Remembering That Night. Stephanie Doyle
father was Arthur Dunning and your mother was Louisa. They were shot and killed when you were eight years old. You were their only child.”
Shot and killed in their home. At the dinner table. When the police arrived they found Liza huddled under the table in a state of shock—and she had no memory of what had happened.
“Why?”
“Your father was in the mafia.”
“My father.” She gulped.
“I’m sorry.”
She stood then and walked over to the sink, poured her untouched tea down the drain and then held on to the counter as if it was her only support. “I don’t know how to process this.”
“I wish I could sugarcoat it but I can’t.”
“In the pictures...” Liza left the room and Greg got up to follow her. Off the living room was a hallway that led to two bedrooms and what looked to be a home office. The largest bedroom was in the back of the house. Greg hesitated before stepping over the threshold. A man didn’t just walk into the bedroom of a woman if he wasn’t sleeping with her.
But she was right there near her low dresser holding a picture in her hand. She showed it to him, and in essence invited him inside her room, inside her space.
“I figured they were my parents. But the photo did look dated and I didn’t have anything more recent.” He could see that her blond hair came from her mother. But she had her father’s eyes.
She picked up another picture. “Who is the woman? Is this my grandmother?”
Greg looked at the older dark haired woman with the big smile and her arms wrapped around what looked to be a ten-or eleven-year-old Liza. “No. I’m guessing it was Hector’s grandmother, on his father’s side. That’s who you lived with after the shooting. Hector D’Amato was your legal guardian and he took you to the woman who raised him, his grandmother.”
She made an awful face. “And I was having sex with him? The man who was my guardian?”
“That’s speculation, not fact. It could be the reason you had a personal relationship with him was because he was your guardian. It’s not common knowledge. Obviously the police weren’t aware of it or they would have said something. My friend had to dig deep to find the connection. The woman who raised you, Maria Angelucci, had divorced and remarried. The fact that D’Amato hadn’t made it public knowledge that he was your guardian was maybe his way of keeping you safe. You obviously must have been close for people to think you were his mistress.”
She set the picture down. “Is that the worst of it?”
“No.”
She closed her eyes. “Tell me.”
“Maybe you should come back to the living room and we can sit down...”
“Tell me. Now.”
Greg shoved his hands in his pockets. “At seventeen something happened to you. You spent almost a month in the hospital. After that you spent another six months at a private mental-health facility about an hour outside the city.”
Her head dropped and he waited to see what her reaction would be. After a moment she lifted her head. “You’re saying I’m crazy?”
“I’m—I used to be—a psychologist. I don’t say anybody is crazy. I’m saying you were ill.”
Her expression changed and she looked at him with near desperation. “Then you believe me now, right? I mean I’m obviously not the most stable person. Of course something happened and—pop—there I went again. So I’m weak or weak-minded, but I’m not a liar. Tell me you believe that I’m not a liar.”
This was it, he figured. It was time now to make that decision. Believe her and treat her accordingly or don’t believe her and cut his ties.
He hoped like hell he was making the right call because he could already feel himself slipping. He was becoming invested in her. In her life, her condition. Too late now.
“I believe you.”
He could see the relief overcome her. She took a few steps back and plopped down on the bed. “Okay. Okay. You believe me and I’m not crazy. Then I need you to believe this, too...I know I can’t remember what happened but I don’t feel like the kind of person who could kill someone. I mean, I had to be there, right? I knew him, he was shot, I was covered in blood. I had to be there, but I don’t think I did it. Would you believe that, too?”
“I think it’s more important that your lawyer believes that.”
“No. It isn’t. I need you to believe me.”
Her urgency made Greg uncomfortable. He didn’t want to be needed by anyone. That wasn’t his role anymore. But he could see he was basically offering his support like food to a starving animal. Of course she would take it, of course she would hold on to him. The weight of the responsibility made his own breathing tight.
“Why me?” he asked gruffly. It was more a question for the universe than for her.
Still, she answered. “Because right now you’re the only person in the world who knows me. Who really knows me. Which I guess makes you my friend and I would really like to have a friend right now who believes what I’m saying. I didn’t kill another person. I couldn’t have. Okay?”
Friend. There was that word he liked to avoid. With everyone but Chuck. Because friends needed each other for things and he really didn’t want to be needed.
Then he opened his mouth and the word okay slipped out. Shit.
“Okay,” she repeated. He watched her take slow deep breaths and figured it was probably a technique some therapist had given her to use when she was a teenager. Greg had asked Mark if he knew what her condition was, but Mark had only been able to learn about the hospital stay, not about her particular diagnosis. The information he ferreted out about her stay at the mental-health facility was a total violation of her private health information, but Greg had implicitly given Mark permission to bend the rules.
Still, a month-long stay in a hospital before moving on to treatment? It suggested that there was a physical component to her condition in addition to the mental component. Maybe she’d been recovering from something she had done to herself?
A failed suicide attempt might put someone in the hospital for a period of time. Greg considered himself something of an expert in suicide. It was why he wasn’t a psychologist anymore.
“Why was D’Amato my legal guardian? What was the connection between him and my father?”
“He worked for your father. There were a few articles on Dunning where D’Amato’s face could be seen in the background of a picture. Maybe he was a bodyguard. Maybe he was his second-in-command. They must have been close for your father to trust him with his only daughter.”
She nodded. He didn’t need to expand on that. Now that she understood her father was part of the mafia, it was a good bet that Hector was involved, as well. Which meant she was working for a man she knew to be a criminal.
She was working for the man who had a hand in raising her.
“Is that everything?”
She was waiting for the next blow. “If it matters, I don’t think you have a weak mind.”
She gave a brief laugh. “I can’t remember anything right now and you just told me I spent six months in a mental-health facility.”
“When you were a teenager.”
“What difference does it make? I’m not right.”
He sat on the bed next to her and took her hand. He figured it was what a friend would do and she had officially declared him to be her only friend so he figured he was on the hook. He forced himself to breathe through the constriction in his own chest.