a therapeutic tool, it’s…it’s—”
“It’s a fictional character, Dad,” she said, her voice gentle and flat.
There was a strained silence as they both groped for a way out of this danger zone. Dad was half right, as far as it went. The event that had inspired Fade Shadowseeker had indeed been traumatic.
She remembered every detail. It happened eighteen years ago, on her eleventh birthday. Her mother had arranged a big party at the country club. Edie had been dreading the party. Her hair had been curled into a million dumb ringlets. She’d been dressed in a ruffly white thing with a scratchy lace collar. A wreath of white roses, baby’s breath and lacy fluff in her hair. They’d stopped at Daddy’s Flaxon office, so that Daddy could kiss her and give her his present in person, because he couldn’t make the party. He’d bought her a pink bicycle. Pink silk ribbon bows on it. Pink helium balloons tied to the handlebars.
A man had burst in, and run into Daddy’s office before anyone could stop him. He’d been hideously injured. His face blistered with burns, his hair singed off. His hands were black and swollen, his body bloody, covered with oozing cuts. He’d been raving about torture. Mind-rape. Kids thrown in a hole. Begging for someone to make it stop.
Her mother screamed for security, yelling that the man was trying to kill Daddy. They had come running. The enormous, shattering crash as the wounded man threw one of the security guards through the plate glass window and out onto the grounds still echoed in her head.
More security came running. The fight went on for a long time. The man was incredibly strong. It was terrible to hear, though she couldn’t see most of it. Mother screamed through the whole thing.
They’d finally subdued him. It took five of them to pull him out of Daddy’s office. His eyes had fixed on her as they dragged him past, still twisting and struggling. His eyes were bright green. They shone with a brilliant, desperate light, as if lit from within. She saw it in her dreams.
He’d twisted and strained to keep his eyes on her as they carried him away. He’d called out to her for help. His stark desperation haunted her. It haunted her still, eighteen years later.
She tried to grasp that fey light whenever she drew Fade Shadowseeker, the scarred hero of her graphic novel series. She never came remotely close. But she kept on trying. Obsessively.
After they hustled him away, she’d looked down at her ruffly dress. It had been speckled with a fine spray of tiny bloodstains.
Yes, that had been traumatic. Just not as traumatic as having both her parents withhold their approval for most of her life. That trauma beat the burned man raving on her birthday to hell and gone.
“It didn’t blight my life,” she repeated. “It marked it, that’s all.”
“The hell it didn’t! You were traumatized!” Dad jabbed the whispered words at her. “You’ve never been the same since!”
A hard point to argue, since she doubted that her father had noticed what she’d been like before. Shy and insignificant, for sure. Easy to overlook. No trouble to speak of. No problems.
It was afterwards that she’d become a problem to them.
Her mother had canceled the birthday party, pleading a stomach virus. That had marked the beginning of Edie’s oddessey with child psychiatrists and endless medications, to treat her nightmares, her anxiety, her so-called obsessions. Her utter, hopeless inability to be the daughter her parents wanted her to be.
She pushed it away, and shook her head. “It’s just a character. An artistic creation. It’s my work, Dad. It’s how I support myself.”
“Oh, stop. I’ve lost patience with your playacting at being a starving artist in that miserable hole of an apartment. It’s an insult to me and to your mother’s memory, when you could live in any of a dozen beautiful properties! You could have an allowance, a car—”
“I don’t need an allowance. I’m fine. I already have a car.”
“You call that thing a car? It’s a death trap! You know how I worry. How your mother worried! Her worry for you shortened her life!”
Edie winced. “That’s not fair!”
“That’s the truth!” Her father shoved out his jaw, in that self-righteous way that brooked no argument.
Not fair. Linda Parrish’s death had not been her fault, but it hurt, to hear it said. To know that he believed it.
Her mother had died of an unexpected heart attack fourteen months before. No one had known she had a heart condition. She was thin, fit, excruciatingly elegant. She played tennis, golf. She was active on the board of innumerable charities. But one day, at a Parrish Foundation board meeting, she had clutched her chest, and collapsed.
Edie had known it would happen, ever since her mandatory weekly lunch date with her mother. She’d been nervously doodling on her napkin during the lecture about her clothes, her hair, her attitude, the expression on her face. She’d sketched the sharp line of her mother’s profile on the napkin, felt that inner eye open…and realized that she’d surrounded the portrait with dozens of hearts. Big ones, small ones. And she knew that deadly danger stalked her mother.
She didn’t know how, what, or when, but something was going to happen. Something that could kill Linda Parrish. She struggled as best she could to translate the symbols her subconscious threw to the surface. The hearts made her think that Mom should go to the doctor, get tests done. On her heart. That was the best she could figure.
But her revelations had been met with derision and anger. The lunch had ended prematurely, and Edie had been banished in disgrace for forcing her sick delusions on her mother. And in a public place, too.
Linda Parrish died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, a scant week later. No chance to say good-bye, or part on better terms.
Edie had been over it in her head millions of times. She should have been smarter, sneakier. Told someone else to call her mother, someone with credibility. She should have begged her mother’s doctor to suggest it. There had to have been a better way.
Edie pushed away the grief and frustration, and tried again. “OK, never mind the book signing, Dad. I don’t want to fight with you. Let’s just talk about something else, OK?”
Her father looked down at his wineglass, tightlipped. “You don’t understand, Edith. By dwelling on that incident, you’re forever flogging it in my face. I can’t get away from it, no matter how I try to put it behind me. His brothers even came to harrass me! They held me responsible for that godawful nightmare! Me, personally! Understand?”
She gazed at him, baffled. “What do you mean? What on earth? Who, Dad? Whose brothers?”
He made an impatient gesture. “Don’t play dumb. The brothers of that…that person. The one you saw, in that incident at Flaxon.”
“He had brothers? They came to see you?” Chills ran down her spine. “You mean, you know who he is? You know where he is?”
“No! I most certainly do not know anything about him!” her father snapped. “I am sorry for what happened to him, but I assume that he is dead. Osterman hurt a lot of people in his disgusting illicit research, and that unfortunate person was one of them. I unknowingly
