I said, “I don’t know how truthful Celeste is either, because she also said Laura had seduced their father when she was nine years old. Said he went in Laura’s bedroom almost every night because she lured him in.”
“Oh.”
I said, “She was very beautiful. Her sister said she was a child model. The whole family lived on the money she made modeling.”
“And the father sexually abused her.”
“If what the sister said is true, he did.”
Reba said, “If he molested one child, I’d be surprised if he didn’t molest the sister too.”
With a look of distaste, she took a deep breath and seemed to pull up some invisible page of lecture notes. “Children have instinctive expectations of love and loyalty from their parents. Sexual abuse is the most basic disloyalty, not only from the parent who inflicts it, but from the parent who allows it.”
She took another sip of her drink and set her glass down with a gentle hand.
“The most basic human need is to love and be loved, but we have to be taught how to love by receiving love. Love always includes loyalty. When a child gets neither love nor loyalty from her parents, she grows up with a narcissistic exaggeration of self-love. Even if somebody truly loved her, Laura would have been too emotionally fragile and too involved with herself to seek real intimacy with another person. Instead, she would have focused on being in control so nobody could be in control of her.”
I nodded. “Her sister said she took advantage of people.”
“She wouldn’t have seen it as taking advantage. She would have seen it as being the one in power rather than the helpless one.”
“What about what the sister said about her being a slut and seducing every man she knew?”
Dryly, Reba said, “I doubt she had to work hard to seduce them, but narcissism frequently manifests as control through sexual seduction, especially if there has been sexual abuse in the person’s childhood.”
I swallowed against nausea. “That all sounds terrible.”
“Narcissism is a terrible disorder, and it’s made even worse by the fact that narcissists are always desirable. That’s how they seduce.”
“There wasn’t anything sexual in my feelings for her.”
“Desiring somebody isn’t necessarily sexual. We desire intellectual stimulation from one person, humor from another, spiritual enlightenment from another, all those things are just as seductive as sex.”
“Her sister thinks her former employer killed her. He was a bank president, and Laura worked for him.”
“According to the news reports, she was stabbed.”
“Repeatedly. I was there when the deputy found her, and it was so gruesome that he threw up. Her face was mutilated.”
“After she was dead?”
“How did you know?”
“Pathology is magnetic. One pathology attracts its own kind in a different form. Piqueurism is another personality disorder that basically derives from a need to control. A piqueurist derives deep satisfaction from the power of causing terror.”
My mouth had gone dry. “There was a man stalking her. He’s a nurse who lost his license because they think he may have smothered some old people in a rehab center. Suffocating people would give a psycho a sense of power, wouldn’t it?”
Reba drank the rest of her martini and set her glass down with a sharp click.
“Dixie, I hope you’re not involved in this investigation.”
“I’m not.”
“You say that, but you have a way of—”
“Honest, I’m not involved in any way. I thought I would be, because I felt like Laura’s murder was something that could happen to any woman, and I wanted to see her killer caught. But it’s more complicated than that.”
“That may be the understatement of the century.”
I stood up. “Thank you, Reba.”
“You’re welcome.”
I told Big Bubba goodbye and left. The last I saw of Reba, she was headed back into the house with her martini glass. I had the distinct impression that our conversation had caused her to need a second drink.
Michael and Paco were gone when I got home, but Michael had left a tomato-and-basil pie on my kitchen bar. The day sat heavily on my shoulders, and only the aroma of Michael’s tomato pie kept me from going straight to bed. I poured a glass of Riesling and carried it and the pie out to the table on my porch. A yolk of sun was ankle high above a glassy sea, and the sky was shade-shifting from lambent blue to mango. Pedestrian bird traffic was light on the beach, where a gentle surf was tatting lace edging on the shore. A great egret glided down to my porch railing, pivoted toward the sun, pulled one leg into his skirts and balanced on one foot while the breeze luffed his feathers.
Michael’s pie was delicious—puff pastry, overlapping slices of ripe tomato, dark green basil leaves scattered over the top, good Italian olive oil drizzled on with a sure hand, and a light touch of garlic—exactly the light supper I needed after all the heavy information I’d digested. I ate it while I watched the sun slide down the sky and slip below the sea, sending out shimmering banners of gold and cerise.
The egret flew away with a great flapping of wings, and I sat in the draining light and thought about Laura Halston’s life. And about her death.
If what her nutcase sister had said was true, Laura had been treated as a sex object from the moment she was born. Used and abused by her father, envied and shunned by her mother and sister, and ultimately left alone when her parents died. At seventeen, no longer able to command large fees for being a beautiful child, she’d had to create a world for herself with no tools except her beauty.
It was hard to condemn her for using sexual seduction to keep from feeling helpless. That’s what she’d been programmed to do—it may have been the only thing she knew how to do. I wondered if she had loved Martin, the bank president, or if, as Reba had said, she had never loved anybody because she’d never been loved. I had heard Martin tell her she owed him, but he hadn’t said what she owed him. Was it love? Had Martin loved her and she had rejected him? Could he have been the one who got satisfaction from seeing her terror as he repeatedly stabbed her?
When I’d had dinner with her, Laura had spoken of Celeste as if the two were close, but Celeste had seemed contemptuous of her sister. Had that been grief talking? Old bitter rancor that had never been expressed when Laura was alive that was now boiling over? Or perhaps Laura had been playing a role for me when she spoke of her sister as if they were friends.
Guidry had said Celeste claimed Laura was the one who had reported Martin to the federal authorities for handling buffer accounts for drug dealers. How did Celeste know that? If Laura had told her, wouldn’t that point to a closeness between them? And what had Celeste meant when she said Laura had stolen from Martin? Stolen what?
I thought of Frederick, the nurse, and groaned. Was he just a sick man who preyed on the elderly, or had he been so enraptured by Laura’s beauty when they met in the ER that he became obsessed with her and killed her? If Celeste was to be believed, Laura would never have given an out-of-work nurse a moment of her time because he had nothing she would have wanted. But what about Gorgon, the thuggish guy I’d seen at the Lyon’s Mane? He probably had gobs of money, and he would have been a challenge to a woman who liked to seduce and control. If, in fact, that’s what Laura had liked to do, which nobody knew for sure.
I kept thinking about what Reba had said about their childhood experiences causing Laura and her sister to get kinks in their personalities. But there are millions of people who’ve been abused as children who don’t grow up to be liars and thieves, so what makes one person transcend damage done to her as a child, and another lets it become the central core of who she is?