Look Closely (25 page)

“Of course,” Dr. Adler said. “Caroline was here for a good number of years, you know. It was very hard for her to stop the mutilation, and so she was considered a threat to herself for a long time. She underwent intensive therapy of many forms—individual, group, art therapy, meds. During that time it came out that she felt abandoned by your father.”

A little rush of relief. “And is that it? She simply felt abandoned?”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Wel , our mother died very suddenly, at least as far as I know, and from what I can tel , there was an investigation into her death. My parents were separated at the time, and apparently my mother was involved with someone else. I guess I’m wondering if Caroline ever talked about that or about anything specific that our father had done?”

Dr. Adler seemed to think for a minute. “Caroline was very reluctant to talk about the circumstances surrounding your mother’s death. After your mother died, she was sent off to boarding school, leaving her to fend for herself. She was only fourteen, if I recal correctly, and there were apparently very few visits by anyone in your family. She essential y felt discarded and neglected, and that was layered on top of what already was a somewhat depressive personality in her case.”

It made sense, I thought. But was that al there was?

Dr. Adler continued, “Now, as for your father, I should mention that Caroline was often reticent in her revealing her feelings and her past. It’s one of the reasons she was here so long.

However, it was obvious to me that there was something she was holding back about your father, something that had angered her deeply.”

“Did she ever tel you what it was?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Do you know, general y, what it concerned?”

“I believe it may have concerned your mother, but I can’t say for certain.”

We both sat in silence. My mind stewed with thoughts of Caroline, of what she may have seen my father do.

“You mentioned her feelings of loss about our mother,” I said. “Can you explain a little more about that, about how she felt?”

His forehead creased, his thumb stroked the side of his jaw absently. “Caroline was, of course, experiencing a great amount of grief about the loss of your mother.” He looked up at me.

“You were very young at the time, I take it?”

“I was seven.”

He continued rubbing his jaw. “Caroline would tel us that your mother fel down a flight of stairs, but she refused to give details past that point, which made us wonder if she was tel ing the truth. We never did get an answer from her that the staff was satisfied with. Al we could determine for sure was that she felt an utter destruction of her world, as wel as some guilt.”

“Guilt?” I pushed myself forward in the too-soft chair. “Why would she feel guilt?”

“It’s not uncommon in adolescents to feel a certain sense of helplessness fol owing the death of a parent, a certain sense that if only things were different they could have prevented the death.”

“Is that how Caroline felt?”

Dr. Adler gave me another one of his calculating stares. “You must be a trial lawyer.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Younoticetheuseofgeneralitiesinsemantics.”

I didn’t respond.

Dr. Adler made a barely audible sigh. “This topic—your mother’s death, I mean—was somewhat of a bone of contention with the staff here at the time. Dr. Sammeth and the counselors felt Caroline was reacting typical y to this event…” He trailed off.

“But you felt differently?”

He gave a slight nod. “To me, her feelings on this issue seemed to be closely tied to another strong emotion.”

“What was that?”

Dr. Adler shifted in his seat, and for the first time, I sensed he was uncomfortable. “Caroline had a certain irrational hatred.”

“Toward a certain person?”

“That’s right.”

“Was it my father?”

“No.”

“Whothen?”Iwasbeginningtogetexasperated.

“I’m afraid,” he said, placing his hands on the desk, “that it was you.”

19

My foot lifted off the brake and stepped on the gas. I signaled a left merge onto the highway. I saw the outlines of the city in the distance. But I was removed from al of it. In my mind someone was chanting over and over,
She hated you, she hated you,
she hated you.

Dr. Adler had explained it wel enough, I suppose. Her emotions about me had to do with the fact that I was taken care of by my father, he said. I had been sheltered, while Caroline was sent off to a boarding school alone, unprepared. It was perfectly natural, he said. He was sure Caroline no longer felt like that.

“She was making me a quilt,” I said stupidly. I was slumped at the back of that cushy chair by then, unable to keep my rod-straight posture, unable to care anymore that the height difference might give Dr. Adler some kind of intel ectual advantage. What did it matter? My sister hated me.

“Excuse me?” Dr. Adler said.

“I spoke to her husband, and he said she was making me a quilt.”

“Wel , that’s excel ent. As I said, Caroline had stopped focusing on that irrational hatred of you by the time she left us. When I’ve corresponded with her over the last few years, she seemed very happy with her husband.”

My eyes met Dr. Adler’s over his desk, the unspoken thought between us—if Caroline was so happy, why had she gone missing?

Keeping one hand on the wheel now, I fumbled through my purse for my cel phone. I hit the speed dial for Maddy’s number. Not home. Again. No answer on her cel phone, either. The shock was growing into something more panicky. My sister hated me! I had to tel someone.

Matt.Ishouldcal Matt.Iowedhimaphonecal anyway. I cal ed Information for his number and stopped to pay a tol while the cal was connected.

He answered almost immediately with a gruff “Hel o,” like the first time I cal ed.

“Matt, it’s Hailey,” I said. “How are you?”

“Same.”

“No word?”

“Nothing.” He said the word so quietly that it broke my heart. There was a pause, then he said, “Have you talked to your father?” He had so much contempt in his voice now that he made the words

your father
sound like “that serial kil er.”

“Yeah, I have,” I said.

“What did he say about Caroline?”

“We talked about her going to boarding school and stuff like that, and—”

“Hailey, I’m sorry to be rude, but I don’t care about that. I want to know what he said about Caroline’s disappearance.”

Oh, God. How to tel him that I’d never even gotten to that topic because I’d been too upset about the fact that he was lying to me, tel ing me pretty tales about Caroline at Yale and in Paris. “We didn’t exactly get there,” I said.

“What? You didn’t even ask him? You promised me!”

“I know, but I—”

“What?”

“I didn’t think he’d tel me the truth. But look,” I said, rushing on to a different subject, “I just found out something else about Caroline. I went to Crestwood Home. You know about her stay there, right?”

“Yes. But how do
you
know?”

“I saw some letters from there that she wrote to a family friend. I went to Crestwood today and talked to one of her doctors.”

“And they actual y talked to you? I mean, they told you about Caroline’s treatment?” His accusatory tone was impossible to miss.

“Yeah, they did. And I would think you’d want to know about it. I think you’d want to know anything that can help us find her.”

“Wel , did you find anything other than she used to cut herself and she tried to kil herself? Jesus, how could you do that? How could they do that? That’s an invasion of her privacy! I don’t want to know anything unless she’s cal ed them in the last few weeks, which I assume she hasn’t.”

“No,” I said simply. I got off the highway and started making my way over the bridge into the city. Matt’s palpable anger was making me shaky, unsure, and I was glad to hit a patch of traffic so I could slow the car.

He was quiet for a second. “I’m sorry. I’m taking this out on you, when I shouldn’t be. I guess I’ve been hoping that you’d find something out from your father.”

“I’m not sure he knows anything about Caroline or Dan, and if he does, I’m not sure he’d tel me.”

“Dan? What do you mean he doesn’t know anything about Caroline
or
Dan?”

Traffic had started moving again. My car growled as it slowly inched over the steel grid lines of the bridge. The closer I got to the middle, the more anxious it made me, just as my search into my mother’s death made me more uneasy al the time. I explained as quickly as I could what I’d learned about Dan’s life, about how no one had heard from him since that Saturday, the same day Caroline disappeared. I didn’t tel him what Annie said about New Orleans. I had promised her after al , and it was something I hadn’t been able to fol ow up on yet.

“Christ,” Matt said. “This is too fucking weird. I mean, excuse my language, but a brother and sister both walking off into the sunset on the same day? Your goddamn dad has to know something.”

“You’re right. Look, I’l go over to his house tonight, okay? I’l find something.”

“Please,” Matt said, his voice soft once more. “Do whatever you have to do. I miss my wife. I miss her so much.”

Myfather’shousewasdark.Itwasalarge,Georgian home with redbrick, white square columns holding up the portico over the front door, and black shutters framing the windows. The setting suncastasinisterorangeglowbehindit.Thefronthal lights were off, a sure sign he wasn’t home. After thinking about it al afternoon, I had decided to drive out here and simply confront him, ask him what he knew about Caroline and Dan. I procrastinated at first by halfheartedly working on the McKnight case. I took a walk around the neighborhood. Final y, I got up the courage to drive out to Manhasset. But where was he? Maybe out of townforadeposition?Ormaybejustouttodinner? Despitethemessageshe’dleftme,Ihadn’tspoken to him since that night at the Van Newton Guild.

I would just go inside and wait for him, I decided. But even as I thought it, I knew that I wouldn’t simply wait. I wouldn’t lie on the plump couches in the den and watch TV, the way I used to in high school, nor would I sit on the sunporch off the kitchen. Instead I would go into his study. The place my father kept al the documents and bits of information that made up his life.

Maybe I’d find something there about my siblings.

I drove down the street and pul ed my car into the lot of a smal park, where I used to make out with high-school boyfriends. Tucking my keys into my pocket, I walked back down the darkening street to his house. Once there, I reached under the shutter to the right of the front door and felt around the windowsil for the spare key. My fingers brushed over the stone of the sil that felt sandy to the touch. Where was it? Maybe he didn’t keep a spare key outside anymore. I pushed my arm back farther, my cardigan sweater catching on a shrub, and final y I felt the cold metal of the key.

I glanced around guiltily as I put the key in the lock, but there was no one around. The houses were set far apart, not the kind of place where neighbors looked out for each other. The door swung open, and I breathed in the clean, woodsy scent the house always had. As I shoved the key back onto the sil , a tinny
beep, beep, beep
came from inside the house, making me flinch.

The alarm. Shit. I’d forgotten about it.

I stepped inside and quickly crossed the marble foyer to the alarm panel, praying that he hadn’t changed the code. I pressed the numbers that corresponded to my birthday—1013—but the alarm kept up its insistent beeping. Probably only thirty more seconds until it went off. What could he have changed it to? I entered 0102 for my father’s birthday. The alarm continued its warning beep. Was it getting louder? Think, think, think! Caroline’s birthday? What was it? I put in 0418. At least that’s the date I remembered, but the damn thing kept beeping. I knew I had precious few seconds left. What was Dan’s birthday? It was in June, but I couldn’t remember the date. What about Annie? Would he have used her birthday? Did he even know he was a grandfather?

Any second a piercing scream would bring cops running to the house.
Think.
He always used dates of some sort. At least he had in the past. And then I thought of a date that had been looming in my mind, one that was fast approaching. May 20, the day of my mother’s death. I punched in 0520, and the alarm went silent.

The house was eerily quiet, except for the thump of blood pumping through my body. A deep blue-black had settled over the rooms now that the sun was gone from the windows. A few breaths restored my heartbeat. I cut through the formal living room that we never used, down the long marble hal way to the right, and into my father’s study.

The far wal , made al of glass, overlooked the English garden in the backyard. The two side wal s held floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, lined with an array of books—legal and commercial fiction, leather-bound first editions and paperbacks. My father’s decorator had suggested that he keep his paperbacks and the more “user-friendly” books somewhere else in the house, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He loved al of them, he said. Al the different volumes mixed and mingled. His books were the one part of his life that my father didn’t keep meticulously organized.

I went to his desk, the place I used to sit when he traveled for work and some babysitter spent the night with me. I would climb up in that red leather chair, careful not to send it flying on the wheels, and I would touch the things he always used—the leather cup with the embossed logo of the University of Chicago Law School, the iron hammerhead from his father that he used as a paperweight, the heavy silver letter opener. These things were al stil there. I picked up the hammerhead that was sitting atop a stack of faxes, turning it over in my hand, seeing the words painted on the bottom in red—
For Billy.
As always, I marveled that my father had ever been cal ed Bil y.

I flipped through the faxes and business letters. I vaguely read the trial notes on his desk, the half-written client letters printed out with his pencil-marked corrections. It struck me how few personal documents my father had here. I opened the large file drawer and found his household bil s, scrupulously reviewed and filed alphabetical y and by date, but there was little else.