Last summer was her first visit here since I had left the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office and moved away from the city where I was born and where I had returned after my divorce. Lucy is my only niece. At ten she was already doing high-school-level science and math. She was a genius, an impossible little holy terror of enigmatic Latin descent whose father died when she was small. She had no one but my only sister, Dorothy, who was too caught up in writing children’s books to worry much about her flesh-and-blood daughter. Lucy adored me beyond any rational explanation, and her attachment to me demanded energy I did not have at the moment. While driving home, I debated changing her flight reservations and sending her back to Miami early. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
She would be devastated. She would not understand. It would be the final rejection in a lifelong series of rejections, another reminder she was inconvenient and unwanted. She had been looking forward to this visit all year. I’d been looking forward to it, too.
Taking another sip of wine, I waited for the absolute quiet to begin untangling my snarled nerves and smoothing away my worries.
My house was in a new subdivision in the West End of the city, where the large homes stood on wooded one-acre lots and the traffic on the streets was mostly station wagons and family cars. The neighbors were so quiet, break-ins and vandalism so rare, I couldn’t recall the last time I had seen a police car cruise through. The stillness, the security, was worth any price, a necessity, a must, for me. It was soothing to my soul on early mornings to eat breakfast alone and know the only violence beyond my window would be a squirrel and a blue jay fighting over the feeder.
I took a deep breath and another sip of wine. I began to dread going to bed, dreading those moments in the dark before sleep, fearing what it would be like when I permitted my mind to be still, and therefore unguarded. I could not stop seeing images of Lori Petersen. A dam had broken and my imagination was rushing in, quickening the images into more terrible ones.
I saw him with her, inside that bedroom. I could almost see his face, but it had no features, just a glimpse of a facelike flash going by as he was with her. She would try to reason with him at first, after the paralyzing fear of waking up at the feel of cold flat steel to her throat, or at the chilling sound of his voice. She would say things, try to talk him out of it for God knows how long as he cut the cords from the lamps and began to bind her. She was a Harvard graduate, a surgeon. She would attempt to use her mind against a force that is mindless.
Then the images went wild, like a film at high speed, flapping off the reel as her attempts disintegrated into unmitigated terror. The unspeakable. I would not look. I could not bear to see any more. I had to control my thoughts.
My home office overlooked the woods in back and the blinds were typically drawn because it has always been hard for me to concentrate if I’m offered a view. I paused in the doorway, quietly letting my attention drift as Lucy vigorously tapped away on the keyboard on top of my sturdy oak desk, her back to me. I had not straightened up in here in weeks, and the sight of it was shameful. Books leaned this way and that in the bookcases, several Law Reporters were stacked on the floor and others were out of order. Propped against a wall were my diplomas and certificates: Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, et al. I’d been meaning to hang them in my office downtown but had yet to get around to it. Sloppily piled on a corner of the deep blue T’ai-Ming rug were journal articles still waiting to be read and filed. Professional success meant I no longer had the time to be impeccably neat, and yet clutter bothered me as much as ever.
“How come you’re spying on me?” Lucy muttered without turning around.
“I’m not spying on you.” I smiled a little and kissed the top of her burnished red head.
“Yes, you are.” She continued to type. “I saw you. I saw your reflection in the monitor. You’ve been standing in the doorway watching me.”
I put my arms around her, rested my chin on the top of her head and looked at the black screen filled with chartreuse commands. It never occurred to me before this moment that the screen had a mirror effect, and I now understood why Margaret, my programming analyst, could hail by name people walking past her office though she had her back to the door. Lucy’s face was a blur in the monitor. Mostly I saw a reflection of her grown-up, tortoise-rimmed glasses. She usually greeted me with a tree frog hug, but she was in a mood.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t go to Monticello today, Lucy,” I ventured.
A shrug.
“I’m as disappointed as you are,” I said.
Another shrug. “I’d rather use the computer anyway.”