"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Claire Moffatt 02 - The Inheritor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

Maybe, she thought, as she turned on to the skyway approach to the Bay Bridge, she was too fussy; the piano could have gone in the living room, she would, after all, have been down with her clients half the day or more. The little room downstairs off the garage would have made an office, with some remodeling; at worst she could have found office space somewhere outside. In any case it would have been no worse than the rented apartment, cramped even for one, and since Emily had joined her, bulging at the seams with her office and Emily's piano. The harp was still in storage.
And how could she, with the small amount of family money coming from her grandmother, who had for a short time been a concert harpist and recording artist, afford anything more spacious than that little jewel on Russian Hill? Emily's share was earmarked for the Conservatory, and even so Leslie would probably have to help her before she was through. But at whatever cost they must have a place with space for them both; Emily was already chafing at the necessary rule that she could not practice until the last client had left for the day.
She had a good counseling practice, though not as good as it could have been; she still set her fees on a sliding scale based on ability to pay, instead of doing as her colleagues insisted she should do; charging what the traffic would bear. Counseling, they said truthfully, was a luxury service, and the higher fees were set, the higher the therapist's reputation. How much good had she really done with the school counseling which was just part of the system, which she had doled out in SacramentoЧ
Leslie felt she had a singular rapport with disturbed teenagers. She had been cheated out of her own adolescent rebellion; when the whole world, it seemed, had been rebelling, everything from protest marches to pot, she had been working hard to survive, put herself through graduate school, and was already fighting Emily's battle for freedom.
Their mother had successfully forced Leslie into taking a position as a school counselor instead of opening her own office as a therapist; and now their mother was determined that Emily's talent could be best served by earning a certificate to teach music. The idea of Emily teaching in the chaos of the public schools was rather like imagining Secretariat hauling a coal cart. Or more accurately, Leslie thought, visualizing her high-strung and highly gifted sister giving music lessons, Maria Callas as a high school basketball coach.
She had resolved that Emily should have her chance, even if it meant she herself must spend her life teaching. The inheritance had come too late for a normal adolescence or carefree college days for Leslie; but it meant freedom for Emily. And the scandal which had driven Leslie out of the public school system had at least freed them both. Her mother, Leslie reflected bitterly, had been glad to see her go. But she would never forgive her for taking Emily away.
Leslie cursed as a huge double-trailered semi truck cut into her lane of traffic, remembering the headlines splashed across the National Enquirer.
PSYCHIC TEACHER LOCATES BODY OF MISSING SCHOOLGIRL!
PIGTAIL KILLER TRAPPED BY PSYCHIC!
A fluke, Leslie reminded herself. Everybody had a psychic flash now and then. She clenched her teeth, gripping the wheelЕ the traffic was heavy, she had hoped to be back before rush hour traffic built up on the Bay Bridge; there must be an accident on the Bridge. She concentrated fiercely on the crawling car ahead, trying not to see again before her eyes the flash of Juanita Garcia's body in the drainage ditch, covered with blood, long hair tightly braided by the killer who had raped and mutilated four young girls.
No, she would not remember that. She had a different life now, and a different world. Joachim Mendoza, dubbed 'the pigtail killer' for his habit of braiding the long hair of his victims, was still on Death Row. Leslie did not approve of capital punishment, but would not have lifted a hand to save his life; she had seen Juanita Garcia's body, had led the police there.
What if the newspapers had made a Roman holiday of the lucky hunch or psychic flash which had led to the killer? The local headlines had lasted only a day or two; Schoolteacher finds pigtail killer victim. And who ever remembered what was printed in tabloids like the Enquirer?
She had left the notoriety in Sacramento. When she relocated in San Francisco, it would be entirely behind her. If she ever found a place in San Francisco. This was the fifth house she had turned down.
She knew herself well enough to wonder why she kept finding reasons to reject every new house. The perfect house, she told herself firmly, just didn't exist. One way or another, she would have to make up her mind to some compromises. She tried hard to dismiss her own indecision as she took the freeway exit and drove through the Berkeley streets to the tiny house she had rented when she came to Berkeley.
She pulled up and parked in the driveway. The lease here was up on May first: she didn't want to be stuck with a lease for another year.
But she could think about that later. She was seeing a new client for the first time tonight.
Mentally she riffled through the file. Eileen Grantson. Fourteen. Disruptive behavior, temper tantrums, breaking china, lying about it, constant fights in school. Broken home; father has custody, mother remarried and living in Texas, no siblings. The girl probably had a right to be angry at the conditions of her life. It would be easier to deal with a girl already able to express her anger, than one who claimed she felt none. The human mind, Leslie told herself, was a fearful and wonderful thing, and that was why she had become a therapist; because she had never lost her sense of wonder about all the things the mind could do.
Eileen Grantson was not a prepossessing teenager. Her hair was mousy and lank, eyes a pale washy blue, hidden behind thick plastic-rimmed glasses. She slumped in a chair as if her spine was made of poor quality cardboard.
In nearly an hour she had said almost nothing; Leslie had had to extract a few admissions from her by painstaking questions. Most teenagers were all too ready to pour out all their grievances against the world.
"You get very angry with your father sometimes, don't you, Eileen?"
"He's crazy," said Eileen sullenly, "I think he throws those old dishes around himself so he can pick a fight and say I did it."
Leslie maintained her reassuring smile, and asked, in the neutral tone she had been trained to keep, "Why do you think he would do that?"
"Because he hates me. He's my daddy and I love him, but he doesn't want anybody to love him. He didn't love myЧ" Eileen gave a small stifled gulp and snuffle, "That guy my mom was running around with, he was just the excuse, if my daddy had loved her she wouldn't of gone away." The words came out in a single long stream, but then Eileen, as if what she had said had frightened her, relapsed into a limp puddle of silence and self-pity.
Leslie, listening, thought over what she had heard. Was she on the fringes of discovering a case of father-daughter incest? (Freud had called it a common fantasy; what a shame he had not lived to discover how far it was from a fantasy, even in that sick Victorian age where stiff Victorian fathers had wielded almost life and death power over their powerless, traumatized daughters). Maybe Grantson, unable to acknowledge his own guilt, had made a healthy gesture; put his daughter into a therapeutic situation where, sooner or later, she would be sure to tell their guilty secret and free them both.
But now she did not think so. Grantson himself had sent the girl, and sounded as if he had a very real grievance against his daughter. And Eileen's account of the divorce sounded circumstantial.
Leslie asked gently, "Why are you living with your father instead of your mother, Eileen?"
"I don't like that guy my mother married," Eileen said sullenly, "and who wants to live in Texas? All my friends are here. Not that I've got that many friends. They lie about me all the time."
Something inside Leslie suddenly bristled. "What do they "lie about, Eileen? What do they say about you?"
"The same lies my father does," Eileen did not lift her eyes from the floor. "Nobody likes me. They tell lies. They say I break their things. And I didn't. Maybe I would if I could, they hate me, and I hate all of them, so there! Who wants to hang around with that dumb crowd anyhow! And how could I break their damn violin strings anyhow when I'm across the room? All right, so I wanted to play first violin and that damn rotten teacher stuck me in second violin, he's got tin ears, he's at least a quarter tone flat all the whole time, what the hell does he know about it? I want to quit Orchestra and violin lessons anyhow and my father says, I'm too young to know what I want to do with my life, by the time I could make up my mind I wanted to play the violin I'd be too old to learn, so he makes me practice all the time. I think he's afraid if I do anything except practice the goddam fiddle and go to Sunday school I'll screw around and get pregnant or something!"
A familiar complaint and a familiar problem. For the first time, Eileen sounded like any of the other teenagers she had counseled. "You think your father is afraid that you're involved with sex?"
She shrugged, staring again at the floor, and Leslie knew she had asked that question too soon. She glanced briefly at the cuckoo clock on the wall, elaborately carved, Austrian, tacky; but it was easier on the teenagers to hear the impersonal striking of the clock than to end the session herself. It would strike in, perhaps, six minutes. She had accomplished as much as she was likely to accomplish in a first session. She had almost ruled out the idea of an incest victim, which was something. She was probably dealing with an uncomplicated case of an awkward teenager, at the most trying time of adolescence, resenting and half blaming herself for a broken family.
A teenage girl, motherless, without an acceptable mother substitute, a father absorbed in his work, with little energy for his solitary daughter. And Eileen was the pawn in this struggle. Perhaps she could help the girl to see that she was not the target of this hostility, that her father's problems were her father's problems and not her fault, that her mother's flight was her mother's problem and not Eileen's inadequacy as a daughter.
"Tell me about those dishes your father says you broke," she said calmly, knowing it would bring them to the end of the hour in a state of tension which would keep the girl thinking about her problem until the next session.
"I don't know anything about them. They were just there on the floor. He threw one right at me and then he said I did it," Eileen said, raising her voice for the first time, "I didn't do it! It wasn't any accident either! He threw it at me!"
"Why would he do that, Eileen? You think he threw it? At you?"
"Because he hates me," Eileen cried, "He wants me to get in trouble so I'll have to go live with my mother in Texas! He hates me! He hates me! He hates me!"
The box of kleenex unobtrusively placed on the table behind Eileen's chairЧbut she had not cried and Leslie had never had to tell her it was thereЧrose abruptly from the table and came flying at Leslie across the desk. Dazed, Leslie ducked. She would not have thought that the girl had had her hands anywhere near the box. And Eileen seemed such a quiet, unaggressive girl! "EileenЧ"
"Now I guess you're going to say I'm doing it too," Eileen shrieked, getting up out of the chair precipitately. The ashtray on Leslie's desk suddenly rose, hovered a moment in the air, and went flying in a great rush at Eileen. It struck her above the eyebrow, the sharp corner drawing blood, and the girl fell down into the chair, screaming, covering her face with her hands.
"Now you're doing it," Eileen screamed, "You're doing it too! Look at the blood! Why does everybody hate me? Why does everybody lie about me?" She cowered in the chair, smearing the blood on her face, staring in horror at her fingers.
Into the silence the cuckoo clock struck smartly- five times.
"No, I don't accuse you of doing it, Eileen, and no, I don't know how it happened," Leslie reassured the girl again. "Drink that up, now, and don't worry. We'll talk about it next time. And if anything more happens, you can call meЧall right?" She took the paper cup from Eileen's hand. "There's your father to pick you up."
Eileen was still sniffling.
"He's not going to believe this. He hates me. He'll blame me no matter what."
"So don't tell him," Leslie said briskly, and put a wad of clean folded kleenex into Eileen's hand. She blinked, touching the band-aid on her forehead with scared fingers.
"What'll I say if he asks me what happened?" She was clinging now, demanding attention, help, more reassurance. Leslie didn't blame her, but she couldn't encourage it either.
"Tell him the truth, if you want to. It's your choice."
"He won't believe me."
"Then don't. Say you cut your forehead on the corner of the desk." Already Leslie was wondering if that had been what really happened. Had they shared some weird hallucination? But she had also doubted the moment of intuitionЧpsychismЧwhich had shown her the body of Juanita Garcia in a drainage ditch. She patted Eileen's shoulder gently again and shoved her into the hall. Her father's car was at the foot of the steps. Eileen thrust her arms awkwardly into her down jacket, struggled into her backpack and ran clumsily down. The car door slammed behind her.
It was a relief to step inside and close the door.
She might have believed that Eileen had somehow, unseen, reached the box of tissues and flung them across the desk. But neither of them had been within reach of the ashtray.