Patricia Cornwell - Postmortem

Hesitation. I could hear her thinking.

"It was a jogging accident. She was jogging on a sidewalk and tripped, landing on her hands. One of her elbows was fractured from the impact. I remember because she wore a cast for three months during one of the hottest summers on record. She was miserable."

"That summer? Was this in Oregon?"

"No, Cecile never lived in Oregon. This was in Fredericksburg, where we grew up."

"How long ago was the jogging accident?"

Another pause. "Nine, maybe ten years ago."

"Where was she treated?"

"I don't know. A hospital in Fredericksburg. I can't remember the name."

Cecile's impaction fracture wasn't treated at VMC, and the injury had occurred much too long ago to matter. But I no longer cared.

I never met Cecile Tyler in life.

I never talked to her.

I just assumed she would sound "black."

"Mrs. O'Connor, are you black?"

"Of course I'm black."

She sounded upset.

"Did your sister talk like you?"

"Talk like me?" she asked, her voice rising.

"I know it seems an odd question…"

"You mean did she talk white like me?" she went on, outraged. "Yes! She did! Isn't that what education's all about? So black people can talk white?"

"Please," I said with feeling. "I certainly didn't intend to offend you. But it's important…" I was apologizing to a dial tone.

Lucy knew about the fifth strangling. She knew about all of the slain young women. She also knew I kept a.38 in my bedroom and had asked me about it twice since dinner.

"Lucy," I said as I rinsed plates and loaded them in the dish washer, "I don't want you thinking about guns. I wouldn't own one if I didn't live alone."

I'd been strongly tempted to hide it where she would never think to look. But after the episode with the modem, which I had guiltily reconnected to my home computer days ago, I vowed to be up front with her. The.38 remained high on my closet shelf, inside its shoebox, while Lucy was in town. The gun wasn't loaded. These days, I unloaded it in the morning and reloaded it before bed. As for the Silvertip cartridges-those I hid where she would never think to look.

When I faced her, her eyes were huge. "You know why I have a gun, Lucy. I think you understand how dangerous they are…"

"They kill people."

"Yes," I replied as we went into the living room. "They most certainly can."

"You have it so you can kill somebody."

"I don't like to think about that," I told her seriously.

"Well, it's true," she persisted. "That's why you keep it. Because of bad people. That's why."

I picked up the remote control and switched on the television.

Lucy pushed up the sleeves of her pink sweatshirt and complained, "It's hot in here, Auntie Kay. Why's it always so hot in here?"

"Would you like me to turn up the air-conditioning?"

I abstractedly flipped through the television schedule.

"No. I hate air-conditioning."

I lit a cigarette and she complained about that, too.

"Your office is hot and always stinks like cigarettes. I open the window and still it stinks. Mom says you shouldn't smoke. You're a doctor and you smoke. Mom says you should know better."

Dorothy had called late the night before. She was somewhere in California, I couldn't remember where, with her illustrator husband. It was all I could do to be civil to her. I wanted to remind her, "You have a daughter, flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. Remember Lucy? Remember her?"

Instead, I was reserved, almost gracious, mostly out of consideration for Lucy, who was sitting at the table, her lips pressed together.

Lucy talked to her mother for maybe ten minutes, and had nothing to say afterward. Ever since, she'd been all over me, critical, snappish and bossy. She'd been the same way during the day, according to Bertha, who this evening had referred to her as a "fusspot."

Bertha told me Lucy had scarcely set foot outside my office. She sat in front of the computer from the moment I left the house until the moment I returned. Bertha gave up calling her into the kitchen for meals. Lucy ate at my desk.

The sitcom on the set seemed all the more absurd because Lucy and I were having our own sitcom in the living room.

"Andy says it's more dangerous to own a gun and not know how to use it than if you don't own one," she loudly announced.

"Andy?" I said absentmindedly.

"The one before Ralph. He used to go to the junkyard and shoot bottles. He could hit them from a long ways away. I bet you couldn't."

She looked accusingly at me.

"You're right. I probably couldn't shoot as well as Andy."

"See!"

I didn't tell her I actually knew quite a lot about firearms. Before I bought my stainless-steel Ruger.38, I went down to the indoor range in the basement of my building and experimented with an assortment of handguns from the firearms lab, all this under the professional supervision of one of the examiners. I practiced from time to time, and I wasn't a bad shot. I didn't think I would hesitate if the need ever arose. I also didn't intend to discuss the matter further with my niece.

Very quietly I asked, "Lucy, why are you picking on me?"

"Because you're a stupid ass!" Her eyes filled with tears. "You're just an old stupid ass and if you tried to, you'd hurt yourself or he'd get it away from you! And then you'd be gone, too! If you tried to, he'd shoot you with it just like it happens on TV!"

"If I tried to?" I puzzled. "If I tried to what, Lucy?"

"If you tried to get somebody first."

She angrily wiped away tears, her narrow chest heaving. I stared blindly at the family circus on TV and didn't know what to say. My impulse was to retreat to my office and shut the door, to lose myself in my work for a while, but hesitantly I moved over and pulled her close. We sat like this for the longest time, saying nothing.

I wondered who she talked to at home. I couldn't imagine her having any conversations of substance with my sister. Dorothy and her children's books had been lauded by various critics as "extraordinarily insightful" and "deep" and "full of feeling."

What a dismal irony. Dorothy gave the best she had to juvenile characters who didn't exist. She nurtured them. She spent long hours contemplating their every detail, from the way their hair was combed to the clothes they wore, to their trials and rites of passage. All the while Lucy was starved for attention.

I thought of the times Lucy and I spent together when I lived in Miami, of the holidays with her, my mother and Dorothy. I thought of Lucy's last visit here. I couldn't recall her ever mentioning the names of friends. I don't think she had any. She would talk about her teachers, her mother's ragtag assortment of "boyfriends," Mrs. Spooner across the street, Jake the yardman and the endless parade of maids. Lucy was a tiny, bespectacled know-it-all whom older children resented and children her age didn't understand. She was out of sync. I think I was exactly like her when I was her age.

A peaceful warmth had settled over both of us. I said into her hair, "Someone asked me a question the other day."

"About what?"

"About trust. Someone asked me who I trusted more than anybody else in the world. And you know what?"

She leaned her head back, looking up at me.

"I think that person is you."

"Do you really?" she asked, incredulously. "More than anybody?"

I nodded and quietly went on, "That being the case, I'm going to ask you to help me with something."

She sat up and stared at me, her eyes alert and utterly thrilled. "Oh, sure! Just ask me! I'll help you, Auntie Kay!"

"I need to figure out how someone managed to break into the computer downtown."

"I didn't do it," she instantly blurted out, a stricken look on her face. "I already told you I didn't."