Page 66 of Silent Threat

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She tugged to pull her arms down, but he held them fast. She wiggled her head and finally freed her face. “I hit the water the wrong way when I dove into the pool.”

The message his dark eyes were transmitting switched like a traffic light frommurderto a more subduedAll right, nobody has to die. He quietly swore as he let her go, tugged her T-shirt down, tugged the sweatshirt off, and hung it on the peg by the door.

He pointed at the stacked bags of pig feed by the wall. “Take a break.”

She did, but only because her skin was still tingling where he’d touched her, and she needed to regroup.

“What else do you need done?” he asked.

“The animals need to be watered.”

“I’ll do that. You sit right there and tell me all about ecotherapy. I’m ready to listen.”

Sure he was. “Don’t think I don’t know you’re faking interest just to keep me sitting.” But, of course, she couldn’t resist. “What would you like to know?”

“Did you learn it in college?”

“I studied psychology. Kept feeling that I needed more. Like if someone had panic attacks, we just tried to make it easier to deal with them. Mantras and visualizations to make it less scary, to make it go away faster. I wanted a solution that would prevent the panic attacks from happening in the first place. Thyroid disease or even celiac can cause anxiety. No amount of talking about your feelings is going to fix that.”

He watched her lips as he worked.

“I did a lot of extra reading,” she told him. “I believe that physical and mental health are part of a larger system and can’t be treated separately. Our physical health and mental health are not separate from the health of our environment.”

“Makes sense.”

“I interned at a counseling center that had all these middle-class women as their clients. Great houses in the suburbs, great jobs, or some didn’t even have to work. And they were all falling apart. I swear some of them were in worse shape than the military vets I’m treating now. These women were popping pills like you wouldn’t believe. Not to mention self-medicating with wine.”

Cole quirked an eyebrow.

“These women told me,” she continued, “that they felt as if the world was rushing by them at a hundred miles an hour. And they felt impelled to keep up, even at the cost of their health and relationships. A million meetings at work, then a million after-school activities for the kids, then making costumes for the plays and baking cupcakes for the fund-raisers. And the hairdresser and facials and the trips to the gym for maintenance, and shopping for the right clothes for just the right image.”

Cole leaned the broom in the corner, outside the llama pen so neither Esmeralda nor Dorothy the pig could eat it. “How did you fix them?”

“I didn’t fix them. I can’t fix anyone. All I can do is share some ideas people can use to fix themselves.”

“And what did you share?” His gaze hung on her face, as he was genuinely interested.

“Not me. My mentor. I was basically there to learn and handle the paperwork. But Susan shared that it’s OK to get off the train. She got me thinking that maybe what’s outside the train is actually your true life. All the little moments when you stop to smell the roses. A lot of the other stuff is just noise.”

“Pretty deep for an intern.”

“I was a total nerd. I just followed Susan around, when she would put up with me, and read the rest of the time.” She’d spent pretty much every minute of her college years with her nose in a book.

Cole leaned against the door frame. “What did you do after college?”

“Worked with inner-city kids in Philly. There’s a concept callednature deficit disorder. The idea is that not spending enough time in nature negatively affects people’s psyches in ways they don’t realize. A foundation put up the money, and we did nature activities with at-risk kids who live in the concrete jungle. Spent a lot of time at Fairmount Park after school.”

“Did it work?”

“Spectacularly. Missed days at school went down by forty percent. Incidents of in-school violence went down by fifty-four percent. Graduation rate went up by thirty percent.”

He watched her, and he must have picked up on her mixed emotions, because he asked, “But?”

Melancholy filled her. “We had a four-year grant. The foundation’s idea is to give worthy causes three to four years to prove their concept. They figure other investors or some state or federal funds will take over at that point.”

“And that didn’t happen?”

“The city didn’t have the budget. The state is into rural development right now. They think Philly already gets more than its share of state funds. As for federal aid, there are areas of the country in much worse trouble than the Northeast. We couldn’t get funding. The program shut down.”