“What’s ambivalent mean?”
“You don’t really care one way or another.”
“Yes,” she said automatically.
“Or how about sad?”
“Sad, I’d be sad.”
“But not happy?”
Viggie glanced over at Alicia. “There aren’t any numbers in the problem.”
“I know, Viggie, just do the best you can.”
Viggie shrugged and resumed eating her apple.
Horatio wrote some other notes down. “Have you been thinking about the last time you saw your father?”
“Why wouldn’t I be happy?” she asked suddenly.
“You wouldn’t be happy because your friend went away. You do fun things with your friends. So if your best friend went away you couldn’t do fun things anymore,” Horatio explained. “Like I’m sure you did fun things with your father before he went away. You’re sad that your father went away, right? No more fun things with him?”
“Monk went away.”
“That’s right. Were you doing something fun with him the last time you saw him.”
“Lots of fun.”
“What was it?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Oh, it’s a secret? Secrets are fun. Did you have lots of secrets with Monk?”
Viggie lowered her voice and edged closer to him. “It was all secret.”
“And you can’t tell anybody else, right?”
“Right.”
“But you could if you wanted to.”
“Right, if I wanted to.”
“Do you want
to? I bet you do.”
For the first time she showed hesitation with a prompting like that. “I’d have to tell it in a secret way.”
“You mean like in a code? I’m afraid I’m not very good at codes.”
“Monk loved codes. He loved secret codes. It made him bloody. He told me so.”
Horatio glanced questioningly over at Alicia, who looked equally confused.
Horatio said, “It made him bloody, Viggie? What do you mean by that?”