He fingered his eyeglasses. “I don’t know. I suppose they did.” He bent and picked a piece of foam from the floor. Rolled it between his fingers and drew himself up a bit.
“Holly used to do most of the cleaning. Twice a year I’d bring a professional crew in, but she did it the rest of the time. She liked it, was very good at it. I guess I’m still expecting her to… walk right in with a dustrag and start tidying.”
His voice broke and he walked quickly to the door. “Please excuse me. Take as long as you like.”
I let him go and turned my attention back to the room, trying to conjure the place as it had been when Holly had been alive.
Not much to work with. Those white walls- no nails or brackets, not a single hole or darkened square. Young girls typically used their walls as plaster notebooks. Holly had never hung a picture, never tacked a pennant, never softened her life with rock-poster rebellion or calendar imagery.
What had she dreamed about?
I kept searching for some sign of personal imprint but found none. The room was cell-like, assertively barren.
Did her father realize this wasn’t right?
I recalled the back room, barren except for his toys.
His own place of refuge, cold as a glacier.
Emptiness as a family style?
Daughter as charwoman, handmaiden to the cottage tycoon?
The room began to close in. Had she felt it too? Living here, sleeping here, feeling her life drift by?
Ike- anyone who cared, who’d taken the time to care- might have been seen as a liberator. Prince Charming.
What had his death done to her?
Despite what she’d become- what she’d done- I felt for her.
I heard Milo’s voice in the back of my head. Getting mushy on me, pal?
But I wanted to believe that if Milo were to come to this place, he’d feel something too.
The door to the closet was partially ajar. I opened it and looked in. The poison/perfume of camphor. More clothing- not much of it, mostly casual knits, T-shirts, sweaters, a couple of jackets. The pockets had been slit, the linings shredded. Faded colors.
More heaps of clothing on the floor.
Bargain-bin quality. Daughter of a tycoon.
Above the clothes pole were two shelves. The lower one bore two games. Candy Land. Chutes and Ladders.
Preschool amusements. Had she stopped playing at the age of six? Apart from that, nothing. No books, no fan magazines, no stuffed animals or mugs printed with fatuous phrases. No clear-plastic things that snowed when you turned them upside down.
I closed the closet door and turned back to the ravaged room, tried to picture the way it had looked before the police had come. The damage made it seem more human.
Cot and a dresser. Blank walls. A radio.
The word cell kept flashing.
But I’d seen jail cells that looked more inviting.
This was worse. Punitive.
Solitary confinement.
I had to get out of there.
18
Burden was back in his office, sitting at one of the computer workstations. I wheeled one of the secretary chairs into the center of the room and sat down. He touch-typed rapidly for a few moments before looking up, dry-eyed.
“So. What’s the next step, Doctor?”
“Holly didn’t seem to have many interests.”
He smiled. “Ah, the room. You’re thinking I isolated her. For some ulterior motive.”
Exactly what I’d been thinking, but I said, “No. Just trying to get a picture of the way she lived.”
“The way she lived. Well, it wasn’t like that, believe me. Though I can understand your thinking it was. I’ve done my reading on child psychology. So I know all the theories of child abuse. Isolating the designated victim in order to maximize control. But that had nothing to do with us. Not even remotely. That’s not to say we’re… we were social butterflies. As a family or individually. Our pleasures have always been solitary. Reading, good music. Holly loved music. I always encouraged discussions of current events, various cultural debates. Howard, my firstborn, took to that. Holly didn’t. But I always tried to provide the same sorts of things other children seemed to like. Toys, games, books. Holly never showed any interest in any of it. She hated to read. Most of the time the toys stayed in the box.”
“What did she do for fun?”
“Fun.” He drew out the word as if it were foreign. “Fun. For fun, she talked to herself, created fantasies. And she was inventive, I’ll grant her that. Could take a piece of string or a rock or a spoon from the kitchen and use it as a prop. She had a terrific imagination- genetic, no doubt. I’m highly imaginative. However, I’ve learned to channel it. Productively.”
“She didn’t?”
“She simply fantasized, went no further with it.”
“What were her fantasies about?”
“I have no idea. She was a demon for privacy, liked to close her door tight even when she was very young. Just sit on the floor or on her bed, talk and mumble. If I prodded her to get fresh air, she’d go out into the backyard and settle down on the grass, and start in doing exactly the same thing.”
I said, “When she was younger, did she rock back and forth or try to hurt herself?”
He smiled like a well-prepared student. “No, Doctor. She wasn’t autistic- not remotely. If you talked to her she’d respond- if she felt like it. There was no echolalic speech, nothing psychotic. She was just very self-sufficient. From an amusement standpoint. She made her own fun.”
I watched the constantly blinking phones and self-shifting computer images. His fun.
“And she never kept any sort of diary?”
“No. She hated paper- threw everything out. Hated clutter, was a bug on neatness. Probably another example of genetics. I plead guilty to that kind of precision.”
He smiled, not looking guilty at all.
I said, “I saw only two games in her closet. What happened to all the toys and the books?”
“When she was thirteen she did a massive housecleaning, took everything out of her room except for her radio and her clothing, and piled it up in the hall- very neatly. When I asked her what she was doing, she insisted I get rid of it. So, of course, I did. Gave it to Goodwill. There was no arguing with Holly when she made her mind up.”
“She didn’t want anything to replace what she’d gotten rid of?”
“Not a thing. She was quite happy with nothing.”
“Nothing but Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land.”
“Yes. Those.” A split-second flinch. I snared it as if it were a moth.
“How old was she when she got those two games?”
“Five. They were bought for her fifth birthday by her mother.”
He flinched again, forced a smile. “You see, we’ve got an insight already. What do you make of it? An attempt on her part to cling to the past?”
His tone was clinical, detached- the classic intellectualizer. Trying to turn the interview into a chat between colleagues.
I said, “I’m not much for interpretation. Let’s talk about her relationship with her mother.”
“A Freudian approach?”
Trying to keep any edge out of my voice, I said, “A thorough one, Mr. Burden.”
He didn’t say anything. Turning slightly, he tapped his fingers on the keyboard. I waited, watched the letters and numbers on the monitor do their freeway crawl.
“So,” he finally said, “I guess this is what people in your field would call active listening? A strategic silence. Holding back to get the patient to open up?” He smiled. “I read about that too.”
I spoke with deliberate patience. “Mr. Burden, if this is uncomfortable for you, we don’t have to continue.”
“I want to continue!” He sat up sharply, without grace, and his glasses slid down his nose. By the time he’d righted them he was smiling again. “You’ll have to excuse my… I suppose you’d term it resistance. This whole thing has been… very difficult.”