Sully was passing the break room late Monday morning when an aroma pulled him in.
“When did we start a gourmet restaurant in here?” he said.
Martha looked up from the table where she was parked with a salad and a magazine and pointed wordlessly to the microwave. Kyle pulled out a plate of something bubbly and expensive-smelling and wafted it onto the table across from her.
“Seriously,” Sully said as he strolled to the table. “What is that incredible smell?”
“Veal Florentine,” Kyle said. “Get yourself a plate.”
Sully shook his head. “There’s too much green in there for me.” “And nothing in it is fried.” The corners of Kyle’s mouth twitched. “Don’t you people from Alabama like everything breaded and boiled in grease?”
“You’re not that kind of Southerner, are you?” Martha said.
Sully eased into a chair, still studying Kyle’s lunch. “I’m the kind of Southerner who likes to know the ingredients in what he’s eating.”
“But if it smells this good, who cares?” Kyle took a forkful and smiled, close-mouthed, as he chewed. Martha looked expectantly at Sully.
“How’s it going so far, Kyle?” Sully said.
“I’m settled in, ready to work. Now all I need are some clients.” Kyle looked at Martha, who looked at Sully, who had never seen such smooth triangulation.
“I’ve given Kyle two clients to start with,” Martha said.
“A seventy-two-year-old man grieving for his wife who died two weeks ago. He’ll need me for about three sessions before every widow at the senior center starts baking him pies.”
“Or you start baking them,” Sully said, eyeing the dessert Kyle was unwrapping.
“I don’t cook,” Kyle said. “I just order out.”
Martha folded her hands neatly on the tabletop. “The other client is an unhappy woman who I think will respond to Kyle.”
“She’s a schoolteacher. Of course she’s unhappy. Look—” Kyle chipped at a flake of tissue-thin pastry with a tine of his fork. “I know every client deserves full attention no matter how small the problem may seem to us . . .”
“And that small problem may only be the tip of a much larger iceberg that has been forming for years,” Martha said.
“I just want something a little more intense. That’s the way I like to work, you know? Get in there and make a difference.”
“You’ll get your chance, tiger,” Sully said.
“When you’ve shown what you can do with the less-intense cases.” Martha glanced quickly at Sully. “I hope I’m not stepping on your toes.”
“Listen, we’re a team—and since I’m not going to be here more than a couple of months, you two are the core of it.” Sully looked from one of them to the other. “So I think your first session ought to be with each other. See if you can work this thing out.”
“Is there a ‘thing’?” Kyle said.
“We’ll deal with it, Dr. Crisp,” Martha said. “Right now I need to look over some files.”
She tucked her Tupperware into a zippered insulated bag and showed remarkable restraint when she clicked the door closed behind her.
“She doesn’t think I have enough experience,” Kyle said.
“Did she say that?”
“No, but—”
“Then that’ll be a good place to start with her.” Sully grinned and nodded at Kyle’s shirt. “Now, where I want to start is with this getup you’re wearing. Dude, you don’t have to wear a tie and cufflinks around here.”
Kyle laughed. “You think I oughta loosen up? Go for the Top-Siders and the Hawaiian shirt like you?”
Sully shook his head, still grinning. “Nah. Wear a three-piece suit if you want to. Eat sushi. Just work out your deal with Martha.”
“Got it. You sure you don’t want some veal?”
Sully stood up. “I was thinking about a bean burrito from Chihuahua’s.”
“You’re killin’ me,” Kyle said.
Sully actually downed two burritos, picked up a Grande Frap with whipped cream from Starbucks, and sat in his parked Mini Cooper and called Porphyria. She should be done with her physical by now.
“Here’s the scenario, Dr. Ghent,” he said when she answered. “I have an experienced, highly intuitive therapist who plays by the book and a young hotdogger with less experience than enthusiasm, but a whole lot of potential.”
He waited for the mm-hmm so he could fix the twinkle on her face in his mind.
“Could you hold on for one second, Sully—just one second now—”
Sully heard another voice in the background, as if someone were being paged on an intercom.
“I apologize. What were you saying, Sully?”
“Porphyria, where are you?”
“I am in a hospital room with people who will not stop fussing over me. I am just before running every one of them out of here.” Sully felt the smile in her voice, but he couldn’t come up with one of his own.
“Hospital room?” he said. “Since when do they admit you for a physical?”
“Since they decided my heart isn’t tapping out the rhythm they want to hear.”
Sully set his cup in the console. “What’s wrong with your heart?”
“I think that’s what we’re about to find out. It’s probably just a malfunction in the pacemaker.” She gave a deep-throated chuckle. “I never have liked the idea of being fitted with spare parts. Now, how are you doing with your motivation question?”
Sully shook his head. “That can wait if this is serious. I can get a flight tomorrow.”
“It’s going to get serious if I see your face in this hospital. Do what you have to do—one God-thing at a time. Now, I mean it.”
You didn’t argue with Porphyria Ghent, not when she took that tenor. So Sully hung up dutifully and put the car in gear and headed for the Pichaco Hills Community Church as if Porphyria were in the seat next to him, floating a hand toward the windshield, making him go where the answers were. The fact that she wasn’t . . . that she was in a hospital room with doctors frowning over her EKG . . . He couldn’t go there, in body or in mind.
According to MapQuest, he had about a fifteen-minute ride ahead of him across the Rio Grande to the western skirts of Las Cruces, which gave him a chance to experience the same sensation that had come over him anytime he’d ventured out since his arrival in New Mexico.
It was as if he were drifting in a space where the sky took up more room than the tireless desert, which itself ended in distant purplish mountains without ever seeming to reach them. Even as he drove, the light changed and the shadows shifted across the land, and it became a different place than it had been moments before.
It was good to be noticing those things. Large as they were, he would have missed them a year and a half ago when this journey first began. In the process of working with Porphyria for three months and working with his own client in Nashville for a number of weeks before he started a year-long speaking tour, he had become myopic. That, he hoped, was about to change.
He tried to settle back in the seat, not an easy task in the Mini Cooper with his long legs and tall torso. The guy at the used-car lot had all but told him he was going to look like a clown climbing out of a circus car, but it was cheap and temporary, and its frog-green paint job wasn’t hard to find in a parking lot the way his eighteen months’ worth of rental cars had been.
Unless Kyle Neering was at the same location. Sully had been amused when he pulled up to the clinic that morning to find that Kyle’s car was almost identical to his. Gourmet lunch and cufflinks notwithstanding.
Sully made a turn off of Route 70. With five minutes to go, he needed to focus. If he had been preparing a client for an errand like this, he would have suggested rehearsing what he might say when he got there. So far that exercise hadn’t been productive.
I’m looking for Belinda Cox. She’s the quack who called herself a counselor, the one who fourteen years ago told my postpartumly depressed wife she needed to renounce her demons instead of taking medication and getting real therapy, even though she knew she was suicidal. Yeah, as a result, my wife drove off a bridge and took our infant daughter with her, and now, after a near-breakdown, I’m just getting around to locating Ms. Cox and finding out if she’s still using those same methods. I don’t want to throw her in front of a train. I can’t even see that her license is revoked, because she doesn’t need one for her kind of “counseling.” I just want to expose her so she can never allow another woman to go so far into her nonexistent guilt that she can’t find any way out except to kill herself. At least, I think that’s why I’m doing it. So—have you seen her?
Sully almost missed his turn and squealed the Cooper’s tires into a freshly resurfaced parking lot. His hands ached from clutching the wheel. As he licked tiny points of sweat from his upper lip, he decided on a simple I’m looking for a woman named Belinda Cox. I believe she has an office here?
Although he suspected she had moved on. When he called the number listed for Belinda Cox, he got a message saying it had been disconnected.
Sully smoothed the front of the Hawaiian shirt with his palms and strode toward the door marked Office. His Google trail had ended here. Maybe someone could help him pick it up again. Someone like a church secretary. They knew everything.
A bell tinkled cheerfully as Sully entered a sunshiny office that smelled like breath mints and furniture polish. The woman at the desk smiled before she even looked up at him, as if everyone who walked in blessed her and Sully was going to be no different, no matter who he was. When she did raise her head, the smile reached her eyes.
“How can I help you, my friend?” she said in a voice as dimply as her chins.
“I’m looking for someone,” Sully said. “Someone who I believe has an office here, or did have.”
“And that would be—?”
“Belinda Cox.”
Sully had never seen a smile evaporate that way, chilled out of existence by the steely gaze that took its place.
“She no longer rents office space from us,” she said. “She left here four months ago.”
“I suspected as much,” Sully said. “Did she leave a forwarding address?”
“No, sir.”
Sully waited. Ten years of working with clients hadn’t been wasted on him. There was more she wanted to say.
“Are you a family member?” she asked.
“No.”
“A friend of hers?”
“Not by a long shot.”
The woman melted a few degrees and nodded toward a rocking chair situated catty-corner to her desk. If experience served him well, she was working up to a good vent.
“I’m Sarah Quinn, by the way,” she said.
“Sullivan Crisp,” Sully said. “Sully.”
“Well, Sully, I don’t know why you want to find that woman, but I hope it has something to do with the IRS or unpaid parking tickets or some such thing.”
“I take it you weren’t fond of her.”
Sarah sniffed. “I just want to make it clear, first off, that she was never affiliated with this church. She only rented office space from us, until the pastor asked her to leave.”
Sully’s raised eyebrow seemed to be sufficient encouragement for her to elaborate.
“She never paid the rent on time,” she said, ticking that off on a plump finger. “She said she was running a counseling business, which I never saw the need for in the first place, since Pastor does such a good job of that himself. The first time I saw her, I knew I’d never go to her with a problem.”
“Why was that?”
“She dressed like she just came off the reservation, beads and shawls and feathers hanging from her ears. But there isn’t a drop of Native American blood in that woman’s body—blonde hair, freckles all over the place. I mean, honestly . . . right off the bat I knew she was trying to be something she wasn’t.” She doubled the chins. “Now, who wants a counselor who doesn’t even know who she is?”
“I hear you,” Sully said.
“And the way she talked to me, loud, like she thought I was either deaf or stupid or spoke a foreign language. There’s no doubt in my mind she saw me as the hired help.”
Sully stifled a smile.
“And then the goings-on in that office. She was two doors down from here, and I could hear her in there just yelling and raving, telling the devil to get out and screaming at people to renounce him.”
Sully’s hands froze to the arms of the rocker.
“And here was Pastor, trying to hold Bible study with all that going on. The people she was seeing would cry, and some of them would yell too. They’d come out of that door sobbing—it’s a wonder some of them made it out of the parking lot.”
“We are definitely talking about the same woman,” Sully managed to say. “So you have no idea where she relocated?”
Sarah shook her head. She had her hand to her neck, which had turned an angry shade of fuchsia. “She finally made her last rent payment, and all that was printed on the check was Zahira.”
“Was that the name of a company or something?”
“I have no idea.” She looked over her shoulder at the door behind her and lowered her voice. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it was some kind of cult or something.”
It was another twenty minutes before Sully could extricate himself from Sarah. When he left, she made him promise to call her if he found “that woman.”
The day had drawn out to three thirty by the time Sully turned onto Union Street and pulled into the clinic parking lot between Kyle’s matching Mini Cooper and a red Saab he didn’t recognize.
He strode through the clinic’s turquoise double front doors with every intention of going straight to his office and Googling Zahira. But Olivia practically vaulted over her desk in the corner of the reception room and planted herself between Sully and the hallway.
“We have a situation,” she said. The doe eyes had obviously been stricken by headlights.
“What’s up?” Sully said.
Olivia curled her fingers around his wrist and tugged him away from the hall.
“Okay, so, this woman comes in and she is, like, about to freak out, you can tell.”
“Define ‘freak out,’” Sully said. “Are we talking mobile unit?”
Olivia shook her head, and the eyes continued to enlarge. “She’s just, like, mad, and I thought, uh-oh, another lawsuit, but she said she wanted to see a counselor and I asked her if she had an appointment and she said she didn’t know she needed one. The way she said it, it was like it was my fault nobody told her. I mean, you can’t just walk in here, right?”
“Liv,” Sully said, “what did you tell her?”
“I didn’t know what to tell her, ’cause you weren’t here. And Kyle and Martha were in the break room having it out—they still are.”
“Olivia,” Sully said. “Did you get a name?”
“Um—it’s like a guy’s name, only she’s a woman.”
“Where is she?”
“I put her in the green counseling room—she didn’t seem like the yellow type—and I gave her the papers to fill out. I don’t think she’s happy about it.”
“How long has she been in there?”
Olivia looked at her wrist full of bangles, among which Sully did not see a watch.
“About five minutes,” she said. “But I don’t think she’s going to last much longer. I turned up the music and offered her some water, but she still wanted to rip my lips off, I could tell.”
Olivia finally seemed to run out of information. “Did I handle that okay?” she asked.
“I’m sure you were amazing,” Sully said and headed for the counseling room to survey the damages.
Judging from the expression on the face of the woman who turned on him from the window, they were considerable.
“Hi,” Sully said. “I’m sorry you had to wait.”
“So am I,” she said. “You have no idea.”