by Avery Corman
“I was wondering at one point about making it first person.”
“You’d lose that distance. It’s the right voice, otherwise Veronica Delaney is too much in the narrative.”
“That’s where I ended up.”
“Right. So the pages are great. Now, what you do? From my standpoint, if you decide not to go ahead with it, it will absolutely not matter to me. I have no vested interest. None. I brought you and Antoine together, if it worked out, fine, if it doesn’t, fine.”
“Really?”
“Really. He’s a big boy. He’s in business. This wouldn’t be the first book that didn’t happen for him. And don’t factor me into it. This is about you, what’s best for you. And if at this time, with this tension in your life, and your therapy—the thing about therapy, sometimes it brings out dormant feelings that are better left alone, but that’s another discussion—if the book’s not right for you, don’t do the book.”
“Thank you.”
“Having said that, my personal view is you’ve got a marvelous project going and it would be something of a loss if you didn’t go on with it. I don’t see this as the wrong book for you. I see you as the right person for, admittedly, not an easy book. But walk away, Antoine and I will still be pals, and so will we.”
“Okay!”
“Enough about your book, how about my book?” he said lightly.
“How goes it?”
“This cult seems to have gotten softer over the years, where they’re more about their community than their ideology. Not much so far that indicates any ritual abuse in their current history. I’m not sure yet of the past.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“I am. Mainly write it in New York. We should look into some subscription series, music, theater, do the town.”
He was especially tender with her in bed, gently caressing her as though he understood she needed, in her emotional stress, to be held, and that is why he was there, it was what she needed, until another need came to the fore.
He left early in the morning for the shuttle back to Washington, en route to Maryland. Essentially, he had given her permission to terminate the project and yet he was exceedingly complimentary of the work she had done thus far. She made her decision. With the help of therapy, and willpower, the kind of willpower she had shown in being on her own, in choosing to be a freelancer in the first place, she was going ahead with the book. She would stare down the demons.
She sent Richard an e-mail:
Going ahead with the book. Seem to be possessed by the need to finish. Thanks for the support in whatever I would have done.
Later in the day she received an answer from him:
Sounds good. I certainly would have supported your ending it. But now the world is going to have a terrific book from you. Back in about a week. Can’t wait to see you.
He was away again, predictably, but she felt he had made a strongly supportive gesture by coming to New York. Eventually, he would be working there and they might indeed look into some traditional subscription series together, she speculated—theater, the Philharmonic. Autumn in New York.
She called Jenna Hawkins to say she was proceeding, the agent businesslike on the matter. Hawkins was not in the psychology business and didn’t explore the emotional ramifications with Ronnie, principally concerned with stop, go. And it was a go.
The decision was not accepted as smoothly by Nancy, who was back from a weekend visiting her family in Connecticut.
“I’m sticking with the book.”
“Why?”
“Because it could be something substantial, maybe even a breakthrough for me.”
“You’ve broken through. Editors know who you are. You were getting work.”
“I mean in book publishing.”
“Ronnie, this book is giving you nightmares.”
“Not the book per se, the nightmares are from a deeper place, apparently.”
“You have a major therapist telling you to drop it because the book makes everything worse.”
“I’m not a quitter. And it’s clear to me, nothing I’m going through started with this book.”
“Except it’s where you are now. Blacking out. And those drawings. It’s Spook-o-rama around here. This is what happens when Richard shows up. You’re going ahead with a book you shouldn’t be writing.”
“He was very even about it, nonjudgmental. Basically said if I wanted to drop it, it was fine with him, no vested interest.”
“That’s all he said?”
“By and large. If the book worked out, fine. If it didn’t, fine. I did show him some pages.”
“And he loved them, I’ll bet.”
“He did.”
“But that didn’t matter to him. If it worked out, fine. If it didn’t, fine.”
“Exactly.”
“Only he let you know he loved them. I’m beginning to see it the way Bob does. This was very manipulative because you end up doing the book a really smart therapist says you should get out of your life. And by the way, it accrues to his buddy’s benefit.”
“I can’t believe that’s his motivation.”
“Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s worse. Maybe it’s what Bob said, that he wants his women messed up.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“So he rushed into town to aid a damsel in distress. Let me guess. Did he rush out again?”
“He’s doing some research.”
“In town, out of town, here, gone. He is dangling you like a puppet on a string. And now you’re going ahead with a book that’s bad for you. Really neat that he dropped in. This guy is the boyfriend from hell.”
Martha Kaufman sat at the dining room table with her husband of thirty-five years, Elliot Kaufman, an orthopedist in his early sixties. Ronnie had informed Martha during her most recent session about continuing with the book, the therapist offering a last argument against doing it, which Ronnie rejected. Martha gave her husband background on Ronnie and the reasons she recommended Ronnie withdraw from the project.
“It’s like watching the proverbial train wreck about to happen,” Kaufman told him.
“I don’t know what you can do. If she wants to go ahead—”
“She’s sassy. One of those sassy young women today and that’s wonderful. Imagine going into a satanic cult and doing an article about it. And she’s being sassy by wanting to continue with this.”
“She has some protection. She’s seeing you.”
“If she keeps seeing me. She probably thinks I crossed a line. For all her sass, she’s very vulnerable, no family, a couple of nice friends, which is good, and someone she’s having an affair with, and that may not be so good. He wrote a book on Satan and is probably doing one on satanic ritual abuse, as if she didn’t have enough Satan references in her life. Apparently, he’s very good-looking, worldly, but it seems he read her first pages, liked them, and the next I hear from her, she’s going forward. Doesn’t make me a particular fan of his.”
“Possibly she’ll be able to manage and it will work out.”
“It will eat her up.”
“Martha, that’s very theatrical.”
“Her dreams, the drawings, they’re too intense. It’s already eating her up.”
13
“AS YOU WANDER ON through life, brother, whatever be your goal. Keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole.”
A Daily News writer invoked the old legend from the wall of the long-departed Mayflower Coffee Shop on Park Avenue to enliven the reportage on a story already percolating in the tabloids. Felipe Ruiz, part owner of Fresh Donuts on Amsterdam Avenue and 114th Street, attempted to murder his partner, Angel Santos, by driving by and shooting him, hoping to make it look like a drive-by of drug dealers. He dropped a packet of cocaine in the doorway, waited in his car for his partner to appear for work, and drove past and fired at him. The bullets missed, shattering the window. The less-than-cool would-be killer, in appraising his handiwork, hit a bus stop p
ole, was knocked senseless, and found with the gun at his side.
THE DONUT MAN WHO COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT was the Story in the Daily News, while DONUT WAR! was featured in the New York Post.
For the detectives of the Twenty-sixth Precinct it was not the “coffee dunk” case the Daily News referred to—Felipe Ruiz would not confess, insisting the drive-by shooters drove past him and tossed the gun through the window of his car. He claimed the tossed gun caused him to crash. His fingerprints on the gun were the result, he said, of his picking it up out of curiosity.
Investigative work by the precinct detectives revealed a longstanding feud between the partners. The two had engaged in a punching match outside the store. Bystanders broke it up before the police were summoned. That episode was called in to the West Side News, a community weekly, and an item ran in the paper, according to information given to one of the detectives by the newsstand dealer next door to the shop.
Co-owners, Angel Santos and Felipe Ruiz, battled it out in front of their Fresh Donuts shop on Amsterdam Avenue and 114th Street yesterday. Punches were thrown. No arrests were made. What was the dispute, too much glaze?
The item was located by a detective going through back copies. He intended to confront Ruiz with the widely known antipathy between the men when Rourke leaned in to say that Ruiz’s lawyer was talking about a deal. Gomez picked up the newspaper and was browsing through it when a photo caught his attention. The caption: “Winners of the Zip-Ade 5 K Run in Central Park, Bob Fox on the men’s side and Veronica Delaney for the women.”
“Look at this, will you?”
“So?” Santini said.
“You don’t win a race by being a weak little thing.”
“Please.”
“Humor me.”
Ronnie was at her computer working and answered the intercom to hear the unwanted voice of Detective Gomez.
“We need a few minutes of your time, ma’am.”
“I’m working.”
“Well, we’re working, too.”
They all stood in the small foyer to the apartment.
“We wanted to show you this,” Gomez said, and offered the page of the newspaper. “How many women would you say were in the race?”
“I have no idea.”
“Fifty-one, the company told us. Fifty-one women and you came in first.”
“Good for me.”
“How many races have you won?” Santini asked.
“One.”
“This was the first time you ever won a race?”
“Yes.”
“And how have you done in other races?” Gomez said.
“I haven’t run other races.”
Her palms began to sweat and she felt a trickling of sweat in her armpits. They were dead-on one of her unconscious moments and the strain showed in her face as she bit her lip.
“You all right, ma’am? Talking about this make you uncomfortable?” Gomez said with an edge.
“Detectives coming to my apartment in the middle of my workday makes me uncomfortable.”
“No doubt. So I’m going to go back to my Ron Guidry-Mariano Rivera deal, that you can’t tell someone’s physical capabilities just by looking at them. Looking at your frame I wouldn’t guess you could run faster than fifty-one women.”
“Would you say that about Joan Benoit? Won the marathon in Los Angeles, a person same size as me.”
“I’d say she was a strong woman, despite her physical frame. And you must be too, despite your physical frame, a strong woman.”
“I am strong. I freelance. Takes some strength,” she said with an edge of her own.
“I don’t mean that kind of strong; running fast over a distance strong, lung capacity strong, athletic strong.”
“Detective, I didn’t kill Randall Cummings. I may have killed him in print, and that, retrospectively, may not have been the greatest thing I ever did in my life, but I didn’t kill him. Now I’ve seen enough crime shows to know, if you want to book me for his murder, then book me. And I’ll get a lawyer and we’ll go from there. But this is becoming police harassment.”
“You can’t live a life with a secret, Ms. Delaney,” he said, as the detectives turned to go. “Eventually it comes out.”
“No doubt.”
She closed the door after them and pressed her forehead against it, seeing herself again bewildered at the finish line with no memory of having run the race.
She forced herself to get back to work, writing material on some of the important exorcists through the years. She printed hard copies of her last pages, made herself a cup of tea, and then returned to her desk to read the pages she had just printed. On the top sheet in the upper right-hand corner was a drawing, elegantly rendered: Satan, the humanlike face, grinning mischievously, an expression she read as saying, Look where I showed up, I peek out of corners, you can’t get away from me. She felt nauseous and tried to throw up. It was dry heaving. She went back to look at the page, perhaps she imagined it, but the drawing was still there and she couldn’t remember drawing it.
“Hello.”
“Uncle Jim, it’s Veronica.”
“Veronica!”
“How are you feeling, Uncle Jim?”
“Not good. My knees, both of them ache me day and night. Doctor says I could use surgery and my back isn’t good either. Ever see that movie, Seabiscuit? Pain is what you get being around horses.”
“Uncle Jim, I want you to try to remember me when I was a little girl. Say, around ten. Can you remember me when I was around ten?”
“Pretty little girl. Little Veronica. Didn’t see much of you or my brother. I was up here in Saratoga.”
“There were Christmas dinners. Easters. Did you ever see me draw, Uncle Jim, pictures?”
“Draw? Nothing comes to mind.”
“Nothing?”
“I’m trying to put my mind there. Little Veronica around ten …”
“Drawing.”
“Nope, can’t remember.”
“Never saw me with paper and pens or crayons?”
“Nope.”
“If you happen to remember, will you call me? Do you have my number?”
“I’ve got it, drawer in the kitchen. How’s school?”
“I’m out of school, Uncle Jim. I graduated and I’m working in New York as a writer.”
“Did I know that?”
“You did, Uncle Jim.”
“Fancy that, a writer. I ought to write a book. I could tell some stories.”
“You will call me if you remember something?”
“Sure will. Good luck at school.”
She looked at the drawing. She accepted that a person unconsciously moves the Ouija board, it is not done by an outside force, so she must have done this unconsciously from some dark place within her. She wondered if the woman in the psychiatric facility who had the same dream of Satan had ever done a drawing like this. She was unnerved by the possibility that an institutionalized woman might have done so, but she needed to know.
Ronnie went to the Web site and sent a message to CR.
I’m the person who shared a Satan dream with you. Something I must ask you. Imperative you respond. Please.
She kept checking her e-mail the rest of the afternoon and then a message from CR came up on her computer screen.
CR: What is so imperative?
Ronnie: I’ve been making drawings of Satan and demons. I don’t remember drawing them and then they’re there on pieces of paper. Doodles but elegantly done, scary images. Did you ever do anything like that?
CR: Oh, sure.
Nonchalant, “oh, sure.” Ronnie’s hands began to shake as she typed.
Ronnie: Drawings of Satan, like he appeared in the dream?
CR: Yes. I couldn’t draw as far as I knew and out of nowhere I started to, like professional drawings. Very frightening.
Ronnie: And then did they stop?
CR: After a few years.
Ronnie couldn’t imagine how you
could live with something like that for a few years.
Ronnie: What caused it to stop?
CR: Just did. Everything strange stopped.
Ronnie: What else was strange?
CR: All the things that happened. The telepathy. I knew things about people I couldn’t possibly know.
The exchange with Bob replayed in her mind, her saying his father traveled so much and rewarded his patient mother by leaving her, which Bob insisted she couldn’t have known.
Ronnie: What else, please?
CR: Going into a daze. I would go into a daze and do what I never could do before. Like the swimming. I only swam sprints in college. Suddenly I could swim the English Channel.
Ronnie drew a deep breath in anxiety—it was like winning a road race over fifty-one women.
Ronnie: You swam the English Channel? When?
CR: 1982. Just before they brought me here. These are all the signs. It happens when he gets into you.
Ronnie: Who gets into you?
CR: Satan. When he possesses you.
Ronnie: You’re saying you were possessed by Satan?
CR: Yes. And then they brought me here. Have to go.
Work was out of the question for her. She wanted to get to the New York Times microfilm collection immediately. She went to the Forty-second Street Library and looked in the index for 1982. Under sports she found a listing for a Connecticut woman swimming the English Channel and on the microfilm located an item in the sports section:
Claire Reilly, 22, of Bridgeport, a Connecticut woman with no long-distance swimming experience, swam the English Channel yesterday. Reilly formerly competed for the University of Connecticut in 100-meter races. She covered the twenty-one miles of open sea from Dover to Calais in twelve hours and ten minutes. “I just got it in my head to swim the English Channel and I hired a boatsman to track me,” she said afterward. “I was able to keep going even though it was the longest distance I ever swam. It was like I was in a trance the whole way.”
Ronnie was desperate to get to Kaufman for her session the next day, deeply unsettled by the knowledge that she had the same manifestations as a woman who had been in a psychiatric hospital for over twenty years. She presented Kaufman with printouts of the conversation with the woman and a copy of the New York Times article from 1982, along with the latest drawing. As Kaufman examined the material, Ronnie said, “I had the same dream as this woman. Did the same drawings. Had the same kind of out-of-the-blue physical act. We both had a telepathic experience. And she ended up in Empire State!”