The Silent Girl

still a mystery to her. She wondered if he felt the same way about her. Did he worry that she would abandon him, the way everyone else in his life had?
    She pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, appropriate attire for a romp with the dog. Thought about the chicken-and-avocado sandwiches she planned to make, and wondered if Rat liked avocados. Had he ever tasted an avocado or alfalfa sprouts or tarragon? I know so little about him, she thought. Yet here he is, a part of my life.
    She walked down the hall and noticed that his bedroom door was open. “Rat?” she said. Peeking in, she did not see him.
    In the kitchen, she found him sitting in front of the laptop computer that she’d left on the table the night before. The dog lay at his feet and his ears pricked up at the sight of Maura, as if here at last was someone who’d pay attention to him. Looking over the boy’s shoulder, she was startled to see an autopsy image on the screen.
    “Don’t look at that,” she said. “I should have put this all away last night.” She punched the Exit key, and the morgue photo swooshed out of sight. Quickly she scooped up all the Red Phoenix files and set them on the counter. “Why don’t you help me make breakfast?”
    “Why did he do it?” the boy asked. “Why would he kill people he didn’t even know?”
    Maura looked into his troubled eyes. “Did you read the police report?”
    “It was lying here on the table, and I couldn’t help looking at it. But it doesn’t make sense to me. Why someone would do that.”
    She pulled over a chair and sat down across from him. “Sometimes, Rat, there’s no way to explain these things. I’m sorry to say that too often, I haven’t a clue why people do things like this. Why they drown their babies or strangle their wives or shoot their co-workers. I see the results of their actions, but I can’t tell you what sets them off. I just know that it happens. And people are capable of doing terrible things.”
    “I know,” he murmured and looked down at the dog, who rested his enormous head in Rat’s lap as though knowing that comfort was what the boy needed at that moment. “So this is what you do?”
    “Yes, it is.”
    “Do you like your work?”
    “I don’t think
like
is the right word.”
    “What is the right word?”
    “It’s challenging. Interesting.”
    “And it doesn’t bother you, seeing things like this?”
    “Someone has to speak for the dead. I know how to do it. They tell me—their bodies tell me—how they died. If it was a natural death, or if it was violent. Yes, it can be upsetting. It can make youquestion what it means to be human when you see what people do to each other. But this is the job I feel I was always meant to do, to be their voice.”
    “Do you think I could do it?” He looked at the stack of files. “Your kind of work?”
    “You mean, be a pathologist?”
    “I want to learn the answers, too.” He looked at her. “I want to be just like you.”
    “And that,” she said with a smile, “is the most flattering thing anyone has ever said to me.”
    “At Evensong, my teachers say I’m really good at noticing things that other people miss. So I think I could do it.”
    “If you want to be a pathologist,” she said, “you’ll have to make very good grades in school.”
    “I know.”
    “You’ll have to go to college, and then four years of medical school. After that, you’ll have to do a residency, plus a fellowship in forensic pathology. That’s a lot of years and a lot of commitment, Rat.”
    “Are you saying you don’t think I can do it?”
    “I’m just saying you really have to want it.” She looked into the boy’s dark eyes and thought she could glimpse the man that he would one day become. Intense and fiercely loyal. A man who would not only speak for the dead, but fight for them as well. “You’ll have to learn science, because only science will prove your case on the witness stand. A hunch isn’t good enough.”
    “What if your hunch is really strong?”
    “It’s never as convincing as what a drop of blood can tell you.”
    “But a hunch tells you when something’s not right. Like in that picture.”
    “Which picture?”
    “The Chinese man who killed himself. I’ll show you.” He got up and brought the laptop and file folders back to the table. With a few mouse clicks, he reopened the digital image of Wu Weimin’s body,lying in the Red Phoenix kitchen. “The police said he shot himself once, in the