“Sorry.”
She stood up and rinsed the coffee maker in the sink. “Seven years and three kids later it all seems pretty long ago.”
“You felt sorry for him.”
“I did then. But I don’t feel that sorry now. Not for him, at least.”
Back outside the barn, her innocence and vulnerability seemed as quaint as last season’s fashions. “Avery’s very upset,” she told Dubin, fixing him in her gray eyes. “He knows you’re a blackmailer—he’s done some research about you—and he thinks you’ve got him in your sights.”
“He could be right about that.”
“He says you used to be a journalist.”
“He is right about that.”
“What happened?”
Dubin opened the door to his car and climbed inside. “It was one of those scandals a few years back. News stories written by reporters who weren’t anywhere near the scene of the action, that type of thing. I wasn’t the main attraction and I was only guilty of cutting a few corners here and there, but I got sucked in along with everybody else and when I got spat back out I didn’t have a job or a future.”
“So.” She was trying to be polite. “It was time for a career change.”
“Not really. When you write for a paper, ninety percent of what you write never gets printed. Why? Could be lack of verification, lack of space, lack of interest. Or it could be that whoever the story was written about wanted to make sure it never saw the light of day. Maybe that person made a gift to the editor or a well-timed political contribution to the candidate of his choice. And maybe that’s why you were researching the story in the first place.”
“Wow.”
“You can call me a blackmailer if you want to,” Dubin smiled. “I like to think of myself as pursuing journalism by other means.”
Before he drove away, he asked Susan one last question. “Why is Avery so worried about me?”
She raised her eyebrows in a sly reference to what had almost happened in the barn.
“I mean, what does he think I have on him?”
“He says he’s afraid you’ll make up evidence that’s not really there.”
“Some people—the cops, for instance—might do that. But I wouldn’t, and he’d know that if he’d done his homework.”
“You’re an honorable blackmailer, then.”
“There’s nothing honorable about me. But I work on my own terms, and they’re very specific. To attract my attention you have to be very rich, rich enough to buy your own justice. And to be liable for my fee, you have to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Your fee?” she laughed. “I love that.”
“That’s how I think of it.”
“You took my check.”
“Yes, but I still haven’t cashed it.”
“I guess that’s a good sign.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “It means that anything can still happen.”
* * *
Shortly before noon on the day scheduled for Nicole’s next follow-up visit, I happened to glance out the window near the nurse’s station on the second floor and saw Nicole walking up to the main entrance below. She wore a white sun dress and sandals, and with her red hair burning in the midday sun she looked like an angel on a mission of mercy. Since it was two hours before her appointment, I assumed that she would be having lunch with Hunter and Antonia. This was something she often did—just the day before, I’d caught a glimpse of her following the twins into the dining room—and I could only speculate about its significance. In our last session, I recalled, she had related her fantasies about Robert Schumann and his quest for madness in the “spirit world” imagined by a German Romantic writer named Hoffmann (who may or may not have ever existed; I made a mental note to look him up), and I assumed that today she planned to start where she’d left off, with some more literary nonsense fueled by her fantasies about me.
After a few minutes I found myself drifting down to the dining room, where I purchased my usual lunch (a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast), and without being observed I found a seat behind a canvas screen that partitioned the patients’ dining room from the employee lounge. On the other side of this screen sat Nicole, Hunter, Antonia, and Mrs. Paterson, and without any particular effort I was able to overhear every word they said. Hunter’s conversation was the usual indecipherable gibberish, and Antonia of course said nothing beyond an occasional asthmatic sigh. But Nicole and Mrs. Paterson were in the middle of an animated discussion, which I soon realized was about me and my relationship with Olympia.
“He goes to her room every night,” Mrs. Paterson was saying, “when he thinks everyone’s gone to bed—”
“Does he spend the night there?” Nicole asked.
“I don’t know, honey. To tell you the truth, I never hung around long enough to find that out.”
“Then what—”
“But oh, Lord, the noises that come out of that room!”
“Oh my God. Noises?”
“Uh-huh. Some nights she keeps the whole building awake.”
I wanted to push my fist through the canvas screen and cram my chicken salad sandwich down Mrs. Paterson’s throat. Instead I coughed conspicuously and she lowered her voice, which I immediately regretted. Now all I could hear were murmuring and short bursts of laughter and I couldn’t be sure who they were coming from.
Jeff Gottlieb stumbled up to my table carrying a plastic tray laden with pizza and french fries and lemon meringue pie. “Mind if I join you?” Without waiting for an answer, he deposited himself across from me and filled his mouth with pizza.
Suddenly Mrs. Paterson’s voice came through the screen loud and clear. “They’ve been fighting over her like a plaything all her life,” she was saying. “The same way they used to fight over her mother.”
“Olympia,” Gottlieb nodded salaciously.
“You ever notice her eyes? I bet that took some doing.” Mrs. Paterson’s voice dropped back to a murmur and Gottlieb added his own clarification.
“Olympia’s got Miles Palmer’s eyes,” he said between slurps of his coffee.
“So what?”
“What do you think? She got them from her uncle?” Gottlieb leered at me with lewd amusement as I squirmed in my seat.
“There’s something strange about that girl,” Mrs. Paterson went on. “If you ask me, she’s just a kewpie doll, just a hollow little thing that looks pretty on the outside but’s got a big hole in the middle. You hear what I’m saying?”
Gottlieb was laughing so hard that the coffee was dribbling down his chin. “Is that right, Hoffmann?” he sputtered, a little too loudly. “Is Olympia just a pretty doll with a hole in the middle? You ought to know! Ha ha ha ha!”
I was so angry I bolted up from the table and hurried away without even picking up my tray or clearing away my trash. Behind me I could hear laughter—women’s laughter, not just Gottlieb’s—but I didn’t dare look back to find out whether they were laughing at me. At any rate I couldn’t have looked back if I tried: I had been stopped in my tracks by a sudden, blinding headache that seized my temples like a pair of tongs hoisting a block of ice to the ceiling. When the attack subsided I found myself standing in the kitchen surrounded by cooks and dishwashers who, by the looks on their faces, must have wondered if I was one of the patients. I introduced myself officiously and they turned back to their work. Glancing around the kitchen, I noticed a paring knife lying on a counter, with a short wooden handle and a sharp three-inch blade. When no one was looking I wrapped the knife in a linen napkin and stuck it into the pocket of my suit jacket.
Then I hurried back upstairs. I had to be ready for Nicole’s therapy session at two o’clock.
By the time Nicole tapped on the door of my office I had recovered from my migraine attack and my humiliation and anger in the dining room. I straightened my desk and lowered the window shades, wondering whether she would say anything about what had happened. Eavesdropping is never dignified, but I was prepare
d to defend my behavior, if necessary, as a adjunct to her therapy.
“I just had lunch with Hunter and Antonia,” she said blandly.
I pretended to be surprised. “Really? What did you talk about?”
“Oh, the usual nonsense. You know how it is, talking to that pair.”
I decided to play along with her. “Have you noticed any change in Hunter lately?”
She shook her head. “Not really. It’s disappointing, isn’t it? I thought Hunter’s piano playing was some kind of breakthrough that would lead somewhere.”
“It still might. We haven’t exhausted all the available techniques.”
Nicole looked back at me curiously. “What do you have in mind?”
“Well,” I hesitated—I knew I shouldn’t be discussing Hunter’s case with another patient, but Nicole’s interest in his recovery was a healthy sign and I wanted to encourage it—“Olympia suggested that we do a past life regression, using hypnosis.”
“You can’t be serious!”
Her skeptical tone caught me off guard. Wasn’t this the woman who, just a week before, had been lecturing me about the “spirit world”? I still had deep misgivings about hypnosis and past life regression, but I realized that bringing them into the conversation had been a lucky stroke. Through these topics I could probe into thoughts and fantasies that Nicole might otherwise have been afraid to discuss.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “At first I thought the idea sounded kooky—you know how Olympia is—but she gave me a list of books to read on past life regression and I’m almost ready to try it. Apparently her father—Dr. Bartolli, who used to work here and is very well acquainted with this technique—thinks Hunter would make an ideal candidate.”
Nicole seemed incredulous and strangely agitated. “Isn’t this reincarnation you’re talking about? The transmigration of souls?”
“Not necessarily. It could be a psychological phenomenon. A person could imagine himself living in some distant age and construct an entire past life based on some book or movie he’s forgotten all about.”
She lowered her eyes and turned away as if she were looking for an escape route.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I don’t believe in reincarnation,” she said quietly, turning back to face me, “but I guess I’ve been coming to believe in something similar. Not the transmigration of souls but the transmigration of ideas.”
I waited patiently for her to continue.
“It’s part of the thinking I’ve been doing for my thesis. I think it was prompted by the research I mentioned last time on the connection between Schumann and Hoffmann.”
I reached for a pencil so I could jot down some notes. Nicole was pulling me into uncharted waters and I wanted to be able to remember how I got there.
“Ideas are like seed crystals,” she went on. “A writer like Hoffmann could create ideas that spread out and infect thousands of other personalities. And then someone like Schumann—”
A little shiver ran down my spine. “Why did you say ‘infect?’”
“Because it could be like a crystal—something clear and bright and beautiful—or it could be something more insidious and evil, like a virus that has to migrate from one human to another in order to survive. So Hoffmann could become Schumann who could become Offenbach who could become—I don’t know—Dostoevsky? Nietzsche? Joyce?”
I pretended to scribble some more notes as the full impact of Nicole’s theory hit home. In my career I had encountered many delusions, but never anything so elaborate, so well thought out, so thoroughly mad as this. It’s a common belief among psychotics that some distant person or force is sending messages aimed at controlling their mind and actions, to the point where many schizophrenics will claim that their voices are controlled by demons or computer chips. But this was the first time I’d ever heard this delusion articulated as a general theory of culture. Nicole’s illness, I realized, was far more serious than I had imagined. I stood up to signal that our session was over. “Well, that will give us a lot to think about for next time.”
And then she turned the tables on me. “Are you still dating Olympia?”
“Olympia?” I stammered. I wanted to say: We’re not dating; we’re just friends. But Mrs. Paterson had just told Nicole that I spent every night in Olympia’s room. “We see each other sometimes.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“You don’t like her, do you?”
“She seems very nice. But I wonder... whether she’s good for you.”
Suddenly I understood. It was the transference I’d detected at our last session. Nicole had fallen in love with me and now she was jealous of Olympia. “Maybe we can talk about that next time. But try to remember”—I forced a smile—“this is supposed to be about you, not me.”
“I’m not jealous,” Nicole said, returning my smile, “if that’s what you’re thinking.” She stood up to face me. “It’s just that—you’re going to think I’m stark raving mad when I say this—it’s just that Olympia seems to be carrying the Hoffmann virus and she’s drawing you into her world. So this is going to be about you. And there’s nothing either of us can do about it.”
Chapter 9
Miss Whipple had a secret that she’d kept to herself for seven years. She and Maria Morgan had never exactly been friends, but they shared the kind of intimacy that exists between a librarian and her borrower. She knew what books the opera singer read, how long it took her to read them, and how she felt about them, and that was more than many of her so-called friends knew about her. They moved in different circles, of course, but at the library they talked about books and opera, which both of them were passionate about. Shortly before she died, Maria Morgan checked some materials out of the library—a few books and some sound recordings. In those days they still circulated long-playing records, and on her last visit to the library Maria Morgan had gone home with a full-length recording of The Tales of Hoffmann, the Ansermet version of The Nutcracker, and Piano Music of Robert Schumann played by Alicia de Larrocha. She also checked out several books, including a collection of supernatural tales from the nineteenth century. As she explained to the librarian, she planned to use these materials to prepare for her triple role in Hoffmann, steeping herself in everything fantastic and uncanny that she could get her hands on. Nothing in her manner seemed distraught or depressed, but within a few days she was dead. Miss Whipple was too discreet to mention the overdue books and records, and after a few weeks her patience was rewarded. Avery Morgan himself came to the library to return them. She thanked him sympathetically and waived the fines, even overlooking the absence of one of the records, the Schumann piano music, which was never returned. It wasn’t until after he left that she discovered the letter stuck in one of the books.
Nothing too surprising about that. Letters, postcards, shopping lists—even obscene photographs—come flying out of returned books all the time. Miss Whipple had amassed quite a collection over the years and learned a great deal about her neighbors in the process. But to find a letter addressed to Maria Morgan so soon after her death, and postmarked shortly before it, was almost too poignant. Miss Whipple’s first instinct was to call Avery Morgan and offer to hold the letter until he could pick it up. Certainly not to open it or read it. What kind of person would do that? But her second instinct—and it was the one that soon prevailed—was to stuff the letter into her purse and take it home so she could read it without being observed. At home she discovered that it was a love letter and it did not come from Maria Morgan’s husband. When she thought about some of the things mentioned in the letter and who it was that must have written it, she had to catch her breath. She read the letter over a few times, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding, and then she buried it deep in a locked file cabinet and tried never to think about it again.
“I don’t know if there’s much of a story here,” Dubin told Miss Whipple one morning as he followed her shelving cart between th
e stacks. “Maybe Maria Morgan really committed suicide. She’d been depressed—”
The librarian snorted derisively as she squeezed a copy of Reversal of Fortune onto the top shelf in the True Crime section.
“You disagree?”
“If she was depressed,” Miss Whipple said, “I certainly never noticed it. She was in here checking out books the day before she died.”
The librarian started to say more but instead she avoided looking at Dubin and concentrated on her reshelving. Her eagerness to cooperate with Dubin had been flagging; it cut against the grain of her natural discretion. She was not the kind of person who went around telling secrets to strangers, even in a good cause. And of course there were some places she absolutely would not go, secrets she’d kept too long to tell them now.
Dubin followed her around the corner to the History section. He picked up a book off the cart and tried to locate where it went, but she snatched it out of his hand.
“I’ll do that if you don’t mind.”
“No problem,” he smiled, taking a step back. “According to the articles you gave me, she was being treated for depression.”
There was a long pause as Miss Whipple made an opening for the book and slipped it in. “All I can say is I was very surprised to hear that,” she finally said.
“So did she kill herself?”
“I never believed it.”
Dubin watched her carefully. “In that case she must have been murdered.”
The librarian seemed to shiver when he said that word. “Don’t say that!”
“Well, I think it’s the only alternative. She didn’t die a natural death.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.”
Dubin gave her his most winning smile, the one he reserved for old ladies and government bureaucrats. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to run through the logic of whether I ought to be spending my time on this or not.”
She smiled grudgingly and pushed her cart around a corner and halfway down the next aisle. “Okay, go on.”
“The question is why would anyone have wanted to kill her,” Dubin said. “Money had nothing to do with it. I checked out her will. Her money went exactly where you’d expect it to go—to her husband in trust for the kids, with a small bequest to a sister in California.”
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