Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  No one else said anything.

  ‘I’d never really thought about either of them dying, or about how that might make me feel,’ she went on.

  ‘I had.’ Claudia’s voice sounded harsh in the soft night air. ‘After we left Chicago – before I met you, Dan’ – she smiled gently, briefly, at her husband – ‘I often used to imagine Papa dying.’ She turned her head away from them both, so they couldn’t see her face. ‘It was always a painful death I pictured for him. He was always pleading for our forgiveness.’ She paused. ‘And when I imagined Mama’s dying, she was always begging, too – begging me to forgive her for not taking my side against Papa.’

  She turned back, and in the flickering light her face looked full of pain. Daniel put out his left hand, touched her arm, let his hand stay there, just touching, nothing more. Grace knew that Claudia would be all right so long as she had Daniel.

  She woke up early, while everyone else was still asleep – Claudia and Daniel probably sleeping off the effects of the Chianti. Her head ached a little, but otherwise her worst symptom was nervousness because of the call she knew she had to make – the one she’d put off the previous night.

  Frank answered groggily. Grace had known he would be out of it. She supposed she’d chosen early morning because he’d always been a slow starter, would be less able to fight back.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘Took your time.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I drove down to be with Claudia when I heard. It got pretty late, so I thought I’d wait till morning.’ She paused. ‘Claudia said it happened suddenly. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So when are you coming?’

  ‘When’s the funeral?’ Grace couldn’t believe how detached she felt. She’d experienced greater emotion talking to absolute strangers about funeral arrangements than she did now with her own father.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Frank said. ‘That’s what I need the two of you to fix up. The funeral, and your mother’s will, and that kind of thing.’

  ‘That won’t be possible,’ Grace said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We both have commitments,’ she told him. ‘If you let us know when the date’s set, we’ll do our best to be there.’ Her pause was very brief, her voice quite hard. ‘If anything comes up that you really need our help with – and I mean really need – then please call me, not Claudia.’

  ‘Now you’re telling me I can’t call my own daughter?’

  If the memory of his ugliness had ever gone away, the meanness in his voice would have brought it all flooding back.

  ‘I’m your daughter, too,’ Grace said. ‘I mean it, Frank. You call me. Leave Claudia alone, for once in your lousy life.’

  She put down the receiver. Her detachment had gone, and her hands were trembling. But at least the decisions had been made.

  Even at that emotionally charged time, Cathy was still looming large in Grace’s mind. Perhaps remembering their own past was highlighting the poignancy of Cathy’s predicament – another abused, traumatized child in need of all the friends she could get. Grace left Islamorada after breakfast and then, on the spur of the moment, took a chance on Peter Hayman being at his house on Key Largo, and being both willing and able to see her.

  He was there, seeming delighted to find Grace and Harry on his doorstep, and within minutes they were all sitting out on the screened porch overlooking his palm and orchid garden. The air was too heavily perfumed, and if Grace had known him better she would have requested a move to the ocean-facing side of the house, but she was an uninvited guest and so she said nothing, while Harry, uncomfortable, too, stayed low and almost glued to her right foot.

  She drank some of the coffee he brought for her and, careful not to divulge any information that Sam had given her in confidence, brought Hayman up-to-date on their John Broderick-related theorizing.

  He sat quietly, listening until Grace had come to a halt.

  ‘Have you also considered that you may be entirely wrong?’ he asked at last, gently. ‘That Cathy may, after all, be guilty?’

  ‘Of course I’ve considered it,’ Grace answered. ‘But I don’t believe she is.’ She could hear Harry panting. She reached down and fondled his ears for a moment, and resolved not to stay too much longer for his sake.

  Hayman stood up, wandered over to the screen, gazed out into the semi-tropical garden. ‘I’m troubled, Grace,’ he said without looking back at her. ‘It concerns me that maybe I was wrong to have found even the most tenuous of similarities with that old case of mine.’ He turned to face her. ‘Maybe I planted utterly fallacious notions in your mind.’

  ‘Maybe you did,’ she conceded calmly, ‘but with the life of a fourteen-year-old girl at stake, I’m not prepared to take the chance that you were not wrong.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, I’ve moved some distance from the Münchhausen’s notion, so that needn’t trouble you.’

  ‘Okay.’ He paused, apparently taking a moment to accept her point-of-view. ‘Simple question. Do you know what John Broderick looked like? Do you have a photograph of him?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Grace told him about Cathy’s bedroom in the Robbins home, about the family photographs she’d seen which had excluded the man Cathy always referred to as her first father.

  ‘Mightn’t it be an idea,’ Hayman suggested, ‘to get hold of one? If you’re staying with this theory that he might still be alive?’ He smiled. ‘I mean, Grace, you wouldn’t know the guy if you fell over him.’

  ‘That’s true.’ She considered the best way to obtain such a photograph. Lafayette Hospital were bound to have a snapshot on file, but they were unlikely to release it to her, which meant she’d probably have to ask Sam to deal with it. She saw no reason for him to object – for all she knew, he already had one. ‘I’ll get one,’ she said to Hayman. ‘I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it myself.’

  ‘Maybe because you know he’s dead,’ he said, gently. ‘You just aren’t ready to admit it yet.’

  He remarked as Grace was leaving, about a half-hour later, that she was looking rather tired. She told him she’d had some bad news, but did not elaborate. He said he was sorry to hear that, but asked for no details, for which Grace was grateful. He did, however, mention once more, that his invitation was still open for her to join him for a day or two’s R and R aboard his boat.

  ‘Don’t forget, Grace, will you?’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said.

  ‘You mustn’t make yourself sick. You won’t be any use to anyone then.’

  ‘I know.’

  They shook hands. Grace noticed that he held on just a little longer than he needed to. She wondered, for a brief moment, if she might have sent out some misleading signal by just showing up unannounced, but there was nothing else, no intense look in his brown eyes. Just simple care and concern.

  ‘See?’ she said to Harry as they headed back on the Overseas Highway towards the mainland. ‘That’s another thing that comes from being a psychologist.’ She reached across and ruffled the top of his head. ‘You start reading ten times as much as there really is into a simple handshake.’

  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.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 6, 1998

  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 t
hat 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.