Mercy

“I’m not sure with this DA. He seems to be using the case as a resume builder.”

Nat went into the kitchen to make some coffee.

“Do you want a cup?” he called out to her.

“Yes … and make it strong.”

He started making the coffee for her while she carried on typing.

“So who was it?” he asked.

“What?”

“On the phone just now.”

“What?”

“When I came in. You were talking to someone.”

“Some idiot. They keep calling and hanging up.”

“Maybe there’s a problem with the line. Maybe they can’t hear you.”

“No, they keep hanging up after I speak. If they couldn’t hear me, they’d speak.”

“Maybe it’s the other way round. Maybe you can’t hear them.”

“They’re not staying on the line long enough to be talking.”

“So call them back.”

He was bringing in the coffee.

“I can’t. They’re withholding the number.”

“Oh really?” Nat was surprised now.

“That’s why I think it’s deliberate. I keep seeing ‘number withheld’ on the display when it rings and then, when I answer, they give me the silent treatment.”

“Okay, if they call again, let me answer.”

“Why?” she asked with a grin. “You think the caller’s a misogynist?”

“Or maybe just a gynophobe,” he replied, smiling back at her.

“Have you been taking one of those correspondence courses again?”

“Ha fuckin’ ha.”

When the phone rang again, she instinctively reached for it. As she scooped it up she noticed from the caller display that it was again from a withheld number. She quickly waved her other hand to alert Nat. He leaned over and took the receiver from her.

“Alex Sedaka’s office,” said Nat.

“We need to talk,” said a familiar voice.

17:34 PDT

Alex hadn’t made any further headway with Jonathan. He knew that Jonathan was lying, or at least holding back something. But he couldn’t force it out of him. He had to remember that Jonathan Olsen was the brother of the girl that his client had been convicted of murdering. Whatever new evidence there was to show that Dorothy was alive a year later, it didn’t prove that she was alive now. And whatever Jonathan knew, there was no reason to assume that he was wrong in blaming Clayton Burrow for his sister’s death.

But what Alex wondered was how much Esther Olsen knew. True, she and Dorothy were estranged at the time of Dorothy’s disappearance and hardly talked to each other. But they had still been living under the same roof. Could Esther Olsen have been so oblivious to what was going on in Dorothy’s life?

And the issue had now taken on a new urgency because of the deterioration in Esther’s condition. Juanita had told Alex that she was now in hospital and that she had been asking for him. So now he was driving to the Idylwood Care Center in Sunnyvale to visit her.

Dvorak’s New World Symphony blared out and David’s name flashed up on the display.

“Hi, David.”

“Hi, Dad. Quick newsflash.”

“What’s up?”

“More poetry.”

Alex smiled.

“Anything significant?”

“I think so.”

“I can’t read anything right now. I’m on the road.”

“Want me to read it out to you?”

“If you think it’s significant.”

“You tell me. First of all I found one verse earlier. It went like this: ‘You crushed the hope out of me / Not in cold blood but angrily / And only when you died / Did I resolve the mystery / Of your vicious assault on my dignity.’ Note the five-line pattern and note also how it rhymes round the sound ‘ee’ in four of the five lines.”

“Okay, you said that was earlier.”

“That’s right and I was going to call you right away. But then I noticed the line ‘And only when you died.’ That’s the bit that doesn’t make sense. Clayton Burrow is still alive.”

“Not for much longer unless we get a move on.”

“Okay, but at the time she wrote this, assuming it was before she went to England, it was never in question that he wasn’t. And that means that it’s addressed to someone other than Burrow. But at the same time, it’s clear from the language and the tone that she has a grievance against this person. She blames this person for making her suffer.”

“I see what you mean. In fact, when I asked Jonathan about why he said that Dorothy got a raw deal from her mother, he came back with a rather cryptic reply. He said ‘there are sins of omission as well as commission.’”

“Yes,” David persisted, “but this isn’t about a sin of omission. You can tell from the language that this isn’t just someone who let her suffer. This is addressed to someone who actively made her suffer. But that’s not all. I found another two verses. Just listen to this: ‘Because I was too young to understand / You were only trying to set me free / You didn’t really want to change me / You wanted an alternative reality / You wanted to turn back the clock.’ That’s one verse. And then the next. ‘And resurrect a child of three / But I saw things differently / My needs were shaped more selfishly / I had to escape my cell / I had to escape my shell / And find my own path to liberty.’ That’s it.”

“Good work, David.”

“So is it significant?”

There was something about that line ‘and resurrect a child of three” that rang a bell in Alex’s mind.

“Edgar Olsen lost a child of three in a traffic accident,” Alex said, thinking out loud.

“Edgar Olsen being?”

“Dorothy’s father. He had a child by his first marriage and the boy was killed in a car accident.”

“That’s interesting because there was one other thing.”

“What?”

“Well note the variations in the rhyming pattern. It always rhymes round the sound ‘ee’ but in different places depending on which verse — something that a poetry critic would probably analyze to death.”

“I thought you weren’t into all that ‘liberal arts crap’ — as you used to call it.”

“I’m not. I am, however, a scientist with a methodical approach and I did some checking on the internet.”

“Let’s hear the punchline.”

“I found a poem by Sylvia Plath with a similar five-line structure and irregular rhyming pattern built round a single vowel phoneme. It’s called ‘Daddy’.”