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  There was a deadly, cold silence on the phone that lasted nearly a minute.

  “What sort of patient?” Tim Senior asked sharply, echoing his son’s query. “Is this someone dangerous?”

  “I don’t know who it is exactly. The letter wasn’t signed. I’m only presuming it is an ex-patient but I don’t really know for certain. In fact, it might not be. The truth is, I don’t know anything yet, for certain.”

  “That sounds vague. Exceedingly vague.”

  “You are correct. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you think this threat is real?”

  Ricky could hear a harsh, hard edge lining the man’s voice.

  “I don’t know. Obviously it concerned me enough to make some calls.”

  “Have you spoken with the police?”

  “No. Sending me a letter doesn’t seem to break the law, does it?”

  “That’s exactly what the bastards just told me.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Ricky said.

  “The cops. I called the cops and then they came all the way over here to tell me they couldn’t do anything.”

  “Why did you call the police?”

  Timothy Graham didn’t immediately answer. He seemed to take in a long breath of air, but instead of calming himself, this had the opposite effect, as if releasing a spasm of pent-up rage.

  “It was disgusting. Some sick fuck. Some slimy sick motherfucker. I’ll kill him if I ever get my hands on him. Kill him with my bare hands. Is your ex-patient a sick fuck, Uncle Frederick?”

  The sudden outburst of obscenity took Ricky aback. It seemed dramatically out of the ordinary for a quiet, well-mannered, and unprepossessing history professor at an exclusive and conservative prep school. Ricky paused, at first a little unsure how to reply.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Tell me what has happened that has made you so upset.”

  Tim Senior hesitated again, breathing in deeply, the noise making a snakelike hissing sound over the telephone line. “On her birthday, if you can believe it. On her fourteenth birthday, of all days. That’s just disgusting . . .”

  Ricky stiffened in his seat. A memorylike explosion burst behind his eyes. He realized he should have seen the connection right away. Of all his relatives, only one by the greatest of coincidences, shared his birthday. The little girl whose face he had so much trouble recalling, and whom he’d met only once, at a funeral. He berated himself: This should have been your first phone call. But he did not let this observation creep into his own voice.

  “What happened?” he asked bluntly.

  “Someone left a birthday card for her inside her locker at school. You know, one of those nice, oversized, tritely sentimental cards that you buy at the mall. I still can’t figure out how the bastard got in there and got the locker opened without being seen by someone. I mean, where the hell was security? Unbelievable. Anyway, when Mindy got to school, she found the card, figured it was from one of her friends, and opened it. Guess what? The card was stuffed with disgusting pornography. Full-color, leave nothing to the imagination porn. Pictures of women tied up in ropes and chains and leathers and penetrated in every imaginable fashion by every conceivable device. Real hard-core, triple-X stuff. And the person wrote on the card: This is what I intend to do to you as soon as I can catch you alone . . .”

  Ricky shifted about in his seat. Rumplestiltskin, he thought.

  But what he asked was, “And the police? What do they tell you?”

  Timothy Graham snorted with a dismissive burst that Ricky imagined had been used on slacker students for years and was likely to freeze them with fear but in this context spoke more of impotence and frustration.

  “The local police,” he said briskly, “are idiots. Complete idiots. They blithely tell me that unless there exists substantial and credible evidence that Mindy is actively being stalked by someone, there’s nothing they can do. They want some sort of overt act. In other words, she has to actually be attacked first. Idiots. They believe that the letter and the enclosures are practical jokes. Probably upperclassmen at the academy. Maybe somebody I gave a lousy grade to last term. Of course, that’s not outside the realm of possibility around here, but . . .” The history professor paused. “Why don’t you tell me about your former patient? Is he a sex criminal?”

  Ricky hesitated himself, then said, “No. Not at all. This doesn’t sound like him at all. Really, he’s harmless. Just irritating.”

  He wondered if his nephew would hear the lies in his voice. He doubted it. The man was furious, flustered, and outraged, and was unlikely to have the ability to recognize a departure from the truth for some time.

  Timothy Graham was silent for a moment. “I will kill him,” he said coldly. “Mindy has been in tears all day. She thinks there’s someone out there who wants to rape her. She’s just fourteen and never hurt a soul in her life and is impressionable as hell and she’s never been exposed to that sort of filth before. It seems like only yesterday she was still into teddy bears and Barbie dolls. I doubt she’ll sleep much tonight, or for the next couple of days. I just hope that the fright hasn’t changed her.”

  Ricky didn’t say anything, and the history teacher continued after pausing to catch his breath.

  “Is that possible, Uncle Frederick? You’re the damn expert. Can someone have their life changed that quickly?”

  Again he didn’t reply, but the question echoed within him.

  “ . . . It’s awful, you know. Just awful,” Timothy Graham burst out. “You try so hard to protect your children from how sick and evil the world really is, then let your guard down for a second and blam! It hits you. Maybe this isn’t the worst case of lost innocence you’ve ever heard of Uncle Frederick, but, then, you’re not listening to your beloved little girl who never hurt a single soul in her entire life, crying her eyes out on her fourteenth birthday because someone somewhere means her harm.”

  And with that, the history professor hung up the telephone.

  Ricky Starks leaned back at his desk. He let a long, slow breath of air whistle between his front teeth. In a way, he was both upset and intrigued by what Rumplestiltskin had done. He sorted through it rapidly. There was nothing spontaneous about the message he’d sent to the teenage girl; it was calculated and effective. He’d obviously put in some time studying her as well. It also showed some skills that Ricky guessed he would be wise to take note of. Rumplestiltskin had managed to avoid security at a school, and had the burglar’s ability to open a lock without destroying it. He was able to leave the school equally undetected and then travel straight down the highway from Western Massachusetts to New York City to leave his second message in Ricky’s waiting room. The timing wasn’t difficult; the drive wasn’t long, perhaps four hours. But it denoted planning.

  But that wasn’t what bothered Ricky. He shifted about in his seat.

  His nephew’s words seemed to echo about in the office, rebounding off the walls, filling the space around him with a sort of heat: lost innocence.

  Ricky thought about these words. Sometimes, in the course of a session, a patient would say something that had an electric quality, because they were moments of understanding, flashes of comprehension, insights that were bristling with progress. These were the moments any analyst searched for. Usually they were accompanied by a sense of adventure and satisfaction, because they signaled achievements along the path of treatment.

  Not this time.

  Ricky felt an unruly despair within him, one that walked at the side of fear.

  Rumplestiltskin had attacked his great-niece at a moment of childish vulnerability. He had taken a moment that should be filed in the great vault of memories as one of joy, of awakening—her fourteenth birthday. And then he’d rendered it ugly and frightening. It was as profound a threat as Ricky could imagine, as provocative as he could envision.

  Ricky lifted a hand to his forehead as if he suddenly felt feverish. He was surprised not to find sweat there. He thought to himself: We think of threats as so
mething that compromises our safety. A man with a gun or a knife and a sexual obsession. Or a drunk driver behind the wheel of a car accelerating down the highway carelessly. Or some insidious disease, like the one that killed his wife, starting to worry away at our insides.

  Ricky rose from his chair and started pacing nervously about.

  We fear being killed. But what is far worse is being ruined.

  He glanced over at Rumplestiltskin’s letter. Ruined. He’d used that word, right alongside destroy.

  His adversary was someone who understood that often what truly threatens us and is hardest to combat is something that stems from within. The impact and pain of nightmare can be far greater than being struck by a fist. And equally, sometimes it is not so much that fist, but the emotion behind it, that creates pain. He stopped abruptly, and turned toward the small bookcase that rested against one of the sidewalls of the office. There were rows of texts arranged there—medical texts, for the most part, and professional journals. Collected in those books were literally hundreds of thousands of words that clinically and coldly dissected human emotions. In an instant, he understood that all that knowledge was likely useless to him.

  What he wanted was to pluck a textbook from one of those shelves, flip to the index, find an entry under R for Rumplestiltskin, then open to a page that gave a dry and straightforward description of the man who’d written him the letter. He felt a surge of fear, knowing that there was no such entry. And he found himself turning away from the books that had to this moment defined his career, and what he remembered instead was a sequence from a novel that he had not read since his college days. Rats, Ricky thought. They put Winston Smith in a room with rats because they knew that was the only thing on this earth that truly frightened him. Not death. Not torture. Rats.

  He looked around his apartment and office, a place that he thought did much to define him, where he’d been comfortable and happy for many years. He wondered, in that second, whether it was all about to change and wondered if it suddenly was about to become his own fictional Room 101. The place where they kept the worst thing in the world.

  Chapter Three

  It was now just midnight, and he felt stupid and utterly alone.

  His office was strewn with manila folders and scraps of paper, stacks of stenographer’s notebooks, sheets of foolscap and an old-fashioned microcassette tape deck that had been out of date for a decade resting at the bottom of a small pile of minicassette tapes. Each grouping represented the meager documentation that he had accumulated on his patients over the years. There were notes about dreams, scribbled entries listing critical associations that patients made, or that occurred to him, during the course of treatment—telltale words, phrases, memories. If any sculpture was designed to express the belief that analysis was as much art as medicine, it could do no better than the disarray surrounding him. There were no orderly forms, listing height, weight, race, religion, or place of national origin. He had no cleverly alphabetized documents delineating blood pressure, temperature, pulse rate, and urine output. Nor did he even have organized and accessible charts, listing patients’ names, addresses, next of kin, and diagnosis.

  Ricky Starks was not an internist or a cardiologist or a pathologist who approached each patient seeking a clearly defined answer to an ailment, and who kept copious and detailed notes on treatment and progress. His chosen specialty defied the science that preoccupied other forms of medicine. It was this quality that made the analyst something of a medical outsider, and why most of the men and women attracted to the profession found it.

  But at this moment, Ricky stood in the center of the growing mess and felt like a man emerging from an underground shelter after a tornado has swept overhead. He thought he had ignored what chaos his life really was until something big and disruptive had torn through, unsettling all the careful balances he’d created. Trying to sort his way through decades of patients and hundreds of daily therapies was probably hopeless.

  Because he already suspected that Rumplestiltskin wasn’t there.

  At least, not in readily identifiable form.

  Ricky was absolutely certain that if the person who’d written the letter had ever graced his couch for any measurable length of treatment he would have recognized him. Tone. Style of writing. All the obvious moods of anger, rage, and fury. These elements would have been as distinctive and unmistakable to him as a fingerprint to a detective. Telltale clues that he would have been alert to.

  He knew that this supposition contained a certain amount of arrogance. And, he thought it would be a poor idea to underestimate Rumplestiltskin until he knew much more about the man. But he was certain that no patient that he’d ever had in any usual course of analysis would return, bitter and enraged, years later, so changed that they could hide their identity from him. They might return, still inwardly bearing the scars that had caused them to seek him out in the first place. They might return frustrated and acting out, because analysis is not some sort of antibiotic for the soul; it doesn’t eradicate the infections of despair that cripple some people. They might be angry, feeling that they had wasted years in talk and nothing much had changed for them. These were all possibilities, though in Ricky’s nearly three decades as an analyst, few such failures had ever happened. At least not that he knew of. But he wasn’t so conceited to believe that every treatment, no matter how long it lasted, was always completely successful. There were bound to be therapies that were less victorious than others.

  There had to be people he hadn’t helped. Or had helped less. Or had lapsed from the understandings that analysis brings, back to some prior state. Crippled again. In despair again.

  But Rumplestiltskin presented a far different portrait. The tone of his letter and the message relayed to his fourteen-year-old great-niece showed a calculating, aggressive, and perversely confident person. A psychopath, Ricky thought, giving a clinical term to someone still unclear in his mind. This was not to say that he didn’t think that perhaps once or twice over the decades of his career he hadn’t treated individuals with psychopathic tendencies. But none who had ever displayed the depth of hatred and fixation that Rumplestiltskin did. Yet someone whom he’d treated less than successfully was connected to the letter writer.

  The trick, he realized, was determining who these ex-patients were, and then tracing them to Rumplestiltskin. Because that was clearly, now that he had thought about it for a few hours, where the connection rested. The person who wanted him to kill himself was someone’s child, spouse, or lover. The first task, Ricky thought aggressively, was determining what patient had left his treatment on the shakiest of circumstances. Then he could start backtracking.

  He maneuvered amid the mess he’d created back to his desk and picked up Rumplestiltskin’s letter. I exist somewhere in your past. Ricky stared hard at the words, then looked back at the piles of notes scattered about the office.

  All right, he said to himself. The first task is to organize my professional history. Find the segments that can be eliminated.

  He sighed out loud. Did he make some mistake as a hospital resident more than twenty-five years earlier that was now returning to haunt him? Could he even remember those first patients? While he was undergoing his own analytic training he had been engaged in a study of paranoid schizophrenics who had been committed to the psychiatric wards at Bellevue Hospital. The study had been about determining predictability factors for violent crimes and had not been a clinical success. But he’d come to know and been involved in some treatment plans for men who went on to commit serious crimes. It had been the closest he’d ever come to forensic psychiatry and he hadn’t liked it much. When his work with the study was finished, he’d immediately retreated back into the far safer and physically less demanding world of Freud and his followers.

  Ricky felt a sudden thirst, as if his throat were parched by heat.

  He realized he knew absolutely next to nothing about crime and criminals. He had no special expertise in violence. Indeed, he
had little interest in that field. He doubted that he even knew any forensic psychiatrists. None were included in his extremely small circle of occasional friends and professional acquaintances with whom he kept current.

  He glanced over at the textbooks lining his shelves. Krafft-Ebing was there, with his seminal work on sexual psychopathology. But that was it, and he rather doubted that Rumplestiltskin was a sexual psychopath, even with the pornographic message he’d sent to Ricky’s great-niece.

  “Who are you?” he said out loud.

  Then he shook his head.

  “No,” he said slowly. “First, what are you?” And then, he told himself, after I can answer that, I will determine who you are.

  I can do this, Ricky thought, trying to bolster his own confidence. Tomorrow I will sit down and rack my memory and create a list of former patients. I will divide them into categories that represent all the stages of my professional life. Then I will start to investigate. Find the failure that will connect me to this fellow, Rumplestiltskin.

  Exhausted, not at all certain that he had accomplished anything, Ricky stumbled out of his office and into his small bedroom. It was a simple, monklike room with a bed stand, a chest of drawers, a modest closet, and a single bed. Once there had been a double bed with an ornate headboard and colorful paintings on the walls, but after his wife’s death he’d given away their bed, choosing something simpler and narrower. The bright knickknacks and artwork that his wife had once decorated the room with were mostly gone as well. Her clothing he’d given to charity, her jewelry and personal items had been sent to her sister’s three nieces. He kept a photograph of the two of them on the bureau, taken fifteen years earlier outside their farmhouse in Wellfleet on a clear, azure summer morning. But since her death he’d systematically erased most of the other, outward signs of her onetime presence. A slow and painful death followed by a three-year erasure.

  Ricky slid out of his clothes, taking time to carefully fold his slacks and hang up his blue blazer. The button-down shirt he wore went into a laundry hamper. He dropped his tie on the bureau surface. Then he plopped down on the edge of the bed in his underwear, thinking that he wished he had more energy. In the bedside drawer, he kept a vial of rarely used sleeping tablets. They were significantly past their expiration date, but he guessed that they would still be potent enough for him that night. He swallowed one and a tiny piece of another, hoping that they would quickly deliver a deep and deadening sleep.