Jonathan Kellerman - Silent Partner

“When did she change her mind about becoming a teacher?”

“Beginning of her senior year. She’d majored in psychology. Given her background, you could see why she’d be interested in human nature- no offense. But she never said anything about actually becoming a psychologist until she went to a Careers Day at Long Island University- representatives of various professions sitting at tables, handing out literature and counseling students. She met a psychologist there, a professor who really impressed her. And apparently she impressed him as well. He told her she’d make an excellent psychologist, was quite adamant about it to the point of offering to sponsor her. He was moving to Los Angeles, guaranteed her acceptance to graduate school there if she wanted it. It was a real boost for her- to see herself as a doctor.”

“What was this professor’s name?”

“She never told it to me.”

“You never asked her?”

“She was always a private person, told me what she wanted me to know. I came to learn that the worst way to get anything out of her was to ask. How about some pie?”

“I’d love to, but I’m really full.”

“Well, I’m going to have some. I crave something sweet. I just really crave that, right now.”

I learned nothing more through a half hour of photo albums and family anecdotes. Some of the snapshots featured Sharon- lithe, smiling, beautiful as a child, enchanting as a teenager, mothering the boys. When I commented on them, Helen said nothing.

By nine o’clock an awkwardness had settled between us: Like two kids who’d gone further than they should have on the first date, we were pulling back. When I thanked her for her time, she was eager to see me leave. I left Willow Glen at five after, and was back on Route 10 forty-five minutes later.

My freeway companions were semis hauling produce, flatbeds loaded with specimen trees and hay. I started to feel logy and tried listening to music. That made me even drowsier and I pulled off near Fontana, into the lot of a combo self-serve Shell station and twenty-four-hour truck stop.

Inside were scuffed gray counters, red vinyl booths mended with duct tape, rotating racks of freeway toys, and hard, heavy silence. A couple of broad-backed teamsters and one sunken-eyed drifter sat at the counter. Ignoring over-the-shoulder glances, I took a corner booth that provided the illusion of privacy. A thin waitress with a port-wine stain on her left cheek filled my cup with industrial-strength liquid caffeine, and I filled my mind with a tempest of questions.

Sharon, Queen of Deception. She’d risen, literally, from the muck, made “something of herself” in fulfillment of Helen Leidecker’s Pygmalion dream.

That dream had been tinged by selfishness- Helen’s desire to relive her urban intellectual fantasies through Sharon. But no less sincere for that. And she’d wrought a remarkable transformation: a wild child tamed. Chiseled and buffed into a paragon of scholarship and good breeding. Top of the class. Summa cum laude.

But Helen had never been given all the pieces to the puzzle, had no idea what had taken place during the first four years of Sharon’s life. The formative years, when the mortar of identity is blended, the foundation of character set and hardened.

I thought once again of that night I’d found her with the silent partner photo. Naked. Regressed to the days before Helen had found her.

A two-year-old boy’s tantrum kept coming to mind.

Early trauma. Blocking out the horror.

What horror for Sharon?

Who’d raised her for the first three years of her life, bridging the gap between Linda Lanier and Helen Leidecker?

Not the Ransoms- they were too dull to have taught her about cars. About language.

I remembered the two of them, gazing after Gabe and me as we left their dirt patch. Their sole souvenir of parenthood, a letter.

Your only little girl.

She’d used the same phrase to refer to another set of parents. Noël Coward bon vivants who’d never existed- not in Manhattan, Palm Beach, Long Island, or L.A.

Martinis in the sun-room.

Wax-paper windows.

Separating the two, a galactic abyss- the impossible leap between wishful thinking and dismal reality.

She’d tried to bridge that gap with lies and half-truths. Fabricating an identity out of the fragments of other people’s lives.

Losing herself in the process?

Her pain and shame must have been terrible. For the first time since her death, I let myself feel really sorry for her.

Fragments.

A Park Avenue snippet from well-born Kruse.

A car crash orphan story lifted from Leland Belding’s bio.

A ladylike demeanor and love for erudition from Helen Leidecker.

No doubt she’d sat at Helen’s feet, absorbing stories about the way the “idle rich” comported themselves out in the Hamptons. Had enhanced her knowledge, as a Forsythe student, strolling past the gated entrances of sprawling beach estates. Collecting mental images like bits of broken seashell- images that enabled her to paint me a too-vivid picture of chauffeurs and clam spouts, two little girls in a pool house.

Shirlee. Joan.

Sharon Jean.

She’d rotated the story of the drowned twin one way for Helen, another for me, lying- to those she ostensibly loved- with the ease of brushing her hair.

Pseudo-twinship. Identity problems. Two little girls eating ice cream. Mirror-image twins.

Pseudo multiple personality.

Elmo Castelmaine was certain “Shirlee” had been born crippled, which meant she couldn’t be one of the children I’d seen in the sawtooth-edged photo. But he was relying on information Sharon had provided.

Or lying himself. Not that there was any reason to doubt him, but I’d grown allergic to trust.

And what was to say the crippled woman was really a twin? A relation of any kind? She and Sharon had shared general physical traits- hair color, eye color- that I’d accepted as proof of sisterhood. Accepted what Sharon had told me about Shirlee because at the time there’d been no reason not to.

Shirlee. If that was even her name.

Shirlee, with two e’s . Sharon had made a point of the two e’s. Named after her adoptive mother.

More symbolism.

Joan.

Another mind-game.

All those years , Helen had said, I felt I understood her. Now I realize I was deluding myself. I barely knew her.

Welcome to the club, Teach.

I knew that the way Sharon had lived and died had been programmed by something that had taken place before Helen had discovered her gorging on mayonnaise.

The early years…

I drank coffee, explored blind alleys. My thoughts shifted to Darren Burkhalter, his father’s head landing on the backseat, like some bloody beachball…

The early years.

Unfinished business.

Mal had chalked up another victory: he’d get a new Mercedes, and Darren would grow up a rich kid. But all the money in the world couldn’t expunge that image from a two-year-old mind.

I thought about all the misborn, afflicted children I’d treated. Tiny bodies hurled into life’s storm with all the self-determination of dandelion husks. Something told to me by a patient came to mind, the bitter farewell comment of a once self-confident man, who’d just buried his only child:

If God exists, Doc, he fucking well has a nasty sense of humor.

Had some sick joke dominated Sharon’s formative years? If so, who was the comedian?

A small-town girl named Linda Lanier was one half of the biologic equation; who’d supplied the other twenty-three chromosomes?

Some Hollywood hanger-on or one-night-stand mattress jockey? An obstetrician with an after-hours sideline scraping away life? A billionaire?