While this tussle is going on at the door, I decide to give Benita her first test. She’s already announced that she’s here just for me and to ask her anything. Or ask her nothing. It’s entirely up to me. Of course, I’ve heard this so many times at this point I could vomit. It must be, like, Chapter One in the dysfunctional witness/victim textbook.
“Why is there a problem with asking me questions with the word why?” I ask her.
She glances at the prosecutor, who isn’t paying attention to us at all. I’m sure she’s worried about delivering inside information to a teen-age subject. Probably not addressed in the textbook at all.
“Because it implies that you are to blame,” she answers. “You know, like ‘Why did you do such and such?’ Or ‘Why do you think this happened to you?’ Mr. Vega would not ask you a why question. You are not to blame for anything.”
This interests me. I try to remember if the doctor has ever asked me a why question and decide he hasn’t. It never occurred to me that there is doctoring going on by omission, which is bothersome, and a whole new thing to worry about.
The door shuts with a crisp click, and the doctor is on the other side of it. The prosecutor rolls over the doctor’s desk chair, facing me intently.
“OK, Tessie. Sorry about that. I am not at all interested in discussing the case today, so you can relax if that’s on your mind. We probably won’t discuss it next time, either.” He nods at Benita. “Neither of us believes that it’s a good idea to ask you questions about something this traumatic and deeply personal when we have no relationship whatsoever with you yet. So first, we’ll get to know each other. I also want to assure you that I am completely prepared to go into court with your memory exactly as it is.”
This is not the impression I have from the doctor at all. He’s a seesaw, for sure, but always subtly pushing. Sometimes I think he is purposely trying to confuse me.
Now I have to wonder who is telling the truth. It makes my head hurt. I decide to turn the tables and ask Mr. Vega a question. He’s clearly a control freak, too.
The Benadryl has set me free. I just don’t care.
“Why,” I ask, “are you so sure this man is guilty?”
Tessa, present day
I’m staring at the stupid plastic heart again, half-expecting it to start beating.
It’s just Jo and me. I’m the first to arrive even though it took two frantic hours to decide the appropriate outfit to wear to meet Hannah’s grieving mother, who probably hopes part of her dead daughter is now living inside me. Of course, it turns out that she is living in me, but I don’t want to tell her that. It also turns out that the proper outfit for this event is a crocheted sweater, brown leather skirt, boots, and my mother’s dangling pearls, which I have never hooked around my neck before today.
“The heart is cool, huh?” Jo pulls it off the shelf, snaps open the box, and hands it to me like it is a rubber dog toy. It feels like a rubber dog toy. My instinct to take it was automatic, as is the one to fling it across the room. I hand it back gingerly.
“Is it real?”
“Yes. Preserved through plastination. I did it myself.”
So I wasn’t wrong about that part. Still, I can’t believe that Jo, my hero, my good guy, is being so cavalier.
“Want to hear the story?” She glances at her watch. This is apparently her idea of a good way to distract me for the next ten minutes.
I shake my head, but her head is bent down while she’s placing the heart back in its little customized stand. “My grandmother and I were driving to my aunt’s the night before Thanksgiving on a dark county road in Oklahoma. The deer darted out before I could slam on the brakes.”
A deer. OK. Feeling better.
“It was a nasty clunk,” she continues. “My grandmother and I were both OK. But I wanted to make sure the deer was dead before we drove off. I wasn’t going to leave him on the side of the road dying. But when I got to him, it was pretty clear the car did the job. Before I could decide what to do with the deer, three different pickups had pulled over to the side of the road. Three good ole boys passing by, and all three of them want to take the deer off my hands. I notice one of them has a sharp knife hanging off his belt.”
A distressing turn of events. The heart, back to being a question mark.
“I told the guy with the knife that I’d choose him to keep the deer if he let me borrow his knife. So he hands over the knife and I cut out the deer’s heart.”
Grimm’s fairy tale, Oklahoma-style. I’m nauseated and relieved at the same time.
“Did these truckers… have any idea you are a forensic scientist?” I interject. “Did they know why you wanted the heart?” Did you know why you wanted the heart?
“I don’t remember if it came up. They were focused on deer meat.”
“And you brought the heart… back to your grandmother in the car and put it… where?”
“A cooler.”
“And you brought it to… Thanksgiving?” I didn’t ask if the pumpkin pie and Cool Whip had to make room.
“My aunt was pretty distressed when she ran out to welcome us and saw the bashed-in hood and blood all over me. We had a good laugh about it.”
There’s something else niggling at me. “How were you going to kill the deer if he was alive?”
“I didn’t know. Maybe strangle him with my shoelace. No matter what, he was going to be dead when I left him.”
This is the Jo I know. And another one I didn’t.
There’s a knock on the door, and a student in a lab coat pokes her head in.
“Dr. Jo, the cops are here. I put them in the conference room. The front desk is sending up the family now. Bill called to say that the Stein family has officially rejected his request to be there but wanted to be sure you and Tessa knew the mother is bringing a psychic along with them.”
None of this appears to ruffle Jo in the least. After all, left alone on a black Oklahoma road with her grandmother, three hulking strangers, and a knife, all she’s thinking about is cutting out the heart of a deer.
“You ready?” Jo asks me.
Two detectives, one brother cop, one mother, one psychic-all waiting in grim silence around a conference table in a claustrophobic room whose only adornments are a stained coffeepot, a stack of Styrofoam cups, and a brown box of Kleenex that sits untouched in the middle of the table. The fresh-paint smell is so strong it stings my throat. Except for the brother, painfully young and official in full dress uniform, I couldn’t in a million years distinguish who was who. No weepy red eyes. No crystal balls or flowing peasant shirts. No other uniforms or badges.
A man in Wrangler’s and a tie immediately stands to shake Jo’s hand, as does a woman around fifty, with the most motherly, kind face in the room. Detective No. 1 and Detective No. 2.
I drop into a chair, wishing to be anywhere else on earth.
I turn my attention to the woman across from me, who immediately reaches over to cover my hands. Her hair is stiff with hair spray, and aggravated with bold blond streaks. Her eyes are the bluest I’ve ever seen. Rachel Stein, I assume. Except I can tell from a frown on Detective No. 2’s face that she isn’t.
“Ma’am, we’ve asked that you not participate in this meeting unless asked to. You are here strictly as a courtesy to the family.”
She draws her hands back reluctantly and winks, as if we are on the same team. I am repulsed. I want back whatever she thinks she has snatched out of me with her moist psychic paw.
The detective is droning out introductions while my eyes are now fixed, by process of elimination, on Hannah’s mother-a pale, sharp-faced woman in her sixties. Jo had told me she was a middle school English teacher. She has that no-nonsense air about her. Except she brought a psychic.