Draw the Dark by Ilsa J. Bick Page A

have wanted me to do that in front of Mrs. Krauss?”
    That was a good point. “Well, that’s a good point.”
    “Yeah, I thought so too. Everyone at Aspen just calls me
Doc
, so . . . I didn’t see any graceful way to bring it up, and I didn’t want to embarrass you. Winter’s a small town. Most people are pretty sensitive when it comes to seeing me, and we hadn’t set any ground rules yet.”
    “So, uh, what do we do?”
    She stepped away from the door. “Coming in would be a start.”
    And here I’d been all prepared to hate her.

    There were three rooms: a playroom with toys and an easel off to my left, the room where Dr. Rainier saw her adult patients to our right, and another door directly ahead. I pointed to that. “What’s behind there?”
    “Nothing important.” She tilted her head to the right. “Want to come have a seat?”
    I hung back. “Who goes in that room? With all the toys?”
And the easel . . .
    “Kids, mainly, ones who are too young to want to just talk. Do you want to go in there instead?”
    I eyed a box of crayons and colored pencils, watercolors. A blackboard. “Ah . . . maybe another time.”
    Her main office was big, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along one entire wall, a bank of windows opposite that overlooked the lake, a desk with a computer workstation, a couple of sling-back chairs. She gestured me to one and then dropped into the one opposite. She said, “Let’s talk about here versus Aspen Lake first, okay? At Aspen, we work together, so it’s nothing heavy. Just whatever comes up, and we may not run into each other that much. Here, we work together too, but . . .”
    “You get to call the shots.”
    Her lips moved in a small smile. “You could put it that way, but not really. Anything we talk about will have to be a two-way street. The thing is, we might also run into each other around town. I usually leave it up to patients to approach me. So if you spot me, I won’t say anything unless you say something first. That way, you control things, not me.”
    I liked that. “What do I call you?”
    “What do you want to call me?”
    I thought about that. “Dr. Rainier, if that’s okay.”
    “That’s fine.” She fingered up a sheaf of papers. “I’ve got the court’s report, the sheriff’s report, and the results of the psych testing. There’s other stuff here from the time when your mother left: the report your uncle filed and an assessment by a court-appointed social worker.”
    “I don’t remember any of that.” It also hit me that I hadn’t thought about my mother in days. It felt like years. “My mom didn’t leave.”
    “Oh?”
    But I was already sorry I’d said anything. I just shrugged and then folded my arms and looked at the wall of books. “You read all those?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “So you’re smart.”
    “I’m not sure that reading a lot translates to smarts. You can read Swahili too, and not understand anything. I once picked up a book on quantum physics, and I could read all the words, but I didn’t understand a thing.”
    “That’s different. You read Swahili?”
    “No. French and German. What about you?”
    “I take Spanish. I wanted to take Japanese, but the school’s too small to afford a teacher.”
    “Why Japanese?” Then her face cleared. “Ah, you must like anime.”
    I blinked. “Manga. Yeah. I like
Hellsing
. Alucard is awesome.
    She was nodding. “I know that one. What do you like about Alucard?”
    “Well, you know it’s Dracula backwards, right? He’s just . . . awesome. He’s got this great red coat, he’s kind of creepy, and he goes after ghouls and bad vampires and . . .” I stopped.
    “What is it?”
    “This tells you about me, doesn’t it? I mean, that I like this kind of stuff.”
    “Well, you also like art, and that says just as much about you.”
    “You don’t want to know all about me.”
    “Why not? We all have our dark places, Christian.”
    “Right. Like what bad things have you lived