Page 118 of Sharp Force
“You should have told me Lucy was having trouble.” He won’t let it go. “I could have helped her.”
“You couldn’t have.”
“At the very least I would have told you that Georgine Duvall wasn’t the right fit, for Christ’s sake,” he says hotly. “All her touchy-feely bullshit, the massive boundary violations, and whatever quackery she divined. Everything was about her own fucking self. Her insatiable need for affirmation and power. To be the most important. To be worshipped and feared. I can’t think of anything worse for Lucy. Or Zain Willard. Or any patient.”
“Lucy must have recognized at least some of what you’re saying.She knew Georgine was bad news, eventually she did,” I reply. “All of this explaining why she quit seeing her without telling me the reason.”
“Georgine had real pathology, Kay.” Benton is incensed by what he’s been reading. “One of these people who needs to be needed at the expense of everything and everyone.”
“Lucy felt ignored by her mother and at the same time over-managed by me, only to find herself ensnared in the same dysfunction with a shrink,” I decide.
Benton sits back down on the floor, picking up the file.
“At least Lucy had the gumption to end the relationship,” I go on. “But knowing her, she was embarrassed about it at the time, explaining why she’s never wanted to discuss it. Now she’s embarrassed again if she has any inkling that we’ve found her file. And I’m sure it’s crossing her mind.”
I envision her demeanor when we left her at the airport. She could scarcely look at me when I asked if she was coming with us. No wonder she refused. Lucy wouldn’t want to be present for this.
“You won’t like what she has to say about us.” Benton flips to another page. “Myself. Marino. And of course, Dorothy. Lucy goes gangbusters after all of us.” Benton looks at me. “But most of all you, Kay.”
“I would expect as much since I’m the one who made her feel over-managed, over-corrected, over-everything.” I sound matter-of-fact while feeling punched in the gut.
Tears touch my eyes and I blink them away.
“Better put your armor on,” Benton says. “It’s not pretty. She was struggling against your influence. And it’s clear she considered me a lightweight spoiled rich boy with a poker up his ass.”
“I’m well aware of her anger back then, and how much sheresented me, and I also understand it,” I reply. “What did I know about raising Lucy? Or anybody, really? Maybe at the end of the day I’m no better than Calvin Willard. Someone powerful who always knows best. Someone who can fix everything.”
“We’re both like that, Kay. But we’re nothing like him.”
The late afternoon light is fading as we resume going through Zain’s records. By the time we’re done it’s dark out, and I check one last thing before we leave. I have an uneasy hunch about the hanging victim on Mercy Island who was rudely nicknamed Santa Crotch. It turns out I’m right that he was Georgine’s patient.
Diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, Samson Digley had been in and out of Mercy Psychiatric Hospital since he was a teenager. After Georgine was hired eight years ago, she began working with him in person and remotely. I’m appalled to learn that when he died last Christmas, he was undergoing one of her silent treatments.
“The last time she saw or communicated with him was two weeks before he presumably hanged himself.” I’m relaying all this to Benton, the file open in my lap. “She took him for a walk on the hospital grounds, ending up on Thirteen Shore Lane so he couldborrow the bathroom and look at my Christmas extravaganza as he has so many times in the past…”
“Christ,” Benton says, skimming through a stack of files. “The damage she caused is unfathomable.”
“After her last time with him, she stopped lavishly decorating for Christmas, as we saw for ourselves earlier today,” I reply. “And it’s no wonder.”
In her notes she describes visiting with Samson Digley in her backyard, enjoying the view as it began to snow. She mentions that he wasenthralledwith her elaborate strands of LEDs woven around tree trunks, the trellises and twinkling in shrubbery.
… SD walked around the garden sparkling like a galaxy of fallen stars. That’s how he described it,she writes.
Bemoaning how bleak his hospital room was, he asked her for a string of lights to cheer it up. And she gave it to him.
The outcome was unfortunate,she wrote the day after his death.I couldn’t possibly have seen this coming. He was doing so well…
“That’s all she has to say about it beyond him showing no indication of being suicidal,” I tell Benton.
“Nothing about feeling bad. She didn’t regret ghosting him or whatever she was doing.” He closes one file, opening another.
“No indication that I’m seeing. But I suspect she was worried her notes would be subpoenaed,” I reply. “And had I known then what I do now? His file would have seen the light of day, that’s for sure. His family would have sued the hospital. And possibly they will once the truth is known.”
“Doesn’t sound like she was the empath or even decent person you remember. In fact, she sounds cold and irresponsible as hell,” Benton decides, and I can tell he’s haunted by Lucy’s file.
“Georgine wasn’t like that when I knew her.” I get up from the sofa. “She was inappropriate, in my opinion. But not blatantly careless and destructive.”
“Something changed her.”
