Chosen for Death (37 page)

Not that Andre was looking at anything. He'd arrived in the night, nearly comatose from exhaustion, announced that he'd finally arrested a suspect in his latest homicide and fallen asleep with his clothes on. Once we made it out to the deck, he hadn't even pretended he was going to read, just lay down in the chair, let me cover him with sunscreen, and asked to be turned in an hour. Andre the human steak.

I wasn't doing much better. My mind was so bleary from another frantic week of work that I had passed up the serious book I was reading and was dithering over a piece of bodice-buster trash. So far, the characters in the book had nothing on us. I kept losing my place and couldn't keep the players straight. All the women were bubbleheaded and gorgeous, even the ones who were supposed to be executives, and all the men were studly and smoldering. Their lives were so sexually supercharged no one could even buy a pair of socks without someone of the opposite sex staring intently at their trembling cleavage with knowing blue eyes. Their dialogue had been written by a third-grader. I stuck with it for a while, since my mother, who is no bubblehead, had suggested I'd like it, but familiarity bred contempt. I stuffed it under my chair and went around to the front to get the paper.

The headlines were the usual mix of financial scandals, the president's grandstanding in the international forum while the country went to hell, and the latest sensational murder. I often skip the front page, unless there's a story relating to education, but there was something about today's murder that caught my eye. A prominent woman psychologist, a so-called "founding mother" of the movement for introducing the woman's perspective into psychology, had been stabbed to death in Anson while she was out walking her dog. Gripping the paper, I dropped into my chair and read the story.

The woman, Helene Streeter, age fifty-three, had been on the staff of Bartlett Hill, a well-known private psychiatric hospital. Her husband, Clifford Paris, was head of the childrens' outpatient unit there. According to neighbors, it had been Ms. Streeter's custom to walk the family dog in the evenings after supper, often accompanied by Mr. Paris. When Ms. Streeter did not return from her walk, her husband had gone out looking for her. He had found her lying in the shadow of a hedge a few houses away. A trail of blood on the sidewalk indicated that she had crawled some distance before collapsing. She was rushed to Mt. Lucas Hospital, where she died from multiple stab wounds. A hunting knife, possibly the murder weapon, was found on the lawn of a house several blocks away.

The story continued, but I'd read enough. I folded up the paper with shaking, ink-smudged fingers and stuffed it under a pot of geraniums so it wouldn't blow away. Most stories of violence and death occur under circumstances so remote from everyday life that they don't touch us. We read them, tut-tut about the state of things, and move on. This one was different. I hadn't seen much of them lately, but I knew Helene Streeter and I knew Clifford Paris. Knew them pretty well. Their daughter, Eve, had been my friend in college, and my roommate for a few years after college, when I was busy being a reporter and a social worker, and she was getting her master's degree in social work. We lived together until she moved to Arizona. Back then, Eve's relationship with her parents had been strained. They still treated her like a child and she still carried an adolescent chip on her shoulder so big it sometimes blocked her vision, but she went through the motions of a dutiful daughter, and that included dinner with her parents. I often went along as a buffer.

In some ways, Eve's estrangement was easy to understand. Like many psychiatrists' children, she had been extremely close to her parents as a child, sometimes, as she'd described it to me, to the exclusion of other children. That closeness had hampered her ability to make a comfortable social adjustment to her peers, and had also created an even greater distance to go when the time came to break away from her parents and become her own person. According to Eve, the struggles had been titanic. Her parents, so respected for their ability to help the troubled, had been completely baffled when it came to their own daughter's behavior. They'd reacted with an impossible combination of rules, restrictions and demands for dialogue to her every attempt to find her own identity. Even something as ordinary as a chaperoned boy-girl party had required a family meeting.

In self-defense, Eve resorted to deception, developing an agreeable facade which appeared to conform to their wishes while doing exactly as she pleased. It was probably necessary to get her through adolescence, but having to lie made her angry, and the fact that they let her get away with it—these supposedly sensitive, insightful people—made her even angrier. Maybe they saw through it and let it go because it was the only way they could cope. I didn't know. I wasn't around then. By the time I met her, lying to them had become such a habit that she lied even when she didn't have to. After our first dinner with them, when I challenged her about some things that she'd said, Eve had responded, "It's terribly sad, Thea, but I've lied to them so long I'm not sure I'd know how to tell them the truth. Anyway, I don't even think of it as lying anymore. I just tell them what they want to hear and they're satisfied. They deal with so many serious problems every day. It's important to the stability of their world that things are all right with me."

It was so sad. Eve and her family sat around like people hiding behind cardboard cutouts of themselves, looking like the perfect family, and never told each other anything risky. Eve never told her mother, who specialized in treating abused women and children, that her boyfriend, Padraig, was abusive, and she never told her father, who knew a great deal about eating disorders, that she was bulimic. She just struggled along on her own and eventually she cured the bulimia herself and dumped Padraig. Dumping him had not been easy, since in his own perverse, possessive way, he'd loved Eve and didn't want to be discarded, and because Padraig, when he wasn't being abusive, was the most charming man on earth. He'd had hair the color of fire, a lilt in his voice that could woo statues off their pedestals and a passionate way of throwing himself at life that made you want to be swept along. But he'd had a dark side, too—moods of brooding intensity when he blamed everyone but himself for his failure to make it as an artist. Then he would take out his frustration on Eve.

Part of her reason for moving to Arizona was to get away from Padraig. As long as she was near him, she couldn't resist him. It was also to get away from her family. One day at lunch she'd said, "Lying to them is such an established pattern that I can't seem to stop. I hope by going away I can put enough distance between us that when I come back I can deal with them honestly. Maybe I'm deluding myself but that's what I hope." I'd helped her pack everything into the back of her little silver Accord and she'd driven away.

I could still see her face, peering out the window at me, bottom lip caught between her teeth, and little worry lines in her forehead. We were a strange pair. Me tall, green eyed and serious, with my mop of impossibly long, curly hair, and Eve, with her merry, adorable little face, cropped, string-straight hair, and small, strong body. Together we looked like the giant and the dwarf. Eve's bulimia hadn't been a reaction to anything wrong with her body. I guess that's often the case. She had an athletic build, but she was well proportioned and slim. It was just that Helene was so impossibly beautiful that anyone would have had trouble being her daughter. As Eve, one of whose strengths was her blunt self-awareness, once observed, "I can stick my finger down my throat until hell freezes over, and I'll never look like Helene." And now Helene was dead. I hoped Eve had had a chance to establish the kind of relationship with her parents that she wanted. I didn't know.

After Eve left to work on the reservation, I'd met David Kozak, gotten married, and immersed myself in a world of domestic bliss. A year later I read in the paper that Padraig had died in a car accident. I'd written her and sent her the clipping and she'd written back that his death was the loss of an important artistic talent. By the time she came back, David had been killed, and I'd dealt with my grief by becoming a workaholic. We'd had lunch a few times, dinner with her parents once, and spent one pleasant weekend on Cape Cod, but otherwise we hadn't seen each other much. Eve was working with cancer patients, and on the weekends she was doing a lot of cycling and kayaking. She seemed very happy.

It was a beautiful May Saturday. Brilliant sunshine. A fresh cool breeze. It was a day made to be enjoyed, but I couldn't stop thinking about what I'd read. I try to avoid thinking about death and dying. I'm not a depressed or morose person, I've just seen my share of death. It's been more than two and a half years since the car accident that killed David, and almost nine months since my sister Carrie was murdered. Hardly a day goes by when I don't think about them and miss them.

They say that with time a grieving process takes place and you get over things. I know that's true. Most of the time I'm fine. But sometimes, at a certain time of day, when the light slants a certain way, or when I hear a special song, catch a faint whiff of some man's cologne, or glimpse a tall, thin, dark-haired man walking toward me, I still expect to see David. Sometimes, when the phone rings and I hear a girlish, excited voice, I expect it to be Carrie. Then the disappointment, the loneliness, and the pain are just as real, immediate, and sharp as in those first awful days. So I had some idea of how it was going to be for Eve.

Andre put a warm hand on my shoulder. "Penny for your thoughts," he said.

"I was thinking about this," I answered, tugging out the paper and handing it to him. "I knew the woman—the victim. Her daughter is a friend of mine."

He scanned the article quickly and handed it back. "The mysterious stranger lurking in the bushes with a knife, huh? Statistically speaking, it's much more likely she was killed by someone she knew."

"But she knew everybody. And people loved her."

"Only one of them killed her, though, and I doubt that it was the butler."

"No," I said, "they didn't have a butler. A maid, but not a butler. Helene was an ardent feminist. In her world, it would have been the maid who did it. It isn't something we should joke about, though. Poor Eve."

"Eve is the daughter? Your friend?"

"Yes."

"Have you called her?"

"Called her?" It sounded dumb even to me. "Isn't it too soon?"

He shook his head. "She'll need people to talk to. Maybe not right away, but it will help her to know you're there. You understand what she's going through and you're sensible and compassionate. Go on. Go call." He made little motions with his hands, like someone shooing a flock of chickens.

"Don't you start telling me what to do," I said, but it was a pro forma complaint. We both had some expertise in this area and I knew he was right. I could be helpful. I also knew why I was hesitating. I might be able to help Eve, but not without cost to myself. Talking to Eve about her loss would make me think of my own.

His arched eyebrows rose quizzically, giving him a slightly elfin look I find very attractive. That was usually the prelude to a provocative remark, but this time all he said was, "You might bring some sandwiches on your way back out."

"Andre, you just had breakfast."

"I just had you, too, and I never get enough of that, either."

I groaned and went inside to call Eve.

~

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Death in a Funhouse Mirror

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Kate Flora first developed her fascination with people's criminal tendencies as a lawyer in the Maine attorney general's office. Deadbeat dads, people who beat and neglected their kids, and employers hateful acts of discrimination led to a deep curiosity about human psychology that's led to fourteen books including seven "strong woman" Thea Kozak mysteries and four gritty police procedurals in her star-reviewed Joe Burgess series. She thanks Nancy Drew, Sara Paretsky, and Dick Francis for her inspiration. She's been an Edgar, Derringer, Agatha and Anthony finalist and twice won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Her nonfiction won the Public Safety Writers Association Award in 2015.

When she's not writing, or teaching writing at Grub Street in Boston, she's usually found in her garden, where she wages a constant battle against critters, pests, and her husband's lawnmower. She's been married for 35 years to a man who can still make her laugh. She has two wonderful sons, a movie editor and a scientist, two lovely daughters-in-law, a perfect grandson, and four rescue "granddogs," Frances, Otis, Harvey, and Daisy.