“You didn’t do up your shoelaces,” she said.
Frank shrugged, standing. “I’ll be fine. He seems like a nice fella.”
You have no idea, Anna thought.
“Are you going to watch TV in your room?”
“I think so. Maybe work on the machine a bit.”
“Dad, you already did, like, an hour of rowing this morning.”
“Oh, right.”
She accompanied him as he went into the main part of the house and walked to the bottom of the stairs. She looked at the coffee he was holding, his untied shoelaces, and that flight of stairs, and could imagine the disaster that was waiting to happen.
“Hang on, Dad,” she said.
Anna knelt down and quickly tied his shoes. “You don’t have to do that,” he protested.
“It’s no problem,” she said. “I don’t want you tripping on the stairs. Hand me your coffee.”
“For Christ’s sake, I’m not an invalid,” he said angrily.
Anna sighed. “Okay.”
But she stood there and watched as he ascended the stairs, one hand still gripping the coffee mug, the other on the railing. When he’d reached the second floor he turned and looked down at her.
“Ta da!” he said again.
Anna gave him a sad smile, then went back through the house to her office. She found Gavin standing around the back of her desk where her closed laptop sat, admiring the books on her shelves, running his finger along the spines. Gavin wore a pair of faded jeans, sneakers, and a tight-fitting black T-shirt. In addition to being thin, he was scruffy haired and no taller than five-six. From the back, he could have been mistaken for someone in his early to mid teens, not a man who’d soon turn thirty.
“Mr. Hitchens,” she said formally. “Please take a seat.”
He spun around innocently, then dropped into the same chair Paul Davis had been in moments earlier. “Your father’s nice,” he said. “He told me he used to work in animation. And he said” — Gavin grinned — “that it’s time you found yourself a man. But don’t worry, I don’t think he was looking at me as a prospect.”
“Gavin, we need to talk about—”
“But he called you Joanie. Is that your middle name?”
“That was my mother’s name,” Anna White said reluctantly. She did not like revealing personal details to clients. And that was especially true of Gavin Hitchens.
“Oh,” he said. “I see. Is your mother...”
“She passed away several years ago. Gavin, there are certain ground rules here.” She grabbed a file sitting on her desk next to the computer. “You are here specifically to talk with me. Not my father, not any of my other clients. Just me. There need to be boundaries.”
Gavin nodded solemnly, like a scolded dog. “Of course.”
Anna glanced at some notes tucked into the file. “Why don’t we pick up where we left off last time.”
“I don’t remember where that was,” Gavin said.
“We were talking about empathy.”
“Oh, right, yes.” He nodded agreeably. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I know you think I don’t feel it, but that’s not true.”
“I’ve never said that,” Anna replied. “But your actions suggest a lack of it.”
“I told you, I’ve never hurt anyone.”
“But you have, Gavin. You can hurt people without physically harming them.”
The young man shrugged and looked away.
“Emotional distress can be scarring,” she said.
Gavin said nothing.
“And the truth is, someone could have been hurt by the things you did. There can be consequences you can’t predict. Like what you did with Mrs. Walker’s cat.”
“Nothing happened. Not even to the cat.”
“She could have fallen. She’s eighty-five, Gavin. You locked her cat in the attic. She heard him up there, dragged a ladder up from the basement, and climbed it to the top to open the attic access panel to rescue him. It’s a wonder she didn’t break her neck.”
Gavin lowered his head and mumbled, “Maybe it wasn’t me.”
“Gavin. Please. They weren’t able to prove you did that, not like with the phone call, but all the evidence suggests you did it. If we’re going to be able to work together, we have to be honest with each other. You get that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said, looking suitably admonished and continuing to avoid her gaze. His eyes misted.
“You’re right, I did the cat thing. And the phone call. I know I need help. It’s why I agreed to come here and see you. I don’t want to do these things. I want to get better. I want to understand why I do what I do and be a better person.”
“Gavin, you were ordered to see me. It was part of the sentencing. It kept you out of jail.”
His shoulders fell. “Yeah, I know, but I didn’t fight it. I heard you were really good, that you could fix me. I’m happy to come here as often as it takes to make me a better person.”
“I don’t fix people, Gavin. I try to help them so they can fix themselves.”
“Okay, sure, I get that. It has to come from within.” He nodded his understanding. “So how do I do that?”
Anna took a breath. “Ask yourself why.”
“Why?”
“Why would you hide a lonely old woman’s cat? Why phone a still-grieving father claiming to be his son who died in Iraq?” Anna paused, then asked, “What would make a person do something like that?”
Gavin considered the question for several seconds. “I know,” he said slowly, “how those actions might be viewed as cruel or inappropriate.”
Anna leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Gavin, look at me.”
“What?”
“I need you to look at me.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, allowing Anna to fix her eyes on his. “What is it?”
“Are there any other incidents you haven’t shared with me?”
“No,” he said.
“Any that you’ve contemplated but haven’t done?”
Gavin kept his eyes locked on hers. “No,” he said. Then he smiled. “I’m here to get better.”
Three
Driving home, Paul was pleased Dr. White did not actively discourage his idea of delving more into the Kenneth Hoffman business, rather than retreating from it. He’d come to believe that the nightmares rooted in his near-death experience — “near-death” in the most literal sense, since he had almost died — would persist as long as he allowed the event to consume him.
There needed to be a way to turn that horrific night into something that did not own him. Paul could not let his life be defined by finding two dead women in the back of a car, followed by a blow to the head. Yes, it was horrendous. It was traumatic.
But there needed to be a way for him to move forward.
Maybe there was a way to apply what he did for a living to the situation. Paul taught English literature. He’d studied everything from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Chaucer to Chandler, but more recently, his course on some of the giants of twentieth-century popular fiction, Nora Roberts, Lawrence Sanders, Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Mario Puzo, had proved to be the biggest hit with students, sometimes to the chagrin of his colleagues and the department head. His point was, just because something was embraced in large numbers did not necessarily make it lowbrow. These writers could tell a story.
That was how Paul thought he could approach the Hoffman business. He would take a step back from it, attempt to view it with a measure of detachment, then analyze it as a story. With a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Paul knew much of the middle and the end. He had, literally, walked into the middle of it.