Turn to Stone by Brian Freeman

of him and what she’d been through. She was strong—to do the work she did, to survive what she had at the Novitiate. There was steel inside her, and yet steel also locked out emotions. She had to be immune to pain. He assumed there was no other way to deal with the people she met. The abusers and the abused. The bullies and the bullied.
    He remembered what his uncle had said about Greg Hamlin. Hamlin was a hard man. A hot-tempered teacher who didn’t belong in the schools. A husband in a combustible marriage. Recently, however, he’d changed. He’d softened. As if he’d gotten help.
    “Was Greg Hamlin a client of yours?” he asked Kelli. “Did he come to you for counseling?”
    Her eyes widened with surprise. “I—I can’t say anything about my clients. You know that.”
    “Did Percy ask the same question?”
    Kelli chewed her bottom lip. “Yes.”
    “What did you say?”
    “Just what I said to you. I can’t confirm or deny that anyone is a client. If I did that, you could assume that I’m counseling someone simply because I won’t give an absolute denial about it. Even so, I had already told Percy what I told you. I never met Greg Hamlin.”
    “Except if he was a client, would you acknowledge knowing him? A lot of therapists won’t say hello to a client on the street.”
    “Oh, God.” She held up her hands in exasperation. “Don’t you see the impossible position I’m in? I’m trying to deny something I can’t ethically deny.”
    Stride wanted to believe that Kelli didn’t know Greg Hamlin. That his death was a mystery to her, even if her husband was at the heart of it. He felt an urge to help her, but that urge had betrayed him in the past. Sometimes he’d let his sympathy for victims get in the way of his better judgment. He was getting mixed signals from this woman.
    Trust her—but don’t trust her.
    “If you didn’t know him, Kelli, explain the phone call,” Stride said.
    “I’m telling you, I can’t. I don’t understand it.” She shook her head and searched for an answer. “Look, I don’t know, maybe Hamlin wanted therapy. Maybe that’s why he was calling me. Everyone in town knows what I do.”
    Stride stood up and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not trying to accuse you, but I want you to understand the questions you’re going to face from the police.”
    “I realize that. I appreciate it.”
    “Nothing you tell me is privileged. If the sheriff asks, I have to tell him everything you say.”
    “I know that.”
    Stride eyed the window and the quiet Shawano street. “We don’t have a lot of time. I want to be gone before the sheriff arrives.”
    “Of course.”
    “You say you didn’t know Greg Hamlin,” Stride said. “What about Percy? Did he know him?”
    “He never mentioned him to me.”
    “Could they have known each other in the past? Before you met Percy?”
    Kelli shook her head. “I don’t see how. Percy wasn’t from around here. He grew up near Janesville. I’m telling you, Greg Hamlin was as much a stranger to Percy as he was to me. This was a missing persons case for Percy. Nothing more.”
    “Did he talk about it?” Stride asked.
    “No, but he never talked about his work with me. Just like I never talked about my work with him. Neither one of us really liked what the other did, Mr. Stride. I hated the danger of him being a cop. He hated the kind of people I had as clients. It was sort of an unspoken rule between us. We didn’t go there.”
    “Except you said he was obsessed with Hamlin’s disappearance. How did you know?”
    She pointed at the hallway that led to the house’s small bedrooms. “Percy spent hours in his office. He brought home boxes of papers and pored over them. Whenever he wasn’t there, he locked the door. That was unusual. He had never done that before. He was being really secretive about it.”
    “Show me,” Stride said.
    Kelli hesitated. “I can, but it won’t do you any good.”
    “Why?”
    “There’s