffee or
brandy maybe?"

"
Coffee would be good."

There was a silver service set on a sideboard behind
her. She walked over to it and poured coffee into a blue china cup.
"I'm really sorry to call you out on a miserable day like this,"
she said over her shoulder, "but we've got this . . .situation.
At least Phil thinks it's a situation." She turned back to me,
the steaming coffee cup in her hand. "Maybe he's right."

She said it dubiously, as if that wasn't often the
case.

"My husband," she said, handing me the cup.
"He should be back any minute—he had an emergency at his
office."

"He's a physician?"

"A psychiatrist."

Louise Pearson walked over to the fireplace and
leaned up against the mantel. Behind her in a far corner of the room
a large tinseled Christmas tree flickered like a loose bulb.

"Drink," Louise Pearson said in her
peremptory way. I drank.

The woman was altogether too ripe and sturdy for lace
and chintz. I wondered if she'd inherited the house from someone
else, if she'd stepped into that cozy room from a more robust kind of
life—a life among men. That was the way she talked, as if she was
used to handling men, parrying them, fending them off. It amused me
to speculate about her in that way—it was a sure sign that I found
her attractive.

Between the fire and the coffee I slowly warmed up. I
started to smell things again: the fresh cut pine of the Christmas
tree, the cedar logs on the fire, the coffee. And something else.
Something sweet and sensual that I didn't place until the woman came
closer to me, and I realized it was her scent.

"I don't mean to sound cynical about Phil,"
Louise Pearson said, drawing a chair up across from mine. "It's
just that most psychiatrists tend to read portents into normal
behavior, even their own behavior. Believe me, it can be grueling to
have your inner life constantly analyzed and second-guessed like a
parlor game. I know Kirsten, my stepdaughter, feels that way."
She turned her head to look at the fire, and her hair caught the
light and turned reddish gold.
"Kirsten's
the reason we called you."

"She has a problem?"

The woman smiled sadly. "The world is Kirsten's
problem," she said. And then, as if she didn't like the
melodramatic sound of that, she added: "She was badly wounded by
life with her mother—her real mother, Phil's first wife. Those
childhood years left Kirsty . . . well, they've made her an emotional
cripple. She and her brother, alike. Phil's tried his best to make it
up to both of the kids—to give them a fresh chance. So have I. But
even loving parents can't erase the past or control the future. I'm
not at all sure it's a good idea to try—or to hire someone else
to."

I said, "You don't think I'm needed, do you?"

The woman shrugged noncommittally. "I don't know
if you are or not, Mr. Stoner. I don't know if Kirsty can use
anyone's help. Without trying to minimize her neuroses, which can be
pretty damn disabling, I tend to think that the more time she spends
on her own the better. I'm sure Phil will have a different view of
it, but that's the way I feel."

As if on cue, a tall handsome man with black hair and
beard stepped into the room. There was half-melted snow in his hair
and on the shoulders of his overcoat.

"Is that the way you feel?" he said to the
woman.

Louise Pearson stiffened in the chair. "You
could have announced yourself, Phil."

"And spoiled your spiel?" He laughed,
brushing the snow out of his hair and beard as he walked over to the
fireplace. "I love to hear you talk psychology, Lou. You know
that. It turns me on."

Smiling expansively, he came up and extended a hand.
I shook with him. Like his wife, Pearson made a tall, imposing
figure, although he looked older than she did up close, and worse for
wear. His tan skin was heavily lined and deeply grooved at the
cheeks. His eyes were a brilliant blue, nervously, almost shockingly
alert. For a second I found it difficult to hold his stare. It was as
if he was looking for something I didn't have.

"Phil Pearson," he said.

"Harry Stoner."

"Good," he said, dropping my hand. He
clapped his own hands together loudly and said, "Good,"
again.

"I guess you'll want to take over now, Phil,"
Louise Pearson said, rising from the chair. "That's the way it
usually works, isn't it?"

For a split second the man looked crestfallen, as if
he was losing his audience in the middle of a speech. "You don't
have to leave, Lou."

"Oh, I think I do."

She smiled at me warmly. "It was a pleasure
meeting you, Mr. Stoner. I'm sure we'll talk again."

She walked out of the room, leaving her husband
staring blandly after her. The woman's exit effected an immediate
change in Pearson's manner. He stopped smiling. He stopped talking,
too. In fact he didn't say another word until he'd unbuttoned his
topcoat, draped it on the side board, and poured himself a cup of
coffee from the silver server.

"Not everyone shares my sense of humor," he
said in a subdued voice. "I can be abrasive at times."

I didn't say anything. I didn't feel like coddling a
grown man. He looked chastened by my silence, as if I'd boxed his
ear. Then he looked resentful. I started to get the feeling that this
wasn't a grown man, after all.

Pearson sat down across from me and took a sip of
coffee while he collected himself "Living with a psychiatrist
can be tough," he said after a time. "My wife's had her
fill of me recently. Of me and my kids. You know what they say about
psychiatrists' kids, don't you? Like ministers' kids." He smiled
pastily. "Has Lou told you about Kirsten?"

"She said that you were having a problem with
her. She didn't tell me what that problem was."

"Of course, she wouldn't," he said quickly.
"The kids are my responsibility, after all. I think we can agree
on that."

He glanced quickly at the door, as if he was hoping
Louise was listening in as he had been listening to her. In spite of
the friction between them, the man seemed lost without his wife.

"Has Kirsten run away, Dr. Pearson?" I
said, trying to put him back on course.

He sighed. "Not exactly. I'm really not sure
what's happened to her, if anything."

"Then why call me?"

"Why call you?" he echoed. "I'm
worried, that's why. My daughter has serious emotional problems, as
Lou may have told you. They were severe enough to put Kirsten in a
hospital this past summer. She returned to school this fall, to the
University of Chicago. But I'm not sure she was ready to be on her
own again."

"You have reason to think she's not doing wel1?"

"There have been signs," he said vaguely.

"What kind of signs?"

The man shifted uneasily in his chair. "At the
moment, I'm concerned that she hasn't come home for the holidays."

"Concerned enough to hire a detective?"

"Yes."

"
Couldn't Kirsten have gone to visit a friend
over the break, Dr. Pearson? Kids often do that."

"I talked to her myself on Wednesday of last
week, and she said she was planning to fly home Thursday afternoon.
Since then I've been in touch with her roommate, her therapist, the
airlines, and several university officials—not one of them knows
where she's gone. Not one."

"Your daughter's problems," I said
delicately, "are they . . . are you worried that she may have
become depressed?"

He nodded. "Yes."

"Have you contacted the police in Chicago?"

"I haven't been able to bring myself to . . ."
His voice dropped to a whisper. "No, I haven't called the
police."