burial service. I know how much you dislike churches. I don’t think
it would be a smart idea to contact the police. They would probably
mock you, which I suspect your conceit would have difficulty
handling. And it would likely enrage me more, and, right now, you
must be a little uncertain as to how unstable I actually am. I
might respond erratically, in any number of quite evil ways.
But of one thing of which you can be absolutely certain: My anger
knows no limits.
The letter was signed in all-capital letters:
RUMPLESTILTSKIN
Ricky Starks sat back hard in his chair, as if the fury emanating from the words on the page in front of him had been able to strike him in the face like a fist. He pushed himself to his feet, walked over to the window and cracked it open, allowing the city sounds to burst into the quiet of the small room, carried by an unexpected late July breeze that promised an evening thunderstorm might be tracking the city. He breathed in, looking for something in the air to give him a sense of relief from the heat that had overcome him. He could hear the high-pitched caterwaul of a police siren a few blocks distant, and the steady cacophony of car horns that is like white noise in Manhattan. He took two or three deep breaths, then pulled the window closed, shutting away all the outside sounds of normal urban life.
He turned back to the letter.
I am in trouble, he thought. But how much, he was initially unsure.
He realized that he was being deeply threatened, but the parameters of that threat were still unclear. A significant part of him insisted he ignore the document on the desktop. Simply refuse to play what didn’t sound like much of a game. He snorted once, allowing this thought to flourish. All his training and experience suggested that doing nothing was the most reasonable course of action. After all, often the analyst finds that maintaining silence and a failure to respond to the most provocative and outrageous behavior by a patient is the cleverest way to get to the psychological truth of those actions. He stood up and walked around the desk twice, like a dog sniffing at an unusual smell.
On the second pass, he stopped and stared down at the page of words again.
He shook his head. That won’t work, he realized. For a moment he had a shot of admiration for the writer’s sophistication. Ricky understood he would probably have greeted the “I’m going to kill you” threat with a detachment closing on boredom. After all, he had lived long, and quite well, he thought, so threatening to kill a man in his middle years didn’t really amount to much. But that wasn’t what he was facing. The threat was more oblique. Someone else was slated to suffer if he did nothing. Someone innocent, and in all likelihood, someone young, because the young are far more vulnerable.
Ricky swallowed hard. I would blame myself and I would live out my remaining time in true agony.
Of that, the writer was absolutely correct.
Or else kill myself. He could taste a sudden bitterness on his tongue. Suicide would be the antithesis of everything he’d stood for, his entire life. He suspected the person who signed his name Rumplestiltskin knew that.
He felt abruptly as if he’d been placed on trial.
Again he began to pace around his office, assessing the letter. A great voice within him wanted to be dismissive, to shrug the entire message off, to anoint it an exaggeration and a fantasy without any basis in reality but found that he was unable to. Ricky berated himself: Just because something makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t mean you should ignore it.
But he didn’t really have a good idea how to respond. He stopped pacing and returned to his seat. Madness, he thought. But madness with a distinctly clever touch, because it will cause me to join in the madness.
“I should call the police,” he said out loud. Then he stopped. And say what? Dial 911 and tell some dull and unimaginative desk sergeant that he’d received a threatening letter? And listen to the man tell him So what? As best as he could tell, no law had been broken. Unless suggesting that someone kill themselves was a violation of some sort. Extortion? What sort of homicide could it be? he wondered. The idea crossed his mind to call an attorney, but then he understood that the situation posed by Rumplestiltskin’s letter wasn’t legal. He had been approached on the playing field that he knew. The game suggested was one of intuitiveness, and psychology; it was about emotions and fears. He shook his head and told himself: I can play in that arena.
“What do you know already?” he spoke to himself in the empty room.
Someone knows my routine. Knows how I let patients into my office. Knows when I break for lunch. What I do on the weekends. Was also clever enough to ferret out a list of relatives. That took some ingenuity.
Knows my birthday.
He breathed in sharply, again. I have been studied.
I did not know it, but someone has been watching me. Measuring me. Someone has devoted considerable time and effort to creating this game and not left me much time for countermoves.
His tongue remained dry and his lips parched. He was suddenly very thirsty, but unwilling to leave the sanctity of his office for the kitchen and a glass of water.
“What did I do to make someone hate me so?” he asked.
This question was like a quick punch in the stomach. Ricky knew he enjoyed the arrogance of many caregivers, thinking that he had delivered good to his small corner of the world through understanding and acceptance of one’s existence. The idea that he’d created some monstrous infection of hatred in someone somewhere was extremely unsettling.
“Who are you?” he demanded of the letter. He immediately started to race through the catalog of patients, stretching back over decades, but, just as swiftly, stopped. He understood he might have to do this eventually, but he would need to be systematic, disciplined, dogged, and he wasn’t ready to take that step yet.
Ricky didn’t think of himself as very qualified to be his own policeman. But then he shook his head, realizing that, in a unique way, that was untrue. For years he’d been a sort of detective. The difference was truly the nature of the crimes he’d investigated and the techniques he’d used. Buttressed slightly by this thought, Ricky Starks sat back down at his desk, reached into the top right-hand drawer and removed an old, leather-bound address book so frayed around the edges that it was held together by a rubber band. For starters, he told himself, we can find the relative who has been contacted by this person. It must be some former patient, he told himself, one who cut his analysis short and plunged into depression. One who has harbored a near-psychotic fixation for a number of years. He guessed that with a little bit of luck and perhaps a nudge or two in the right direction from whichever of his relatives had been contacted, he would be able to identify the disgruntled ex-patient. He tried to tell himself, empathetically, that the letter writer—Rumplestiltskin—was really reaching out to him for help. Then, almost as quickly, he discarded this wishy-washy thought. Holding the address book in his hand, Ricky thought about the fairy tale character whose name the letter writer had signed. Cruel, he told himself. A magical gnome with a black heart that isn’t outfoxed, but loses his contest through sheer bad luck. This observation did not make him feel any better.
The letter seemed to glow on the desktop in front of him.
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.
Chapter Two
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 dangerou
s? 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.”
Analyst Page 2