10

Richard Parrish sat in his new office with the door locked. He had given his secretary strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed. Not that that meant anything. He was surrounded by incompetence. He had moved swiftly, brilliantly, when Anna had appeared out of nowhere, reeking of scandal, intent on doing him harm. Acting quickly and coolly, he had silenced her, saved his career.

And it had all gone for nothing, that effort. That crazy son of a bitch impersonating an x-ray technician had taken her out of the hospital. It was unsettling. The ward nurse had called Parrish the next morning, and the phone call had filled him with vertiginous fears. He had hardly been able to speak. “I’ll get back to you,” was all he could manage.

He had sat there in the dark, thinking. He reassured himself. Anna Shockley was no threat. There was nothing anyone could prove. He could have walked away from her when he first saw her standing there in the hospital ward, and he hadn’t because … well, he’d been unnerved. It had been like seeing a ghost. But she was no threat, certainly not now. He had been jolting her with massive doses of amphetamines followed by equally massive doses of neuroleptics, effecting a condition of acute schizophrenia, exacerbating the girl’s already unstable condition. The girl was no longer coherent. Girl? He still thought of her as a girl. Anna Shockley was a woman now, not the child of their first encounter. But she still looked so damnably young, a function, perhaps, of her mental disorder, a fountain of youth that sheltered her from the years, kept her a child in body as well as mind.

He had had to shake the image of Anna Shockley from his mind that night. He tried to calm himself by writing in his diary, but that was no solace any more. A full glass of Scotch proved more effective. Then he called the desk back and advised them that he was taking care of the situation, that they were not to mention the incident to any more people, that those already aware of the situation were not to speak of it. A patient disappearing from the hospital wasn’t something he wanted to read about in the papers.

“Let’s say she has signed out on my cognizance,” he said. “I’ll come by in the morning and complete the necessary paperwork.”

It was going to be okay, he told himself. Yet the fear kept whispering. Why did he take her? What has she told him?

David Livingston. That was the name of the man who had spirited Anna away. It took no great deductive powers to fit the description of the bogus x-ray technician with the man who had accosted Parrish in the hall. The man had said he was a friend of the social worker, Diane Nichols. Parrish had lost no time in seeking Nichols out.

The Nichols woman was obviously expecting a visit. She gave him only what she judged he could get elsewhere. Yes, a longtime friend of Anna’s had been staying at her house. Together they had taken Anna to the clinic when they became concerned about her deteriorating mental health. The friend’s name was David Livingston and he wrote children’s books, and he had left to return to Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived. No, Diane Nichols knew nothing about his posing as an x-ray technician and stealing Anna from the hospital.

The woman was a poor liar, and she seemed to know it, not even making a great effort, just stubbornly claiming ignorance. Parrish knew he would learn nothing from her.

David Livingston. The name jogged a memory and Parrish went back to his early notes on Anna and found a David there, someone she had been writing to when she was in Romner the first time. He, David, had been in an army stockade then.

A criminal mentality, Parrish thought with disgust. Parrish had no tolerance for lawbreakers.

It had been a week since Anna was spirited from the hospital. Livingston had dragged her off to Virginia, Parrish supposed. Fine. The guy would discover soon enough that Anna would have to be institutionalized. There were always guys like Livingston, caught by some honey-sexed bitch, ready to dedicate their lives to her recovery. A couple of days or weeks down the road, and they would discover that the little darling wasn’t about to snap out of it, that the cunt had screaming fits, saw monsters, slashed her wrists in the tub, and took a notion to set her lover’s hair on fire with her lighter. The guy would forsake romance, dump pretty Anna in some public mental health program, and slide away, hoping no one had noticed. A few misguided fucks, anybody could make a mistake.

Calm down, Parrish thought. He laughed. Maybe I’m jealous, he thought.

There was no reason to panic. Anna was probably already roaming the halls of some understaffed mental ward, babbling and bumming cigarettes from freaked-out teens. She could tell her story about being screwed by her shrink to other weary shrinks. Maybe that wasn’t the most common story on the wards. If not, it was the runner-up.