"I was not happy there. They objected to the marriage."
"Tell him everything, Trissa," Augusta said. "It may be important."
She looked from Augusta to Fitapaldi. The placid acceptance in his face instilled trust in her. She felt she could tell him everything and he would not recoil in disgust or blame her. But Augusta was there, and Trissa did not want her to know and perhaps think less of her. "I believe my father may have done this to Nicholas. He told me he would if I did not come home. I told the police, but they can't find out anything."
"Have they talked to your father?"
"He's missing apparently. He was never a homebody."
Fitapaldi rose to clear away their empty dishes. When he returned, he reached a hand across the table to pat the top of Trissa's clenched fists. "Trissa, I'm going to assume from the way you speak that you know something of abusive relationships."
She lowered her head to avoid Augusta's horrified gaze. "Yes."
"In your family?"
"Yes."
"And Cole... Nicholas has told you nothing of his background."
"I know he's moved around a lot. He never speaks of his family. He has a whole drawerful of photographs but none are of his family."
"I'm not surprised. He has spent his life destroying his memories of his family, and his memories, in turn, have almost destroyed him."
"They hurt him? The scars?" Trissa vividly remembered the scars. "Old battles. Long forgotten," he'd told her.
"Yes. His father was -- is -- severely disturbed, psychotic, and quite violent at times, with episodes of prolonged catatonia. He's hospitalized now and will be for the rest of his life. But that happened too late to save Nicholas and his family.
"The case was quite notorious for awhile, though I expect you are too young to remember it, Trissa, and maybe it would not have received the notice here that it did up north. Nicholas had two sisters and a brother, all younger. His mother was a loving woman who struggled to keep her family safe from her husband's increasingly frequent rages. But in the end, she was helpless. He isolated her from her own family by moving them to Michigan from Ohio. When she objected to his treatment, he locked her out of the house and made her sleep in the garage. She called the police a couple of times, but he had the children so frightened that they lied about what went on at home. They thought they were protecting her. Their father had told them that the police would lock her up for being a bad mother and running away.
"Nicholas, when he was nine, stole the little ones away and hid them in a neighbor's abandoned dog kennels. He kept them warm and fed by breaking into homes and stealing blankets and food. He was afraid to go to anybody for help. He had no faith in adults. When they were found, it was Nicholas who was punished. He was placed in a boys' home for eight months. That confirmed to the other children what their father had threatened all along. He had them more tightly bound together than ever.
"I won't go into the worst of the abuse, but it took all forms. Nicholas was, in a way, the lucky one because he had a brief respite from it during his detention. By the time he was returned to his home, his mother had given up and sought her escape in prescription drug addiction. She spent nearly all her time sleeping. The oldest daughter, Valerie, had been forced to take her mother's place, in all ways possible."
Trissa shuddered and put her face in her hands.
"I think she's heard enough, Doctor," Augusta said.
"No, if it will help Nicholas, I have to hear it. Go on."
"Though there were periods of relative calm, Duncan Brewer eventually became so sick that he was no longer able to keep up the facade necessary to work and earn a living. He was fired from a series of jobs. The last occurred just before Thanksgiving when Nicholas was thirteen. Duncan drank for three days straight but demanded that a Thanksgiving dinner be prepared as if they were a Norman Rockwell painting family. Nicholas and Valerie tried but Duncan was not satisfied. He flew into a rage, smashed up the house, every dish, every stick of furniture. Then he killed them."
"No!" cried Trissa and Augusta together.
Fitapaldi pressed his fingers to his temples and nodded. "He killed them all. Or thought he had. He carried their bodies to a