Shame

love you?”
    “That’s a silly question.”
    “Why is it?”
    “Psychopaths can’t love. They can only mimic love.”
    “How do you know your daddy was a psychopath?”
    “He murdered seventeen innocent women.”
    “That still doesn’t rule out his loving you.”
    Caleb didn’t try to hide his anger. “You make a mockery of the word,” he said. “How could someone like him possibly love?”
    “I know he was sick,” Lola said, “but that doesn’t mean all of him was rotten. I suppose it’s easier, though, to picture him as a totally bad human being. If he did love you, that would only make everything hurt all the more, wouldn’t it?”
    He didn’t answer.
    “How old were you when he died?”
    “Fourteen.”
    “I lost my father when I wasn’t much older than that. But he didn’t die like yours did. He just kicked me out of our house and told me never to come back again. He meant what he said.”
    “Are we supposed to be sitting here comparing sob stories?” Caleb asked.
    “No. I guess I’m just saying in a roundabout way that you don’t have a monopoly on pain. Lots of people can’t walk out the door without being suspects for one reason or another: their skin color, their looks, their disability, their sexual orientation. Those people can’t do anything about their situation. You can.”
    Rather than make a case for his own misery, Caleb returned to her biography. It was easier that way. “Where was your mother while your father was kicking you out?”
    “Right behind him, subtly encouraging him to do it. Nothing too overt, you know. That wouldn’t have been ladylike. But she was always ashamed of me. I was much darker than my mother. As an adult, I hear myself described as
exotic.
As a child, everyone just called me
ugly
. And when it was clear I was
different,
my father began to blame my mother for how I turned out. One of his favorite laments was that he never should have married a ‘half-breed.’ My mother never argued with him. She had fancied herself a very refined woman, and to her mind I was proof she had something to be ashamed of. And that was even before my femininity shamed her.
    “Shame: that word was such a part of my early life. I think that’s why your father’s use of it had such a terrible appeal to me, and others as well. He made us confront our own shame.”
    “Serial murder therapy.”
    “That wasn’t my inference.”
    “I know. I was trying to be clever. But I’m not good at being clever.”
    “I don’t agree. Maybe you’re too good at it, and that’s what scares you. I think your whole life you’ve been thinking things but not saying them. You didn’t want people to know there wasa growl in you, because you figured they might start looking for teeth. Maybe the murderer was counting on that. Maybe you’ve already surprised him.”
    “How?”
    “By not rolling over and playing dead. By not immediately becoming that perfect patsy.”
    “He’s spun me like a top,” Caleb said.
    “But you’re still spinning. You’re not down.”
    “He watched me,” Caleb said, unsuccessfully fighting the tremor in his voice. “He knows about me.”
    She heard his sense of violation and anger. And something else. There was bedrock way down there.
    “What are you going to do?” Lola asked.
    “I’m going to become acquainted with my father,” he said.

18

    T HE SHERIFF’S PRESS conference was held in the Ridgehaven sheriff’s main conference room. The only thing missing from the opening announcement was a lit fuse. Even from the press, with whom showing surprise is considered bad taste, his revelation was met with gasps. Around the room one word was repeated: “Shame.”
    Everyone found their voices at the same time and began shouting, “Shame’s son, Sheriff? Shame’s biological son?”
    And all the while one word continued to come out of disbelieving lips:
“Shame, Shame, Shame, Shame...”
    An awakened hive, all abuzz. It reminded Elizabeth of the time she had visited an ashram and heard a room of penitents chanting, “Om.” The power of their chorus had been astounding, with the sounds detonating around her, human voices raising thunder. She had been incredulous that such power could come from the repetition of a single word. Now another word was being invoked, if not as loudly or by as organized a chorus. But still, it was producing a similar electricity.
    In the front of the room, behind a lectern with a microphone, stood Sheriff