EYES ON YOU Read online

  A first impression of the boy led Roman to believe that Aden Leitner was feeling less aggrieved from having to see him as a condition of getting only one day’s suspension from school. However, Aden barely shook hands with him when Roman greeted him. The boy was apparently feeling disconcerted by the more formal setting of the counseling service’s office.

  A spur-of-the-moment decision by Roman threw a monkey wrench into Aden’s expectation once again. He told the boy he’d be right back, retrieved his coat, and when he returned, announced, “That fish I had for lunch has made my mouth dry. Let’s get a couple of sodas and walk down to feed the birds.”

  “Don’t forget the bread,” Rene absently said while tending to some work on the computer.

  “Thanks for the reminder,” Roman said.

  *****

  They stopped at Mickey’s Mart about half a block from Roman’s office, bought sodas and Roman acquired a loaf of stale grain bread, the owner more than happy to get rid of it.

  “How you doin’ Doc?” the proprietor, Josh Fountain, asked Roman.

  “Great,” Roman replied as they were leaving the store.

  Outside again, Aden asked, “You know everybody?”

  “Just about,” Roman answered, tucking the bread under his arm and opening the pull top on his Diet drink. “I was born and grew up here.”

  “Where’s your dog?” asked Aden. “I thought…”

  “She watches over my mom four days a week. Comes to work with me on Fridays.” Roman really was thirsty and had almost finished the can.

  They walked toward the shore, a few blocks in the opposite direction. The late afternoon temperature was almost balmy, the sun having been out all day. They ambled past the ferry landings, both ferries out on a run, and gulls were already beginning to circle overhead.

  “Everything about this place is…predictable.”

  “That’s true,” said Roman. “Predictability isn’t always a bad thing, however.”

  “It’s mostly boring as shit,” Aden countered.

  They began to cross over some large piles of rocks, Roman having to watch his footing more than he wanted, and Aden noticed.

  “Several months ago, I broke my ankle and it’s still on the mend.” They finally stopped where the bay met the shore, the tide rising. There were now at least fifty or more gulls sweeping low overhead, knowing what was coming.

  “You play basketball?”

  Roman nodded his head. “I hurt it playing with my two nephews, but yeah, I played in high school and four years during college.” Roman had long since finished his drink, tipped the can to empty the drop or so left, squashed and pocketed it. The boy was still hanging with his half full.

  “You look like a player.”

  Roman smiled as he began to crumble some of the bread inside the closed package. The boy looked up, appearing amazed by the addition of more gulls and some terns that were swooping in closer for morsels of the bread.

  “They get really close,” Roman warned when he opened the package and took out a small handful. He threw the crumbles of bread at an angle, the birds began diving for the pieces, their loud squawks piercing the air. The boy put down his can, Roman handed him the sack, and the kid began lobbing the pieces one right after another, also at the angle, farther and faster than Roman could dream of doing. Minutes passed, Roman had stepped further back from the avian fracas, intent on watching the boy pitch his heart out. The kid had a truly great right arm, continuing to lob pieces of the bread as high as they would go, one after the other. When he got near the bottom of the package, he stepped closer to a small covey of arctic terns that had waited patiently onshore, their feathers ruffled against the cold wind. With their stick-like legs appearing fragile, he gently lobbed the rest of the bread at them. He then turned the almost emptied bag toward the wind, allowing tiny morsels that were left to be swept up and carried toward the terns.

  As soon as some of the birds began to move on, Aden turned around to find Roman leaning against a large rock. The boy’s exuberant expression was met by Roman’s wide smile. “What position do you play?”

  The boy’s expression changed to one of nonchalance. “I was playing shortstop back at home.” A frown overtook his face.

  “You’ve signed up for the season?”

  “Too late,” the boy said, turning and stooping to pick up a couple of small stones, which he threw at the proper angle, skimming them deftly over the incoming tide.

  Roman thought he remembered that signing up for high school baseball ended sometime in February. “Exceptions are made. They haven’t started practice yet.”

  “Too late,” the boy said with finality.

  “Probably not,” Roman casually remarked. “You’ve got a good arm and I’d bet you can hit well.”

  “Maybe.” The kid’s face took on a blank look again.

  “You gonna wish you had, or be glad you did?”

  Retrieving the soda can and then draining it, the kid squashed it by stepping on it. He looked at Roman’s impassive face before picking it back up and beginning the climb back over the rocks, back to the promenade area, above the ferry landing. He kept going, not once looking back until he’d effortlessly climbed all the way to the top. Roman was not nearly as fast with the ascent, carefully picking his way alongside the larger rocks, reaching the top where the boy stood with his back turned. He thought he heard sniffling.

  “Home is here now,” he said.

  A minute of more passed, the boy sniffed again before saying, “Just until I’m sixteen. Then I’m going back.”

  “To what? Your mom and sister will be devastated if you do that.”

  After another moment, Aden hung his head. In a quiet, steady voice, Roman added, “You’ll never know where a new road leads if you don’t take it, Aden.”

  The boy defiantly lifted his head, still with his back to Roman. “My father took a new…a different road and ended up getting killed.”

  Sobs began to wrack the boy’s entire body. Roman was all too aware of being mislabeled if someone saw him hug the boy. No matter how innocent the encounter, the act could definitely be a game changer. This was always a problem with adolescents who came in for treatment, both male and female. But now was the time to give comfort, if the boy would allow it, a necessary gesture that threw all caution to the wind. Roman grabbed hold of Aden, who struggled a bit, and then unexpectedly turned into Roman’s arms to continue sobbing his guts out.

  When they returned to the office, the black Range Rover was parked by the front door, with Jess and Molly Leitner inside it. The boy clamored inside the vehicle, still sniffling from his crying jag, while Roman stopped at the front of the vehicle to look stone-faced at Jess Leitner through the windshield. She, too, held to her own stony façade, before slowly putting the vehicle into reverse, and then backing out of the parking space.

  CHAPTER 10

  The following morning, he doubted that she would be there. For one thing, the early time was a problem, but even more than that, he had made her son cry—or it had looked as though he had—and virtual strangers who did that were automatically labeled as villains in most mothers’ minds. But at three minutes past seven, she turned her vehicle into the office’s parking lot, while Roman remained in his vehicle. Beside him in the cup holders were two large, steaming cups of coffee.

  Without hesitating, she got out and came to him, he opened the door for her, reaching as far out of the vehicle as his arm would allow. When she got in, he got a whiff of her shampoo, or of something else she used with a subtle fragrance that was enormously pleasant to him.

  In an apologetic tone, he said, “When we decided to meet, I wasn’t thinking about the crowd of people who’ll be in Lenore’s, many of whom will surely interrupt us because they’ll want to talk, or say hello.” Much more likely, Lenore’s patrons and staff would be wanting to know who he had brought in with him.

  “I’m glad you brought coffee,” Jessica said. “I was running late and didn’t ha
ve any. Did we decide to start therapy—or do you just want to ask me some questions? Or what?”

  Looking straightforwardly at her, he answered, “You decide.”

  Roman backed out of the parking space, got to the entrance, and turned north. He couldn’t help noticing that her freshly-scrubbed face was devoid of any make-up. She had on what must have been either transparent lip gloss, or perhaps a lip balm of some sort to ward off chapped lips, but that was all, on an unusual face that could make him stare at it for hours.

  He confessed, “The time was too early for you—and especially for the kids. I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  “There’s an early bird program at both my kids’ schools,” she said. “But…” she looked over at him.

  He looked back at her and said, “My bad. I’m sorry.”

  Had she just smiled? Maybe.

  After driving a couple of miles, they’d gotten out of the main part of town. He turned in at an overlook, one that afforded a view that was high up enough to see most all of the bay, along with the tiny strip of land that was Whittler Island, before the waters of the Atlantic Ocean stretched onward and forever. The vista was breathtakingly beautiful, especially on a morning where the sun had already risen and was casting its early light on the placid, rock-strewn bay, a vista that looked very much like a field of melted gemstones.

  “This is so gorgeous,” she said as he cut the Navigator’s engine. “Almost surreal.” Staring through the windshield, she took the time to take in the panoramic view with a slow, appreciative gaze.

  “It really is,” he agreed, removing both lids from the paper cups. “I brought along honey buns if you’d like one.”

  She smiled at him while twisting herself in the seat to face him more fully. He did the same, resting his back against the driver’s door to be able to face her directly. It wasn’t just the ocean view that was surreal. The vision of her in his vehicle was amazing. He was smiling more than he should, lifting one of the cups and quietly sipping. She likewise took a sip, her brows peeking higher when she tasted how good the coffee was, before saying, “Thank you.”

  Roman felt he owed her an explanation about the day before and said, “When Aden began crying yesterday, we were standing on the promenade, up from the ferry landing. I took him in my arms and let him cry it out. We stood there a good ten minutes, just before you came and picked him up.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” she said, appearing unconcerned. “I’m so glad you got him to cry. He’s needed to, but hasn’t. Maybe he cried after he went to bed at night, but I listened for that, and I don’t think he did. After the police came, Aden shut down his feelings about his father.”

  Looking outward at the sun rising above some of the hazy pink clouds, Roman thought about what she had said. An adolescent finding his father dead was something he’d never treated before. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  She sat quite still, holding the cup of coffee, the expression on her face serious. “Aden went over to his dad’s place to ask him for permission to go on a week-end trip with one of his friends. I had misgivings about allowing him to go because the boy isn’t, or, I should say—wasn’t someone who I thought Aden should have been hanging out with. So, he was hoping that his father would overrule me, but when he got to his father’s condo, he found his father dead from a gunshot wound to his head. The scene was horrid—I’ve never seen anything like that, so I know Aden’s been traumatized by what he saw. I’m still having nightmares.”

  “You said ‘his dad’s place.’ Tell me what you mean by that.”

  Taking a deeper breath, then letting it out with an audible exhalation, Jessica stalled for another moment to drink more of her coffee. “Gary and I were divorced—we had been separated …for a long while before that, and lived apart—the children with me, and him…well, I guess he lived alone. I’m not sure what he did.” A painful look swept over her as she took another deeper breath.

  Roman said, “He had other relationships while you were married?”

  “Yes,” she acknowledged. “Gary was a brilliant man—a very intense, serious person. But he had faults and one of them was that he couldn’t or wouldn’t stay committed to me. He was also a distant father who had very little time for the kids. But he made sure that we had everything we needed. He just couldn’t invest much of anything of his heart—in the only real future he had. He spent most all of his time and energy involved in an investment company that he started, a tech firm that was doing quite well.”

  “Aden said that you and he don’t believe that he shot himself. Why is that?” Roman asked.

  “Because the signs of Gary doing something so…egregious—so final—weren’t there,” she quickly answered. “Gary wasn’t depressed, or despondent. It just wasn’t in his nature to take his own life. That’s what I told the police investigators, and it’s what we still believe. The authorities must think so too, but haven’t been able to prove it. Some of the firm’s files are missing and there’s no back-up—or back-ups haven’t been found.

  “I think that Bill Leitner, Gary’s brother, or Gary’s other partner, Frank Norcross—one or both of them killed Gary, and made it look like a suicide. Aden insists that Frank Norcross is the one who did it, and that Bill didn’t know about it. Aden and Molly’s Uncle Bill has been like a pseudo-father to them in some ways. He’s spent some time with them, especially with Aden, but also some with Molly too. So Aden believes he really knows who Bill is, and that he could never have killed his own brother.

  “I had to get my kids away from all this. Molly doesn’t appear to be as affected by all that happened because Gary was such a poor father. Her emotional involvement with him was far less than Aden’s.”

  Roman reminded her, “That first morning at the police station, Aden called his dad ‘a fucking bastard.’”

  “You’ve got a great memory,” she replied with a tepid smile. “He’s conflicted by a wide range of feelings, and has had to deal with them most of his life. I first thought the kids just assumed that everyone’s dad was like theirs—distant and too consumed by work to pay them much attention. And I think Molly’s like any child of divorced parents, where the mother has custody of the kids and the father drifts in and out of their lives, the kids not really knowing him that well. But Aden’s reached a time in his life when he so wanted a father to care and be there for him and for Molly, that he had begun to resent Gary’s inability to be a more attentive and involved father. Some of his friends had divorced parents, and yet the fathers tried to be there for important times.”

  Moisture had begun festering in her eyes, before becoming tears that ran down her cheeks, which she tried to brush away. Roman reached behind her seat to retrieve tissues from a box he kept there, handing several to her.

  After a couple of minutes, Jessica haltingly said, “Aunt Ruth…she’s being…so awesome. She’s not one to keep asking a bunch of questions, and she seems really happy to have me and the kids here. But I’ve recently bought a house for us.”

  “You have?” He knew she had, but chose to react as though he hadn’t heard.

  She nodded, sniffing back more tears. “I hope to God I’ve done the right thing by my kids—coming here.”

  “This state—this area—it’s totally different for all three of you,” he said.

  “I would love it if Aden could adapt. So far, he hasn’t done well. Molly’s done much better with transitioning to a new area. She’s made a couple of friends, and is more adaptable. She says she likes her school a lot.”

  Roman thought for a moment before saying, “I think kids are like anyone else. Feeling safe in their environment, becoming involved with other kids in the community, having a parent who loves and cares about them—these are the most important things that will help them to adapt. I think Aden needs counseling so that he has someone to voice his feelings to, because he’s definitely been traumatized. His mood swings indicate that he’s acting out his anger in various ways, and he’s h
aving to remember his father in the most horrible way imaginable. He will probably always have that image in his head when he thinks of him. Hopefully, however, it won’t have the power later on in life that it does right now. That’s one goal I may be able to help him with.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Mayer, for seeing us as clients, and for trying to help him.”

  The time to be honest with her was now, and whatever she said would induce him to do his best in regard to her and her son. “Do you need a therapist—or a loyal friend who knows how to keep a confidence?”

  There in her green eyes, he saw a flash of relief that reflected a warmth toward him that he had first witnessed in Mayer’s Fresh Market. He was feeling something very similar for her, but unable to acknowledge to himself what that something was.

  With no hesitation in her tone, she said, “I need a friend. Someone who’s trustworthy, and who might even be a saint.”

  Relief bubbled up inside him. He grinned and said, “Knock off that last bit and I’ll be your trusted friend.”

  After starting the engine and turning out of the overlook and toward town, he said, “Friends can have lunch together.”

  “They can,” she agreed. “Would you like to see the inside of the Hartman house? Maybe you have…”

  “I’ve never been inside,” he admitted. “It’s always looked like a great place for kids to grow up.”

  “Would Friday be good?”

  “Friday’s excellent.”

  “All you have to do is show up,” she said.

  “We’ll be there. I’ll have my canine sidekick with me.”