"I’ll pass that along," promised Paul. Some of it, he would.
Tengstedt changed the subject abruptly. "You know, we would have got her back somehow after she ran off to Tahoe, except for one thing."
"What’s that?"
"I strongly disapproved of her marriage to Anthony Patterson. I felt it would be disastrous for Michelle to link her life to his. But I have to say this one thing about Patterson: He really loved Michelle. I could see it when they were together. I never dreamed he would strike her, harm her. He seemed to idolize her. We prayed for her happiness."
"Of course," Paul said. "I understand that you are Christian Scientists."
"Science of Mind, yes. My wife and I both were practitioners, you know, spiritual healers. No longer."
"You left the Church?"
"No. We left that particular congregation when we came back to the States from the Philippines in 1982, of course. But we are still followers."
"Why did you leave?"
There was a pause. "We had some irreconcilable religious conflicts," he said finally. "And we found ourselves at odds with our neighbors. It seemed better to leave."
"Mmm-hmmm," Paul said.
"I joined the Science of Mind Church at a very young age. My grandparents had been members of the Boston congregation, the Mother Church, for years, and they were close to Mrs. Eddy. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church. Barbara joined the Church when we married."
"Tell me a little about the Church," Paul said.
"There are thousands of congregations all over the world. I’ll give you the book, Science of Mind, if you’d like. Basically we’re Protestants, one of the few Protestant churches that was born in America. We believe the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ was the central event in history, and we believe that heaven is located right here on earth, if we can develop the attitude of the Christ mind."
"Heaven right here on earth ..."
"You see, the material world is nothing but a hypnotic construct. Belief in a world of matter is what causes sin and suffering. So we believe that disease is merely a delusion of the material world, and that prayer and understanding through Bible study can rectify any problem."
Tengstedt said this as though he had said it many times before, with complete conviction. Paul listened hard for the point of this earnest religious statement.
"So I was a practitioner, healer. A doctor of the spirit, you might say. I ministered to the nationals as well as to people on base in need of help."
"Tell me about Michelle’s life in the Philippines," Paul said.
"I don’t know why you’re so interested."
"For us to understand Michelle, we need a few details about her life growing up," Paul said.
Mrs. Tengstedt appeared in the doorway, a ghost in a white apron. She carried a tray toward them and set it on a table nearby. "Please help yourselves to some refreshment. You’ve had a long drive," she said to Paul. As she stood up, she looked directly at her husband. "Michelle has been our greatest blessing, also our greatest heartache," she said, moving toward the kitchen.
"Will Michelle be told about the things we discuss today?" Tengstedt said.
"It depends. I believe you know Michelle cannot remember the first ten years of her life. She has forgotten some events of the night of April twenty-sixth as well. Nina feels that if she were helped to remember her early childhood it might help her remember the more recent events."
"She’s on the wrong track. She’s not going to take her to some quack psychiatrist, is she?"
"I don’t know if Nina plans on bringing in a doctor." Tengstedt had jumped up from his recliner as if he had been bitten by a Filipino snake. "Take it easy, Mr. Tengstedt. Ms. Reilly would never do anything that would hurt your daughter."
"You tell that lawyer for me that Michelle’s first ten years are not something we’re prepared to discuss at this time. Events from long ago could not possibly influence the legal problems she has."
"I hope you’ll reconsider your decision, Mr. Tengstedt. We think it might have some relevance."
Tengstedt said nothing.
"Do you mind talking about Michelle’s life in Fresno?" asked Paul, moving on to what he hoped would be less explosive territory.
"I put in my time and I retired. My family was here in Fresno, so we moved back," Tengstedt said shortly.
"Go on," Paul said.
"After we moved here, things steadily went downhill for her. She got wild, got secretive, did poorly in school, though she tested out as very bright," he said, a sad note of pride in his voice. "And then she ran off with this backstreet thug, Patterson. Who’s been killed." He fingered a picture on the mantelpiece of a young woman in a yellow dress and hat, haloed with golden hair, a flat Easter backdrop behind her. "It broke my wife’s heart to see her throwing herself away like that."
"I was so afraid that something like this might happen someday." Barbara Tengstedt was standing in the entryway between the kitchen and living room, smoothing her hands over her apron. Her husband walked over to her, put his arm around her shoulder. They were about the same height. The effect was almost comically bland, Mr. and Mrs. America in their living room, but it was a tableau, with a frozen, waiting quality. It seemed to Paul as though, by touching her, Carl Tengstedt had silenced his wife.
"Not knowing is causing her pain right now," Paul said. "Look, whatever it is, we can deal with it together. Why not just blurt it out?"
"You don’t know how to take no for an answer, do you, Mr. van Wagoner? But you will have to accept my judgment on this."
"Okay, let’s talk about April twenty-sixth. A Thursday night. Just for completeness’ sake, I need to know where you and your wife were," Paul said.
Tengstedt clapped his hand to his forehead. "Now he’s accusing me of murdering that slime!" he cried disbelievingly. "Mr. van Wagoner, perhaps you ought to leave our house."
Paul was about out of patience himself. "Did you or your wife go to Tahoe on April twenty-sixth, Mr. Tengstedt?"
"No! How dare you!"
"Where were you?"
"Right here in this house all evening. Barbara!" He commanded her, squeezing her shoulder. "Tell Mr. van Wagoner here that we were in the house all that night. He’s accusing me of something!"
"Keep your shirt on, Mr. Tengstedt," Paul said.
"We were right here," Barbara Tengstedt said in a tremulous voice. She twisted away from her husband and sank into her chair.
"Sure you didn’t go for a swim in the lake that night? From what I hear, you like swimming."
"Out! Out!" Carl Tengstedt roared.
11
NINA DROPPED THE kids at school on the way to work that same Monday morning. Troy and Bobby played out their boyish identity struggles together in the backseat, arguing over who kicked a soccer ball farther; who ran faster; who multiplied quicker; who bullied meaner; and Brianna, in the front seat, took advantage of her final bit of privacy to squeeze in a little thumb sucking. Before Bobby left the car, he offered up his cheek for a kiss. "I like it here, Mom. But I’m getting kind of tired of living at Uncle Matt’s. When are we going to have our own place?"
Good question, Nina thought, but she had no answer. Not yet,
By nine o’clock, Nina stared through a purple haze out her office picture window at Mt. Tallac, raising her pencil to a sheet of paper with nine dots in three rows.
She began running it around the dots. Matt had said you could touch the pencil to paper once and make four straight connected lines join all the dots. Bobby had solved the puzzle immediately, but Nina couldn’t, and it bothered her. Her pencil scraped satisfyingly as she moved it around. It looked so simple!
She knew two ways to approach any puzzle. You could be methodical and linear, eliminating false leads one by one until only the solution remained. The police investigated this way, and Paul would investigate this way based on his training.
Start at the beginning, logically. She put the dot puzzle aside and made
a list for Paul to work on. Check on the photos of Misty’s bruises that she had promised to provide. Talk to Rich Eich and look the boat over. Interview Tom Clarke. Interview Stephen Rossmoor, the manager at Prize’s with whom Misty had had a fling. Look at the physical evidence listed in the police reports. Talk to the ex-wife, Sharon Otis, and Peter La Russa, Anthony’s friend.
And then there were those footprints in the snow, heading toward the back of her house, that Misty had noticed and assumed were Anthony’s. Sic Paul on that.
She set Paul’s list down, and started making her own. Take care of the legal questions. Research search- and arrest-warrant law, and make sure the police had made no mistakes on the night Misty was arrested. Find every hole in the police, autopsy, and lab reports, and every conflicting inference. Research the crimes of murder and manslaughter, looking for ways to reduce the charge.
So much for the logical method. The second method was her own little secret. She turned the lists over and picked up the piece of paper with those infernal dots again. She stopped analyzing and stared at the piece of paper for a long time. She almost had it....
Now, quickly, still staring at the dots, she turned her mind to the case, coming up on it sideways, like a crab. There it was, blurry and huge, the center, the question that burned, flamed, demanded to be answered, made every other question inconsequential: What had happened after Misty left her husband and went into the kitchen? Nina drew a quick sketch of the living room, the door to the kitchen, the man lying on the couch, the glass from the broken table, as Misty had described these things. A bright fire in the fireplace. A maroon robe. Two glasses, and a bottle of Yukon Jack. Dirty dishes. Footsteps in the snow outside, and a polar bear statue.
Misty could not remember. Why? Theory One: Misty remembered, and she was lying. Theory Two: Misty had been tired and gone to sleep, as she said. Theory Three: Misty was repressing the memory. Theory Four? Nina couldn’t think of anything else.
Theory One: In spite of her own conviction that her client spoke the truth, to be thorough Nina had hammered at Misty a few times. Her story remained the same; not one detail changed. Theory Two: Misty was completely immune to normal human feeling and had indeed fallen asleep in the heat of one of the most violent scenes in her marriage. Theory Three. Nina drew a circle around it and the thought came to her again, as it had visited her persistently all through the weekend: Misty suppressed memories.
She would do the legal work later. Today was Theory Three day. She would talk to Dr. Greenspan. Later she would call Bruno again.
Drawing the nine dots again, she failed with her pencil one last time, then set the puzzle aside on her desk, hung her heavy briefcase off her shoulder, and left the office.
Dr. Frederick Greenspan’s office was a rustic but well-kept bungalow a block from Boulder Hospital, off Winnemucca. In a quaint reception room furnished with lace curtains and a Baldwin piano, several older people lounged on chairs. Others could be seen through the interior door, lying on narrow cots with tubes snaking out of their arms. The receptionist, unusually tall for a woman and incongruously elegant in yellow and black, offered Nina a cup of herbal tea and said the doctor would be right with her.
The people waiting did not seem impatient. Talking and whispering, reading and shifting in their chairs, they seemed at home, friendly with each other. Nina, who hated waiting, picked up the holistic healing brochures from the spindly table beside her. The first, a short four-color extravaganza on hypnotherapy, promised that clients could regain lost memories, heal emotional problems by learning to relax, end addictive behaviors, and intensify the therapeutic relationship through this miraculous "new" treatment.
The second pamphlet covered chelation therapy. The article, written with a folksy touch by a satisfied patient, extolled its virtues. The writer had suffered a heart attack and after chelation therapy was "now regularly cleansed of free radicals and will not need the surgeon’s knife in the future." Chemicals suffused into the bloodstream at a steady rate for a few hours each week vacuumed up free radicals and unsafe ions, the implication being that aging could be slowed. That explained those people with tubes. But what about those chemicals? And what about the good ions? How did they avoid the vacuum? No details here, even in the fine print at the bottom of the last page.
The doctor came out within five minutes and shook Nina’s outstretched hand, then showed her to his office. In his fifties, tall, gaunt, and angular, with a heavy brow, sunken eyes, jutting cheekbones and prominent ears, he carried himself with the mien of Moses about to hoist his staff and command the Red Sea. "I’m sorry to keep you waiting," he said, sitting down at his desk and taking off thick glasses, while Nina revised her impression. The voice still spoke with a Brooklyn accent, and the brown polyester slacks with patterned anklets reduced him to unmiraculous. The office was too warm; a thin sheen of sweat blanketed his forehead.
Nina sank into a deep-blue easy chair, the only other chair in the office. Obviously clients sat here, eyes directed toward certificates displayed on the opposite wall. She read in a moment that Dr. Greenspan had completed a course in hypnosis at J.F.K. University and a course in Zen practice at Shasta Monastery. He had earned his M.D. at Temple University in New York twenty-five years before.
Misty’s file sat on the desk. "Thank you for seeing me today. I’m hoping you’ll give me total access to my client’s file."
"You haven’t really told me what this is all about," Dr. Greenspan said, spreading his hand on the file. "But I have my patient’s authorization to give you a copy of her file and discuss whatever you wish." Up close, he smelled like soap. His cheeks had been scraped clean in what must be a painful daily process.
"The file is a start. I am sending it to another doctor at UC in the city who may serve as a consulting psychiatrist in this case."
"Does he intend to try hypnosis?"
"Yes. Don’t worry, Bruno’s very good."
"I hope he will be very careful."
"He has written extensively in the field. An expert, you could say."
The receptionist came in without knocking. "Frederick, I’m leaving now. Now, remember, your file clerk says she’ll cover the desk for the rest of the afternoon. Keep an eye on her." Turning toward Nina, she smiled. "She’s new, and needs extra help. Our nurse, Rhea, is going to be busy with patients." Nina had seen the file clerk in the front office, a plain, soft-spoken girl with gray teeth, who looked remarkably similar to the nurse, except for the nurse’s bifocals. Walking around Dr. Greenspan’s desk, the woman planted a kiss on his forehead, then curled her lips into a grin, saying, "Don’t worry. We’re married."
"Oh, good," responded Nina, trying not to look at her watch.
"Good-bye, Ericka. I won’t be late." Dr. Greenspan led his wife to the door. "I won’t be a minute," he said, closing his office door behind him. Through the wood, Nina heard murmuring that went on for several minutes. "Instructions for the nurse and so forth," he muttered when he came back. "Now, where were we?" He looked pleased to see the file still on his desk, apparently untouched. "Misty Patterson. How is she?"
"Her arrest came as a terrible shock to her. I’m not sure they knew whether to take her to jail or a mental hospital. She’s worked hard to pull herself together and is trying to adjust."
"It’s disturbing to hear this. To my knowledge, she’s not violent or insane," the doctor said. "She shouldn’t be locked up."
"We hope to have her out soon."
"I haven’t seen her since right after her husband disappeared, in a brief emergency session. She did call me this Friday, explaining that she could use some help and asked if she could see me. I told her I’d talk to you today about it."
"You mean, you’d continue to treat her?" Nina paused and thought. "Well, first of all, Doctor, Misty’s medical records and your testimony are probably relevant to a number of issues in this case. If there is a trial, as you’re still her treating physician, I expect you’ll be called as a witness to discuss her state
of mind. Anything Misty said at this point might be discoverable. It’s too risky."
"That may be so, looking at the situation purely from a legal point of view, Ms. Reilly, but I am concerned about Misty’s health. To suddenly terminate the treatment she is receiving would be damaging. She needs therapy, you know. With due care we could maintain the progress we have already made, and keep her stress at a manageable level. I believe we could keep away from any discussion of the events leading up to this charge."
"Maybe," Nina said. "But I have to call this one. I think we have to put her treatment on hold."
The doctor shrugged, a little angrily. "I suppose I’ll have to defer to your judgment, then."
"Tell me about your work with her."
He picked up the file and began flipping. "She started coming in right before Christmas. Here’s her paperwork." Nina read rapidly through the form. Misty’s handwriting was round and large. She dotted her i’s with circles.
Under "Why did you come today?" she had written, "I am so sad." The statement stood out in stark contrast to the girlish handwriting.
"We had only ten hypnosis sessions. It sounds like many, I know, but she had a long way to go. I believe she initially consulted me because she wanted to know why she felt compelled to be unfaithful to her husband. Later she indicated some interest in her forgotten childhood, which she had come to realize played a role in the person she had become. It took three sessions for us to understand that the two problems are connected."
"You mean, some kind of shock in her childhood caused her to suppress those memories and led her to the reaction-formation of sleeping around?" Nina said. The words felt mealy in her mouth.
They must have sounded thick to him too. He frowned. "I suppose you could put it that way."
"What was this childhood trauma?"
"We hadn’t gotten to that point."
Deeply disappointed, Nina forged on. "You have no ideas? After all this work with her?"
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