“Before I found out he was a lawyer.”
“I thought he was investigating me for murdering Caleb. I don’t know if I really thought that. But she thinks I killed him. She really thinks that.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
He cocked his head, interested. “Well? Did you?”
“What?”
“Did you do it?” he said patiently. “Ariel Jardell, you have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Did you, Ariel Jardell, murder your innocent baby brother?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I did it in my sleep.” They looked at each other for a moment, and then they both began to laugh.
Sixteen
In Dr. Reuben Gintzler’s office one sat on neither couch nor chair. The diminutive psychiatrist provided his patients with a tufted yellow chaise lounge, an uncomfortable piece of furniture on which one could not quite sit and not quite lie down. Roberta had occasionally entertained the thought that this was all according to the man’s master plan — he wanted to keep you off-balance. At other times she decided he was not so much calculating as he was oblivious to such matters.
She was on the chaise now, had been on it for half an hour. She’d been guarded at first, her monolog punctuated by long silences, but then her guard had slipped some and she’d let herself run off in several directions at once, talking about the state of her marriage and the death of her son, about Jeff and Ariel and the picture from the attic and the mysterious attack upon Caleb’s room. She found herself tugging at a conversational thread, drawing it out until it hit a snag, then switching abruptly to another and repeating the process.
She became silent now, her eyes lowered and half-lidded. There was no sound in the room but the ticking of Gintzler’s wall clock, a Regulator pendulum-type in an unvarnished oak case. Clocks like that had hung in schoolrooms when Roberta was a girl, and she wondered if they were there still. Perhaps they had all been rescued to tick out their lives in shrinks’ offices, letting neurotics know when their fifty minutes were up.
“Mrs. Jardell?”
She turned to look at Gintzler. He was poking at a pipe with a wire cleaner, running it through the stem and shank. He never smoked the pipes, only played with them incessantly.
“You are very scattered today,” he said. “Your thoughts run all over the place. Your son, your daughter, your husband, your lover. You came here as if you were at a crisis, and indeed you behave as though this were so, but instead you discuss a great many areas of concern without touching on any crisis. I wonder why.”
She shrugged, said nothing.
“I wonder what really bothers you, Mrs. Jardell.”
“All of the things I’ve been talking about.”
“Oh? I wonder if this is really so. You have mentioned so many unrealistic concerns. Ghosts which form in the corners of rooms. An old black woman who mutters occult secrets in dialect. A painting which seems to have some arcane significance. A mysterious spirit which haunts your gas range and extinguishes its burners. A flute which evidently is not to your liking musically. A curious force, no doubt a poltergeist, which rearranges articles in your dead son’s room. Stairs which creak, windowpanes which rattle. It would seem—”
“It would seem as though I’m crazy,” she said. “So I guess I’m in the right place.”
“It would seem as though you are using all of these phenomena to mask what is really bothering you.”
“And what would that be?”
“Can’t you tell me, Mrs. Jardell?”
And then she was talking about Ariel again, talking about Jeff’s attempt to learn more about her parentage, defending her desire to know Ariel’s ancestry. “Environment isn’t everything, is it?” she demanded. “Don’t genes count for anything? They determine what a person looks like. Why shouldn’t they have a lot to do with what’s on the inside?”
“This is a recent concern, Mrs. Jardell?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I have never heard you allude to it before.”
“No.”
“But now your natural son has died and you react by showing increased concern for your daughter. You mask this concern by saying it is for her character. You are afraid to worry about Ariel’s possibly dying because that is unthinkable. To think it might cause it to happen. We do not speak the word cancer because that might cause us to have it, and so it is with other unmentionable topics. So your mind rejects the notion that Ariel might die as your son died, and instead you worry that there is something wrong with her, just as perhaps you worry now that something was wrong with your son, that some genetic flaw you passed on to him led to his being taken from you. You are shaking your head. Are you so certain what I suggest is unsupported by the facts?"
“Yes.”
“There is guilt involved, you know. You betrayed your husband with another man. That guilt was always present, even though you have never permitted yourself to experience it, to deal with it. Perhaps there is a belief within you that your son was conceived in guilt, that his magical death was your punishment for adultery.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Perhaps it is illogical. What we believe is not always what we ought to believe. Perhaps you feel guilt over Caleb’s death—”
“No, I don’t!”
“You feel you should have been able to prevent it—”
“No.”
“You even feel you caused it.”
“I feel she caused it.”
“Yes, so you have said. But of course that makes no sense. I feel you have erected a whole superstructure to support this delusion in order to keep yourself from fearing for your daughter’s life. You—”
“Dammit, she’s not my daughter!”
The vehemence of her outburst surprised her. Around her the silence became heavy, oppressive. The clock ticked some more of her hour away. She lit a cigarette, dropped her lighter back into her purse. Calmly now, she said, “Did you ever happen to read a book called Helter-Skelter? About the Manson family?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Did you read it?”
“I am familiar with the book. I have neyer read it.”
“He had children with most of those glassy-eyed little girlfriends of his. Charles Manson did. Of course it was always tricky to know just who fathered which child because all of those people did everything to everyone, they behaved like animals. But there were quite a few children born. And according to the book most of the children wound up being placed for adoption after the arrests were made and the Family broke up. The authorities just swept up the children and offered them for adoption.”
“And?”
Her eyes were intense. “Can you imagine? A man and woman decide to adopt a child and without having the slightest idea they take the daughter of two murderers into their home. Can you imagine that? Can you?”
“Mrs. Jardell...”
Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t seem to get hold of herself.
“Mrs. Jardell. You are not seriously suggesting that perhaps your Ariel was one of those children? Because the dates are wrong. And surely those children would have been placed with families in California, or at least in that part of the country. You can’t suspect—”
“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Don’t order a straitjacket just yet, all right? I know she’s not one of those kids. I was just giving an example of what could happen.”
“And what is it that you think could happen, Mrs. Jardell?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What could happen now? What is the threat?”
She tried to concentrate. “You think I’m afraid that Ariel might die.”
“Your son was born out of adultery and he died. Now you have resumed the affair. And now you expect punishment for it.”