Prayers for Rain (Kenzie & Gennaro 5)

“She modeled herself,” Dr. Bourne said, “like a lot of girls, after television ideals. Repeats mostly in Karen’s case. That was part of her pathology-to live as much in the past and an idealized America as she could, so she idolized Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards and also all those mothers from fifties and sixties sitcoms-Barbara Billingsley, Donna Reed, Mary Tyler Moore again as Dick Van Dyke’s wife. She read Jane Austen and missed the irony and anger of Austen’s work entirely. She chose instead to see her work as fantasies of how a good girl’s life could be successful if she lived correctly and opted to marry well like Emma or Elinor Dashwood. So this became the goal, and David Wetterau, her Darcy or Rob Petrie, if you will, was the linchpin to a happy life.”

“And when he was turned into a vegetable…”

“All those demons of hers, repressed for twenty years, came back to roost. I had long suspected that were Karen’s model life ever to suffer a serious fissure, her breakdown would manifest sexually.”

“Why would you suspect that?” Angie asked.

“You must understand that it was her father’s sexual liaisons with the wife of Lieutenant Crowe which predicated Lieutenant Crowe’s extreme act of violence and the death of Karen’s father.”

“So Karen’s father had an affair with his best friend’s wife.”

She nodded. “That’s what the shooting was all about. Add in certain aspects of the Electra complex, which at six years old would have surely been blooming, if not raging, in Karen, her guilt over her father’s death, and her conflicted sexual feelings for her brother, and you have a recipe for-”

“She had sexual relations with her brother?” I said.

Diane Bourne shook her head. “No. Emphatically, no. But, like a lot of women with an older stepbrother, she did, during adolescence, first recognize symptoms of her sexual awakening in terms of Wesley. The male ideal in Karen’s world, you see, was a dominating figure. Her natural father was a military man, a warrior. Her stepfather was domineering in his own right. Wesley Dawe was given to violent, psychotic episodes and, until his disappearance, was being treated with antipsychotic medication.”

“You treated Wesley?”

She nodded.

“Tell us about him.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I think not.”

Angie looked at me. “Out to the car?”

I nodded. “Need to pick up a thermos of coffee, but then we’re good to go.”

We stood.

“Sit down, Ms. Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie.” Diane Bourne waved us down to our seats. “Jesus, you two don’t know when to quit.”

“Why we get the big bucks,” Angie said.

Dr. Bourne leaned back in her chair, parted the heavy curtains behind her, and looked out on the heat-choked brick of the building across Fairfield from her. The metallic roof of a tall truck bounced the hard sun back into her eyes. She dropped the curtain and blinked in the darkness of the room.

“Wesley Dawe,” she said, her fingers pinched over her eyelids, “was a very confused, angry young man the last time I saw him.”

“When was this?”

“Nine years ago.”

“And he was how old?”

“Twenty-three. His hatred of his father was total. His hatred of himself was only slightly less so. After he attacked Dr. Dawe that time, I recommended he be involuntarily committed for both his family’s well-being and his own.”

“Attacked how?”

“He stabbed his father, Mr. Kenzie. With a kitchen knife. Oh, typical of Wesley, he botched the job. He aimed for the neck, I think, but Dr. Dawe managed to raise his shoulder in time, and Wesley ran from the house.”

“And when he was caught, you-”

“He was never caught. He disappeared that night. The night of Karen’s senior prom, actually.”

“And how did that affect Karen?” Angie asked.

“At the time? Not at all.” Diane Bourne’s eyes caught a glint of light slanting through the gap in the curtains behind her and the flat gray turned shiny alabaster. “Karen Nichols was powerful in her denial. It was her primary shield and her primary weapon. At the time, I think she said something to the effect of, ‘Oh, Wesley, he can’t seem to stop acting out,’ and then went on to speak in great detail about her prom.”

“Just like Mary Richards would,” Angie said.

“Very astute, Ms. Gennaro. Exactly like Mary Richards would. Accentuate the positive. Even to the detriment of your own psyche.”

“Back to Wesley,” I said.

“Wesley Dawe,” she said, exhausted now from our questions, “had a genius IQ and a weak, tortured psyche. It’s a potentially lethal combination. Maybe if he’d been allowed to mature into his late twenties with proper care, his intelligence would have been allowed to gain dominance over his psychosis and he would have led a so-called normal life. But when he was blamed for his baby sister’s death by his father, he snapped, and shortly thereafter, disappeared. It was a tragedy, really. He was such a brilliant boy.”

“It sounds like you admired him,” Angie said.

She leaned back in her chair, tilted her head toward the ceiling. “Wesley won a national chess tournament when he was nine. Think about that. Nine years old, he was better at something than any other child in the country under the age of fifteen. He had his first nervous breakdown at ten. He never played chess again.” She tilted her head forward, held us with those pale eyes. “He never played , period, again.”

She stood and her shimmering whiteness towered over us for a moment. “Let me see if I can find that temp’s name for you.”

She led us back into a rear office with a file cabinet and small desk, opened the file cabinet with a key, and riffled through it until she held up a piece of paper. “Pauline Stavaris. Lives-are you ready?”

“Pen in hand,” I said.

“Lives at Thirty-five Medford Street.”

“In Medford?”

“ Everett.”

“Phone number?”

She gave it to me.

“I trust we’re done,” Diane Bourne said.

“Absolutely,” Angie said. “It was a pleasure.”

She led us back through her main office and then out to the foyer. She shook our hands.

“Karen wouldn’t have wanted this, you know.”

I stepped back from her. “Really?”

She waved at the foyer. “All this mess you’re stirring up. All this sullying of her reputation. She cared deeply about appearances.”