There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of their respirations. Then Annabelle seemed to reach a decision. “She was my nanny. She took care of me after Mama—” Her voice got higher as she choked up and abruptly stopped speaking. She turned away and Claudia saw that her shoulders were shaking. When she spoke, her breath came out in harsh gasps.
“One day I came home from school and she was gone. Her room was empty.” Her voice quavered. “She promised she would always stay with me, but she lied.
Everyone
lies.”
“What happened? Why do you think she left?”
“
He
tried to make her have sex with him and she didn’t want to.”
The words sounded as obscene coming from Annabelle’s lips as what they suggested.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Dominic.”
She spat her father’s name with utter contempt. “He said it was because she was stealing, but it’s not true.”
“How do you know this?”
“I saw them in the pool house. Marisa took me swimming and afterward she went to change in the dressing room. I was supposed to go in the house, but I hid behind the planter. I was going to jump out and surprise her. Then
he
came outside.
“He pushed open the door. She yelled at him that she was in there, but he wouldn’t leave. I went and peeked in. Her bathing suit top was off and he was groping her. She was crying and trying to push him away, but he wouldn’t stop. It was totally gross and disgusting.”
For all her attempts at worldliness, she was little more than a child after all. A child who had witnessed appalling behavior by her parent.
“What did you do?”
“I yelled at him to let her go and he jumped back. Marisa pushed him away and ran into the house. She ran right past me like I wasn’t there.”
“What did your father say?”
“He—he yelled at me to mind my own goddamn business and he started hitting me. I hate him!” Tears quivered on Annabelle’s lashes. “Why couldn’t she have called me, or at least sent me a birthday card or something? She just left me.”
The self-centered worldview of the ten-year-old she had been.
Claudia didn’t believe that the nanny had deliberately cut Annabelle out of her life after caring for her for four years. Had she threatened to expose Dominic Giordano?
How many calls and holiday cards to Annabelle might her father have diverted? Or had it been a condition of the nanny’s termination, not to ever contact his daughter? Punishment for refusing his advances. Or part of a pay-off? It would be easy for a man of Giordano’s stature to intimidate his employee into not reporting an episode of sexual harassment. It seemed plausible to Claudia that it could have happened that way.
She thought of the caution her friend Zebediah Gold regularly gave her: Don’t get emotionally involved with young clients. He should know; he was a semiretired psychologist. But Claudia had never learned how to do that. How could she keep her distance when this prickly little person so clearly
needed
someone to be involved?
She picked up the drawing Annabelle had made in response to her instruction to draw the family doing something.
The drawing suggested more than a little artistic talent. Two figures were depicted. Close to the left edge of the paper, reminiscent of where she had placed her handwriting, Annabelle had drawn a lone female figure, which represented herself. It didn’t take an expert to interpret the feelings of futility in the closed eyes and sad, turned-down mouth, the sense of helplessness in the lack of hands or feet. The black hair surrounded her and reached her feet, Rapunzel-like, affording some protection from the outside world.
Across the page on the right-hand side, a much larger, menacing male figure was engaged in an act that made Claudia catch her breath. Annabelle had drawn her father pushing a car over the edge of a cliff.
Depicted from behind, he faced away from the viewer, a shocking portrayal of the rejection Annabelle felt by Dominic Giordano, whom the drawing showed she believed had turned away from her, both symbolically and literally.
Abruptly, Annabelle grabbed the drawing from Claudia’s hands and crushed it into a ball.
“I hate him,”
she said again with a vehemence that prickled the hair on Claudia’s arms. “I’m gonna get even with him. I
swear
I will.”
Chapter 9
Paige handed over a mug of good coffee. “So, how’d it go?”
Claudia took a grateful sip. She felt emotionally drained after her meeting with Annabelle. “Better than I expected. She’s agreed to try the graphotherapy program. I left her with some exercises to do.”
“But what did she
tell
you?”
“It’s a therapeutic relationship, Paige. She has to be able to trust me if she’s going to confide in me. I can’t give you details.”
Paige’s eyes narrowed. “You’re kidding, right? Did she say anything about me? Did she talk about Cruz?”
“No, I’m not kidding, and don’t ask me specific questions, because I won’t answer them. It would interfere with the therapy if she found out.”
“Who’s gonna tell her?”
“No, Paige,” Claudia said firmly. “I’m not going to share what she said to me.”
What Claudia had said wasn’t strictly true. As handwriting analysis was an unlicensed profession, she was not legally bound to confidentiality laws the way a therapist would be. But even with her assurance of privacy, Annabelle had begged her, “Don’t tell anyone! Promise you won’t tell anything I told you.”
What was I supposed to do?
Claudia asked herself.
So Paige was royally pissed, but couldn’t very well refuse to let Annabelle work the program for a month’s trial. If the combination of hand movements and therapeutic music was going to help unlock the logjam of emotions, some initial signs should have appeared by then in her handwriting. At that time, they would reassess the situation.
The rain started up again as Claudia hurried out to the Jaguar. She had parked under a shedding jacaranda tree and the wet flowers made a purple mush under her feet. The wind buffeted her umbrella, and her sprint from the school’s portico left her soaked to the skin. Shivering, she turned on the heater and slid a Richard Elliott disk into the CD player.
The rain pelted the windshield in noisy sheets, mocking the wiper blades as she left the Sorensen Academy and turned onto Sunset. Any other day she would be admiring the mansions that lined the Boulevard. Today it was a challenge to see six feet in front of her. Worse, an overturned vehicle on the east side of the street kept the traffic at snail’s pace.
A mile from home the skies began to clear, and as she crossed Lincoln on Jefferson a double prism of color arced across the road ahead. The stunning beauty of it took her breath away. She started to reach for the cell phone. A rainbow that spectacular was meant to be shared.
Before she could dial, Jovanic’s special ring tone sounded.
“Hey, where are you?” he asked without preliminaries.
“Almost home. I’ve been over at the Sorensen Academy, getting to know my new graphotherapy student—”
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he interrupted.
“Oh, really? What were you thinking about?”
“How much I miss you.”
Claudia’s lips curved into a smile as she signaled left near the beach end of Jefferson and started driving up the hill. “So, tell me, Columbo, just how much
do
you miss me?”
“Mmmm, enough . . .”
She grinned. Jovanic was a little like Annabelle. Getting him to share his feelings was about as easy as stripping old wallpaper.
She said, “I miss you, too.”
It was an understatement. Paige’s case and other work had kept her busy, but over the past couple of weeks Jovanic had been out of town and his absence gnawed at her like a toothache. He was four hundred miles away—only an hour by air—but it could have been another galaxy. Tony Bennett’s signature song
I Left My Heart in San Francisco
had taken on a whole new meaning.
“It’s been pouring down here,” she said. “How’s your weather?”
Why am I talking about the weather when he’s telling me he misses me?
“Raining like a monsoon,” he said. “But right now I’m looking at a very cool rainbow.”
“Really? Me, too. I wish you were here and we could look at it together.”
His voice faded on the cell phone.
“Can you hear me? Damn signal’s breaking up. I’m losing you. When are you coming home?”
“. . . real soon.”
“I can’t hear you. How soon?” She turned the corner of her street.
Her driveway came into view and there was Jovanic, standing outside the garage, his cell phone at his ear, wearing a goofy grin.
Suddenly, the rainbow looked even brighter and more beautiful.
Chapter 10
The week after her first meeting with Annabelle Giordano, Claudia returned to the Sorensen Academy. She wanted to check Annabelle’s graphotherapy exercises early to correct any mistakes before they became ingrained.
Paige wanted to see her first, so she went up to the office. Angry voices from inside froze her hand midknock.
“. . . and when we’re through with you,” shouted a woman’s voice, “you won’t have a pot to piss in!”
Paige’s lower-voiced response was muted by the door and the sudden barking of her dog.
“Didn’t your mother tell you eavesdropping is a no-no?” a husky male voice said, close to Claudia’s ear. The spicy scent of cinnamon chewing gum hit her nose at the same instant.
She swung around to face Cruz Montenegro. “I’m
not
eavesdropping.”
He grinned, splitting the light scar line that ran across his lips. “Hey, come on,
somebody’s
gotta bust your chops.”
She gave him a withering look. “Listen,
dude
, I don’t need—”
A crash and the sound of glass breaking interrupted her retort. Cruz shoved past her and flung open the door. Over his shoulder, Claudia could see Paige and Diana Sorensen. They faced each other like snarling tigers in front of Paige’s desk. Paige’s face was leached of color. Diana’s complexion matched her cherry red suit.
Shattered crystal and a bouquet of roses littered the carpet. Water spilled from the vase left a dark stain.
Growling and barking, Mikki, the bichon frise, hurled his pint-size body at Diana’s legs. Diana kicked out, doing her best to stomp the dog, which was doing its best to bite her.
“You crazy bitch,” Paige cried, grabbing up her dog and holding it close. “Get the hell out of here!”
“This is
my
school! You’re just a gold-digging—”
It happened in an instant, too fast for either Cruz or Claudia to react. A guttural sound came from Diana’s throat as she lunged, grabbing at Paige’s sweater, and shoved her with both hands.
Paige’s arms windmilled. She staggered backward and landed on her butt in the midst of the broken glass and roses. With a cry of pain she let go of the dog. Mikki ran to his basket, yelping, and cowered there, his little body trembling.
For a nanosecond no one moved. Then Cruz thrust Diana aside and lifted Paige to her feet as if she weighed nothing, asking her if she was okay.
She leaned into him, whimpering, shaking her head. Bright red blood ran between her fingers, streaking the front of her white angora sweater.
Turning to leave, Diana spotted Claudia still standing in the doorway. Her eyes narrowed to slits. “This is
your
fault,” she cried. “This is all your fault!”
Claudia stared back at her, dumbfounded. Nothing she said was going to improve the situation. She backed out onto the landing, allowing the Sorensen woman a wide berth. But Diana closed in on her, backing her up against the wooden banister.
She was a large woman, taller than Claudia and outweighing her by a good twenty pounds.
“You helped her steal our inheritance,” Diana rasped, her hot breath blasting Claudia’s face. “You crooked fake. You’re a scammer, just like
she
is! What did she pay you to lie for her?”
Then she made the mistake of jabbing Claudia with her finger.
Without stopping to think, Claudia grabbed the finger and bent it in a direction it was not intended to go. “Are you insane? Get the
hell
off me.”
Diana’s mouth opened in a big O of surprise. Her hand balled into a fist and she drew back her arm. In that instant, Claudia had just enough time to wonder whether the railing would hold her when the blow landed, or if she would go tumbling over the side, the way they did in the movies.
But the blow never came.
A small figure came hurtling along the landing and launched itself onto Diana’s back.
Diana staggered backward, trying to throw her off, but Annabelle wrapped one skinny arm around her neck and clung like a demon. Her free hand seized a hank of Diana’s coarse black hair and gave it a vicious yank.
“You little shit,” Diana Sorensen bellowed like an enraged elephant. “Get her off me!” But Annabelle just wrapped her fingers tighter and twisted.
“Annabelle, let go!”
Claudia’s arms encircled the girl’s waist as her mind raced to catch up with what was unfolding. Annabelle’s body was as unsubstantial as a bag of bones, but she was surprisingly strong and refused to be dislodged.
Cruz came out Paige’s office, took in the scene, and barked an order for Claudia to step aside. He grabbed Annabelle and hoisted her off Diana’s back with ease. “You—
stay
here,” he said, setting her down.
She glared at him and opened her mouth with a retort, but she shut it again and backed up against the wall, rebuffing the protective arm Claudia offered.
Somewhere in the building, a buzzer sounded. Seconds later, classroom doors could be heard slamming open on the ground floor below. After-school voices filled the hallways. In a matter of moments, this ugly scene would be the object of dozens of curious stares.