Free The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi Page B

Mrs. Gordon, I need to talk to you for a moment…”
    Mila pointed the way with a movement of her arm. Then she made them walk ahead of her towards a second little room, with a coffee machine and a snack dispenser, a worn sofa against the wall, a table with blue plastic chairs and a rubbish bin full of plastic cups.
    Mila asked the Gordons to sit on the sofa and went to get one of the chairs. She stretched her legs, feeling another little pang in the wound in her thigh. It wasn’t all that strong: she was getting better.
    Mila screwed up her courage and began by introducing herself. She talked about the investigation, without adding any details to what they knew already. Her intention was to put them at ease before asking them the questions that interested her.
    The Gordons hadn’t stopped looking at her for a moment, as if she somehow had the power to stop the nightmare. Both husband and wife were attractive and elegant. Both lawyers. The kind that are paid by the hour. Mila imagined them in their perfect home, surrounded by selected friends, with their gilded lives. It made sense that they could send their only daughter to study at a prestigious private school. Both husband and wife must be two sharks in their profession. People who can deal with the most critical situations in their own field, who are used to smashing in the teeth of their opponents, and never being discouraged by adversity. But now they were both completely unprepared for a tragedy like this.
    Once she had finished the exposition of the case, she got to the point: “Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, are you by any chance aware of any special friendship that Debby might have made with a girl her age outside of the boarding school?”
    The couple looked at one another as if, rather than an answer, they were trying to find a plausible reason for the question. But they couldn’t find it.
    “Not that we know of,” said Debby’s father.
    Mila, however, wasn’t satisfied with that meager reply. “Are you sure that Debby never talked to you on the phone about anyone who wasn’t a schoolmate?”
    As Mrs. Gordon struggled to remember, Mila found herself studying her outline: that flat stomach, the toned muscles of her legs. She understood immediately that the choice to have only one child had been carefully mulled over. This woman would not have weighed down her physique with a second pregnancy. But it was too late now: her age, close to fifty, would not allow her to have any more children. Goran was right. Albert hadn’t chosen them by chance.
    “No…but lately she had sounded much more at ease on the phone,” said the woman.
    “I imagine she must have asked you to bring her home…”
    She had hit a sore point, but she couldn’t help it if she wanted to get to the truth. His voice cracking with guilt, Debby’s father admitted: “It’s true: she was out of her element, she said she missed us and Sting…” Mila looked at him, baffled, and the man explained: “Her dog…Debby wanted to come home, to her old school. Well, she never actually said that. Perhaps she was afraid of disappointing us, but…it was apparent from her tone of voice.”
    Mila knew what was going to happen: these parents would forever reproach themselves for not listening to their daughter’s heart when she begged them to let her come home. But the Gordons had put their ambition before her, hoping that it was something that could be genetically transmitted. There was really nothing wrong about their behavior; they had wanted the best for their only daughter. Basically, they were just behaving like parents. And if things had gone differently, perhaps one day Debby would have been grateful to them. But that day, sadly for them, would never come.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, I’m sorry to have to insist, I can imagine how painful this is, but I must ask you to think back to the conversations you had with Debby: the people she saw out of school might turn out to be very important to the