Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  As he pulled into the empty drive of the Dreaded Vinyl Cube, he frowned. Despite his detour, Sharon’s car was not yet in the drive, and when he entered the house, it was deserted. His shout brought back nothing but an echo.

  That’s strange, he thought. Sharon had been acting a little oddly the last couple of nights. She had jumped whenever the phone rang, she’d stared into space during dinner and forgotten to tease him when he described his day at the conference. And now she was at least two hours later than she usually was.

  Inside, he checked the phone for messages, of which there were none, and headed upstairs to strip off his wet clothes. He was just beginning to worry in earnest when he heard a car door slam, and Tony’s excited chatter filled the air. He reached the front door in time to see Sharon mounting the front steps with Tony and his bag in one hand, and in the other, towed along like a reluctant barge, was the biggest, ugliest dog he’d ever seen.

  Nine

  Sharon’s day had crawled. Many times she had found her mind wandering from the mundane duties of her job to the unanswered questions of the Fraser case. Both yesterday’s and today’s lunch hour had come and gone without a call from Leslie Black, and as the afternoon ticked by, Sharon felt her hope fading. The clock on the wall above the nursing station read three thirty-five when she paused in her charting to rest her chin wearily in her hands. Leslie was not going to call. She must have lost the fight with her conscience.

  It was probably just as well, Sharon thought. She didn’t really need to be in the middle of this investigation, trapped by issues of confidentiality and forced to choose between loyalties in what was already a murky and personally repugnant case. Mike could build his own case without her help. He’d been doing it long before he met her and without the moral confusion she felt. The facts alone mattered to him, and once he’d laid them bare, then others could begin the task of sorting out right from wrong.

  She pushed the case out of her thoughts with relief and picked up her pen to continue her charts. At that moment the phone rang and when she answered it, her heart sank.

  “Sharon? It’s Leslie. Can we meet when you get off?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking…”

  “So have I.” Leslie Black’s voice was unusually furtive. “Meet me in the library, back table, four o’clock.”

  It seemed ridiculously cloak and dagger, even for a potential violation of the privacy laws, but as Sharon made her way through the maze of corridors which connected one wing of the hospital to another, she felt excited in spite of herself. She arrived at the library less than one minute late and was surprised to see Leslie rise from the table at the back the instant she walked in. Leslie drifted slowly along the shelves towards the front, her face resolutely averted. As she drew near, Sharon opened her mouth to speak but was stopped by Leslie’s very faint but unmistakable shake of the head.

  “Go to the table at the back. Slowly!” Leslie whispered, and then she was out the door and gone.

  Sharon suppressed a laugh, for Mata Hari tactics did not quite suit the shabby and virtually deserted atmosphere of the Rideau Psychiatric staff library. Life among the phobics must be rubbing off on you, Leslie, she thought, as she made her way towards the table Leslie had left.

  The table top was cluttered with journals and open books, which Sharon perused curiously, noting that Leslie had been reading up on treatment efficacy studies for social phobia. For a few minutes, Sharon puzzled over the significance of Leslie’s asking her to read these, before noticing the blank manila envelope sitting on the chair beside her. She picked it up and out slid the thick, well-worn file of Matthew Robertson Fraser.

  Bingo. Without a qualm, surrounded by the camouflage of a half-dozen scientific journals, Sharon opened the file and began to read.

  Matthew Fraser’s connection to the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital spanned ten years and began innocuously enough with an outpatient appointment with a psychologist. His initial complaints had been anxiety, insomnia, inability to concentrate and occasional crying spells. Entirely understandable, the psychologist had postulated, given that the patient had recently come under investigation for sexual abuse and had been relieved of his teaching duties. The psychologist had seen him five times, provided supportive counselling, and suggested a mild anxiolytic which the psychiatric resident on staff had duly prescribed.

  Some months later, Fraser was brought into Emergency by his father in a distraught state, unable to eat or sleep and contemplating suicide. At that time he was under the care of his family doctor, who had prescribed both stronger anti-anxiety medication and a sleeping pill. The emergency room psychiatrist in his wisdom had taken Fraser off both medications, prescribed the then new and highly touted Prozac, and sent him on his way. Prozac, Sharon thought drily, why not? Guaranteed to make you happy and forget all your troubles. Forget that you’re on trial for abuse, forget that your career is irredeemably lost and forget that your friends have deserted you.

  Curiously, there was no record of his having been seen in forensic psychiatry prior to the trial, which suggested that either the Crown had not been certain of the wisdom of a psychiatric evaluation, or they had thought they had a strong enough case without it.

  Sharon flipped through the file in search of the Sexual Behaviours Assessment Leslie said he’d undergone three years earlier, but there was no trace of it. She found notes on Fraser’s outpatient admission two years ago for severe anxiety and multiple phobias, at which time the consulting psychiatrist had prescribed an anti-depressant, and Emmerson-Jones had designed a treatment plan to desensitize Fraser gradually to the situations he feared. Sharon knew these were both sound treatments for his condition, but they left her wondering where in this list of symptoms and remedies was the man himself. Where was the recognition that above all, he needed the chance simply to learn to cope with what he’d been through.

  Almost against her will, she felt a tweak of sympathy. In a way, the tweak was comforting. She’d always considered herself a compassionate person who tried to see the salvageable in everyone who came into the ward, no matter how bizarre or unsympathetic their life story. But pedophiles were predators, and she always felt an unexpectedly hard kernel of condemnation in her core whenever she thought of them. It was comforting to know that even for one of them—for the human part of him—she could still feel sad.

  She was about to close the file when she noticed a wad of folded papers shoved in among the therapy notes from long ago. There was nothing odd about this. In the hands of careless or harried clinicians, files often became jumbled and out of order. When she unfolded it, she discovered it was the sexual behaviour report she’d been looking for. Dated three years earlier, it detailed the results of Dr. Pelham’s interviews, the psychological tests and the results of the laboratory studies of sexual arousal. The conclusions were as Leslie Black described. All three assessments suggested a man who experienced normal physical attraction to adult females and who displayed no sexual reaction either to children or to coercive sex. In short, not a typical profile of a sexual deviant at all.

  Beyond that, however, the report said a good deal more. Matt Fraser was described as an anxious, depressed and overwhelmed man who could see no escape from the pressures of a hostile world. Although attracted to women, his sexual experience even before the accusation, which had occurred when he was twenty-six, had been minimal and rather unsuccessful. He’d had recurring problems with self-doubt and impotence and had a genuine fear of aggressive women. In general, the laboratory studies proclaimed in brutally clinical language that his erectile responses, although normal in type, had been weaker than most men his age, from which Dr. Pelham had concluded chronic depression. This was confirmed by the fact that when informed that his sexual interests were normal, the patient had wept. Pelham had prescribed a course of yet another anti-depressant.

  The assessment revealed another detail which Sharon found intriguing. Although she knew Fraser had a clear agenda for taking the tests, and that al
l his answers in both the interview and the questionnaires were probably slanted to make himself look good, a skilled clinician could usually catch a glimpse beneath the surface to the patient’s deeper core. This psychologist had found Matt to be an intelligent but sensitive and hyper-vigilant man whose development might have been marred by an early trauma that left him forever anxious and on guard. The patient himself could articulate nothing, but the psychologist suspected some form of abuse.

  Pure speculation right up there with reading tea leaves, Sharon thought, as she closed the file and slipped it back into the manila envelope. Still, it was intriguing. Although far from inevitable, habits of abuse could be passed on from one generation to the next, the victimized child becoming himself the abuser. Had Fraser been a victim, and if so, what had it done to him?

  The library was nearly deserted, and Sharon glanced at her watch. It was nearly five o’clock, too late to track down Dr. Pelham, even if she could think of credible grounds on which to ask him to discuss the case with her. But on the shelves around her was a wealth of information about every kind of mental health question, and perhaps a little bedtime reading to expand her knowledge of sexual abuse was in order.

  Fifteen minutes later, she walked out the glass entrance doors of the Administration Building with two books tucked under her arm. Rain lashed at her umbrella, and she hurried towards the parking lot with her head bowed and her thoughts already focussed far ahead on Tony and dinner. Suddenly, a figure jumped out of the bushes directly into her path and thrust out a bony hand to clutch her arm.

  “Sharon Levy! Thank God!”

  Instinctively, Sharon recoiled and knocked away the hand. A second figure emerged from the shadows, this one massive, dark and snarling.

  “Modo! Down!” the woman cried, and Sharon recovered enough to take in the sight before her. A giant black and brown dog had settled on the wet ground and rested its massive head on its paws, but its eyes watched her every move. The thin, angular woman had retreated back into the cover of the trees, both hands clinging to a huge umbrella. Her eyes skittered over the parking lot nervously.

  “Thank God, you’re still here!” she exclaimed. “I was afraid I’d missed you.”

  Sharon suppressed the anger that had followed her fright, and she searched her memory warily. The hair colour was different and the face, even white with fear, was fuller. If Mike hadn’t described her the other day, Sharon would never have remembered her. Excitement and curiosity tempered anger, and she forced a soothing smile.

  “Janice Tanner, how are you?”

  “I’m okay.” Janice’s words tumbled out in a rush. “No, I’m not. I think someone’s following me!”

  “Oh?” Sharon probed dubiously.

  Janice forced a nervous laugh. “I know, you’ve heard that before. I used to see stalkers behind every tree. But this time it’s different. I’ve been getting better. Going to a group, taking the bus by myself, even taking walks in the park in the evening. But the last few days, there’s been someone watching me.”

  “Do you know them?”

  Janice shook her head vigorously. “What do they look like?”

  “I don’t know, that’s the thing. I never get a clear glimpse. First, on Monday there was a face outside my bedroom window. Then two days ago, someone tried to pick open my lock. But...” She gave another nervous laugh. “I have four locks, so they couldn’t get in. Then yesterday, when I went to group, I’m sure someone followed me here. I heard footsteps behind me, and every time I stopped, they did.”

  “But you didn’t see anyone?”

  “They were real! I wanted to go to the police station to tell that husband of yours, but I’m—” She gulped. “I’m getting panic attacks again. I got as far as the bus stop, and I froze. Then I thought of you. And if I brought Modo, who could hurt me? I thought you could tell your husband they’re after me too.”

  “Who?”

  “The people who kidnapped Matt Fraser! Your husband is still investigating that, isn’t he?”

  Sharon hesitated. She should feign total ignorance and stay as far away as possible from Janice’s irrational fears, while at the same time protecting the confidentiality of Mike’s case. But the safe route had rarely been her first instinct.

  “Yes, he’s still investigating.”

  “He thinks Matt’s—” Janice tightened her lips as if to prevent the dreaded word from escaping. “Dead, doesn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. But why would the same people be after you? What’s the connection?”

  Janice backed further into the shadows. “I don’t know! Maybe they think I know something.”

  “Do you?”

  “No! But they don’t know that, right? I’m not safe, I can’t go home because they know where I live—”

  “Janice—” Sharon laid a calming hand on the woman’s arm to draw her out of the bushes. The dog raised its head sharply. “You’re okay now. The dog’s here, I’m here. Let’s go sit over there out of the rain and examine this calmly.”

  She led Janice to a bench by the entrance to the hospital, and when Janice had settled with her back to the brick wall and the dog pressed against her feet, some colour returned to her ashen face.

  “You’re right, I’m safe. I don’t know what they want. I wish I did, then maybe I could shed some light on Matt’s disappearance. But he told me so little, just that he was afraid of something from his past.”

  Sharon remembered the psychologist’s report about a longburied trauma. “Did he ever talk about his past? About any bad experiences or abuse in his childhood?”

  Janice seemed to mull the idea over doubtfully. “A lot of us had bad experiences, and we’d talk about them sometimes. One man had been a relief worker in Bosnia, and another woman had her parents blown up in Tel Aviv. I...I was raped eight years ago. But Matt didn’t talk, he just listened. Why, do you think his childhood is important?”

  “It might be.” Distant thunder rumbled on the horizon, and a fork of lightning split the western sky. The dog pressed itself closer against them, whining softly. Sharon felt its damp heat soak through her pant leg, and she leaned forward to shift the weight. Modo’s anxious brown eyes followed her every move.

  “So Matt never let anything slip?”

  “Well, we knew there’d been trouble with the law—some sort of false accusation—and that some people never accepted his innocence. Besides that...” Janice took a deep breath, and Sharon could see her struggling to focus on her memories through her fear. “I think he had an unhappy childhood. The few times we talked, I had the impression it was lonely, and that pretty well everyone had let him down in one way or another.”

  “Everyone? Did he mention anyone specific? Parents? Other family?”

  “His mother, for sure. I remember him talking about Modo and how Modo was always there, through thick and thin. When he’d come home from group, she’d be there wagging her tail to say hi. And he said his biggest memory as a kid was coming home from school, and there’d be no one there. Just an empty house. And how scared that made him feel.” Thunder cracked overhead, causing both Janice and the dog to jump. Janice clutched Sharon’s arm, and her colour fled again. “I don’t think I can go home. I can’t—” She began to hyperventilate.

  “Maybe you could stay with a friend for a few days.”

  “Sharon, I—I don’t really have any friends.”

  “Not even a distant relative?”

  Janice shook her head. Her eyes were glazing, and she began to sway. Rapidly, Sharon weighed her options. She didn’t like to feed the woman’s panic, but at this rate Janice was headed for an emergency admission to the Rideau Psychiatric. Sharon rose to her feet briskly.

  “Okay, I know an excellent woman’s shelter. You’re not exactly fleeing a violent husband, but in a pinch, why not? They’re friends of mine there.”

  “What about Modo? Would they take her?” Sharon stopped in mid stride. The dog had risen at the sound of its name and timidly nuzzled Sh
aron’s hand. Its nose felt like damp velvet.

  “They don’t allow pets, but how about the Humane Society? They can find a foster home for her.”

  Janice shook her head. “Matt got her from there when they were just about to put her down. They have far too many puppies, and a big dog like this, with her traumatic history, they’d likely have to put her down.” Janice knelt down and pressed her face to Modo’s. The dog licked her eagerly. “She really is a sweet, wonderful dog, and the fact that she still trusts humans is a miracle.”

  Then Janice looked up at Sharon, and the question in her eyes was as plain as day.

  * * *

  Green stared at Sharon in astonishment, convinced he must have heard wrong. While they both juggled busy work schedules, babysitters, temper tantrums and the running of the household, his wife had volunteered to take this hundred-pound monstrosity under their wing. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  They were all standing on the driveway in the drizzling rain. Sharon shifted Tony on her hip and held out the end of the leash impatiently. “It’s only temporary, while Janice figures out what to do with her. Now either take the leash or take your son. Help a little!”

  Gingerly, he took the end of the leash, but he didn’t move. “We can’t take a dog! We don’t know anything about dogs!”

  “We’ll learn. We didn’t know anything about babies either,” she replied as she mounted the front steps towards the door. At the last minute she flashed him a grin. “It could be worse. I could have brought Janice home too.”