In Dark Places

Chapter Thirteen

"I'll pick you up at ten," Robin said as she cleaned up after Meg's hurried dinner.

Meg showed her the pouty face she used when she was being treated unfairly. "I can get a ride from Jamie's sister. She's got her license now."

"Very reassuring. I'll be there at ten."

"You know, it's bad enough being dropped off by your mother. But being picked up by her"

"Just think of me as your personal chauffeur. So why a party on a Monday night?"

"It's not a party. It's a study group for lit class."

"Sounds very academic."

"You know me, the junior scholar."

"Any boys participating in this educational effort?"

"Boys? Yuck. Seriously, no Y-chromosome types are allowed. It's a strictly double-X affair."

"You might want to rephrase that."

"What I'm saying is, it's a girl fest. Who knows, there might even be pillow fights."

"So you, uh, you're still not seeing anybody?"

"I guess you'd know if I were."

"It wouldn't kill you to be sociable with some of the boys in your class."

"I'm not interested in them. They're all so immature. They're just, you know, kids."

You're a kid, too, Robin thought, but she said nothing.

"Hey," Meg added with a glance at the clock, "we'd better take off, or I'll be late."

"I just need to close the windows so I can set the alarm."

"Why bother? It's a five-minute ride. Ten-minute round trip."

"Ten minutes is long enough for someone to break in." Someone like Brand.

Meg shook her head. "Wow. You weren't like this in Santa Barbara. You spend way too much time around criminals. It's making you crazy."

"Thanks for the diagnosis."

They set the alarm, locked up, and descended to the condo building's underground garage. Meg stopped short when she saw the Saab. "Oh, my God. Were you in an accident?"

"No, nothing like that."

"Why didn't you tell me about this?"

"I forgot." This excuse, lame was it was, happened to be true. With everything else that had taken place today, the damage to the car had slipped her mind.

"You forgot? What happened to it?"

"Vandals," Robin lied. "They broke the windows while I was at work."

"You mean they did this in the parking lot behind your building?"

"Afraid so."

Meg pondered the damage before reaching a decision. "I can't be seen in this car. It's a wreck."

"Think of it as retro."

"Mom, seriously amp;"

Robin wanted to ask Meg if she was really that worried about what her friends would think, but of course she knew the answer. Friends were your whole world when you were in high school.

"I'll park behind a tree," she said. "They'll never even see me."

"You swear?"

"Cross my heart and hope to never eat pizza again."

Tentatively Meg got into the car, treating it as if it were a giant bear trap poised to spring shut. Robin slid behind the wheel.

"You're going to get this fixed, right?" Meg pressed.

"No, I was planning to leave it this way. Gives the car some character, don't you think?"

Meg stared at her, aghast, then relaxed a little. "Oh, you're joking."

Robin started the engine. "What gave it away?"

"You must've been pissed when you saw the damage."

"Don't say pissed."

"Ticked off. Riled. Irked."

"That's better."

They pulled onto the street, heading north to Wilshire. The sun was lowering. Sunset was at seven-forty-five, twenty minutes from now.

"When did you start going all Miss Manners on me?" Meg asked.

"I've always been Miss Manners. Miss Manners is my alter ego."

"Right."

"Have you ever seen me eat with the wrong fork?"

"I've seen you eat takeout straight from the container with a plastic spork. I don't picture Miss Manners doing that."

"She does it. Just not in public." Robin turned right on Wilshire, blending into a smooth stream of traffic.

"So amp; did you see Justin Gray today?" Meg asked.

Robin frowned. The question had come out of nowhere. "Why ask about him?"

"Just curious."

"He's coming tomorrow. You know that. Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"Right, right." Meg looked out the window at the strip malls and fast-food joints. "It's weird."

"What is?"

"The stuff he did."

"Murdering girls? I'd say that qualifies as more than weird."

"The way he did it. Kidnapping them at random. And he didn't rape them or anything."

Robin wondered where Meg had picked up that detail. She had never been interested in following the news. "True."

"So if he didn't have anything personal against them, and he wasn't in it for sex, why'd he do it at all?"

"What's with this sudden interest in Justin Gray?"

"I was just wondering if you had any, you know, theory about it. Unless you're not up for the Grand Guignol stuff right now."

"I'm up for it, I guess. It's not Grand Guignol, anyway. It's sort of Freudian. Or Jungian. I don't know. Symbolic."

"I'm going to regret asking, aren't I?"

"Too late now." Robin composed her thoughts while the Saab idled at a stoplight. "The fact that he didn't know the girls personally was part of their appeal. It made it easier for him to objectify them, depersonalize them. He didn't want to see them as individual human beings. He wanted to see them as generic females. As femininity in the abstract. You with me?"

"I'm hanging on every word."

The light cycled to green. Robin glided through the intersection. "By killing them, he was finishing the job of dehumanization. He was"

Meg finished. "Making them nonpersons."

"Yes. Exactly."

"Nonpersonslike him."

Robin was pleased. "You could end up as a shrink yourself, you know that?"

"No way. For me, it's either supermodel or research bio-chemist." She thought for a moment. "There's another way he's like the girls he killed. They were teenagers. So's he."

"He's twenty-eight."

"Not inside. Inside, he's still fifteen and probably all covered with pimples. That's why he's so obsessed with high school girls. He's still in high school. Emotionally, I mean. And I bet he always will be."

Robin felt a flush of painful pride. "Sometimes you're so smart, it's scary."

"I have a genius for a mother. Some of it had to rub off."

"I think you'll outgenius me by a long way before long."

"And Dan, too?"

"He's only a genius at selling himself."

"You believe that?"

"When it comes to your father, I don't know what to believe."

They reached Jamie's house on the outskirts of Westwood. Robin actually did pull up alongside a tree to hide the car.

"Ten o'clock," she reminded Meg.

"I got it. Jeez, you've got to get this car fixed tomorrow. It'll be, like, a total humiliation if anybody sees me in this thing."

"You'll survive."

"I'll never live it down. Make an appointment with a body shop, please?"

"I aim to serve."

"Cross your heart?"

"You only get one of those per day."

Meg nodded good-bye, then left the car and hurried up the walk to the bungalow's front door. Robin watched until she was safely inside, then pulled away, shaking her head.

Total humiliation, Meg had said. And she'd meant it, too. To be embarrassed in front of her peers was the worst fate she could imagine.

Nothing unusual about that. Her daughter had reached the stage of adolescence when the world centered on her.

Every problem was a crisis. Every decision was a turning point. Image was all-important. Her personal life was cosmic in scope and significance, and the rest of the world had shriveled to an afterthought.

This much was clear to Robin, not because she was a shrink, but because she had been fifteen herself not so very long agowell, on second thought, it had been twenty-four years, more than a lifetime in Meg's eyes. Still, she remembered. Remembered the clash of fear and excitement whenever she contemplated the future, guessing at the path she would take, the obstacles she would face, wondering if she had the courage to run the race, or if she would stumble and fall like most of the adults around her. Remembered the moods that came and went like flashes of summer lightning, fluctuations of emotional voltage she herself couldn't explain. Remembered how much everything matteredthe right hairstyle, right clothes, right friendsand how she'd hated herself for caring so deeply about things that were so shallow. There was a painful immediacy to every momentary feeling. Any ripple of disappointment or pleasure became a surge of grief or joy.

Hormones explained some of it, but there was also the vertigo-inducing task of forming one's own character, the scary thrill of knowing that choices made now might echo down decades of regret.

And yet, nearly all of it was unnecessary. That was the secret Robin wished she could impart to her daughter. But it was not a secret to be shared. It was a lesson to be learned.

She wished she could hug Meg and say to her, Life is not so hard. It's usually about as hard as we make it. We can't plan it out. We have much less control than we think. Mostly, things just happen, and if there's a reason, we don't know it at the time. But we don't have to know. It's not our job to do more than we can do. Life doesn't give us more than we can handle.

But if she said all that, Meg wouldn't hear. She wasn't ready to hear. She was fifteen.