The Axeman's Jazz

could never seem to sit still long enough to make it work. At the moment attempts to empty her mind resulted only in the ping-ponging of disjointed thoughts.
    Was her mother in danger? Had she sacrificed the personal for the professional?
    Surely, surely, surely not. There’s a million twelve-step groups. What are the chances the killer’s in that one?
    But something Elizabeth had said echoed in her mind:
There’s a lot you don’t know about me.
    Maybe she went to three meetings a day, like Mary Shoemaker. Skip dismissed the thought:
Anyone who’d make that remark about my “spiritual life” couldn’t possibly have one.
    That was the ping; the pong said,
You don’t really know.
    And the ping said, Don’t be silly.
You’re just feeling guilty because she manipulated you into it.
    Over it all reverberated the part that really counted, the part that would be there for a long time, the phrase that even Steve Steinman wouldn’t be able to kiss away:
    Fat as a pig!
    Fat as a pig!
    Fat as a pig!

NINE
    “I’M DI, AND I’m codependent.”
    “Hi, Di.”
    Di was a gorgeous woman, a woman of a certain age, but what age that was Skip couldn’t have said—thirties to fifties was the best she could do. It hardly mattered. She had probably been ordinary at birth, awkward at twelve, and magnificent at fifteen; she would die magnificent so long as she didn’t let her hair go gray. In ten or twenty years, even that wouldn’t hurt.
    She was small, a quality about which Skip was ambivalent at best. Yet she was so perfectly proportioned, so oddly beautiful in that dark, strange way of Southern women, that even tall people couldn’t miss her. She wore black jeans and a T-shirt with a hand-painted parrot on it, a lavender parrot. Her expensive, many-strapped sandals showed plenty of toe cleavage; her toenail polish matched her parrot. A lesser dresser, Skip thought, would also have worn lavender eye shadow, but Di had chosen a dull gold. She was as well turned out as she was beautiful. The odd thing about her was the oversized doll in her lap.
    This was obviously a hugely popular meeting—there were probably fifty people in the small, stuffy room, sitting either on the floor or on half-size chairs meant for children. It was a Sunday-school room in a Baptist church, a cheerful yellow room, the walls decked with children’s drawings, a room apparently chosen for ambience rather than comfort.
    Skip had chosen the floor over one of the tiny chairs, but still she felt huge and awkward, wildly uncomfortable, restless as a kid in Sunday school. Maybe that was part of the deal. It didn’t matter a damn because this was where she wanted to be. Fully a third of the people in the room, not one of whom was a child or even a teenager, cuddled teddy bears or dolls.
    Mary Shoemaker had described the group a little—it was Codependents Anonymous (Coda, to initiates) with an inner-child focus—but she hadn’t mentioned anything about toys. And why should she have? Tom Mabus’s teddy bear was one of those details that hadn’t been given to the press.
    Di led the group through virtually the same twelve-step ritual Skip had so detested at OA, but this time she found herself relaxing a little, almost getting used to it.
    Di said the subject was vulnerability.
    “I talked to my daughter today,” she said, “and she said to me, ‘Mom, you’re still a kid, you’re always going to be a kid.’ And I was hurt. Isn’t that weird? Nothing is more important to me than this group. Some of you know how hard I’ve worked to let my kid out, to really experience things like a child again, but when she said that, I thought, ‘You’re supposed to be a mother, not a kid. If your kid thinks you’re a kid, there must be something wrong with you.’ And I realized how vulnerable my inner child still is, how much more work I have to do, reassuring her and letting her know she’s loved.”
    There was more, some of which Skip followed and some of which she didn’t. Mostly, she found herself distracted, wondering why the hell a grown woman would be so hurt by something her daughter said.
    Fat as a pig!
came at her like a slap in the face, and with it the memory of her feelings when she’d heard her mother share, some of them adult, lots of them childish.
    So that’s it. Your inner child is the part of you that didn’t grow up, that kicks in when your parents run the same old familiar numbers on it.
    But was that it? Di was talking about