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.Such misery was hard to imagine, even after his own experience with loss.A cheery LPN escorted him down a series of hallways, eventually delivering him to the open doorway of a large, bright room overlooking a gently sloping lawn and some manicured trees.Sitting by the large window, looking out, was a small, slight woman with a full head of white hair, who turned toward them as the nurse gently knocked on the door.“Natalie?” she said gently.“You have a visitor.”The old woman merely watched them with a vacant expression.“It’s okay,” the nurse whispered to Joe.“Just sit with her awhile.She needs the company.”In a louder voice she added, “Okay.I’ll leave you two alone.If you need me, you know how to get me coming.”Joe waited until she’d left before entering the room a few feet.“Mrs.Shriver? Is it okay that I’m here? I don’t want to disturb you.I know you’ve just been through a huge shock.”Natalie Shriver tiredly waved a hand toward the other chair by the window.“It’s all right.”Joe sat opposite her.“I’m a police officer, Mrs.Shriver.”“Natalie.Everyone calls me that.”“Okay.I’m Joe.I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’d like to ask you a few questions about Hannah.”Natalie’s tired, pale blue eyes studied him as if searching for salvation.“That would be fine.”“Before we start, is there anything I can get for you, or would you like to ask me about what happened?”She blinked a couple of times, he thought perhaps translating his words into something she could decipher.“No.”“Okay.If you don’t mind, then, I’ll be direct, only because I don’t want to drag this out more than I have to.But if anything I say upsets you, or if you want to stop at any time, please just tell me.Times like these are tough enough without people like me making them worse.”She continued looking at him, and finally acknowledged his speech with a barely perceptible nod.“All right,” he began, unsure of what to make of her silence.“Do you know of anyone who might’ve wished Hannah harm?”“No.” The answer came after a moment’s reflection.“Did she mention that she was involved in anything or with anyone that might’ve been even slightly risky, or which might’ve caused you concern?”“No.”“How about just the reverse? Did she seem upbeat lately, perhaps excited about something good coming her way?”“No.”Gunther paused to rethink his approach.There was nothing hostile in the woman’s responses.Her voice was thin but steady, her expression open.It dawned on him where he might have gone wrong.“When was the last time you saw your daughter, Natalie?”This time there was a slight frown.“I’m not sure.I think it was about five years ago, but it might have been longer.Time isn’t quite the same when you reach my age.”Joe couldn’t resist smiling a little.God knows, time had been a little confusing to him, too, lately.“I may be gaining on you, then,” he said.“If it’s not too personal, were the two of you not close, or was your daughter just very busy?”This time the small smile was hers.“You have a nice way of putting things.Do you have any children?”Whether it was the directness he already sensed in this woman, or simply a decision to set the mood by opening up first, he chose to answer her honestly.“I wish I did.I wanted to, a long time ago, but my wife died of cancer and I never had the heart to try anything like that again.”Natalie nodded thoughtfully and gazed out at the peaceful sylvan view.“That’s the struggle, isn’t it? Not to have kids and to mourn their absence, or to have them and be forever concerned about their fate.”Joe stared at her.A startling aspect of this job was how often people defied expectations.Before coming here, he’d worried about this person being mentally capable.Now he knew he was dealing with someone whose brains and verbal competence were several notches above the norm.He was grateful he’d broken the ice as he had.“Was Hannah a challenge along those lines?” he asked.“She was willful, independent, stubborn, and proud,” her mother told him.“All the makings of a corporate tyrant.Unfortunately, she was also lazy, hedonistic, impatient, and arrogant.”Gunther felt a small chill.He didn’t doubt the portrait’s accuracy, but he would have expected it from someone other than the subject’s own mother.It was almost clinically detached.The image of grief-stricken parent was undergoing serious revision.“Sounds like she might’ve been a handful now and then,” he commented blandly.Natalie shifted her gaze outdoors once more.“I suppose so.It’s a shame you never had children, in a way.They’re quite fascinating to watch.You can learn a great deal.The concept that they mimic their elders is quite hopeless, obviously, beyond certain speech patterns and behavioral twitches.Fundamentally, they set their own course pretty early on, which I think is why so many parents become baffled and anxious when the child acts so wholly differently from their memories of themselves.”She stopped.Joe waited, unsure if that constituted her answer in full, or if she was warming up to an entire treatise on children as lab rats.But she was done.“You’ve given it a lot of thought.I’m guessing you’ve had training in some of this,” he suggested, by now ready for anything.“I was a psychologist at Tufts for thirty years,” she answered.“Research work only, of course,” she added.Of course, he thought.Probably a good thing, too—might have cranked up the suicide rate otherwise.“Did her father play much of a role in her upbringing?” he asked.She eyed him appreciatively.“You are good.Were we divorced? Yes, early on.His name was Howard, and after we broke up, he moved to Vermont—Norwich.Hannah spent most of her summers with him.After I got her back each fall, it would take me weeks to undo the bad habits he let fester.”Joe opened his mouth to ask the next obvious question, but she anticipated him with, “He died almost fifteen years ago.”He nodded and pretended to consult the notebook he’d pulled from his pocket.At least he was no longer concerned about her falling apart.“She had a lot of different jobs over the years.Why was that, do you think?”Natalie sighed—not impatiently, Joe chose to think, but perhaps with a touch of melancholy.“Hannah was one of the perpetually discontent.She aspired to wealth, respect, and being admired, but she never worked hard enough to earn them.In purely structural terms, you might say she was too eager to operate at the uppermost tiers to bother constructing the scaffolding that could have gotten her there.She never seemed to either understand that dichotomy or to stop hoping that some shortcut might render it moot.”“Did she ever marry or have any boyfriends?”She looked straight at him.“Same disability with the same results.No one ever measured up.She tried enough times, but again, with absurd expectations.”“Anyone recently that you know of?”“I knew little of her life during these last ten years.She grew distant.Perhaps my increasing lack of vitality proved discouraging—too much of a reminder of what she would be facing soon herself.”Joe could have thought of a variety of other, more plausible reasons for Hannah to distance herself from Mom.Lack of warmth, for one.For that matter, Joe was beginning to think that adding vitality to the woman before him might be a horrible idea.“When I was looking into Hannah’s background,” he continued, “I noticed she worked as a court reporter for a period.Do you recall that?”Natalie Shriver nodded slowly.“About thirty years ago.She went to Champlain College in Burlington for training.Took her a couple of years or more.I was quite impressed at the time.I didn’t understand the interest, but she seemed very taken with it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]