Free Widow’s Walk by Robert B. Parker Page B

home and it’s no good at school… Goddamn it.”
    “No place to hide,” I said.
    “No place.”
    “Any theories why people are such jerks about it?” I said.
    Susan shrugged.
    “Nature of the beast,” she said.
    “There is a high jerk count among the general populace,” I said. “Present company, of course, excluded.”
    Four girls from Radcliffe went past us in various stages of undress. They all talked in that fast, slightly nasal way that well-bred young women talked around here.
    “Living in a college town is not a bad thing,” I said.
    Susan watched silently as the girls passed. She sipped her martini. I could hear her breathing.
    “We are both in a business,” I said, “where we lose people.”
    “I know.”
    “A wise therapist once told me that you can’t really protect anyone, that sooner or later they have to protect themselves.”
    “Did I say that?”
    “Yes.”
    “After you lost Candy Sloan?”
    “Yes.”
    “I am wise.”
    “Good-looking, too,” I said.
    “But god-damn it…” she said.
    “Doesn’t mean you can’t feel bad when you lose one.”
    Susan nodded.
    “Go ahead,” I said. “Feel bad.”
    Susan nodded again.
    “I’ve been fighting it,” she said.
    “And losing,” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “Give in to it. Feel as bad as you have to feel. Then get over it.”
    Susan stared at me for a while. Then she put her head against my shoulder. We sat for a time watching the street traffic. I listened to her breathing.
    “That what you do?”
    “Yes.”
    “Even after Candy Sloan?”
    “Yes.”
    She fished another olive from the jar and put it in her martini. She had already drunk nearly a fifth of it.
    “And,” I said, “there’s always you and me.”
    “I know.”
    A squirrel ran along Susan’s front fence and up a fat oak tree and disappeared into the thick foliage. Pearl followed it with her eyes but didn’t raise her head.
    “You’re a good therapist,” Susan said after a while.
    “Yes, I am,” I said. “Maybe we should open a joint practice.”
    With her head still against my shoulder Susan patted my thigh.
    “Maybe not,” Susan said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
    It took me three days to boil the class lists down to people I could locate, and another two days to find people on that list who remembered Mary Toricelli. One of them was a woman named Jamie Deluca, who tended bar at a place on Friend Street, near the Fleet Center.
    I went in to see her at 3:15 in the afternoon when the lunch crowd had left and the early cocktail group had not yet arrived. Jamie drew me a draft beer and placed it on a napkin in front of me.
    “I didn’t really know her very good,” Jamie said. “Mary was really kind of a phantom.”
    Jamie had short blond hair and a lot of eye makeup. She was wearing black pants and a white shirt with the cuffs turned back.
    “What kind of a phantom?” I said.
    “Well, you know. You didn’t see much of her. She wasn’t popular or anything. She just come to class and go home.”
    “Sisters or brothers?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    While she talked Jamie sliced the skin off whole lemons. I wondered if the object was to harvest the skin, or the skinless lemon. I decided that asking would be a needless distraction, and I had the sense that Jamie would find too much distraction daunting.
    “Parents?”
    “Sure, of course.” Jamie looked as if it was the dumbest question she’d ever heard. “She lived with her mother.”
    “Father?”
    “I don’t know. When I knew her there wasn’t no father around.”
    “Her mother still live in Franklin?” I said.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Her mother’s name is Toricelli.”
    “Sure. I guess so.”
    “Who’d Mary hang out with?” I said.
    “Most of the time she didn’t hang with anybody,” Jamie said. “She didn’t have a bunch of friends. Just some of the burnouts.”
    “Burnouts?”
    “Yeah. You know, druggies, dropouts, the dregs.”
    “Remember anybody?”
    “Yeah. Roy Levesque. He