Skull Session (17 page)

Heather climbed awkwardly out of her chair and went to the window seat, where she looked out at the backyard. All he could see was the curtain of hair again.

"I really don't like you," she said again. Her voice was shaky, and Mo felt at once a rush of excitement and a stab of pity. This kid was messed up. She'd been through a lot. Mo could guess only so far, and then he drew a blank. He had no idea what had happened or what Heather knew or didn't. At some point, he'd have to have her cooperation, or he'd get nothing. "Anyway," Heather continued bitterly, "she wasn't really the schizophrenic sister's friend."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because she just came because she was supposed to for her religious club. Because she just came to see Richard."

"Couldn't she do both of those and still really be a friend too? I think she could."

"And the brother just went places with the sister so he could be with the girl."

"I don't think it has to be that way either."

Heather shook her head. "You think you're very smart, but you're really stupid. If the schizophrenic girl thinks things like that, she can't be mad at them, and if she can't be mad, then she'll have to be even more sad and it will all be much worse. You get mad so when you think of it, all you can think of is how mad you are. You don't have to think of what happened."

Mo waited, hoping she'd go on, his heart thudding so hard he was sure she'd hear it. He wished he'd brought a tape recorder. This was rich stuff, material to be analyzed by a forensic psychologist. She sat silently, working her hands together as if they were fighting, so much tension and force in the knotting motions that Mo had to look away. "What did happen, Heather?"

"How should I know? I was talking about a story. I haven't written it all yet." Heather turned to face him, and he was shocked to see her smiling, an incongruous, horribly artificial ear-to-ear grin.

"That's not true."

The smile went away. "Besides, there's another thing behind the mad, not just sad, that's even worse."

"What," Mo said quietly. She seemed to want to tell him, tell somebody.

"Scared," she whispered with a round-eyed, childish certainty.

Mo's skin prickled. "What kind of scared?"

"Very very. But you have to guess."

Mo knelt in front of her. He had to overcome the desire to take her by the shoulders and shake it out of her. "Heather, you need to tell me. I need to hear you. But I can't do this. I'm not as smart as you are, and this isn't a game. And it isn't a story. You know it isn't."

"And the brother said never to tell. About them."

"He never thought all this would happen."

"Sometimes he'd park the car and they'd go up. I'd wait. Sometimes I'd walk partway too. You couldn't park too close because people would see the car there."

Mo waited, his eyes locked on hers, trying to keep it flowing between them by force of will. Heather seemed to draw into herself, her eyes watching some scene he couldn't imagine. She didn't continue.

Mo let several minutes pass. "And?" he prompted at last.

"What?"

"And what happened then?"

She looked across the room, her eyes suggesting resignation, as if she were disappointed with him. "See, you think it's just a detective story. I said
sort of a,
detective story."

"Well, what kind of story is it then?"

"It's much, much more than that. It's very important. It's about when we think we know what's real and then find out we didn't know. How we didn't know hardly anything. How people can do things nobody ever, ever imagined they could.
Ever, ever, ever, ever, never, never, never,
never, never."

She chanted the last words as if they were a warding ritual from which she took some desperate comfort. Mo felt lost again. Heather was drifting into abstractions that he couldn't fathom. He'd have to bring her back.

"Heather, what happened then? They parked the car and you waited, and they went up. What happened after that?"

She looked at him as if surprised. "When?"

"In the story."

"What story?" She stood up and went to the table, where she picked up the spiral notebook. "This? This isn't a story. You were right, it's not a story. See? I was fooling you." She brandished the book at him, and he could see that the lines weren't script at all, just a series of uniform squiggles neatly filling each line on the page. She tore four or five pages from the book and began ripping them neatly in half, then in half again.

"Heather, please," he said.

Heather pointed at a wall clock over her table. "It's time for me to be getting ready for my therapy session with Dr. Kurtz. I call him Dr. Klutz."

"We will have to talk again. Would that be okay?"

"Probably not. If I tell my mother or Dr. Kurtz how much I don't like you, they won't let you see me again."

Mo stood and watched her as she brushed her hair in front of the bureau mirror. He tried to think of the thing to say, the one right thing that would provoke her, crack her open again, but couldn't come up with a guess. If he ever slipped, guessed too wide of the mark, she'd know she could dodge him forever. It was safer to let it ride. For now.

"Okay," he said. "Heather, you've been very helpful. I'm going to go. I hope you'll consider talking with me again." He went toward the door of the bedroom and stood, wondering if she'd say good-bye.

To his surprise, she turned quickly. "Wait," she said. She came toward him, smiling a little smile now. "Don't look so sad. I'll tell you a clue. A secret." Standing close to him, she tilted her child's face up toward him, and he automatically bent toward her. She put her lips next to his ear, so close he could feel her breath on his cheek.

"It was Superman," she whispered, her voice lisping slightly because of the braces. The skin across Mo's back drew taut with a sudden chill. She pulled away and looked at him round-eyed, awed, shaking her head up and down with that childlike certainty.
"Superman."

"Great," Mo said. He had no idea what was going on. He just felt a strong desire to get away from this demented, pathetic, frightened girl and try to sort out what he'd learned, if anything. He couldn't keep track of the levels of truth, deception, denial, manipulation, and whatever else she was working through. The hell with it. He wasn't cut out for this. He turned to go down the hall but stopped when she spoke again: "Don't you want to know what happens to the detective in the story?"

"Okay. I'll bite, Heather," he said wearily. "What happens to him?"

"He gets killed," she said, still round-eyed, certain.

19

"R
OYCE DID IT," Kay said immediately.

They were all at the big dining room table at Kay and Ted's house in Philadelphia, the feast spread out before them. Paul and Lia had been describing their visit to Highwood, and Paul had recounted his visit with Vivien. The whole group had relished the story—Kay and Ted, their two children Alexis and Ben, Aster, and a younger neighbor couple, Jim and Francette, with their eight-month-old baby.

At the head of the table, Ted sat next to Kay, serving the turkey he'd carved. He'd put on weight since Paul had seen him last, and his wide shoulders were now offset with a broadening belly. His dark, thick hair and bristly mustache were shot with gray.

Kay was plumper too, but she looked vigorous, happy, her skin pink from the heat of the kitchen. Now she worked as the plates came around again, serving seconds of mashed potatoes and stewed onions from gigantic bowls.

Down at the far end of the table, the three children were still acting shyly toward one another. Alexis was now twelve and had begun to get her growth; Ben was nine, stocky like his father, an extroverted, good-natured boy. Seen with his cousins, Mark seemed smaller and paler, his uncertainties obvious. Between the divorce and his neurological problems, his confidence was weak, especially in this rather staid, well-off household.

Only Aster hadn't enjoyed the talk about Highwood, scowling when the others appeared to be enjoying the narrative too much. She'd had her hair permed recently, a tight curl that made her hair stiff and too sculpted, like a ball of steel wool. It emphasized the age lines in her face.

"Yep—Royce," Kay said again. "He's our cousin, the son of the woman who owns the house," she explained to Jim and Francette.

"Why Royce?" Lia asked.

"He was always a creep. He also hates his mother. Always has."

"You two used to be very close friends," Aster said. Then she addressed Ted and the neighbors, as if looking for support: "The two of them were inseparable from the moment we set foot on the hill to when I had to pry Kay away. You never heard so much laughing and carrying on."

"He was spoiled rotten, he was neurotic and manipulative. And he made sure we never forgot that they had money and we didn't."

"We all had a perfectly lovely time at Highwood," Aster insisted.

"We ran around like loonies, it's true. It would have been hard not to have fun up there. But I pretty well had to do what Royce wanted. It wasn't always very nice. More turkey, anyone?"

Jim held out his plate, and Ted forked a piece of meat onto it.

"Ohhh, bay-fcw/i!" Paul said. It was the tic of the day, the Big Bopper's voice. Nobody paid any attention—the family was used to it, and he'd taken a moment earlier to explain to the guests.

Ted thoughtfully rubbed the bristles of his mustache. "Why do you say he hated his mother?"

"Because he often said so. There was always this strange antipathy. It's easy for me to believe he'd take it out on her, on the house, even all these years later."

"Chilling idea," Jim said. "An adult man harboring such a deep resentment that its expression takes such a vehement form, even after thirty years. Pathological, really." Jim was the guidance counselor at Alexis and Ben's school. At the far end of the table, the three children were eating silently, following the conversation.

"Fantasy, really," Aster said, disgusted. "Royce has been a successful businessman, with interests all over the world, for many, many years."

Ted had been stirring his food with the tip of his fork, listening thoughtfully. "There are other possibilities that fit what you've described. Think about it—someone's been slashing the ducts, poking holes in the walls, busting open bureaus, emptying out file cabinets. Sounds to me like they've been looking for something."

Lia nodded. "The thought had occurred to me. Not that there isn't a lot of other damage that doesn't fit that pattern—"

"The real question," Francette put in, "then becomes whether or not they plan to come back to continue looking for whatever it is. And how they'll react when they find you there, dutifully trying to put things back together."

"Have you talked to the police up there yet?" Ted asked. "Maybe this should be looked into from a crime perspective before you disturb the scene. There may be evidence in the rubble."

"She doesn't want the police to come in," Paul told them. "She keeps stressing that it's a job for family. All her private papers and so on."

"Completely understandable," Aster said.

Ted shook his head. "I wouldn't touch it if I were you, Paul. Stay clear of the whole deal."

Kay laughed and slugged his arm. "Oh, Ted! It's not like that! It's a nice area, it's a lovely house. Don't scare Paul off—he needs the work."

"Ohhh,
bzy-bah\"
Almost always when Kay was talking: some residual sibling thing.

No one was ready for dessert. They cleared the table and made a stab at the mess in the kitchen, then moved into the living room. Ted stoked the fire in the fireplace, the kids began a card game. The adults took chairs, sipping drinks as they talked and watched the flames.

"Do you remember Vivien's weird gardeners?" Kay asked Paul.

"Aha—the weird gardeners," Jim said in a Boris Karloff voice.

"Well, she had a succession of gardeners up there," Kay explained.

"There was that Italian, the great big one? He had the bushiest eyebrows I'd ever seen—they made him look mad all the time. He was so strong! Once Vivien asked him to remove a boulder from the garden, assuming he'd hire a bulldozer. So a half hour later, she looks out the window and there's this guy, leaning into the boulder and rolling it up the hill himself, like Sisyphus. It was practically the size of a . . . a
freezer,
so help me, and he dug it up and shoved it uphill a hundred feet by himself."

"Actually, Vivien mentioned him to me," Paul told them. "Apparently he stole some things from the house. She had him arrested."

"There's more to it than that. He had a temper. Remember, there was that shack at the top of the garden? One little room, where they kept the tools and wheelbarrows and so on. I thought Vivien had him arrested because he went bananas and tore the place apart. This is what Royce told me, anyway. He said the gardener got mad and threw the wheelbarrow through the window of the shed."

"You just can't get good help nowadays," Jim quipped.

"Personally, I can't blame the guy," Kay told him. "If I'd had to work around Vivien and Royce all day, I'd have wanted a little cathartic self-expression too."

Everyone laughed but Aster.

"There was one more weird gardener when we still lived in the area," Kay went on. "He worked there for such a short time, I hardly remember him. A smaller man, younger. Asian—Indonesian or Vietnamese."

"Haven't we heard enough yet?" Aster complained.

"What was his claim to the weird-gardener hall of fame?" Jim asked.

"Apparently he got into the habit of coming into the house at night, shall I say,
unannounced.
Back then, Vivien's gardeners used to live upstairs in the carriage house. So it wasn't unusual for them to come into the kitchen during the day. But this guy liked to come into the rest of the house when everybody was asleep."

Kay paused, and everyone waited expectantly. "And?" Jim prompted her.

"One night Vivien saw him coming out of Royce's room. Tiptoeing in his bare feet—"

Ted cleared his throat, a deep rumble, and glanced meaningfully at the kids, who appeared to be deeply engrossed in their game. Paul knew they were listening intently.

"He was never tiptoeing out of Royce's room!" Aster said. "You've been watching too much television. He was from the Philippines, he'd been a farmer there, and he often preferred to be barefoot in the summertime. Vivien was concerned he was taking things—"

"Anyway, they got another gardener
very
quickly." Kay let them digest the scandal and then went on, clearly enjoying her rumormongering role. "And you know how Freda died, right? Run over by the train. The question in my mind is, did she fall or was she pushed? And where was Royce that afternoon?"

"Oh, Kay, for the love of God!" Aster said indignantly. "This has gone well beyond the bounds of good taste."

"Sounds like the kid in
The Addams Family,"
Jim said.

Aster stood up. "Well. If you people can't figure out some topic for adult conversation, I'm going to retire. I really don't think I can take any more of this rubbish."

Kay put her hand on her mother's arm. "Oh, Mother. Don't get so upset. You have to admit, there are some dark things in that family's past."

Mark and Alexis looked up from their cards, unable to conceal their interest.

"Of course," Aster said. "Certainly. There are dark secrets in every family's past. But one doesn't have to parade every last one before the public's eye, does one?" She stalked out of the room.