43

 

On Tuesday afternoon, one week after the arrest of Kaylie McMillan, a burial service was held on the grounds of the Hawk Ridge Institute.

John Cray stood in a gathering of mourners at the small cemetery near his house. Ordinarily such a ceremony would attract only a handful of staff members, but today’s occasion had brought out nearly everyone who worked at the institute, whether on duty or not.

Even the press had come. A reporter from the local newspaper stood at the back of the crowd, jotting notes in a steno pad. Before the ceremony he had asked Cray for his thoughts.

“It’s always difficult to lose a patient,” Cray had said, his tone cool and steady, “but in this instance it’s especially hard.”

He thought the words would look good in print. He hoped the reporter remembered to identify him as the author of The Mask of Self, and not merely as the institute’s director.

At the head of the grave, the minister of a local church stood with a leather-bound Bible open in his hands, reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. “None of us lives to himself,” he said in his calm, clear voice, “and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord ...”

The day was cloudless and bright, but for the first time there was a taste of autumn in the air. Cray wore a greatcoat over a somber suit. He kept his face expressionless, careful to betray nothing.

Everything had gone so well up to this point. It would be a shame to spoil it all by laughing aloud.

His greatest worry had been the autopsy. The county coroner routinely investigated any death at an institution that received state funding. A cursory examination posed no dangers, but there had been the possibility of toxicology tests.

Luckily no tests had been done. Death by natural causes had been the ruling.

And now all evidence to the contrary had been sealed in a mahogany casket, hanging in a sling over a newly dug grave.

“Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and of the living.”

The Bible clapped shut, and a portable winch operated by one of the groundskeepers hummed into action.

Cray and the others watched as the sling was lowered, the casket committed to the earth.

There was a soft thump as the casket touched bottom. The minister poured sand from a bottle into his open palm, then ritually spilled it into the grave.

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Cray hadn’t cared much for St. Paul’s effusiveness, but he liked this older sentiment. It was the hard, honest dogma of a desert people. What was a person, after all, except earth and dust? What was a life, in the end, except ashes scattered in the uncaring wind? No romanticism here. No illusions. Man was clay.

When the ceremony was over, Cray lingered awhile, watching the groundskeepers remove the sling and fill in the hole with shoveled dirt. One of the men misinterpreted his continued presence as a sign of grief.

“Don’t feel too bad, Dr. Cray,” the man said kindly. “It’s just one of those things, you know?”

There was wisdom in this, too—the unstudied fatalism that got most human beings through the pointless maze of their lives.

“I know, Jake.” Cray smiled. “Still, I wish I could have done more.”

“Nothing you could do. Just happened, is all.”

“I feel it’s my fault, in a way. If I hadn’t agreed to cooperate with the police—”

“You can’t think of it like that. You did what was right. Anyway, you couldn’t have her running around loose.”

“No. No, that wouldn’t have been good ... for anyone.

“The McMillan girl’s better off now,” the man said.

“I suppose she is.”

“And as for Walter ...” The groundskeeper cast a glance at the grave half-filled with dark, damp soil. “Well, maybe he’s better off, too.”

This was the fellow’s first concession to sentiment, and it disappointed Cray. “Maybe so,” he said curtly, and then he left the two men to their work.

Walter was not better off. Walter was dead, and Cray saw no honor in death, no cheer to be found there.

Certainly Walter had not wanted to die. He would have pleaded for his life, if he’d had the wits to do so, on the night Cray killed him.

Cray had waited three days to carry out this necessary task. If Walter had expired immediately after Kaylie’s arrest, questions might have been raised. By Friday, Cray had felt safe enough to act.

He’d made his preparations in the evening. Come midnight, he had visited Walter in his room. At that hour the administration building had been largely empty, and no one had seen him enter.

Even so, he had carefully shut the door behind him, and had kept his voice low....

* * *

“Hello, Walter,” Cray said.

Walter, still awake with a single lamp lit, was sulking on the edge of his fold-out sofa. He looked up with a guilty start when Cray entered.

“Hi, Dr. Cray,” he answered softly, a fearful flutter in his voice.

“You didn’t come to work today, or for the past two days. You hardly even leave this room anymore.”

Walter was silent.

“I hear you’ve been skipping meals at the commissary.”

“Not hungry.”

“Is that it? Or is it that you’ve been afraid to come out and face me?”

No answer.

“You did cause an awful lot of trouble Tuesday night.”

“I know it, Dr. Cray,” Walter agreed morosely. Then, as a plaintive afterthought: “I was just trying to help.”

“Of course you were. But don’t you see, Walter, that you can’t help anybody by thinking for yourself? Your brain is all muddled. What comes out of it is so much goop, of no value to anyone.”

“Kaylie’s dangerous,” Walter muttered. “She could hurt you. I didn’t want you getting hurt.”

“Yes, well, you needn’t worry about Kaylie anymore.”

Walter lifted his head in surprise, showing his first, faintly hopeful smile. “Is she ... dead?”

“Why, no. She’s our guest. Hadn’t you heard?”

“I haven’t been talking to anybody.”

“I see.” Cray had suspected as much, but he was pleased to obtain confirmation of this fact. “Well, Kaylie is staying with us now, locked up tight.”

“So you’re helping her get better?”

“Oh, I’m helping her, all right. But we’re not through talking about you, Walter.”

“I won’t do it again, Dr. Cray.”

“Won’t do what again? Try to kill Kaylie? Follow me when I go out for a drive? Say too much to the wrong people, as you almost did on Tuesday night?”

Walter was confused by the fusillade of questions. “I—I won’t do any of it anymore.”

“But you will. Oh, not right away. You’re too badly cowed at the moment, too humiliated even to emerge from your room for more than one meal a day. But eventually your shame will ebb. You’ll be back to your old self again, won’t you? But not quite your old self. You’ll be different. You’ll have changed.”

“I ... I haven’t ... I didn’t...”

“Oh, yes. You’ve changed, whether you know it or not. You’ve acquired a taste of independence. You know how it feels to act on your own initiative. After all these years of doing what you’re told, running errands on command, eating at assigned times—after all that, you’ve finally discovered your glorious ego.”

“I have?”

“It’s remarkable, really. On your own, you’ve retraced the course of human evolution over the past several thousand years. Have you read the Iliad, Walter? Oh, of course you haven’t. It hasn’t got Curious George in it, so how could you? But if you had read it, you’d know that the Greeks of that period possessed no concept of an integrated person. Limbs and breath and blood, yes—but not a person, a totality, moved by a single will. The arm tensed, or the breath came fast and shallow, or the blood pulsed quicker in the veins, but where was the unique, conscious personality, the mind and self that were the unifying principle of it all? There was no person, not in the modern sense. Imagine living with no notion of a self. But you don’t have to imagine it, do you?”

Walter blinked, plain bewilderment showing on his face.

“Then later,” Cray went on as if he’d heard an answer, “came the more sophisticated Greeks—Sappho the poetess, Archilochus the warrior. They discerned a will in themselves, a will to love or fight. What a find this was! They glorified their newfound will, and subsequent Greeks built avidly on this discovery, until you hear of an inscription on the Delphic oracle’s temple that read simply, Know thyself. A platitude now, but originally a new and dizzying insight. Ever since that day, poor humanity has been striving to know itself, to analyze and organize and prioritize its endlessly fascinating inner life. Today we have built a great, towering edifice of self, a skyscraper of Babel, and we worship at its cornerstones, while neglecting and forgetting and denying what animals we really are. Denying the primal truth for the sake of an ever more elaborate illusion, a game of words, abstractions, superficialities. We’ve cut ourselves off from our true nature, from the instincts that really move us. We deny the earth that made us, while striving after a divinity that doesn’t exist.”

Cray allowed himself a smile, a kindly smile directed at the man who had been, in some way, his friend.

“Now you’ve become one of us, Walter. You’ve become a person with a will and a mind and all the tormented conflict and narrow self-absorption attendant on such things. You’ve arrived, Walter. You’re a man of the modern world at last. Congratulations.”

Walter, dazed under this onslaught, comprehending none of it, merely nodded in stupid gratitude. “Thank you, Dr. Cray.”

Cray laughed. Poor Walter.

“The point is,” Cray said softly, “you’re not what you once were. You’ve become unreliable, a random variable, capable of disrupting all the careful equations of my life.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Walter said with the perfect genuineness of a child.

Cray sat on the couch, comfortingly close to the huge, stoop-shouldered man. “Will you take your medicine?”

Walter blinked. “I always do.”

“No, this is new medicine. It’s used only in very special cases, like yours.”

“I’ll take it, Dr. Cray.”

“You haven’t even asked me what it is.”

“I trust you.”

“Yes, of course you do.”

“I trust you,” Walter said again, more softly. “I think ... I think you’re the greatest man in the world. I think you’re like ...” He turned away, bashful in this moment of absolute sincerity. When he finished his thought, he was blushing. “I think you’re like God.”

Cray uncapped a vial and spilled a few small dark pills into his hand.

“I always wanted to tell you,” Walter went on, his voice hushed with embarrassed reverence. “But I was afraid you’d say I was crazy. I mean ... more crazy than usual.”

“We’re all crazy, Walter,” Cray said without emotion. “The mind itself is our disease. We seek a cure. Now take your medicine.”

Humbly: “Yes, Dr. Cray.”

With the practiced skill of a lifelong patient, Walter dry-swallowed the pills.

“You’ll be feeling tired soon,” Cray said. “I’ll let you rest.”

“Don’t go, Dr. Cray.”

“No? Well, I suppose I can stay a little while.”

As things turned out, Cray lingered in the room for hours, holding Walter’s hand and speaking soft, comforting, meaningless words, while Walter first blinked at his blurring vision, then clutched his belly in a spasm of pain. Finally Walter closed his eyes and slept.

Even then Cray maintained his vigil. He monitored his patient’s pulse, observing the onset of bradycardia, the most common symptom of a digitalis overdose.

Walter’s heart rate dropped below sixty beats per minute, then below forty, then became irregular.

At dawn his heart stopped. Supine on the sofa, his mouth open, head lolling, the big man shivered all over like a wet dog and lay still.

Watching him, Cray reflected that he was indeed like God, in at least one way.

He could take a life.

* * *

He remembered that stray thought now, as he crossed the grounds of the institute under the clean blue sky and the crisp peaks of the Pinaleno range.

He felt whole. He felt strong. He felt—

“Dr. Cray!”

Cray stopped.

He knew that voice.

Damn.

He looked down the long driveway toward the front gate, where a guard had detained a burly, bearded man of seventy.

“Dr. Cray, I demand to speak with you!”

The man’s voice carried easily. Several patients were staring in his direction. An orderly pushing a woman in a wheelchair had stopped on the greensward, his gaze swinging between the unwelcome visitor and Cray himself.

“I know you can hear me!”

“Oh, hell,” Cray muttered.

He would have to acknowledge this man, much as he hated to. Straightening his shoulders, he marched along the driveway toward the gate, where Anson McMillan, Kaylie’s father-in-law, waited by his pickup truck, glaring at Cray through the wrought-iron bars.

McMillan had gray hair and a gray beard. He was all squares and rectangles—hard, blocky face, squat frame, wide shoulders. In his denim shirt and corduroy pants he looked like an aging cowhand, lacking only a lasso and a wide-brimmed hat.

Cray had expected him to return eventually, but not so soon. McMillan had visited the hospital only last week, immediately after Kaylie’s arrest.

“Dr. Cray,” McMillan said again, with dangerous courtesy, as Cray drew close.

“Good afternoon, Mr. McMillan.” Cray kept his voice even. “What seems to be the problem?”

“The problem is that this glorified night watchman”—McMillan threw a contemptuous glance at the guard, who stiffened under the insult—“won’t let me pass.”

“Don’t denigrate my employees, please,” Cray said, reaching the gate at last and coming face to face with McMillan across the iron barricade. “Officer Jansen here is doing his job.”

“His job is to keep me out?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Why?” McMillan barked the word, baring his teeth in a threat display. Cray thought he looked like an ape in a cage.

“Surely, Mr. McMillan, you don’t need it explained to you. It’s my policy to deny access to any visitor who might be reasonably expected to disrupt this hospital.”

“I’m not here to disrupt anything.”

“Your behavior last time suggested otherwise. Perhaps it’s slipped your mind that you had to be escorted off the premises by several members of the institute’s security detail.”

“Slipped my mind—hell.” McMillan chewed the words and spat them out. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a senile old fool.”

Cray kept his expression blankly formal. “I’m merely explaining why Officer Jansen is under orders not to allow you readmittance to this facility.”

“Damn it, I wouldn’t have raised a ruckus if you’d acted sensible about things.”

“Mr. McMillan, I know what’s best for the patients treated here—”

“And visitors aren’t what’s best? Family?”

“You’re not a blood relation.” Cray spread his hands. “Frankly, given the circumstances, I’m surprised you care to see her at all.”

“Well, I do.” McMillan hesitated, then added in a gentler voice, “She needs to talk to someone.”

“She talks to me every day. I see her for therapy. And there are nurses and orderlies to chat with, if she lacks company.”

“That’s not what I mean. She needs somebody who’ll listen to her. Who ... who believes in her.”

“No, Mr. McMillan. That’s precisely what she does not need. A sympathetic listener would only encourage the persistence of her delusions. What’s necessary for her right now is a structured, supervised, carefully controlled environment.” Cray found a smile, cool and calm, and unsheathed it like a blade. “I only want what’s best for her, you know.”

McMillan was not charmed. He took a step closer to the gate, and Cray could see his eyes, coal black, strikingly intense.

“What’s best for her,” McMillan whispered, “is a shoulder to lean on. That’s what she’s always used me for. We’re close, her and me. She’s like a ... like my daughter.”

“A daughter? She murdered your son.”

McMillan was unfazed. “There were reasons.”

“An odd thing for a bereaved father to say. What would possibly induce you to forgive Kaylie for what she did?”

McMillan brushed this question aside. “I didn’t come here to be psychoanalyzed. I came to talk with her. You’re going to let me.”

“No.” Cray shrugged. “I’m not.”

McMillan’s hands were large and callused, and when they squeezed into fists, they became blunt instruments packed with force, meaty hammers that could have opened Cray’s skull in a cascade of blows, if not for the dual barriers of the iron gate and McMillan’s precarious self-restraint.

A moment passed, and then the hands relaxed, weapons no more, and McMillan asked softly, “How long do you intend to keep me away from her?”

“Until she’s ready to face her past.”

“How long?”

“It could take weeks. Months. An indefinite period of time. There’s no way to predict the length or efficacy of a course of treatment.”

McMillan absorbed this, then rejected it with a shake of his shaggy head. “No, sir. Not weeks, months. I’ll see her sooner than that. She’s my daughter-in-law. She’s family. I have an interest. I can force the issue.”

“It would not be advisable—”

McMillan cut him off. “Screw what’s advisable. I’ve been talking to a lawyer. He’s the one who told me to come on over here and give you a second chance to be reasonable. Seeing as how you won’t cooperate, we’ll just have to go over your head.”

“I run this institute,” Cray said sharply.

“But you don’t own it. One of these big health-services companies in Phoenix has got title. You’re their hired hand, is all. And they don’t like bad publicity, do they? I’ve been reading up on this place. Patient got beaten here last month, state government’s investigating. Another patient, Walter somebody, died just three days ago.”

Cray said nothing.

“That’s not the kind of track record your bosses probably want to see. And now here I come—me and my lawyer—demanding action. You think they’ll side with you? If they do, I’ll go to the papers. I’ll get a court order. I’ll make a stink.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“No, I’m sure I won’t—because it’ll never get that far. They’ll overrule you and let me in, pronto, just you wait and see.”

“You’re a determined fellow, Mr. McMillan.”

“Damn straight I am, where Kaylie’s concerned. Now one more time I’m asking: do I get in to see her?”

“I think not,” Cray answered mildly.

“Then we’ll do it the hard way. I’ll be back.”

“No doubt.”

“Soon. Maybe tomorrow, if my lawyer can open the door to the corporate boardroom quick enough, and I’m betting he can. Good day, Doctor.”

Cray watched Anson McMillan walk to his truck and swing open the door on the driver’s side.

“Why are you doing this?” Cray asked suddenly, the question coming as a surprise even to him.

McMillan paused, half-inside the truck, looking at

Cray over the door frame. “Because she’s not crazy,” McMillan said. “She never was.”

Cray was silent. He stood motionless as McMillan slammed the door and started the engine. Even when the pickup reversed out of the entryway and vanished down the road, he did not move.

“Some kind of nut, huh?” Officer Jansen said finally, for no reason other than to break the long silence.

Cray nodded. “Yes.”

“Think he was serious about all that lawyer business?”

“Yes.”

“So ... what are we gonna do?”

“We’ll handle it.” Cray took a step back from the gate and repeated the words. “We’ll handle it.”

He turned and headed back toward the administration building. His mind processed the dilemma, evaluating options, ordering priorities, weighing risks.

McMillan could not be allowed any contact with Kaylie. She knew too much. She would tell him everything. And given what McMillan must know or guess about his son Justin’s past, he might very well put the whole story together, then persuade the sheriff to take a fresh look at the case.

“Dangerous,” Cray murmured, mounting the staircase of the administration building.

Yes. Much too dangerous.

Cray had not avoided arrest this long by taking chances. His survival instinct was finely honed. To save himself, he would do whatever was necessary.

There was only one way to defuse this latest threat. It was a course of action he disliked, one that carried risks and smelled of desperation.

He would dare it, though. He had to. And quickly, before McMillan returned.

Pausing at the front door, he nodded slowly, in silent endorsement of his decision.

Kaylie must die.

Tonight.

A shame, really. He enjoyed having her as his prisoner. He looked forward to their daily sessions, the intricate mind games he played with her. And he would have relished the opportunity to watch her for just a few weeks longer.

To watch her—as she finished going insane.