“Michael Shaw is dead, not your quarry. And being a suspect in a securities fraud does not mean one suspends the usual doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“Oh.” She slumped back in her chair, running her fingers through the unraveling fringe on the arms. She had thought she was on to something.
“If it’s any comfort, I doubt Shaw treated the man you’re investigating.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Before he went into private practice, Shaw worked under a mutual friend at Hopkins. He treated rapists, the hard-core cases-repeat offenders, pedophiles.”
“Really?” As Carl had told her, over and over again, serial killings had a sexual component.
“He started with the program as a young resident, back in the 1980s. You may have heard of the study. About a hundred and fifty offenders were given Depo-Provera.”
“I thought that was a contraceptive.”
“It’s derived from the female hormone progestin and is used as a contraceptive, yes. But it also was employed for what is known as chemical castration. The program was somewhat misrepresented in the press, I’m afraid. Depo-Provera was only one component, along with traditional therapy and behavior modification. But the media focused on one patient, the so-called ski-mask rapist, who volunteered for treatment. Unfortunately, he stopped taking the drugs and was arrested a few years ago for raping a three-year-old girl. Very sad.”
“But this program was up and running twenty years ago?” She did the math in her head. Billy Windsor had “died” at age seventeen, but that had been fifteen years ago. Could he have disappeared in order to enter the program, or a subsequent version? Had Becca Harrison’s murder been a sex crime? No, they were boyfriend and girlfriend, suitably puppylike in their devotion, according to the old woman on Notting Island. Yet Michael Shaw was on Billy Windsor’s list. No coincidences, Luisa O’Neal had said. No, that was Freud. Luisa had said nothing was random.
What if Billy Windsor had sought treatment from Michael Shaw in order to control his impulses? Could he have been that self-aware, that analytical? It seemed impossible, yet that would explain why the deaths had stopped, why there was the long gap between Hazel Ligetti’s murder and Dr. Shaw’s hit-and-run.
And it would explain why they had started again. Billy Windsor had given up on modern psychiatry.
“Why are you smiling that rueful little smile, Tess?”
“Am I?” A half-dozen minute hands snapped to twelve, signaling her freedom. “I’m just thinking about what I want for lunch, now that we’re done.”
“Do you see yourself as a godlike figure?”
The question comes back to him, unbidden. Why is he thinking about that now, when he has so much that he must fix, so many unanticipated problems, so much that has gone wrong?
But he doesn’t even have time to track that thought as he normally would. He’s vigilant about his own mind, knows it as well as he knew the marshy inlets back home and navigates it with the same delicacy. Only two people have ever known him as well as he knows himself, and one is lost to him forever.
As for the other-he cannot believe they went to his mother, frightening her so that she walked three miles, crossing two highways, until she found a pay phone where she felt safe. “What was she talking about, Billy? Are they DNR? Do they know what you’re doing?”
He was at once relieved and horrified. At least they had not revealed all his secrets to his mother; at least she was still safe, still innocent. He told her that the visit meant nothing: The girl was a little crazy, maybe even a pathological liar. He would take care of it. In the meantime, his mother was not to open the door to anyone without asking for a badge or ID, and she was not to talk to anyone without a lawyer present.
She began to cry, telling him she couldn’t do this again, couldn’t go without seeing him. He reminded her that they had managed in the early years, when she was still on the island, and they would manage now. No one could keep them from seeing each other.
But beneath his soothing voice and calm assurances, he was furious.
How dare she go to his mother? How had they found his name, the one thing he had kept for himself? Who had betrayed him? Luisa O’Neal would not dare speak his name, even if she had known it. But they knew whom they sought when they visited Notting the second time. Fuck June Petty, with her big yapping mouth, her love of gossip, and her never-ending rivalry with all the women on the island. She had dined out on this story-the expression had never been more apt-for years, smacking her lips and shaking her head in mock sympathy for a woman she had never liked. He supposed June Petty would say it was ironic, if she knew what irony was: Drey Windsor helped her son’s girlfriend escape her terrible father, only to see that son kill himself in despair over her disappearance.
But it had been his mother’s idea-he appeals to some invisible jury-a brilliant idea, at that. After all, she had not needed to be a particularly good actress to portray the grief of a mourning mother. He was dead to her all those years-the “good” years, as he thinks of them now, the years of going to school and building his business and finding release with the occasional prostitute. Strange, it was just before his mother joined him on the mainland that the pull began. Not because of her, but because things were finally settled. Anchored at last, he was free to search for the love he craved, to create the love he needed.
But when he persuaded his mother to leave Harkness, it was as if he took her away from the source of her strength and power. On the mainland, she is weak. She is dying. Not physically but emotionally. His father’s accelerated death had shown him how a parent can disappear before one’s eyes, and he knew he would someday have to face this with his mother. But he had expected that her mind would be unchanged, that she would always be sharp and shrewd, capable in a crisis.
After all, she was the one who knew what they must do when he came home sobbing, overwhelmed by what had happened. It had been her idea to weigh Becca down, let his boat drift on the tide, and then take him across the bay dressed in women’s clothes. If anyone had noticed the boat that arrived at Saint Mary’s that night, they would have seen two women on the dock. She had put him ashore with all the cash she could manage to find, hugged him, and headed home to wait for the knock at the door and the announcement that her son’s skiff had been found with a note, indicating he had killed himself because Becca Harrison had told him she was running away to be an opera singer. Which was all true, after a fashion. Becca was gone, and he couldn’t live without her.
The thing is, she’s right, his new girl, his oh-so-clever girl, she’s gotten to him. Whatever happens, he cannot risk seeing his mother for the time being. So she has taken something from him, punished him. He who has given her so much. Doesn’t she know her debt to him? The others didn’t understand, but then the others were not capable of accepting his gifts. He knows that now. He chose poorly, time and time again, and finally despaired of ever getting it right.
He had tried to explain this once, not in so many words, but the doctor had proved to be even dumber than the women he had tried to help.
The doctor. That’s why the stupid question is ringing in his ears, after all this time. “Do you see yourself as a godlike figure?”
“Of course not.”
The doctor had persisted. “Do you think of yourself as superior to others, better?”
“No,” he had said. “Not at all. Are you listening to me? I identify with Pygmalion. He’s a mortal.”
“It’s a Shaw play. I’ve always been partial to Shaw.” The doctor gave a self-conscious, meant-to-be-deprecating smile. “For the most superficial reasons, I admit.”
“Yes, I know all about his Pygmalion. The basis for My Fair Lady, unfortunately.”