A08 City of Bones - Harry Bosch by Michael Connelly

Author:Michael Connelly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Politics, Suspense, Azizex666, Thriller
ISBN: 9780446699532
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

She shook her head.

“I was gone. I left almost ten years before that.”

“And you had no contact with your family at all?”

“I thought . . .”

She didn’t finish. Bosch waited.

“Mrs. Waters?”

“I couldn’t take them with me. I was young and couldn’t handle . . . the responsibility. I ran away. I admit that. I ran away. I thought that it would be best for them to not hear from me, to not even know about me.”

Bosch nodded in a way he hoped conveyed that he understood and agreed with her thinking at the time. It didn’t matter that he did not. It didn’t matter that his own mother had faced the same hardship of having a child too soon and under difficult circumstances but had clung to and protected him with a fierceness that inspired his life.

“You wrote them letters before you left? Your children, I mean.”

“How did you know that?”

“Sheila told us. What did you say in the letter to Arthur?”

“I just . . . I just told him I loved him and I’d always think about him, but I couldn’t be with him. I can’t really remember everything I said. Is it important?”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. Your son had a letter with him. It might have been the one from you. It’s deteriorated. We probably won’t ever know. In the divorce petition you filed a few years after leaving home, you cited physical abuse as a cause of action. I need you to tell us about that. What was the physical abuse?”

She shook her head again, this time in a dismissive way, as if the question was annoying or stupid.

“What do you think? Sam liked to bat me around. He’d get drunk and it was like walking on eggshells. Anything could set him off, the baby crying, Sheila talking too loud. And I was always the target.”

“He would hit you?”

“Yes, he would hit me. He’d become a monster. It was one of the reasons I had to leave.”

“But you left the kids with the monster,” Edgar said.

This time she didn’t react as if struck. She fixed her pale eyes on Edgar with a deathly look that made Edgar turn his indignant eyes away. She spoke very calmly to him.

“Who are you to judge anyone? I had to survive and I could not take them with me. If I had tried none of us would have survived.”

“I’m sure they understood that,” Edgar said.

The woman stood up again.

“I don’t think I am going to talk to you anymore. I’m sure you can find your way out.”

She headed toward the arched doorway at the far end of the room.

“Mrs. Waters,” Bosch said. “If you don’t talk to us now, we will go get that court order.”

“Fine,” she said without looking back. “Do it. I’ll have one of my attorneys handle it.”

“And it will become public record at the courthouse in town.”

It was a gamble but Bosch thought it might stop her. He guessed that her life in Palm Springs was built squarely atop her secrets.

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