“How long ago was it that your wife was murdered?” she asked.
I felt as if I'd been sucker-punched. The answer was three years, two months, and a couple of weeks. I gritted my teeth and reminded myself: I'd asked for this. There was a greater good. “Three years. I'd rather not talk about my personal life,” I said.
She looked genuinely pained. She turned off the tape recorder. “I'm sorry. I just thought your working on the car might have been a way of working through your grief.”
“It was very painful,” I said, not wanting to get into it more deeply than that. “I don't think there are words that can do it justice.”
“I know,” Kelly said. “My fiance was killed in an airplane crash. Do you ever get over it?”
She closed her notebook and looked at me. Had the sadness been there in her eyes all along and I just hadn't noticed? I smiled at her. So many of us wounded souls were walking around looking whole.
“Not really,” I told her. “When you lose someone you love, it creates a hole. Grief shrinks the size of the hole. The loss never stops being there. But after a while, you can keep yourself from falling into it. Eventually, you get to where you can get on with your life without thinking about it every godamned minute” âI heard my voice rising but I couldn't help itâ“of every stinking day.”
The interview only took forty minutes, but it felt like two hours. Kelly gave me a hug when she left.
Bill from Argus Security arrived as Kelly was leaving. He took his measurements and gave me an estimate.
After he left, I closed the garage and stood inside in the dark. It was just a car, I told myself. If there was one thing I knew, it was that cars could be fixed.
The article ran on the front page of the Health and Science section of the paper. I couldn't read it. I barely glanced at the picture of me polishing my car and looking like I'd rather be giving blood.
Annie called me that morning. She'd told me it was fine. It could do the trick.
The phone started ringing before I'd left for work. I let the answering machine accumulate the messages from well-meaning friends who'd seen the piece.
I drove to work in a rented Toyota, hoping the BMW left in the garage all day would make an irresistible target. Even though I didn't think he'd take the bait right away, whenever my beeper went off it was an electric shock that didn't subside until I checked the readout to see that it wasn't the security company. Gloria noticed. She suggested a couple of Valium.
As the end of the week neared and work at the Pearce wound down, no alarms had been tripped.
NICK WAS supposed to come to my office to finish up the tests. At the last minute he called to say his mother's caretaker had called in sick and asked if I could come over to his house instead. I wasn't happy about doing it there. Though there was no time pressure from Chip, the last thing I wanted was for the testing to be seriously interrupted, giving Nick the opportunity to fortify his psychological defenses. In my office, I could control interruptions.
The security gates were closed when I pulled into Nick's driveway. I opened the car window and pressed the button on the intercom mounted on a post. I waited. His neighbor's yard was abloom with newly planted pansies, and the air was fragrant with lilacs that reached out into the driveway on either side. It was the last place you'd have expected to find a gruesome murder.
The gate clicked and swung open, and I drove through. In the daylight, the low-slung house with its harsh angles seemed
like a scar on the landscape. The bushes that flanked the door had been pruned as they were into cubes and spheres.
As I pulled up, the garage door swung up to reveal Nick, standing in the shadowy interior. I got out and walked up to meet him. It was one of those garages that look as if no one had ever parked a car in them for fear of soiling the concrete floor.
He led me in through a laundry room. It smelled of detergent, the way it had the night of the murder. The dryer hummed, and there was a stack of clean laundry on the top. In the kitchen, the counters were clean and bare.
“Coffee?” he asked, opening the refrigerator door and pulling out a carton of whole milk. In his pressed pants and white oxford shirt with a button-down collar, Nick reminded me more of an accountant than a computer geek.
The photographs of babies were gone from the refrigerator. The calendar had been turned to June, and the photo was of a fluffy white kitten peering out from a basket of pink and turquoise yarn balls. Each day's space had chores carefully written in, like I'd seen on May's page. Lisa Babikian hadn't expected May to be her last month.
“How's your mother doing?” I asked, pouring a cup.
“She's fine. We got back and it was as if she'd never left.”
I took my coffee and followed Nick through the living room and into the family room. The wood floor gleamed, but I remembered where the blood had been smeared. When I looked up, Nick was staring at the same spot. He looked at me and immediately away.
Nick sat at the edge of the leather couch. I took a chair and put my briefcase on the glass coffee table. All the masks in here were lacquered, some white-faced, others gilded. They were arranged on the wall in clusters. Did a camera lens peer from any
of the eyeholes, beaming my image into Nick's basement workroom? “I've got them turned off,” Nick said, reading my thoughts.
“Really?”
“You don't believe me?”
I shrugged and sipped the coffee. What did it matter if he was recording the session, anyway? I took out the inkblot cards and a blank test protocol. I clicked my pen open.
Nick looked at the cards with distaste. “Let's get this over with,” he said.
“You've got the phone turned off?” I asked. “I'd like to get through this without interruption.”
“No one calls me except telemarketers. If it rings, the answering machine will pick up.”
The Rorschach is a sensitive test. It has no right or wrong answers. It taps into the basic personality structure of the unconscious. As the test goes on, card after card, the subject's defenses tend to become more permeable, and the person's underlying character and issues surface. With someone who's more fragile, I might administer cognitive tests as bookends around the Rorschach, starting and ending with their more structured, less emotionally charged content. I didn't do that with Nick. His defenses didn't need shoring up. If anything, a bulldozer might have helped get past them.
I started the test the way I always do. “When I was a kid, I used to lie on the beach and look at clouds. Their shapes reminded me of other things. You ever do that?”
“You want me to look at inkblots and tell you what I see.”
“Right. Have you ever taken this test before?”
“No. But everyone knows how it works.”
“Good, then,” I said, handing him the first card.
Nick examined it. He turned it over and back. “Looks like a horseshoe crab. There's bumps on the back. And maybe gills on
the sides. Or maybe a vampire mask.” He pointed to two white spots. “Eyes.” Then to jagged outcroppings on the bottom edge. “Teeth.”
Vampires. Hermit crabs. These were pretty standardâwhat many people see, in fact. Although Nick had given it a twist, calling it a mask.
I showed him the second card. His eyes flicked over it. “Two men in red masks, dancing,” he said. The “red masks” part was a bit more unusual. Still, this was close to another popular response. He'd integrated a card with lots of different parts into a single ideaâsomething you see in high achievers.
Several cards later, Nick was staring at a vividly colored inkblot. “This is fire,” he said, pointing to an orange and green shape at the bottom, “and smoke.” He indicated a gray area above the green. He stopped abruptly when the phone rang. The second ring was broken off by a click.
“And here,” he pointed to one of the red shapes on either side, “are the bloody bodies of two lions that ⦔
There was another click from the kitchen. Then the distant sound of a man's voice. “Nick, Chip Ferguson calling. We got back the results ⦔
Nick leaped to his feet and raced into the kitchen. He grabbed the phone. “I'm here,” he said, then lowered his voice so I couldn't hear what he said next.
This was what I'd been afraid would happen. Now Nick was pacing the kitchen. For a moment his voice got louder, angry. “That can't be!” Then quickly he quieted again.
A minute later, he returned and sat. His face was blank.
I showed him the card we'd been doing. “Anything you want to add?” I asked. He seemed to be looking at it but didn't say anything. “You need more time?”
He peered into my face. “You knew, didn't you?”
“Knew what?”
“That Chip was going to call with the DNA results. That's why you wanted to see me today.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You're the one who made
me
come
here
.”
Logic didn't ruffle him. “We could easily have finished the testing last week. Just like you had to come to the jail to see my reaction to the autopsy. You think I don't get it?”
“I don't know what you're talking about.” Then I stopped myself. Belatedly I processed what he'd said. “
You
got a DNA test?”
“Don't pull that crap on me. You knew all about it.”
I wondered why he'd agreed to one, after all his suspicions about the testing labs. Clearly, the results had surprised him. “Is it your child?” I asked.
“Of course not!” Nick exploded. He started to say something, then stopped. He looked confused. Then a wave of anger crossed his face. He leaned back and collected himself. “Maybe ⦔ He gave his head a shake, dismissing whatever it was. “If it's not Teitlebaum's,” he said slowly, “and it's not mine, then who the hell ⦔
“You want me to finish the tests another time?” I asked, though I didn't especially want to have to come back to this house, the atmosphere thick with Nick's barely controlled paranoia and echoes of Lisa Babikian's violent death.
“Just give me a couple of minutes.” He put his head in his hands. “I'll be okay.”
“Take your time,” I told him, though I knew it was wasted effort to stay. Even if we finished, the results would be pretty empty with the flow interrupted and Nick as distracted as he was. Coming back wasn't a great option, eitherâhe'd already seen most of the inkblots.
Nick sat there motionless, his fingers making tracks through his hair as he pressed his forehead deeper into his hands.
“I'll go outside,” I told him. Maybe a walk would freshen my mood. I was surprised when he didn't object. Then I reminded myself: He probably had cameras out there watching me.
I went through the atrium doors to the back. In a little building to one side of the pool, a compressor pulsed and hummed. I crouched at the water's edge, near the spot where Lisa Babikian's body had floated, bumping up against the edge of the pool. I wondered if the pool had been drained and scrubbed down since then.
The garden around the pool was landscaped with little pathways through the bushes. Mrs. Babikian emerged from one of the paths. She was holding a spray of lilacs in one hand, the blossoms already drooping off the woody stems. She came toward me, holding out the flowers.
“Lilac,” I said. “So fragrant.”
She handed me the flowers. I took them, feeling her cool, hard fingers.
She put her hand heavily on my shoulder and lowered herself. She let her knees collapse until she was kneeling alongside the pool. I put my arm around her, afraid she might tip over into the water. But she seemed quite stable as she reached out, dipped her hands in the water, and drank from cupped hands.
When she looked back at me, her face was wet with tears. “She had to drink. What else could she do?” she said.
I remembered the heartbreaking story Mrs. Babikian had recited, of her mother's forced march with the Turkish army, and how, parched with thirst, they'd drunk from the river that ran red with the blood of relatives and neighbors. Now Mrs. Babikian drank from the pool that had gone red with her daughter-in-law's blood.
“Of course,” I said. “What else could she do?”
Mrs. Babikian's eyes were focused on the air, somewhere above the water. “My mother hardly remembered her uncle,
except for the way the Turks killed him. They burned his home, and he and his neighbors fled to the caves.” The story was told in a singsong. “The Turks followed. Stacked wood in the mouth of the cave. Lit a fire. And waited. When someone came out of the cave, they shot him. Inside, my great-uncle and his wife, their five-year-old son and a baby, were asphyxiated. They were never buried.”
Nick's grandmother had immersed both Nick and Nick's mother in her horrifying memories. In Nick, they'd found new life in his computer games. It was a way to make himself feel as if he had some control over the violence that had been visited upon his family. Now the images came back to Mrs. Babikian as forcefully as her own memories of waiting for Nicky to come home from school.
“They had to hide. They thought it was the only way to survive,” Mrs. Babikian whispered. “My mother saw a place. This was a place where many skulls were piled very high. Not bodies. Just skulls.”
Mrs. Babikian pushed herself up, leaving wet handprints on the concrete apron at the pool's edge. She drifted off through the garden. I followed, not knowing if it was safe to leave her alone. The everyday world was a dangerous place for an Alzheimer's sufferer. I'd seen patients eat flowers brought to them by caring family members, and a garden was full of poisonous plants. Even in a confined space, it was easy to become confused and lost.
She walked around to the back of the house, humming to herself. Here, the ground sloped away, and there was a door standing open to the basement. I followed her inside.
First we passed through a corridor. Midway along it, a door was ajar. Through the opening I could see what looked like an officeâfile cabinets, bookcases.
We emerged through a door at the end of the corridor into
a large space. The room had black and white checkerboard tile flooring, white walls, dropped ceiling with recessed fluorescent lighting. It had no basement smell of damp or mildew. I realized why, at first, the police hadn't found Babikian's workroom. Closed, I'd have assumed that the door we'd just passed through led to the outside, not to a corridor and an office.
I followed Mrs. Babikian up the stairs. “Nicky?” she called when she emerged into the kitchen.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked her.
She jumped at the sound of my voice.
“Juice?” I asked.
She nodded. I found a cup, opened the refrigerator. There was a bottle of apple juice. I opened it and poured. I followed Mrs. Babikian to the back of the house. Her room was large and sunny, and it overlooked the pool and garden. She sank into a wing chair opposite the TV and I handed her the cup. She drank, set the cup down on the table, turned on the TV, and began to watch a rerun of
I Love Lucy,
her eyes blinking and then glazing over.
I returned to the family room, hoping Nick had collected himself and was ready to finish up. He wasn't there.
“Nick!” I called out.
I waited. There was no answer. It was annoying that he'd just vanish like that, leaving me to cool my heels.