The Murderer's Daughter

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “The thought of school is repulsive.”

  Malcolm smiled. “Repulsive, repugnant, repellent, and quite possibly regressive. But, unfortunately, necessary.”

  “There’s really no choice, dear,” said Sophie. “We’re hoping this process doesn’t turn out more difficult than it needs to be. That you might actually find the experience rewarding.”

  “Or at least interesting,” said Malcolm.

  Grace said nothing.

  “It might only be for a year or so,” said Malcolm.

  “Might?” said Grace.

  “Given your present academic level you’d easily qualify for college at sixteen. In fact, on a purely intellectual level, you could handle college right now. But we don’t believe sending you straight from homeschooling to university at fifteen is a great idea and I’m sure you concur.”

  Grace thought about that. Realized she’d never been to USC with either of them. But she had seen pictures of colleges. Read about college life in books and magazines. Photos that showed students who looked like adults, relaxing on the grass, huge buildings in the background.

  As inviting as an alien planet…

  Malcolm said, “Do you? Concur?”

  Grace nodded.

  “Good, then. Onward.”

  Sophie said, “A year or so spent in high school could serve as an excellent preparatory experience for college.”

  “Prep school,” said Grace.

  “Literally and figuratively, dear.”

  “Holden Caulfield hated it.”

  Sophie and Malcolm both smiled.

  Malcolm said, “Yes, he did, but admit it, Caulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.”

  Despite herself, Grace laughed.

  “You, on the other hand,” he went on, “are a young woman of substance. Surely one year, give or take, spent in the company of other highly gifted adolescents won’t trip you up.”

  Grace said, “A school for the gifted?”

  “Would you prefer a clutch of morons?”

  “Mal,” said Sophie. To Grace: “We’ve narrowed it down to two.”

  —

  They brought out brochures.

  The Brophy School was a forty-minute drive to Sherman Oaks in the Valley and featured an emphasis upon “high-level academics combined with personal growth.” High school only, student body of one hundred twenty.

  Malcolm said, “It’s a little bit lax, standards-wise, but still serious.”

  Grace said, “Personal growth?” She snickered.

  “Rather touchy-feely, yes.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “The Merganfield School,” he said. “From seventh through twelve but small classes, the student body maxes out at seventy.”

  “Smaller classes and extremely rigorous,” said Sophie.

  Grace said, “No personal growth, huh?”

  Malcolm smiled. “I asked Dr. Merganfield about that, as a matter of fact. He said growth comes from achievement. He’s a bit of a martinet.”

  Sophie said, “It’s somewhat authoritarian, dear.”

  Malcolm said, “Lots of structure.”

  Grace said, “Where is it?”

  Sophie said, “Not far from here, actually. One of those big mansions, near Windsor Square.”

  Grace said, “Is it expensive?”

  Silence.

  Sophie said, “No need for you to worry about that.”

  “I can pay you back,” said Grace. “One day, when I’m successful.”

  Malcolm reached for a cookie, changed his mind. Sophie sniffed and wiped at her eyes.

  “Dear girl,” she said, “we have no doubt you’ll be successful. That, in itself, will be our payment.”

  Malcolm said, “Not that we need recompense.”

  Grace said, “I hope it’s not too expensive.”

  “Not at all,” said Malcolm, blinking the way he did when he tried to hide something from her.

  Grace said, “Sounds like Merganfield’s the optimal choice.”

  “You’re sure?” said Sophie. “It really is a no-nonsense place, dear. Maybe you should visit both of them.” She broke out into laughter. “How foolish of me. Touchy-feely isn’t your thing. If you approve of a place, you’ll thrive.”

  “First, visit,” said Malcolm.

  “Sure,” said Grace. This hadn’t turned out so bad. Taking a cookie, she reached into her vocabulary vault. “Guess now I’ll have to be pro-social.”

  —

  Two days later, she took the Merganfield admissions test in the mahogany-paneled reception room of the cream-colored building that served as the school’s main building, the only other structure a triple garage converted to a no-frills gym.

  Sophie had called the place a mansion. To Grace, it felt like a palace: three stories on Irving Street, easily double the size of Malcolm and Sophie’s Tudor. The house sat centered on a vast, park-like lot surrounded by black iron fencing. Trees were huge but most looked neglected. Lawns, hedges, and shrubs appeared shabby.

  The style was one Grace recognized from her readings on architecture: Mediterranean mixed with a bit of Palladian. To the north were the enormous homes of Windsor Square, to the south the office buildings on Wilshire.

  The exam duplicated many of the IQ tests Malcolm had administered to Grace and with the exception of some of the math, the achievement components were only challenging at the uppermost levels.

  “Same old story,” Malcolm had warned her. “Impossible to get everything right.”

  No matter how long they knew each other, Grace decided, he’d never stop being a psychologist.

  —

  The letter of acceptance arrived a week later. The owner-headmaster, Dr. Ernest K. Merganfield, was a short, slight man with little personal warmth but, somehow, an aura of reassurance. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, plaid slacks, and rubber-soled blue cotton shoes, and Grace came to learn that was his daily uniform.

  He had two doctorates: a Ph.D. in history from Yale and an Ed.D. from Harvard. The teachers were all Ph.D.’s, mostly retired college professors, with the exception of Dr. Mendez, the biology instructor, who was an elderly retired medical pathologist. Upper-class students—sophomores, juniors, and seniors—took their classes on the top floor, with some rooms offering nice views. Grace’s score on the exam qualified her to be a fifteen-year-old senior, but when she arrived to join her classmates she found she wasn’t the youngest in the class, not even close.

  Sitting next to her was a twelve-year-old math prodigy named Dmitri, and behind her were fourteen-year-old twins from Nigeria, children of a diplomat, who spoke six languages fluently.

  No one exhibited any curiosity about her entry in the middle of the school year and soon Grace learned why: Her brand-new peers were, for the most part, shy, introverted, and obsessed with scholastic achievement. Of the eleven students in her class, seven were girls, four quite pretty, but none with any fashion sense.

  Then again, without Sophie, Grace figured she’d have been clueless about clothes, makeup, nickless shaving. How to walk and talk. How to hold a fish fork.

  Merganfield students had biological parents who probably didn’t care much about anything but their getting into a top college. The twins had already been guaranteed admission to Columbia in two years.

  The lack of maintenance Grace had noticed in the garden extended to the interior. Bathrooms were old and balky and papered with warnings not to flush anything but toilet paper and “scant amounts of that.”

  Of the four boys in her class, one was obese with a stammer, two were shy to the point of muteness, and one, the oldest pupil in the senior class, was a tall, rangy, good-looking seventeen-year-old named Sean Miller, gifted in math and physics. He had dark curly hair, hazel eyes, nice features marred by virulent acne.

  Also shy, that seemed to be the Merganfield way. But definitely interested in Grace, she could tell because every time she looked up from h
er notebook, she caught him averting his eyes. Just to confirm her hypothesis, she sidled up against him at the end of rhetoric class and smiled.

  He colored crimson around his zits and lurched away, as if hiding something.

  Definitely hiding something. The front of his khaki pants had tented.

  This could be interesting.

  —

  Three weeks after arriving at Merganfield, having earned nearly straight A’s on every test and certain that she was considered “fully integrated,” she encountered Sean Miller as he left the garage/gym that hardly anyone used because P.E. was optional (though Dr. Merganfield did espouse “Grecian ideals of integrating mental and physical mastery”).

  Not a chance encounter. Grace had observed Sean and he was predictable as a well-tuned clock, lifting weights and running on a treadmill every Wednesday after class. Grace had finally convinced Malcolm and Sophie to let her walk the mile and a half home, promising to keep to Sixth Street, with its busy traffic and easy visibility. Tonight, both of them would be coming home late due to meetings. Sophie had pre-cooked a tuna noodle casserole for Grace to microwave.

  She wasn’t hungry for pasta and canned fish.

  Sean Miller learned that quickly enough.

  Soon, they were doing it every Wednesday, outside behind the gym, and Grace had shoplifted enough condoms from a local pharmacy to keep everything nice and safe.

  The first time Sean attempted to talk to her afterward, she quieted him with a finger over his lips and he never tried that again.

  It was one p.m. when Grace drove away from Wild Bill’s, leaving the two punks gaping. If her energy held up, she could make the trip in six or seven hours. If she started feeling less than optimal, she’d stop in Monterey.

  For the first fifty miles, she tried to empty her head by listening to music.

  Unsuccessful; her brain pinged rudely through Bach and doo-wop and alternative rock and jazz, a heckler at a lecture.

  Random noise clarified to a yammering voice reminding her.

  She’d killed a man.

  How did she feel about that?

  She didn’t know.

  Rationalization was obvious: bad guy, obvious self-defense. But still, it was odd. The fact that she’d actually ended a life.

  The permanence.

  The sound of her victim’s corpse bumping down the canyon grew to a drumbeat.

  Her victim.

  Not an everyday event, dispatching another human being. She knew from her training that soldiers had trouble getting used to it.

  So how did she feel about it?

  She really didn’t know.

  Focus.

  All right then, the old affective system, first. Mood-wise, she’d have to describe herself as calm, settled. Basically okay.

  What did that say about her?

  Murderer’s daughter, prisoner of genetics? Keeping up a family tradition? Could she have adapted more smoothly than most to the military? To something expressly homicidal, say, sniping?

  She’d worked with former snipers, had a decent idea about what that entailed.

  Sitting there, suppressing your breathing, focusing on the target, reducing organic matter to a kill-spot.

  Could she do that?

  Probably. Whatever it took to survive. She’d always been driven to survive. Which was why she was still around.

  A bit of luck didn’t hurt, either. Fate, karma, divine will, choose your delusion.

  Be nice to have religious faith, to believe in life fitting together like a gorgeous puzzle. And looking back at her own life, Grace could see how an otherwise rational person could tease out a pattern that really didn’t exist.

  Hard-luck orphan with a Ph.D. and a house on the beach. Pretty damn miraculous when you thought about it, call Hollywood!

  To Grace, it just felt like her life.

  Still, it would be nice to have faith in something. To believe she was destined to be around.

  Meanwhile, survival meant you took care of business, so that settled it, she was fine, had done what was necessary.

  As she repeated that mantra, keeping her foot steady on the gas pedal, Beldrim Benn’s face faded in her head until it was little more than an airy sketch.

  She kept going and it thinned to random lines.

  A dot.

  Erased.

  So why did her eyes ache? The sound…bump bump bump…No, the Escape was bucking and swaying and she realized she’d allowed herself to speed up—edging close to ninety—taxing its suspension.

  She quickly slowed down. Checked the rearview and saw nothing but asphalt.

  She’d be fine.

  Twenty miles later, Benn’s stubbly visage had crept back into her consciousness and nothing she did could get rid of it.

  She stopped fighting and just went with it, allowing herself to wonder.

  Did he have a wife? Kids? Were his parents alive? What about hobbies? Something other than knifing people?

  Switching to the right lane, she reduced her speed further. Annoyingly, though, her pulse had quickened, she could feel the thrum in her neck, at her wrists, her ankles, all those pressure points thumping like a steel band. And now her aching eyes were wet…

  The Escape had settled at fifty-five. Time to work on slowing her own engine.

  Reaching for the beef jerky, she chewed two sticks to pulp. Worked her jaws like a maniac and finally scoured her brain free of memory.

  She was coasting smoothly when the disposable she’d used to call Wayne beeped.

  She said, “Uncle.”

  “I’m happy to be your uncle, but no need for subterfuge, I’m alone.”

  “Me, too. What’s up?”

  “Got your message about Selene McKinney. Talk about a blast from the past. It took some time to figure out who to call but I think I may have something.”

  Grace said, “She had a child.” A girl, tell me a girl.

  Wayne said, “Apparently, quite a while back, a girl lived in Selene’s house but no one ever confirmed she was Selene’s daughter. In fact the assumption was that she was a niece or some kind of ward because Selene never introduced her as a daughter and more important, Selene had never been known to date a man. Or a woman. Her sex was politics.”

  “Single woman lives with a child who isn’t hers?”

  “It wasn’t that uncommon back then, Grace. Families were closer-knit, people took in relatives all the time.”

  “How long ago are we talking about?”

  “Shortly after Selene was first elected, which would make it at least forty years.”

  “How old was the girl?”

  “My source recalls her as six or seven, but she won’t swear to it, she honestly can’t remember the details. Whatever the arrangement was with Selene, it was brief. The girl was seen at the house for a couple of years, then she wasn’t.”

  Grace calculated mentally. Forty-six or so, today, meant a woman in her early twenties at the time of the Fortress Cult showdown, no problem having three kids.

  So lovely when things came together. “Does your source have any theories about what happened to her?”

  “She claimed she’d never thought about it and I believe her. Let’s just say curiosity isn’t her strong suit. When I pressed her, she said young ladies of a certain age often got sent to boarding school but that was just a guess. Bear in mind that Selene was born into huge money, politics was her avocation. We’re talking social circles neither of us have experienced firsthand, Grace, but I know a few things about the mega-rich because my father was a chauffeur for a banking clan in Brentwood. All the children were sent away to ‘develop.’ It wasn’t out of the ordinary. Dad used to joke that if he had the money, he’d do the same to my brothers and me so he could enjoy his life. Would you care to tell me why you’re interested in Selene McKinney years after her death?”

  “At this point, everything’s conjecture.”

  “I’m okay with conjecture, Grace.”

  Grace tried to sort
out her answer. Wayne didn’t wait. “All right, then, do you have a moment to listen to my conjecture? You’re thinking the girl could be the mother of those cult children, one of the lunatics who died in the showdown.” A beat. “How am I doing, Dr. Blades?”

  “Very well.”

  “What led you there, Grace?”

  “The only link I can find between the boys’ adoptive parents is Selene.”

  “What link is that?”

  “Both couples attended her reelection fund-raiser.”

  “The boys but not the girl.”

  “From the sequence you gave me I’m assuming the girl was adopted first.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You couldn’t obtain exact dates—”

  “It was all I could do to produce what I did.”

  “Right,” said Grace. “Highly appreciated. Anyway, Lily was adopted by a working-class family but the boys ended up in affluent homes. I figured they might’ve knocked around the system for a while, being high-risk adoptees, but now you’ve brought up the boarding school theory, perhaps they got farmed out that way. Either way, the time came when they needed homes and Selene cashed in IOUs.”

  “All that,” said Wayne, “because of a fund-raiser?”

  “Conjecture,” Grace reminded him, “but the time line fits. And think about it: How often do high-risk male fosters end up on Easy Street?”

  The same went for high-risk female fosters. Sophie’s face flew into Grace’s head, then Malcolm’s. Both smiling, encouraging. Proud.

  Wayne said, “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It sounded like you gasped and then you didn’t reply when I said something.”

  Not good, girl. “Sorry, got the sniffles, Wayne. Anyway, that’s my working theory but I’m a ways from proving it. You’ve been a peach, thanks again.”

  Wayne sighed. “I hope I’ve actually helped you.”

  “Of course you have.”

  “I wish I could be as certain as you, Grace.”

  “You’re worried about me. I appreciate that but don’t be.”

  “Easy for you to say, Grace. I’m more than worried, I’m frightened. Especially if you are right. What you’ve told me about the older one—Samael—has really sunk in, I can’t stop thinking about poor Ramona, that crippled boy. Top that off with someone who’d do that to his own brother? You’re the psychologist, you know the kind of pathology that implies.”