A bell rang. A small bell. The kind her grandmother kept on the fireplace mantel and told stories about, tall tales of India and elephants, and she could practically smell the incense burning. Her eyes came open to soft lighting and the barely discernible image of a thin woman with graying hair sitting stiffly in a chair opposite her. Her grandmother? But no; she was long dead.
Her scalp itched. She felt pearls of sweat on her upper lip that tasted of salt as she licked them off. And then she identified the source of the incense: a small ceramic dish to the left of the thin woman.
“Whoa,” she said. “Did I go under?”
“I believe so. Yes, Fiona.”
“Did I say anything?”
“We’ll get to that,” Katherine said. Fiona took in the surroundings of the office and for a moment didn’t recall coming here to this session. “Whoa,” she said again.
“It can be a little surprising the first time,” Katherine said.
“I’m totally disoriented.”
“Understandable. You were somewhere else just now.”
“I don’t remember a thing.”
“As it should be. We can work on that.”
“Did I remember anything? Do you know how I hit my head? Do you know what happened?”
“The important thing is that you know what happened.”
“I do? I remembered?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“And did I tell you anything useful?”
“It’s all useful. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”
“There was a man. I think he was speaking to me . . . saying something to me . . . though I don’t know what, exactly.”
Trying to connect what she was being told with an unwilling memory, Fiona felt as if she were reaching into dark water.
“Don’t force it,” Katherine said. “There’s no rush. The point is: you’ll get there if you need to. You’ll find it if it’s important.”
“Of course it’s important. There’s a piece of my life missing.”
“Maybe for good reason.”
“The only reason is because I hit my head.”
“Not necessarily. We’ve discussed this.”
“Protecting myself from myself? I don’t buy that.”
“And I’m not selling, just trying to help you to work this out.”
Fiona felt herself cooling off. Whatever it was, it had to be something major for her to have gotten this worked up about it. But what, she had no idea.
“I need this,” she said.
“We generally have what we need. The general misperception is that we need what we want.”
“Be careful what you wish for.”
“Words to live by,” Katherine said.
“Can we try again?”
“Not today. Soon enough, though.”
“Thursday’s session?”
“We’ll see.”
“I need to know.” She hung her head. It was everything she could do not to cry.
21
“No, I’ll handle it,” Walt said into his BlackBerry, staring at the dairy case in Atkinson’s Market. “I’m heading that way anyway.”
On the other end of the call, Tommy Brandon said nothing.
Walt understood the source of his deputy’s confusion: he rarely, if ever, refused the offer of help. Overburdened and overworked, he welcomed, even preached the need for such initiative. But here he was, pushing back on Brandon. And there was Brandon, not understanding—or understanding too well, Walt thought. Brandon was no slouch; he probably saw right through Walt’s justification.
He cursed Brandon’s efficiency. In studying topographic maps and Google Earth images of the area around the location of Gale’s body, all in an effort to widen their canvassing, Brandon had made an interesting, and possibly damaging discovery: the Engleton property—where Fiona lived—was technically immediately adjacent to the crime scene, if one discounted four hundred feet of elevation. Looking from high above, only the blur of the scree field separated them.
If Gale had not been tossed from a pickup truck, then he had likely fallen to his death from the eastern edge of the Engleton property, though the condition of his clothes did not suggest he’d been hiking. The contradictions needed clarification.
Someone needed to question Fiona—and quite possibly Kira—and Walt was not leaving that to anyone else.
He reviewed his exchange with Brandon, searching for a believable if inelegant way out.
“She has some photos of the scene for me,” he said, realizing, upon reflection, how stupid it sounded: Fiona e-mailed her photographs to the office. He had to end the conversation—quickly.
“Listen, I’m in Atkinson’s trying to buy string cheese. Nikki is very picky, and I can’t for the life of me remember which brand it is she likes. For her, there’s only the one. I’ll take the Engleton place. You divvy up the rest and we’ll hope someone saw something.”
“Got . . . it,” Brandon said, intentionally clipping his words so that Walt would not miss his unspoken message.