U Is for Undertow

traumatic and you don’t want to believe something so horrible would happen at the hands of those you love. Pay me for this session and let’s meet again next week so we can get to the root of it. In effect, my parents paid Marty Osborne six thousand dollars to drive a stake into their hearts.”
    “They must have been distraught.”
    “They were devastated, and I don’t think they ever really got over it. I can barely deal with it myself and I wasn’t one of the accused. After the case was settled, my parents swore they’d put it behind them. They shut the door on the whole ugly episode. They were desperate to believe Michael loved them and everything was okay. Here’s how ‘okay’ it was. A couple of years afterward, my mother died in a drowning accident, and my father dropped dead six months later of an aneurysm. He never got around to changing his will, so after what Michael put us through, he inherited an equal share of their estate.”
    “That’s a tough pill to swallow.”
    “What choice did I have? I’ve made my peace with it. The money was theirs and they could do with it as they pleased. Maybe that was always my father’s intent, to look after him.”
    I could see where she was going. “So you think Michael’s memory of the two guys digging is just more of the same.”
    “Basically,” she said. “How did he come up with this story in the first place? Doesn’t that sound suspect to you?”
    “I’ll admit I was skeptical at first,” I said. “He says he read a reference to Mary Claire in the paper and it triggered his memory of the whole event.”
    “That was years ago. What makes him so sure?”
    “He said he saw them on his sixth birthday, July 21, and that’s how he made the association. Your mother left him at Billie Kirkendall’s while she ran errands. He was wandering around the property when he saw them.”
    “It sounds bogus to me.”
    “It wasn’t his imagination. There was something buried there.”
    “Oh, please,” she said. “Michael’s a drama queen. He can’t seem to help himself. Sometimes I think he’s delusional or spaced out on drugs. He’s incapable of telling the truth. It’s not in his nature. He can’t tell the difference between what’s really true and what he imagines.”
    That caught my attention. In my brief relationship with him, I could cite my experience in support of her claim. He was evasive, omitting critical information from his account of himself. When I called him on it, he’d corrected himself and filled in the blanks. If I hadn’t, I would have ended up with an erroneous impression. I felt protective nonetheless. I didn’t want to sit and say nothing while his sister trashed him. “I don’t think he fabricated the story. He was six. Maybe he didn’t understand what he’d witnessed, but that doesn’t mean he lied.”
    “That’s exactly my point. He takes a simple moment and he embellishes, invents, and exaggerates. Next thing you know, there’s an elaborate conspiracy afoot. He sees two men digging a hole and suddenly it’s about Mary Claire’s murder and her being buried in that grave.”
    “You’re implying that he did this deliberately, which I find hard to believe.”
    “I’m not telling you this stuff just to hear myself talk. This is how his mind works. You can’t believe a word he says.”
    “This comes a little late from my perspective.”
    “Don’t kid yourself. You haven’t seen the last of him. It’s never over with him. Have you met any of his friends?”
    The shift in subject caught me off guard. “One. A girl named Madaline. He told me she was addicted to heroin . . .”
    “And now she’s clean, but not sober,” Diana interjected, derisively. “Did he mention she’s a lush? Twenty-two years old and she’s on probation for public drunkenness. Of course, he’s the one who ferries her to AA meetings. He collects losers like her, anyone in worse shape than he is, if you can imagine such a thing. Sutton’s wounded birds. He gets into rescue mode so he can feel good about himself. There’s usually two or three of them hanging around at any given time. They move in. They borrow money. They take his car without permission and wind up in fender-benders that he ends up paying for out of pocket. Some land in jail, while loudly protesting their innocence. He bails them out and brings them home again because they have nowhere else to go. That’s when they steal his credit cards and go on a spending