“Sounds very well thought-out.”
“Oh, it is. And very lucrative.”
Emphasizing the last word to let me know he meant megabucks. A cottage industry tycoon.
That didn’t mesh with the worn carpet, the thirty-year-old furniture, the dirty Honda. But I’d met other rich men who didn’t care to show it. Or were afraid to show it and hid behind a Just Plain Folks facade.
Right now he was hiding something else.
I said, “Let’s talk about Holly.”
He looked surprised. “Holly. Of course. Is there anything else you need to know about me?”
The naked narcissism threw me. I’d thought his self-absorption was a means of delaying painful questions. Now, I wasn’t sure.
I said, “I’m sure I’ll have lots of questions about all your family members, Mr. Burden. But right now I’d like to see Holly’s room.”
“Her room. Makes sense. Absolutely.”
We left the office. He opened a door across the hall. More notepaper walls. Two windows, covered by Venetian blinds. A thin mattress lay on the floor, parallel to a low wooden bedframe. The mattress had been slit open in several places, the ticking peeled back, the foam scooped out in handfuls. A crumpled ball of white bed sheet lay rolled in one corner. Nearby was a pillow that had also been slit and sat in a pool of foam chunks. The only other furniture was a pressed-wood three-drawer dresser below an oval mirror. The mirror glass was finger-smudged. The dresser drawers were pulled open. Some clothing- cotton undergarments and cheap blouses- remained inside. Other garments had been removed and piled on the floor. Atop the dresser sat a plastic clock radio. Its beaverboard back had been removed and it had been gutted, parts spread across the wood.
“Compliments of the police,” said Burden.
I looked past the disarray, saw the sparseness that had pre-existed any police intrusion. “What did they take with them?”
“Not a thing. They were after diaries, any sort of written record, but she never kept any. I kept telling them that but they just went in and pillaged.”
“Did they say you were allowed to clean it?”
He fingered his eyeglasses. “I don’t know. I suppose they did.” He bent and picked a piece of foam from the floor. Rolled it between his fingers and drew himself up a bit.
“Holly used to do most of the cleaning. Twice a year I’d bring a professional crew in, but she did it the rest of the time. She liked it, was very good at it. I guess I’m still expecting her to… walk right in with a dustrag and start tidying.”
His voice broke and he walked quickly to the door. “Please excuse me. Take as long as you like.”
I let him go and turned my attention back to the room, trying to conjure the place as it had been when Holly had been alive.
Not much to work with. Those white walls- no nails or brackets, not a single hole or darkened square. Young girls typically used their walls as plaster notebooks. Holly had never hung a picture, never tacked a pennant, never softened her life with rock-poster rebellion or calendar imagery.
What had she dreamed about?
I kept searching for some sign of personal imprint but found none. The room was cell-like, assertively barren.
Did her father realize this wasn’t right?
I recalled the back room, barren except for his toys.
His own place of refuge, cold as a glacier.
Emptiness as a family style?
Daughter as charwoman, handmaiden to the cottage tycoon?
The room began to close in. Had she felt it too? Living here, sleeping here, feeling her life drift by?
Ike- anyone who cared, who’d taken the time to care- might have been seen as a liberator. Prince Charming.
What had his death done to her?
Despite what she’d become- what she’d done- I felt for her.
I heard Milo’s voice in the back of my head. Getting mushy on me, pal?
But I wanted to believe that if Milo were to come to this place, he’d feel something too.
The door to the closet was partially ajar. I opened it and looked in. The poison/perfume of camphor. More clothing- not much of it, mostly casual knits, T-shirts, sweaters, a couple of jackets. The pockets had been slit, the linings shredded. Faded colors.
More heaps of clothing on the floor.
Bargain-bin quality. Daughter of a tycoon.
Above the clothes pole were two shelves. The lower one bore two games. Candy Land. Chutes and Ladders.
Preschool amusements. Had she stopped playing at the age of six? Apart from that, nothing. No books, no fan magazines, no stuffed animals or mugs printed with fatuous phrases. No clear-plastic things that snowed when you turned them upside down.
I closed the closet door and turned back to the ravaged room, tried to picture the way it had looked before the police had come. The damage made it seem more human.
Cot and a dresser. Blank walls. A radio.
The word cell kept flashing.
But I’d seen jail cells that looked more inviting.
This was worse. Punitive.
Solitary confinement.
I had to get out of there.
18
Burden was back in his office, sitting at one of the computer workstations. I wheeled one of the secretary chairs into the center of the room and sat down. He touch-typed rapidly for a few moments before looking up, dry-eyed.
“So. What’s the next step, Doctor?”
“Holly didn’t seem to have many interests.”
He smiled. “Ah, the room. You’re thinking I isolated her. For some ulterior motive.”
Exactly what I’d been thinking, but I said, “No. Just trying to get a picture of the way she lived.”
“The way she lived. Well, it wasn’t like that, believe me. Though I can understand your thinking it was. I’ve done my reading on child psychology. So I know all the theories of child abuse. Isolating the designated victim in order to maximize control. But that had nothing to do with us. Not even remotely. That’s not to say we’re… we were social butterflies. As a family or individually. Our pleasures have always been solitary. Reading, good music. Holly loved music. I always encouraged discussions of current events, various cultural debates. Howard, my firstborn, took to that. Holly didn’t. But I always tried to provide the same sorts of things other children seemed to like. Toys, games, books. Holly never showed any interest in any of it. She hated to read. Most of the time the toys stayed in the box.”
“What did she do for fun?”
“Fun.” He drew out the word as if it were foreign. “Fun. For fun, she talked to herself, created fantasies. And she was inventive, I’ll grant her that. Could take a piece of string or a rock or a spoon from the kitchen and use it as a prop. She had a terrific imagination- genetic, no doubt. I’m highly imaginative. However, I’ve learned to channel it. Productively.”
“She didn’t?”
“She simply fantasized, went no further with it.”
“What were her fantasies about?”
“I have no idea. She was a demon for privacy, liked to close her door tight even when she was very young. Just sit on the floor or on her bed, talk and mumble. If I prodded her to get fresh air, she’d go out into the backyard and settle down on the grass, and start in doing exactly the same thing.”
I said, “When she was younger, did she rock back and forth or try to hurt herself?”
He smiled like a well-prepared student. “No, Doctor. She wasn’t autistic- not remotely. If you talked to her she’d respond- if she felt like it. There was no echolalic speech, nothing psychotic. She was just very self-sufficient. From an amusement standpoint. She made her own fun.”