Shut Your Eyes Tight

intensely moody, easily bored, self-centered, intolerant, impatient, and volatile.”

“Quite a profile.”

“That was her brighter side-the relatively harmless Jillian, spoiled and bipolar. Her darker side was something else entirely.” Ashton paused, gazed fixedly at the picture on the wall as if to check the accuracy of his words.

Gurney waited, wondered where this extraordinary commentary was going.

“Jillian…” Ashton began, still looking at the picture, speaking softly now and more slowly. “Jillian was in her childhood a sexual predator, an abuser of other children. That was the chief symptom of the central pathology that brought her to Mapleshade at the age of thirteen. Her more obvious affective and behavioral problems were ripples on the surface.”

He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, then rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger as if to dry them again. His gaze shifted from the picture to Gurney’s face. “Now, do you want to ask your questions, or shall I ask them for you?”

Gurney was happy to let Ashton keep talking. “What do you think my first question would be?”

“If your mind weren’t spinning with a dozen of them? I think your first question, at least to yourself, would be: Is Ashton crazy? Because, if so, that would explain a lot. But if not, then your second question would be: Why on earth would he want to marry a woman with such a disordered background? To the first question, I have no credible answer. No man is a trustworthy guarantor of his own sanity. To the second question, I would say that it’s unfairly slanted, since Jillian had another quality I failed to mention. Brilliance. Brilliance beyond the normal scope of the term. She had the fastest, most facile mind I’ve ever encountered. I am an exceptionally intelligent man, Detective. I am not being immodest, just truthful. You see the chessboard built into this table? There are no chessmen. I play without them. I find it a stimulating mental challenge to play the game in my mind, imagining and remembering the positions of the pieces. Sometimes I play against myself, visualizing the board alternately from the white side and the black side, back and forth. Most people are impressed by that ability. But believe me when I tell you that Jillian’s mind was more formidable than my own. I find intelligence like that in a woman very attractive-attractive in both the companionable and erotic senses.”

The more Gurney heard, the more questions came to mind. “I’ve heard that sexual abusers are often victims of abuse themselves. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“True in the case of Jillian?”

“Yes.”

“Who was the abuser?”

“It wasn’t just one person.”

“Who were they, then?”

“According to an unverified account, they were Val Perry’s crack-addict friends, and the abuse, by numerous perpetrators, occurred repeatedly between the ages of three and seven.”

“Jesus. Are there any legal intervention records, social-service case files?”

“None of it was reported at the time.”

“But when she was finally sent to Mapleshade, it all came out? What about the records of the treatment she was given, statements she made to her therapists?”

“There are none. I should explain something about Mapleshade. First of all, it’s a school, not a medical facility. A private school for young women with special problems. In recent years we have admitted a growing percentage of students whose problems center on sexual issues, especially abuse.”

“I was told that your treatment emphasis is on abusers rather than the abused.”

“Yes-although treatment is not the right word, since we are not, as I said, a medical facility. And the line between abuser and abused is not always as clear as you might think. The point I’m making is that Mapleshade is effective because it is discreet. We accept no court or social-service referrals, no insurance, no state aid, provide no medical or psychiatric diagnoses or treatment, and-this is vitally important-we keep no ‘patient’ records.”

“Yet the school apparently has a reputation for offering state-of-the-art treatment, or whatever you choose to call it, directed by the renowned Dr. Scott Ashton.” Gurney’s voice had taken on a sharper edge, to which Ashton showed no reaction.

“A greater stigma attaches to these disorders than to any other. Knowing that everything here is absolutely confidential, that there are no case files or insurance forms or therapy notes that can be purloined or subpoenaed, is a priceless benefit to our clientele. Legally we’re just a private secondary school with a knowledgeable staff available for informal chats on a variety of sensitive issues.”

Gurney sat back, pondering Mapleshade’s unusual structure and the implications of that structure. Perhaps sensing his uneasiness, Ashton added, “Consider this: The feeling of security that our system offers makes it possible for our students and their families to tell us things that they would never dream of divulging if the information were going into a file. There’s no source of guilt and shame and fear deeper than the disorders we deal with here.”

“Why didn’t you reveal Jillian’s horrendous background to the investigation team?”

“There was no reason to.”

“No reason?”

“My wife was killed by my psychotic gardener, who then escaped. The task of the police is to track him down. What should I have said? Oh, by the way, when my wife was three years old, she was raped by her mother’s crazed crackhead friends? How would that help them apprehend Hector Flores?”

“How old was she when she made the transition from victim to abuser?”

“Five.”

“Five?”

“This area of dysfunction always shocks people outside the field. The behavior is so inconsistent with what we like to think of as the innocence of childhood. Unfortunately, five-year-old abusers of even younger children are not as rare as you might think.”

“Jesus.” Gurney looked with growing concern at the picture on the wall. “Who were her victims?”

“I don’t know.”

“Val Perry is aware of all this?”

“Yes. She’s still not comfortable talking about it in any detail, in case you’re wondering why she didn’t tell you. But it’s why she came to you.”

“I don’t follow you.”

Ashton took a deep breath. “Val is driven by guilt. To make a complicated story simple, in her twenties she was part of a drug scene and not much of a mother. She surrounded herself with addicts even crazier than she was, which led to the abuse situation I described, which led to Jillian’s ensuing sexual aggression and other behavior disorders, which Val was unable to deal with. Her guilt tore her apart-a colorful cliche, but accurate. She felt responsible for every problem in her daughter’s life, and now she feels responsible for her death. She’s frustrated by the official police investigation-no leads, no progress, no closure. I believe she came to you in one final attempt to do something right for Jillian. Certainly too little too late, but it’s the only thing she could think of doing. She heard about you from one of the officers at BCI, about your reputation as a homicide detective in the city, read some article about you in New York magazine, and decided you represented her best and last chance to make up for being a terrible mother. It’s pathetic, but there it is.”

“How do you know all this?”

“After Jillian’s murder, Val was close to a breakdown, and she still is. Talking about these things was one way of holding herself together.”

“And you?”

“Me?”

“How have you held yourself together?”

“Is that curiosity or sarcasm?”

“Your discussion of the most horrible event of your life, and the people involved in it, seems remarkably detached. I don’t know what to make of that.”

“Don’t you? That’s hard to believe.”

“Meaning what?”