Then he moved to a spot opposite the windows to the living room. The smell from the gasoline spread throughout the house mixed with the smell on his hands and clothes. He thought how alien all these angry scents were, clashing with the summer warmth and mixed honeysuckle and wildflowers, with just the mildest hint of the ocean salt, that permeated every breeze that slipped innocently across the trees. Ricky took a single deep breath, tried not to dwell on what he was doing, took careful aim with the pistol, cocked the hammer back, and then fired a single flare through the center window. The flare arced through the night, leaving a streak of energetic white light in the black air between where he stood and the house. The flare crashed through the window with a tinkling of shattered glass. He half expected an explosion, but instead heard a muffled thud, followed by an immediate crackle and glow. Within a few seconds he saw the first licks of fire dancing about the floor and beginning to spread through the living room.
Ricky turned and ran back to the Honda. By the time he slipped the car in gear, the entire downstairs was glowing with flame. As he headed down the driveway, he heard an explosion, as the flames hit the gas in the kitchen.
He decided not to look back, but accelerated into the deepening night.
Ricky drove carefully and steadily to a spot he had known for years called Hawthorne Beach. It was several miles down a narrow, lonely blacktop lane, removed from any development, other than a couple of old and darkened farmhouses not unlike his own. He switched off the lights as he eased past any house that might be occupied. There were several beaches in the Wellfleet area that would have suited his purposes, he thought, but this was the most isolated, and least likely to be the site of some late-night teenage party. There was a small parking lot at the beach entrance, usually operated by the Trustees of Reservations, the Massachusetts conservation association dedicated to preserving the wildest spots in the state’s landscape. The parking lot would only accommodate perhaps two dozen cars, and was usually filled by nine-thirty in the morning because it was a spectacular beach, a wide expanse of flat sand resting at the base of a fifty-foot bluff of blond sandy dirt encrusted with green sea grass thatches, with some of the strongest surf on the Cape. The combination was favored both by families who were moved by the view, and surfers who appreciated the waves and strong tidal pull, so that their sport was always mingled with a bit of danger. At the end of the parking lot, there was a warning sign: strong currents and dangerous undertow. do not swim without lifeguard being present. be alert for threatening conditions.
Ricky parked by the sign. He left the keys in the car. He placed the envelopes with the contributions on the dashboard and set the envelope with the letter addressed to the Wellfleet Police right in the center of the steering wheel.
Seizing the crutches, the backpack, running shoes, and change of clothes, he stepped away from the car. These he placed at the top of the bluff, a few feet away from a wooden barrier that marked the narrow path down to the sand, after removing the picture of his wife from the backpack’s outer pocket. This he placed in his pants pocket. He could hear the steady rhythmic crash of waves, and felt a bit of a southeasterly breeze on his face. He welcomed the noise, because it told him that the surf had picked up in the hours after sunset, and was slamming like a frustrated wrestler against the shoreline.
There was a full moon above, spreading wan light across the beach. It made his slippery, stumbling trip down the bluff to the water’s edge considerably easier.
In front of him, as he had predicted to himself, the surf was roaring like a drunken man, exploding as it hit the beach and sending sheets of white froth across the sand.
A small chill carried in on a breath of wind, striking him in the chest, making him hesitate, breathe in deeply.
Then Ricky removed every article of clothing he wore, including his underwear, and folded them into a neat pile, which he carefully placed on the sand well above the high-water mark the evening tide had left behind, where the first person to stand at the top of the bluff in the morning was sure to see them. He took the vial of pills that he’d acquired that morning at the pharmacy and emptied them into his hand, sticking the plastic container with the clothes. Nine thousand milligrams of Elavil, he thought. Taken all at once it would knock a person into unconsciousness within three to five minutes. The last thing he did was put the photograph of his wife near the top of the pile, weighed down by the edge of his shoe. He thought to himself, you did much for me while you were alive. Do this one thing more.
He raised his head and looked out at the immense expanse of black ocean before him. The stars dotted the sky above, as if it were their responsibility to mark the line of demarcation between the waves and the heavens.
It is, he told himself, a nice enough night to die.
Then, naked as the morning that was only hours away, he walked down slowly toward the fury of waves.
Part Two
THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS
Chapter Twenty-One
Two weeks after the night he died, Ricky sat on the edge of a lumpy bed that creaked whenever he shifted position, listening to the sound of distant traffic filter through the thin walls of the motel room. It mingled freely with the noise of a television set in an adjacent room tuned too loudly to a ball game. Ricky concentrated on the sound for a moment and guessed that the Red Sox were at Fenway, and the season was closing down which meant that they would be close, but not close enough. For a moment, he considered turning on the set in the corner of his room, but decided against it. They will lose, he told himself, and he did not want to experience any more loss, even the transitory one provided by the eternally frustrated baseball team. Instead, he turned to the window, staring out into the evening. He had not drawn the shades, and could see headlights slicing down the nearby interstate highway. There was a red neon sign by the driveway to the motel, which informed drivers that nightly, weekly, and monthly rates were available, as were kitchenettes such as the one he occupied, although why anyone would want to stay in that location for more than a single night eluded Ricky. Anyone except himself, he thought ruefully.
He rose from his seat and went into the small bathroom. He inspected his appearance in the mirror above the sink. The black dye that had marred his light hair was fading quickly, and Ricky was beginning to regain his normal appearance. He thought this slightly ironic because he knew that even if he once again looked as the man he once was, he would never actually be that person.
For two weeks, he had barely left the confines of the motel room. At first he’d been in a sort of self-induced shock, like a junkie undergoing a forced withdrawal, shivering, sweating, twisting in pain. Then, as this initial phase dissipated, it had been replaced by an overwhelming outrage, a blinding, white-hot fury that had caused Ricky to pace angrily around the tiny confines of the room, teeth gritted, his body almost contorted by rage. More than once he’d punched the walls in frustration. Once he’d picked up a glass in the bathroom and crushed it into shards in his hand, slicing himself in the process. He’d bent over the toilet, watching blood drip into the water in the bowl, half wishing that every drop within him would simply flow out. But the pain that gathered in the ravaged palm and fingers reminded him that he remained alive, and eventually led him into another stage, where all the fear, then all the rage finally subsided, like the winds settling down after a thunderstorm. This new stage seemed to Ricky to be cool, like the touch of polished metal on a winter morning.
In this stage, he began to plan.
His motel room was a shabby, decrepit place that catered to long-haul truckers, traveling salesmen, and the local teenagers needing a few private hours away from prying adult eyes. It was located on the outskirts of Durham, New Hampshire, a place that Ricky had selected at random because it was a college town, housing a fractious population thanks to the state university. He had thought the academic atmosphere ensured him access to the out-of-town newspapers he would need, and provide a transitory world that would help to hide him. This gue
ss on his part, as best as he could tell, had so far proven true.
At the end of his second week of death, he’d begun to make sorties out into the world. On the first few occasions, he’d limited himself to the distance his feet would carry him. He didn’t speak with anyone, avoided eye contact, stuck to abandoned streets and quiet neighborhoods, almost as if he half expected to be recognized, or worse, to hear the mocking tones of Virgil or Merlin float over his shoulder from behind his back. But his anonymity remained intact, and confidence grew within him. He’d rapidly expanded his horizon, finding a bus line and riding it throughout the small city, getting off at random locations, exploring the world he’d entered.
On one of these trips, he’d discovered a secondhand clothing store, which had provided him with an oddly well-fitted, cheap, and utilitarian blue blazer and some worn slacks and button-down shirts. He’d found a used leather satchel at a nearby consignment shop. He put away his eyeglasses in favor of contact lenses, purchased at a chain eyewear outlet. These few items, worn with a tie, gave him the appearance of someone on the edge of academia, respectable, but not important. He thought he blended in nicely, and he welcomed his invisibility.
On the kitchenette table to his side in the small room were copies of the Cape Cod Times and the New York Times for the days immediately following his death. The paper on the Cape had stripped the story across the bottom of their front page, with the headline: prominent physician an apparent suicide; landmark farmhouse destroyed in blaze. The reporter had managed to acquire most of the details that Ricky had provided, from the gasoline purchased that morning in newly acquired containers spread throughout the home, to the suicide note and the contributions to charities. He’d also managed to discover that there had been recent “allegations of impropriety” against Ricky, although the reporter neglected to convey the substance of the concoction invented by Rumplestiltskin and carried out so dramatically by Virgil. The article also mentioned his wife’s death three years earlier and suggested that Ricky had recently undergone “financial reversals” that also might have contributed to his entering a suicidal frame of mind. It was, Ricky thought, an excellent piece of writing, well researched and filled with persuasive details, just as he’d hoped. The New York Times’s obituary, which appeared a day later, had been discouragingly brief, with only a suggestion or two for the reasons behind his death. He had stared at it with a sense of irritation: a little angry and put out that the entirety of his life’s accomplishments seemed to be so successfully wrapped up in four paragraphs of clipped and opaque journalese. He thought that he had given more to the world, but then understood that perhaps he hadn’t, which made him pause for a moment or two. The obituary also pointed out that no memorial service was planned, which, Ricky realized, was a much more important consideration. He suspected that the lack of a service honoring his life reflected Rumplestiltskin and Virgil’s work with the sexual misconduct allegation. None of his colleagues in Manhattan wanted to taint themselves with attendance at some event that memorialized Ricky’s work and persona when so much of that had been abruptly called into question. He guessed that there were a great number of fellow analysts in the city who saw the news of his death in the paper and thought that it was exquisite proof of the truth to Rumplestiltskin’s creation and at the same time was a fortunate thing, for the profession was spared a moment of ugliness when the allegations had surfaced in the New York Times, as they inevitably would have. This thought created in Ricky a modest fury with the membership of his own profession, and for a moment or two he insisted to himself that he was well to be done with it.
He wondered whether up to the first day of his vacation he had been equally as blind.
Both newspaper stories stated that his death was apparently by drowning, and that Coast Guard units were searching Cape waters for Ricky’s body. The Cape Cod Times, though, to Ricky’s relief, quoted the local commander saying that body recovery was extremely unlikely, given the strong tides in the area of Hawthorne Beach.
When he reflected upon it, Ricky thought it was as good a death as he could come up with, on such short notice.
He hoped that all the clues of his own suicide had been collected, from the prescription for the overdose he’d appeared to have taken before walking into the waves, to his unforgettable and uncharacteristic rudeness to the teenager in the marine supply store. Enough, he told himself, to satisfy the local police, even without a body to autopsy. Enough, too, he hoped, to convince Rumplestiltskin that his plan for Ricky had been successful.
The oddity of reading about one’s own suicide created a turmoil within him that he was having trouble sorting through. The toil of the stress of his last fifteen days of life, from the moment Rumplestiltskin entered his life to the moment he’d walked down to the edge of the water, carefully leaving footprints in the newly scoured sand, had put Ricky through something that he thought no psychiatric text ever contemplated.
Fear, elation, confusion, relief—all sorts of contradictory emotions—had flooded him, almost from the first step, when, water licking at his toes, he’d thrown the handful of pills into the ocean, then turned and walked through the wash a hundred yards, distant enough so that the new set of footprints when he emerged from the cold water around his ankles would not be noticed by the police or anyone else inspecting the scene of his disappearance.
The hours that had followed seemed to Ricky, alone in the kitchenette, to be the stuff of memory nightmare, like those details of a dream that stick with one after waking, giving a sense of unsettled uneasiness to each daytime step. Ricky could see himself dressing on the bluff in the extra set of clothes, pulling on the running shoes in a frantic hurry to escape the beach without being spotted. He’d strapped the crutches to the backpack, then hefted it onto his shoulders. It was a six-mile run to the parking lot of the Lobster Shanty, and he’d known that he had to get there before dawn and before anyone else taking the six a.m. express to Boston arrived.
Ricky could still feel the sensation of wind burning in his lungs as he’d raced the distance. The world around was still night and filled with black air, and as his feet had pounded against the roadway, he’d thought that it was like running through what he imagined a coal mine to be like. A single set of eyes marking his presence might have destroyed the slender chance at life that he was seizing, and he had run with all that urgency driven into every step taken down the black macadam street.
The lot had been empty when he arrived, and he’d drifted into the deep shadows by the corner of the restaurant. It was there that he’d unstrapped the crutches from the backpack and slung them on his arms. Within a few moments, he’d heard a distant sound of sirens blaring. He took a small satisfaction in how long it had taken someone to notice his home burning. A few moments later, some cars began to drop people in the lot, to wait for the bus. It was a mingled group, mostly young people heading back to Boston jobs and a couple of middle-aged business types, who seemed put out by the need to ride the bus, despite the convenient quality it had. Ricky had hung back, to the rear, thinking that he was the only one of the people waiting on this damp, cool Cape morning bathed in the sweat of fear and exertion. When the bus arrived two minutes late, Ricky had crutched out into line to board. Two young men stood aside, letting him struggle up the steps, where he had handed the driver his ticket purchased the day before. Then he had sat in the back, thinking that even if Virgil or Merlin or anyone assigned by Rumplestiltskin to probe the suicide and who might have doubted the truth of his death thought to question any bus driver or passenger on that early morning trip, what they would remember was a man with dark hair and crutches, and not known that he had run to the waiting area.
There had been an hour delay before the bus to Durham. In that time he’d walked two blocks away from the South Street bus terminal, until he’d found a Dumpster outside an office building. He’d thrown the crutches into the Dumpster. Then he had returned to the station and boarded another bus.
Durham, he tho
ught, had one other advantage: He had never been there before, knew no one who’d ever lived there, and had absolutely no connection with the city whatsoever. What he did like were the New Hampshire license plates, with the state motto: Live Free or Die. This, he thought, was an appropriate sentiment for himself.
He wondered: Did I escape?
He thought so, but he wasn’t yet sure.
Ricky went to the window and again stared out into a darkness that was unfamiliar. There is much to do, he told himself. Still searching the nighttime beyond the motel room, Ricky could just make out his own reflection in the glass. Dr. Frederick Starks no longer exists, he told himself. Someone else does. He breathed in deeply, and understood that his first priority was to create a new identity for himself. Once that was accomplished, then he could find a more permanent home for the upcoming winter. He knew he would need a job to supplement the money he had left. He needed to cement his anonymity and reinforce his disappearance.
Ricky stared over at the table. He had kept the death certificate for Rumplestiltskin’s mother, the police report for the murder of her onetime lover, and the copy of the file from his months in the clinic at Columbia Presbyterian, where the woman had come to him for help and he’d failed to deliver it. He thought to himself that he had paid a large price for a single act of neglect.
That payment was made, and he couldn’t go back.
But, Ricky thought, his heart filled with a cold iron, now I, too, have a debt to collect.
I will find him, he insisted to himself. And then I will do to him what he did to me.
Ricky stood and walked over to the wall, where he flicked the switch for the lights, dropping the room into darkness. An occasional sweep of headlights from outside sliced across the walls. He lay down on the bed, which creaked in an unfriendly fashion beneath him.
Analyst Page 29