The Analyst (3 page)

He nodded slowly. It tells you much, he insisted. Blend the words on the page with what the writer has already done, and you’re probably halfway to figuring out who it is.

So, he pushed the letter to the side and opened up the address book, searching for the number for the first person on the list of fifty-two. He grimaced a little and he started to punch the numbers onto the telephone keypad. In the past decade, he had had little contact with any of his relatives, and he suspected none of them would be very eager to hear from him. Especially given the nature of the call.

Ricky Starks thought himself singularly ill suited at prying information from relatives surprised to hear his voice. He was accustomed to internalizing everything he heard from patients in his office, keeping close reins on all observation and insight. But as he dialed number after number, he found himself in unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. He was incapable of designing a verbal script that he could follow, some standard salutation followed by a brief explanation of why he was calling. Instead, all he could hear was hesitation and indecision in his voice, as he stumbled through hackneyed greetings and tried to extricate an answer to the stupidest question: Has something unusual happened to you?

Consequently, his evening was filled with a series of genuinely irritating telephone conversations. His relatives either were unpleasantly surprised to hear from him, unhappily curious as to why after so much time had passed he would be telephoning out of the blue, busy with some other activity that he was interrupting, or simply rude. There was a brusque quality to each contact, and more than once he was dismissed sharply. There were more than a few terse “What the hell is this all about?” questions, to which he lied that a former patient had somehow managed to obtain a list of his relatives’ names and he was concerned that they might be contacted. He left out the possibility that someone might be facing a threat, which, he wondered was probably the biggest lie of all.

It was already approaching ten p.m., which was closing in on his bedtime and he still had more than two dozen names on the list. So far, he had been unable to discern anything enough out of the ordinary in any of the lives he’d checked to warrant further investigation. But, at the same time, he was doubtful of his own questioning abilities. The odd vagueness of Rumplestiltskin’s letter made him fear that he might have simply missed the connection. And, it was equally possible that in any one of the brief conversations he’d experienced that evening that the person contacted by the letter writer had not told Ricky the truth. And, mingled in with the phone calls had been several frustrating nonanswers. Three times he’d had to leave stilted and cryptic messages on answering machines.

He refused to allow himself the belief that the letter delivered that day had been a mere charade, although that would have been nice. His back had stiffened up. He had not eaten and was hungry. He had a headache. He rubbed a hand through his hair, and then stroked his eyes before dialing the next number, feeling a sort of exhaustion that bordered on tension pounding behind his temples. He considered the pain of his headache to be a small penance for the realization that he was being greeted with: that he was isolated and estranged from the majority of his family.

The wages of neglect, Ricky thought to himself, as he readied to dial the twenty-first name on the list provided by Rumplestiltskin. It is probably unreasonable to expect one’s relatives to embrace sudden contact after so many years of silence, especially distant relatives, with whom there was little he shared. More than one had paused when he said his name, as if trying to place precisely who he was. These pauses made him feel a little like some ancient hermit coming down off a mountaintop, or a bear in the first minutes after a long winter’s hibernation.

The twenty-first name seemed only vaguely familiar. He concentrated hard, trying to put a face and then a status to the letters on the sheet in front of him. A slow picture formed in his head. His older sister who’d passed away a decade before had two sons, and this was the elder of the two. This made Ricky an uncle of little substance. He had had no contact with any niece or nephew since the sister’s funeral. He racked his brain, trying to remember more than appearance, but something about the name. Did the name on the list have a wife? A family? A career? Who was he?

Ricky shook his head. He had drawn a blank. The person he needed to contact had little more personality than a name plucked from a telephone book. He was angry with himself. That’s not right, he insisted to himself, you should remember something. He pictured his sister, fifteen years older than he, an age chasm that had made them members of the same family growing up, but revolving in far different orbits. She was the eldest; he was a child of accident, destined always to be the baby of the family. She had been a poet, graduating from a well-to-do women’s college during the Fifties, who first worked in publishing, then married successfully-a corporate attorney from Boston. Her two sons lived in New England.

Ricky looked at the name on the sheet in front of him. There was an address in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in the 413 area code. A burst of memory flooded him. The son was a professor at the private school located in that town. What does he teach? Ricky demanded of himself. The answer came in a few seconds: history. United States history. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and came up with a mental image: a short, wiry man in a tweed jacket, with horn-rimmed glasses and rapidly thinning sandy hair. A man with a wife who was easily two inches taller than he was.

He sighed, and equipped at least with a small parcel of information, reached for the telephone.

He dialed the number and listened while the phone rang a half-dozen times before being answered by a voice that had the unmistakable tone of youth. Deep, but eager.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” Ricky, said. “I’m trying to reach Timothy Graham. This is his Uncle Frederick. Doctor Frederick Starks…”

“This is Tim Junior.”

Ricky hesitated, then continued, “Hello there, Tim Junior. I don’t suppose we’ve ever met…”

“Yes, we did. Actually. One time. I remember. At grandmother’s funeral. You sat right behind my parents in the second pew of the church and you told my dad that it was a kind thing that grandma didn’t linger. I remember what you said, because I didn’t understand it at the time.”

“You must have been…”

“Seven.”

“And now you’re…”

“Almost seventeen.”

“You have a good memory to recall a single meeting.”

The young man considered this statement, then replied, “Grandmother’s funeral made a big impression on me.” He did not elaborate, but changed course. “You want to speak with my dad?”

“Yes. If possible.”

“Why?”

Ricky thought this an unusual question coming from someone young. Not so much that Timothy Junior would want to know why, for that was a natural state of the young. But in this context the question had a slightly protective air to it. Ricky thought most teenagers would have simply bellowed for their father to pick up the telephone and then returned to whatever they were doing, whether watching TV or doing homework or playing video games, because an out-of-the-blue phone call from an old and distant relative wasn’t something they would ordinarily add to the list of relevancies in their lives.

“Well, it’s something a little strange,” he said.

“It’s been a strange day here,” the teenager responded.

This statement grabbed Ricky’s attention. “How so?” he asked.

But the teenager didn’t answer this question. “I’m not sure my dad will want to talk right now, unless he knows what it’s all about.”

“Well,” Ricky said carefully, “I think he might be interested in what I have to tell him.”

Timothy Junior absorbed this. Then answered: “My dad’s tied up right now. The cops are still here.”

Ricky inhaled swiftly. “The police? Is something wrong?”

The teenager ignored this question to pose one of his own. “Why are you calling? I mean, we haven’t heard from you in…”

“Many years. At least ten. Not since your grandmother’s funeral.”

“So, right. That’s what I thought. Why all of a sudden now?”

Ricky thought the boy right to be suspicious. He launched into his set speech. “A former patient of mine-you recall I’m a doctor, Tim, right?- may try to contact some of my relatives. And even though we haven’t been in touch in all these years, I wanted to alert people. That’s why I’m calling.”

“What sort of patient? You’re a shrink, right?”

“A psychoanalyst.”

“And this patient, is he dangerous? Or crazy? Or both?”

“I think I ought to speak about this with your dad.”

“I told you, he’s talking to the police right now. I think they’re getting ready to leave.”

“Why is he speaking with the police?”

“It has to do with my sister.”

“What has to do with your sister?” Ricky tried to remember the girl’s name and tried to picture her in his head, but all he could recall was a small blond-haired child, several years younger than her brother. He remembered the two of them sitting to the side of the reception after his sister’s funeral, uncomfortable in stiff, dark clothes, quiet but impatient, eager for the somber tone of the gathering to dissipate and life to return to normal.

“Someone followed…” the teenager started, then stopped. “I think I’ll get my father,” he said briskly. Ricky heard the phone clatter to a tabletop, and muffled voices in the background.

In a moment the phone was picked up and Ricky heard a voice that seemed the same as the teenager’s, but with a deeper weariness attached. At the same time the voice had a harried urgency to it, as if the owner were being pressured, or caught at a moment of indecision. Ricky liked to think himself an expert on voices, on inflection and tone, choices of words and pacing, all of which were telltale signals or windows on what was concealed within. The teenager’s father spoke without introduction.

“Uncle Frederick? This is most unusual and I’m in the middle of a little family crisis here, so I hope this is truly important. What can I do for you?”

“Hello, Tim. I apologize for barging in like this…”

“That’s all right. Tim Junior said you had a warning…”

“In a way. I received a cryptic letter from what might be a former patient today. It had what some might consider a threatening tone. That was directed primarily at me. But it also indicated that the letter writer might contact one of my relatives. I have been calling around the family to alert people, and to determine if anyone has already been approached.”

There was a deadly, cold silence on the phone that lasted nearly a minute.

“What sort of patient?” Tim Senior asked sharply, echoing his son’s query. “Is this someone dangerous?”

“I don’t know who it is exactly. The letter wasn’t signed. I’m only presuming it is an ex-patient but I don’t really know for certain. In fact, it might not be. The truth is, I don’t know anything yet, for certain.”

“That sounds vague. Exceedingly vague.”

“You are correct. I’m sorry.”

“Do you think this threat is real?”

Ricky could hear a harsh, hard edge lining the man’s voice.

“I don’t know. Obviously it concerned me enough to make some calls.”

“Have you spoken with the police?”

“No. Sending me a letter doesn’t seem to break the law, does it?”

“That’s exactly what the bastards just told me.”

“I beg your pardon?” Ricky said.

“The cops. I called the cops and then they came all the way over here to tell me they couldn’t do anything.”

“Why did you call the police?”

Timothy Graham didn’t immediately answer. He seemed to take in a long breath of air, but instead of calming himself, this had the opposite effect, as if releasing a spasm of pent-up rage.

“It was disgusting. Some sick fuck. Some slimy sick motherfucker. I’ll kill him if I ever get my hands on him. Kill him with my bare hands. Is your ex-patient a sick fuck, Uncle Frederick?”

The sudden outburst of obscenity took Ricky aback. It seemed dramatically out of the ordinary for a quiet, well-mannered, and unprepossessing history professor at an exclusive and conservative prep school. Ricky paused, at first a little unsure how to reply.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tell me what has happened that has made you so upset.”

Tim Senior hesitated again, breathing in deeply, the noise making a snakelike hissing sound over the telephone line. “On her birthday, if you can believe it. On her fourteenth birthday, of all days. That’s just disgusting…”

Ricky stiffened in his seat. A memorylike explosion burst behind his eyes. He realized he should have seen the connection right away. Of all his relatives, only one by the greatest of coincidences, shared his birthday. The little girl whose face he had so much trouble recalling, and whom he’d met only once, at a funeral. He berated himself:
This should have been your first phone call.
But he did not let this observation creep into his own voice.

“What happened?” he asked bluntly.

“Someone left a birthday card for her inside her locker at school. You know, one of those nice, oversized, tritely sentimental cards that you buy at the mall. I still can’t figure out how the bastard got in there and got the locker opened without being seen by someone. I mean, where the hell was security? Unbelievable. Anyway, when Mindy got to school, she found the card, figured it was from one of her friends, and opened it. Guess what? The card was stuffed with disgusting pornography. Full-color, leave nothing to the imagination porn. Pictures of women tied up in ropes and chains and leathers and penetrated in every imaginable fashion by every conceivable device. Real hard-core, triple-X stuff. And the person wrote on the card:
This is what I intend to do to you as soon as I can catch you alone…
.”