No one said anything in the car while Karen drove across the West Seattle Bridge toward Amelia’s uncle’s house. Amelia sat on the passenger side, pensively gazing out her window. Jessie was in back with a grocery bag full of food from Karen’s fridge. She’d insisted on fixing dinner for Amelia’s uncle and his family.
A bit taken aback by the idea, Karen had wondered out loud if they’d be intruding on the family’s grief.
“Nonsense, they gotta eat, don’t they?” Jessie had replied while loading up the grocery bag. “You have all the fixings here for chicken tetrazzini-chicken, noodles, Parmesan cheese, sour cream. I’ll whip up the casserole, stick it in the oven, and then you and I can beat a path out of there if it looks like we’re wearing out our welcome.”
Amelia had been inconsolable, sobbing hysterically for twenty minutes until the diazepam had kicked in. She finally slumped back on Karen’s sofa. “I should go see Uncle George,” she murmured, wiping her eyes. “Poor Jody and Steph…”
Sitting beside her on the couch, Karen handed her another Kleenex. “Your uncle asked me to drive you over. I said I’d be glad to.”
Amelia nodded. “Thanks.”
Biting her lip, Karen studied her for a moment. “You-you still haven’t asked how it happened.”
Silent, Amelia stared down at the wadded-up Kleenex in her hand.
“Your Uncle George said you had some kind of premonition.”
Amelia shrugged helplessly. “It was just a feeling-an awful, awful feeling that something was wrong.”
Karen’s heart was breaking for her. “Honey, there’s no easy way to tell you this. They haven’t confirmed it. But it’s possible your dad shot your mom and your aunt, and then he killed himself. They don’t know for sure yet.”
Amelia said nothing. She merely gave out an exhausted sigh, and closed her eyes.
Karen stroked her arm. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
While they’d gotten ready to leave, Amelia had just sat quietly on the sofa. Her voice hadn’t even cracked when she’d left Shane a phone message, explaining she was spending the night at her uncle’s house. She’d told him he could pick up his car at Karen’s. She’d said nothing about her parents’ deaths. “I’ll call you later tonight,” she’d finished up listlessly.
Once they’d climbed inside Karen’s Jetta, Amelia had suggested they take Highway 99 to the West Seattle Bridge. But after that, she hadn’t said anything else.
Karen took her eyes off the road for a moment to look at her now. She was still staring out at the Seattle waterfront and skyline. There was a tiny, sad smile on her face.
“How are you doing, Amelia?” she asked.
She kept gazing out the window at the view from the bridge. “I was thinking about all the trips we took here to Aunt Ina and Uncle George’s house-the Christmases, Thanks-givings, and birthdays. It’s a long drive down from Bellingham, almost two hours.” She traced a horizontal line on the window with her finger. “This bridge was always the landmark, the sign we were almost there. I remember when we were kids, Collin and I used to get so excited crossing this bridge. We loved going to Ina and George’s.” She let out a little laugh. “Last Thanksgiving on our way here, I noticed Collin had way too much product in his hair. He had his window open, but his hair didn’t budge an inch. I could have broken off a piece of it. I remember teasing him, and Mom and Dad were laughing. Collin’s face got red and he started cracking up too. He had the funniest laugh. You should have heard it….”
Still staring out the window, she said nothing for a moment. Then the smile ran away from her face. “That was the last time I drove here with my family. I can’t believe they’re all gone now. I can’t believe I actually could have…” She trailed off and shook her head.
From the backseat, Jessie leaned forward and patted Amelia on the shoulder.
Karen glanced at her on the passenger side. Amelia had her head down. She absently twirled a strand of her hair around her finger-the same nervous tic Haley had had.
Karen remembered Amelia doing that during their very first session.
Someone from Student Health Services at the University of Washington had referred the 19-year-old to Karen. Karen didn’t have much information on her potential new client, except that her track record with therapists hadn’t been too marvelous. She’d been having problems with alcohol and joined this campus group, Booze Busters. That had worked for a while, but she’d fallen off the wagon when her kid brother had drowned three weeks before.
When Karen answered her door for their first session that warm Friday afternoon, she was surprised at how beautiful Amelia was. The soft-spoken, polite girl had wavy black hair and blue eyes. She wore a pink oxford-cloth shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals. She said, “Yes, thank you,” to a bottle of water, and sat at one end of the sofa in Karen’s study. “So-what do you know about me?” she asked.
Karen settled in her easy chair with a notebook and pen. “Not very much, just what they told me at the U’s Student Health Services. Do you know anything about
“Not very much,” Amelia echoed her, a tiny smile flickering on her face. “But I Googled you. Under ‘Karen Carlisle, Counselor, Seattle,’ there were a few links. I found out that you’re thirty-six years old. You graduated with honors from UCLA. You have a master’s in Social Work from the U, and you were a counselor at Group Health for five years before you started counseling on your own. Your name kept coming up in articles about that girl who got killed last month, Haley Something. Was she a client of yours?”
“She was a friend,” Karen answered carefully. “But we’re not here to talk about her.”
“I guess you’re right. This is my hour.” Amelia sipped her water. “Well, I suppose you know I’ve been through a lot of therapists. I’m like a one-session wonder with them.”
Karen shifted a bit in her chair. “Why is that?”
Amelia shrugged. “They were all dorks.”
“Dorks,” Karen repeated.
Amelia nodded. “For example, my Aunt Ina recommended this Dr. Racine, absolutely raved about her. And she turned out to be awful. The whole time I was talking to her, she sat there and stroked this ugly cat in her lap. I don’t think she was even listening. Every once in a while, she just said something like, ‘You own that,’ or ‘That’s valid.’ I mean, spare me.”
“Okay, so that’s one crummy therapist,” Karen said. “What about the others?”
Amelia rolled her eyes. “Well, there was this hippie, who seemed very promising until the end of our first session, when he gave me a homework assignment. He wanted me to go home, get some magazines, and clip out pictures and words that made me feel happy-and pictures and words that made me sad. And then I was supposed to make two posters: a happy collage and a sad collage. So I went home, got some magazines, and found this picture of a little girl waving at someone from a car window. I think it was an auto insurance ad or something. I clipped that out, and cut out the word Good-bye. Then I made a little poster of that and mailed it to him.”
Karen nodded. She was trying to figure out this young woman, who had come across as so vulnerable and sweet when they’d met just ten minutes ago. But she had a smartass streak, too. Karen wondered just how much of what Amelia said was true.
“Then there was this Arab guy-not that it makes any difference. I just couldn’t understand him half the time because his English was terrible. He tried to hypnotize me, and kept screaming at me in his thick accent that I was
“Why was he hypnotizing you?”
Amelia sipped her water. She brushed a piece of lint off the sofa arm. Her focus seemed intent on that. “He was trying to get me to remember stuff about my childhood, before the Faradays adopted me. Didn’t Student Health Services tell you that I was adopted when I was four?”
Karen shook her head. She made a quick note:
“Nope. One of my first therapists was all hot on finding out about them. So my dad tried to get in touch with the adoption agency in Spokane. Turned out the place burned down after the Faradays adopted me. All their records went up in smoke. My folks thought about hiring a private detective to look into it further. I’m sure it couldn’t be too tough tracking down state or county records. I mean, the information’s there, somewhere. Am I right?”
“I suppose,” Karen allowed. “So did they hire a private detective?”
“Nope. They dropped the idea when I dropped the therapist.” She cocked her head to one side and squinted at Karen. “I have a feeling my folks would rather I not know about my biological parents.”
“If that’s true, it’s certainly understandable,” Karen said. “How do you feel? Do you want to know more about
