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Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1876
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"I USED to have this pair of shoes..."
"Shoes?"
"Yeah. Red ones. Like Dorothy's from Oz. "
"And...?"
"And I believed they were magical."
"Magic shoes?"
Alice nodded sure of her maddening answer. "I believed they were unique, since I couldn't find anything similar."
"And why would you think they were magical?" Hannibal asked, attempting not to laugh at that ridiculous statement of hers and the colorful outfit she wore that day with pigtails.
"Because it was my mother's." She confessed. "It was one of the last things I kept from her. One of the only memories I have from her actually."
"So the magic is actually the feeling you developed to the shoes attached to the love for your mother." He psychoanalyzed.
"Yeah, you made it technical but I think that's it." She chuckled adorably, he had started to notice those tiny details, how her charming how her smile was, or how her eyes lightned up while talking. "I know, they're just shoes....it's funny to speak about it to someone...I think only my siblings and Will knew about it. He laughed so hard when I told him that."
Hannibal lifted his eyes towards her from the notebook he drew in,.resting the hard working pencil for a moment. "Will Graham?"
"Yes." She said without making much of a deal about it."But he understood after I told him about the meaning."
His expression remained neutral, or maybe impossible to understand what he was really thinking. "Do you still have the shoes?"
Alice stopped. Her eyes reflected a core memory of the past, something filled with tragedy, anger and sadness, a true storm that filled her inside. She shaked her head. "No, not anymore. I've lost them."
"You lost the shoes your mother gave to you? Suddenly?" Her statement seemed unlikely to the doctor, something in her stance gave her away, how she stared at the grey walls with apprehension.
"Actually someone took them... so I don't know what happened to them." She confessed. "I haven't seen them in almost 10 years, I guess. I only have the pictures of me wearing it at college."
"Who took them?" He asked, slightly curious.
"I...don't know." Her tone wasn't uniform, changed within the sentence, her eyes avoided looking into his, the legs were glued to each other.
Hannibal Lecter knew she was lying.
"That's a shame." He responded. He would let her lie...for now. It was no use of insisting anyway, wasn't something important to him.
