Page 76 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
“It is,” replied Katharine, still in English. She spoke without a trace of an accent. “It’s excellent, in fact. Where’d you learn?”
“School, mostly, but both my parents spoke Spanish, too. We had a large Hispanic population where I grew up. What gave me away?”
Katharine glanced briefly down at their hands, which were still joined. She met Ember’s gaze again and her brown eyes were sparkling with amusement. “No one shakes hands like an American. It always feels like you’re sealing a blood pact.”
“Is that good or bad?”
Katharine smiled at her. “Does it have to be one or the other?”
Ember released her hand and shrugged. “Everything is.”
Katharine cocked her head and made a very doctorly, “Hmm,” and Ember realized the session had already begun.
“Okay, doc, time to shrink my head. You sure you’re up for this? It’s pretty ugly in there.”
With a Mona Lisa smile and a hand held toward the door she’d just come through, Katharine said, “After you, September.”
Feeling like she was going off to face a firing squad, Ember walked through the door.
An hour later, after her interesting new patient had been escorted out and she sat alone behind her polished mahogany desk, the yellow pad of scribbled session notes beside her and a blank patient file open on her computer, the good doctor pressed the rewind button on the small cassette recorder she used to tape her conversations.
Most new patients had an extreme aversion to being taped at first, eventually learning to ignore the recorder as their trust in the process and in their therapist grew, but Ember hadn’t even flinched when Katharine had asked her permission to use it. This, in itself, was telling. She’d admitted to seeing “a few” psychiatrists in the States, but judging by the practiced way she articulated her responses, Katharine suspected the number was probably in the double digits.
She clearly had extensive experience telling professionals what they wanted to hear.
Surprisingly forthright—especially for a first session—September Jones had spoken openly about the crash that had killed her mother and little brother. She was composed, almost clinical, and there was a slightly faraway look in her eyes as she spoke, as if she were telling a sad story about someone else.
Katharine had seen this before. A well-prepared patient with very strong mental barriers could quite easily disassociate themselves emotionally when speaking about a trauma they’d suffered, especially if it were years in the past. If there were no immediate emotional triggers, she could safely share, as if from a comforting distance.
But the devil was in the details. And after nearly twenty years of practice, Katharine knew with canny precision where the real skeletons lay.
She checked a notation on her yellow pad and rewound the tape to the number she’d written. She pressed play and Ember’s steady voice filled the quiet room.
“…and after that I drove home and picked up my mother and brother, and we headed to the restaurant.”
Katharine heard her own follow-up question. “Do you remember how much you had to drink before getting in the car?”
Here was the troubling pause. It wasn’t long, but it had a sense of fraught heaviness, as if something very important hinged on whatever she said next.
“A lot. Too much. Probably…” Another pregnant pause, and she fumbled her next words. “Um, a who
le bottle of…scotch. One of the big ones. The biggest.”
Katharine paused the tape.
There were several things that troubled her about this. The majority of people who were in alcohol-related automobile crashes had little to no memory of the actual crash or the hours leading up to it, especially if they’d ingested the quantity of alcohol September had described. After consuming a large bottle of hard liquor, at her height and body weight, she would have been, as they say, “blind drunk,” yet she’d chronicled in minute detail exactly what had happened before, during, and after the accident.
Also, her mother certainly would have noticed her daughter’s impairment—aside from the slurred speech and affected motor skills, the smell of whiskey on the breath is very distinctive—and protested she shouldn’t drive, especially with August in the car. Indeed Ember most probably would have been unable to operate a vehicle at all, especially to drive twenty minutes out of town toward their destination as she’d later said.
And there were the pauses. Katharine’s intuition was a finely honed organ, something she often referred to as a sixth sense, and those pauses felt all wrong. They didn’t feel like guilty or embarrassed hesitations, or the courage-gathering spaces before a confessional that they should have been.
They felt calculated.
As if September was deciding something.
Or hiding something.
Or lying.
