Second Chance (32 page)

"
Don't be cute. You've been talking to Foster.
You know how things stand. If you've got new information I want it. I
want who's responsible for that." He pointed to the river.

But I wanted her, too. As badly as Parker did. At
that moment finding Carla Chaney was all I could think of.

37
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Louise didn't say a word. until we'd gotten in the
car and started back to Indian Hill.

"Are they sure it's Ethan and Kirsty?" she
said.

"Yes," I said bitterly. "It's them."

Louise's head sank to her breast. "Oh, God.
Kirsty."

She put her hands to her ears as if the thing was a
noise she could block out of her head.

"I want this to stop." Grabbing my arm she
said, "I want you to stop."

But I wouldn't have stopped at that moment for
anyone. She knew it, too. Dropping her hand to her side, she stared
miserably through the window. "You're not going to stop."
She said it hollowly, like I'd passed a judgment on her—or her
powers of persuasion.

Louise laughed bitterly. "What are you going to
find at the end of this, Harry?"

"Carla Chaney."

"I thought you said her name was Chase."

"They're one and the same."

Louise looked surprised. "All right, say you do
find her—Chase or Chaney. You think she's just going to let you
cart her off to prison for the rest of her life? What are you going
to do—shoot her?"

"If necessary."

"Bravo!" she said with heavy sarcasm.
"You'll kill the killer and then everyone comes back to life.
Phil and Stelle and Ethan and Kirsty. Our big happy family."

"There were others."

"And you're going to avenge them all." She
laughed again. "You're a fool, Harry. A dangerous fool."

"
Why dangerous?"

"Because you're trying to change things that
can't be changed—histories that were built up like limestone over
years. You blame Carla Chaney—Chase for all this trouble. But
you're wrong. Each one of us Pearsons is equally to blame for what
happened here. The whole damn family."

She stared at me a moment
and then sighed defeatedly. "Oh, hell, go find your woman. Be a
hero. Who knows—maybe she's ready to die, too."

* * *

It was almost three when I got to Shelley Sacks'
office in Clifton. I pulled up in the lot, parked beside his silver
Merc, walked around a hedge to the front of the duplex, then upstairs
to the second-floor waiting room. There was no one else in the
waiting room. Even the nurse was gone from her cubicle. I wondered if
Sacks had gone out, too. But I found him in his office, sitting
behind the desk.

He looked up as I came in. The desk lamp reflecting
off the lenses of his glasses hid his round blue eyes, but the rest
of his face looked drawn.

"Hello, Stoner," he said wearily.

"Where is everyone?"

"I closed the office today. I didn't feel up to
other people's problems." Tenting his fingers in front of his
face, he said, "This has been the worst week I can remember
since . . ."

"Estelle died?"

He nodded.

I sat down on a chair across from him. "Why
don't we start there, then. With Stelle and Phil."

Sacks shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Stoner,
I'm not going to discuss certain things. I've told you that. I
promise my patients confidentiality?

"Even when they murder each other?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean Phil Pearson killed your friend,
Estelle—and then covered up her murder."

"That is a dreadful accusation," Sacks
said, unfolding his tented fingers. "A terrible accusation. The
man just died, for chrissake."

"I have proof. Records of money paid to Rita
Scarne by Phil Pearson—a thousand dollars a month for over a
decade, paid out to cover up the murder of his wife. A murder that
Phil planned with the help of Rita and two of her friends"

Sacks leaned back in the chair and the reflections in
his glasses went out like snuffed candles. I saw his eyes for the
first time, troubled, rimmed with red.

"He was paying Rita a thousand dollars a month?"

"To conceal murder."

Sacks shook his head, no. "You're wrong. There
was no murder. If Phil was paying the woman money it was for
something else."

"Like what?" I said.

He was going to balk. I could see it in his face. I
pounded the desktop with my fist, making him jump.

"I don't want to hear about your ethics again,
Sacks. Those two kids are dead. The State Patrol found their bodies
today in the Miami River."

"Oh, my God," Sacks said, going pale.
"Kirsty?"

"Dead," I said harshly. "Ethan is
dead. The Scarne woman is dead. Talmadge is dead. Because of
something that was covered up thirteen years ago. Something you've
been helping to cover up with your silence ever since Ethan told you
what he saw that September day. I've read the transcript of the
coroner's inquest. You didn't mention a word about Ethan, Doctor. You
blamed what happened on bad luck—you're still blaming it on bad
luck."

"To an extent that's what it was," the man
said defensively.

"Why? Because Phil Pearson wanted it to look
that way?"

"Christ, no."

Sacks took off his glasses and pitched them on the
desk. Pinching the bridge of his nose he shut his eyes and rocked
back against the window, crumpling up the blind. Sunlight filtered
through the gap, powdering his shoulder and neck with pale, golden
light. Sacks touched at his neck as if he could feel it like a chill.

"Phil didn't try to conceal anything from the
police, Stoner. I was the one who told the officers to ignore Ethan's
story. "

"Why?"

"Why?" He laughed lamely. "What
earthly good would it have served to raise suspicions of murder on
the basis of a child's hysteria? I knew Estelle had killed herself. I
even knew why. But the police might have seen the situation
differently. At the very least, Phi1's career would have been ruined.
I saw no reason to take that chance."

"How would letting Ethan tell his story have
jeopardized Pearson?"

"The police are dogmatists," Sacks said.
"Once they started thinking in terms of a murder they look for
motives. In this case . . . they might have concluded that Phil had a
reason to get rid of Estelle."

I leaned forward eagerly in the chair. Phil Pearson's
motive for murder was at the heart of the case. It was the one of two
large blanks left in the story—his motive and Carla.

"What reason did he have to murder Estelle?"

"You're not listening to me," Sacks said
sharply. "I said he didn't have a motive to be rid of her. It
was she who wanted to be rid of him. If things had worked out
differently, Estelle would have divorced Phil that winter."

"
She would have divorced him?" I said
confusedly. "I thought Pearson intended to divorce Stelle.
That's what Louise told me."

Sacks shook his head. "That was wishful
thinking—probably fostered by Phil himself. Believe me, he would
never have divorced Stelle or married Louise if fate hadn't taken a
hand. Phil simply depended on Stelle too deeply and in too many ways.
Emotionally, physically, financially?

"
Financially?"

"All  the money was Stelle's. Phil didn't
start making a decent living until a couple of years after she died.
In fact he was very poor for those years, because her estate was tied
up in probate."

I didn't say it to Sacks, but that would explain why
the payoffs to Rita had begun three years after Ste1le's death.

"Money wasn't the real issue, anyway,"
Sacks went on. "Phil would never have divorced Stelle if for no
other reason than he needed her forgiveness so badly."

"Forgiveness for what?"

Sacks took a deep breath. "Do you know anything
at all about Phil's family history, about his father in particular?"

"Louise told me that his father was a drunk. She
also said that she thought Phil might have been abused by him,
sexually."

Sacks nodded. "Abuse is such a dreadful thing,
and at the same time so commonplace. More often than not it goes
undiscovered. And even when it is discovered, it is usually hushed up
by the family or ignored. Unless the children can work through the
trauma therapeutically, they invariably have serious emotional
problems for the rest of their lives. They simply can't love anymore,
not as adults. They can only love dependently—or cruelly. As
victims or persecutors. Tragically that means that many of them end
up as abusers themselves. "

Suddenly I knew Phil Pearson's ugly secret. Knew why
he'd been so afraid of exposure, so evasive about his past and his
children's pasts, so terribly afraid of what his son and his daughter
might accidentally reveal about him—and themselves.

Hearing Sacks say it aloud only underlined the horror
of it.

"In the spring of 1976, Stelle discovered that
Phil was . . . that he'd been sexually abusing Kirsten."

"He abused his daughter," I said, feeling
it fully.

"It broke Stelle down. Broke both of them down,
really. Phil just managed the break differently."

"You mean Louise?"

"And his work. Stelle didn't have his support
system. She was quite fragile anyway, with long-standing emotional
problems. Problems of self-worth, problems of sexual identity. This
thing hit her precisely where she was most vulnerable. She worshiped
Phil when they first married. But she had always feared that Phil
didn't love her back—that he'd married her for money and social
connections. Discovering that he'd been abusing Kirsty simply
destroyed the little ego she had left."

Sacks' lips trembled violently, and he put a hand to
his mouth to cover them. "I tried so hard to make her well. But
as the depression waned, the manic stage began. Her anger welled up,
and all she could think about was hurting Phil as he had hurt her.
She wanted to expose him, to divorce him, to take his money and his
name. Above all she wanted to take Kirsty and Ethan away from Phil
forever."

"You don't think that's a motive for murder?"

"You're missing the point," Sacks said
irritably. "He was so racked with guilt himself he thought he
deserved to be murdered. I think he would have welcomed it."

"I suppose that's why he threw himself into an
affair."

"Phil was constantly having affairs. Louise was
hardly the first. They were never particularly romantic things,
anyway. He just wanted someone to talk to—to ease his loneliness,
to assert his manhood. But none of his women, not even Louise, could
absolve him for what he'd done to Kirsty. Only Stelle could do that.
Phil knew that Stoner.
Stelle knew it, too. She knew Phil would do anything to make amends."

"Did that make a difference to her?"

"It might have—over time. If she'd had the
chance to work it through. She never got that chance."

For a time neither one of us said anything.

"The abuse," I said. "That was what
Kirsty had been repressing?"

"Yes. The affair Kirsten had with her teacher
last spring, you know about that, don't you?"

I nodded.

"And you know about the lesbian roommate?"

"I know about Marnee," I said, although
frankly I hadn't thought of her as part of Kirsten's psychodrama.

"Kirsten was reenacting this childhood trauma
with both of them—symbolically reenacting it. An older man who used
her sexually and then rejected her. A woman whose love Kirsty
couldn't accept because it was tinged with jealousy and
possessiveness. Even her search for this imaginary killer was part of
the reenactment—a displacement of her guilt about her father and
her rage against her mother onto a convenient stranger."

I thought of the girl's face, floating in the frozen
river like a stone flower. She hadn't gone on that journey with Ethan
to kill an imaginary stranger. In her own mad way she'd made an
effort to face the reality of her past. To face the violence
inflicted upon her and the violence that had been done to her mother.
She hadn't been looking for a scapegoat. She'd been looking for the
truth—and for a measure of justice that was long overdue.

"Talmadge wasn't imaginary, Doctor," I said
heavily. "Phil used him to kill his wife and then paid Rita to
cover it up."

"Use your head, Stoner," Sacks said. "If
Rita Scarne was blackmailing Phil, it was over his abuse of
Kirsty—not Stelle's death. Rita was there, after all, almost every
day. Part of the family. She could easily have picked up on this.
Stelle didn't hold much back, except around the children."

But I wasn't convinced. Money, prestige, career—not
to mention his children. Those were damn good reasons for homicide.
Sacks was simply blind to the possibility that Stelle hadn't killed
herself. And I thought I understood why. He needed Stelle's suicide
the way Ethan Pearson had needed her murder. Because he'd loved the
woman and felt he'd failed her. Clinging to the idea of her suicide
was a way of both punishing and excusing himself, by injecting an
element of fatality into a situation that he cou1dn't control. There
was no point in debating it with him. Besides there was something
else I wanted to know. "Blackmail or murder, two other people
were involved in this thing besides Phil and Rita. Two people who had
killed once before and disguised it as suicide. You know about
Talmadge. You don't know about a nurse named Carla Chaney. Do you
remember her?"