Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) by Blake Banner (best motivational books to read .txt) 📕

me all of five minutes to get him talking. First he started weeping. Then he clung to Dehan’s arm and smiled at us. After that he spoke. He said, ‘Dad is coming.’” He swallowed hard and I pressed a finger against his chest. “Maybe it’s time you stopped being Dr. Mitchell for a while, and started being Dad. He needs to talk, and he needs to talk to a friend, or a father, not to a damned doctor!”

He shook his head. “You’re insane.”

“Why?”

“Because of my wife, God damn it! She will never allow it!”

Thirteen

We left Nurse Thelma with Marcus and went down to the living room. He gestured us toward the sofa and chairs and went to the sideboard to pour himself a generous whiskey, neat. When he’d taken a pull, Dehan asked him, “What is it about your being a ‘dad’ for Marcus, that your wife would object to?”

He gave her a curious look, approached the chair beside the sofa where Dehan had sat, and lowered himself into it.

“After Lee and Lea were murdered, and Marcus was diagnosed with catatonic depression, naturally I set about finding the best people to treat him and help him come to terms, in as much as any person can come to terms with such a thing, with what had happened, with his traumatic experience.” He paused and took another swig. “Naturally, as you’d expect, all those therapists agreed on one point, that he needed to address—anddeal with—what had happened in the shed; but more to the point, more precisely, it was not the event itself he had to deal with. It was the memory of what had happened, his emotional response to what had happened.” He shook his head, as though dismissing any argument to the contrary. “It is not the event that lives on in Marcus. That would be absurd, a physical impossibility. It is his emotional response that lives on within his memory, and is poisoning his mind and his emotions. And it is the memory of the event which needs to be dissolved, and dealt with. And for that he needs to replay the memory and disassociate himself from it emotionally.”

I said, “But your wife will not allow him to do that.”

“No.” He took another swig and shook his head. “She says it is out of the question. And when we have tried, she goes completely hysterical, threatens to divorce me and take Marcus with her… More trauma for the boy, more suffering, more unhappiness. For the last five and a half years she would not even allow me to visit the boy in his room unless she was there. If I want to see him I have to sneak home while she’s at work.”

“Where is your wife now? I would have expected her to be here.”

“She’s teaching a seminar and has probably given strict orders that she is not to be disturbed. Otherwise I assure you she would have been here before me.”

I reached in my pocket, pulled out the court order and handed it to him. He read it carefully and nodded. “Good.” He placed it on the table beside his chair. “Good, maybe this way the boy will get the treatment he needs.” He paused a moment. Then he frowned at me. “You say he spoke… That is extraordinary.”

I recounted what had happened. About halfway through he began to smile. When I had finished he asked me, “Have you studied any psychology, Detective?”

I shook my head. “Not really. I have read a fair bit of Freud, Watson and Skinner,” I smiled, “the other Mitchell, the English one.”

“Juliet, she’s a very fine psychoanalyst. One of the few women who truly understand Freud.” He paused, nodding at the floor. “Your instinct led you very surely to what poor Marcus needed.”

“It was common sense, Dr. Mitchell, nothing more…”

“You are quite right, but common sense is something that somehow seems to dissipate in rarefied, academic environments.” He buried his face in his hands and his voice became muffled. “That is what I need: to dispense with all the bullshit and get real again, remember who I was before I became Dr. Brad Mitchell. It is so easy to lose one’s way. Common sense, yes. A lot of it is common sense.”

Dehan spoke up. “Something inside him wanted to vomit out the memory, just like your stomach wants to vomit out food that is off, or too much tequila or whiskey.”

He laughed. “Psychic reflux?”

I smiled. “Something like that. I’m not a psychiatrist, but Detective Dehan and I both saw clearly that he needed to talk.” I gestured at the paper on the table beside him. “That court order places no limit on how often or how many times we can talk to him. I mean to give him time to rest, and then talk to him again, and again, until we find out what happened that day. Do you plan to obstruct us?”

He threw back his head and laughed out loud. “Obstruct you? I could not be more grateful to you, Detectives! This has been a living nightmare for me for the last five years, since Emma effectively robbed me of my son, my last, remaining child. I love her dearly, but she can be excessively controlling. Now, there is some hope that I might get my boy back.” He paused, tilted his head on one side and gave a small, eloquent shake. “But you must know that my wife will be a very different story.”

“Yes.” I nodded. “I am aware of that.”

“She will fight tooth and nail to stop you.”

Dehan cleared her throat. “Dr. Mitchell, there are a couple of questions I would like to ask you. Marcus could not possibly have known that you were arriving when you did. So, what do you think he meant by, ‘Dad is coming’?”

He took a deep breath and held it. “Off the top of my head I’d say that he was perhaps reliving that day, that terrible thing had happened