Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [2]
But of course it was.
“This is Ana Watkins.”
“Oh, yes—hello, Ana. How are you?” His professionalism clicked in automatically, keeping his tone steady and objective—or so he hoped.
“I’m downstairs—can I come up and see you?”
“Downstairs?”
“At McSorley’s, actually.”
How did she know where he lived?
As if reading his mind, she said, “You’re in the directory.”
Not true, but never mind. His explanation that he wasn’t in private practice anymore didn’t seem to put her off. She insisted that she wouldn’t take up much of his time, but that it was very important to her.
“Please? I wouldn’t ask, but—”
But what? he thought irritably. You didn’t cause enough trouble the first time around?
“I’ll come down and meet you at McSorley’s.”
“It’s too loud in here,” she said, and he could hear the din of clanking glasses and boisterous laughter in the background. McSorley’s was always loud on a Friday night.
He glanced at the clock. It was just after six.
“I have a dinner meeting at seven.”
“I won’t take long—I promise.”
He peered out the window down at the street. It was August, but as evening drew in a cold rain whipped the naked branches of the trees on East Seventh Street. They shivered in the chilly gusts, shaking like frightened skeletons. He caught a glimpse of his own ghostly image staring back at him—curly black hair, angular face, intense, deep-set eyes. He knew it was a face many women considered handsome, and wished that Ana Watkins weren’t one of them.
Lee had an impulse to pour himself a Scotch, but decided against it—he needed his mind clear for the encounter. When the downstairs bell rang he took a deep breath and buzzed her into the building.
Her footsteps on the carpeted stairs were light and quick, the tread of a young person. He opened the door and fixed a smile on his face. She entered in a cloud of lilac perfume, and as soon as he breathed the aroma, he inhaled the memories of that time in his life along with it. It all felt so long ago.
She had changed very little—tall and thin and so pale that she always reminded him of an albino. She wasn’t an albino, she had told him in their first session together, but her pallid skin lacked the shade and depth of ordinary skin; it looked two dimensional, like paper. She wasn’t exactly pretty—her nose was too big and her lips were too thin—but she was striking, and she knew it.
She took in the apartment with one nervous glance, probably noticing more than she appeared to. Lee remembered her IQ was 160, or so she had claimed. That could have been a fiction, of course—much of what she had told him was. She was one of his earliest patients, and he had not yet acquired the skill of seeing through the myriad lies and obfuscations of the narcissistic personality. Still, there was no doubt that Ana was bright—very bright. Her sessions may have been frustrating, but at least they were never dull.
She slipped off her gray raincoat and dangled it from her outstretched arm, as though she expected Lee to take it from her. That was so like her—her helplessness always had an aggressive quality, and she could turn even a small gesture like removing her coat into a demand. Evidently years of therapy had failed to change this. He suppressed a sigh and took the coat, hanging it on the antique bentwood coatrack his mother had found at an estate sale in Bucks County.
“Do you have any coffee?” she asked, rubbing her thin hands together and blowing on them.
Another demand. Lee was flooded with relief that they would not be continuing their sessions together. He had always done his best to disguise one of the uglier truths of the therapeutic relationship: there were some patients he just didn’t like. If his enmity toward a patient ever threatened to compromise his effectiveness, he would find an excuse to suggest they seek out another therapist, but in the case of Ana Watkins, his dislike of her didn’t become entirely apparent to him until after their last session together.
“I can make some coffee,