Flakes flecked with ice ticked against the windows.
Angie hated snow—the way it smelled. The subtly metallic scent unsettled her on a deeply profound level. It was a sensation she’d never quite been able to articulate, but it was there. Always when it snowed. Worse around Christmas. She rubbed her arms, her thoughts boomeranging back to her failure on a sweltering evening last July—her inability to save the life of a three-year-old toddler. How her focus on trying to resuscitate the little girl might have also cost the life of her partner.
Tiffy Bennett had died in her arms while her mentor and partner, “Hash” Hashowsky, had taken a bullet to the throat and bled out before EMTs could arrive. Then Tiffy’s father, standing over the body of Tiffy’s dead mother, had turned his weapon to his own head and shot out his brains. He’d been abusing his baby girl for just about her entire life, and a restraining order had failed to protect Tiffy and her mom.
Sometimes, Angie thought, the difference between heaven and hell was people. Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried, you made no difference at all.
“You look tired,” her father said, coming up behind her.
She straightened her spine, turned to face him.
“All those new lines around your eyes,” he said. “That job of yours, it ages you, you know?”
“You don’t look so hot yourself, Dad—been a rough day all around. Here, give me that.” She took the box that her father was holding, and she set it near the front door. It was packed with some of her mother’s things that he thought she might want. They’d spent the morning moving Miriam Pallorino into a long-term psychiatric facility, and the afternoon cleaning out her home office and closets. The house felt hollow and huge.
“Why don’t you quit, Angie? Especially after—”
“After what? Losing that kid and my partner?”
“You could maybe move to another department. Dealing with all those sex perverts who come through the special victims unit ... seeing that sordid side of humanity all the time, it gets in your head. It’s changed you.”
Anger flared hot in her chest. It came with an urge for physical violence—a kind of ferocity for which there was sometimes no real justification, which just set upon her at the slightest of provocations. Which she worked very hard to control under a cool and seemingly detached exterior. She stared at her father. Standing there in his oversize sweater with leather patches on the elbows. His thatch of dense white hair, once so black. Behind him a fire crackled in the hearth, and the walls were lined with cabinets of books, pieces of art. A life of privilege. Dr.Joseph Pallorino, professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria. Born into an Italian immigrant’s fortune hard-won in the mining industry. Given on a silver platter the wherewithal to indulge his personal academic passions. Her parents had always lived a rarefied life into which she never really felt she fitted.
“I deal with victims,” she said quietly. “Survivors. Innocent and vulnerable women and children who never asked for what hurt them. I put bad guys away.” She held his gaze. “And I’m good at it, Dad. Damn good. I make a difference.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah, I do.” She looked away, at the unlit Christmas tree in the corner with the gold angel on top, and a chill passed through her. “Sometimes. Yes. I do.”
“Your mother, she thought you’d outgrow it. She always thought you joined the police out of some kind of rebellion.”
Her gaze flared back to his. “Is that what you thought, too? That I’d get my kicks, find what I was looking for, then finally settle down in a nice Victorian character home with a picket fence and a little row of nodding daffodils out front?”
“Angie, you have a master’s in psychology. You were top of your class. You could have gone into research, could have had an academic career—stillcould ...” He wavered under the heat of her glare, cleared his throat, stuffed his hands deep into his pockets, and gave a resigned shrug. “I—we—just want you to be happy.”
“Let it drop, okay? This isnotthe time. I’m going to order pizza—we can eat together before I go.” She made for the phone on the kitchen wall as she spoke. She’d booked the weekend off, and she and her father still had Sunday to get through, to finish moving things. To check in on her mom again, make sure that she was settling in okay. She lifted the receiver. “Want anchovies?”
The pizza, dinner, prolonging the evening had been a mistake. Angie and her dad ate in awkward silence, lost in their own worlds without the bustling presence of Miriam Pallorino. Outside the wind howled and branches rattled against the eaves. Angie’s thoughts turned to the small room in which they’d left her mother this morning. The locked doors in the facility. The white-coated orderlies. The confusion and, yes, the fear she’d witnessed in her mom’s eyes.
She reached for her juice, sipped, cleared her throat. “How long, really, did you know that she wasn’t well?”
Her father did not look up. “A while.”
“Like ... how old was she when you first noticed the onset of symptoms?”
A shrug. He picked an olive off his pizza.
“It has a strong hereditary component, you know?” she said. “The illness occurs in less than one percent of the general population, but it manifests in ten percent of people who have a first-degree relative with the disorder, like a parent.” She waited. Her dad said nothing. Angie leaned forward. “I’d like to know when you first saw the signs, first became aware that something was ... off.”
He pushed the olive to the edge of his plate.
“Dad?”
He wiped his mouth and carefully folded the hem of his white linen napkin over the orange cheese and tomato stains. He tucked the neatly folded napkin under the rim of his plate. “She’s been on medication for quite a long time now, Angie. Keeping things under control. The first indication I had that she might be experiencing hallucinations, delusions, came in her midthirties.” He looked up. “We thought it was PTSD, from the car accident in Italy.” He fell silent for a long while. The fire in the hearth flickered. “Images, sounds, smells—they can all trigger flashbacks that can look like psychotic hallucinations, you know? The emotional numbness, apathy, social withdrawal, low energy ... the doctor said it could all be signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.” He looked sad, broken, as if the bones of his large skeleton had suddenly crumpled inside him a little. He inhaled deeply. “She was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia when she turned forty-two. A mild form, one that could be successfully managed with medication. And it had been.” He paused, a strange and distant look entering his eyes. “But now, combined with the early onset of the dementia ...” His voice faded. Her mother had suddenly and sharply lost touch with reality. It was why they’d had to institutionalize her. She’d become a danger to herself.
Angie waited until his eyes met hers again. “Can you tell me about the early hallucinations?”
“Auditory and visual,” he said.
