Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

Was this how she relaxed her patients? “Getting better,” I lied. “We know now those skeletons we found were Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell.”

“Seems like a long time ago,” she said, her voice different, losing a little of its high sheen. She sighed. “How’s Lindsey?”

“She left me,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. Overshare.

“Maybe it’s the season. She was probably a transitional affair, anyway, David. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you know.”

I looked into the desktop. “How are you?”

She made a stretching move with her head, making her lustrous black hair wave about. Sharon never touched her hair when she was nervous.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with him?” she said, speaking quickly. “I mean, really live with him. It’s not like he beats me or is really emotionally abusive. But he’s just like this supernova of a personality, and underneath it’s really needy, incredibly needy. But it’s not like the need can ever be met.”

Then she suddenly stopped. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“I’m not trying to involve you in our troubles.”

“It’s delicate. I care about you both.”

She watched me with large, dark eyes. “I’m not seeking your approval.”

Bam! That one landed in my lap. Later, I would think of all sorts of witty comebacks for this conversation, but for now all I could manage was a mute awkwardness.

“Do you know how long we’ve known each other?” she asked. “You and I?”

“Twenty years?”

“Twenty years, David Mapstone. In that time, I put myself through school, raised two daughters, who turned into people I admire. I built a practice, learned to appreciate jazz from you, taught myself Navajo sand painting. I wrote a book. I faced down my fears.”

She was off on the kind of riff that marital discord breeds; I’d been there. But it’s true that Sharon had made the most amazing transformation from the first time I met her as Mike’s shy, working-class wife to the role model she is today.

She stopped, then added. “He hasn’t changed at all.”

I let it lie in the silence between us like a wounded soldier in no-man’s land. It was true.

Then she said, in a voice merry with ironic self-knowledge, “How does it feel to be ad hoc counselor to Dr. Sharon?”

“I wouldn’t presume,” I vent

ured gallantly, failing.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t.” She looked at me with something unreadable and incendiary in the large, dark eyes.

So I told her about the Yarnells, the family curse and the secret covenant. Then I told her about Max Yarnell. I told her about the attempt on James Yarnell. I told her about Jack Talbott’s death row statement that never made it into the newspapers.

“This family is hiding so much,” Sharon said. “From you, from each other.”

“Is that a professional opinion?”

“It’s my opinion,” she said. “There’s something dangerous, something treacherous hiding in all this.”

“I know,” I said, but I didn’t know. “Why would somebody leave a doll at a murder scene, with his hands bloody?”

“The message isn’t subtle. The killer thinks the victim has bloody hands. It’s vengeance. Or maybe it’s a childhood issue out of the killer’s life. I’m not a criminal psychologist.”

“And an identical doll was left here in my office, without the bloody hands.”