Zachary watched Spencer’s Adam’s apple moving up and down. The man’s face was blank. The newspaper articles had said that he had shown no emotion either on Declan’s disappearance or on the discovery of his body. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t feeling anything. Looking around the office, Zachary could see a framed picture of Declan placed prominently on the desk. On the back of the printer sat a stuffed toy dog.
“Declan liked dogs?”
“He loved them.”
“Tell me about your wife.”
Spencer reached out to his hand sanitizer, pumped a portion onto his hand, and again rubbed his hands together.
“Isabella was a very loving mother. This has been hard on her.”
“Yes, I would expect it to be. Molly is very worried about her daughter’s emotional state.”
Spencer nodded.
“Do you think she’s right to be concerned?”
“She knows her daughter better than I do. I know Isabella is unhappy… but that’s how I would expect her to feel…”
“Like you.”
Spencer gave a brief nod.
“Where did the two of you meet?”
“When I moved here, I was looking for a support group. Isabella had been put into a program by her therapist. We met. We really hit it off. It’s hard for people to understand what it’s like…” he trailed off uncomfortably.
“What it’s like to have OCD,” Zachary guessed.
Spencer didn’t look surprised that Zachary had figured it out. It wasn’t like he had tried to hide his compulsions.
“Yes.”
“You and Isabella both have OCD?” Molly hadn’t mentioned what kind of mental illness Isabella suffered from. “What’s that like? It must be nice having someone who understands what it’s like.” Zachary made a motion to encompass the room. “It’s a very tidy household,” he observed with a smile.
“What you have seen so far. I thought it would be easier, living with someone like me; someone who understood; but we are very different. I think probably more different than it would have been to marry someone without compulsions.”
Zachary shook his head, not understanding. Spencer tipped his chair back a little. He let out a sigh.
“Combining our households was a challenge. Isabella had accumulated so much stuff. They didn’t live at Molly’s current place, which you already saw. They lived in a little bungalow, and it was full to the brim with things. Isabella obviously couldn’t bring everything here. She did her best to only bring a reasonable amount, and we tried to make a home.”
Zachary nodded, following the story, though he wasn’t sure where it was going to lead.
“The dishes were a combination of what I already had and what she brought. I went through them, getting rid of duplicate items or anything that was cracked or damaged. There was a plate that didn’t match anything. A chipped blue dish. I got rid of it. This was all done while she was on a business trip, so she would be out of the way and wouldn’t know what all I had gotten rid of. So, it wouldn’t upset her.”
With a little smile, Zachary could see what was coming. “But she noticed the loss of the blue plate.”
A longer sigh from Spencer this time. Almost a groan. “That blue plate was the only one she would eat off.”
“Oops.”
Spencer swiveled to look at him. “That isn’t an exaggeration, Mr. Goldman. She really would not eat off any other plate in the house. In the eight years we have been married, she has never eaten off another plate within these walls.”
“Never? Then, what…?”
“If she’s out at a restaurant, she can eat off their plates. At home, she can’t. She can drink out of a cup. She can eat out of a bowl or straight out of the package.” Spencer wrinkled his nose at this. “But she cannot bring herself to eat off a plate other than the chipped blue plate I threw out.”
“Couldn’t you get another one to replace it?”
“No. Even if I got one that was identical, she would know it wasn’t the same plate, and she still wouldn’t be able to use it.”
“Oh.” Zachary knew he should be making notes about the experience, but he was too baffled to write anything down.
“Compulsions can be very disruptive,” Spencer said. “They can take over your life, out of nowhere. It isn’t just a comfortable ritual.” As if to demonstrate, Spencer leaned forward to squirt another stream of antibacterial gel onto his hands and scrub it away. For the first time, Zachary was aware of the sharp tang in the air, and noticed how red and chapped Spencer’s hands were. “It isn’t just a habit; it is something you must do. You can’t move forward until you do. Do you want to know why I moved to Vermont?”
Zachary leaned forward. “Yes, of course.”
“The sign law.”
“The no-billboards law?”
Spencer nodded. “Before I came here, I had a compulsion to count billboards. I knew exactly how many there were on every route I traveled. If I was distracted and missed one of them, I had to go back to the beginning of the route and start over again. I was spending hours on the highway, just counting signs. If the advertisement on one of them changed, I had to drive by it twenty times. It had taken over my life.”
“And you can’t do anything about that?”
“There are therapies. Some people can get over their compulsions without replacing them with something new.” His chair creaked. “I came to Vermont.”
“Because you knew there weren’t any billboards to count.”
“Does that sound crazy to you?”
Zachary scratched his head, considering it. It certainly seemed extreme. As did refusing to eat off any other plate for eight years; but Spencer wasn’t claiming to be normal. He was describing a pathology. A deviation from the norm.
“I can understand how it must have disrupted your life,” he said slowly. “Moving to Vermont and starting over here seems like a disruption too, though. It can’t have been easy.”
Spencer drummed his fingers on the desk and gave a little shrug. “Yes, it was hard to leave Ohio to come here. Sometimes, even if it’s painful, you just need to find a way to get away from your triggers. If I were still living in Ohio, I wouldn’t have any kind of life now. I’d be driving up and down the highway endlessly. I never would have met Isabella. Deck would never have been a part of my life.”
Zachary was uncomfortably aware of his own circumstances. All that had been taken away from him that everybody else seemed to take for granted.
“Do you ever wish that Declan hadn’t been a part of your life? That he’d never been born? The pain of losing him…?”
“No.” Spencer’s eyes strayed to the stuffed dog. “I think he was meant to be a part of my life, even if it was only for a short time. I wouldn’t want to have to give that experience up, even if it was painful.”
His face was still blank of any emotion, but Spencer knew that was just a mask that Spencer showed the world. Or maybe it wasn’t something he hid behind, but that he was unable to express the emotion he felt. Zachary could feel it there between them. The grief. The anger. The despair.
“Yeah.” Zachary sighed and turned the page on his notepad to a clean sheet. “I will have more questions for you later. I guess I should meet your wife now.”
“Of course. We’ll help in any way we can.”
They both stood, and Zachary waited for Spencer to take him to wherever his wife was waiting. Spencer’s mouth twitched, and he didn’t come out from behind his desk.
“Has Molly told you about Isabella? What to expect?”
“No, not really, just that she’s going through a difficult time. That Molly is concerned for her mental or emotional state.”
Spencer didn’t offer up any further explanation.
“Anything you could tell me that might help this go more smoothly?” Zachary suggested.
“You will find her… eccentric. Or maybe you won’t. She wears her heart on her sleeve. She doesn’t have cleanliness compulsions.
She may act happy and cheerful, but…” Spencer shifted his feet. “That’s her TV persona. She’ll put it on if she’s not comfortable with you.”
Zachary nodded, understanding. “Okay. Thanks.”
They made the walk to Isabella’s office in silence. Zachary kept his eyes open, looking around the rest of the house as much as he could. It was almost clinically tidy.
Then they walked into Isabella’s studio. That was where the neatness ended.
Spencer took him up to the doorway and didn’t enter. Zachary could understand why. For someone with compulsions for cleaning and straightening, even having such a room in his house must have been painful. Certainly, he wouldn’t want to spend any time there.
Zachary knocked on the open door, not wanting to just barge in on Isabella. She stood in the middle of the chaos, in front of an easel with some abstract daubing, her back to the door. She turned around, and Zachary saw the face that was so familiar from The Happy Artist commercials and advertisements. There was one brief, unguarded moment when she looked at him, her face hollow and lined before she realized she was facing a stranger and put on the mask Spencer had warned him about. She smiled brightly, and a fan of laugh lines replaced all the deep frown lines.
“Hello,” she greeted, “come in, come in.”
She looked around her and found a chair stacked with canvases. She moved the paintings to the side, leaning them against the wall.
“There you go. Make yourself at home.”
Zachary sat down but wasn’t exactly comfortable. There were canvases and art materials covering every surface, including most of the floor. All manner of brushes, paints, and bottles filled a couple of bookcases. There were tables with a space cleared in the middle for charcoal and pastel sketches. He had the uncomfortable sensation that everything stacked around him was going to fall down in a landslide and bury him.
Isabella herself was not untidy. She had on black pants and a flowing tunic-shirt with several layers of jewelry. Her long, dark hair had been gathered into a ponytail to keep it out of her face. When she appeared on TV, it was often done up in intricate braiding or decorated buns, a nod to the fact that her back was often to the cameras as she worked. Giving the audience something to look at besides her paint work.
“My name is Zachary. From Goldman Investigations.”
“I know who you are,” she said dismissively, flipping a hand at him as she studied her canvas. “And I know why my mother hired you.”
“You know I’m here about Declan’s accident.”
“Of course.” She looked away from her painting and gazed at him briefly, brows raised.
“I don’t want to waste your time with small talk. I know this must be very difficult for you.”
“Do you want to know why my mother is so worried about me?”
“Sure.”
There was a stool nearby for her to sit on while she painted. She dragged it closer to Zachary and sat down. It was higher than Zachary’s chair, so he was forced to look up at her.
“The network says I have to wear long sleeves on the air now,” Isabella said, pulling up the right-hand sleeve of her tunic.
Molly’s concern and the words prefacing the gesture made Zachary expect to see fresh cut marks. There was no sign of self-mutilation or a suicide attempt. Instead, he was looking at the tattoo of a boy’s face, with the name Declan under it.
“Do you really think my viewers would find that so offensive?” Isabella demanded. “Why is it a bad thing that I tattooed my son into my skin?”
“Uh, no…” Zachary was caught by surprise and had no idea what to say to this. “No, I think… it’s sweet.”
“He came from my body, and now he’s returned to it,” she went on, her voice loud and forceful. “The tattoo artist mixed a small amount of his ashes into the tattoo ink. His body has returned to me and will always be with me.”
Zachary did find that surprising, and maybe a little morbid. He didn’t know regular people did that kind of thing. In prison, all kinds of materials were burned to make DIY tattoo ink, but he didn’t know anyone would mix cremains in with the ink. Was it common, and he’d just never paid attention before?
“My son is always with me,” Isabella had continued, while Zachary was lost in his own thoughts. “I don’t ever want him to leave me again.”
She plucked up one of the pendants that hung around her neck and held it out toward Zachary. He saw, with a mounting feeling of discomfort, that what he had taken to be a vial with rough pearls inside actually contained teeth.
“These are his. Not the teeth from his body, those were cremated with him, but baby teeth I helped him to pull out while he was still alive, and I could touch him and hold them in my hand.”
Zachary stared at her. This was why Molly was so concerned. Not just because Isabella was sad, mourning her lost child, but because her mourning had taken her into territory that was… morbid and unsettling.
“Maybe we could talk about what happened that day,” he suggested.
“This ring contains some of his ashes,” Isabella offered as if she hadn’t heard him. She held out her hand toward him, showing off a large purple stone like an amethyst. “You can get jewelry where you can put the ashes into a little chamber yourself, but this one, the ashes are actually suspended in the glass. You see the sparkle inside?”
“Yes.”
“This one,” she tapped the ring, “the producers will let me wear on air, but the tattoo and the teeth, those are inappropriate.” Her tone mocked their words. “Somehow those might drive the viewers away. They wouldn’t be able to handle my grief.” She dropped her hand to her lap. “My viewers know that I lost my child. Do they think I wouldn’t mourn him? Do they think after I’ve taken a few weeks off work, I’m all better? Everything is fine?”
“No. I don’t think they expect that. Probably your producers don’t either. They’re just being… cautious…” Zachary tried to pitch his voice so that it was low and soothing. Isabella was agitated, almost manic, and he didn’t know whether that was her normal state, or whether he had triggered her behavior by being there, asking about her son, trying to find some different answers from those she had already received. Did she go off like that on everyone?
Isabella ignored his assurance and went on, itemizing the other bits of hair and ash that were woven or contained within her various accessories. After a while, Zachary grew numb to it. It was no longer shocking or even surprising. He’d never known there were so many ways to carry a memento of your deceased loved one around with you. Obviously, the jewelry companies were ready and eager to provide the products.
Isabella seemed to be winding down. “I sent the rest of his ashes away to a company that makes diamonds. They actually take the ashes—carbon—and add heat and pressure to form them into a real diamond. It’s not just ashes suspended in a gem, like this,” she indicated the amethyst ring, “or inside a micro urn, like these… but the ashes are transformed into a diamond.”
“That’s amazing,” Zachary obliged. “But you don’t have it back yet?”
“It takes a few months to make. I’m hoping to have it before Christmas.”
“That would… be a nice present.”
“I want Declan to be with me. Always. I don’t ever want to be separated from him again.”
“Yes. I can see that.” Zachary took another breath, looking for his opening. “You must have been very scared when he disappeared.”
“I was! It was horrible. You don’t know the kind of terror… You don’t have any children, do you?”
“No.” Again, the lead ball in his stomach. “I don’t.”
“You could never understand how terrifying it is. He was right there. I only looked away for two minutes!”
“I don’t think anyone blames you. Children can wander away from even the most diligent caregiver.”
She shook her head, not believing it. She knew that it was her fault he had wandered away. It had been her responsibility. She
was the one who had fallen down on the job, and the responsibility for his death fell on her. She wore that guilt just like all the leftover bits of Declan’s body.
“Can you tell me about how it happened? I know this is a terrible thing to ask of you. You’ve already had to repeat it so many times. Can you manage just one more…?”
Isabella looked at him, her hands wringing in her lap. Her eyes were once again hollow, the laugh lines gone.
“You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child,” she told him again.
Zachary gritted his teeth and didn’t disagree.
“He was playing outside in the back yard.” She made a gesture toward it. The yard was not visible from Isabella’s studio as it was from Spencer’s office.
“And you were supervising him? You were outside with him?”
“I wasn’t outside.”
“Oh. Where were you, then?”
“I was in the bedroom. It has patio doors that look into the yard. I could see him from there.”
Zachary nodded his encouragement. “I see. Do you mind if I… see the bedroom for a minute?”
Her lips tightened, and he knew she was going to say no. She thought that he was going to judge her as a negligent mother, watching her child from a distance instead of being out there with him, playing with him, talking and laughing with him. Had either of the parents really connected with Declan? Did either of them see him as a person rather than a responsibility?
“I’d like to see where the blind spots are,” Zachary explained. “Areas where an intruder might have approached and seen and talked to Declan without you being able to see them.”
“Oh.” Her expression softened, and she nodded. “Yes, I guess that makes sense.”
“Just think of it as a security sweep. I need to understand where the weaknesses in the defenses were. I’m not here to accuse you of anything.”
“Some people have been very cruel.”
Zachary hoped that didn’t include Isabella’s own husband and mother. She couldn’t have been an easy person to live with, wallowing in her grief, wearing her heart on her sleeve, as Spencer had said. Or her child’s face on her arm.
She Wore Mourning Page 3