Model Child_a psychological thriller

by R. C. Goodwin

  “Well, then, maybe Ms. Shannon doesn’t have to be such a mystery after all. Maybe she was just an extremely unpleasant little girl, spoiled rotten by doting parents who’d almost given up on having children. A spoiled, unpleasant little girl with bad chemicals in her brain. Voilà.”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “The thing is, Sharon, bad behavior tends to fall into certain patterns. And her pattern, at least the accounts I’ve had of it, fits nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  “But you’re not a child psychiatrist. And even if you were, you never met the girl, so how could you make a good assessment of her? Your information’s secondhand.” She pulled herself closer to him and rubbed her face against the coarse dark curls of his chest hair. “Mmph. I don’t want to talk about the Shannons anymore, okay?”

  “Okay.” With his free hand he reached over to the bedside table and turned off the light. Her face still nestled against him, she ran her fingertips along the side of his neck, his cheeks, his lips. He kissed her fingers and then reached down, scooping her up from under her arms, bringing her head to the level of his own. He kissed her lips, her eyes. Their legs entwined.

  With quick well-practiced motions, she slipped off her knee-length jersey, and he wriggled out of his pajama bottoms. Their hands roamed over the minutely known terrain of each other’s bodies, his hands lingering on her breasts. Sharon’s bosom, still firm, was larger now than when they’d gotten married, enhanced by nursing their two children. Her pregnancies had also resulted in stiffer, darker nipples, in which he still took inordinate pleasure.

  In a few minutes they were making love, on their sides with her back against his chest. She lifted her upper leg and drew up her knees as he entered her, while his hand made figure eights along her back and the top of her buttocks. He heard her characteristic sound, a cross between a sigh and coo, as he thrust against her, as she met his thrusts with a scrunch and swivel of her own, as they joined together for the thousandth time, the five-thousandth time? He had no idea how many times they’d done it through the years; he couldn’t even guess. Sometimes he divided his life into two phases, before and after he and Sharon became lovers. The first phase was getting harder to remember. He knew there was a stretch of more than twenty years when he’d lived without her, but most of the time it was empty knowledge, hazily remembered and devoid of feeling. He knew it the same way that he knew he’d been in kindergarten once.

  The act was not extraordinary. A deep if simple pleasure, a comfort, a release and relief. As familiar as the advent of dawn or dusk, and no less valuable for its familiarity. The act was not extraordinary, except for Cassandra.

  Turned towards his wife’s back with his eyes tightly shut, still driving himself into her, Gottlieb found himself besieged by the unexpected jarring image of another woman next to him. He imagined the firm, broad expanse of Cassandra’s compact body, the taste of her pretty mouth, the touch of her large high breasts, the pressure of her well-muscled thighs. He wondered, what would she be like in bed? What would be her quirks and tricks, her sounds, her smell, her rhythm? Would she buck and jolt, or bite and scratch? Or would she lie back and accept him with a calm passivity? Not likely, that. He could see her as many things, but never as a passive partner.

  Unsettling. Gottlieb, the psychiatrist with two decades of experience, knew that men and women routinely fantasize about other partners when they’re having sex. Apart from being commonplace, the phenomenon was potentially useful, a good safety valve. But Gottlieb, the steadfast husband, had never had such a fantasy come unbidden to his conjugal bed.

  Afterwards, while he and Sharon lay together, she turned to him. “Well, now, Hal, I don’t know what got into you just then, but I liked it.”

  “I’m glad. Me, too.”

  “You haven’t been trying out Viagra samples, have you?”

  He emitted a brief laugh. “Not yet.”

  She turned to her side and positioned his arm across her breasts. “’Night. I love you.”

  “I love you too.” He wondered if he didn’t sound a bit perfunctory.

  ⸎

  Gottlieb couldn’t sleep. Tossing and turning, trying not to wake the demurely snoring Sharon, he threw on a robe and went downstairs to the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of milk and opened a box of oatmeal cookies, more for lack of something else to do—he wasn’t hungry, wasn’t thirsty. Pacing, beset by an irrational claustrophobia, he felt his spacious kitchen to be as confining as a cell at GCFI.

  His pacing took him to the study, where he retrieved James Shannon’s journal from his briefcase. Splayed out on the couch, he read it again, slowly and carefully. Towards the end he came to the mention of Christina’s abortive stay at camp. “After that summer when they sent her back from camp, I knew the truth about her.”

  He got his wallet and fished a scrap of paper from it, on which he’d jotted down a name. Green Lake Camp for Girls. About an hour from Milwaukee, Kenyon said. He checked a schematic map in the front of the phone book, trying to determine the right area code. Then he picked up the phone.

  A chirping voice answered. “Directory Assistance for what city, please?”

  “I’m, uhm, not certain. I’m trying to find the number for a summer camp, and I’m afraid I don’t know the nearest town.”

  The voice chirped less perkily. “What’s the name of the camp, sir?”

  “Green Lake Camp for Girls. It’s about an hour from Milwaukee.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t see a listing . . . wait, just a moment.” He heard the tapping of a few computer keys. “Yes, there is a Green Lake Camp . . .”

  Gottlieb jotted down the number, unsure about what he planned to do with it.

  CHAPTER XV

  A S HE WENDED HIS WAY THROUGH HEAVY Monday morning traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway, Gottlieb tapped the steering wheel impatiently with the fingers of his left hand. His right hand held a cell phone. He’d just called Cassandra and was waiting for her to answer.

  “Hello.” Strictly business, not a greeting or a question. The subtext, I hope this is worth my time and trouble. But the businesslike tone vanished as soon as she recognized his voice. “Oh, hi, Hal! I was wondering when I’d hear from you.”

  “I wanted to call sooner, to thank you for lunch, but . . . the thing is, Cassandra, I know how busy you are. I didn’t want to call too often and make a pest of myself.” While not glib, Gottlieb usually spoke in a clear, cogent manner. She, however, had a way of making his words sound tentative and sometimes close to jumbled.

  “Call as often as you’d like. If you start to make a pest of yourself, I’ll tell you.”

  “So I gather I haven’t done it yet.”

  “Nowhere near it. Don’t be so insecure.”

  “I’m not, for the most part.” He struggled to keep from sounding hopelessly adolescent. “You see, this whole, uhm, thing, is still new to me. Seeing you, even calling you.”

  “You’ll get used to it. I hope you do.”

  Caught up in the conversation, distracted, he found himself drifting towards the lane to his left. A woman in a green Toyota honked her horn and gave him the finger as she zoomed by. “Jesus!”

  “Hal? Are you okay? What happened?”

  “I’m fine, it was just a momentary lapse. I’m calling from

  the car, and the traffic’s heavy.”

  “You shouldn’t be talking while you’re driving,” she admonished him, rather mildly. “Why don’t you call me back later?”

  “No, stay on the line. When can I see you again?” The question, he thought, contained a certain urgency.

  “It’s up to you. I’ve got a lot to do before I leave, and of course there’s the seminar on colonialism, but apart from that, my schedule’s pretty flexible.”

  “Before you leave?”

  “I’m going to Germany in September. A sabbatical. The Goebbels book. I told you all about it in when we were eating at the Japanese place, remember?”

  He had,
in fact, forgotten. The prospect of not seeing her for six months hit him like a cloudburst in the middle of a sunny day.

  “It must have slipped my mind,” he said finally, “but I remember now.” He hesitated. “I’ll miss you.”

  “You could always fly over to see me,” she bandied lightly.

  “Wouldn’t you be surprised if I did!”

  “Beyond surprised, thunderstruck. But I’d like it.”

  Gottlieb had a brief, intensely pleasant fantasy of driving to O’Hare some ordinary night with nothing but a passport, a few credit cards, and a toothbrush, and heading off to Germany. A place he’d never visited, despite an abiding curiosity about it. Germany was part and parcel of his heritage, almost as much his as hers. His forebears on both sides were German Jews. Although born in the United States, his paternal grandparents spoke German before English. Germany might have been the birthplace of the Holocaust, but it was also his ancestral homeland. Cassandra wasn’t the only one with mixed feelings about it.

  He would see places he’d only read about. Berlin and Munich, the Black Forest and Bavarian Alps, the Rhine valley. He’d wander side streets of medieval cities, explore cathedrals,

  discover museums—Berlin alone had eighty-five of them, he’d read somewhere. He’d feast on wurst and Wiener schnitzel, red cabbage, and spätzle, washed down with a Pilsner or a good Riesling. And she, of course, would be his guide, his interpreter, his boon companion. Not to mention his lover.

  He pondered the fantasy with a wry detachment. Quite a scenario I’m dreaming up with someone I haven’t so much as kissed yet.

  “Hal? Are you still there?”

  “More or less. About this week: maybe we could get together for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon?”

  “Sounds good to me. What exactly did you have in mind?” He couldn’t decide if she said this teasingly; he still hadn’t learned how to read her.

  “What I have in mind isn’t clear to me, as long as I see you.”

  She hesitated before replying. “Listen, Hal, I like you a lot. But I don’t want you doing anything you don’t want to do. Seduction’s not my style. So, how about meeting somewhere other than my apartment? A place that’s out of harm’s way.”

  “That would probably be better.” Equal parts of relief and disappointment swelled up in him.

  “We should do something indoors, though. They’re talking about another heat wave.”

  “Have you been to the Shedd lately?” The Shedd Aquarium was his favorite among Chicago’s renowned attractions, even more so than the Art Institute.

  “Not for years. I don’t know why it’s been so long. I’ve always loved it.”

  “Let’s do it, then. We could meet at the main entrance. About 2:30?”

  “That should be fine. Now, I think you should quit while you’re ahead. Get off the phone before you kill yourself. Auf Wiedersehen.”

  “Good-bye, Cassandra.”

  Auf Wiedersehen. His German consisted of a few words and

  phrases picked up here and there, and he’d rarely heard it spoken. Still, he conceived of it as a harsh, unlovely, rasping tongue. The language of endlessly compounded words and impossible sentences, as twisted as the roots of an old, gnarled tree. The language of SS men as they’d herded their victims to and from the cattle cars: Schnell, schnell, schnell! The language of Hitler himself. But when Cassandra said auf Wiedersehen, she made the words sound as gentle as light rain against a windowpane.

  ⸎

  The forecasters proved right, and by Wednesday they found themselves in the grip of another heat wave. In the short walk from his air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned lobby, Gottlieb felt his face become hot and flushed, his undershirt sticky. The Shedd, magnificently perched at the edge of Lake Michigan, often receives the benefit of cooling breezes off the lake. Not today.

  Despite the crowded lobby he spotted her right away, and his pace quickened as he headed toward her. She wore an off-white skirt, and a peach-and-plum-striped blouse, and her customary tan sandals. As he hugged her, she pressed her cool cheek against his overheated face. The heat wave had no obvious effect on her. It might have been a crisp October afternoon.

  He moved a step back from her and touched her shoulder. “It’s nice to see you.”

  Cassandra’s lips curved into a hint of a smile. “You sounded so solemn when you said that. Funereal, almost.” The heat-induced redness of his face was compounded by a blush. But she took him off the hook before he felt obliged to defend himself. “It’s nice to see you too.”

  They bought tickets and made their way to the Aquarium’s central exhibit, a huge tank holding ninety thousand gallons of water behind two and a quarter inches of laminated glass. The tank was made to replicate a coral reef. Hundreds of aquatic creatures inhabited it, from rainbow-hued tropical fish no larger than minnows to nurse sharks and sea turtles to bright green moray eels. Most of them swam around in lazy circles or darted in and out of rock formations; others hugged the sand and pebbles at the great tank’s floor.

  Cassandra stood transfixed, her blue eyes following their movements with rapt interest, saying nothing. “It really makes you wonder,” she said finally.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It makes you wonder about the varieties of life, about evolution. About all these fantastic adaptations. Look at that one, with the spines, like a porcupine! Or that one, in front of the fan-shaped piece of coral. He looks as though he has an eye in the middle of his tail!”

  Gottlieb nodded and said, “It’s a great defense, that kind of marking. Makes a predator thinks he’s bigger than he is. Besides, if he is attacked, he’ll only lose a piece of his tail instead of his whole head.”

  She pointed to a small shark, only four or five feet long, circling the tank with easy grace. Its mouth was slightly open, just enough to expose a profusion of short triangular teeth. “I’ve always been fascinated by sharks, ever since Jaws.”

  “Me too. Some of their adaptations are incredible.” His tone became a bit pontifical. “There are species that have up to three thousand teeth, arranged in twenty rows. Some sharks can detect blood in amounts as small as one drop in two dozen gallons. Others find their prey by detecting electrical charges of up to a millionth of a volt.”

  “You know a lot about them.”

  He shook his head. “Not really. I’ll read an article, or I’ll watch something on Public TV or the Discovery Channel.”

  They fell silent as they stood before the tank. “This is marvelous,” she said at last. “I could spend all day here. So peaceful. By the way, how do they keep the local citizens from

  eating one another?”

  “By keeping them extremely well fed, I imagine.”

  They took a few steps around the periphery of the tank. Gottlieb pointed to a huge sea turtle circling nearby. “I’ve always liked turtles. I used to have them when I was a boy. I like their eyes. They remind me of the eyes of kind old men.”

  She gave a short laugh. “That’s a bit anthropomorphic, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I’ve read that some of the Galapagos tortoises are supposed to have lived for more than two hundred years. Now there’s a place I’d go to in a heartbeat. The Galapagos Islands.”

  “Some friends of ours went there last year. They travel a lot, this couple, and they said it was the most interesting trip they’ve ever taken.” I’d like to go there with you, he almost added, the unspoken words roiling inside his head.

  “It’s fabulous here!” He stole a glance at her, and for an instant, he could see a carefree little girl, smitten with natural wonders, long hidden within the heavily burdened woman. “So dark and quiet, so apart from everything,” she went on. “I should come here more often.”

  “You should. It’s not that far from where you live.”

  She turned to him. “I especially like the fact that it has nothing to do with the Third Reich.”

  “God, you must get sick
of it.”

  “More than you could know.”

  “I doubt that,” he responded dryly. “But why not give it a break, then? There are other aspects of European history, presumably.”

  “So I keep trying to remind myself.”

  “I mean it. There’s more to German history than the Holocaust, and there are other European countries besides Germany in the first place. Delve into something different for a while.”

  She bristled, “Do you think it’s that easy to let go of an

  obsession?”

  “No, but it’s easier if you try.”

  She looked up at him, surprised by his challenging edge. When she resumed, her tone had softened. “Once I start a book, I give myself over to it wholly. It was like that with the others, and it will be that way with the Goebbels book. But when it’s done, I’ve been thinking of moving on to something else.”

  She went on, pensively. “It occurred to me that historians don’t pay as much attention to Switzerland as they should. Now here’s this confederation that has survived for nearly a thousand years. A place where they’ve built a multiethnic democracy on a continent where different ethnic groups, even very similar ones, habitually try to massacre each other. I’m aware the Swiss have their faults. Their actions during the Holocaust left a great deal to be desired, and their banking system protects the fortunes of some of the world’s worst people, but that doesn’t mean their history’s not worth studying.”

  He nodded. “It sounds fascinating. Hard to imagine better use of a historian’s time and energy."

  “Maybe I will.” She spoke thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll surprise us both, especially myself.” In a flash her tone took on its customary briskness. “But first I’ll write the Goebbels book.”