asked.
“Not necessarily,” I said.
Dr. Dawe clapped his hands together again, the sound as loud as buckshot in the still room.
“Well, this has just been great! Can’t think of the last time I had so much fun.” He stood, held out his hand. “But, all good things must come to an end. Mr. Kenzie, we thank you for regaling us, and hope it won’t be too many seasons before you and your minstrels return this way again.”
He opened the door and stood by it.
His wife stayed where she was. She poured herself some more tea. She was stirring the sugar in when she said, “Do take care, Mr. Kenzie.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Dawe.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Kenzie,” she said in a lazy singsong as she poured her cream.
Dr. Dawe led me into the foyer and I noticed the photographs for the first time. They were on the far wall, and would have been to my left as I’d entered, but because I’d been blocked on either side by the Dawes and moving so quickly, blinded by their niceness and pep, I hadn’t seen them.
There were at least twenty of them, and all were of a small dark-haired girl. Some were baby pictures, some were of the child as she grew. A younger Dr. and Mrs. Dawe were in most of them, holding the child, kissing the child, laughing with the child. In none of the pictures did the child appear to be older than four.
Karen was in some of the pictures, very young and with braces, but always smiling, her blond hair and perfect skin and aura of pristine, upper-middle-class perfection seeming to carry, in hindsight, a kind of piercing desperation. There was a tall, slim young man in several of the photos as well. His hair was thinning and the hairline itself rose rapidly in a succession of photos as the child grew, so it was hard to guess the man’s age except to place him somewhere in his twenties. The doctor’s brother, I assumed. They had the same squeezed-heart shape to their faces and bright, displaced gaze, always searching, rarely remaining still, so that the young man in the photos gave one the sense that the camera had consistently captured his image as he was about to look away from it.
I peered up at them. “You have another daughter, Doctor?”
He stepped up beside me and placed a light hand under my elbow. “Will you need directions back to the Pike, Mr. Kenzie?”
“How old is she now?” I asked.
“That’s a terrific cashmere,” Dr. Dawe said. “Neiman’s?”
He turned me to the door.
“Saks,” I said. “Who’s the young guy? Brother? Son?”
“Saks,” he repeated with a pleased nod. “I should have known.”
“Who’s blackmailing you, Doctor?”
His gleeful eyes danced. “Drive carefully, Mr. Kenzie. Lotta nuts on the road.”
Lotta fucking nuts in this house, I thought, as he gently pushed me out the door.
9
Dr. Christopher Dawe stood in his doorway and watched me walk to my car, which was parked behind a forest-green Jaguar at the base of his driveway. I don’t know what he expected to accomplish by this; maybe he was afraid if he didn’t play sentinel, I’d dash back into the house, raid the bathroom for those little perfumed balls of soap. I climbed in the Porsche and felt paper crackle under me as I sat behind the wheel. I reached under my butt, pulled a piece of paper off the seat, and placed it on the passenger seat as I backed out into the street. I pulled past the house as Dr. Dawe shut the front door, drove up a block to a stop sign, and looked at the note on the seat beside me:
THEY LIE .
WESTON HIGH SCHOOL ASAP.
The handwriting was cramped, scratchy, and feminine. I drove another block and pulled my Eastern Massachusetts map book from under the passenger seat, flipped through it until I found the page devoted to Weston. The high school was half a grid from where I sat, roughly eight blocks east and two north.
I drove over there through the sun-dappled streets and found Siobhan waiting under a tree by the far corner of the tennis courts that fronted the parking lot. She kept her head down as she hurried over to the car and climbed in the passenger seat.
“Take a left out of the lot,” she said, “and drive fast, yeah?”
I did. “Where we going?”
“Just away. This town has eyes, Mr. Kenzie.”
So we left Weston, Siobhan keeping her small head down and chewing the flesh around her fingernails. She would glance up occasionally to tell me to take a right here, a left there, and then lower her head again. When I’d start to ask her questions, she’d shake her head as if somehow we could be overheard in a convertible traveling forty miles an hour down half-empty roads. A few more quick directives from her, and we pulled into a parking lot behind Saint Regina’s College. Regina ’s was an all-female, private Catholic college, where the middle class and pious tucked away their daughters in hopes they’d somehow forget about sex. It had the opposite effect, of course; when I’d been in college we’d made several Friday night pilgrimages out here and came home mauled and a bit dazed by the ferocity of good Catholic girls and their pent-up appetites.
Siobhan stepped out of the car as soon as I pulled into a space, and I killed the engine and followed her along a path that led around to the front of the main dorm quad. We walked for a bit in silence, passed through the still and empty campus like survivors of a neutron bomb; the grass and trees were parched and yellowing. The wide chocolate buildings and low limestone walls seemed stricken somehow, as if without voices to bounce off their facades, they grew weak, threatened to melt in the heat.
“They are evil people.”
“The Dawes?”
She nodded. “He thinks he’s a god, he does.”
“Don’t most doctors?”
She smiled. “I guess so, yeah.”
We reached a small stone bridge that overlooked a tiny pond gone silver in the heat. Siobhan chose a spot at the midway point to place her elbows. I joined her and we looked down into the water, our reflections staring back up at us from the metallic surface.
“Evil,” Siobhan said. “He enjoys torture-mental torture. He enjoys showing people how intelligent he is and how dumb they are.”
“And with Karen?”
She leaned her small upper body over the rail of the bridge. She stared at her reflection below, as if uncertain how it got there and who it belonged to. “Ah,” she said as if the word were an expletive and shook her head. “He treated her like a pet. He called her his ‘dim little bulb.’” She pursed her lips and exhaled heavily. “His sweet dim little bulb.”
“Did you know Karen well?”
She shrugged. “Since I came there thirteen years ago, sure. She was a nice person until near the end.”
“And then?”
“Then,” she said flatly, her eyes on a gaggle of mallards as they waddled down the slope on the far side of the river. “Then she was a touch insane, I’d think. Ah, she wanted to die, Mr. Kenzie. So, so much.”
“Wanted to die or wanted to be saved?”
She turned her head toward me. “Aren’t they the same thing? Wishing to be saved? In
“It’s what?” I said.
