Delusion

by G. H. Ephron

  “Ooh, visitors!” one of them said.

  “My Louie was tall like that,” said another.

  “Young people today,” a third one said, sniffing. “Don’t they know it’s not polite to wear a hat indoors?”

  “Maybe he’s orthodox?” another suggested with a hopeful, upward inflection at the end.

  Nick swiped the baseball cap off his head and stuffed it into a back pocket.

  We went up to the second floor. Nick started down the hall to his mother’s room. “Hold your horses,” I told him. “You asked me to help. Now let me help.”

  He looked as if he were about to argue.

  “Let me explain what I’m going to do,” I said. “Last time I was here, your mother thought you were still a little boy, and she was waiting for you to come home.”

  “She does that all the time,” Nick said.

  “That’s typical of people with Alzheimer’s. Often, they don’t have access to recent memories, although their past remains readily accessible. As a result, they’re overly responsive to the environmental cues in the present that trigger those past memories.

  “I know that for your mother, milk and cookies bring back the anxiety of waiting for you to come home, but also the pleasure of having you return safely. I can use milk and cookies as a cue, use the promise of seeing Nicky home safe from school to put your mother in a receptive state of mind for going with you. In a sense, I’ll be lying to her. But we do it so often working with Alzheimer’s patients, there’s even a word for it. A therapeutic fiblet. A little lie that’s harmless and helpful at the same time. You need to become little Nicky and follow my cues. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he agreed, though he didn’t seem convinced.

  I found Dottie. She poured a cup of milk and gave it to me along with the plate of cookies on a little bed of napkins that she had ready. I asked her to keep anyone in a uniform out of the halls for the next half hour. She escorted Nick to the lounge to wait for me.

  Just like last time, I loosened my shirt collar and rolled up my sleeves so I’d look as unofficial as possible. Armed with the milk and cookies, I headed to Mrs. Babikian’s room.

  She was standing at the window. She wore a loose house dress, her pocketbook clutched to her chest. As I drew near, I could hear, “My mother was a little girl when the Turks came to her house. The soldiers’ eyes were empty.”

  It was the story she’d recited last time I was here, told in practically the same words. This was another piece of the past that Mrs. Babikian had stuck in her present along with the milk and cookies.

  I cleared my throat so I wouldn’t startle her. Her voice died and she looked at me. Her eyes widened in terror, and I could hear the beginning of a howl working its way out of her belly. I held out the milk and plate of cookies. “Where’s Nicky?” I asked.

  Fear vanished from her face. “Nicky?” She looked at me, her eyes bright. “I’m waiting for him to come home.” Her face broke into a broad smile. “Milk and cookies! Nicky loves his milk and cookies.”

  “Is he coming?”

  “I don’t know. He should be.” She turned back to the window.

  I joined her. “Is that him?” I asked.

  A couple was walking from the parking lot into the building.

  “Oh, look,” I said. “There he is. He just came into the building.”

  “Nicky. Nicky,” Mrs. Babikian keened, straining to see what wasn’t there.

  “He should be up here any minute,” I said. “Shall we bring him his milk and cookies?”

  I handed Mrs. Babikian the plate of cookies. Then I took her other arm. “He’s waiting for us,” I said, coaxing her out in the hall.

  Once I had her started, it was easy to guide her to the lounge, the promise of Nicky propelling her forward. Nick was sitting in a corner beside an artificial ficus plant. He stood. “Mom!” he said.

  “Nicky! You’re home!” She brought the cookies over and stood beside him, beaming. “How was school?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Fine, Mom. It’s always fine.”

  “Those boys? They give you trouble again?”

  “No trouble.”

  She pushed the plate of cookies at him. “Eat! You’re always so hungry when you get home.” Nick took a cookie and munched on it.

  I went back to Mrs. Babikian’s room and got the black, softsided suitcase that the staff had packed in preparation for our visit. When I got back to the lounge, it was Mrs. Babikian who was drinking the milk. She put down the cup. Nick took the napkin and gently dabbed at some that had dribbled down her chin. “Let’s go home, Mom.”

  Mrs. Babikian went happily along, out to the parking lot. She got into Nick’s car without a murmur.

  “You okay now?” I asked Nick.

  “Thanks,” he said. Gratitude. That was a first.

  When I got home, there was a note stuck to my door. It was my mother’s handwriting: “You have company. She’s with me.”

  Maybe Annie had discovered something else gone missing and didn’t want to be alone. Or maybe something more had happened. I knocked on my mother’s door. When she answered I pushed past her and into the living room. No one was there. I whipped around. “Where’s Annie?”

  “Annie?” she said. “What happened to Annie? Is she sick? Did she have an accident? Is she all right?” My mother peppered the questions at me, her eyes sharp with anxiety.

  I realized my mistake and tried to downplay it. “She’s fine. Healthy and all in one piece. Nothing’s the matter. I just thought she’s who was here.”

  “Nice try,” my mother said. “We’ll talk more about this later. Right now, Mrs. Gratzenberg is in the kitchen.”

  “Mrs. Gratzenberg? Why on earth?” It was the last thing I’d expected.

  “She tried calling you at work, but she doesn’t like leaving messages. I agree. Terrible inventions, answering machines. And she didn’t understand how to beep you. Electronics, feh.”

  Figured, a computer geek’s mother would be a technophobe. But I wondered how she’d found her way here. Again, my mother anticipated. “She found my number in the phone book. I answer my phone.” My mother said this as if it were an accusation.

  We’d had this problem before, someone looking for me and finding my mother. I’d tried then to get my mother to unlist her phone, but she didn’t want to be out of reach of long-lost relatives, or friends who’d misplaced their address books or their glasses.

  “You know I don’t list my phone number because I don’t want my work coming home,” I said.

  “This,” she said, “I know. What else I know is how beside myself I’d be if you disappeared.”

  “If I disappeared?” Then it dawned on me. “Jeff Gratzenberg is missing?”

  My mother put her finger on her nose. I followed her into the kitchen.

  Mrs. Gratzenberg was perched on a chair. A cup of tea was on the table in front of her. She stood. I remembered her as the shadowy figure who had emerged from the back of her house when I’d gone to see her son. She was about my mother’s height but seemed much smaller. She held out a card, her hand trembling. I took it from her. It was my business card.

  “You know my Jeffrey?” she asked.

  “Yes. Remember, I met you at your house? I came and Jeff showed me some software.”

  “Ah, yes. I remember now. I saw you, but for just a moment. Jeffrey hasn’t come home.” She held her palms up in despair.

  “Maybe he’s staying with friends?”

  Mrs. Gratzenberg set her mouth in a determined line. “No. He tells me if he’s going to stay out.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him.”

  “Day before yesterday. In the afternoon.” She peered up at me. “You had work for him?”

  “I wouldn’t have had any work for him. Why do you ask?”

  “He was excited. He’d found work. He left. Said he was going to meet the people. I made him dinner but he didn’t come home. Not that night. Not the next day. He always c
alls.”

  Now I understood. After her son didn’t come home, Mrs. Gratzenberg looked around in Jeff’s basement room, hoping to discover where he might have gone to. She’d found my business card and tracked me down, thinking I was his new employer.

  “Did you call the police?”

  “I tried. Yesterday. Again today. They say he’s not gone long enough. He’s young. It’s probably nothing. But I know, it’s not nothing.”

  “Can’t you help?” my mother said. “You work with the police. Can’t you make them do something?”

  I picked up the phone and called the Cambridge PD and asked for Detective Sergeant Joseph MacRae. The angels must have been with us, because he was there. I told him the story and asked if he could lean on whoever needed to be leaned on to take Mrs. Gratzenberg’s story seriously.

  MacRae pointed out the obvious: A twenty-five-year-old who’s been missing for a day and a half is an unlikely missing person. I told him I knew that, and would he do it anyway. He said he’d try. Ten minutes later he called back. An officer from missing persons would be on his way over to Mrs. Gratzenberg’s house shortly.

  I thanked him. I hated thanking MacRae. “It’s nothing, Peter. Don’t sweat it,” he said. I hated that even more.

  “You’ll drive Dobra home?” my mother asked, tilting her head my way after I told her a police officer was on the way. “And help her with the police?”

  These only sounded like questions. They were actually commands.

  A police cruiser was waiting for us. Mrs. Gratzenberg glanced at the neighboring houses, then across the street. I could read her face. What would they think? That her Jeffrey had another run-in with the law?

  The officers introduced themselves and Mrs. Gratzenberg hurried them inside. She darted about in the living room smoothing cushions and straightening bits of lace that rested on the backs and armrests of her sofa and one stuffed chair.

  The officers sat. One flipped open his pad. Sitting in the soft, deep upholstered chair with his knees up around his shoulders, he made the furnishings seem doll-sized. Neither one of them was a day older than Jeff Gratzenberg.

  “You say your son is missing?” the one with the pad said.

  Mrs. Gratzenberg slowly explained how two days ago, he said he’d gotten a call about a job. He’d gone off and hadn’t come back. She described what he’d been wearing—jeans and a black T-shirt with white letters, some kind of slogan on it.

  “That’s what he wore to a job interview?” one of the officers asked.

  Mrs. Gratzenberg shrugged.

  “He’s a computer programmer,” I explained. “That’s what they’d expect him to wear. If he showed up in a suit, he’d lose his credibility.”

  They asked about her son’s friends. Girlfriends. Mrs. Gratzenberg knew next to nothing.

  “You should tell them about the incident a few months ago,” I told her. “When Jeff was arrested.”

  “You know about that?” she asked me.

  I nodded. I wished it didn’t matter, but I knew it might.

  Mrs. Gratzenberg looked tired, her eyes sad. “You tell them. Please.”

  Mrs. Gratzenberg leaned back and shut her eyes, her mouth trembling, as I told the police that a few months ago Jeff Gratzenberg had been arrested for breaking into his employer’s company and making a bomb threat. I told them that his employer was the man who’d been under suspicion in his wife’s murder. That got their attention.

  The officers asked to see her son’s room. Mrs. Gratzenberg opened the door to the basement. The smell of mildew wafted up. She turned on the light. The police officers followed her down.

  The lava lamp glowed orange in a corner and the refrigerator hummed. Mrs. Gratzenberg pulled a string and the fluorescent ceiling fixture flickered to life.

  One of the officers started to work his way around the paneled rec room, just as the investigators had done at the Babikian house after the murder, spiraling in from the outside.

  Gratzenberg’s computer sat on the bar in the middle of the room. The screen was black with a glowing red, blue, and black drawing at the center. Tiny blue stars pulsed away from images that changed every few seconds. The images—the inside of a spaceship, an explosion in space, and so on—were comic bookish and flat.

  I jiggled the mouse. There was an E-mail on the screen. “Hey, look at this,” I called to the officers. They came over. The E-mail contained a job description. It was from FRODO177@HOTMAIL.COM.

  While the officers checked out Gratzenberg’s computer, I wandered around the room. On a small plasterboard bookcase was an array of sci-fi cyberpunk novels, from William Gibson’s Burning Chrome to Neil Stevenson’s Snow Crash. He also had what looked like the complete works of C. J. Cherryh. His taste in literature wasn’t half bad.

  I went over to a shadowy corner of the room where a twin mattress sat on a box spring. A T-shirt, jeans, and jockey shorts lay in a crumpled heap on the bed. On the bedside table was a clock and a comb. At one end of the bed, stuck to the cement wall, were some strips of cork. Pinned to them were ticket stubs, a couple of postcards, some photographs. I turned on the gooseneck lamp so I could see better.

  In the middle of the hodgepodge was a photograph cut from the newspaper. It was Lisa Babikian. And above it, stuck under the pushpin, was a dried clover flower. Was this a little memorial to an acquaintance? A friend? Or something more?

  22

  THAT NIGHT, Annie and I went to the movies. I was quickly reminded why I avoided Saturday night movies—long lines and kids running around inside, throwing popcorn at each other. Annie had wanted to see a new Chinese martial arts flick. By the time we got to the front of the line, it was sold out. We decided to go down the street for sushi instead.

  Over a bowl of steamed edamame, I told her about Gratzenberg. Annie put one of the soybean pods in her mouth and pulled it out between her teeth. She chewed. “You think Jeff Gratzenberg was Lisa’s lover?”

  “I don’t really know what I think. He liked her. It made Nick jealous the way he chatted her up. More than that? Maybe.”

  “If Gratzenberg did it.” Annie said, tossing the empty pod into the bowl, “don’t you think he’d have buried the fetus in Nick’s backyard? To incriminate him, not Teitlebaum.”

  It was a good point. He’d want to get back at Nick for setting him up for burglary. “But it leaves us with the question: Where’s Gratzenberg,” I said.

  “Probably with a girl. Or he had a car accident. Or maybe he’s been working seventy-two hours straight. I’ve heard those guys can work through day after day and subsist on pizza and Mountain Dew.”

  I hoped it was one of the above. I’d barely met him, but I liked Jeff Gratzenberg. He deserved a break. I wished him better luck choosing his new employer.

  I reached for Annie’s hand. I tasted one of her fingers. It was salty and moist. Annie smiled and offered me a pod of edamame. I took it in my mouth and bit down as she slowly pulled the pod out through my teeth, releasing the nutty-tasting beans.

  That’s when I realized Annie looked tired. There were dark smudges under her eyes. “You having trouble sleeping?” I asked.

  “I got new locks, but it isn’t making me feel any safer. You’ve got to feel safe to sleep well.”

  “You should have called me. I’d have come over and …”

  “Peter, I’ve been living alone ever since I got out of school. I’m a big girl. I don’t want to feel like I need someone to take care of me. I want to fix the problem, make whoever is doing this stop. Not change my lifestyle.”

  “It’s got to be Bridges,” I said. “He bragged to Nick that he knew about the ‘special-delivery packages,’” I said, drawing quote marks in the air. “But he’s in jail.”

  “He couldn’t be orchestrating this unless he’s using a phone to contact an accomplice. Or maybe he’s sending E-mail from the prison library computer. If we can get his phone and computer privileges suspended, that might shut him down.”

  “I like it. Bu
t other than what he told Nick, we haven’t got any proof that it’s him.”

  “I think he could get a stranger to post notices in bars. But to break in, steal, mail those packages—I say it’s someone he knows. An accomplice.” Annie took an edamame pod and gestured with it. “If we could lure him out.” She split the pod open with her fingers. A soybean dropped onto the table. “Catch him.” Annie pressed her thumb down on it. “Then squeeze until he admits that Bridges is behind all this.” There was a little popping sound as the skin burst and the bean flattened.

  I winced. “How?”

  “You’re the psychologist,” she said. “What would he find irresistible?”

  Past behavior was a potent predictor. He put up degrading posters. He’d defaced my father’s grave marker. Destroyed Kate’s pot. Dismembered Annie’s doll. And rubbed our noses in the damage he’d wrought. “He’s targeting the people I care about. Finding their vulnerable spot, and …” Nick’s comment about Ralston Bridges came back to me. Bastard like that. Knows just where to stick it, and how to twist it. “So we need to offer up a spot so soft and vulnerable that he can’t resist. Something he knows I care about, have labored over. And then wave it in his face.”

  We said it in unison. My car.

  “I don’t know,” I said, immediately having second thoughts. “All that work—” I’d spent hundreds of hours working on the 1967 BMW, painstakingly restoring it until it was like new, inside and out.

  “Come on, Peter,” Annie said. “It’s perfect. You know it’s perfect. It’s in your garage, not in the house. We can get the place wired so even a pro can’t detect it. The only question is, once we lay the trap, how to get him to take the bait?”

  I’d worked on the car to keep myself from thrashing around half the night, unable to sleep because the bed was too big and too empty without Kate. To keep myself from obsessing about what I should have sensed, how I should have acted. A benign variant of classic obsessive-compulsive behavior, working on the car served me as a distraction.

  That was it. The answer to how to get Bridges’s attention. I told Annie about the call I’d gotten from a journalist asking if she could interview me about obsessions and the compulsive behaviors people use to deal with them. I could do the interview and talk about the less debilitating obsessions that help turn an ordinary person into a performing artist, a collector, or as in my own case, a car restorer. The article might draw Bridges’s attention.