Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [85]
“Why would I want to punish you?”
“You would know that better than I would.”
She leaned back in her chair, the tips of her long fingers touching.
“Actually, I was wondering if your continued search for Laura’s killer could be a form of self-punishment.”
He stared at her. “Why on earth would you say that?”
“Well, it is keeping open a wound, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see any way that would change until her killer is found.”
“Other people might have decided to move on by now, that’s all.”
“They haven’t even found her body, for God’s sake! How am I supposed to ‘move on'?” The blood vessels in his head were pulsating. The headache he’d been fighting all day was getting worse.
“It’s interesting you’re having such a strong reaction—”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exploded. “What kind of reaction do you expect? We’re talking about my sister’s death—how am I supposed to react?”
“It’s your reaction to my suggestion I’m talking about. You could have just said that was an interesting observation, and moved on. But you didn’t—you saw it as an attack.”
The light was directly behind her now, surrounding her head like a gauzy halo. He blinked and rubbed his temple. The light seemed to pulsate at the same speed as the throbbing in his head.
“Okay,” he said, “I know where you’re going with this—it’s Therapy 101. The force of my reaction means that you struck a nerve, which means that the more I protest, the more you have a point. Ergo, I am using my sister’s death to serve my own masochistic need to punish myself because I feel responsible somehow.”
His words hung in the air, the harshness of his voice echoing in his ears. But Dr. Williams merely smiled.
“All right,” she said. “Shall I write you a check this week?”
“Touché,” he said, ashamed of his outburst. “But why do you always have to be so goddamn right all the time?” “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, taking a sip from her sports bottle, which was usually filled with iced tea. He was wondering if she sometimes wished it were filled with whiskey. She opened her mouth to say something, but he spoke first.
“Please don’t say that my anger at you is all about my mother.”
“Actually, I was going to observe that your anger at your mother is somewhat ironic,” she said, crossing her legs.
“How so?”
“Well, you’re mad at her because she refuses to believe your sister is dead.”
“And?”
“Hasn’t it ever struck you that your profession is in some ways an attempt to keep your sister alive?” He took a deep breath.
“I don’t see it that way. I know she’s dead—I’ve accepted that. I just want to find out who killed her. And if I can’t do that, then I can at least catch the people who are out there killing other people’s sisters.”
“Or wives, or husbands—”
“Right.”
“So we’re back to my first point.” “That I may never catch him.”
“Or her.”
Or her. Funny, but he had assumed from the first that Laura’s killer would be a man—even now the idea of it being a woman struck him as odd and unlikely. Not that he believed women were incapable of great violence and evil deeds—he had too much experience for that—but he felt Laura would never have fallen victim to anyone unless she was vastly overmatched in size and physical strength.
He looked at Dr. Williams, who was smoothing her long maroon skirt as she rose from her chair.
“I’m afraid our time is up.”
Later, on the walk home, as he calmed down, he realized that—as usual—there was something to what she said. He remembered as a child the feeling of worrying a scab, and the perverse satisfaction at the sight of his own blood as he pulled it away from his skin. He recalled the summer after his father left, when he had skinned his elbow jumping from the tree house next door on a dare from Drew Apthorp. She was a slim girl with smooth, straight-as-a-stick sandy hair and freckle-mottled skin who came to spend summers with her grandparents, and he had a crush on her.
He would lie in bed at night thinking of Drew, picking at his scab while listening to the buzzing of moths as they