“I’m not sure where or how, just yet. My first instinct was he’d be top of the list, no matter how Mavis feels about him, because those feelings go back to when she was a kid and he played the center role in keeping her from going hungry and being alone.”

She shoved her hands in her pockets. “But then you talk to him awhile, and the sense is he’s sincere—in his warped way. That he has a code—it’s screwed up, but it’s a code—and he isn’t capable of doing what was done to those girls. Then, with a little distance, you have to remember he lives and makes his living off the grift. He’s not just a liar, he’s a damn good actor with it. So, he’s a possible, even if just a possible accomplice.”

“Is that because you sense he is capable after all, or because you instinctively hate the idea whoever killed those girls may already be dead and beyond the reach of justice?”

“Probably more of the second.” She dropped down again. “But—” Then stopped when Dennis shuffled in again with a tray loaded with cups, what looked like a bowl mounded with whipped cream, and a fat white pitcher.

“Here we are. Don’t let me interrupt. I’ll fix you up and be right out of the way.”

“Sit down and have some with us,” his wife instructed. “It’s very possible for older siblings to feel a sense of duty and responsibility for a younger, especially a younger who falls short. They come from a family who based their lives, their work on faith, good work, and the mission to use that work to draw more into the faith. They could hardly exclude their own brother from that mission.”

She shifted, crossed her legs. “Particularly after the mother’s death, the suicide which would go against their tenets—suicide affects those left behind, and the younger brother was still a teenager when she died.”

“It messes you up.”

“Family and loved ones often feel anger and guilt after a suicide. And there’s often a sense of abandonment.”

“The father went off on a mission within the year, dumped the younger on his older brother and the sister. So they’re responsible, right? That’s the way it would work. They’re responsible for him now. It’s their job to take care of him.”

“Yes, they would in a very real way have substituted for the parents. At the same time, repeated failures by a sibling or a refusal or disinterest by that sibling in sharing the load, doing the work, would begin to wear. No one rubs you quite as hard the wrong way as a sibling. And while you may criticize, protecting and defending from the criticism of others is common.”

“He was a drain on the work,” Eve began, then goggled at the cup Dennis offered her—and the frothy hillock of whipped cream, sprinkled with shaved chocolate topping it. “Thanks. Wow.”

“You’ll want this,” he said, handing her a spoon.

“From what you’re telling me, yes,” Mira agreed. “He put a strain on the mission they both forged their lives to fulfill. It may very well be they found this post in Africa as a way to push him to contribute, and remove him from the immediate area while they reorganized in the new location.”

“Could he have snapped?” Eve demanded. “If they gave him an ultimatum. We’re shipping you out if you don’t start pulling your weight?”

“There’s so little known about him. The medical records are very general, and there aren’t many. The treatment for depression indicates he was troubled, certainly, that he had some difficulty not achieving what his siblings had, suffered from anxiety, and as I said, those abandonment issues. But the doctor who treated him is deceased, and the treatment ended fifteen years ago with the patient’s death.”

“He was more isolated than his brother and sister. And I have to ask, is this legal?” Eve dipped her spoon into the cool cream and warm, rich chocolate again.

Dennis beamed at her. “In this house it is.”

“It’s really amazing. Sorry,” she said to Mira. “What I mean is, being more isolated, having less opportunities to socialize with peers, like the others who went on to study and work outside the homeschooling and missionary stuff, wouldn’t he have a harder time adjusting to that li

fe outside? His mother self-terminates, his father goes off on a missionary gig, leaves him in the care of the older two. They were given a small but decent financial share of the sale of the family home, a kind of before-I’m-dead inheritance. But the younger got an allowance, you can say, in the mother’s will. So much per month he could draw from rather than a lump like his siblings.”

“Which indicates the parents, either together or separately, had decided he couldn’t or wouldn’t handle a lump sum well, and needed more guidance. And yes, that could have caused some resentment on his part. Could have caused some anxiety and depression. So depressed, anxious, in treatment for both, still in a way under the thumb of his parents, who are now represented by his siblings, he’s pulled into their work as he has nowhere else to go, no particular skills, and from what it seems, no burning ambition.”

“Ends too loose tend to tangle,” Dennis said as he sipped his chocolate, and Mira nodded.

“Exactly. You want to know if it’s a viable theory. Could this at-too-loose-ends young man—with emotional challenges, challenges that may very well have been compounded by his separation from socializing with others his age in school, in play groups with other viewpoints and faiths . . . this young man who lacked his siblings’ skills, their drive, and perhaps their vocation, have become so troubled, so tangled, that even the change from one location, which would have been his home now as his parental home had been taken away, to another—yet another, where he was not given a true choice—have caused a psychic break?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s about it.”

“It’s certainly possible. And the method, the drowning, at the place that had become his home? Perhaps a rebellion against the tenets he’d been raised on, or a terrible attempt to embrace them.”

“A ritual baptism deal—either to screw with the whole basis of his siblings’ world, or to try to prove he could be a real part of it.”

“Yes.” Through the hillock of whipped cream, Mira sipped the chocolate. “You lean toward the first of those. You’d prefer it if he acted out of malice. But in this scenario, if it falls along these lines in the end, I’d lean toward the latter.”

“Why?”

“He seems sad, your tragic and doomed suspect. His life so restricted—the youngest is often babied too long, held too tightly. If they were raised traditionally, as I suspect, rigid tradition, I mean, the mother—also challenged—would have had more of the day-to-day care and tending. She may have held too tight to him, and as he approached adulthood, despaired.”

“You’d feel sorry for him, even if he killed those girls.”

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
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