The word cell kept flashing.

But I'd seen jail cells that looked more inviting.

This was worse. Punitive.

Solitary confinement.

I had to get out of there.

18.

Burden was back in his office, sitting at one of the computer workstations. I wheeled one of the secretary chairs into the center of the room and sat down. He touch-typed rapidly for a few moments before looking up, dry-eyed.

"So. What's the next step, Doctor?"

"Holly didn't seem to have many interests."

He smiled. "Ah, the room. You're thinking I isolated her. For some ulterior motive."

Exactly what I'd been thinking, but I said, "No. Just trying to get a picture of the way she lived."

"The way she lived. Well, it wasn't like that, believe me. Though I can understand your thinking it was. I've done my reading on child psychology. So I know all the theories of child abuse. Isolating the designated victim in order to maximize control. But that had nothing to do with us. Not even remotely. That's not to say we're . . . we were social butterflies. As a family or individually. Our pleasures have always been solitary. Reading, good music. Holly loved music. I always encouraged discussions of current events, various cultural debates. Howard, my firstborn, took to that. Holly didn't. But I always tried to provide the same sorts of things other children seemed to like. Toys, games, books. Holly never showed any interest in any of it. She hated to read. Most of the time the toys stayed in the box."

"What did she do for fun?"

"Fun." He drew out the word as if it were foreign. "Fun. For fun, she talked to herself, created fantasies. And she was inventive, I'll grant her that. Could take a piece of string or a rock or a spoon from the kitchen and use it as a prop. She had a terrific imagination-genetic, no doubt. I'm highly imaginative. However, I've learned to channel it. Productively."

"She didn't?"

"She simply fantasized, went no further with it."

"What were her fantasies about?"

"I have no idea. She was a demon for privacy, liked to close her door tight even when she was very young. Just sit on the floor or on her bed, talk and mumble. If I prodded her to get fresh air, she'd go out into the backyard and settle down on the grass, and start in doing exactly the same thing."

I said, "When she was younger, did she rock back and forth or try to hurt herself?"

He smiled like a well-prepared student. "No, Doctor. She wasn't autistic-not remotely. If you talked to her she'd respond-if she felt like it. There was no echolalic speech, nothing psychotic. She was just very self-sufficient. From an amusement standpoint. She made her own fun."

I watched the constantly blinking phones and self-shifting computer images. His fun.

"And she never kept any sort of diary?"

"No. She hated paper-threw everything out. Hated clutter, was a bug on neatness. Probably another example of genetics. I plead guilty to that kind of precision."

He smiled, not looking guilty at all.

I said, "I saw only two games in her closet. What happened to all the toys and the books?"

"When she was thirteen she did a massive housecleaning, took everything out of her room except for her radio and her clothing, and piled it up in the hall-very neatly. When I asked her what she was doing, she insisted I get rid of it. So, of course, I did. Gave it to Goodwill. There was no arguing with Holly when she made her mind up."

"She didn't want anything to replace what she'd gotten rid of?"

"Not a thing. She was quite happy with nothing."

"Nothing but Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land."

"Yes. Those." A split-second flinch. I snared it as if it were a moth.

"How old was she when she got those two games?"

"Five. They were bought for her fifth birthday by her mother."

He flinched again, forced a smile. "You see, we've got an insight already. What do you make of it? An attempt on her part to cling to the past?"

His tone was clinical, detached-the classic intellectualizer. Trying to turn the interview into a chat between colleagues.

I said, "I'm not much for interpretation. Let's talk about her relationship with her mother."

"A Freudian approach?"

Trying to keep any edge out of my voice, I said, "A thorough one, Mr. Burden."

He didn't say anything. Turning slightly, he tapped his fingers on the keyboard. I waited, watched the letters and numbers on the monitor do their freeway crawl.

"So," he finally said, "I guess this is what people in your field would call active listening? A strategic silence. Holding back to get the patient to open up?" He smiled. "I read about that too."

I spoke with deliberate patience. "Mr. Burden, if this is uncomfortable for you, we don't have to continue."

"I want to continue!" He sat up sharply, without grace, and his glasses slid down his nose. By the time he'd righted them he was smiling again. "You'll have to excuse my . . . I suppose you'd term it resistance. This whole thing has been . . . very difficult."

"Of course it has. That's why there's no reason to cover everything at once. I can come back another time."

"No, no, there'll be no better time." He looked away from me, touched the keyboard again. "Can I offer you something? Juice? Tea?"

"Nothing, thanks. If the things I've brought up are too hard for you to discuss right now, perhaps there's some topic you'd like to get into?"

"No, no, let's stay on track. Bite the bullet. Her mother. My wife. Elizabeth Wyman Burden. B. 1930, D. 1974." He tilted his head back, gazed at the ceiling. "An exceptional woman. Deductive and intuitive and extremely talented-musically talented. She was very adept at the viola da gamba. Howard played the modern viola, seemed quite promising but dropped it. I helped Elizabeth develop her abilities. She complemented me beautifully."

He twisted his mouth, as if searching for the right expression, settled on regret. "Holly was nothing like her, really. Nothing like me either, really. Both of us, Betty and myself, are-were-highly intelligent. That's not a boast, simply a descriptive statement. As a couple, we were intellectually oriented. As is Howard. I saw early that he had a gift for mathematics and tutored him intensively-not remedial tutoring; he was always an excellent student. Supplementary tutoring, so that he wouldn't sink to the level of the public school system-be dragged down to the lowest common denominator."

"The school wasn't meeting his needs?"

"Not by a long shot. I'm sure your experience has shown you the entire system's oriented toward mediocrity. Howard thrived on what I gave him, stayed on the math track. He's a graduate actuary, passed all ten exams the first time, which is almost unheard of. Youngest man in the state to do so. You should speak to him about Holly, get his point of view. Here, I'll give you his number. He lives out in the Valley."

He turned back toward his desk, took a small piece of paper out of a drawer, and scrawled on it.

I put it away.

He said, "Howard's exceptionally bright."

"But Holly wasn't much of a student?"

He shook his head. "When she got C-minuses it was because of teacher charity."

"What was the problem?"

He hesitated. "I could spin you some yarn about poor motivation, being bored in class, never finding her niche. But the truth is she simply wasn't very intelligent. An IQ of eighty-seven. Not retarded, but the low end of the normal range.

"When did you have her tested?"

"At age seven. I did it myself."

"You tested her?"

"That's correct."

"Using what test?" I said, expecting some sort of quick-and-easy questionnaire lifted from a self-help book.

"The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. It's the test of choice, isn't it? The most extensively validated?"

"The Wechsler's an excellent test, Mr. Burden, but it requires quite a bit of training in order to administer and score it properly."

"Not to worry," he said, with sudden cheer. "I trained myself. Read the manual carefully and boned up on a number of related articles in psychology journals. Then I practiced on Howard-he took to it like a duck to water. Scored one forty-nine, top tenth of a percent, I believe."

"The Wechsler's not supposed to be sold to laymen. How'd you get hold of it?"

Sly smile. "Not thinking of filing a complaint, are you, Doctor?"

I crossed my legs casually, returned the smile, and shook my head. "You must be pretty resourceful."

"Actually," he said, "it was painfully simple. I filled out an order blank at the back of one of the psychology journals, sent in my money, put a Ph.D. after my name, enclosed a card from my business at the time-'Demographics, Incorporated. Applied Social Research.' It must have sounded sufficiently psychological to the company, because a week later the test came, parcel post."

Flaunting his duplicity. But then, why would someone who made his living hawking Tibetan Harmony Bells and personal power pills shy away from a bit of self-serving subterfuge?

"I did a fine job of testing," he said. "More thorough than any school psychologist would have been. And I took the trouble to retest her twice. At ages nine and eleven. The results were almost identical-eighty-seven and eighty-five. No outstanding deficits or marked strengths, no imbalance between Verbal and Performance scores. Just a general dullness. My theory is that she experienced some sort of intrauterine trauma that affected her central nervous system. Perhaps due to her mother's advanced age-Betty was thirty-nine when she conceived. In any event, there had to be some kind of brain damage, didn't there? It might have been worse but for our unique situation."

"What do you mean?"

"Given average heredity, she might very well have turned out truly retarded. With Betty and me as parents, she was given a genetic boost into the Dull Normal range."

I said, "Do you have her testing profile?"

"No. I threw it all out years ago. What would have been the point?"

"Did you ever consult a specialist about her learning problems?"

"In the beginning I gave the school a chance to come up with something-saw the usual assortment of civil service flunkies. Counselors, special education teachers, whatnot. Holly didn't fit into any of their classification groups-too smart for Educable Mentally Retarded, too dull for a normal classroom, no discipline or management problems that would have qualified her for Educationally Handicapped. They had conferences-those types love to have conferences. Sat there and talked down to me with their jargon-thought they could hide behind jargon because I didn't have a degree after my name."

"Would there be any records of those conferences?"

"No. I demanded they destroy them. I'm in the information business. I know how records can come back to haunt. They tried to protest-some stupid regulation-but I prevailed. Sheer force of personality. They were such a weak-willed bunch, so dull themselves. Endless talk, no action. I realized early on that I was on my own; any meaningful remediation would have to take place at home. So I washed my hands of them. It's the same way I feel about that policeman Frisk. That's why I took the initiative to call you. I know you're different."

The second negative reference he'd made to the school. I said, "Did you discuss your feelings about the school with Holly?"

He gave me a long stare. Searching. Illuminated by unwelcome insight.

"Doctor, are you trying to say I planted hatred in her mind?"

"I'm trying to get a picture of how she felt about the school."

"She hated it. She must have. It represented failure to her. All those years of incompetence and insensitivity. How else could she have felt? But she wasn't about to kill anyone because of that."

He gave a derisive laugh.

I said, "What kinds of remedial things did you do?"

"Gave her my personal attention-when she'd accept it. Sat down with her every evening after dinner and walked her through her homework. Tried to get her to concentrate, tried to bribe her-what you'd call operant conditioning. That didn't work, because she really didn't want anything. Eventually I did get her reading skills and math levels to a point where she could function in the real world-simple instructions and computations, road signs. She wasn't interested in-or capable of-any higher abstractions."

"How was her attention span?"

"Just fine for things she was interested in-cleaning and straightening, listening to pop music on her radio and dancing to it when she thought no one was looking. Nonexistent for things she didn't care about. But isn't that true of anyone?"

"Dancing," I said, trying to picture it. "So her physical coordination was okay?"

"Adequate. Which is all anyone needs for the dances they do today." He flapped his arms and made a grotesque face. "Betty and I used to dance seriously. Long-forgotten baroque and classical terpsichore-gavottes, minuets. Steps that really required virtuosity. We were quite a pair."

Drifting back, inevitably, to self-congratulation. Feeling as if I needed a thick rope to tug things back to Holly, I said, "Did you ever consider medication-Ritalin or something similar?"

"Not after I read up on the effects of long-term amphetamine usage. Stunted growth. Anorexia. Possible brain damage. The last thing Holly needed was more brain damage. Besides, she wasn't hyperactive-more on the lethargic side, actually. Preferred to sleep late, loll in bed. I'm an early riser."

"Did she have periods of emotional depression?"

He dismissed that with a wave. "Her mood was fine. She just lacked energy. At first I thought it might be nutritional-something to do with blood sugar or her thyroid. But all her blood tests were normal."

Blood tests. Half-expecting him to answer that he'd punctured her vein himself, I said, "Did your family doctor have any suggestions when he gave you the results?"

"Never had a family doctor. Never needed one. I took both of them, Howard and Holly, to the Public Health Service for their blood work. For their immunizations too. Told the civil servants there that I suspected some kind of contagious infection. It's their responsibility to check that kind of thing, so they were forced to do it. I figured I might as well get something back for my tax dollars."

Genuine glee at dissembling. How much of what he told me about anything could be believed?

"Who managed their childhood diseases? Where did you take them when they had fevers and needed antibiotics?"