Blameless (19 page)

A co-worker at Fidelity stated that James was charming, hardworking and dependable.

A childhood friend reported that as teenagers, he and James drank heavily, smoked marijuana, and used cocaine.

The
Inquirer
reported that Diana was not really a faculty member at Ticknor, only an adjunct, implying that she had misrepresented her credentials.

When pressed by Risa, Pumphrey admitted that James had refused him permission to file a sexual abuse complaint against Diana.

A minister in James’s hometown of Norwich, Connecticut, said the Hutchins family had always been well-respected churchgoers, and that James had been a happy child, particularly close to his sister, Jill.

When Adrian Arnold claimed prior commitments, Brad Harris went on the Channel 5 News to discuss borderline personality disorder. He reported that many therapists refused to work with these patients out of fear of just such a situation as Diana was facing. And he managed to squeeze in a couple of statements about Diana’s uncompromising dedication to her patients and the promising preliminary findings of her research.

And in a journalistic coup, the
Providence Journal
discovered that when Diana had been an undergraduate at Brown, she had amassed five unpaid parking tickets—one more than the number the university automatically excused—and the bursar’s office had had to threaten to withhold her diploma to get her to pay up.

By Sunday the story had slipped from the headlines to the inner pages, the repetitive arguments and lack of clear villain or victor obviously boring the public. Diana’s disappointment with the ineffectiveness of her campaign was somewhat mitigated by her relief at finally becoming a bore.

“Waste of time,” Craig muttered as he turned the pages of the
Sunday Globe
, breaking the silence of their glum brunch. “Just stirred everything up.”

“I had to do something,” Diana said, hearing the whine in her voice.

Craig raised his eyes from his bagel and looked at her directly for the first time in days. He didn’t say anything, but his thoughts were clear.
Haven’t you done enough?
Diana read in his eyes.

Pouring herself another cup of coffee, Diana left Craig with the newspaper and went down to her office. Craig was right: She had been wasting valuable time—three days to be exact—in a vain attempt to maintain some idiotic status in the minds of people she didn’t know. Wasting her time battling Jill in the media—instead of in court where it mattered. Although Valerie was increasingly optimistic about the trial, she kept reminding Diana she needed her resume, the support statements, the literature review, and her treatment notes organized as soon as possible.

As the resume and support statements had practically generated themselves out of the media battle of the last few days, Diana’s priorities were to search the psychological literature for research supporting Valerie’s “impossible borderline” prong and to organize James’s records under the “self-mutilation” and “treatment plan” prongs. Picking up the thick pile of manila folders containing her notes on James, Diana paused a moment to mourn their loss as evidence. Then, reminding herself to keep an eye out for Ethan’s elusive “something,” she turned to the task at hand. She had skimmed through the notes last week and marked segments that might be useful to Valerie. Now it was time to carefully scrutinize every word. And there were many.

She had seen James for almost three years, on an average of twice a week, resulting in over three hundred pages of individual session notes. He had also been part of her borderline disorder group for almost as long; her group notes were not as detailed, but they were voluminous, and references to James would be more difficult to ferret from her general comments. Roughly another three hundred pages.

Intakes. Histories. Treatment and discharge summaries. Consult reports. Copies of hospital forms from his suicide attempt. Lab slips for blood work monitoring his medication. A couple of pictures James had given her: one of him clowning at the beach with friends and the other of him and Ethan standing in front of Ken’s Pub in Cambridge, arms thrown over each other’s shoulders, grinning their bad-boy smiles for the camera. Postcards. Letters. The crushed black orchid he sent after she had terminated with him.

This was going to be both long and painful. Pulling the individual session files from the stack, Diana ordered herself to focus. But from the very first page, she found herself distracted, unable to keep from getting lost in James. Every sentence she read, every word, brought him back. James, lost and confused and hiding behind his repressed memories the first year. James, gaining strength and confidence during the second year. James, losing it completely at the end.

She forced herself to jot down notes and make piles for Valerie. But before long, her mind strayed once again. It hadn’t just been James’s good looks or winsome charm that had won her over, as Gail often teased. Diana had known enough to see through the perfect manners and flattery. “I know this is how you’ve charmed your way through life,” she told him in response to his comment that she was the best therapist he had ever had, that she was “right on target,” that she saw things about him no one else had ever even glimpsed. “You don’t need to do that here,” she had said.

It wasn’t what showed on the outside that had gripped her, it was what was inside: James’s potential, his spirit, his energy, his health, hiding beneath the shell he had built to protect himself. It was his love of literature, the voracious way he devoured Homer and Tolstoy as well as Anne Tyler and Agatha Christie. It was how he had painted his downstairs neighbor’s living room because Mr. Berger was in a wheelchair and the landlord refused to pay for it. It was the software program he designed at Fidelity that had a better performance record predicting stock prices than Magellan, Fidelity’s own superstar fund. It was that perfectly sane, perhaps even brilliant, James who had haunted Diana, who kept her awake at night, who roamed her dreams. It was that bruised, beautiful boy she had longed to unearth, to bring back to life. “I feel like I’m floating alone in space,” he told her early in his treatment. “Lost in ghostly solitude.”

Diana squeezed her eyes closed to hold back both the tears and the raging guilt. She had brought him so far, only to fail him. He had been doing so well after he remembered what Hank Hutchins had done to him. But about six months after his breakthrough, she had suffered an ectopic pregnancy. And nothing between them was ever the same after that.

Guilt twisted through Diana and she dropped all pretense of reading her notes. She swiveled her chair and looked out the window. It had been a cold, bright day, not all that different from this day. But it had been mid-winter; it would be two years this coming February. The twelfth of February, to be exact.

James had been edgy and excited, alternately wringing his hands and laughing as he told her about his fantasies of killing Uncle Hank. “I dreamed last night I was in a castle. A dark, brooding castle. In a room with a pointed ceiling so tall I couldn’t see to the top. I had him on a rack—a metal rack like ones you see in those old horror movies. I had strapped down his wrists and his ankles with thick leather thongs and he kept begging me to release him.

“But I just laughed in his ugly face,” James said, his eyes shining with both fear and excitement. “Then I yanked on a huge lever mounted in the cement wall behind me and the rack began to pull apart. It pulled his arms one way and his legs another. He screamed and screamed and then he exploded into a million bloody pieces.” James looked up at her with a guilty smile. “Am I a terrible person?” he asked.

When Diana assured him that he was not, that his anger was a normal—and positive—response, he began talking about how thrilled his boss was with the performance of his software program. “I feel like a great albatross has been lifted. I’m going to be able to do it now. I really am.” James grinned at her, his deep blue—almost purple—eyes locked on hers. “Because of you,” he said softly. “All because of you.”

The intensity of James’s stare sent small ripples of desire through Diana. She looked down at her desk. The guy was just too damn good looking. More than good-looking. He was steeped in sex appeal—he reeked of it. Only an ice woman could withstand this kind of idolatry from that kind of face. She twisted her wedding ring and looked at a spot above James’s head, hoping the flush that she felt rising to her face was not visible. “I’m glad if you think I’ve been of some benefit,” she said stiffly.

James grinned at her. “The only reason I have this job is because of you. Because of the help you gave me.”

“It’s because of
you
,” she corrected. But before she could continue, a pain cut through her belly and jackknifed her forward in her chair. A moan escaped her lips as she looked down and saw blood spreading across her lap.

James was beside her in seconds. She looked up at him, the agony in her eyes and the growing circle of blood on the chair communicating everything he needed to know. Before she could say a word, he grabbed her coat from the hook outside the door and wrapped it around her. He lifted her in his arms as easily and as gently as if she were a child. “Don’t worry, everything’s under control,” he said as he carried her outside, kicking the door closed with his foot. “Beth Israel’s the closest.”

The pain was so great that Diana couldn’t speak. Tears squeezed from her eyes as she hunched into a fetal position in the front seat of his new Porsche, blood spreading over the leather upholstery. Her baby. Her baby was flowing from her and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

James kept up a soothing prattle as he sped to the hospital. “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You’re going to be fine. I’d never let anything happen to you.” Steering with one hand, he gently pressed her lower back with the other, as if he had some instinctual sense of the source of her pain. “Fine, fine,” he kept repeating. “You’re going to be fine.”

“Sorry,” she managed to whisper. “Blood. Car.” Something was very wrong. This hurt far too much to be a normal miscarriage. Something else was happening. Something very bad.

“We’re going to one of the finest hospitals in the world,” he said as if reading her thoughts. He applied more pressure to her back, rubbing in a soothing circular motion. “In the world,” he repeated.

He swerved into the emergency entrance and jumped from the car almost before it stopped. “Quick! Quick!” he yelled as he ran toward the door, carrying her in his arms. “She’s bleeding. She’s bleeding badly!”

The rest had always been pretty much of a blur to Diana. Even at the time, her daze of pain and fear had kept her in a fuguelike state, dissociated from the orderlies and the stretchers and the lights and the noise, until finally some kind of rubbery mask turned the world into sweet blackness. But through her fog, she had been keenly aware of two warm, protective hands cupping hers. And she could still hear that velvety voice. “They’re going to take good care of you here,” James kept repeating. “You’re going to be just fine.”

16

D
IANA SPENT THE NEXT THREE DAYS READING AND
organizing and rereading every word she had on James Charles Hutchins. The whole process was even longer and more painful than she had anticipated, an emotional roller-coaster that threw her from the depths of sorrow to the heights of rage, and just about every feeling in between. But finally, she was finished. She called Valerie to tell her that she had everything she needed—including a number of recent studies concluding that recovery from borderline personality disorder was a long shot, at best. They agreed that Diana would bring the documents over the next morning and go through the Mass General records from James’s July suicide attempt at the same time.

Diana was happy to have the job behind her and relieved that she could finally get out of her house and on to something beyond her own files. But the next moring when she stopped into her office to pick up the materials for Valerie, she noticed the light blinking on her answering machine. And when she heard the voice on the tape, she knew that her hours with James’s files weren’t over yet.

It was Ethan Kruse, and he had left two messages. The first was an unintelligible jumble, something about not being at the Cape anymore, followed by some gibberish about his feet. But the second message was distinct and straightforward. “It’s in the records,” he said clearly, although he giggled between sentences. “The records.”

Still standing at the side of her desk, Diana shook her head as she replayed the messages for the third time. There was no “it” in the records. She had been through every one at least twice—many of them three or four times. There was nothing in them. And there were no more records to search. For about the tenth time in the past couple of weeks, she dialed Ethan’s number.

As she listened to its empty, endless ringing, Diana stared at the bookshelves across from her, waves of exhaustion and anger washing over her. It was as if Ethan’s message had been some kind of catalyst, releasing the hostility that she had been trying to suppress. For suddenly she was mad at everything: at the world, at the media, at James, at Jill, at Craig’s boss Lionel, even at her mother, who kept calling with homilies about being glad she had her health. She was mad at her sister-in-law Martha, who had telephoned Craig at work to complain of the embarrassment this was causing his brother Paul. She was mad at the sickos who left obscene messages on her machine, and she was mad at the strangers who wrote her touching letters of support. And right now, she was especially mad at Ethan. She slammed the phone down.

Diana had to admit to herself that she had never liked Ethan: his lack of remorse after his drunk-driving accident, his cruelty to anyone weaker than he, his uncanny ability to hone in on that weakness, his powerful—and negative—influence on James.

And now this. If Ethan was so hell-bent on helping her out of this mess, then why didn’t he just tell her what she should be looking for? Why didn’t he call when she was home? Or better yet, why didn’t he just show up with the proof? Because Ethan was amusing himself with some kind of sick joke, Diana thought, not for the first time. Toying with her, punishing her for some slight of which she was unaware—or had never committed. James had once told her he was afraid of Ethan. Mortally afraid.