“Most Americans are not very good at remembering colonies and colonial powers. I think that is probably a good thing.”
“It’s a double-edged sword, that. Americans are better at making history than learning from it.”
“Yes, well, I am properly impressed by your broad knowledge and powers of deduction, but that is not why you’ve come. Now I realize you must want to discuss John Tierney, yet you were most vague on the phone.”
“Yesterday, the detective in charge of Sashi Bluntstone’s case let me look at all the evidence: case file, interviews, pictures… all of it.”
“Still searching for absolution?”
“Answers.”
“For you, in this instance, they appear to be synonymous. If you can get answers to the questions, you will be relieved of your guilt.”
“You’re good, Doc.”
He laughed, but with little joy. “Moe, a student in freshman psychology could make that leap.”
“But you feel the guilt too. Don’t you want answers?”
“We all want answers to big questions, but the essential struggle of being human is to grapple with questions for which there are no easy answers: Where do I come from? Where do I belong? Where am I going? What does it all mean? Religion and philosophy, literature, even science, are human reactions to our ability to ask these fundamental questions. Knowing this doesn’t make me feel any the less guilty about the child’s murder, but I accept as an occupational hazard that I am not omnipotent and cannot predict how my patients will react under any and all circumstances.”
“Sounds like a rationalization.”
“It is,” he confessed, “but a useful one. So now that we have discussed my own personal house of cards, let us move on to what you wish to discuss?”
“When I was reviewing the formal statements, I noticed that Candy, Sashi’s mom, in describing her daughter’s clothing, said Sashi liked colorfully patterned bikini-style panties. The detective who searched Sashi’s room confirmed this, but in the pictures of her that the cops found on Tierney’s altar, she was wearing full-cut, plain white panties. It occurred to me that John-”
“-would have to have planned to have the child for a period of time and would have had to go into a store to purchase this item of clothing.”
“Exactly.”
Ogologlu’s calm and professional demeanor took a sudden turn. He stood up from the arm of the chair and paced the floor, brushing the back of his hand against his face.
“I’m no shrink, Doc, but given Tierney’s problems, I can’t see him in that environment at all. I mean, this is a guy so nuts he had aluminum foil on his windows, his TV screen facing out away from him, and who was so dead certain he was being monitored and his thoughts were being infiltrated that he had the utilities turned off. But I’m supposed to believe he strolled happily into a Kmart or CVS-well-lit places full of people, security guards, and cameras-and bought a package of little girls’ underwear? C’mon.”
“No, in my estimation that is a very unlikely scenario. Possibly, if he were still under my care, medicated, and we had gone over a strategy to make such a purchase, he might have, and I strongly emphasize might have, been able to perform such a task. Yet when those conditions were in place, John found it too anxiety-provoking to perform those sorts of errands. Shopping for his most basic needs was beyond him. He could no longer purchase his own clothes. After his mother died, he continued wearing the same few outfits. Even his meals were delivered to his home by a charitable organization.”
“Detective McKenna says that maybe he did it at four in the morning when the store was almost empty or that maybe one of his internet friends-”
“He had no friends, Moe. His level of distrust sabotaged any old friendships or family ties and his pathology was such that forming new social bonds was not possible. And I think I have made it clear that it would not have mattered what time he went to the store.”
“Yet the new panties are an undeniable fact,” I said.
“So it is also a fact that John committed suicide, that the child was murdered, and that John was responsible. That is the your central problem, Moe. It is the problem of bees.”
“What?”
“For a very long time it was believed that the laws of physics and aerodynamics indicated that bees could not fly. But bees do fly. We know it. We see them fly. It is an undeniable fact. Just because some answers escape us does not mean there are no answers.”
“Well, try this one on for size, Doc. Days before I found John Tier-ney, someone vandalized my car and left Sashi’s teddy bear with its legs and arms bound exactly like her legs and arms were bound in the pictures. Explain how John managed that one.”
“But I do not have to explain it because it changes none of the essential truths. Bees fly. John Tierney kidnapped and murdered Sashi Bluntstone.”
“You’re quite the philosopher, Dr. Ogologlu. Thanks for your time and the water.” I stood and walked in the direction of the front door.
“If you were my patient, Moe, I would suggest a certain course of treatment for you because I believe you are on the threshold of a very dark place.”
“But I’m not your patient.”
“Precisely. And because you are not my patient, I urge you to follow your questions wherever they may lead.”
“You’re telling me this as a psychiatrist?”
“No, not as a psychiatrist, but as a man who understands that regardless of what I suggest, you will not heed my advice.” He laughed that joyless laugh again. “I am being a realist. I can see that you are determined to do this thing. In all frankness, I hope that you succeed, for I have as much to gain by that success as you. The facts, though, will remain unchanged. My fear, however, is that you will not.”
“So long, then.”
“And to you,” he said.
I slipped back into my running shoes and as I knelt to tie the laces, I thought about bees and about the dark places I’d already been.
THIRTY-FOUR
This time it is her eyes, Sashi’s eyes. They are on me and in the realm of pinned and wriggling, Prufrock is a distant second. Her lids are closed, not squeezed shut, just closed and transparent, a clear reptilian membrane through which her green eyes accuse. She stares down from Tier-ney’s mildewed walls, the black-eyed saints all gone. I hold the hog-tied teddy bear in my arms. I am frozen, unable to move, to look away. Then, a gunshot. A window breaking. My legs working, I run up the stairs. John Tierney, nude but for little girl’s white panties, is dead in his chair. His head impossibly intact, his eyes blackened. I stand in the doorway, pinned again. I unfreeze, step into the room and slip on the blood. I fall through the floor into an ocean of blackness. My eyes won’t close. Above me, I somehow see the headless teddy bear floating just out of reach. I extend my arm. I grope for it and the ocean is gone. Now I am falling through air, endless black air, the wind rushing in my ears. I am falling and falling and falling and…
When you’re twenty and wake up in a sweat, you’ve had too much to drink. At my age, it’s probably lymphoma. Not this time. It hit me as soon as I woke up from my endless falclass="underline" there was more wrong with the accepted version of Sashi’s kidnapping and murder than the panties and the vandalism to my car. In his psychosis, John Tierney had blackened the eyes in every photograph and painting and drawing in his house. Tierney had even done it to paintings in portfolios and photo albums stored in boxes in his attic. Why did he do it? Maybe he did it for the same reason he turned the TV to the wall and cut off the utilities. Maybe it had some quasi-religious significance that only he understood. The reason was beside the point. What he hadn’t done was to blacken the eyes in the pictures of Sashi that were found on top of the altar. Why do it to the paintings and drawings and photos of Sashi that were in the collage on the wall behind the altar, but not to those on the altar?