Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Not a thing.’ Grace winced. ‘That’s what’s wrong. I’m supposed to be the psychologist, but you’re absolutely right, Sam – I haven’t been allowing either Cathy or myself to face up to our feelings.’

  ‘That’s because you can’t shrink your own head,’ Cathy said.

  ‘She’s right,’ Sam said to Grace.

  ‘I know,’ Grace said again.

  They moved a little closer to the head of the line.

  ‘Do you want to see another psychologist?’ Grace asked Cathy suddenly. ‘Maybe Dr Khan – you liked him, didn’t you?’

  ‘He was okay,’ Cathy said, but her face had fallen.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be Dr Khan,’ Grace said swiftly. ‘It could be anyone.’

  ‘I don’t want to see anyone.’ Cathy’s voice had grown suddenly loud, too loud, and her cheeks were hot. ‘I don’t want anyone but you, Grace.’

  ‘But I’m not sure I can be any real use to you as a therapist right now.’

  ‘I don’t want you as a therapist – I want you as my friend.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I know things can’t be normal, I know that, but I want us just to be ordinary, even if it’s only for a while.’

  Grace felt Sam’s hand touch her right arm, gripping her gently but firmly. She understood his message, wanted to go with his instincts. She wanted nothing more than to give Cathy a big hug, hold her close, be the friend she wanted, maybe more. But she was still scared: of crossing a border she had no right to cross, into the territory that had belonged to Marie Robbins.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, praying that the simplicity of the word would be enough.

  ‘Is it?’ Cathy searched her face. ‘Do you get it, Grace?’

  ‘Of course I get it.’ Grace compromised, reached for her hand, held it, not too tightly. ‘I want that too. Normality.’ She glanced at Sam, saw that he was conscious of her predicament, knew that he thought she’d failed, or at least that she’d copped out.

  ‘Well, I know what I want, guys,’ he said, helping out again. ‘I want spring rolls and fish with nuoc man sauce.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Cathy asked.

  ‘Lime and garlic.’

  ‘You better have that, too, Grace,’ Cathy said, grinning.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Do I?’ Grace was all innocence.

  Cathy giggled. It felt great to hear and watch. Grace knew they were back to game-playing, to skirting around things, but suddenly part of her – the regular woman part, not the psychologist part – felt that maybe it wasn’t such a wrong way to go. After all, she wasn’t really sure what the hell point there was in analysing their feelings right then. Yes, they were both scared, but they both knew that. Sam was right on the button about reminding them to admit to it now and again, but even if the worst happened and this period did turn out to be all too brief, it might – if it was handled in as relaxed a way as it could be – at least provide a comparatively happy interlude for Cathy, another good time for her to hold on to.

  She fascinated Grace more and more. Some of the time she was so grown-up, made grimly streetwise by her losses and by her time in prison; other times she seemed to revert to being much younger than her years. And yet, beneath it all, Grace could still see the nice, highly intelligent, perfectly normal young person who had both impressed and touched her the first time they’d met.

  Grace remembered that first time. She remembered Cathy’s composure, the slightly bland expression that Grace had soon realized was part of her blocking mechanism. Cathy still did the same thing now and again, but with Grace, at least, it happened less and less. If one positive thing had come out of the last several roller-coaster months, it was, Grace thought, that Cathy had come to trust her.

  It did disturb her that Cathy was so up and down. Her moods were mercurial and extreme, with explosions of rage and bravado, followed by longer periods of depression, followed, thankfully, by times of contentment and optimism. Sam was good with her, for her, when he was around – though he and Grace were still, despite Cathy’s clear encouragement of their relationship, being circumspect about intimacy. Over and over again, Grace saw what a great father he must have been, would have been, had Sampson lived. Would, God willing, be again some day in the future.

  David and Judy did their best, too. David came to visit a couple of times, on his own – which went well – and Judy invited them to dinner one Friday evening, the end-result of which was less of a success.

  ‘Mrs Becket doesn’t like me,’ Cathy commented later, when she and Grace were back home alone. ‘She isn’t sure about me, anyway, is she?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘It was obvious. Didn’t you feel it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Grace had actually thought that Judy had made a special effort to put Cathy at her ease.

  ‘I felt it,’ Cathy said quietly. ‘She was okay some of the time – I mean, she was kind to me, and I guess she was trying not to let it show too much, but every time I tried talking to Saul, she was there, in my face, you know? I think, if she could have, she’d have gotten right between the two of us.’ She paused. ‘It was like she thought I was going to hurt him or something.’

  ‘I honestly don’t think she thought that at all,’ Grace said, appalled.

  ‘I do,’ Cathy said, quite calmly.

  Chapter Seventy-one

  THURSDAY, JULY 30, 1998

  On the penultimate day of the month, Susan Pitlow, a senior nurse in a private hospital in Spokane, up in Washington State, recognized a photograph on a flier pinned to the bulletin board on the administrative floor. She seldom visited that part of the hospital, or else she would have seen it earlier and identified the child in the photograph. Pitlow had nursed more children than she could count since she’d seen that little boy. She had grown fifteen years older, married, had two sons of her own and relocated. But that particular child had been at the centre of a case that had haunted her for all those years.

  His name had been Thomas Harding, and she’d met him when she’d been a young emergency room nurse at a hospital in Portland, Oregon. He had been brought in by his father suffering from abdominal pain and vomiting and had died several hours later from a heart attack. Thomas had been a sweet, stoic little boy even in the midst of his agony, Pitlow now told the FBI agents who came to interview her in Spokane, and his father, Paul Harding, had appeared distraught throughout. When Pitlow had enquired, a few days after his death, into the cause of Thomas’s illness, she had learned that he’d apparently eaten poisonous berries. What was causing some disquiet was that Paul Harding – a young widower who had come to Portland three years earlier with his son – had taken so long to bring Thomas into the ER. Further investigation had unearthed one previous emergency visit to that hospital, and two more to another emergency room in the city.

  Susan Pitlow was not the only person in Portland who remembered little Thomas Harding. The medical examiner on his case had raised the possibility of Münchhausen’s Syndrome by proxy as cause of the child’s sufferings and indirect cause of his heart attack and death. Paul Harding had been questioned by the Portland police at length, and the boy’s hospital records had been gone into in as much detail as possible, but nothing had been conclusively proven. Harding claimed that Thomas was a curious child, always putting things into his mouth; he admitted that on two other occasions he’d had to induce vomiting in his son because he’d been afraid that he’d swallowed pills, thinking they were candy. Harding seemed eager to help at first, gave plausible answers, then, as things progressed, became increasingly outraged. No one succeeded in breaking him down, and a couple of months after his son’s death Harding had sold his house and gone away – after Thomas had been laid to rest beside a stranger, a woman named Agnes Brown, one row away from the plots belonging to the Tully family, also strangers to the five year old, in a cemetery just outside the city.

  Of the three mountains visible from Portland, Oregon
, the one in the photograph that Peter Hayman – now identified as Paul Harding – had taped to the underside of his bed in Key Largo, was Mount St Helens.

  They discovered more about Harding. They learned from his brother, David, that as children living in Seattle, Paul and he had both been MSBP victims, courtesy of their mother. Alice Harding had suffered a nervous breakdown when the brothers had been aged three and five, after which their health had returned to normal. No one had put a name to the bizarre torments she had put her sons through, and until he heard about his nephew’s death in 1983, David had believed that Paul had put the past successfully behind him, just as he had. Had the Portland police interviewed David at the time of Thomas’s mysterious death, they might not have let Paul Harding go free, but no one had talked to David, and if any dark doubts had troubled him, he had pushed them away.

  Now that he knew the whole story, David Harding agreed with the FBI that there might even be grounds for wondering if Paul’s wife’s early death might also have been suspicious.

  Everyone agreed that it explained a lot. It certainly explained why Harding had taken a new identity and moved thousands of miles to Florida. It clearly accounted for Peter Hayman’s fascination with psychiatry and his obsession with MSBP. It also ruled out any possibility that Hayman and John Broderick had been the same man.

  It did not, however, explain why he had kept the photographs of three of the scalpel victims and of Cathy Robbins and Grace Lucca in a locked room in his house. Neither did it present the police with any clear or rational explanation as to why he might have turned into a bloody multiple killer.

  Grace went to Captain Hernandez and made another statement reiterating what Hayman had suggested at their first meeting back in April.

  ‘He was trying to get me to link up the Robbins murders with MSBP. He invented another case history – the St Petersburg shootings – to illustrate his point. That a parent might be so twisted, so sick, as to get people to believe their child was mentally disturbed enough to kill.’

  ‘To frame their own child,’ Hernandez said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Grace said.

  ‘But Hayman – Harding – wasn’t Cathy’s father,’ the captain pointed out.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So how does this follow through, Dr Lucca, in your opinion?’

  ‘I don’t – I can’t – form a solid opinion,’ Grace answered quietly. ‘I can only hazard guesses at this stage. Maybe after Harding turned himself into Hayman, the psychiatrist, he thought up bizarre ways of deviating from MSBP. Maybe he had other victims through the years.’ She paused. ‘Maybe, at some time we don’t yet know about, Harding somehow latched on to Cathy and her family, and took it a step further.’

  ‘A big step,’ Hernandez said.

  Grace read the scepticism in his voice and eyes. ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t there another possibility, Dr Lucca?’ The captain paused. ‘Isn’t it possible that after he met you at the seminar, he became obsessed by you and your involvement with Cathy Robbins? Isn’t it possible that Harding was never actually involved with the murders at all?’

  For a moment, Grace closed her eyes.

  Back to square one again for Cathy.

  She felt, and quickly suppressed, an urge to scream.

  She opened her eyes again and faced up to Hernandez.

  ‘Of course it’s possible,’ she admitted, quietly.

  Chapter Seventy-two

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1998

  They waited for the other shoe to drop.

  Grace and Cathy had come to an agreement to be honest with one another, especially when it came to their anxieties over the case. Every day after Grace’s conversation with Hernandez, they waited for any indication that Cathy was going to be re-arrested. It didn’t come, but they were both increasingly jittery, and Sam was troubled for them both.

  It hadn’t been all roses to begin with, and it didn’t get rosier.

  Three things happened in the first week of August – things that Grace hadn’t anticipated at all.

  The first occurred on Wednesday morning while she was downstairs on the deck with a patient and Cathy was, to the best of her knowledge, reading a book she’d borrowed from Grace’s general fiction shelves – Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead – not exactly light and easy escapist reading, but still a wonder to Grace, and Cathy had seemed to be immersed in it, too, when Grace had last seen her in her room.

  Grace was with Gregory Lee, a seven-year-old sufferer of night terrors, and they were really starting to get somewhere when for some reason Gregory looked up at the outside of the house and grinned. Grace looked up too, and saw what had made him smile.

  Harry was out on the tiny balcony off her bedroom.

  Standing right at the edge of the narrow parapet.

  Grace stared for a second, then got up slowly.

  ‘Gregory, please wait here. I’ll be right back.’

  She tried not to run, fighting down her panic, aware that if she scared the boy, he might start to make a noise and startle Harry into falling. Once inside and out of Gregory’s view, she flew up the stairs and into her room.

  Cathy was in there. Sitting on the edge of the bed, looking out at Harry on the balcony.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Grace’s voice was half hiss, half shriek.

  Cathy turned to look at Grace. She seemed surprised to see her.

  Grace said nothing more. She passed Cathy, moving towards the balcony.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, in her softest, calmest voice, to Harry, praying he’d either stay exactly where he was and let her pick him up, or jump down on the inside of the parapet and come to her. ‘Hey, Harry, what’re you doing?’

  Harry wagged his tail, but stayed where he was.

  Grace got to him in less than a second, grabbed hold of him, held him close. She could feel his heart beating fast, smell his doggy scent against her face.

  ‘What were you doing out there, Harry?’ she said, and then, slowly, giving herself time to calm down, she turned around to face Cathy again.

  She was standing now, still beside the bed.

  ‘Is he okay?’ Her voice was strained.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Grace said. ‘What happened, Cathy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How did he get out there?’ Grace paused. What were you doing in my room? She stopped herself asking that question. She hadn’t made any rules, hadn’t declared any parts of the house off-limits, with the exception of her computer, which she had explained housed confidential patient files.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cathy said again. ‘I was in my room, reading, and I got this feeling.’ She stopped.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t know why I came in here.’

  ‘Maybe you heard Harry?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I just came in, and saw him.’

  Grace remembered Gregory Lee. She never left young children alone on the deck for more than thirty seconds at a time.

  Quickly, Harry still in her arms, she moved across to the window and looked down. He was sitting exactly where Grace had left him. He looked lonely.

  She turned back to Cathy. ‘I have to go back down.’

  ‘Do you want me to take Harry?’

  ‘Gregory was missing him,’ Grace said, as easily as she could. ‘Harry’s always been at our sessions before.’

  ‘He’s good that way, isn’t he?’ Cathy said, just as easily. ‘Let’s get out of here and close the door,’ Grace said.

  They were in the narrow hallway and Grace was about to head downstairs when she turned again. ‘Why were you just sitting watching Harry?’

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ Cathy said. ‘I was afraid if I went outside on the balcony he might get scared and fall.’

  ‘You were probably right,’ Grace said, still holding Harry.

  ‘I was talking to him,’ Cathy said, ‘asking him to come inside.’

  ‘I have to get back down now,�
�� Grace said again, and walked down, not too fast, not too slow. ‘See you in a while.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cathy said.

  Grace heard the door of her room open and close.

  She put Harry down on the floor and watched him head for the deck, in his usual, untroubled way. Then she stood in the downstairs hall for another few moments, trying to compose herself. She didn’t know how much use she was going to be to Gregory for the rest of their session. Her nerves were still jumping, and she guessed that after the interruption the child would probably be focusing most of his attention on Harry, who wouldn’t be arguing.

  One thing was clear in her mind. When she’d gone into her bedroom and seen Cathy sitting on the bed, she had not been talking to Harry, not even softly. That alone didn’t bother Grace too much. She might still have been confounded about what to do for the best.

  What really bothered her was how the hell Harry could have gotten up on to the parapet at all? He had short legs and was a poor jumper at the best of times.

  Marie’s goldfish.

  Grace tried not to think about them, tried to push the image out of her mind. After all, she and Sam had just about convinced themselves that John Broderick had got into his former wife’s house and dispatched the unfortunate fish himself.

  Back to work, Lucca.

  Grace stirred herself, and returned to her patient.

  It was Dora Rabinovitch who discovered the next thing while she was doing some work for Grace two days later, on Friday afternoon, while Cathy and Grace were out doing some shopping together at the Aventura Mail.

  Dora told Grace later that she’d known almost immediately after switching on the computer that someone had been using it, and that she’d been surprised because Grace had told her she hadn’t had time to turn it on for more than a week.

  ‘You can see right away the heading for the last document,’ Dora said.

  Grace understood that much herself. She nodded, but said nothing.

  ‘Your house guest’s been using it,’ Dora said.

  Grace knew that Dora still felt much the same as Claudia did about Cathy.