Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  ‘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.

  Chapter Seven

  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?’

  ‘I think it’s a good idea,’ Grace said, easily. ‘Want me to come along, or do you want to run alone?’

  ‘Alone. If that’s okay?’

  ‘Sure it’s okay. Mind if I wait for you here?’ Grace nodded towards the edge of the golf course beside them. ‘I’d be glad to sit down for a while.’

  ‘You’re very nice,’ Cathy said, and then, as an afterthought, added: ‘I’ll be more careful – I won’t get knocked down or anything.’

  ‘Go run,’ Grace said.

  She watched the teenager run to the end of the road, then, as she disappeared from view, forced herself to sit down on the grass and try to relax. Grace was aware that there was some risk in what she was doing – that for all she knew, Cathy Robbins might just keep on running and not come back. But at the same time, Grace also realized that Cathy desperately needed the release and, perhaps, the simple freedom. And even though she was right in saying that there was no escape, and even though it was perfectly true that there could be no escape from her nightmare for Cathy Robbins for a very long time, there was probably less harm in trying for a quick burst of freedom than in just sitting and letting it all roll over her.

  She came back, cheeks flushed, breathless, at least physically better for the exercise. ‘That felt good,’ she said, stretching out her muscles. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Grace said.

  ‘You let me go without making a fuss. I might have done anything – I might have run straight under a bus.’

  ‘You told me you wouldn’t.’

  ‘And you trusted me.’

  They headed back to her aunt’s place at a comfortable pace, neither of them saying much. Grace wasn’t about to push Cathy into disclosing anything she was reluctant to, not at that time, anyway, though she did ask her, before they parted, if Cathy wanted to see her again.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

  ‘Just to talk,’ Grace told her easily, ‘about anything you want to.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about what happened.’

  ‘That’s okay. We wouldn’t need to. You could come to my house. We could talk about your mother, if you felt you wanted to – we could talk about good, happy times.’ Grace paused. ‘You could tell me some more about those flashes.’

  ‘They’re nothing,’ Cathy said, as she had when she’d mentioned them earlier, but her eyes veered away as she said it.

  ‘I get them, too,’ Grace told her. ‘At least, I think I probably get something similar. I think of mine as snapshots – they come and go very fast, but they’re quite clear.’

  Cathy shook her head. ‘Not mine.’

  Grace gave a swift, easy shrug. ‘Maybe they’re not so similar.’

  The girl looked at her for a moment. ‘I think I would like to talk to you some more, Grace. If you don’t mind.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have suggested it if I did.’

  ‘If I do come,’ Cathy said, cautiously, ‘I don’t have to talk about stuff I don’t want to, do I?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Only I went to a therapist once before.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t like her much.’ She was still watchful. ‘I didn’t feel I could trust her.’

  ‘It happens,’ Grace said.

  ‘She’s very intuitive,’ Grace told Sam Becket later on the phone.

  ‘I noticed that, too,’ he said. ‘Any progress?’

  ‘Not the kind you’re hoping for.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘How about your end?’

  Grace could almost hear Becket considering his words.

  ‘Our people have analysed some ashes we found in the Robbins’ garbage incinerator,’ he said, finally. ‘Apparently they may have been from a fabric similar to the nightgown Cathy was wearing when she was found with her parents.’

  ‘Which means what?’ Grace had a bad feeling.

  ‘I’m not convinced it means anything at all, except that someone in the household burned some voile fabric, and obviously we’re going to be trying to find out who that was, and why they did it.’ Becket paused. ‘But one theory on the squad is that Cathy might have stabbed her parents, burned the nightgown she was wearing, then showered and put on a fresh gown before lying down with Marie and Arnold and waiting for the housekeeper to arrive.’ He heard the shocked heaviness in Grace’s silence. ‘Personally, I think the theory’s full of holes.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’ Grace knew she sounded stiff. ‘None of it rings true to me.’

  ‘I didn’t think it would,’ Becket said.

  Uncertain if that was a slight or encouragement, she went on. ‘I’ve spent a little more time with Cathy now, and everything I’ve observed to date convinces me that she’s a sad, bewildered, haunted child who loved her mother and stepfather.’

  ‘Actually,’ Becket
said, ‘Arnold Robbins adopted Cathy.’ He paused. ‘Has she talked about her relationship with them?’

  ‘No, not really. No protestations of love or devotion. It’s all too deep, too real for that. Cathy Robbins doesn’t seem to have any idea that she has to prove her love for her parents.’

  ‘Any chance she might just be a fine actress?’

  Grace bit down the urge to answer sharply. ‘If my instincts are at all sound,’ she answered steadily, ‘the Cathy I was with this afternoon was not play-acting.’

  ‘Let’s both hope your instincts are very sound,’ Becket said, quietly.

  Chapter Eight

  TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 1998

  Cathy arrived at Grace’s house just before a quarter to three in the afternoon, it having been arranged with Frances Dean that she would come in a cab, and that her aunt would come to collect her at four.

  ‘I’m sorry to be early,’ Cathy said at the front door. She was unsmiling, her eyes and mouth betraying her nervousness.

  ‘No problem.’ Grace kept her voice low, mindful of the twelve-year-old boy waiting for her. She’d left him out on the deck with Harry, but he was an inquisitive child with a tendency to wander around and, almost certainly, to eavesdrop. ‘If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll try not to be too long.’

  Grace drew Cathy through the entrance hall and into the den, a cosy room lined with books, photographs and paintings by former child patients, most of them colourful and hope-bringing. ‘I shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes. Will you be all right in here?’

  Cathy was already looking at one of Grace’s favourite paintings, of a vivid red balloon floating free in a pure blue sky, only a white dove for company.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, not looking away from the painting.

  Grace closed the door quietly, and left her.

  The twelve year old collected by his mother and his case notes filed away, Grace grabbed a dish of cookies from the larder and a jug of juice from the refrigerator, and, with Harry trotting alongside, took Cathy out to the lanai.