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  “Not yet, but maybe if you would show me your handwriting I could start to.” Claudia drew a chair from the desk and sat down. “So, how about it? I’ll tell you what it says about you, and just maybe you’ll find out that handwriting analysis doesn’t really suck ass.”

  Annabelle shot her a quick glance from under her lashes, probably surprised that an adult would quote her own rude words back at her. “I bet Paige already told you everything about me.” Defiantly using the headmistress’ first name.

  Claudia smiled. “I don’t think Paige knows everything about you.”

  Annabelle went over to the window and threw it open. The sun had disappeared behind the clouds and a fine drizzle had started up again. She dipped her hand into her pocket and brought out a crumpled pack of Winstons, shook one loose, and stuck it in her mouth. Without looking at her, she offered the pack to Claudia. “Smoke?”

  This is a test.

  “No thanks,” said Claudia. “I don’t smoke. And I’d rather you didn’t while we’re together.”

  Annabelle snorted. “You gonna rat me out?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Give you an excuse to stay angry.”

  “I really don’t give a fuck,” Annabelle said with elaborate casualness, but she hesitated, jammed the cigarettes back into her pocket. The next dive into her pocket produced a piece of grape Bubblicious.

  Annabelle unwrapped the bubblegum and popped it into her mouth. This girl had built a solid wall of defenses, but at least she wasn’t going to force a showdown on this issue.

  “So, you gonna write something or not?” Claudia asked, relieved that she wasn’t going to have to deal with a display of defiance.

  The girl stared at her, chewing hard, daring her to complain about the gum. Her need to defy anyone she viewed as an authority figure was so transparent that Claudia almost smiled.

  “How do I know you’re not just guessing?”

  “Hey, kiddo, if you don’t want to do it, it’s fine with me. I don’t have anything to prove.” Claudia got up and started for the door.

  Before she reached it, Annabelle spoke up. “Why should I do it?”

  Claudia thought about that. “Is there anything in your life right now that’s not working the way you’d like it to?”

  The girl gave a rude snort. “What do you think?”

  “I think there’s a thing or two you might like to change.”

  “What’s that got to do with how I write?”

  “Your handwriting shows how you feel and how you deal with life. There might be ways to do some things better, but we won’t know unless we check it out. It’s up to you.”

  Annabelle mused on that for a moment, blowing her gum into a big pink eruption, then sucking it back into her mouth. “I still think it’s crap . . . What do I have to write?”

  “Let’s start with a few lines about anything you like. I’d also like you to draw a tree and a picture of your family doing something.”

  A hint of suspicion crept into the dark eyes. She was obviously bright, and she’d probably had enough of being put under a microscope by the shrinks in the hospital. A suicide attempt would have netted her a battery of psychological tests even if her father was a big shot. Still, curiosity sparked there, too.

  “I thought you were going to analyze my handwriting. Why do I have to draw all that stuff?”

  Claudia took several sheets of blank paper and a pen from her briefcase and put them on the desk closest to Annabelle’s bed. “Because your handwriting is still developing. The drawings give me some additional information.” She reached back into the briefcase and took out a magnifying glass.

  Annabelle slid off the bed and edged toward her. Not too close, just enough that Claudia could sense that she was interested.

  Like a wild animal—curious, but afraid of human contact.

  “Draw a tree?” the girl asked.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “What kind?”

  “Any kind you want.”

  The tree was part of a projective test that would show Claudia how Annabelle viewed herself, her family, and her attitude toward her life. Deliberately refraining from giving her any explicit instructions, Claudia left her the freedom to express herself uncensored in the drawing.

  Annabelle pushed her laptop to one side and sat down at the desk. Picking up the pen Claudia had left there, she uncapped it and sat staring down at the paper, tapping the end of the pen against her teeth.

  Claudia watched her pondering what to write and guessed that she was trying to figure out how to do it without revealing anything of herself.

  “Just so you know,” Claudia assured her, “our conversations are confidential. The only exception is if you told me that you planned to hurt yourself or someone else. Then I’d have to report it. But aside from that, anything else you say—or write or draw—is between you and me.”

  Annabelle turned her head and stared at her for a long moment, chewing slowly. She blew an enormous sticky pink bubble, which expanded and thinned until it burst, splattering her nose and mouth. Wordlessly, she peeled the gum off her face and popped it back into her mouth. Then she began to write.

  While Annabelle wrote, Claudia surveyed the room. No scuffed slippers peeping from under the bed, no notebook covers tattooed with teen idol names, as there were on her roommate’s side. No Teen People or Elle Girl magazines on her shelf, only a half dozen textbooks in an untidy pile. In fact, Claudia concluded, Annabelle’s space looked like she had just packed up her belongings in preparation for moving out. Wishful thinking? Yet Paige had told her that Annabelle hated going home.

  The girl’s voice intruded on her thoughts. “I’m done.” She thrust the papers at Claudia with a look that challenged, Okay, I dare you.

  The first page was the handwriting sample. Small, printed writing hugged the left edge of the paper, leaving virtually no margin on that side with an excessive margin on the right side.

  The words themselves were compressed, but wide rivers of space flowed between them. Without reading what Annabelle had written, Claudia held the page at arm’s length for a moment, then turned it over and ran her fingers across the back.

  “Why are you doing that?” Annabelle asked, forgetting to maintain her fortress of indifference.

  “I’m checking to see how much you pressed the pen into the paper. You have very light pressure. That means you hold your feelings inside until you can’t stand it anymore, then they sort of explode. See how your writing doesn’t slant to the right or the left, but stays straight up and down? That’s another sign that you work really hard at controlling your emotions.” She paused to give Annabelle time to digest the information and respond, but the girl was staring at her with something like disbelief.

  Claudia held the magnifying glass close to the paper, showing Annabelle the enlarged strokes and the small hooks that appeared at the beginnings and endings of her words.

  “You chose to print instead of writing in cursive,” she continued. “Connections between letters are sort of like holding hands with other people. When you break the connections between the letters, which is what you have to do when you print, it’s like cutting off emotional connections. The amount of space you leave between words shows how close you want to be to other people. You leave very wide spaces between your words, which makes me think that you’re afraid to let anyone get too close.”

  Annabelle glared at her. “I’m not afraid of anything!”

  That’s what Paige had said.

  “I’m sorry, bad choice of words. What I should have said was, you need a lot of space. Is that better?”

  “Not really.”

  Claudia ignored the smart-ass retort and turned to the second page. She had drawn a tree that was little more than a scrawny stump. About one-third up the trunk was a knothole filled with ink. A half inch higher, another smaller knothole. This one was just an oval shape, not filled in.

  The poor little tree had a few shriveled branches that stabbed t
he sky. There were no refreshing leaves, no roots that would indicate feelings of stability.

  “This is a sad tree,” Claudia said. “It looks like someone tried to cut it down.”

  Annabelle hunched her shoulders, protecting herself. “It’s my tree. I can do what I want with it.” Including trying to kill it—kill herself by cutting her wrists.

  “You’re absolutely right. Tell me about the knotholes in the trunk.”

  “I don’t know. I just put them there. I thought you were gonna tell me about it.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what it says to me. When you were about six or seven years old, you lost something or someone that you loved a lot, and you’ve never gotten over it. Then, when you were a little older, you had another big loss, but that one wasn’t quite as devastating as the first one.”

  “How did you know that?” Annabelle demanded. “Who told you that?” The coal-colored eyes filled with tears. She pushed her fists against them, struggling to contain her emotions.

  “No one told me,” Claudia said, telling the truth. The realization that the first knothole in Annabelle’s tree drawing had a direct correlation with the loss of her mother had not occurred to her until that moment. She still had no idea what the second one represented.

  “Knotholes in a tree trunk are symbols of painful emotional wounds,” she explained gently. “Where you place them tells when the event took place. The top of the tree trunk is the present—now, when you’re fourteen years old. The bottom of the trunk represents when you were born. The first wound appears a little below the middle of the tree, so that would be when you were about six. The second one is a little higher, so I would say you were about nine or ten.”

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe you know that.” Annabelle wrapped her thin arms around herself. She spoke almost in a whisper. “Marisa.”

  “Who is Marisa?” Claudia asked, surprised to hear this unfamiliar name, rather than a reference to her mother.

  There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of their respirations. Then Annabelle seemed to reach a decision. “She was my nanny. She took care of me after Mama—” Her voice got higher as she choked up and abruptly stopped speaking. She turned away and Claudia saw that her shoulders were shaking. When she spoke, her breath came out in harsh gasps.

  “One day I came home from school and she was gone. Her room was empty.” Her voice quavered. “She promised she would always stay with me, but she lied. Everyone lies.”

  “What happened? Why do you think she left?”

  “He tried to make her have sex with him and she didn’t want to.”

  The words sounded as obscene coming from Annabelle’s lips as what they suggested.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Dominic.” She spat her father’s name with utter contempt. “He said it was because she was stealing, but it’s not true.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I saw them in the pool house. Marisa took me swimming and afterward she went to change in the dressing room. I was supposed to go in the house, but I hid behind the planter. I was going to jump out and surprise her. Then he came outside.

  “He pushed open the door. She yelled at him that she was in there, but he wouldn’t leave. I went and peeked in. Her bathing suit top was off and he was groping her. She was crying and trying to push him away, but he wouldn’t stop. It was totally gross and disgusting.”

  For all her attempts at worldliness, she was little more than a child after all. A child who had witnessed appalling behavior by her parent.

  “What did you do?”

  “I yelled at him to let her go and he jumped back. Marisa pushed him away and ran into the house. She ran right past me like I wasn’t there.”

  “What did your father say?”

  “He—he yelled at me to mind my own goddamn business and he started hitting me. I hate him!” Tears quivered on Annabelle’s lashes. “Why couldn’t she have called me, or at least sent me a birthday card or something? She just left me.”

  The self-centered worldview of the ten-year-old she had been.

  Claudia didn’t believe that the nanny had deliberately cut Annabelle out of her life after caring for her for four years. Had she threatened to expose Dominic Giordano?

  How many calls and holiday cards to Annabelle might her father have diverted? Or had it been a condition of the nanny’s termination, not to ever contact his daughter? Punishment for refusing his advances. Or part of a pay-off? It would be easy for a man of Giordano’s stature to intimidate his employee into not reporting an episode of sexual harassment. It seemed plausible to Claudia that it could have happened that way.

  She thought of the caution her friend Zebediah Gold regularly gave her: Don’t get emotionally involved with young clients. He should know; he was a semiretired psychologist. But Claudia had never learned how to do that. How could she keep her distance when this prickly little person so clearly needed someone to be involved?

  She picked up the drawing Annabelle had made in response to her instruction to draw the family doing something.

  The drawing suggested more than a little artistic talent. Two figures were depicted. Close to the left edge of the paper, reminiscent of where she had placed her handwriting, Annabelle had drawn a lone female figure, which represented herself. It didn’t take an expert to interpret the feelings of futility in the closed eyes and sad, turned-down mouth, the sense of helplessness in the lack of hands or feet. The black hair surrounded her and reached her feet, Rapunzel-like, affording some protection from the outside world.

  Across the page on the right-hand side, a much larger, menacing male figure was engaged in an act that made Claudia catch her breath. Annabelle had drawn her father pushing a car over the edge of a cliff.

  Depicted from behind, he faced away from the viewer, a shocking portrayal of the rejection Annabelle felt by Dominic Giordano, whom the drawing showed she believed had turned away from her, both symbolically and literally.

  Abruptly, Annabelle grabbed the drawing from Claudia’s hands and crushed it into a ball. “I hate him,” she said again with a vehemence that prickled the hair on Claudia’s arms. “I’m gonna get even with him. I swear I will.”

  Chapter 9

  Paige handed over a mug of good coffee. “So, how’d it go?”

  Claudia took a grateful sip. She felt emotionally drained after her meeting with Annabelle. “Better than I expected. She’s agreed to try the graphotherapy program. I left her with some exercises to do.”

  “But what did she tell you?”

  “It’s a therapeutic relationship, Paige. She has to be able to trust me if she’s going to confide in me. I can’t give you details.”

  Paige’s eyes narrowed. “You’re kidding, right? Did she say anything about me? Did she talk about Cruz?”

  “No, I’m not kidding, and don’t ask me specific questions, because I won’t answer them. It would interfere with the therapy if she found out.”

  “Who’s gonna tell her?”

  “No, Paige,” Claudia said firmly. “I’m not going to share what she said to me.”

  What Claudia had said wasn’t strictly true. As handwriting analysis was an unlicensed profession, she was not legally bound to confidentiality laws the way a therapist would be. But even with her assurance of privacy, Annabelle had begged her, “Don’t tell anyone! Promise you won’t tell anything I told you.”

  What was I supposed to do? Claudia asked herself.

  So Paige was royally pissed, but couldn’t very well refuse to let Annabelle work the program for a month’s trial. If the combination of hand movements and therapeutic music was going to help unlock the logjam of emotions, some initial signs should have appeared by then in her handwriting. At that time, they would reassess the situation.

  The rain started up again as Claudia hurried out to the Jaguar. She had parked under a shedding jacaranda tree and the wet flowers made a purple mush under her feet. The wind buffeted her umbrella, a
nd her sprint from the school’s portico left her soaked to the skin. Shivering, she turned on the heater and slid a Richard Elliott disk into the CD player.

  The rain pelted the windshield in noisy sheets, mocking the wiper blades as she left the Sorensen Academy and turned onto Sunset. Any other day she would be admiring the mansions that lined the Boulevard. Today it was a challenge to see six feet in front of her. Worse, an overturned vehicle on the east side of the street kept the traffic at snail’s pace.

  A mile from home the skies began to clear, and as she crossed Lincoln on Jefferson a double prism of color arced across the road ahead. The stunning beauty of it took her breath away. She started to reach for the cell phone. A rainbow that spectacular was meant to be shared.

  Before she could dial, Jovanic’s special ring tone sounded.

  “Hey, where are you?” he asked without preliminaries.

  “Almost home. I’ve been over at the Sorensen Academy, getting to know my new graphotherapy student—”

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he interrupted.

  “Oh, really? What were you thinking about?”

  “How much I miss you.”

  Claudia’s lips curved into a smile as she signaled left near the beach end of Jefferson and started driving up the hill. “So, tell me, Columbo, just how much do you miss me?”

  “Mmmm, enough . . .”

  She grinned. Jovanic was a little like Annabelle. Getting him to share his feelings was about as easy as stripping old wallpaper.

  She said, “I miss you, too.”

  It was an understatement. Paige’s case and other work had kept her busy, but over the past couple of weeks Jovanic had been out of town and his absence gnawed at her like a toothache. He was four hundred miles away—only an hour by air—but it could have been another galaxy. Tony Bennett’s signature song I Left My Heart in San Francisco had taken on a whole new meaning.

  “It’s been pouring down here,” she said. “How’s your weather?”

  Why am I talking about the weather when he’s telling me he misses me?

  “Raining like a monsoon,” he said. “But right now I’m looking at a very cool rainbow.”