It took me a while but I explained Mrs. Miller’s odd nuptial delusions to Diane, who had many questions, some psychological in nature, more having to do with wedding logistics, owning all those outfits, and buying all those gifts.
I had answers for a paltry few of the questions in any of the categories, psychological or matrimonial. After multiple prods on her part I tried to refocus her by saying, “I only saw the Millers for that one session. That’s all. Most of my energy went into trying to understand her history and then trying to prepare the two of them for a whole different kind of treatment than they’d come in the door thinking they’d get.”
“Receptions, too?” Diane asked, ignoring my pleas of ignorance.
I told her, yes, that Rachel had also attended the receptions. I shared the story about the one at the Boulderado where she’d been busted by the sheriff’s deputy.
Diane had more questions. While I protested my continued ignorance about most things matrimonial, Diane chided me that it had been a very long session I’d had with the Millers, and I should know more than I was letting on.
Once Diane had-finally-exhausted her queries about Mrs. Miller and her serial wedding attendance, I had a question of my own. It was the question that I had wanted to ask Diane since the moment she told me that Hannah had done an intake with the girl who was probably Mallory. “Do you think it’s possible that Mallory went to Vegas to see her mother? Based on what Hannah told you, would she have done that? Could that be what this is all about?”
“It’s possible. Hannah stressed that the girl missed her mother. May even have said it a couple of times, so you have to wonder. Hannah focused on the mother/daughter relationship and the conflicts between the girl and her dad.”
“Might explain the Christmas Day stomachache,” I said. “Her holiday anxiety, missing her mom.”
“Psychosomatic?”
“Why not? If she was worried enough to seek a therapist on her own, she could certainly be worried enough to develop symptoms.”
She paused after a couple more steps. We had walked all the way down to Eighteenth Street by then, almost a full ten blocks from our cars. I stopped and turned back to the west. The late December sun was just a slash of brilliance above the Divide and pedestrian traffic was thinning out on the Mall.
“What was the mother like, Alan? Could she have come and taken Mallory?” Diane asked.
“I suppose that’s possible. Anything is, but-”
“The cops would check that first, right? They would have gone to Vegas and checked with Mallory’s mother to see if her kid was there, to see if the mom had been in Boulder?”
“Yes,” I said. I was also thinking that the Boulder cops who went to Vegas would probably have found a truly disturbed woman.
Diane casually tapped me on the shoulder and handed me the second shopping bag. Like a fool, I took it.
We started walking back in the direction of the mountains. The western sky was much brighter than the eastern sky had been. She asked, “So are you ready now?”
Segue or no segue, I knew exactly what she was talking about. We really had been friends a long, long time. “Sure, as ready as I’ll be. So what else did the girl tell Hannah?”
12
The moment the sun completed its descent behind the Rockies the day turned from pleasantly brisk to downright cold. What I had been considering a light breeze felt decidedly like an icy wind. Diane had seen it coming-now that I was schlepping both of her shopping bags she was able to shove her mittened hands deep into her jacket pockets for additional warmth.
My gloves were in my car and the flesh on my hands was the color of the fat on a slab of uncooked bacon.
“The kid was concerned that her dad was ‘up to something’ or ‘into something.’ She’d left Hannah with the impression that she didn’t like it, whatever it was. The girl was feeling like she had to do something about it, or else. That kind of thing.”
“ ‘Up to something’? That’s a quote?”
“Close as I can remember. It was a casual consultation-I didn’t exactly memorize it. I didn’t know what was about to happen.”
“ ‘Or else’? What did that mean?”
Diane shrugged. “I should have asked. I didn’t ask. She also had some friend trouble, too, was conflicted about some guy she was seeing.”
“Boyfriend?”
“I guess.”
“It felt like typical adolescent stuff to you?”
“At the time it did.”
“And the nature of what the girl’s father was up to?”
“Hannah didn’t know.”
“Precipitant?”
“See, that’s the thing. I asked Hannah that, too. Hannah felt there was some urgency for the girl, but couldn’t get the kid to admit to anything.”
“A secret?”
“I wish I knew.”
“The holidays?”
“Hannah didn’t stress that part. I suppose it’s possible.”
“The police should know all this,” I said. “Boulder’s two most high-profile recent…”
I didn’t know what to call Hannah’s death and Mallory’s disappearance. Diane did. “Crimes. The word you’re looking for is ‘crimes.’ ‘Felonies’ would work fine, too.”
“Whatever. The police would want to know that there’s a possible connection-a big connection-between Hannah’s death and Mallory’s disappearance. But nobody knows about it but you,” I said.
“And you,” she reminded me.
“Mostly you. It’s too bad you can’t tell the police.”
She skipped for one step. I think that’s what she did, anyway-just one little schoolgirl skip. Why? Who knew? “I bet that twerp Slocum would love to know what the two of us know, wouldn’t he? He’d probably cuff me again and throw me in the slammer if he knew what I was keeping from him.”
I was thinking that not only would Detective Slocum like to know, but so would Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Geraldo Rivera, and Oprah. Not to mention the Enquirer and the Sun and the Star.
And Bill Miller.
I was also thinking that Diane’s continuing animosity toward Detective Jaris Slocum, though completely understandable, was one of the ways that she was postponing her grief about Hannah’s death. That moment, however, wasn’t the time to confront her with that particular reality. Years of experience with her had taught me that with Diane I had to pick my spots.
“Raoul wants me to sue Slocum. Did I tell you that?”
“For what?”
“He doesn’t care. He calls him ‘that little fascist.’ ‘Let’s sue that little fascist, baby,’ he tells me. He hates it when I say it, but sometimes he’s such an American.”
I said, “Raoul has too much time on his hands. He needs to go start a new company or something.” Diane’s husband was a legendary Boulder entrepreneur. When he wasn’t nurturing somebody else’s start-up tech company, he was busy casting the bricks to create a new one of his own.
As we crossed back over Fifteenth to the herringbone pathways of the Mall, Diane asked the money question: “So what do I do about all this?”
“Did Hannah leave any notes?”
“She named me in her will to handle the details of closing up her practice should anything happen to her. But I haven’t found any notes about that session. Zip, nada.”
Few therapists show the foresight to make death stipulations in their wills. But Hannah had. I said, “She knew Paul Weinman back when, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she knew Paul.” Paul had been another friend of Diane’s, a psychologist who’d skied into a tree at Breckenridge years before. His sudden death, and the subsequent uncertainty about what to do with his current cases and his practice records, had caused a lot of procrastinating Boulder therapists to make plans for what would happen to their practices in case of their own death.