“What is a meet outfit, exactly?” the detective probes.
“What the doll is wearing when you buy her. This is a cute dress, but you can tell the owner put it on. Her waist. It’s very thin.” She tugs on the dress. “See? It’s gappy. Doesn’t fit her.”
Oliver cuts in. “Maybe the owner bought the wrong dress size.”
Helen shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe the doll lost weight,” again Oliver.
“You’re funny.”
“You know what else is funny? The fact that I’m sitting here listening to a kid give a presentation on doll structure.”
“Oliver, not now,” I reprove.
The detective leans forward, a serious look on his face. “What would you say is the reason, Helen?”
“I don’t know, but look at her.” Helen holds the doll up in the air. “She’s flawless! Someone went through a lot of time and effort to put her together. Dolls are hard work. You don’t just put your heart into it and mess up the outfit.”
“Which means what?” the detective pushes for answers.
“You’re the cop. You figure it out,” Helen remarks.
My brows furrow. “Okay, Helen?” I can’t believe I’m looking to a little girl for answers. “What does all this mean?”
“It means the doll wasn’t bought.” Oliver sighs deeply, leaning back slightly in his chair. “It was made.”
“Well, what do you know? You’re not a fool after all,” Helen harasses. “He’s right. She’s hand-made. Hand-painted. Hand-everything. The seam is extra careful. Looks very natural. I bet a small goat it’s worth a lot of money. You want my guess? Whoever made her didn’t want to lose her. I bet he or she is blowing a fuse right about now.”
I can almost feel the doll looking back at me. “Get it away from me. It’s creepy.”
Helen gives a little laugh.
“What is it?”
“She kind of looks like you.”
I can feel it, my heart beating faster and faster, the sweat breaking out all over my body, my brain on fire.
“Thank you, Helen, for your help,” says the detective. “You can return to your mother now.”
After her leaving, Detective Hamilton tells his partner to get him a list of every doll maker in the country. “You heard me,” he says. “All of them.” He stands and paces the room in thought.
He slowly retreats to his chair and says, “We weren’t looking at it right. There’s two of them.”
The claim takes Oliver by surprise. “What do you mean two of them?”
“Most likely a man and a woman, judging by the female print we found on the envelope.”
I must be hearing things. “I’m sorry. What? Two?”
“It makes sense,” says the detective. “One has the motive; the other executes the crime.”
I scoff. “So...they’re Bonnie and Clyde now? Is that it? And how do you know it’s a woman’s fingerprint?”
“Sophie.” Oliver holds my gaze as if telling me to calm down.
“I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m just curious.”
The detective adds, “The chemical composition in a print is distinctive for one sex or the other. Miss Cavall, some might consider it the perfect crime. Separately, neither of them can be incriminated. Put them together, and we have a criminal—a possible doll maker—and an accomplice, who I believe is the girl who broke into your apartment. What does that tell you?”
I sigh, allowing my tense body to settle into a slouch. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea. I’m not even sure if the person who’s after me is a doll maker. He could’ve hired someone else to do it for all we know.”
“When painting the Mona Lisa, I don’t believe Da Vinci summoned Michelangelo to help him paint Lisa’s right hand.”
A smile clambers onto Oliver’s face. “He has a point.”
“Yeah, I get it,” I say.
“A murderer is an artist, and killing is his art,” the detective keeps going. “Each masterpiece is meticulously designed. They don’t go out and ask someone to slit a few throats for them. They don’t pass their artistic work on to others. They plan everything from the clothes they’re going to wear, to the hospital-grade disinfectant they’re going to use to clean up the crime scene. Now, the dress...it doesn’t fit the doll.”
“Maybe he’s not a professional pattern maker,” I suggest, frustrated.
“You’re not going to believe this, but it’s a visual metaphor,” the detective says, giving in to a chuckle. “It’s not supposed to fit.”
My eyes search his face, as I lean forward in my chair. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“We can all recognize that the image of a car stands for a real-life car, or that a person wearing a jacket means it’s cold. This is a visual language, and it communicates with people. Both psychiatrists and psychologists employ visual metaphors in their therapy, to help patients who have experienced trauma open up, create new meaning, or direct focus.”
“Where are you getting at, detective?” Oliver inquires.
“The doll is you, Miss Cavall. The person who made the doll must really believe you and the outfit don’t go well together, and by outfit I mean tiara, roses, everything. This ties to the days when you were a child model.” He rubs his mouth, puts his hands on his hips. “I usually deal with murder and serial murder. We often see criminals with a misplaced sense of self-righteousness; not only that, but they see themselves as victims, turn the blame on an outside cause. We could be looking at a woman who got upstaged by you when you were kids. Fits the profile. Gives us motive. It’s a strong lead.”
“I won over a hundred beauty pageants,” I say, swept up in a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. “Who’s to say which girl it is? And why is it happening now all of a sudden? That was such a long time ago.”
“We’ll look into it,” the detective promises.
“I still don’t understand how you’re drawing your conclusions. How do you know there’s two of them?”
“The day you were almost kidnapped there were two,” he adds. “It’s clear that someone was driving the van. One makes mistakes; the other doesn’t,” he says it like it goes without saying. “I used to do criminal profiling for the bureau before I became a detective, get inside perpetrators’ heads in the hopes of understanding them and finding them. I know criminal behavior when I see it.”
“He’s a criminal!” I shout. “Who knows what goes on in his head or what he’s going to do. He’s probably screwing with all our minds.”
“On the contrary, criminals are very easy to understand, namely murderers. There are often things that stand out when shaping their personality.”
“Like?”
“Sexual abuse, physical violence, neglect... I can tell you a lot about him, Miss Cavall. Where he grew up, what he likes, what he doesn’t, I can even tell you this: his weakness is his ego. He doesn’t like to fail.”
“Okay, detective,” I say. “And what about this other person you mention?”
“A companion. A woman. A sister. A lover. She understands him, his behavior, and his needs.”
Oliver shares his opinion. “It doesn’t seem unlikely, Sophie. If this is a woman around your age, she’s been tracking you for a long time. No wonder she’s been able to get to you. This kind of resolve to look out for someone is personal. Perhaps now, she found someone who will help her accomplish what she wants.”
“Which is what?”
Both men glance at each other, as if I’m the only one who’s not following. Silence fills the room momentarily. Then, the detective glances back at me and says, in a low voice, “Murder.”
TWENTY
AFTER HEARING EVERYTHING Detective Hamilton said, I am left staggered, feeling like a two-by-four slammed into me. I’m oddly quiet, and so is Oliver, as we sit in a booth opposite each other at the retro-chic restaurant that is Monkey Bar. I put my fork down and push my entrée salad aside.
“Is something wrong wi
th the food?” he asks. “Each forkful is smaller than what you would feed a baby.”
“I don’t really like the cheese. Besides...I’m not,” I pause as he begins stabbing all of the tiny cheese slabs with his fork and deposits them into his mouth.
“Problem solved.”
“Really hungry,” I finish saying.
I take a look around. The booths are empty. The tables are empty. There is not a single person at this restaurant. “Why are we alone?”
“You know I like being free from public attention. Let’s order our main dishes.” He motions the waitress to approach the table and she doesn’t even have to walk more than a few steps as she is already lingering behind the booth, secretly watching us.
She stands upright and zealous with a mini computer touch screen. “What will it be for you, Mr. Black?”
“Ladies first,” he says.
“I need another minute. I’m not ready to order yet.”
“Sure thing!” exclaims the overzealous waitress. “Take all the time you need!”
I continue reading my menu and secretly look at Oliver as he reads his. He can’t possibly be mentally ill like Cassie said, can he? He begins making inquiries about the meat—the temperature at which it is kept in the refrigerator, and if it’s been mechanically tenderized—and I purse my lips, faintly rolling my eyes. I hear him say at the end, “...cooked to a temperature of one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.” If it’s Oliver’s explicit request or Oliver himself, I don’t know, but the waitress looks overwhelmed.
“I’ll have the same, please. Medium-well.”
“Medium-well is heinous,” Oliver says after the waitress leaves the table.
“I’m not paranoid about my meat if that’s what you’re implying. I’m thinking we may get our food contaminated after you being such a pain in the ass.”
I wait for him to finish eating a chunk of bacon.
“I am merely cautious, Sophie.”
“Cautious of what? Having a normal meal like a normal person at a normal restaurant?”
“Why are you emphasizing the word ‘normal’?”
“What about you and the whole ‘cooked to a temperature of one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit’? Who even says that?”
“I do.” He takes a swig of his Bordeaux. “I am sure this upscale restaurant can handle my requests accordingly.”
Can I handle him and other issues get tangled in a web of thoughts. Is Cassie right? Should I take her advice? I need a great amount of patience to handle the catastrophically unspoken truths surrounding our relationship. My own secrets are eating me up inside.
After our food arrives and we are left with gratified bellies, questions boil on the tip of my tongue. I want to hurl them at Oliver, gab them off one by one.
I don’t look at him as I softly say, “Hey, so while you were in the hospital, your sister revealed some very interesting facts about you.”
“What facts?” he asks while digging a spoon into an ice cream sandwich.
I stick my spoon in it too. “Like you were charged in juvenile court with assault.”
“She told you about that?”
“Yes.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Not much, just that you weren’t one to need help, except for that time. She said the whole story I would have to get from you.”
He leans back and takes his time to savor each bite. Smoothly, he wipes his mouth clean and then makes a tent with his fingers. “You want to discuss this here?”
“Sure. There’s nobody else around.”
“What exactly do you want to know? It seems my sister has already said more than she’s supposed to say.”
“Don’t blame her,” I say. “I’d just like to know what happened, if that’s okay. You can trust me.”
He maintains a calm exterior as he begins. “When I was about to turn sixteen, I was involved in a fight with someone. I guess you could say he was a good friend of mine. Unfortunately, he ended up severely injured in the hospital.”
I shake my head clear. “A fight?”
“Yes, but I didn’t even touch him. I shoved him back to get him off me. I was already a second-degree black belt in Shotokan and had trained a year in Ukidokan with my sensei. I know that I was rougher that I needed to.”
I stare at him, perplexed. “What exactly happened to your friend?”
“We were drunk at a party at his house. He tripped over a rug, fell over on his own, and hit his head hard on the edge of a table. Doctor said his head was like an egg that had been dropped. The accident left him in a coma for six months.”
“Oh my God, is he okay now?”
“Yes. Terrific, actually.”
“So this guy started the fight. What did you to do to him in the first place that made him so angry?”
“He was drunk, Sophie. You can never reason with a drunk man.”
“And I assume there’s a girl involved in all this.”
“Yes. I did something that couldn’t be seen as good. I was arrested immediately after the complaint of assault against him. His parents pressed charges. I was a minor, but I managed to avoid jail time by agreeing to a program. As a part of the court’s ruling, I had to undergo many...examinations.”
Just when my questions are answered, a thousand other questions open up after that. “Examinations? Why?”
His eyes turn dark, deep set. His stare cuts deeper than any dagger. And then he says, “Because less than thirty people in the whole world have been diagnosed with Hyperthymesia. Even less have a mild level of Asperger syndrome.”
As soon as the words register in my head, my heart sinks. I don’t know what Hyperthymesia or Asperger syndrome is, but I remember Cassie mentioning something about a condition. Concern washes over me, and I suddenly want to reach out and comfort him, but I know that isn’t what he needs.
“Is that why you have a good memory?” I quietly go on.
“An elephant has a good memory. I have a near-perfect recall of every day of my life.”
I take a second to process this, my head swimming in an ocean of gray, blurred thoughts.
“It was arranged for me to live in Massachusetts,” he explains, after sipping on his glass of wine. “I would work with the community, help the university, meet people with IQs akin to mine, people I could relate to so that I could cultivate friendships and stay away from crime. They put me in a group of IQ pariahs, along with troubled autistics and savants, and we could make special contributions to society. However, we were also mentally impaired, so we were kept under close supervision and documented. I’ve had more brain scans and tests than you can imagine.”
“Oliver...I’m...,” I mumble, tears welling up in my eyes. I hold them in as I say, “I’m...so sorry.”
“Sophie, it’s okay.” He chuckles calmly, reaching to hold my hand. “It happened a long time ago. I’m glad it did. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have you.”
“You’ll always relieve the memory as if it was happening again. I can’t imagine what that’s like for you.”
“Not easy I can tell you that. But rising through ranks and levels of martial arts, I have become more balanced and relaxed in my mind. It was the reason I took up karate in the first place. When I was a kid, I was reading too much, thinking all the time, not getting enough sleep...just filling my head. I didn’t really have friends...my mother was worried, said karate might be a good idea. I was interested in the physical part—I was a very lanky child and the ninja turtles were a large part of my childhood—but then it became a preparation for controlling myself up here.” He points to his temple. “I’ve learned to let go of things that detract from the quality of my life.”
I breathe sharply, allowing the heaviness of his words to sink in. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry I brought it up. It must be difficult.”
“That’s all right.”
“It’s just that I really like you.”
“I like you
too.”
“No like, really really like you.”
“Well, I really really like you too.”
“Let’s try again.” I smile, pulling myself together. “So, Asperger syndrome...is that...is that bad? I don’t know what it is.”
He lets out a loud exhalation. “I don’t have evil intentions. I don’t want to steal a car or rob a bank, if that’s what you want to know.”
“That would be ridiculous. You have money, Oliver. Why would you want to do that?”
“Then what are you asking?”
How are you wired? What should I expect? Should I be worried? How do I help? How do we make it work? “Just what it means,” I simply say.
“It means I get to have a great fascination for specific topics such as universal laws, the environment, engineering, outer space...the orbit of the planets. Particularly, I like knowing how things work.”
“Well, that’s no mystery,” I bluster.
“Good. So you know. Nothing to be said there.”
“I told you yesterday that I wanted to know you, Oliver. You didn’t say anything back. You just sat there in complete silence. How can you expect me to move in with you with all these questions swelling inside me? I don’t think I can keep having questions in my head without answers.”
He strokes his wine glass lightly like he’s wondering what to say next. “I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have anything to say at the moment.” A semblance of an overwhelmed look dawns on him. “You know who I am, Sophie.”
I shake my head like the motion can quell the frustration his words bring to me. “Clearly, I don’t. I know two percent of who you are. It’s been a relatively short period of time for you and me...not a lifetime, and that wouldn’t be enough either.”
“But this is a process, not a race.”
“Now it’s a process? I thought you raced into everything, part of your ‘seize the day’ motto.”
“Do I strike you as a fool?”
“No, of course not.”
“I don’t rush into anything. I consider the infinite possibilities in everything.”
“You kind of rushed into me.”
A Diamond in the Rough Page 25
