Sue Grafton - U Is For Undertow

“That still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.”

She cocked her head and the light glinting off her glasses was like a quick camera flash. “I’m his sister, Dee.”

Ah. Dee, the difficult one. I looked at her closely, seeing for the first time Sutton’s solemn brown eyes staring back at me. “Alvarez is your married name.”

“I’m divorced. Pete’s my ex.”

“Peter Alvarez, the radio talk-show host?”

“The very one,” she said. “I take it Michael mentioned me.”

“Briefly. He told me you were estranged.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No, and I didn’t ask.”

“Shall I fill you in?”

“To what end?”

“I think you should know what you’re dealing with.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. A conversation about him is inappropriate.”

“Hear me out. Please.”

I debated with myself. Technically, I was no longer in his employ and nothing she said would have any bearing on the job he’d hired me to do. I couldn’t imagine where she was headed and I confess my curiosity got the better of me. “Keep it short,” I said, as though a brief airing of the dirty laundry would be less objectionable.

“I’ll have to backtrack first.”

“No doubt,” I said. Long-winded storytelling must have been a family trait. Michael had done the same thing, making sure the facts were arranged in date order. I could see her composing sentences in her head.

“Michael’s been depressed all his life. As a child, he was always anxious, subject to all manner of imaginary illnesses. He did poorly at Climp and barely managed to graduate. He couldn’t find a job and since he had no income, he asked Mom and Dad if he could go on living at home. My parents agreed on one condition: he had to get help. If he’d find a therapist, they’d pay for it.”

I was getting restless. Unless Michael Sutton was a spree killer, I didn’t care about his psychiatric history.

She must have caught my impatience because she said, “Bear with me.”

“It would help if you’d get to the point.”

“Are you going to listen to me or not?”

She fixed me with a stony stare and I could barely keep from rolling my eyes. I gestured for her to continue, but I felt like an attorney questioning the relevance of her testimony.

“The family doctor referred him to a licensed marriage and family counselor, a psychologist named Marty Osborne. Does her name ring a bell?”

“Nope.” I could tell she was teasing out the narrative for dramatic effect and it annoyed me no end.

“Michael seemed to like her and we were all relieved. After he’d been seeing her for a couple of months she suggested his depression was symptomatic of early childhood sexual abuse.”

“Sexual abuse?”

“She said it was just an educated guess, but she felt they should explore the possibility. He didn’t believe a word of it, but she assured him it was natural to block trauma of that magnitude. We didn’t know any of this at the time. It all came out later.”

“Shit.”

“Shit is right.” Diana shook her head. “Marty continued to work with him and, little by little, the ugly ‘truth’ came out. She was using hypnosis and guided imagery to help him recover his ‘repressed’ memories, sometimes with the aid of sodium amytal.”

“Truth serum.”

“That’s correct. Next thing we knew, she’d diagnosed him with multiple personality disorder. As luck would have it-now here’s a happy coincidence-she ran an MPD support group, which Michael joined. More cash changed hands, his to hers. Meanwhile, my parents were blissfully unaware of what was happening. My brothers and I were out of the house by then so we saw much less of him than they did. After three months, Michael started seeing her twice a week and talking to her on the phone three and four times a day. He didn’t eat. He scarcely slept. We could see that, psychologically, he was disintegrating, coming apart at the seams, but we thought his getting worse was part of the process of getting better. Little did we know. She persuaded him it would be ‘healing’ if he confronted the past, which he did with a vengeance. He accused my father of molesting him from the time he was eight months old. He had these shadowy memories that he knew were real. Soon, his hazy mental movie came into focus and he ‘remembered’ my mother was also in on the abuse. Next thing you know, my younger brother Ryan was added to the list. We’re talking nasty stuff-claims of satanic ritual, bestiality, animal sacrifice, you name it.”

“Sounds preposterous.”

“Of course. What made it worse was my parents had no way to defend themselves. Any attempt they made to refute his claims only served to reinforce his conviction that they were guilty as charged. Marty told him abusers always deny what they’ve done. He moved out of the house, cutting off all contact, which was actually a relief. Then she talked him into collaborating on a book and that’s what blew the lid off.

“When Mom and Dad got wind of it, they hired an attorney and sued the crap out of her for slander and defamation. The night before they were set to go to trial, they reached a settlement. I don’t know the terms because they signed a confidentiality agreement. Whatever it was, my parents were never able to collect a cent. Marty filed for bankruptcy and that’s the last anybody ever heard from her. For all we know, she’s still in private practice only somewhere else.”

“I don’t get it. Why would she do such a thing?”

“Because she could. She saw it as part of her job. In her eyes, she did no wrong. When they took her pretrial deposition, do you know what she said? That even if his story wasn’t true, she was there to validate his feelings. If he was convinced he was abused as a child, then she would support him in his beliefs. In other words, if you think you were abused, you were, and that’s all it takes.”

“Without proof?”

“She didn’t need proof. She said if that was ‘his truth,’ he could depend on her to keep the faith.”

“Did the family doctor who referred him know what she was up to?”

“In his deposition he admitted he’d never met her. She’d been recommended by another doctor whose opinion he respected. In a way, it was beside the point. You don’t need a doctor’s referral to see a therapist. Just look in the yellow pages and pick anyone you like. Some of them even have little boxes advertising their specialties. Self-esteem issues, crisis counseling, anger management, stress, panic attacks. The list goes on and on. Who among us hasn’t experienced the occasional rage or anxiety?”

“How do you know which therapists are legitimate?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never been in therapy. I’m sure most of them are honest and capable. Some might even be skilled, but sexual abuse is like a siren call. There’s a ton of money to be made.”

“That’s a bit cynical, isn’t it?”

“Not as cynical as you might think. Suppose you go into therapy because your relationships aren’t working out the way you’d hoped. Turns out that’s a symptom of early childhood abuse. Write me a check and come back next week. You don’t remember what was done? That’s called being ‘in denial.’ You’ve repressed the memory because it was all so traumatic and you don’t want to believe something so horrible would happen at the hands of those you love. Pay me for this session and let’s meet again next week so we can get to the root of it. In effect, my parents paid Marty Osborne six thousand dollars to drive a stake into their hearts.”

“They must have been distraught.”

“They were devastated, and I don’t think they ever really got over it. I can barely deal with it myself and I wasn’t one of the accused. After the case was settled, my parents swore they’d put it behind them. They shut the door on the whole ugly episode. They were desperate to believe Michael loved them and everything was okay. Here’s how ‘okay’ it was. A couple of years afterward, my mother died in a drowning accident, and my father dropped dead six months later of an aneurysm. He never got around to changing his will, so after what Michael put us through, he inherited an equal share of their estate.”