How angry?
I didn’t know that yet.
The second motive was the attention and power she was enjoying being the only reporter on the story.
Going against her claim of innocence was that she purported to be devastated over the deaths of four men she’d known, and yet she wasn’t willing to do anything to help prevent the next crime.
But neither was I.
And that didn’t make me a suspect.
Was she dangerous? Did she have mood swings? Inappropriate responses? Lapses in concentration? Inability to focus? The answers would help me make an educated guess, but she’d have to be in therapy with me for a few more weeks before I could assess whether she was psychotic. Psychotic enough to be a serial killer?
And there was the issue of her being female. Male criminals raped and killed serially. They easily had sex without forming connections. (Even healthy men.) But women were much less likely to engage in sexual athletics. Despite themselves, they made connections. The women in the group had attested to that when they’d bemoaned the fact that they couldn’t go to Philip Maur’s memorial service.
Certainly women could kill. A wife could murder her husband in a crime of passion if he betrayed her, but for a woman to kill four men she cared about, one after the other, because they didn’t pay her as much attention as she would have liked?
It wasn’t impossible, but it was highly improbable. Especially a woman who didn’t exhibit signs of serious psychosis.
Certainly Betsy was involved on some level, but how? And what could I do about it? She had not exhibited any behavior to lead me to suspect that she was going to harm herself. She had not named any man other than the men who were already dead. I could only go to the police if I feared for her or had information suggesting she was going to harm someone else.
The law was clear on this.
That I had a group of patients who knew men who were being targeted was just on the wrong side of the line. I had already encouraged them to go to the police.
Now I would have to try even harder to convince Betsy to tell the truth.
Forty-Six
My ex-husband had called me early on Sunday morning and told me what had happened to Dulcie over the weekend in Boston so that I’d be prepared.
I waited for her to come home that night. Sitting in the den without the TV or stereo on, I listened for the click of her key, holding my breath. Aching for what my thirteen-year-old little girl had gone through.
I had to hold myself back from rushing over to her and wrapping her up in my arms when she opened the door. I waited as her footsteps echoed in the foyer and stopped sounding as she walked down the carpeted hall to her room.
Only then did I get up and go to her.
She was sitting on her bed, the suitcase at her feet. Eyes red-rimmed, her hair lank.
“Hi, honey,” I said. Walking over to the bed, I sat down next to her, put my arm around her back and kissed her cheek. She buried her face in the hug. I didn’t know that she was crying until I felt the reverberation of the sobs on my fingertips.
“I want to quit the play,” she whispered through her tears.
“I know, sweetheart.”
Her small head was nestled under my chin. I wanted to kill my ex-husband for persuading me to let Dulcie do this. Life would offer enough pain, I had told him. Can’t our child have her whole childhood before she confronts the vagaries of the professional world?
Dulcie was crying so hard it hurt my chest.
I had held my mother like this, but then I was the little girl and she the adult. It hadn’t mattered; her heart had still been broken by the audience. By the love she needed so badly but could never have gotten from strangers watching her act on a stage.
“Dulcie, I love you.”
She nodded and hiccuped. “I want to quit,” she said again.
“I know.”
And I wanted her to quit. I wanted to call the director of the show and tell him that I was sorry but Dulcie had decided that she didn’t want to continue with the play. I knew exactly the tone of voice I’d use so that he would understand it wasn’t a conversation we were having. I was just giving him information and he would have to accept it. There were two understudies, and both girls were prepared to go on. And there was no reason that either of them wouldn’t do just as good a job as Dulcie. And her school would take her back. They’d agreed to that. She’d been tutored the entire time. She’d get up to speed quickly. The director would try to convince me that Dulcie needed to stay. Or maybe he’d be relieved that she wanted to pull out. How dare he think that? Dulcie was perfect for the part of Mary Lennox.
I wanted to laugh. My pride and my need to protect her were mixed up with each other.
I hugged her tighter, knowing that I wasn’t going to do anything that I wanted to do.
“It’s dinnertime. I made your favorite.”
“Made it?” Dulcie looked at me askance from under swollen eyelids. She was depressed but she was still her irreverent self. I had never been quite so happy to hear her sarcasm.
“Yes. First I purchased it at EAT, then I brought it home, put it on the stove and turned on the heat.”
“That’s not making it, Mom, that’s heating it.”
I laughed. She laughed and then fresh tears spilled out of her eyes, wetting her cheeks all over again.
We sat at the table in the kitchen and Dulcie proved that, no matter how upset she was, it didn’t affect her appetite.
“I thought I was fine.”
I nodded at her, listening to what happened in Boston on Saturday night.
“I wasn’t even nervous. I mean, we’d had so many rehearsals. I really knew my lines. And all the songs. And I wasn’t scared.”
I nodded again.
“But when I stood up there. I don’t know. It just stopped working. I couldn’t find anything. Everything was wrong. It was the most awful thing. And they wrote about it. How nervous I was. Even unprofessional.”
She started to cry again and I had to hold back from crying with her, in sympathy. She pushed the plate away from her, laid her head on the table, and started to sob as if it had just happened all over again.
I stroked my daughter’s head but didn’t say anything. I wanted to give her the space to feel the full brunt of the pain. Professionally, I knew that talking to her, trying to dilute the embarrassment and disappointment, would only dam it up.
When she picked her head up a few minutes later, the tracks of tears on her face made my stomach seize up. Of course I would let her quit the play. There was no reason that my child had to go through anything this terrifying. The world would offer up enough pain for her later that I couldn’t fix.
This was something I could stop.
“I want to quit.”
“Okay, let’s talk about it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to quit.”
That wasn’t okay, as much as I wished it were.
“Dulcie, we have to talk about it. It’s much too big a decision not to talk out.”
“Dad said I could.”
“And I’m not saying you can’t. We don’t have to have the conversation now, but we do have to have it eventually.” I cursed my ex-husband for giving her the okay without talking to me. Of course she could quit, but it wasn’t good for her to make a decision like that without understanding why she wanted to and what it would mean.
I stood up and filled the kettle. “I’ll make some hot chocolate. We can watch a movie.”
“I hate that powdered hot chocolate. Instant!” She spat the word out as if she could taste the stuff and wanted it out of her mouth.
Inwardly, I sighed. She was acting her age. I couldn’t blame her and I didn’t want her to act any other age. But that didn’t mean I could cope with it. Of every aspect of motherhood, the one that I had the hardest time with was the idea that I had to adore every facet of my daughter’s personality. My daughter was stubborn and willful and sarcastic, and when she exhibited all those parts of her personality at once, it was as if a demon child had moved into her body and taken over.