then seemed to remember. “San Francisco. Before my daddy died.”
“I see.” Now the other attorney was beginning to glance strangely both at Vanessa and the judge, but he signaled him to remain silent. “You never lived anywhere else?” She shook her head. “Have you ever been to London, Vanessa?” She thought about it for a minute and shook her head.
“No.”
“Did your mommy ever remarry?”
Vanessa began to squirm and look uncomfortable in her seat, and everyone in the courtroom felt for her. She began to play with her braids and her voice cracked. “No.”
“She had no other children?”
The eyes glazed over again. “No.”
And then the shocker. “How did your mommy die, Vanessa?” The whole courtroom was stunned into silence and Vanessa only sat there, staring straight ahead. At last, in a wisp of a voice, she spoke. “I don't remember. I think she got sick. In a hospital… I don't remember … Uncle Teddy came … and she died. She got sick.…” She began sobbing. “That's what they told me.…”
The judge looked appalled, and he reached down and stroked her hair. “I only have one more question, Vanessa.” She went on crying, but she looked up at him at last. “Are you telling me the truth?” She nodded and sniffed. “Do you promise?”
She spoke in a brave little voice with those two shattered eyes. “Yes.” And it was obvious that she thought she was.
“Thank you.” He signaled for the matron then to take her away and Teddy longed to go to her, but he knew that he couldn't. The door closed behind her, and the courtroom exploded into a hubbub of chatter as the judge pounded his gavel and literally roared at both lawyers. “Why didn't anyone tell me the child was disturbed?” Pattie was put on the stand and insisted that she didn't know it, that she hadn't dared to discuss the murder with Vanessa before. But there was something about the way she testified that told Teddy she was lying. She knew how disturbed Vanessa was, but she didn't give a damn about her, Vanessa was an object—or worse, a prisoner of war. Teddy insisted that he was never allowed enough time with the child to determine anything, although he had begun to suspect it from little things that she said. The hearing was postponed pending further investigation. A psychiatrist was assigned to get a full evaluation of Vanessa before any further decisions were made. Meanwhile the story had leaked to the press and it was all over the headlines that the granddaughter of the Fullertons, and the daughter of the internationally known model, was allegedly “catatonic” after witnessing the murder of her mother, at the hands of Greek-English playboy Vasili Arbus. It went on to discuss Vasili's other wives, the fact that he had been spirited out of the country and was currently in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. And the article further explained that Vanessa was now the object of a custody fight between both of her father's surviving brothers: Greg Fullerton, head of the family law firm, and “socialite Surgeon,” Dr. Theodore Fullerton. The articles every day were awful, and eventually Vanessa had to be taken out of school. Before that, some effort had been made to maintain normalcy for her, but she had followed almost nothing in her classes, and much of the time she hadn't gone at all.
The psychiatrist took a full week to come to his conclusions. Vanessa waited in the judge's chamber as the doctor's testimony was given. The child was in a state of severe shock, suffering from depression, and had partial amnesia. She knew who she was, and remembered her life clearly up until the point at which her mother had married Vasili Arbus. In effect she had totally blocked out the last year and a half, and she had repressed it so severely that the doctor had no idea when she would be aware of the truth, if ever. She had some recollection of her mother being extremely ill, and it was, as Teddy had suspected, her memory of her mother in the hospital in London that had conveniently surfaced, but she did not recall that it had happened in London or that the reason for the “sickness” was that her mother was in labor. Along with all memory of Vasili, the memory of the baby she had loved so much, tiny Charlie, had vanished. She had repressed it all to avoid the agony it had brought her.