“Does it bother you that your mother sent you away?”
“There was an opportunity, Miss. She set me on the road to the good life.”
“My parents sent me away and it really hurt. It still hurts every day. When the lawyer found me to give me the lodge, I felt like it was a bad joke, like they only wanted me around when they had gone, when they had left it. When they were dead.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Did you have any friends at home, Teddy? I mean, before the professor?”
“There was my cousin Bertha.”
“Anyone else?”
“I had a tortoise for a while. But she ran away and was crushed by a shire horse.”
“What was her name?”
“Michelle.”
“How did you know the tortoise was a girl tortoise?”
“She had long nails.”
Laurel shook her head. The boy seemed to revel in his lack of dept
