During the time I’d spent there, the sun had set and I walked out into darkness. It enhanced the feeling of having been away for a long time. Having been on another planet.
An unsettling man. The portrait he’d painted of his daughter was bleak. But instructive.
Living in a cell.
Talking to herself.
Scrubbing everything spotless.
Not autistic, but aspects of her behavior had an autistic flavor: self-absorption to an extent that implied mental disorder.
Creating her own world. Like father, like daughter.
But he’d willed his isolation. Channeled it
Had she encased herself in a bubble only to be trapped within? A victim of genetic insult? Environmental accident? Some incalculable combination of both?
Or had she taken on her father’s life-style of her own free will?
Had she been capable of free will?
Had the purveyor of gadgets manufactured himself a house-cleaning robot- efficient, mechanical, like some high-priced toy out of his catalogue? Adapted her inadequacies and pathology to his needs?
A little too quick on the draw?
Or was I just letting clinical guesswork get the better of me because he wasn’t a likable man?
I reminded myself he was a victim, wanted to feel more sympathy, not the resentment that had grown within me during my incarceration in that cold, empty house.
I realized I was thinking of him, instead of Holly. Taken in by his narcissism.
I forced myself back to the main subject.
Whatever her motivations, an image of Holly Lynn Burden had emerged from the murky ground of the interview.
Early childhood loss.
Repressed anger.
Mental confusion.
Low intelligence.
Low achievement.
Low self-esteem.
Social isolation.
A young woman with no external life and a flood of unknown fantasies swimming through her head.
Dark fantasies?
Stir in a parental attitude that disparaged authority. Disparaged all schools, and one school in particular.
Add a sprinkling of new friendship, snipped cruelly by violence. Buried rage that buds anew. And grows.
Night walks.
Guns in a closet.
Mahlon Burden couldn’t have come up with a better profile of a mass murderer had I dictated it to him.
A profile of a time bomb, ticking away.
19
I got home to a dark, empty house. Over the last few months- the post-Robin months- I’d worked hard at learning to consider that soothing. Worked hard under the tutelage of a kind, strong therapist named Ada Small. Ever the conscientious pupil, I’d applied myself, gaining an appreciation for the value of solitude- the healing and peace that could come from moderate doses of introspection. Not that long ago, Ada and I had agreed to cut the cord.
But this evening, solitude seemed too much like solitary confinement. I switched on plenty of lights, tuned the stereo to KKGO, and cranked up the volume even though the jazz that blared out was some new wave soprano-sax stuff in a bloodcurdling-scream-as-art-form mode. Anything but silence.
I kept thinking about my meeting with Burden. The shifting faces he’d shown during the course of the interview.
The shifting attitudes he’d displayed toward his daughter.
There’d been an introductory display of grief, but his tears had dried quickly in the sanctuary of his computer womb, only to be followed by a shallow lament:
He might have been discussing the loss of a cleaning woman.
Once again I told myself not to judge. The man had been through hell. What could be worse than the death of a child? Add to that the way she’d died- the public shame and collective guilt that even someone like Milo was quick to assign- and who could blame him for retreating, gathering whatever psychological armaments he had at his command?
I let that rationalization settle for a while.
His behavior still bothered me. The detachment when he’d talked about her.
It was as if her weaknesses, her failure to be
I imagined a Burden family crest. Crossed muskets over a field of Straight A’s.
A man used to having his way. She’d upset his sense of organization, had been an affront to his
Using her to clean house. Prepare
Some sort of punishment? Or simply an efficient allocation of resources?
Yet at the same time, against all logic, he was proclaiming her innocence.
Contracting me for… what? A psychological whitewash?
Something didn’t fit. I sat struggling with it. Finally told myself to stop taking my work home. Once upon a time I’d been good at following that dictum. Once upon a time life had seemed simpler…
Suddenly the music was ear-shattering. I realized I’d blocked it out. Now I could barely stand it and went to switch stations. Just as I touched the dial, the saxophonist quit and some Stanley Jordan guitar wizardry came on. Good omen. Time to push all thoughts of the Burden family from my mind.
But my mind was no different from anyone else’s: It abhorred a vacuum. I needed something to fill the space.
Call Linda. Then I remembered her restlessness. Needing to
I realized I was hungry, went into the kitchen and took out eggs, mushrooms, and an onion. Jordan gave way to Spyro Gyra doing “Shake Her.” I cracked eggs, chopped vegetables in tempo. Paying attention in order to get it just right.
I fried up an omelet, ate, read psych journals, and did paperwork for an hour, then stepped onto the skiing machine and pretended I was crossing some snow-filled meadow in Norway. Midway through the fantasy, Gregory Graff’s bearded visage appeared through the sweat-haze, urging me to work harder. Reciting a list of brand-new products that could maximize my performance. I told him to fuck himself and huffed away.
I got off a half hour later, dripping and ready to sink into a hot bath. The phone rang.
Milo said, “So how’d it go?”
“No big surprises. She was a girl with lots of problems.”
