Sixteen

The next morning I looked through my files and found his name. Dr. Robert K. Santori. I’d handled his divorce some years before. The negotiations had gone well, and so there’d been no need to go before the court. Santori had behaved very sanely, given the fact that he’d actually discovered his wife in the arms of another man. “Quite a nice fellow,” he’d quipped at one point, “but then my wife always had good taste in men.”

The case file was brief. It took me only a few minutes to refresh my memory. Santori had worked at Brigham for nearly fifteen years before setting up his own practice in an office in the Chandler Building, a squat professional structure that was practically on the grounds of the county hospital.

I hadn’t actually talked with Santori since the divorce, but I could still remember certain stories he’d told me about the time he’d worked at Brigham, the grave madness he’d treated there, sometimes with some success, as he’d said. He’d readily admitted though that a great many of his patients had remained beyond his reach, and so had simply been “tranquilized,” so that they lived, as Santori said, “a mothlike existence,” fluttering but unaware. I’d never asked about the Old Man, whether he’d treated him at Brigham, helped to strap him down, injected him with tranquilizers or perhaps simply glanced into his room to see Diana at his bedside, quietly reciting to him.

I’d called Santori just after lunch, told his receptionist who I was, and asked her to please have the doctor call me. He’d done exactly that within an hour, and without giving much away, I’d asked for a “consultation.”

“Let’s just call it a ‘conversation’ for now,” Santori said. “We’ll get to the billable part later on.”

His office in the Chandler Building was small and neat, with the usual bookshelves and framed licenses and diplomas. The fabled couch was made of brown leather and sat off to the side, like an afterthought. Santori, dark, portly, with black bushy eyebrows, greeted me with a hearty handshake, then took his place behind a large wooden desk.

“So, I understand this has to do with your sister,” he said.

Two plain chairs rested in front of Santori’s desk. They looked vaguely as if they’d been scavenged from some public institution, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the Old Man had been strapped down in one of them at some dire point.

“My sister, yes,” I said, then lowered myself into the nearest chair.

Santori had iron gray hair, parted in the middle and combed very flat so that a perfect line ran backward from his brow to the back of his head.

“When we spoke earlier, you mentioned that she’d recently lost her son,” Santori said.

I thought of that death, and began to see it as it may or may not have happened, a boy moving through high grass toward a glimmering pond, voices growing louder and more insistent as he closed upon the water.

“That’s right,” I answered.

Now Jason had broken through the grass, the unfeeling stone before him, insensate, as it had to have been, and yet, in my imagination, oddly waiting.

“His name was Jason,” I added. “He drowned a few months ago.”

Time blinked, and Jason was in the water now, motionless, already dead, his legs together, but his arms spread out, birdlike, as his body curled forward then drifted down and down, to the bottom of the pond.

“An accident,” I said. I heard Diana’s wail, deafening yet silent, as if silence itself served to magnify sound, made audible what would otherwise have remained forever unheard things.

Santori leaned back slightly. “I take it her behavior has changed since her son’s death?”

“Her whole life has changed.”

“In what way?”

“She ordered her husband out of the house,” I said. “They got a divorce not long after.”

“That’s not unusual, of course,” Santori said. “Marriages often don’t weather the death of a child.”

Weather.

I don’t know why the word struck me as peculiar, or at least as a word Diana would have noticed had she been sitting in the other chair. I could almost see her there, listening intently. She would have noticed “weather,” noticed that Santori had applied a meteorological term to the buffeting we take in life, the thermals that drag us down or lift us to grand but perilous heights. Or was it a geological reference, Diana would have wondered, the work of wind and water, the wearing down of stone.

“Did Diana appear upset by the divorce?” Santori asked.

“No,” I answered.

In fact, I thought, she had tossed her marriage away as casually as a candy wrapper, forgotten as soon as it had been discarded.

“Diana isn’t a woman scorned,” I added.

“Let me be clear why I asked,” Santori said. “Sometimes behavior, even behavior that can appear, for lack of a better word, crazy, may have a perfectly rational basis. It may seem crazy, but the reason for it may not be. A person might set a fire in order to get attention.” He smiled. “Or kill a rock star or a politician.”

“Diana has always gotten plenty of attention,” I told him. “Especially when she was a child. From my father.”

“Why so much attention from him?”

“Because she was so smart,” I answered. “A reader and a memorizer. She could quote huge passages. She was very gifted in that way.”

“And it served her well, this giftedness?”

To my own surprise, I answered, “No.”

No, because at that moment it seemed to me that Diana’s high-voltage brainpower was the very force that had blown her into playground corners and walled her up in libraries. It was almost classically tragic, I thought, a gift that was simultaneously a curse.

Abby’s voice sounded in my mind. She got it from him.

“She got it from our father,” I said. “He was very gifted, too.”

I recalled the day we’d brought him home from Brigham, how desperately he’d clung to Diana as she’d led him from the hospital to my waiting car, reciting for him softly all the way:

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot

I’d walked behind them, my mind fiercely recording every word she spoke as they flowed down the walk together, smoothly in tune, two parallel streams, Diana murmuring softly in his ear as she eased him into the backseat, then climbed in behind him. All the way home, she’d continued her recitation, though no longer of whole poems, as I’d noticed, but stringing together verses from different poems and different poets, shifting meters slightly on occasion, yet seamlessly sewing the disparate lines into a perfect fabric of meaning:

Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did,
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is to keep that hid.

It was to me a demonstration of towering skill, and she had done it as easily and with as little note as I might have spun out “Humpty Dumpty.”

“Dave?”

I came back to the present, the modest room where Santori sat behind his desk. “Yes?”

“Did you hear my question?”

“I guess I didn’t,” I said.

“I asked what first alerted you that Diana might have a problem?”

“I suppose in one way or another, I’ve always been on the alert.”

“Why?”

“We have a family history,” I told him. “My father was paranoid.”

“Institutionalized?”

“Twice,” I said.

I remembered the first instance, how the proverbial “men in white coats” had arrived, seemingly out of nowhere, on the day after my father had stared at me in his mad ire, It’s you, then rushed up the stairs to run his bath.

“The first time was when I was five,” I told Santori. “Diana was nine.”

“How long was your father in the hospital?”

“About a month, I think. Diana and I were placed in foster care. A nice old couple. They had a farm.”

“And then you were both returned to your father?”

“Yes.”

“Any other mental illness in your family?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“On your mother’s side?”

“My mother left us,” I said. “I never knew her or anything about her.”

Santori nodded. “When was your father institutionalized the second time?”

“When Diana and I were in college,” I said. “I was a freshman. Diana was a senior at Yale. She was on full scholarship. She gave that up to take care of my father. She did that until he died.”

“And after that?”

“She lived alone for a while, then got married. A few months later Jason was born.” I shrugged. “That’s about it, her history.”

Santori nodded. “Okay, let’s move forward then,” he said casually. “What’s been happening lately? With Diana, I mean.”

I told him what Leonora Gault had told Abby, that Diana walked about in the early morning hours, and that she seemed unwilling to let people into her apartment.

“So you’ve never been in her apartment?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t,” I answered.

He picked up a pad and pen, leaned back in his chair, and placed the pad on his upthrust knee. “What else have you found troubling about Diana?”

I told him about the e-mails and faxes, my sense that Diana was doing research of some kind.

“Is this a new behavior?” Santori asked. “Delving into research?”

“No,” I answered. “She’s always had a great deal of curiosity.”

I thought of all her many passions, the collections she’d maintained as a child, everything from seashells to the souvenirs she’d gathered on the modest trips we’d taken with the Old Man, a little piece of cobblestone from New York City, a bit of ground from Gettysburg. How many times had I seen her take out one of these small tokens of our travels, peer at it intently or press it to her ear, always with that little crinkling in her brow.

Santori wrote a brief note then looked back up at me. “Please continue.” He smiled warmly. “The devil is in the details.”

I told him about the trip to Dover Gorge, the passage from Price’s book that Diana had recited. He asked me to tell him what was in the passage, and listened quietly as I described it. When I finished, he laughed softly. “Well, it’s certainly not an alarming piece of work, is it?”

“No,” I said.

“Why do you think that passage appealed to her?” Santori asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it interested her enough to look up the guy who wrote it. She found out that he was still alive, and she went to his house.”

Santori took another note. Then he said, “What do you know about this visit?”

I told him about Ray Pendergast, the voice he’d claim to hear, the murder he suspected, a little brother down the well.

“I don’t know what’s in Diana’s mind,” I added. “But I do know she spends hours and hours at the library.”

“She’s never told you what she’s reading there?”

“No, but I saw some of her notes, stuff about sound, mostly.”

“Do you think that she’s somehow covering something up?”

“Yes, I do.”

A pause, then, “Dave, what was your relationship with Diana before Jason died? Were you close?”

“Yes.”

“And after he died?”

“I guess we’re not as close now.”

“How do you feel about that?”

This sounded like a question from Spellbound. I could almost hear Gregory Peck asking it of Ingrid Bergman, but I answered it anyway. “I miss her,” I admitted.

Santori leaned forward in his chair and eyed me closely. “Has she gotten close to anyone else? I mean, since Jason’s death?”

“My daughter.”

“Really? In what way?”

“Patty’s gotten taken in by all this stuff Diana believes.”

“But you don’t quite know what Diana believes,” Santori reminded me.

“I know she thinks her husband is ‘evil,’” I said. As if it were Exhibit A in a case against my sister, I took out the single square of yellow paper I’d found on Mark’s windshield, and handed it to Santori.

“Diana put this on her husband’s car,” I told him.

“Ex-husband,” Santori corrected. He read the note then passed it back to me. “What do you think she’s accusing him of?”

The word fell from my mouth like a drop of blood. “Murder.”

He regarded me intently for a moment, then asked the one question that surprised me. “Do you believe that, too?”

“No,” I answered instantly. “If I did, I’d help her find the evidence.”

Santori hesitated briefly, then said, “What options have you considered?”

I shrugged. “What options do I have?”

“Well, I take it Diana’s never hurt herself, right? Or hurt anyone else, for that matter?”

“No.”

“Would she talk to me?” Santori asked. “Probably not,” I said.

“Would she submit to any kind of evaluation?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Which means, of course, that she wouldn’t voluntarily seek treatment,” Santori said. ” That’s not unusual, of course. Part of mental illness is not to perceive mental illness.”

“So what can be done?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid,” Santori said. “Because she hasn’t done anything. Evidently she feels that her husband is a murderer. Okay. Fine. But other than that little note, she hasn’t done anything about it.”

“So we just wait until she does?”

“Yes, of course, we do,” Santori answered. He nodded toward the small yellow slip I still held in my hand. “Clearly Mark’s her target.” He looked at me pointedly. “I mean, no one else is in the line of fire, right?”

“No one else,” I said, then thought, But Patty.

“So you were no longer focused on Diana?” Petrie asks.

“No,” you admit.

“Or Mark?”

“Only as a means,” you answer; though you cannot be sure at what point the plot actually began to form. For a moment, you see yourself in images of Shakespearean villainy. Richard. lago. You have not thought of these figures since you left Victor Hugo Street. How much, how very much, you have buried, half a lifetime of pure learning.

Petrie draws a long breath, and you hear his mortality in the slight wheeze at the end. Another death approaching. Far off still, perhaps, but gaining ground.

You recall a saying of Cocteau’s, that Death is not really the issue, only the me .  .  . me .  .  . me .  .  . who is dying.

Me. Me. Me.

Three deaths.

How odd now, the little firings of your mind.

Petrie taps his pen against the notepad, and you wonder if he does this in order to return you to this room, his questions. Are you drifting away now, drifting into your own imagined world .  .  . like Dad?

“Coffee.” You blurt the word so suddenly, perhaps even vehemently, that Petrie is clearly startled.

“You want coffee?” he asks.

“Yes,” you answer, though what you really want is something grounded in reality, a taste, or perhaps nothing more than the feel of a warm cup in your hand. “Please.”

Petrie rises, walks to the urn, pours the last of the coffee into a Styrofoam cup.

“Thank you,” you say politely when he hands it to you.

He sits down, picks up the pen. “Okay, where were we?” He looks at his notes. “Oh yes,” he says. “Mark.”

You see his face, but it is not his face. lt is the face you think Diana saw when she thought of him, a hideous mask.

“Santori called him the ‘target’?” Petrie asks.

“Which he was.”

“An innocent man.”

“No one is that,” you say grimly.

“Wrongly accused.”

You take a sip from the cup, feel the tepid fluid in your mouth, wonder what it would taste like, truly innocent blood.