Stephen White - Warning Signs

"Take your time, Lucy." It was something I said to patients all the time in psychotherapy. For some reason, it usually made them seem to hurry.

"Susan Peterson is my mother, Alan."

I said, "What?" I knew exactly what she had said. My question expressed my befuddlement, not my failure to hear or comprehend.

Lucy returned her weight to both legs and turned and faced me. She'd pulled the robe closed at her throat with one hand. "Susan Peterson is… my mother. Or at least she's the woman who gave birth to me."

At her pronouncement, I stood. I don't know why. "Lucy, Lucy. My God. I had no idea."

"No one did. We are… estranged. That's a good word for it. Estranged. In fact, it couldn't be es- stranger."

"Royal knew?"

Again, Lucy spun and faced the glass. She'd released the shawl collar of her black robe. The reflection made it clear that it had again fallen open to the middle of her chest. "Of course Royal knew."

"Cozy and Lauren?"

She shook her head. "No one else in town knows." She found her own words humorous, or ironic, or something. "At least no one in town knew. Until tonight. Now that's about to change."

I tried to make sense of the implications of the news that Lucy had just shared. I had to assume that this was the reason she had been in the Peterson home the night that Royal had been murdered. A visit to her mother would explain all the fingerprints the police had found in the house. Lauren and Cozy could create considerable doubt with that revelation.

But Lucy had also told Cozy and Lauren that if the reason she was in the Peterson home that night was known, everyone would be convinced that she had a motive for Royal's murder.

I couldn't make sense of that.

And, of course, I hadn't heard anything yet that would account for the wet spot.

Lucy turned back toward the room. She wasn't holding the collar of her robe this time.

"We're intimate now, aren't we, Alan?"

I thought, Whoa . She saw the puzzlement in my face.

"I've certainly been open with you… and, God knows, I've never been more vulnerable in my life than I am right now."

L ucy Tanner was the only child of a mannamed Charles Tanner and a free-spirited woman he'd met at a sit-in in a bank in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969. The woman's name was Susie Pine. Lucy's conception predated Charles and Susie's subsequent marriage by almost six months. Susie's friends were much more surprised that Susie Pine married at all than they were that she never adopted her husband's last name.

The Tanner-Pine marriage endured, at least as far as the state of Michigan was concerned, for seven years. The reason that Susie gave when she initially left her husband and daughter in Ann Arbor was that she felt she had to go to the bedside of her older sister, who was dying of breast cancer in Tucson. Six weeks later, two days after her sister's Arizona funeral, Susie Pine packed up the things she wanted from her sister's house and moved to Boulder. Within days, she filed for divorce from her husband, Charles.

She never returned to Ann Arbor.

The divorce was uncontested, and custody of the minor child, Lucy, was awarded to Charles Tanner. He remarried two years later and his second attempt at marriage was much more successful than his first.

Lucy's adolescence was less tumultuous than her childhood had been, and she considered herself to be a relatively confident, though shy, young person when she graduated high school near the top of her class and moved west to attend Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

L ucy told methat her move west for school had nothing to do with a desire to reconnect with the mother who had abandoned her during her childhood. She maintained that she chose Colorado College solely because of its unique curriculum.

The psychologist in me noted her resistance, but I wasn't in Lucy's flat to give her a boost up on some eventual psychotherapy, I was there to be her friend. I bit my tongue and kept my thoughts about unconscious motivation to myself.

S usie Pine becameSusan Peterson a little more than a year after her divorce from Charles Tanner. She and her new husband, an ambitious thirty-year-old prosecuting attorney named Royal, had two children during the first two years of their marriage, and added a third three years later.

One year after the completion of his family Royal Peterson won his first term as district attorney of Boulder County.

W hen did youfind her for the first time?" I asked.

"I didn't even know if she was still in town when I joined the police department. I figured there was as good a chance that she had moved away as there was that she was still here. I never looked for her. That's not true. I checked the phone book once-does that count? Then I went to a reception when they opened the new coroner's offices in the Justice Center. That was about, I'm not sure, four or five years ago. She was there with Royal."

"You recognized her?"

"Sure. Susan had aged well. But I grew up with lots of photographs of her. My father is quite the amateur photographer and he always wanted me to know who my mother was. But she didn't recognize me. And I didn't talk to her that night. Not at all."

A cuckoo clock chirped once. I'd been wondering what time it was. Now I knew. I was also wondering how people survived living with cuckoo clocks. I still didn't know that.

"I finally went and saw her after I heard rumors about her illness. You know, her MS. I don't know why, exactly. Compassion? More likely pity, I guess. That, or it was just a good excuse to see her so I could try to begin to understand how she could leave her daughter so cavalierly. It was probably a combination."

I was uncomfortable with the way Lucy was referring to herself. "Her daughter was you, Lucy."

"Yeah. Her daughter was me. But, let's face it, I'm not the only kid who's ever been left behind by a parent. I remind myself of that a lot. Being left behind by my mother is not an excuse to let myself be damaged for life. My dad raised me well. My stepmother is a sweetheart. Whatever mistakes my father made with women, he got them out of his system by marrying Susan."

"Does reminding yourself that you're not the only child who's been left behind by a parent help?"

"Not much." She sighed. "I was terrified that first time that I went to her house to see her. Not that she'd slam the door in my face. My biggest fear? My biggest fear was that I was going to adore her, like instantly, the moment I set my eyes on her. As a girl, I'd idealized her after she left. My father was always kind; he never criticized her and I was left to create this image of her that had almost no basis in reality. She was as pretty as a movie star, as kind as the best mother in the world. Anyway, going to see her that day, I felt that some angel was going to answer the door. And I was afraid that the more it turned out that I adored her, the angrier I was going to be that she'd left me behind. Does that make sense?"

"Of course."

Lucy's voice grew small. "But it didn't turn out that way. I didn't like her. I didn't like her at all. She was critical, belittling, selfish. She wasn't this benevolent soul who'd left me to tend to my ill aunt. She was Susan Peterson. You must have gotten to know her through the DA's office. Didn't you? Lauren worked for her husband for years. You had to have known her at least a little bit."

"I've known her socially, yes."

"Do you like her?"

I managed a complete inhale and exhale before I responded, trying to find an alternative way to answer Lucy's question than the one I ended up with: "She can be difficult."