Model Child_a psychological thriller Read online

  Gottlieb jerked his head up sharply. “What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Makes you wonder ’bout the late Miss Shannon,” Dwight reflected.

  “There’s a lot I’d like to know about the late Miss Shannon.” Gottlieb tapped a pencil on the desk. “Okay. Anything else, before I see him?”

  “Yeah. Nordstrom called back yesterday.” Dwight checked a scrap of paper on which he’d jotted down a time and date. “Gonna meet with him a week from tomorrow, three thirty.” Roger Nordstrom was the neurologist they’d called in.

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  Norma rose to leave. “The brother and sister are eager to meet with you, said they’d come in whenever you wanted. I think there might be stuff they want to tell just you.”

  He nodded. “I’ll check my book and give you a time.”

  ⸎

  Gottlieb brought Shannon to his office and waved him to a chair. “I know there are many areas we haven’t touched on yet,” he opened. “Are there things I haven’t asked you that you’d like to tell me at this point?”

  Shannon took a moment to gather up his thoughts. “Only this. There has never been a child more wanted or more welcomed than Christina. I think I told you, Margaret had a hard time getting pregnant. In fact, we’d almost given up. We were just about ready to go to one of those fertility specialists. If that didn’t work, we planned to adopt.” He paused. “She called me at work as soon as she found she was pregnant. She called me from the doctor’s office, didn’t even wait till she got home.”

  “How did you feel when your daughter was born?”

  “Very happy, but more than anything else, relieved. Like I said, there’d been some problems with the pregnancy. I was glad it was over. We both were.”

  “What was Christina like as a baby?”

  He spoke with obvious deliberation. “She was . . . different. I haven’t had much contact with too many other ones, mainly my niece and nephews, but she was different. Margaret thought so too.”

  “Different in what way?”

  “For one thing, she didn’t like to be hugged or kissed. Didn’t like to be touched at all, in fact. She’d tolerate it, but you could tell she didn’t like it. She’d tense up, sometimes she’d even shudder.”

  Gottlieb wondered, Had she been autistic? Unlikely: her impairment would have been more severe and obvious. A teacher or pediatrician would almost certainly have picked up on it. But she could have had autistic traits without the full-blown syndrome. He filed away the question, planning to come back to it later. “All right. In what other ways do you think she was different?”

  “Well, she almost never smiled. I know how strange this must sound, but it seemed to take real effort on her part. An act of will, you might say. But sometimes she smiled in strange circumstances.”

  “Such as?”

  He stopped to think. “Here’s an instance. Christina was close to four. It was a Saturday morning, and the three of us were in the kitchen having breakfast. Margaret was bringing a cup of coffee to the table, and she dropped it. Most of it landed on her foot. The coffee was scalding hot, of course. Must have hurt her like the devil; I remember how the pain made her jump up and down. Christina smiled, and then she laughed! She laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. She clapped her hands, and this is exactly what she said: ‘Do that again, Mommy!’”

  “What happened then?’

  “I’ll admit, I was short with her. I said it wasn’t nice to behave like that when people had been hurt. I said we should try to help them, not laugh at them. But she kept on laughing anyway. So, I took care of Margaret’s foot, put first aid cream on it to keep it from blistering, and then I sent Christina to her room.”

  “Did she apologize for her behavior?”

  Shannon’s facial muscles tightened. “Christina never apologized for anything.”

  Gottlieb took a few seconds to regroup. “How else was she different?”

  “She had no friends, ever. Not one. She had a few acquaintances, not many, but certainly no friends. And she disliked being part of any group, disliked it intensely. To be alone didn’t bother her in the slightest.”

  “Did other children make overtures to her?”

  “From time to time but not often. They seemed to shy away from her.”

  “Did they pick on her or tease her?”

  “Not that we knew of.” He folded his hands into their custo-

  mary prayer-like position. “It troubled us, the lack of friends, not that it ever troubled her. We told her, over and over, that she was free to invite other children to the house but she never did. Every fall—her birthday was late October—we’d ask her if she wanted to have a birthday party, and she always turned us down.” He paused briefly. “Once we sent her away to summer camp. We thought the contact with other children would be good for her.”

  “How did that go?”

  “The camp was supposed to last eight weeks. They sent her home after four or so. They said she couldn’t adjust, never got over being homesick. We didn’t buy that at all about the homesickness. She wasn’t the homesick type, Christina.”

  “What really happened, do you think?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose I’ll never know. They were always vague about the details. I’ll say this, though. They must have been terribly eager to get rid of her. Sent us a refund for the whole summer, even though she’d been there for more than half the session.”

  Despite his curiosity about the summer camp, Gottlieb moved on to less weighty matters. How she ate (heartily), how she slept (like a log). The ages at which she crawled and walked and talked (all normal or early). He ascertained that she’d had the usual childhood illnesses but no serious ones, no injuries or operations. No speech impairment, no learning disabilities. In school she always made good grades with minimal effort, had never posed disciplinary problems. No hyperactivity, no trouble with attention or concentration. Cats made her eyes water and her nose run, but she had no other allergies. The late Christina Shannon had been a model of good health.

  “How did she play?” asked Gottlieb.

  “That’s an interesting question. She didn’t, not really. We bought her the usual, dolls and stuffed animals and so forth, but she ignored them.”

  “Even when she was a baby?”

  He nodded. “You know those toys that hang on cribs like a mobile, made of different shapes and colors? We got her those,

  and she ignored them too.”

  “If she didn’t play, and had no friends, how did she spend her time?”

  “She read a lot. Learned to read early, before her fifth birthday. She was always a good reader. And she always liked to paint and draw. She liked that more than anything. She also had a great capacity for doing nothing.”

  “Do you mean that she was lazy?”

  “Not really. She could work very hard when she wanted to.”

  Gottlieb prepared to end the meeting. “Anything else before I take you back?”

  Shannon looked up distractedly. “You asked about how Christina was different. I told you how she was when Margaret spilled the coffee on herself. I remember another incident. She had a streak . . . like a mean streak, but something more than that. I should tell you about Joe and Moe.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Her goldfish.”

  “Uh huh,” Gottlieb grunted with faint interest. While increasingly curious about Christina, he had no desire to delve into the story of her goldfish. He also had to see other patients.

  “This would have been when she was six or so. She had these goldfish, Joe and Moe, which she kept in a big bowl on top of her play table. One evening I came to her room to tell her dinner was ready. The goldfish were on the floor. They were thrashing around, poor creatures, obviously about to die. Christina was sitting on the floor, just watching them, totally caught up in it. I don’t think she even heard me enter.”

  “Go on,” said Gottlie
b, more interested now.

  “‘What happened?’ I asked her. She told me Joe and Moe fell out of the tank. I tried to get them back in the water as soon as I could, but one of them died anyway. Then I turned to her, ‘Christina, goldfish don’t fall out of tanks. Don’t lie to me!’ She looked at me with those big blue eyes. ‘All right. I took them out.’ ‘Chrissy, you can’t do that to goldfish,’ I told her. ‘They

  need water the same way you and I need air!’”

  “What did she say?”

  “She looked at me with that stare of hers. That stare, I can’t describe it. She looked at me and said, ‘I know that, Daddy!’”

  ⸎

  “We’ll be eating together,” announced Sharon when he came home. Sarah sat at the counter, engrossed in a coloring book. “All four of us, believe it or not.”

  “Well, there’s a welcome change.”

  “I made curried chicken salad. You know, Beth Kaylin’s recipe, the one with crushed walnuts. We’ll have that, and corn on the cob, and I picked up fresh strawberries for dessert. Three of his favorites. I thought he might like a real meal for once, on a plate, in spite of himself.” She picked up tongs, extracted ears of corn from the boiling water. “Want to get him, Hal? Dinner’s almost ready.”

  He nodded, left the kitchen and went upstairs. Standing outside his son’s bedroom, he waited a moment before knocking.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me, Peter. Dinner’s ready.”

  When the door opened, Gottlieb averted his eyes from the room’s interior. The foul jumble that lay within did not improve his mood or appetite. A few seconds later, his son emerged. He wore a T-shirt from the San Diego Zoo, baggy gray shorts, and well-scuffed sneakers without socks. Gottlieb discerned at least three kinds of stain on the T-shirt. What looked like catsup and iced tea in the front, sweat below the armpits. He wondered if the boy had slept in it.

  “Hello, son. How was your day?”

  “Okay.” Peter could not have sounded more indifferent.

  His father glanced again at the T-shirt, embarrassed that his son would wear such a thing. He tried to make a feeble joke of it. “You, uhm, might want to change the shirt, Peter. It looks like you’re testing some new antibiotics on it.”

  Peter scowled, but he did go back into his bedroom. He emerged in a plain yellow jersey, almost fresh.

  At the table, he tried again to engage his son. “So, what did you do with yourself today?”

  “Nothing much. Took a walk this morning, then I sat on the patio reading. Then it got too hot to read outside. Spent the rest of the day in my room.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Magazines. A Time and Harper’s that were lying around. A couple of issues of National Geographic.”

  “I’m working a short day tomorrow,” his mother broke it. “Just one to four. I was planning to go the library in the morning. You’re welcome to go with me if you’d like, pick up some books.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can I go, Mommy?” asked Sarah eagerly. She couldn’t read yet, but she loved the picture books.

  “Sure, hon.”

  They fell silent as they ate. Then Gottlieb turned to his son

  again. “I was listening to the weather as I drove home. It’s going to be over ninety. You should go to the club and take a swim.”

  “Maybe.” Peter spoke in the same flat tone, the tone of a hanging judge.

  His mother turned her eyes into slits. “It would be nice if just once, for old time’s sake, you showed a jot of enthusiasm about something.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  With that, the older Gottliebs gave up the battle to engage him. They turned their attention to Sarah and each other. Sharon told him about a call she’d received from an aunt in Arizona, and he told her about the latest doings at GCFI, and Sarah asked why corn on the cob looked so different from popcorn, and was it really the same thing? Peter fell into a silent funk. He ate hungrily but without an iota of discernible enjoyment. Or, if he did enjoy it, a perverse stubbornness kept him from admitting it. Yeah, I suppose it’s good, he might have been saying, but so what?

  From time to time, Gottlieb stole glances at his son. He looked for fleeting evidence of contentment, for a sign that the boy saw life as more than a penance or burden. None came. Gottlieb recalled something he’d heard a speaker say, years earlier, at a seminar on adolescent psychiatry. The speaker, an eminent professor at an Ivy League medical school, had passed along this aphorism: Adolescence is an illness. Those who recover, we call adults. Those who don’t, we call schizophrenics.

  CHAPTER VI

  G OTTLIEB AND HIS FELLOW GUESTS sat stiffly around circular table in the main studio of WKLN, Channel 33. The table held only a pitcher of water, glasses, and pencils and notepads. Behind the guests hung a photomural of the Chicago skyline at dusk, shot from Lake Michigan, the studio’s sole decoration.

  Trying to distract himself, to defuse the anxiety he always felt before TV appearances, Gottlieb scrutinized their moderator. Melanie Fuller, a thin woman in her mid-thirties, had short-cropped red hair, chiseled features, and a clear creamy skin. She would have been exceptionally attractive, he decided, if it weren’t for her hunched-over posture and her small gray eyes, too close together.

  His reveries broke off sharply as a camera approached her. All of a sudden they were on the air.

  “Good evening,” began Fuller, “and welcome to Roundtable. Our discussion tonight should be a fascinating one. It deals with a subject that has captivated us, perhaps obsessed is a better word, since the dawn of human consciousness.” She paused for emphasis. “It is nothing less than an exploration of the phenomenon of evil. Of course, we may approach this from a number of perspectives—religious, psychological, and historical, among others. It is our good fortune, then, to have with us experts from three different fields. To my immediate right is the Reverend Burton Evers, Senior Pastor at the Grace Congregational Church here in Chicago, and a former Professor of Religion at . . .” She quickly went through the clergyman’s credentials. “In addition to his degree in divinity, Reverend Evers also has a master’s degree in philosophy. His dissertation

  dealt with concepts of evil during the late Middle Ages.” The camera panned to a round-faced man with owlish eyes behind horned-rimmed glasses and a neatly trimmed salt-and- pepper beard.

  “To his right,” continued Fuller, “is Professor Cassandra Wirth, an expert in modern European history, whose field of special interest is the Holocaust. She has written several books on the subject, most recently Silent Professors: The Academic Response to Hitler’s Rise to Power. She is also a contributing editor of one of the major journals of Holocaust studies.” As she went on, the camera panned to a tallish buxom woman with long blonde hair and a square face, her hands folded placidly on the table in front of her. She looked to be a few years older than their moderator.

  “To her right,” said Fuller, concluding her introductions, “is Dr. Harold Gottlieb, a practicing psychiatrist who serves as a consultant to the Greater Chicago Forensic Institute. In this capacity, he has often evaluated and treated those accused of heinous crimes. He has recently edited a book, Beyond Good and Evil, a compendium of writings on forensic psychiatry.” She went on to mention his position as an assistant professor in one of the city’s medical schools. The camera panned to Gottlieb, who responded with a small grim smile.

  Fuller addressed her first question to the clergyman. “Reverend Evers, in your career you’ve taught comparative religion at several institutions. Can you tell us a bit about how religions differ in their perceptions of evil?”

  Evers cleared his throat. “Well, Melanie, your question could easily be the subject of a year-long course in a seminary. The best short answer I can give you is this one: they differ profoundly. Some religions, the Eastern religions in particular, pay relatively little attention to it, or regard it as mainly the absence of good. Some have a powerful embodiment of evil, something
which corresponds to Satan, and others don’t. Others—these would include many of the Native American tribal religions—have a central figure who’s more mischievous than evil; sometimes he’s referred to as the Trickster. And some religions show discrepancies themselves in their treatment of evil. A good example would be Christianity. The four Gospels vary markedly in the extent to which they mention evil, as well as the importance they give to Satan.” He illustrated his point with brief quotations.

  She nodded and turned her attention to Cassandra. “Professor Wirth, your focus as a historian has been on Nazi Germany, the best known instance of the flourishing of evil in the twentieth century. Can we understand what made the Holocaust possible?”

  “I think so, but only partially.” She spoke in a precise, no-nonsense voice. “We can analyze important contributing factors, such as the catastrophic unexpectedness of Germany’s defeat in World War I. Many Germans, possibly the majority, thought until the very end that Germany would win the war. We can analyze German rage resulting from the Treaty of Versailles, and the abysmal failure of the Weimar Republic. We can analyze Hitler’s malignant charisma, his intuitive knowledge of how to bring the German people to his cause. We can talk about the roots of German anti-Semitism through the centuries.”

  Stopping to take a sip of water, Wirth resumed. “We can analyze these things, and more. But can we ever understand fully what made Nazi Germany possible? Personally, I doubt it. This is part of what makes the Third Reich such an enigma, as fascinating as it is terrible.”

  Fuller turned to Gottlieb. “There’s an obvious parallel here to the study of a given personality. Suppose, Dr. Gottlieb, we consider a violent criminal who repeatedly commits horrific acts. To what extent can we understand him?”