Written In Blood by Shelia Lowe

of the trunk represents when you were born. The first wound appears a little below the middle of the tree, so that would be when you were about six. The second one is a little higher, so I would say you were about nine or ten.”
    “Oh my God, I can’t believe you know that.” Annabelle wrapped her thin arms around herself. She spoke almost in a whisper. “Marisa.”
    “Who is Marisa?” Claudia asked, surprised to hear this unfamiliar name, rather than a reference to her mother.
    There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of their respirations. Then Annabelle seemed to reach a decision. “She was my nanny. She took care of me after Mama—” Her voice got higher as she choked up and abruptly stopped speaking. She turned away and Claudia saw that her shoulders were shaking. When she spoke, her breath came out in harsh gasps.
    “One day I came home from school and she was gone. Her room was empty.” Her voice quavered. “She promised she would always stay with me, but she lied. Everyone lies.”
    “What happened? Why do you think she left?”
    “ He tried to make her have sex with him and she didn’t want to.”
    The words sounded as obscene coming from Annabelle’s lips as what they suggested.
    “Who are you talking about?”
    “Dominic.” She spat her father’s name with utter contempt. “He said it was because she was stealing, but it’s not true.”
    “How do you know this?”
    “I saw them in the pool house. Marisa took me swimming and afterward she went to change in the dressing room. I was supposed to go in the house, but I hid behind the planter. I was going to jump out and surprise her. Then he came outside.
    “He pushed open the door. She yelled at him that she was in there, but he wouldn’t leave. I went and peeked in. Her bathing suit top was off and he was groping her. She was crying and trying to push him away, but he wouldn’t stop. It was totally gross and disgusting.”
    For all her attempts at worldliness, she was little more than a child after all. A child who had witnessed appalling behavior by her parent.
    “What did you do?”
    “I yelled at him to let her go and he jumped back. Marisa pushed him away and ran into the house. She ran right past me like I wasn’t there.”
    “What did your father say?”
    “He—he yelled at me to mind my own goddamn business and he started hitting me. I hate him!” Tears quivered on Annabelle’s lashes. “Why couldn’t she have called me, or at least sent me a birthday card or something? She just left me.”
    The self-centered worldview of the ten-year-old she had been.
    Claudia didn’t believe that the nanny had deliberately cut Annabelle out of her life after caring for her for four years. Had she threatened to expose Dominic Giordano?
    How many calls and holiday cards to Annabelle might her father have diverted? Or had it been a condition of the nanny’s termination, not to ever contact his daughter? Punishment for refusing his advances. Or part of a pay-off? It would be easy for a man of Giordano’s stature to intimidate his employee into not reporting an episode of sexual harassment. It seemed plausible to Claudia that it could have happened that way.
    She thought of the caution her friend Zebediah Gold regularly gave her: Don’t get emotionally involved with young clients. He should know; he was a semiretired psychologist. But Claudia had never learned how to do that. How could she keep her distance when this prickly little person so clearly needed someone to be involved?
    She picked up the drawing Annabelle had made in response to her instruction to draw the family doing something.
    The drawing suggested more than a little artistic talent. Two figures were depicted. Close to the left edge of the paper, reminiscent of where she had placed her handwriting, Annabelle had drawn a lone female figure, which represented herself. It didn’t take an expert to interpret the feelings of futility in the closed eyes and sad,