Chapter 18: Suspended
The morning room at that house is the only pleasant room in it.
It faces east and it has a bay window and it is the one room Ana Reyes-Blackwood is supposed to have chosen anything in.
I only know that because Roz said it once, in passing, about a chair.
There were three of them waiting and one of them was a woman I had never seen.
Victor Blackwood, in a different shirt, unshaven, standing at the window and not sitting down for the whole nineteen minutes.
Marvin Aaronson, in the same gray overcoat, now off and folded over the back of a chair, with two files.
And a woman of about fifty in a navy suit who was introduced as being from a firm that advises on household employment.
She was there to take a note. She took a note. She said eleven words in nineteen minutes and I never learned her name.
Serena Montigue was not in that room, and nobody mentioned her in it, and that is the most eloquent thing about it.
Nobody offered me a chair, and then Victor turned round and saw that nobody had, and moved one about ten centimetres towards me with his foot.
I sat down.
Aaronson did the talking. He was very good and very slow and he never once said anything he could be quoted on.
He said that the hospital had filed a mandated report, which was routine.
He said that the police had opened an inquiry, which was also routine.
He said that the family took the welfare of the child extremely seriously.
He said the word family four times in nineteen minutes and never once said a name.
Then he said that with immediate effect I was suspended from my duties.
He used the words pending the conclusion of the inquiry, and I noticed that he did not say whose inquiry.
My pay would continue at the existing rate. My accommodation would continue. I was asked not to leave the state.
I was asked not to speak to any representative of the press, which I would not have done anyway and did not.
I was asked to notify Mr. Aaronson’s office before any further contact with the police, and I said, “All right,” and then I did not do it, not once, ever.
I was told I must not remove anything from the house.
I said, “Does that include my own things?”
Aaronson said it included anything relating to the child.
I said, “Then it includes about thirty pages of clinical observations in a notebook in the nursery.”
That was the first time all morning anybody looked directly at me.
Aaronson wrote something. Then he said the notebook was to remain in the house and be available.
I said, “Available to who?”
He said, “To the family and to its advisers.”
I said, “It’s a medical record. It goes to Dr. Moreno. It has gone to Dr. Moreno every four weeks since March.”
And Marvin Aaronson said, in the mildest voice you have ever heard, “We’ll come back to Dr. Moreno.”
I have had eleven months of Aaronson since then. That is the only sentence of his I still think about.
I said, “I’d like my recorder back.”
Aaronson looked at Victor. Victor did not look at either of us. He was looking out of the bay window at the drive.
Aaronson said, “The device is not available at present.”
I said, “It’s mine. I paid sixty-one dollars for it.”
He said, “Nobody disputes that.”
Then Victor Blackwood said, without turning round, “I have it.”
Three words, and they were the only true thing said in that room for nineteen minutes, and it did not help me at all.
Then I asked the question I had come in to ask, which I had rehearsed on the stairs.
I said, “Am I dismissed?”
Aaronson said, “You are suspended.”
I said, “That isn’t what I asked.”
He began a sentence about the distinction between suspension and termination in Illinois and how the former is not a finding of any kind.
And Victor Blackwood turned round from the window and cut across his own lawyer, which I had not seen him do and never saw again.
He said, “No. You’re not dismissed.”
Aaronson said, “Victor —”
Victor said, “She isn’t dismissed.”
There was a silence in which the woman in the navy suit wrote something down and then stopped writing.
I said, “May I ask why?”
And he told me. He did not dress it up and he did not spare himself.
He said, “Because he won’t be held by anybody else.”
I said, “You’ve tried.”
He said, “We tried for two hours this morning.”
And then he said the sentence that made me understand exactly what my position in that house was going to be for the next ten months.
“You’re suspended from your duties, Miss Carter. You’ll be doing them anyway.”