When She Was Bad(85)

‘Well, she certainly wasn’t angry or agitated, if that’s what you were hoping to hear,’ said the Head tartly. She glanced over towards Ed and Dan, and I wondered if she’d picked up on the tension between us.

‘In fact, she was unusually calm, almost like she was in a trance.’

Wandering outside to the playground, we spotted Laurie straight away. She was playing with another little girl in the sandbox at the far end. We watched them for a few moments. They were deeply involved in their game which involved digging tunnels with their hands through a mountain of sand.

‘She looks very settled,’ said Dan. ‘Can you point out the child she had the altercation with?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call it that,’ said the Head, her lips pulled together like a drawstring purse. ‘But that’s her – the one she’s playing with now.’

I glanced over at Ed just in time to catch on his face a fleeting flash of satisfaction. The Wendy house incident must have momentarily rocked his confidence, but here she was, calm and sociable and conciliatory.

Later, after Jana arrived to collect Laurie, we took them both to a nearby diner. If the little girl thought it was odd to be seated in a booth surrounded by strange adults, she didn’t show it. As I watched her, I felt a chill creeping up through me. There was something so preternaturally contained about her. Shouldn’t a four-and-a-half-year-old be asking questions, like who Dan was? There was no squirming, no fidgeting, no ‘can we go now’? Just this blank conformity. Where was she hiding it – all the anger, the grief, the confusion about what was happening to her and where her old life had gone?

‘Do you like school?’ Dan asked Laurie. He was sitting opposite her and his height made his head curl down across the table towards hers. He looked uncomfortable, as if he wasn’t used to talking to small children.

Once, in our first year of studying together, Dan made a clumsy pass at me. I’d been so surprised I hadn’t properly recognized it as a pass until I’d got home. We’d bumped into each other in the library and gone for a coffee and he’d pressed his leg up against mine under the table while staring at me purposefully. For a few moments I’d let it stay there while the heat travelled through my body until I felt I would ignite. Then I moved my leg away and suggested we get the bill. That was two years before, when I had very definite ideas about romance. Back then, I was looking for the big love story, the charismatic stranger. I didn’t learn until it was way too late, until long after my failed marriage to Johnny, that love doesn’t ride into town and sweep you off your feet, but sometimes looks at you in a certain way and you realize it was there all the time, right under your nose. Anyway, I digress. The point was, whatever my definition of love, Dan Oppenheimer wasn’t it.

At the time of the Kowalsky assessments, he was dating an attractive undergraduate from Stanford who came to stay every other weekend. The rumour was that Dan himself had his sights set on a teaching post at Stanford. This case might get him there.

‘School’s OK, thanks,’ said Laurie, without looking up from her ice cream, which came in one of those tall glasses which meant she had to dig around with a long spoon to dislodge the chocolate from the bottom.

‘And how about the other children?’ Ed was sitting at the end of the booth. ‘Have you made friends there?’

‘Yeah.’ She scraped her spoon down the side of the glass.

Ed tried again.

‘I heard you had a little falling-out with Sandy.’

Laurie shrugged.

‘Want to tell us about that, Laurie?’

In contrast to Ed’s practised manner, Dan’s question sounded clumsy. Laurie looked up. Blinked. Then went back to her ice cream.

‘It’s all OK now. I said sorry and she said that’s OK so that means we are friends again. We don’t have to talk about it any more.’

‘That’s what they’re told at school,’ explained Jana, reaching a slender arm around Laurie’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. ‘They’re told that once a situation has been dealt with and everyone has said sorry and apologies have been accepted, they need to move on and put it behind them.’

‘’S not important anyway,’ said Laurie. ‘’S all finished with.’ She carried on fishing around with her spoon in the bottom of her glass, even though there was no ice cream left.

‘Laurie?’ I asked her diagonally across the table. ‘When you and Sandy were having your . . . falling-out in the Wendy house, can you describe how you were feeling? Were you very cross with Sandy?’