Draw One In The Dark(65)

"Was?" Mr. Ormson said. His blue eyes, so much like Tom's, were filled with a cooly evaluating look that was nothing like Tom's at all.



She shook her head. "He didn't show up today. I'm assuming he gave up the job. I don't know . . ."



But Mr. Ormson continued looking at her, cooly appraising. "Do you . . . I don't quite know how to ask this question, but I need to—do you have any idea if my son might be involved in illegal activities?"



Oh, Lord, the drugs. Yes, she was fairly sure that Tom was involved in illegal activities. But talking about it to this stranger felt like a violation of trust. Stupid to feel that way, she told herself. Stupid. And ridiculous.



He'd broken confidence with her. He'd been a guest in her house and behaved with utter disregard, with utter—



But she thought of the food left on her shelf. She had expected him to eat it all. She wouldn't have held it against him if he had eaten it all. It must have taken a lot of willpower to control himself and not eat all the protein he could. She, herself, and Rafiel too, had binged shamelessly. But Tom hadn't. And if he'd given in to the drugs later, perhaps he hadn't realized what he was doing? Or perhaps he had but had no other choice?



She looked at Mr. Ormson staring at her. No. Tom was, if nothing else, another shifter, a member of this makeshift family in which she'd ended up plunged suddenly. She owed him that much loyalty, if nothing else. Even if he were really guilty of murder; even if she ended up having to fight him or take him out—he was one of hers. And Mr. Ormson, even if his looks were testimony of a genetic relationship to Tom, was not one of them.



She raised her eyebrows at Mr. Ormson, and he laughed, as if she'd said something very funny. Only the laughter echoed bitter and hollow at the edge of it. "Ah. I see," he said, though she clearly did not. "Let me tell you what I know of my son. Let me explain."



"You don't need—"



"No, please let me, then perhaps you'll understand better what I mean, and that I'm not merely fishing for something that will allow me to put my son away or something equally . . . drastic.



"Tom was never an easy child. No, perhaps I lie there. He was a happy baby, chubby and contented. At least, we had a nanny, but when I was home and the nanny brought him to me, he was usually asleep and sometimes he . . . woke up and looked at me, and smiled." He made a face, worried, as if trying to figure out, now, what those smiles might have meant, and suspecting them of some deeper and possibly bad meaning. "But then he started walking. And he started speaking. The first word he learned was no. And he said no very often over the next fourteen or fifteen years. His teachers told us there was nothing wrong with his mind, but his grades were dismal."



He frowned again and took a quick sip of his espresso, as if it could control the flow of words. "I was going to say the first call from the police station, saying he'd been arrested was a shock, but that isn't true. From nursery school onward, we got calls, from Tom's teachers and supervisors. He'd stolen something. Or he'd broken something. His language violated all the rules of every school that ever took children. He had . . . I think they call it appositional deviational disorder. He couldn't obey and he wouldn't submit to any authority."



Ormson's lips compressed into a bitter line. "By the time he became officially a teenager, I'd run out of options. Counselors and boot camps, and whatever I thought might straighten him out, just made him more violent, more unruly. His mother had left by then. She— I think she couldn't understand him. I couldn't understand him, either, but I had my work. She . . . she found someone else and moved to Florida, as far as she could from us and still remain on the East Coast. And Tom and I settled into a routine. As long as he kept his . . . infractions beneath a certain threshold, I could get him out of jail the same day, and no harm done. I thought . . . I thought he would grow out of it."



Kyrie finished her coffee. For some reason, the story was making her feel sorry for Tom. Oh, it was foolish. It was borderline suicidal to feel sorry for someone like Tom. But in his father's descriptions—it seemed to her, from kids she had known in foster care—she read a desperate desire of Tom's to be seen, to be noticed, to be acknowledged. Oh, she didn't think it could all have been solved with a nice talk by the fire. Life tended not to behave like a Disney special, so much more the pity. She suspected that by the time that Tom had learned to walk, learned to say that all-vital no, the problem was already intractable. But nonetheless it was possible to feel sorry for the man he might have been.



"There was joyriding," Ormson said. "And drugs. And one or two cases of lewd acts in semipublic places."