“I know. True crime is always fascinating to me. The psychological impact on you as a four-year-old victim, losing your twin as well as your mother, the repression of traumatic memory—it must be devastating still.”
“A survivor,” Angie said crisply. “I’m not a victim. I’m a survivor.”
The psychologist’s eyes held hers, and Angie felt suddenly as if she’d come to be interrogated by this woman rather than the other way around. Or that Eden was challenging her, laying down subtle lines in the sand.
“Yes, of course,” Eden said softly. “A survivor. My apologies. Come on through.” She held her arm out toward the door. “I rescheduled my lunch-hour appointment so we can chat in peace.”
At least that made a change from Kathi Daly.
“My last patient left via the rear entrance,” she said as she showed Angie into a consulting room with comfortable-looking chairs and decor that was easy on the eyes. “Therapy can be an emotionally draining experience for my patients, and no one wants to exit through a waiting room full of people after sobbing their eyes out. This way—” She took Angie into a smaller office that led off the consulting room. Inside was a large desk. Bookshelves lined the walls. Eden shut the door behind them.
The wall beside Eden’s desk was adorned with framed degrees, diplomas, medals. The glory wall, thought Angie as she stepped closer to read the inscriptions on some of the medals that hung from ribbons.
“You’re a marathoner as well?”
“I completed five. But I prefer the river or ocean to the road. Give me a kayak and a rod over pavement and running shoes any day.” She nodded at the medals. “But those races were to prove to myself I could actually go the distance if I put my mind to it. Many things in life are analogous to the marathon struggle. I use the metaphor a lot in therapy.”
“These are your kids?” Angie said, moving to the next wall, which was hung with what appeared to be family photographs.
“Two sons and a daughter, yes. I have a stay-at-home husband, or I don’t know how I’d manage.” Eden gestured to a leather chair. “Please, take a seat.”
“Is this him, your husband?” Angie pointed to a photo of a balding male with a beard. The man looked soft in the face, a little flaccid in physique. Gentle eyes.
“Yes. John Drysdale. I kept my own name for my practice since it’s how I qualified.”
Angie briefly scanned the other images. There were at least seven photographs of Eden and her father at various stages in their lives. No images of Eden with her mother.
Angie stopped at a fading print of a little towheaded boy on a tricycle.
“Is this your brother, Jimmy?” Angie said.
“It is. We lost him that holiday. It’s the last picture we have of him.”
“I’m so sorry,” Angie said as she took the seat being offered her. “Your parents told me about him. It must have been traumatic. Maybe it still is,” she said, lobbing Eden’s earlier dig back at her.
Eden gave a wry smile. “Touché. It is. Past trauma never really leaves you. You need to make room, a home for it, and learn to live with it and use it in positive ways.”
Angie let that sink in because it was true. She was still trying to make a home for her past while at the same time forging a new way into the future, a new way to be.
Eden took a seat opposite Angie and said, “The hardest, I suppose, was that my mother blames me in some ways for Jimmy’s death. I was supposed to be watching him, but I’d ventured off the dock to gather the blackberries I could see growing in brambles farther along the lakeshore. While I was picking berries, he went off the edge of the dock with his tricycle. By the time I heard the splash ...” She fell silent, then inhaled slowly. “Guilt can be a terrible thing. I felt guilt for years. My mother still does, I think. Because she left me with Jimmy, and I was only nine at the time. My mother feels she shouldn’t have given me that responsibility at that age.”
“What about your father?” Angie said with another glance at numerous dad-and-daughter pictures on the wall. “Was he at the lake that summer, too?”
“He was busy marking papers in the lake house. It was my mother who should’ve been taking care of us—at least, that’s what she’d led my dad to believe she was doing so he could focus on his work. She left us alone often—she was a bad mother in that respect. It’s a miracle nothing happened to either of us before then.” Eden regarded Angie as if watching for a reaction from which she’d learn more about her visitor. But Angie kept her features studiously impassive. Again, she had a sense the head doc was messing with her mind, testing for something. Maybe that’s just what shrinks did.
Eden crossed her stockinged legs and settled back into her chair. Her pumps, Angie noted, looked like they probably cost more than several months’ worth of her old MVPD detective’s salary. “My mother called to tell me you’d been to see her and that you took her uncut documentary footage. She explained what you were after. How can I help?”
“I suppose she also advised that you were under no obligation to speak to me?”
Eden grinned. “Of course she did. Which made me even more interested to meet you and hear you out.”
Angie realized she was a chess piece in some ongoing power game that defined Dr.Eden Hart’s relationship with Rachel Hart, the famous outdoor documentary filmmaker and self-professed feminist. “What can you tell me of those last hours in the camp before Jasmine Gulati left to fish alone and before the guides screamed for help?”
“My memory from the trip is spotty. I was only fourteen at the time, and a lot has transpired in my life since then. But I do recall snippets from the turning point events. Like our arrival in Port Ferris and, of course, the night Jaz went over the falls. We’d pulled the boats in for the evening and set up tents. The guides got the fire going. Then Jasmine left with her gear to go fishing. The guides departed shortly afterward to hunt for more wood. Then my mom left to shoot evening footage.”
“Which way did your mother go?”
She frowned. “I ... don’t know. I can’t recall. I only remember her saying she was going to shoot while the evening light lasted. I went to relieve myself in the woods, but I didn’t see her anywhere. Is it important which way she went?”
