Salter, Anna C (12 page)

I just didn't do well with the head thing. I called in sick to work Monday and Tuesday —a flu bug, I said —and it wasn't until late Tuesday that I could even walk around without gritting my teeth. Finally, I got well enough to remember there was an outside world and noticed the machines that kept me in touch with it.

I might as well tackle the phone. I was halfway through listening to the messages when it rang. Impulsively, I picked it up and said "hello."

I felt a jolt when I heard Adam's voice. "Michael," he said. I was supposed to say something back, but I couldn't remember what—besides I realized I was holding my breath. When I didn't speak, Adam went on, "Look, I don't want to bug you; I only have a couple of things I want to say."

It didn't sound like Adam. He didn't sound all that warm —worried maybe, but not warm —and his speech sounded rehearsed. "First, I am sorry I brought up Jordan."

"Now isn't the time to talk about it," I responded. Oh, Jesus, if he triggered Jordan again I would surely lose it.

"I know that. I figured that out," he added dryly. The second thing is —the only thing I want—is for you to promise me you'll call me if Willy contacts you."

I didn't say anything. I was not, I was absolutely not ready to discuss Willy with Adam. I didn't want Adam anywhere near me right now. He stirred up too much stuff, and I needed a clear head to deal with Willy.

I sighed but didn't say anything. I hated to lie to Adam, and his request sounded so sincere and so . . . reasonable.

"Michael, has he contacted you already?" Adam said sharply.

"I'm thinking, Adam. Don't read too much into it. I have to think about whether I can make a promise like that." I hadn't lied yet.

"If I have a problem," I said, "you'll be the first to know."

There was a pause.

"That isn't good enough," Adam said.

He was taking away all my wiggle room. "All right," I said, giving up. "I promise." Why do some people force you to lie?

"Okay," he said, sounding relieved, and I got a full body flush of guilt; the man trusted me. "We can talk about other things later," he added, and he was gone.

After he hung up I just sat there. If it was possible to make my relationship with Adam worse, I had just done it. But what are you supposed to do when somebody has a gun to your head? This wasn't my fault. People should not pressure their friends into lying to them.

But when I thought about it I realized there were all kinds of things I could have said. Like "no," for starters. Why didn't I just say, "No, I'm not promising anything, Adam, but I'll keep your request in mind." The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed that I had agreed. Adam always had an unsettling effect on me. I couldn't think straight when he was around. Not to mention that I could hardly think at all with this hammer banging on my head.

But it was bigger than that. There was a reason I lived alone. Relationships are like magnets for me: They pull me off course. Expectations, demands —I have that female thing that hates disappointing people. After a while, in every relationship, I start feeling less "me." Pretty soon, I'm so watered down I can't stand myself, and then I get out.

I decided to put it aside —after all, Adam had invited me to lie to him; he had practically insisted I lie to him —and I walked over to the computer. Willy was still out there, and I needed to quit obsessing over Adam and figure out what he was up to. I had thrown down a gauntlet to Willy, sort of, and it was going to be interesting to see how he responded.

I checked on my e-mail, and yes, there was a message from "partytime." I stared at it for a moment before I opened it. Just seeing mail from Willy gave me a bad case of the dreads. I finally double-clicked on "partytime," and Willy's letter popped up on my screen.

Well, well, my good doctor. I should prove to you I can control my appetites—a little reverse psychology, perhaps? Next you'll be proscribing the symptom! But no, I can't see you in the Milan school. My dear, you must think I am an oppositional adolescent to be bought off so easily. Oh, Michael, you do amuse me.

So he knew a little something about psychology. Big deal. A lot of people know about the Milan group and their focus on proscribing the symptom. If someone was truly oppositional they'd quit having the symptom just to win the power struggle.

But interestingly, I hadn't been proscribing the symptom. I had just been playing to his narcissism, which, for all his smarts, he still didn't see.

Still, all in all it was a disappointing connnnunication. Perhaps you are simply less clever than I thought. Or then again, stress has a way of eating into your soul like acid, doesn't it? You start wondering when and how and . . . what.

You need solace! Distraction from the inevitable. There's still time—some anyway. Get yourself a dog, a Rottweiler, maybe, and keep her. Perhaps some flowers—Camellias say. Have a little Kiwi fruit or quiche Lorraine.

I froze. For a moment I couldn't breathe. I read it again and again. I got up and walked around the room and sat down and read the last paragraph again. I got up and walked again, still reading it and telling myself it couldn't mean what I thought it meant. I could be wrong; I had to be wrong.

But what were the probabilities? I had a client named Camille, one named Kiwi, and one named Lorraine. He'd even capitalized the names, for God's sake. Get a Rottweiler and "keep her." Keep her. Keeter.

I needed an outside person to read this and tell me I was crazy. I got as far as the phone and stopped. Anybody I knew who looked at this would tell me to spend the next two years in New Zealand.

But how could Willy know who my clients were? How could he possibly know? Had he broken into my files? Had he followed people who went in and out of my office? How could he know? Was he tapping my phone? Had I spoken to them on the phone? He couldn't have gotten into my computer files. I didn't keep my clients' names on my computer.

I read the message again. It had to be what I thought it was. It made no sense otherwise. Quiche Lorraine and Kiwi fruit? He just couldn't pull those out of a hat.

So he was here. Close enough to watch my office. But how would he know their names? Was he following them and then checking out who lived at that address? But even if he did? He might somehow find out their names from where they lived, but how did he get Keeter's name? I kept going over and over it like a broken record. Had he broken into my office? Had he read my files? But if he was following people, he knew where I lived, too.

I was going in circles. I got up and got a glass of ice tea to settle my nerves and sat down to think. Ice tea is mother's milk to Southerners, and somehow, under stress, I always like to touch something from the South. I looked at the ice and twirled it in the glass while I tried to clear my mind. "In ghostlier demarcations," Wallace Stevens had written, "keener sounds." Well, things were pretty ghostly, and I was hearing something all right, but what? "In ghostlier demarcations, muddy but insistent noises." Stevens had never written that.

I remembered something from long ago. I had gone sailing with some friends in college. We'd been on a twenty-four-foot Erickson, a little Clorox bottle of a boat, when the motor went out and, worse, the fog rolled in. I had been assigned the job of navigating, and I had gone below with the charts while others steered and kept a lookout—as best they could—for other boats. The fog had been so thick you couldn't see three feet ahead, and the little boat didn't have radar.

Nobody had really gotten freaked out until the ferries started coming. We'd hear the sound of their motors grow louder and louder, but nobody could see a thing. Then when the motors were so loud that we were all just waiting to be run over, the sound would slowly start fading. The damn things were passing us so close we could practically touch them, and we still couldn't see them.

"In ghostlier demarcations, the sound of ferries." That was closer to the truth. I could hear Willy in the fog, but I couldn't see anything. It was a lot like the ferries, with one difference: Willy wasn't in the fog. You might say he had radar of a sort, but the ferries used it to avoid us, and Willy would use it to circle me and circle me, getting closer all the time. More like a hammerhead shark than a ferry.

That wasn't really news. No matter what I told anybody, I knew Willy would be on my doorstep —or more likely outside my window—from the moment I heard he was getting out of jail. But I never thought he'd drag my clients into it.

I thought of Lucas, the mass murderer. When he was five years old, his mother asked him if he loved the family mule. He said he did, and she shot it in front of him. She knew she could hurt him most by hurting things he loved.

I had no children. I lived alone. I wasn't somebody you could easily threaten with things like that. But the sanctity of my therapy office was important to me, and the people I took care of were important to me. What made me think Willy wouldn't figure that out?

There were a couple of things I had to do. I got dressed and pulled the fanny pack I kept my magnum in from a drawer. I put on the fanny pack and then checked the gun to be sure it was loaded. Without children in the house, I could keep my gun loaded, and I did.

I threw a couple of speed loaders in the pack, grabbed my car keys, and headed for the car. I was moving too fast, and my head started hurting again. I slowed down —Jesus, I hated slowing down when I was trying to get somewhere —and slowly glided my head to the car.

I never noticed the ride in. It was one of those deals where my mind was so preoccupied, my brain stem took over the wheel. I got to my private practice office in Carlotta's house and sat outside. The lights were on in her part of the house, and I had no choice whatsoever. Carlotta had been my best friend since college —which I hoped to God Willy did not know —and I had to go talk to her about this.

I thought of about eighteen ways I could approach this without telling her the truth, and none of them worked. I gave up and got out of the car. Between m}^ prickly sense of privacy and Carlotta's safety, my privacy was going to have to take it on the ear.

I went around to the back door, which opened on the kitchen. I knocked as I opened it with my key. Carlotta was standing in the kitchen in her favorite white satin pj's, mixing her nightly protein drink. Carlotta's way of living is a little different from mine. My favorite night wear is a T-shirt. She turned around as I came in and said. "Greetings. Dr. Michael. Want a milk shake?"

"No, thanks," I said and sat down at the kitchen table. I ran my fingers absentmindedly over the top of the table. It was an extraordinary^ object: a thick piece of solid redwood in a free-form style supported by a handmade potter}^ base. At the sound of my voice. Carlotta turned around again to look at me briefly, then went back to making her drink. "What the hell happened to you?"

"Fell off a horse," I said. Carlotta turned around again and looked at me. "Nothing serious," I said. "Jack was at the ED."

I didn't say anything more, and shortly Carlotta finished futzing with the blender and sat down. She didn't say anything either, just drank her drink and waited. I suppose it was obvious I wasn't there just to visit. Finally, I got going.

"How are things with Hank?" I asked. Hank Holden was a judge Carlotta had been seeing.

"Fine," she said.

I took a deep breath. There was no way I could fool Carlotta, so I might as well cut to the chase. "Why don't you go stay with him for a while?"

"Michael . . ."

"I'm not going to get into it, Carlotta. I'm just not. But I'm telling you, go stay with Hank."

"So he's here."

I shrugged.

"You're wearing your fanny pack."

I shrugged again. I got up and poured myself some milk shake just to be doing something.

"You haven't told Adam about this."

I sat back down.

Carlotta's face —which was ordinarily composed—looked like a kaleidoscope of emotions. Anger had passed through it and fear and some other things that went by too quick to identify.

"Michael, you are a goddamn fool."

"True," I said. Hard to argue with that.

"Why me?" she said.

"There's nothing specific about you," I said.

"Then I'll stay. It's you he's after."

"I wouldn't do that," I replied.

"Why not?"

"He knows some things he shouldn't know," I said carefully looking down at the table. "It may be he got into the office."

I heard Carlotta's sharp intake of breath but didn't look up. It really wasn't a comfortable thought. Carlotta quit arguing.

"Hank's out of town until tomorrow."

"I'll stay tonight."

"Is that going to help or hurt?"

"Good question, but I have a gun and you don't. You need to think about a gun course," I said firmly. This was on old argument; Carlotta hated guns.

"If I quit hanging around you," she replied, "I wouldn't need one."

Which was probably true.

"Adam doesn't know," Carlotta said flatly.

I didn't reply. It wasn't a question.

"You know I'll call him," she said.

"It'll just cause an argument," I replied. "I, uh . . . I promised him I'd tell him if Willy showed up."

I knew I didn't have a prayer.

"That was dumb," was all she said.

Carlotta stormed off to bed. She hadn't said a whole lot, but she was as pissed as I could remember her being. Who could blame her? I had brought a maniac into her life who might even have gotten into her house, no doubt while she was sleeping. Now she had to move out without knowing when she could come back, and on top of that she had to worry about me.

Plus, when she thought about it, she would figure out I had more or less lied to her at lunch when I reassured her that Willy would take off for the hinterland and not come after me. Then she'd get doubly pissed.

And worse, what could I say? I don't know why I hate for people to worry about me so much. I just do.

So, as close as I could figure it, I was now in trouble with just about everybody I knew. I hadn't returned Marv's phone call when he told me it was urgent. I'd lied to Carlotta and Adam; one of them knew it and the other was about to.