FAMILY FALLACIES (The Kate Huntington mystery series #3) (4 page)

“Good idea, wrong
timing,” she said, returning his smile as she sat up on the sofa.

“I know, still too
soon,” he said, without the falsetto this time.

She stood up to walk
him to the door, opening it and then stepping back to put a few feet between
them. When he was through the door and out on the porch, she said, “I meant it,
Skip. I really appreciate you putting up with me. I wish...” Her voice trailed
off.

He smiled at her, his
eyes gentle. “The waiting is hard to put up with, but you’re not. I enjoy every
minute I spend with you. Goodnight, Kate.”

T
he next morning, Kate
tried to convince herself the note had just been a bad dream. Reality came
crashing back when Edie crawled across the floor toward her open briefcase by
the sofa. Lifting the case out of the baby’s reach, Kate took the note out and
sat down on the sofa. She stared at the big letters, but they told her no more
than they had the night before.

Putting the note back
in her briefcase, Kate thought,
Oh, Eddie, what should I do?

After a minute she
decided he wasn’t going to answer her. What did she expect? The two
flesh-and-blood men in her life had no suggestions other than filing a police
report, so why did she think her dead husband would be able to help?

She pushed up off the
sofa to scoop Edie up and change her. They were meeting Liz for lunch.

An hour later, Liz was
carrying the baby on her hip across the restaurant parking lot while making
faces at her. Edie was chortling with delight.

“Why didn’t you want to
go to Mac’s Place?” Liz asked as Kate opened the restaurant door for her.

“I wanted to talk to
you about something that I don’t want Rose or Mac to overhear.” They joined a
short line of people waiting to be seated. It was a little before noon but the
Italian restaurant was already a bit crowded.

Liz nodded. “Do you
think it’s too chilly to sit outside?”

Kate glanced at the
almost-deserted patio. “Good idea. Then we don’t have to worry so much about
her making noise and disturbing people.”

They followed the
hostess to the patio and took a table in the warm September sun. Kate dug sunscreen
out of the diaper bag and put it on the baby’s face.

“So what did you want
to talk about?” Liz asked, once they had given the waitress their drink orders.

“Skip,” Kate answered
succinctly.

“Oh, ho!”

“Yeah, oh, ho. I hope
you don’t mind me using you as a sounding board. I can’t–”

“Of course not,” Liz
interrupted. “To my mind, one of the best things about being a woman is talking
about men with other women. They are such fascinating creatures, aren’t they?”

Kate laughed out loud
as she broke up some crackers on the highchair tray to keep Edie occupied. The
child started obliterating them with her little fist.

“And the one I’m
married to is being a bit obstinate, in my opinion, about not accepting that
you and Skip are an item now,” Liz said.

Kate resisted the
temptation to probe Liz’s thoughts on why Rob was reacting that way. She wanted
to get her feelings sorted out about Skip first.

“Well, that’s the
question actually. Are we an item now?”

“Looks like a duck.
Quacks like a duck.”

“Yeah, but the ducks
never touch each other.”

“And whose choice is
that?” Liz said, raising an eyebrow.

“Mine at this point.
Although I’m not sure
choice
is the right word. It’s still just too soon
to go there.”

“And where would you be
going, besides to bed?”

“That’s the crux of the
matter,” Kate said, as the waitress arrived with glasses of iced tea and bread
sticks. They ordered their food while Kate wiped most of the oil and garlic off
a bread stick and gave it to Edie to gnaw on.

When the waitress had
left, Liz repeated her question. “So where would you be going?”

“Liz, I think we would
go from zero to sixty faster than a NASCAR driver. I know holding him at arm’s
length is the right thing to do, until I’ve finished letting go of Eddie, but
the side effect of that is we’re...”

“Building up a lot of
desire,” Liz finished for her. She paused, then asked, “So how do you feel
about him when you’re
not
craving his body?”

“That’s what I’m not
sure about. It’s hard to get past the lust, to sort that out. I enjoy his
company. He’s easy to be around. And he almost always gets me. He understands
who I am.”

“Sounds like a good
start,” Liz said. “How well do you know him?”

“Fairly well, I think,
although you never know somebody completely.”

“Tell me about it!” Liz
said. “Every once in awhile Rob still surprises me, even after all these years.
His reaction to Skip was one of those times.”

Again resisting the
temptation to discuss Rob, Kate said, “We’ve been getting together almost every
week, and we talk most evenings. I think we’ve talked about everything under
the sun by now.”

“Do you miss him when
you can’t get together for awhile?”

Kate nodded.

“Quack, quack,” Liz
said with a grin, as the waitress delivered her salad and Kate’s soup. “So have
you found anything about him that you don’t like?”

“No, and trust me, I’ve
been looking. I see enough rotten relationships in my office to know what to
watch out for. He’s not the least bit controlling or possessive, although he
gets a little jealous of Rob sometimes, of how close we are. But when I call
him on it, he immediately backs off. He’s just this incredibly nice, easy-going
guy, with a great sense of humor and a quick mind.”

Liz had been watching
her friend carefully as she talked. Now she put her fork down and covered
Kate’s hand on the table with her own. “Sweetheart, you sound and look like a
woman in love to me. And from everything I’ve seen, Skip is truly a great guy.”

Kate squeezed her
friend’s hand, then let it go to wipe down another bread stick for Edie. The
child had turned the first one into soggy pulp, ingesting about a third of it
and smearing the rest on her highchair tray.

“Yeah, I keep telling
myself I’m half in love with him, but I think I’m all the way there.”

“And how does it feel
to say that out loud?”

Kate laughed. “Liz, if
you ever get tired of being an actuary, you should become a therapist. You’d be
great at it. But to answer your question, it feels okay. Good even. Somehow
it’s not so scary to admit it. Not as scary as thinking to myself that I
might
be in love. Is this making sense?”

“Yeah, it is, but don’t
ask me to explain it back to you. So then why is it still too soon?”

Kate scooped up a
spoonful of soup to buy some time. The answer to that was because she still
talked to Eddie in her head, but that wasn’t something she was willing to
share, even with Liz.

“It just feels like I
need to let go of Eddie more. It would be so unfair to Skip, if we
officially
became an item, and he was still in competition with...” She couldn’t make
herself say
a dead man
out loud. “...my late husband.”

Liz nodded, as their
entrees arrived.

Of course, Edie chose
that moment to get fussy. Kate pulled out a toy. The baby started happily
banging the ring of oversized plastic keys on her highchair.

Trying to ignore the
racket, they worked on their food for a few minutes. Then Liz said, “So you
don’t want to talk about Rob, I take it.”

“Actually I’d like to
hear your take on why he’s reacting the way he is. I just wanted to sort out my
thoughts about Skip first, knowing that the munchkin here would only give us so
much time for serious conversation.”

“I wish I had a good
take on it, Kate. It’s something he’s been resistant to talking about.”

“With me as well. Last
summer, my sense was that it was a knee-jerk reaction like a father or brother
would have. Who is this guy who wants to date my sister?”

“It doesn’t have that
feel to it anymore, though,” Liz said. “Best read I can get is that he’s just
plain terrified that you’ll get your heart broken.”

“It’s funny but I’m
not
afraid of that. It’s possible that things won’t work out with Skip but I know
he would never do anything to hurt me.”

The baby started to
fuss again. “I’ll get her,” Liz said. “I’m finished eating.” She stood up and
lifted the baby out of her highchair. She started walking back and forth,
bouncing the child in her arms. As she glanced over at Kate, she was startled
by the strange expression on her friend’s face.

“I just realized
something,” Kate said. “There’s another reason I’ve been holding Skip at arm’s
length.”

“What’s that?”

Kate looked up at Liz,
pain in her eyes. “I’m not the least bit afraid that he’ll hurt me. But I’m
terrified
that he’ll die on me, like Eddie did.”

~~~~~~~~

O
n Monday, Kate could
no longer ignore the issue of the note. She made a special trip to the center
for her meeting with Sally.

After examining the
note, her boss said, “Any clue who this is from?”

“Actually, yeah. A few
possibilities have occurred to me. I have two clients who are in the process of
getting a divorce. Could be one of their soon-to-be-ex-spouses. Or... Do you
remember Tammy Wingate?”

Sally caught herself in
mid eye-roll. Kate suppressed a grin. Her boss, a tall, elegant black woman
with a cap of short curly gray hair, was the quintessential professional and
was also the most no-nonsense person Kate had ever known. At the moment, those
two aspects of her personality seemed to be in conflict.

“Tammy doesn’t lie
per
se
,” Kate said. “But she often over-reacts and misinterprets reality. And
she and her husband have been fighting like cats and dogs lately.”

Sally raised one
eyebrow. “She’s exhibiting borderline tendencies?”

“Actually she meets the
criteria for the full-blown disorder. I’ve only met the husband one time. He
didn’t strike me as someone so unstable he would send anonymous notes to his
wife’s therapist, but I did confront him about his emotional neglect of his
wife. And Tammy’s reported some violence, slapping and throwing things, on both
their parts.”

“So he’s an abuser,”
Sally said bluntly. “That would qualify him as unstable enough to send nasty
notes in my book.”

Kate paused to choose
her words. “Sally, I know it’s not politically correct for therapists to ever
excuse or minimize a man raising his hand to a woman. But, quite frankly, Tammy
is pretty damned intense. And isn’t it a bit sexist of us to expect the man to
remain nonviolent, when his woman is hurling objects at him from across the
room? Maybe Mark Wingate is an abusive personality, or maybe Tammy just drives
him to distraction.”

Sally nodded. “Good
point.”

Kate passed along Rob’s
suggestion that they file a police report. Sally was resistant to the idea, for
fear it would bring negative media attention to the center.

She got up and pulled a
fresh file folder from a box on a shelf. After writing “Note to Kate” on its
label, Sally slipped the sheet of paper inside and put it in her desk drawer.
“Try not to worry about it, Kate. Whoever sent this is probably just trying to
shake you up.”

“I hate to admit it,
but he’s succeeded.”

I
t took awhile for Kate
to put the note out of her mind. After two days of obsessing about it, she
asked herself,
What would I tell a client to do?
After that, when
thoughts of the note popped up, she recited the Serenity Prayer in her head,
reminding herself that this fell into the category of that which she could not
control.

Driving to work the
first Tuesday of October, Kate realized she hadn’t thought about the note at
all the previous weekend. Not wanting to start obsessing about it now, she
deliberately cast about for something else to occupy her brain. Skip’s smiling
face immediately popped up in her mind’s eye.

I’m really looking
forward to Friday evening, Eddie.

Oops!
That was a
no-no. For some reason, Eddie never answered her when she tried to talk to him
about Skip. Could ghosts get jealous?

I love you, Eddie
,
Kate reassured him.

I love you, too
,
came the echoing reply, a bit fainter than usual.

When Kate arrived at
the center, Pauline informed her that Audrey had called, practically in
hysterics, asking if she could get in to see Kate that day. “See if she can
come in during my four-thirty break,” Kate said. It would make her long day
incredibly intense to work straight through the afternoon and evening, but
Audrey was not the hysterical type. This could not be good.

When the woman arrived
at four-thirty, she looked like the sole survivor of a train wreck. Her clothes
were rumpled, her hair sticking up. Her face was tear-stained. “I’m sorry,
Kate, but I just had to see you,” she said, her voice a bit shaky.

“My God, Audrey, what
happened?” Kate exclaimed as they sat down across from each other.

Audrey’s voice
gradually steadied as she talked. The previous afternoon, she’d had yet another
argument over the phone with her mother, when she’d refused to let Alicia spend
the weekend at her grandparents’ house. Her mother had kept demanding an
explanation.

Audrey had finally told
her that she was having dreams, and sometimes little flashbacks during the day,
that her therapist thought might mean she had been sexually abused as a child.
Then, not sure where to go from there–she didn’t dare imply to her mother that
she thought her abuser was her father or her uncle–she’d ad-libbed. The
memories were vague and she didn’t know who it was, but she thought it might
have been one of her friends’ fathers, during a sleep-over. Until she and her
therapist could sort out the memories better, she just felt too uncomfortable
letting Alicia spend the night away from home, even at her grandparents’ house.

This explanation had
seemed to appease her mother, but not her father. He had called an hour later,
yelling his usual litany of insults, that she was stupid, crazy, an ingrate.
Audrey had hung up on him, but the verbal abuse had set off her worst anxiety
attack yet.

“When Ted came home
from work, and saw the state I was in, he suggested I go out for awhile. Go to
Starbucks, get a latte and read.” Kate knew this was something that often
helped Audrey get herself grounded again.

“But when I got there,
this man... He was sitting alone, minding his own business. But I could have
sworn he wasn’t wearing any pants. Just a tee shirt. I was afraid to look at
him. I knew any minute he was going to turn toward me and...” Her voice choked
on a sob.

“I get the picture,
Audrey. Did you report him to the staff?”

“But that’s just the
thing, Kate. He
was
wearing pants. After a few minutes he got up to
throw his coffee cup away and he had on khaki slacks. I had an anxiety attack,
right there in Starbucks. It was all I could do to get home.

“And then it happened
again. When we were getting ready for bed. Ted started to take his pants off
and I freaked out. I went out and slept on the couch, or tried to sleep. I
couldn’t be around him, couldn’t see him, couldn’t stand the thought of him
touching me.” The words were coming fast now. “Oh, my God! I can’t do this to
him. He’s been so good to me.”

Kate went over to kneel
beside Audrey’s chair and gathered the sobbing woman into her arms. “Sh, sh,
it’s going to be okay. We’ll get you through this. Ted and I are going to help
you get through this. He’s a good man, Audrey. He’ll understand.”

When Audrey was finally
relatively calm, they went over her journal entries from the weekend. There was
one, about the man in the flashbacks wearing a plaid shirt, that Audrey didn’t
remember writing.

“That’s not totally
unusual,” Kate reassured her. “I’ve had clients remember an entire memory one
session, and by the next week, their minds have pushed it away again. That’s why
I have you keep the journal.” Also when the client saw the words in their own
handwriting, they couldn’t say that Kate was making stuff up.

At the end of the
session, she reminded Audrey that she should call the emergency number if she
needed to talk the next day.

~~~~~~~~

K
ate stood at her
office window, admiring the reds and oranges of the changing leaves in the
trees along the sides of the back parking lot. Sighing, she turned and sank
into her desk chair.
Thank God it’s Friday!
  Kicking off her shoes, she
propped her feet up on the corner of her desk and unwrapped her sandwich.

As she ate, her mind
turned to her two toughest cases. Audrey was scheduled to come in later that
afternoon, for her second session of the week. Hopefully her unconscious mind
would cough up more pieces of the puzzle soon. Kate was toying with the idea of
using an imagery technique she’d learned at a workshop a couple years ago. She
would see how things went.

Tammy had actually had
one productive session recently, right after the note incident. Kate had
planned to probe to see if she had mentioned the temporary separation
suggestion to her husband. But an unexpected encounter with her abusive parents
at a family wedding had stirred up Tammy’s anger, and for once she had directed
it toward the appropriate parties. Kate had hoped the young woman would be able
to stay focused on the past long enough to get some issues resolved. By the
next session, however, she and Mark had fought again, and Tammy was back to
ruminating about his indifference to her needs.

Kate jumped a little
when someone knocked on her slightly ajar door. As Sally came into her office,
closing the door behind her, Kate dropped her feet to the floor and put the
remainder of her sandwich down on her desk. Suddenly she didn’t feel so good.

Sally was holding an
envelope. “Came in today’s mail. No return address. Postmarked at Towson’s main
post office.”

“Which tells us
nothing.” Kate tried to match her boss’s matter-of-fact tone. She held out her
hand.

The envelope was
addressed to Sally Ford. The words on the sheet of paper inside were YOU NEED
TO FIRE THAT KATE BITCH. SHE FILLS PEOPLE’S HEADS WITH LIES AND DESTROYS
FAMILIES.

“Now I’m starting to
wonder if this is the false memory crowd,” Sally said.

Kate shuddered at the
thought. In the nineties, several parents, who had been accused by their grown
children of sexual abuse, had banded together to counter the accusations with
the claim that false memories were being planted in their offspring’s heads by
inexperienced or unethical therapists. Since then many similar groups had
sprung up around the country.

Sally flopped down in
the chair next to Kate’s desk. “I figured it was only a matter of time before
they targeted us,” she said, her tone dejected.

Kate was a bit alarmed.
Dignified and professional Sally Ford did not flop nor become dejected.

Kate wasn’t sure what
to say. If some local false memory group was sending the notes, then things
were likely to get a lot worse. Some of these groups had gone after therapists
in the trauma recovery field, filing lawsuits, picketing their offices. A
couple therapists had even received death threats, although these could not be
officially linked back to the false memory groups.

Kate sat silently, as
she would with a client, but Sally continued to stare morosely out the window.
Finally Kate said, “What do you want to do?” She wasn’t afraid that Sally would
fire her. She and her boss were not close but they had tremendous respect for
each other and she knew Sally would not succumb to threats.

“I don’t know,” Sally
said. “These notes are awfully vague. This could be about any of our cases,
past or present.”

Kate thought for a
moment. “Has to be a current case. The first note was in the present tense. But
you’re right. What the notes are saying could apply to almost all of my cases.”
Kate was seeing a dozen survivors of childhood physical or sexual abuse, plus
three women whose husbands were verbally and emotionally abusive. One of the
things most abusers had in common was a phenomenal ability to distort reality,
while accusing their victims of lying.

Standing up, Sally
said, “All we can do is hope that they stick to nasty-grams.” She picked up the
note and envelope and headed for the door.

~~~~~~~~

A
t some point since
Tuesday, Audrey’s anxiety had shifted to anger. Kate spent the first half of
their session that afternoon trying to convince the young woman that it was too
soon to confront her parents about the sexual abuse. Kate pointed out that
Audrey’s anger was natural and even healthy, and then spelled out her concerns
about having such a confrontation.

Although Audrey was
fairly convinced her abuser was her father, the face in the memories was still
not totally clear. If she later realized the abuser was her uncle, ‘Hey, Dad, I
think you molested me when I was a kid’ were not exactly words one could easily
take back.

And Kate, unlike some
of her colleagues, did not believe that an incest survivor confronting his or
her abuser was necessarily the best way to vent the anger and allow the
survivor to re-empower themselves. All too often that approach backfired and
the survivor ended up being traumatized again when other family members sided
with the abuser, joining forces against the one who threatened their denial and
the status quo. Kate only agreed to such confrontations when all other attempts
to resolve the past for the client had fallen short.

Kate was able to
extract a promise from Audrey that she would not say anything to her parents
until Kate felt she was ready to deal with the repercussions. Then Kate used
the guided imagery technique she had been contemplating, hoping it would help
the young woman vent some of her anger.

And it did. After
following Kate’s instructions to close her eyes and imagine her father, in her
mind’s eye, tied to a chair with a gag in his mouth, Audrey spent the better
part of ten minutes yelling inside her head at the man.

As she saw her client’s
face begin to relax. Kate quietly said, “When you’ve told him everything you
want to say, tell me how you want to end the scene.” This was not a technique
she would use with someone who was unstable or the least bit violent, but she
felt comfortable using it with Audrey.

After a long pause,
Audrey said, “I want to have him hauled away to jail.”

“Then do that in your
mind’s eye now. Call the police and invite the little girl inside of you, the
one that he hurt so much, invite her to stand beside you and watch him being
dragged off to jail where he belongs. Hold her hand and watch the police arrest
him and take him away.”

After a moment, a big
smile started spreading across Audrey’s face. “Now give that little girl that
you once were a hug, and tuck her back away inside of you,” Kate quietly
instructed. Another moment went by and Audrey opened her eyes.

“Wow, that was cool!”
She was grinning from ear to ear.

Kate grinned back at
her. She decided to wait a session or two to see what impact this intervention
had on the woman’s psyche, before pointing out that confronting abusers in
imagery is a lot safer and less stressful than real-life confrontations.

The technique had been
a success on two levels. Kate’s earlier distress about the nasty-gram, as Sally
had called it, had been displaced by the sense of accomplishment that comes
with a job well done.

~~~~~~~~

W
hen the last client
was out the door, Kate grabbed her purse and briefcase and raced home. She and
Skip were going out to dinner.

At the house, Samantha,
the Franklin’s seventeen-year-old daughter, had already arrived to babysit for
Edie. Sam and the little girl were playing on the living room rug. Kate greeted
the teenager and then hurried to her bedroom to change her clothes.

Skip was there when she
finally emerged, after agonizing awhile over what to wear–she wanted to look
attractive, but not seductive. She had settled on her favorite black sweater,
dressed up with a string of pearls, over a simple gray skirt.

Skip gave her an
appreciative smile.

After checking that Sam
had her cell phone number, Kate headed out the door. “Did you have a restaurant
in mind?” she said over her shoulder to Skip.

“Café Troia okay?”

Kate froze for a second
at the top of the porch steps, then forced herself to move again.

Skip had caught the
moment of hesitation. He descended after her, then fell into step with her on
the sidewalk. “You used to go there with Ed,” he said quietly.

Kate nodded mutely.
They had reached Skip’s Explorer at the curb before she felt she could trust
her voice. “We went there on our last anniversary, two weeks before he was
killed.”

Without thinking, Skip
took her hand. “I’m sorry, Kate.”

An electric shock ran
up her arm. She closed her eyes, fighting the urge to collapse into his arms.
“It’s okay. You didn’t know.”