Part 24 (2/2)
”I don't know,” she said.
”Burke'll be here any minute.”
Lydia looked at the clock. It was ten after nine. Where the h.e.l.l was he?
Andrea Stone turned abruptly and walked back to her desk.
”The Honorable Thomas J. Burke. All rise.”
Burke crossed to the bench just as the double doors flew open behind her and Sansom appeared hurrying down the aisle.
The fact that he was late wasn't lost on Burke. He didn't comment.
Sansom looked awful.
His suit didn't exactly look as though he'd slept in it, but it did look uncomfortably close to that. The tie was crooked, the collar in need of pressing. His gla.s.ses were water-spotted again.
She glanced at Edward Wood standing next to Arthur. She didn't like the contrast she was seeing.
”Are you all right?” she whispered.
He nodded. ”Late start,” he said. ”Sorry if I worried you.”
You're worrying me now, she thought.
”Be seated,” said Burke. And so the day began.
Bromberg seemed ill at ease, s.h.i.+fting in his seat and sipping from a gla.s.s of water as Sansom questioned him about Robert's symptoms. His shyness and his stuttering, his clumsiness, his incontinence, his dreams.
”And are all these consistent with what you'd see in a case of child abuse, Doctor?”
”At Robert's age the onset of stuttering's somewhat unusual. Otherwise I'd say yes.”
He took him through an explanation of his treatment-the ”play therapy” that was designed to open Robert up. ”Would you say he's responding well or badly?”
Bromberg smiled. ”Not too well, sorry to say.”
”He's uncommunicative?”
”Yes, mostly.”
”And is this consistent, in your opinion, with a child who's ... with ah, with an abused child?”
”An abused child would tend to be secretive and withhold information, especially from adults. Yes.”
”Doctor, based on your knowledge of him, do you believe it likely that Robert's been abused?”
”Likely?”
”Yes. Couldn't these symptoms all be accounted for by some other means? His parents' divorce, maybe?”
She saw what he was doing. He was heading Wood off at the pa.s.s with that one.
Bromberg thought it over.
”No, I'd have a problem with that explanation. It's what we've been calling his clumsiness, you see, which isn't really clumsiness at all. The boy's hurting himself-and he's doing it frequently. To me, that's the most significant indication that someone else is hurting him. That and his incontinence, of course.”
”So you'd say it is likely.”
”Yes.”
On cross-examination Wood took him carefully over the same terrain-at first going nowhere in particular that Lydia could see. But Bromberg seemed more relaxed now and she had to wonder to what extent the two men had talked together prior to the hearing.
Then that became apparent.
”So this is your conclusion, Doctor. That Robert's been s.e.xually abused.”
”Yes.”
”And did you also conclude that the abuser was definitely his father?”
”No, I did not conclude that. Not necessarily.”
”Couldn't it just as likely have been his mother, then? Didn't you in fact tell Mrs. Danse that you hadn't yet ruled her out on that?”
”I did mention the possibility, yes.”
”Exactly what did you say?”
”I said I had suspected abuse for some time. She asked why I hadn't reported it to her. I told her that one did not discuss this sort of thing casually, especially when it had been known to happen that a parent would bring his or her child in for therapy as a kind of smoke screen, to disguise their culpability in the abuse or perhaps even, subconsciously, in the need to be discovered.”
”And how did she respond to that?”
”She became ... quite angry.”
”How do you know she was angry?”
He smiled. ”You only had to look at her, Mr. Wood. Or listen to her.”
”She was hostile toward you?”
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