Stranglehold. Part 24

But she wasn't exactly sure she believed that.

She took the stairs slowly, holding tight to the banister with one hand, tighter to the gun with the other. By now the hand that held the gun was sweating.

On the landing she heard the sound of metal brus.h.i.+ng ceramic.

The chain on the table lamp by the window.

She peered around the corner, leading with the .38.

She saw him kneeling on the couch. Motionless. His elbows leaning against the back of the couch. He was staring out the window. She slipped the gun into the deep pocket of her nightgown hoping he wouldn't notice its dark heavy ma.s.s through the thin cotton.

She walked over and touched his shoulder.

"Robert?"

He didn't acknowledge her at all. Just kept staring. Sleepwalking? she thought. Please, G.o.d. Not that too.

"Robert?"

"He's outside," he said.

"Who?"

But she knew.

"Do you think he wants to get in?" he said.

"Daddy?"

He nodded.

She looked out the window. The lawn, all the way down the hill to the street, was empty.

"Where do you see him? Where is he?"

"Over there."

He pointed to the old elm tree near the center of the lawn. "I woke up and saw him from my window and I came downstairs."

He sounded calm enough. But his eyes were wide.

"He's hiding," he said.

"Wait here."

In the hall closet she found a pair of boots. She took a coat off the coat rack and slipped it on. Robert remained staring out the window. She transferred the gun to her coat pocket, unlocked the door and stepped outside.

As quietly as possible she closed the door behind her.

She stuffed both hands into her pockets and walked toward the tree. The boots and coat were no match for the cold but her face felt flushed and the hand on the gun felt greasy now with sweat. She approached quickly at first and then as she got closer slowed her pace.

She walked wide of the tree to the right until she could see around it to the other side.

Nothing.

To be absolutely certain she walked all the way around it. Circled it.

She felt limp with relief.

He wasn't there.

She wondered what she'd have said to him or done to him if he had been.

She walked back to the house remembering what Robert had said.

He's hiding, he'd said.

It wasn't true, not literally, not this time. Robert had imagined him out there behind the tree, dreamed him there no doubt and then come downstairs still frightened and half asleep. But in a less literal sense it was completely true.

Of course he was hiding.

And Robert saying that, acknowledging that, was probably as close as he was ever going to come to telling the truth about his father.

And accusing him.

Twenty-two.

The Hearing: Second Day

Waiting for Owen Sansom in the courtroom, sitting across from Andrea Stone, she tried to read a newspaper. It had been days since she'd seen one but now her attention kept slipping away. The stories took on the patchwork quality of a dream, one slipping into the other, none of them coming to any real conclusion.

One story managed to hold her though. In New York, a twenty-seven-year-old suburban woman had been arrested for leaving her children at home unattended while she drove to a nearby town to engage in acts of prost.i.tution. The woman had been abandoned by her ex-husband-a lawyer-over a year ago and since that time had received no child-support payments from him and had no training and was unable to find a job. Her two boys, aged seven and nine, had been placed in foster homes following her arrest. The woman said she had involved herself in prost.i.tution only to support them.

She thought how horrible it must be to become so desperate as to feel that this was your only option. That if her story were true then this woman had felt backed into the kind of corner in which responsibility and irresponsibility were all but indistinguishable.

The story troubled her.

"Where is he? Where's Owen?"

Andrea Stone was standing over her.

Lydia was aware of her cologne. Georgio, she thought. She was dressed in a dark blue tailored suit and white blouse, wearing a single string of pearls. She looked keyed-up, nervous.

Lydia put the paper aside.

"I don't know," she said.

"Burke'll be here any minute."

Lydia looked at the clock. It was ten after nine. Where the h.e.l.l was he?

Andrea Stone turned abruptly and walked back to her desk.

"The Honorable Thomas J. Burke. All rise."

Burke crossed to the bench just as the double doors flew open behind her and Sansom appeared hurrying down the aisle.

The fact that he was late wasn't lost on Burke. He didn't comment.

Sansom looked awful.

His suit didn't exactly look as though he'd slept in it, but it did look uncomfortably close to that. The tie was crooked, the collar in need of pressing. His gla.s.ses were water-spotted again.

She glanced at Edward Wood standing next to Arthur. She didn't like the contrast she was seeing.

"Are you all right?" she whispered.

He nodded. "Late start," he said. "Sorry if I worried you."

You're worrying me now, she thought.

"Be seated," said Burke. And so the day began.

Bromberg seemed ill at ease, s.h.i.+fting in his seat and sipping from a gla.s.s of water as Sansom questioned him about Robert's symptoms. His shyness and his stuttering, his clumsiness, his incontinence, his dreams.

"And are all these consistent with what you'd see in a case of child abuse, Doctor?"

"At Robert's age the onset of stuttering's somewhat unusual. Otherwise I'd say yes."

He took him through an explanation of his treatment-the "play therapy" that was designed to open Robert up. "Would you say he's responding well or badly?"

Bromberg smiled. "Not too well, sorry to say."

"He's uncommunicative?"

"Yes, mostly."

"And is this consistent, in your opinion, with a child who's ... with ah, with an abused child?"

"An abused child would tend to be secretive and withhold information, especially from adults. Yes."

"Doctor, based on your knowledge of him, do you believe it likely that Robert's been abused?"

"Likely?"

"Yes. Couldn't these symptoms all be accounted for by some other means? His parents' divorce, maybe?"

She saw what he was doing. He was heading Wood off at the pa.s.s with that one.

Bromberg thought it over.

"No, I'd have a problem with that explanation. It's what we've been calling his clumsiness, you see, which isn't really clumsiness at all. The boy's hurting himself-and he's doing it frequently. To me, that's the most significant indication that someone else is hurting him. That and his incontinence, of course."

"So you'd say it is likely."

"Yes."

On cross-examination Wood took him carefully over the same terrain-at first going nowhere in particular that Lydia could see. But Bromberg seemed more relaxed now and she had to wonder to what extent the two men had talked together prior to the hearing.

Then that became apparent.

"So this is your conclusion, Doctor. That Robert's been s.e.xually abused."

"Yes."

"And did you also conclude that the abuser was definitely his father?"

"No, I did not conclude that. Not necessarily."

"Couldn't it just as likely have been his mother, then? Didn't you in fact tell Mrs. Danse that you hadn't yet ruled her out on that?"

"I did mention the possibility, yes."

"Exactly what did you say?"

"I said I had suspected abuse for some time. She asked why I hadn't reported it to her. I told her that one did not discuss this sort of thing casually, especially when it had been known to happen that a parent would bring his or her child in for therapy as a kind of smoke screen, to disguise their culpability in the abuse or perhaps even, subconsciously, in the need to be discovered."

"And how did she respond to that?"

"She became ... quite angry."

"How do you know she was angry?"

He smiled. "You only had to look at her, Mr. Wood. Or listen to her."

"She was hostile toward you?"