The Rules of Dreaming (15 page)

At three o’clock that afternoon, Dr. Palmer summoned me back to his office.  His attitude seemed to have hardened as the shock of the morning wore off. 

“I just spoke with Avery Morgan,” he said.  “He’s beside himself.”

“I can understand that he would be upset.”

“Upset isn’t the word.  He’s furious.  He blames the Institute and he blames me.  He’s threatening to get a lawyer if we don’t find Hunter by tomorrow morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

Dr. Palmer glared with a ferocity that surprised me.  “You’re sorry?  You ought to be, because this is all your doing.  First you wanted to lower his dosages, and then—I don’t even want to think about that absurd satanic ritual or whatever it was you were performing with my half-wit brother.”

“It was hypnosis.”

“Hypnosis, for God’s sake!  On a schizophrenic!”

There was nothing in Dr. Palmer’s accusations that I hadn’t reproached myself for a hundred times.  That didn’t make it any easier to listen to what he was saying.  “I realize now that it was a serious error of judgment on my part.  I’ve told you that.”

“I swear to God, if you say anything to Avery Morgan or anyone else about that business with my brother—”

“I won’t.”

“Or about anything else, for that matter.”  The sweat was pouring off his forehead like tears from a howling child.  I could see that his career, everything he’d worked for over a quarter century, was on the line.  “Do you understand?” he continued.  “If you talk to any reporters or lawyers or anybody else about anything it’s going to be the last thing you do as a licensed physician.  Do you understand?  Even the police—I don’t want you talking to the police.  There are patient privacy issues, family privacy issues, reputation issues, all sorts of issues that you wouldn’t be sensitive to.  I’ll do the talking.  Do you understand?”

“If you feel that way, then I should resign.”

“You’re not going to resign.  That would only attract attention and be seen as an admission that we did something wrong.  You’re going to stay here until I tell you to resign.  Do you understand?  I won’t have a scandal.”

*   *   *

Nicole was shaken and sad when she left the library that afternoon.  Mrs. Paterson was a kindly lady who’d befriended her when she stayed at the Institute.  It was hard to imagine her hanging herself, and even harder to imagine anyone else doing it for her.  Miss Whipple was undoubtedly wrong about that—she refused to explain her suspicions or why she was giving Nicole the mysterious envelope.  The big question was how Hunter and Antonia would get along without the nurse who’d cared for them since the day they were born.  Nicole thought about driving out to the Institute but she remembered the work she’d planned for the afternoon and decided to wait until the next morning.  It was already late, and the war against distraction had to be fought one inch at a time.

Back in her apartment, she sat in front of the computer but the words would not come.  Instead of literary theory all she could think about was Mrs. Paterson dead and Hunter and Antonia sobbing around her.  She tried to distract herself from her distractions by thinking about the unmade bed and the dirty dishes in the sink and the trash scattered around the apartment, and before long she couldn’t think of anything else.  She made the bed and washed the dishes and then she gathered the trash into a plastic bag and carried it down to the dumpster, where she had one of her dreaded meetings w
ith the landlady, Mrs. Gruber.

Mrs. Gruber was condescending, nosy and cheap, convinced that Nicole was using her apartment for immoral purposes but willing to look the other way if it gave her an excuse to raise the rent.
  That afternoon she wore a pink housecoat over her shapeless torso and a pair of velveteen slippers on her feet.  At the sight of Nicole she raised her eyebrows as if expecting to find something scandalous in Nicole’s garbage bag.

“Did you hear about your friends at the Institute?”  Mrs. Gruber never missed an opportunity to remind Nicole of her stay at the Institute.

“My friends?”

“The nurse was killed—
”

“Yes, poor Mrs. Paterson.”

“And that boy—the Morgan kid—he’s the one who did it.”

Nicole caught her breath.  “What?  What Morgan kid?”

“Hunter Morgan?  Isn’t that his name?  He killed her and flew the coop.”

*   *   *

Dubin had lost count of the Grey Goose martinis and the beers he’d chased them down with.  He sat in a corner booth in a cheap Italian restaurant called Dino’s along Route 17 where he was sure nobody would recognize him.  Mozzarella sticks were as close as he could come to eating.  Families came and went—young couples, teenagers, some quiet, some noisy, all acting as if nothing had happened.  Waiters took their orders and brought their pizzas swooping down on enormous trays.  A football game unfolded silently on the TV over the bar.  Dubin paid no attention to any of this or even to his own thoughts.  He sipped his martinis seriously, as if he were taking medicine, but the alcohol only aggravated his remorse.  He’d thought of blackmail, the way he practiced it, as a victimless crime, or no crime at all, since he only tormented the guilty and extracted money from the rich.  The pursuit of journalism by other means, he called it.  A highly profitable game.  Now Mrs. Paterson was dead, the victim of his victimless crime.  He didn’t know who killed her or exactly why, but he was sure it was a deadly move in the game he’d set in motion.  There was no question of ever forgiving himself.  That would never happen. The only thing he could do was drink and when he stopped drinking find whoever killed her.  That was the only way the game could end.

Chapter
16

He knew enough to stay out of sight until it was dark.  The first day he hid in a barn behind a pile of lumber and when the owners came in to feed the horses he held himself perfectly still and they never knew he was there.  When the sun went down he found some rotting apples on the ground and shoved them into his mouth until he felt like vomiting.  Then he ran away and spent the night prowling the woods and the
ditches along the dark roads on the edge of town.  In the morning he found a dilapidated shed that was full of rusted farm equipment and slept on the wooden floor until dark.  On the third morning he ventured closer to town and watched from behind a tree as an elderly woman climbed into her Subaru Legacy wagon and backed down the gravel driveway to the street.  He found a way into the house through the cellar door, ate some food he knew she would never miss—some crackers and a raw hot dog and a can of soda—and watched TV until he heard her coming home.  He turned off the TV and crept back downstairs to the cellar, where he curled up on the floor behind the furnace and listened to the old woman creaking around upstairs, light as a feather.  Then he started to think about Nicole.  He wondered what she would say when he found her.  Would she be afraid?  When it got dark he would slip back outside, sneak through the town to try and find Nicole.  He wondered if she would be expecting him.

Sleeping was hard on that cement floor, and punctuated by nightmares.  When he woke up he had the sensation that he’d been dreaming someone else’s life.  It must be the drugs, he realized.  The drugs are finally wearing off.

Upstairs he could hear the old woman moving around, probably cooking her dinner.  She seemed harmless enough.  He doubted if she could even make it down the cellar stairs without breaking her neck.  But the dinner—was there some way he could get his hands on the dinner?   Then he remembered the rotten apples and felt sick to his stomach.

Chapter
17

Frank Lynch was slowly bringing the Grady up to the slip when his wife came out of the house with the cordless phone and handed it to him.  It was windy and almost too cold to be out on the water.  In another couple of weeks he planned to pull the boat out and put it in the shed, where he could work on it during the winter.  Anything to get out of the house.  His wife didn’t usually bother him when he was outside.

On the phone he heard the voice of Mayor Lester Kapp, his former boss, who told him about the apparent suicide that turned out to be a murder.  “I’m shocked and saddened by this tragic event,” the mayor said, repeating a line from his statement to the press.  “We’re going to need you up here, Frank.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Frank, I know you’re retired but the guys we’ve got now—not that there’s anything wrong with them, they’re doing a fine job—they’re just a little green, that’s all.”

“A little green?”  Lynch laughed.  Calling the current police force a little green was like calling the mayor a little fat.  “They’ve got at least five years experience between them.  That ought to be enough to find a crazy kid who’s running around out in the cold.”

“Frank,” pleaded the mayor, “we need you here.  Can I count on you?”

At eight o’clock the next morning Frank Lynch, newly deputized, sat in the front seat of the town’s only police cruiser—an aging Ford Crown Victoria—trying to explain his strategy for finding Hunter Morgan.  Captain Tom Wozniak, 28 years old and a former security guard at the Wal
-Mart in Port Jervis, tuned the radio and fiddled impatiently with his keys.  “Do you know something I don’t know?” Wozniak demanded.  “Because if you do, tell it to me now so I can do my job.”

“The mayor thought I might have something to contribute,” Lynch said evenly, “because I was here the last time.  You know, when the boy’s mother died.”

“His mother?  They have her down as a suicide.  Did I miss something?”

“Tom, you weren’t here then, so you actually missed the whole thing.”  Lynch showed Wozniak his jagged smile.  “Relax.  I’m here to help.”

It took another half hour of diplomacy before Lynch could make Wozniak grasp who was in charge of the investigation.  Once that was out of the way, they were able to concentrate on Lynch’s search plan.  Initially it would cover a radius of five miles from the center of town, through terrain that was hilly and wooded and still sparsely populated.  Wozniak and his two assistants had already covered the obvious places, the secluded spots along the creek and the railroad tracks where they’d taken girls or gone to drink as teenagers.  Of course Hunter wouldn’t have known about any of those places, but Wozniak thought they were worth a try.  Some of the local fire departments and rescue squads were sending men to aid in the search, and the Morgan family—you could hardly tell them no, with their kind of money—had brought in a bunch of do-gooder organizations that only got in the way.  What they failed to appreciate, Wozniak told Lynch, was that the kid was dangerous.  He killed a defenseless old woman and God only knows what he would do if he was cornered.  “Yeah,” Lynch agreed, “maybe he’ll string up the rescue team with the nylon cords on their pajamas.”

Lynch opened the door and hoisted himself out of the cruiser, remembering the years of back pain he’d endured driving around in that car.
  “Listen,” he said, leaning down to talk to Wozniak through the window, “let’s get this organized as soon as we can.  We can use the civilians if we give them radios and tell them to keep their distance if they spot the target.  Does that make sense?”

“Sure.”

“And Wozniak, when you get a chance, there’s something else I’d like you to do.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s this stranger been hanging around town for the past month or two.  Maybe you’ve seen him.  Late thirties, moustache, high forehead, dark hair longish in the back.” 

“Drives a Be
amer?”

“That’s the one.”

“Yeah,” Wozniak smiled, “I’ve seen that guy hanging around.”

“He goes by the name of Dubin.  No one seems to know him or what he’s doing here.”

“I’ve seen him.”

“I’d like you to check him out.  Find out who he is and where he came from and what he’s been doing here.”

“You want me to pick him up?”

“No.”  Lynch was quick to wave that idea aside.  “Not yet.  Let’s start by calling
New York
magazine to find out why it’s taking him so long to write his article.”

*   *   *

At seven o’clock Miss Whipple locked the library door and walked the six blocks to her home, a tidy bungalow at the edge of town surrounded by gnarled trees and an impenetrable thicket of shrubbery.  At the end of a long day she was grateful for her sensible shoes and her excellent eyesight, especially now that daylight savings time had ended.  There were still enough leaves on the trees—the oaks in particular clung to their leaves well into November—that on a cloudy night like this the sidewalk seemed to be lost in shadows.  Her little house, all but invisible in the gathering darkness, called out to her with the sound of a porch screen banging in the wind.  She needed to ask the neighbor boy to take down those screens and replace them with the storm windows, to trim the shrubs and rake up all these leaves that were rustling under her feet.  She was fond of this neighborhood with its overgrown, desolate atmosphere—it reminded her of something out of the Gothic Romance section.  But even with sensible shoes it was hard to climb the steps without slipping on those leaves.

Once in the house Miss Whipple turned on all the lights and stoked the TV up to a volume that drowned out the wind whistling outside.  She had no pets—they were a nuisance—and surprisingly few books, other than those she brought home from the library.  On a typical night she would heat up a frozen dinner in the microwave, watch a couple of her favorite shows on TV, and read herself to sleep with a book checked out from the True Crime section.  But on that particular night—it was the night after Mrs. Paterson’s death—she had no appetite for frozen fish sticks and even less of one for True Crime.  She sat in the upholstered wing chair she’d inherited from her mother many years before, gripping her remote control as if she could use it to click reality on and off like one of her TV shows.  Her conscience interrogated her more insistently than any police officer.  Was she responsible for what had happened to Mrs. Paterson?  Could she have done something to prevent it?  And now what about Nicole?  What had possessed her to give that letter to Nicole? 

She clicked the mute button but the scenarios running through her head filled in the silence.  Then she turned the sound back on and sat in the wing chair as if waiting for something to happen.  Would there be a knock on the door? she wondered.  A plea for help?  Or something more violent and irresistible?  With the TV so loud, and that screen banging, would she be able to hear it?

Anything could happen, she’d told Nicole.  Anything.

*   *   *

“I’m to blame for this!  I’m the one who’s to blame!”

Nicole sat in front of me sobbing and digging her fingernails into her red hair as if she wanted to tear it out.  She looked terrible—pasty and pale and sagging like a corpse—from not having slept the past two nights.  I wasn’t in the best of shape myself.   It seemed like an eternity, but it had only been three days since Hunter disappeared.  Mrs. Paterson’s autopsy had told a gruesome but unsurprising tale: head battered from behind with a blunt object, enough to knock her out and possibly to kill her; then she had been choked and hung from a light fixture with the nylon belt of her bathrobe.  In this last detail there was a resemblance that was sickening in its specificity: Mrs. Paterson had ended her life mimicking Hunter’s mother’s suicide of seven years before.  Why? we all asked ourselves.  Why had a young man who had never exhibited any violent propensities suddenly been driven to this terrible recapitulation?  And who was responsible?  On that score, there was more than enough blame to go around and it was going around like the flu.  Avery Morgan blamed Dr. Palmer, Dr. Palmer blamed me, and Nicole—who had the least of anyone to do with it—blamed herself.

She sat in my office berating herself because she hadn’t been able to prevent me from allowing Peter Bartolli to conduct the second past-life regression, which in her mind had led to the tragedy.  I’d told her about that terrible night when Dr. Palmer surprised us in the middle of Hunter’s hypnotic trance and suddenly pulled him back from wherever he had traveled, furiously expelling Bartolli and Olympia from the Institute and removing Hunter from my care.  “Don’t you see?” Nicole demanded.  “It’s just what I told you would happen. Your obsession with Olympia was completely predictable and so was its outcome.  That’s how the first act ends.”

“The first act?”  She seemed to think we were still talking about
The Tales of Hoffmann
.

“Olympia is shattered by the two men claiming to be her father, while her lover stands by helplessly and realizes that she was never anything but a soulless automaton.  That’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?”

I swallowed uncomfortably and took a deep breath.  “We’re talking about real life, not an opera.  And we’re not here to talk about Olympia.”

“We’re talking about you.  Olympia’s irrelevant at this point.”

Nicole was making it difficult for me to help her, by focusing on my life instead of her own.  She needed to be supported and humored even in her most bizarre notions, including her fantasies about me, but I had let her go too far in that direction and now she had become impossible to deal with.  And the shock of the murder had pushed her illness into dangerous territory.

“Now it’s Julietta you’ve become obsessed with, isn’t it?” she
said.

“Julietta?  The receptionist? That’s ridiculous.”

“You need to understand how dangerous this can be for both of you.”

“Nicole, that’s enough!  We can’t sit here discussing my obsession with the receptionist—which by the way I don’t have.  Let’s try to concentrate on your illness and what we can do about it.”

She was crying again.  “We have to find Hunter.  We have to find him before they catch him and hurt him.”

I was relieved when Nicole finally left my office that afternoon.  Frankly I had enough on my mind without having to humor someone who couldn’t tell the difference between real life and an opera.  Things had been getting strange lately, but not quite as strange as an opera, where the characters might as well be living in a madhouse.  Perhaps that was what Nicole was trying to tell me—after all, I was living in a madhouse.  Don’t the patients always start to think of their physician as one of the inmates?  In fact I was trying to get my life back to some semblance of normality, which was not an easy task.  Glad as I was to be rid of Olympia, I dreaded spending the long nights without her.  Sometimes I would awaken not knowing who or where I was, and I’d make it all the way to the bathroom—where I’d finally see my face in the mirror—with the conviction that I was someone else.  An identity disorder, Dr. Neuberger had called it, and until then I thought I’d left it behind me.  The police officer in charge of the search for Hunter had been calling and leaving messages on an hourly basis; he wanted to ask
me about Hunter’s course of treatment, medications, habits, and so forth.  I would have been perfectly willing to accommodate him but I was under strict orders from Dr. Palmer not to talk to anyone.  It was almost as if I were the murderer and Dr. Palmer was afraid I was going to incriminate myself.

*   *   *

Nicole’s house loomed over the narrow street like a black hole swallowing the few stars that penetrated the clouded night sky.  From where he sat in his car across the street, Dubin could just make out the jagged roofline of gables and chimneys and the untrimmed cypress trees that sheltered the old house from the wind and concealed its decay.  The lights had gone out long ago but Dubin stayed behind, watching, listening, wondering whether Nicole was asleep in her garret or watching him from one of the mullioned windows.  Every now and then he would ease out of the car to prowl through the shadows closer to the house, listening for movement near the darkened side entrance.  Once he tried the door and found it unlocked, slipping inside and up the stairs to the third floor.  It was quiet there, deserted—no sign of Hunter Morgan or any other madman or intruder.  Just himself and the mortal silence of people dreaming behind closed doors.  A cat ran down the stairs and out the door.  Dubin clicked the latch behind him as he went out.

Back into the shadows.  Encircling cypresses, evergreens that looked full and black even in the darkness, invisible tentacles with thorns reaching out to snag him as he passed.  He moved carefully but not furtively.  Out of the corner of his eye he saw something move.  He turned quickly, ready to pounce or run, he didn’t know which.
A man lurched in front of him.

“Hold it!” the man said.

A flashlight shined into Dubin’s eyes, then quickly turned upward, revealing the front of the man’s torso and the undersurfaces of his face.  Dubin saw a tall, slightly lopsided figure with thinning gray hair and a politician’s smile.  It was Frank Lynch, the retired cop he’d last seen cleaning bluefish at the Jersey shore.

“Remember me?” Lynch asked.

“Sure.  You’re Frank Lynch.  My name’s Dubin.”