Doria, humiliated in front of Puccini, and with Caruso listening from the studio, burst into tears. She spun to escape from the kitchen, and ran out through the dark garden, racing toward the edge of the lake and its muddy solitude. Puccini called her name, but she didn’t turn back. The dogs left their kennel and bounded after her, one on either side as she ran sobbing into the darkness.
Burning with shame and resentment, she found herself on the rough planks of the boat dock. She walked along to the end, where she crouched down, hugging her knees. Her tears ceased as she gazed into the dark depths of the lake. The dogs nosed her cheeks, then flopped beside her, panting. She put a hand on each of them, taking comfort in their company.
She could still hear the signora screaming her rage into the night, as if she were one of the divas come to coach a role with the maestro. The great difference was that Elvira’s voice was so ugly, splitting the darkness with knife-edged fury. Elvira could stab a person with that voice.
The maestro must not have known her voice was like that. He couldn’t have! Surely he would never have married her if he had.
Doria slipped out of her shoes, and let her long bare toes trail through the cool water. There would be no more music tonight. She felt a rush of sympathy for Puccini. He was trapped by Elvira just as she was, and there was nothing either of them could do about it.
10
Sogni fugaci di chi nacque per gemere e tacer.
Fleeting dreams of one who was born
to moan and to keep silent.
—Tigrana, Edgar, Act One
Tory woke with someone’s harsh cries echoing in her ears.
Her sleep had not been undisturbed after all, though she had been exhausted when she finally pulled the blanket up around her. The same people had been in her dream, acting out a scene of anger and noise. She felt, again, as if she were the girl in the dream. As if she and the girl were the same person. It was a classic case of transference, she supposed, except that she seemed to be both therapist and client. It was as if, by imagining this girl’s unhappiness, she was trying to work out her own.
She pushed back the sheets and swung her feet down to the cold floor. The paperweight reflected the faint light from the window, but everything else lay in the thick darkness of a starless night. The rain had stopped, though the wind still whistled at the eaves and rattled the shutters. Tory padded awkwardly to the bathroom, feeling her way, disoriented and out of balance. She used the toilet, then felt her way to the sink to wash her hands. She turned on the light over the mirror, squinting until her eyes adjusted. When she could see herself, she pushed back her sweat-dampened hair, and saw with alarm that a half-inch of pale roots showed beneath the red dye. What if Iris had noticed?
She flicked the light off again, and wandered aimlessly out into the living room. It was three in the morning, the worst hour of the twenty-four, the worst to be awake, the worst for worrying. A rush of anxiety filled her, a flood of helpless panic that made her mouth go dry and her heart pound.
Jack’s okay. Kate will see to it.
She fought for calm as she stood beside the window, where the chill of the night crept through the glass and dried the perspiration on her forehead. She told herself it was just the hour. And the vividness of her dream. It didn’t mean anything.
One of the hardest things about being fey was knowing the difference between premonition and anxiety. Nonna Angela had understood that, because she suffered the same doubts. She knew when a little boy from her village fell into Lake Massaciuccoli and drowned before anyone knew he was missing. She knew when her cousin, sixteen and unmarried, was pregnant. She saw her father’s death the night before he was struck by a train and died.
On the other hand, she suffered terrible bouts of anxiety before her voyage across the ocean with her American soldier husband, yet their journey was safe and smooth and uneventful. It was a matter of faith, she told Tory, when her fey had made itself known. Faith. Fé, in Italian, which became fey in Nonna Angela’s accented English. It was all the same, and it was both a gift and a curse.
When prickles of cold began to creep up and down her arms and across her chest, Tory made herself go back to bed, but she didn’t sleep. She lay on her pillow, staring up at the low ceiling, listening to the wind and watching the light change as dawn made its slow way over the hills to draw faint sparkles from the tossing sea. The bout of anxiety faded as the light rose, and she felt calm again. Ice Woman.
When the clock said six, she got up. She dressed, and pulled on her coat, which was beginning to look a little down-at-heel. She filled a mug with coffee, a lidded cup some service station had given her. Locking the cottage door behind her, she wandered down to the beach, feeling small and alone on the sandy expanse. As she passed the bench she had repaired the night before, she glanced back at the cottage. The mended shutter looked perfect, the boards now secure. The gate was intact again, too, and swung smoothly on freshly oiled hinges. She had also, when no one was around, repaired the broken frame that held the recycling bins of the house behind hers, and straightened a tilting bike rack at one of the beach entrances, replacing its bent screws with fresh, unrusted ones. She wondered what people must think about her little improvements. It was a bit like the old children’s story about brownies that sneaked around fixing things in the night.
The tide was in, bubbling far up, so she had only a narrow strand to walk on. She found a dry boulder and perched on it to gaze out over the gradually brightening water. The wind had eased a little, but it was still sharp and cold. She slid down onto the sand to sit in the lee of the rock, out of the breeze. She wrapped her arms around her bent legs and rested her chin on her knees.
If her dreams meant anything, she supposed, they meant she should face what had happened to her instead of burying it. She had often advised her clients to walk themselves through their traumas, alone or with a support group. She couldn’t turn to a support group, of course, but she also couldn’t rely on dreams to find her way out of the labyrinth of her feelings. Something terrible had happened—she had made at least one serious error, probably two—and it wasn’t going to vanish just because she had fled from the consequences.
She pulled up the collar of her coat until it nearly reached her temples. She closed her eyes against the dance of light on the water, and let the image of Ellice Gordon—tall, sandy-haired, pale-eyed—rise behind her eyelids.
Ellice had been her client for nearly a year, and it was obvious from the beginning that she was angry. In her sessions she recounted, in an uninflected voice, a long list of resentments, hurts, and suspicions. She returned to them again and again. As she talked, her fury showed in the tightness of her features and the drumming of her fingers on the arms of the easy chair.
She had an unusual face. The nose and pale eyes, the long jaw, the straight eyebrows were all unexceptionable in themselves, but they seemed, in a strange way, not to fit together. It wasn’t an ugly face, particularly, but it was—a difficult one, Tory decided. A difficult face to live with. She leaned back as she listened through that year, and watched the light of the seasons play across it.
The bleak winter light accentuated the lines of tension graven in Ellice’s freckled cheeks. The spring sunshine was softer, filtered through budding leaves, and Ellice looked as if she might be just a little more relaxed, more receptive. The summer sun had been hard and clear, bringing red highlights to Ellice’s short brush of hair, picking out her faint freckles so she looked boyish. In the fall—when the truth began to come out—the light had turned golden, reflecting off the sugar maples and the oak tree, but even that rich light couldn’t bring a shine to Ellice’s eyes.
They had talked about all sorts of things, family relationships, sexual orientation, the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s field. Ellice related her memories of being bullied by her brothers, ignored by her father, berated by her mother for her unfeminine ways. Tory watched and listened, and waited for her intuition to help her help her cli
ent. She had believed, as time passed, that Ellice was beginning to trust her, though slowly. Ellice began to have moments of calm, even of laughter. She began to remember pleasant moments from her youth—baseball games, a fishing trip, a good teacher—instead of only miserable ones. Though Tory’s fey had not yet given her insight into what troubled her client, she thought they were making progress.
Months of therapy passed this way, gradually delving into Ellice’s past, into her feelings of being unloved by her parents, into her fears of being tormented by her brothers, into her sense of receiving no respect for her work. When Ellice admitted her recurring fantasy, Tory regarded it as a breakthrough.
Ellice seemed calmer that day than she usually did. She had come straight from work. She was still in uniform, but she had locked her service weapon in the file drawer, something Tory required of her during a session. The key to the file drawer was safely in Tory’s pocket.
That day Ellice didn’t fidget with her collar or adjust her duty belt over and over as she so often did. She only brushed her short hair with her hand once or twice as she talked. She kept her eyes on the red and gold of the oak tree, and not until she was finished did she look at Tory, assessing the effect of her admission.
Tory had heard many confessions over the years—longings for revenge, stories of betrayal and tragedy, admissions of abuse given and received. She had never heard one like this. She kept her eyes away from the file drawer, where the big gun lay hidden, but she was painfully aware of its presence. It was a hot afternoon in early August, and the sliding glass door was open a bit to allow the breeze from the mountains to fill the house with fresh air.
She heard a nuthatch twitter its innocent song just as Ellice said, “When I think about it—when I think about actually doing it—I feel better.”
“In what way do you feel better, Ellice?” Years of practice kept Tory’s voice steady. The fantasy was disturbing, even repellent, but it was, after all, just a fantasy. A scene, created by her client’s subconscious as an outlet for the emotions she was trying to discharge.
“I feel better because I’m not angry anymore.” Ellice leaned back in the easy chair, crossing her long legs. Her freckled hands lay on the arms of the chair, the fingers relaxed, not tapping as they so often did. “It’s like there’s this big, tight bubble inside me, but when I do it—when I fire my weapon, and see someone go down—the bubble bursts. Like the bullet explodes the bubble.”
“You often feel angry. We’ve talked about that.”
“Furious.” Ellice tipped her head back to rest it against the top of the chair. “Utterly, completely pissed off. Like I could punch someone in the face without a thought.”
“So this fury inside you—this bubble—when do you feel it?”
Ellice’s lips curled in a chilly smile. “People don’t respect me. They’ve never respected me. When I think about that, when I remember how many of them have insulted me, betrayed me—that’s when the bubble grows. It fills me so full I can hardly breathe.”
“Can you be specific about the people, Ellice?”
One freckled finger lifted in a vague, dismissive gesture. “All of ’em. My brothers. My father. The guys in the department. The instructors at the academy.”
“We’ve looked at some of these instances before. I don’t think it’s so much that these people—your colleagues, your parents, your brothers—not so much that they don’t respect you as that you don’t trust them. You’ve accomplished a great deal. Not many women could do what you’ve done.”
“Yeah. But nobody else seems to get that.”
“You might be surprised to find that they do. If you were to talk to your parents, for example—”
“No offense, but what the hell do you know about it? You don’t see them, the way they look at me. You don’t hear my mother whining about me not being married, not having children. She thinks my brothers are all so perfect, with their wives and families and fancy jobs. No one would believe the way they were when we were kids. The guys in the department pretend to treat me okay, but I know they all think I’m a dyke.”
“Have they said so?”
“They don’t have to.” Ellice’s fingers tightened, pressing into the upholstery. “I can tell by the way they smirk behind my back when they think I’m not looking.”
“But you have friends in the department. You told me about having coffee with—”
“I don’t have a friend in the world.” This was said with bitter conviction.
Tory let a moment pass before she said gently, “Maybe, Ellice, they’re afraid of you.” She tried to soften her words with a smile. “You can be—fierce.”
Ellice laughed, and sat up. “Good. I am fierce! And I want them to be afraid of me! You’re not getting it, are you? This whole idea is about that, about pulling out my gun—” Her hand lifted from the chair arm, and hovered above her empty holster. Tory watched her, wishing she could delve beyond the façade, find the real woman behind the bluster.
“Pulling my gun,” Ellice repeated, her laughter fading. White lines bracketed her mouth. “Blasting some poor bastard, just showing them what I can do. I wish someone—anyone, I don’t care who—would give me an excuse!” She fell back again, blowing out her breath. She lifted her hand away from her holster, flexing the fingers as if she had just let go of her revolver.
Tory searched for her fey, but there was nothing. Strange, that her intuition would not respond to Ellice Gordon. She had to speak without it. She chose her words with care, walking the fine line between understanding and indulgence. “My sense, Ellice, is that the relief you imagine you would feel wouldn’t last long. That bubble you speak of—it would grow again. I don’t think you can burst it through violence.”
Ellice’s sandy lashes drooped, and then lifted again. She fixed Tory with her pale-eyed gaze, and showed her teeth. “Maybe not,” she said. It was a wolf’s grin. A predatory expression. “But I’d like to try.”
Tory had to admit, though not aloud, that Ellice was right—she didn’t get it. She didn’t really get it until much later. Until it was too late.
Now, staring out across a beach two thousand miles from that sunlit office, Tory made herself face the truth. She should have taken action that same day. A therapist was supposed to report possible harm to herself, to someone else, or to the client. She should have known Ellice better. She should have understood this client was capable of acting out her fantasy.
But she hadn’t.
A wave of guilt swept over her, as cold and dark as the Pacific waves washing the beach at her feet. The weight of responsibility bowed her shoulders, and she dropped her forehead to her knees again. There were cracks in Ice Woman’s shell. She could feel them growing, fissures marring the glacial surface she had been hiding beneath. She couldn’t stay frozen forever, she supposed. But she didn’t know how she could face this failure in herself.
Suppose Ellice Gordon killed someone else?
But suppose, if she called to tell the police what she knew, Ellice turned on Jack? She had sworn to do it, and Tory knew she would. Her fey had surfaced in time to make that desperately clear. The knowledge had pierced her with a bolt more painful than the cut of the knife that had scarred her arm.
Ellice would choose Jack as her next victim if she thought Tory was still alive. If she thought Tory and the file could expose her. She would choose Jack because that would cause the most damage, the biggest explosion. She would use Jack to burst the bubble of her fury, knowing full well that would destroy Tory, too.
Every therapist knew the stories. Tory, like her colleagues, had been warned during her training that it could happen, that a client could turn violent. It was a cliché, she supposed now, that she had never believed it could happen to her. She had fallen into the classic trap, convinced that her relationship with Ellice was just what it seemed—respectful, productive, and if not amicable, at least reasonable.
She had spent the morning of that October day in her usual fash
ion. She had no curtains on her windows because she loved the trees and the natural light, and she always woke when the sun rose. In autumn the light had a special quality, colored by the turning leaves, angled by the turning Earth. She rose early that morning, and went down to the kitchen for her daily cup of freshly ground coffee before she went out to walk through the woods, enjoying the birds and the drift of spent leaves tumbling from tree branches to cushion the ground. She climbed hills and wandered through gulleys, walking for an hour at a good clip before she went back to the house to shower and dress for the day in jeans, a light sweater, a blazer thrown over everything. She had bought some nice Gravensteins at the farmers market the week before, and she sliced one and ate it with yogurt.
She touched the phone on its mount above the kitchen island, but she didn’t pick it up. She would have liked to speak to Jack, but nine in the morning probably wasn’t a good time. In truth, there were no good times. No matter when she called, he sounded impatient, distracted, busy with classes and friends and all the activities of college.
And that’s the way it should be, she reminded herself. He’s busy with his life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Her calls to him had grown infrequent. She had fallen into the habit of waiting for him to call her instead. It didn’t happen often.
Other parents used e-mail, of course, but she still hadn’t gotten around to buying a computer and learning how to use it. She had put it off for so long now it hardly seemed necessary. She could still send Jack an old-fashioned postcard. That would be better. She would ask him to let her know when to expect him for the Thanksgiving holiday.
She clicked on the radio to listen to the news as she rinsed her bowl and filled the teakettle. She was bending to drop the fruit knife into the dishwasher when she heard the announcement that there had been a shooting in town. It made her straighten in surprise. Their town had so little crime that most people didn’t bother locking their doors and often left keys in the ignition of their cars. To hear that something so strange had happened, the victim found in a parking lot outside a liquor store, was really odd. The sheriff’s office didn’t know much yet, apparently, about who the man was, but he was dead. Deceased, the announcer said, as the result of a single gunshot wound, and left to bleed to death on the pavement. Tory shook her head, saddened by the incursion of violence into her small, quiet town.
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