tragedy there…”
Mrs. Dawe studied me over her teacup and I took a sip from my own before I spoke. Dr. Dawe had been right, it was excellent tea, cream or no cream. Sorry, Mom.
“I’m sure we all are,” I said, “but Karen’s decline seemed, well, drastic.”
“And you base this opinion on intimate knowledge?” Dr. Dawe said.
“Excuse me?”
He waved his cup at me. “Were you and my stepdaughter intimate?”
I gave him what I’m sure was a confused narrowing of my eyes, and he raised his eyebrows up and down gleefully.
“Come on, Mr. Kenzie, we don’t speak ill of the dead around here, but we know Karen’s sexual activities were, well, rampant in the months before she died.”
“How do you know that?”
“She was coarse,” Carrie Dawe said. “She spoke with sudden explicitness. She was drinking, using drugs. It would have been sadder if it weren’t so cliched. She even propositioned my husband once.”
I looked back at Dr. Dawe and he nodded and placed his teacup back on the coffee table. “Oh, yes, Mr. Kenzie. Oh, yes. It was a veritable Tennessee Williams play every time Karen dropped by.”
“I didn’t see that part of her,” I said. “I met her before David was hurt.”
Carrie Dawe said, “And how did she strike you?”
“She struck me as kind and sweet and, yes, maybe a little too innocent for the world, but innocent just the same, Mrs. Dawe. Not the type of woman who’d jump naked off the Custom House.”
Carrie Dawe pursed her lips and nodded. She looked off past me, past her husband, to a point somewhere high up on the wall. She took a sip of tea that was as loud as boots dropping through autumn leaves.
“Did he send you?” she said eventually.
“What? Who?”
She turned her head back, held me in those cool green eyes. “We’re tapped out, Mr. Kenzie. Mention that, won’t you?”
Very slowly, I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She gave me a chuckle so light it sounded like a wind chime. “I’m sure you do.”
But Dr. Dawe said, “Maybe not. Maybe not.”
She looked at him and then they both looked at me and suddenly I was aware of a polite fever in their gazes that made me want to bug out of my skin, throw my skeleton through the window, go clacking like mad down the streets of Weston.
Dr. Dawe said, “If you’re not here to extort, Mr. Kenzie, then why are you here?”
I turned to him and the light in his face seemed more like sickness. “I’m not sure everything that happened to your daughter in the months before she died was accidental.”
He leaned forward, all grave seriousness. “Is it a ‘hunch’? Something in your ‘gut,’ Starsky?” The manic twinkle returned to his eyes and he leaned back. “I’ll give you forty-eight hours to solve the case, but if you can’t, you’ll be walking a beat in Roxbury come winter.” He clapped his hands together. “How was that?”
“I’m just trying to find out why your daughter died.”
“She died,” Carrie Dawe said, “because she was weak.”
“How’s that, ma’am?”
She gave me a warm smile. “There’s no mystery here, Mr. Kenzie. Karen was weak. A few things didn’t go her way, and she cracked under the strain. My daughter, whom I gave birth to, was weak. She needed constant reassuring. She needed a psychiatrist for twenty years. She needed someone to hold her hand and tell her things would be all right. That the world worked.” She held out her hands as if to say Que sera, sera. “Well, the world doesn’t work. And Karen found that out. And it crushed her.”
“Studies have shown,” Christopher Dawe said with his head tilted toward his wife, “that suicide is an inherently passive-aggressive act. Have you heard that, Mr. Kenzie?”
“I have.”
“That it’s meant not so much to hurt the person who kills herself, but to hurt those she leaves behind.” He poured some more tea into his cup. “Look at me, Mr. Kenzie.”
I looked.
“I am a cerebral man. It has brought me no small measure of success.” His dark eyes flashed with pride. “But, being a man of intellect, possibly I’m less attuned to the emotional needs of others. Possibly I could have been more emotionally supportive of Karen as she grew up.”
His wife said, “You did a fine job, Christopher.”
He waved her off. His eyes bore into my own. “I knew Karen never got over the death of her natural father, and in hindsight, maybe I should have worked harder to assure her of my love. But we’re flawed creatures, Mr. Kenzie. All of us. You, me, Karen. And life is regret. So my wife and I will, I promise you, regret often over the coming years the things we didn’t do with our daughter. But that regret is not for the consumption of others. That regret is ours, sir. As this loss is ours. And whatever your odd quest is, I don’t mind telling you, I find it kind of sad.”
Mrs. Dawe said, “Mr. Kenzie, may I ask you a question?”
I looked back at her. “Sure.”
She placed her teacup back on its saucer. “Is it necrophilia?”
“What?”
“This interest in my daughter?” She reached out and wiped her fingers along the top of the coffee table.
“Ah, no, ma’am.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Then what is it, sir?”
“In all truth, ma’am, I’m not really sure.”
“Please, Mr. Kenzie, you must have some idea.” She smoothed the tails of her shirt against her thighs.
I felt awkward suddenly, felt the size of the room shrink around me. I felt powerless. To try to sum up my desire to right wrongs whose victim was well beyond benefiting from my efforts seemed impossible. How do you explain the pulls that dictate and often define your life in a few concise sentences?
“I’m waiting, Mr. Kenzie.”
I raised a helpless arm to the absurdity of it. “She struck me as someone who played by all the rules.”
“And what rules are those?” Dr. Dawe said.
“Society’s, I guess. She worked the job, she opened the dual checking account with her fiance and saved for the future. She dressed and spoke the way Madison Avenue tells us we’re supposed to. She bought the Corolla when she wanted the Camry.”
“You’re losing me,” Karen’s mother said.
“She played by the rules,” I said, “and she got stomped anyway. All I want to know is if any of that stomping wasn’t accidental.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Carrie Dawe said. “Do you make much money tilting at windmills these days, Mr. Kenzie?”
I smiled. “It’s a living.”
She considered the tea service to her right. “She was buried in a closed casket.”
“Ma’am?”
“Karen,” she said. “Buried in a closed casket because what there was to look at wasn’t fit for public display.” She looked up at me and her eyes shone wetly in the gathering gray of the room. “Even her method of suicide, you see, was aggressive, meant to hurt us. She robbed her friends and family of the ability to view her one last time, to mourn her in the correct custom.”
I had absolutely no idea what to say to that, so I kept quiet.
Carrie Dawe gave me a weary backward flutter of her hand. “When Karen lost David and then her job and finally her apartment, she came to us. For money. For a place to live. She was quite obviously doing drugs by this point. I refused-not Christopher, Mr. Kenzie, I-to subsidize her self-absorption and drug use. We continued to pay her psychiatrist’s bills, but I determined that she should otherwise learn to stand on her own two feet. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake. But in the same circumstances, I think I would elect to follow the very same course again.” She leaned forward, beckoned me to do the same. “Does that strike you as cruel?” she
