Twisted: The Collected Stories (11 page)

The room was as bleak as he’d expected.

Face white, eyes shrunken, Patsy lay in bed, looking out the window. She glanced at Harry, didn’t seem to recognize him.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Who are you?” She frowned.

He didn’t answer her question either. “You’re not looking too bad, Patsy.”

“I think I know you. Yes, you’re . . . Wait, are you a ghost?”

“No, I’m not a ghost.” Harry set his attaché case
on the table. Her eyes slipped to the case as he opened it.

“I can’t stay long, Patsy. I’m closing my practice. There’s a lot to take care of. But I wanted to bring you a few things.”

“Things?” she asked, sounding like a child. “For me? Like Christmas. Like my birthday.”

“Uh-hum.” Harry rummaged in the case. “Here’s the first thing.” He took out a photocopy. “It’s an article in the
Journal of Psychoses.
I found it the night after the session when you first told me about the ghosts. You should read it.”

“I can’t read,” she said. “I don’t know how.” She gave a crazy laugh. “I’m afraid of the food here. I think there are spies around. They’re going to put things in the food. Disgusting things. And poison. Or broken glass.” Another cackle.

Harry set the article on the bed next to her. He walked to the window. No trees here. No birds. Just gray, downtown Manhattan.

He said, glancing back at her, “It’s all about ghosts. The article.”

Her eyes narrowed and then fear consumed her face. “Ghosts,” she whispered. “Are there ghosts here?”

Harry laughed hard. “See, Patsy, ghosts were the first clue. After you mentioned them in that session—claiming that your husband was driving you crazy—I thought something didn’t sound quite right. So I went home and started to research your case.”

She gazed at him silently.

“That article’s about the importance of diagnosis
in mental health cases. See, sometimes it works to somebody’s advantage to
appear
to be mentally unstable—so they can avoid responsibility. Say, soldiers who don’t want to fight. People faking insurance claims. People who’ve committed crimes.” He turned back. “Or who’re
about
to commit a crime.”

“I’m afraid of ghosts,” Patsy said, her voice rising. “I’m afraid of ghosts. I don’t want any ghosts here! I’m afraid of—”

Harry continued like a lecturing professor. “And ghosts are one of the classic hallucinations that sane people use to try to convince other people that they’re insane.”

Patsy closed her mouth.

“Fascinating article,” Harry continued, nodding toward it. “See, ghosts and spirits
seem
like the products of delusional minds. But in fact they’re complex metaphysical concepts that someone who’s really insane wouldn’t understand at all. No, true psychotics believe that the actual
person
is there speaking to them. They think that Napoleon or Hitler or Marilyn Monroe is really in the room with them. You wouldn’t have claimed to’ve heard your father’s
ghost.
You would actually have heard
him.
”

Harry enjoyed the utterly shocked expression on his patient’s face. He said, “Then a few weeks ago you admitted that maybe the voices were in your head. A true psychotic would never admit that. They’d swear they were completely sane.” He paced slowly. “There were some other things too. You must’ve read somewhere that sloppy physical appearance is a sign of mental illness. Your clothes were torn and dirty, you’d forget to do straps . . . but
your makeup was always perfect—even on the night the police called me over to your apartment. In genuine mental health cases makeup is the first thing to go. Patients just smear their faces with it. Has to do with issues of masking their identity—if you’re interested.

“Oh, and remember? You asked if a ghost could come to one of our sessions? That was very funny. But the psychiatric literature defines humor as ironic juxtaposition of concepts based on common experience. Of course that’s contrary to the mental processes of psychotics.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Patsy spat out.

“That crazy people don’t make jokes,” he summarized. “That cinched it for me that you were sane as could be.” Harry looked through the attaché case once more. “Next . . .” He looked up, smiling. “After I read that article and decided you were faking your diagnosis—and listening to what your subconscious was telling me about your marriage—I figured you were using me for some reason having to do with your husband. So I hired a private eye.”

“Jesus Christ, you did what?”

“Here’s his report.” He dropped the folder on the bed. “It says basically that your husband
was
having an affair and was forging checks on your main investment account. You knew about his mistress and the money and you’d talked to a lawyer about divorcing him. But Peter knew that
you
were having an affair too—with your friend Sally’s husband. Peter used that to blackmail you into not divorcing him.”

Patsy stared at him, frozen.

He nodded at the report. “Oh, you may as well
look at it. Pretending you can’t read? Doesn’t fly. Reading has nothing to do with psychotic behavior: it’s a developmental and IQ issue.”

She opened the report, read through it then tossed it aside disgustedly. “Son of a bitch.”

Harry said, “You wanted to kill Peter and you wanted me to establish that you were insane—for your defense. You’d go into a private hospital. There’d be a mandatory rehearing in a year and, bang, you’d pass the tests and be released.”

She shook her head. “But you knew my goal was to kill Peter—and you let me do it! Hell, you
encouraged
me to do it.”

“And when I saw Peter I encouraged
him
to antagonize you. . . . It was time to move things along. I was getting tired of our sessions.” Then Harry’s face darkened with genuine regret. “I never thought you’d actually kill him, just assault him. But, hey, what can I say? Psychiatry’s an inexact science.”

“But why didn’t you go to the police?” she said, whispering, close to panic.

“Ah, that has to do with the third thing I brought for you.”

I can help you and you can help me. . . .

He lifted an envelope out of his briefcase. He handed it to her.

“What is this?”

“My bill.”

She opened it. Took out the sheet of paper.

At the top was written
For Services Rendered.
And below that:
$10 million.

“Are you crazy?” Patsy gasped.

Given the present location and context of their
conversation, Harry had to laugh at her choice of words. “Peter was nice enough to tell me exactly what you were worth. I’m leaving you a million . . . which you’ll probably need to pay that slick lawyer of yours. He looks expensive. Now, I’ll need cash or a certified check before I testify at your trial. Otherwise I’ll have to share with the court my honest diagnosis about your condition.”

“You’re blackmailing me!”

“I guess I am.”

“Why?”

“Because with this money I can afford to do some good. And help people who really need helping.” He nodded at the bill. “I’d write that check pretty soon—they have the death penalty in New York now. Oh, and by the way, I’d lose that bit about the food being poisoned. Around here, you make a stink about meals, they’ll just put you on a tube.” He picked up his attaché case.

“Wait,” she begged. “Don’t leave! Let’s talk about this!”

“Sorry.” Harry nodded at a wall clock. “I see our time is up.”

H
e’d found her already.

Oh, no, she thought. Lord, no . . .

Eyes filling with tears of despair, wracked with nausea, the young woman sagged against the window frame as she stared through a crack in the blinds.

The battered Ford pickup—as gray as the turbulent Atlantic Ocean a few hundred yards up the road—eased to a stop in front of her house in this pretty neighborhood of Crowell, Massachusetts, north of Boston. This was the very truck she’d come to dread, the truck that regularly careened through her dreams, sometimes with its tires on fire, sometimes shooting blood from its tailpipe, sometimes piloted by an invisible driver bent on tearing her heart from her chest.

Oh, no . . .

The engine shut off and tapped as it cooled. The dusk light was failing and the interior of the
pickup was dark but she knew the occupant was staring at her. In her mind she could see his features as clearly as if he were standing ten feet away in broad August sunlight. Kari Swanson knew he’d have that faint smile of impatience on his face, that he’d be tugging an earlobe marred with two piercings long ago infected and closed up, leaving an ugly scar. She knew his breathing would be labored.

Her own breath in panicked gasps, hands trembling, Kari drew back from the window. Crawling to the front hallway, she tore open the drawer of a small table and took out the pistol. She looked outside again.

The driver didn’t approach the house. He simply played his all-too familiar game: sitting in the front seat of his old junker and staring at her.

He’d found her already. Just one week after she’d moved here! He’d followed her over two thousand miles. All the efforts to cover her tracks had been futile.

The brief peace she’d enjoyed was gone.

David Dale had found her.

Kari—born Catherine Kelley Swanson—was a sensible, pleasant-mannered twenty-eight-year-old, who’d been raised in the Midwest by a loving family. She was a natural-born student with a cum laude degree to her name and plans for a Ph.D. Her career until the move here—fashion modeling—had provided her with both a large investment account and a chance to work regularly in such
pampering locales as Paris, Cape Town, London, Rio, Bali and Bermuda. She drove a nice car, had always bought herself modest but comfortable houses and had provided her parents with a plump annuity.

A seemingly enviable life . . . and yet Kari Swanson had been forever plagued by a debilitating problem.

She was utterly beautiful.

She’d hit her full height—six feet—at seventeen and her weight hadn’t varied more than a pound or so off its present mark of 121. Her hair was a shimmery, natural golden (yes, yes, you could see it flying in slow motion on many a shampoo commercial) and her skin had a flawless translucent eggshell tone that often left makeup artists with little to do at photo shoots but dab on the currently in-vogue lipstick and eye shadow.

People, Details, W, Rolling Stone, Paris Match,
the London
Times
and
Entertainment Weekly
had all described Kari Swanson as the “most beautiful woman in the world” or some version of that title. And virtually
every
publication in the industrialized world had run a picture of her at one time or another, many of those photos appearing on the magazines’ covers.

That her spellbinding beauty could be a liability was a lesson she learned early. Young Cathy—she didn’t become “Kari” the supermodel until age twenty—longed for a normal teenhood but her appearance kept derailing that. She was drawn to the scholastic and artistic crowds in high school but they rejected her point-blank, assuming either that
she was a flighty airhead or was mocking the gawky students in those circles.

On the other hand, she was fiercely courted by the cliqueish in-crowd of cheerleaders and athletes, few of whom she could stand. To her embarrassment she was regularly elected queen of various school pageants and dances, even when she refused to compete for the titles.

The dating situation was even more impossible. Most of the nice, interesting boys froze like rabbits in front of her and didn’t have the courage to ask her out, assuming they’d be rejected. The jocks and studs relentlessly pursued her—though their motive, of course, was simply to be seen in public with the most beautiful girl in school or to bed her as a trophy lay (naturally none succeeded, but stinging rumors abounded; it seemed that the more adamant the rejection, the more the spurned boy bragged about his conquest).

Her four years at Stanford were virtually the same—modeling, schoolwork and hours of loneliness, interrupted by rare evenings and weekends with the few friends who didn’t care what she looked like (tellingly, her first lover—a man she was still friendly with—was blind).