Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

“Nobody understands me sure we’ve got money but money isn’t everything and the other day my housekeeper looks at me like I’m from outer space and it’s not my fault and I get so angry when my mother wants to go shopping on my one day off and I think Samuel’s seeing someone and I think my son’s gay and I just cannot lose these fifteen pounds...”

Their troubles may have been plebeian, even laughably minor at times, but his oath, as well as his character, wouldn’t let Harry minimize them. He worked hard to help his patients.

And all the while he neglected what he really wanted to do. Which was to treat severe mental cases. People who were paranoid schizophrenics, people with bipolar depression and borderline personalities — people who led sorrowful lives and couldn’t hide from that sorrow with the money that Harry’s patients had.

From time to time he had volunteered at various clinics — particularly a small one in Brooklyn that treated homeless men and women — but with his Park Avenue caseload and his wife’s regimen of social obligations, there had been no way he could devote much time to the clinic. He’d wrestled with the thought of just chucking his Park Avenue practice. Of course, if he’d done that, his income would have dropped by ninety percent. He and Linda had had two children a couple of years after they’d gotten married — two sweet daughters Harry loved very much — and their needs, very expensive needs, private school sorts of needs, had taken priority over his personal contentment. Besides, as idealistic as he was in many ways, Harry had known that Linda would leave him in a flash if he’d started working full-time in Brooklyn.

But the irony was that even after Linda did leave him — for someone she’d met at one of the society benefits that Harry couldn’t bear to attend — he hadn’t been able to spend any more time at the clinic than he had when he’d been married. The debts Linda had run up while they were married were excruciating. His older daughter was in an expensive college and his younger was on her way to Vassar next year.

Yet, out of the dozens of patients who whined about minor dissatisfactions, here came Patsy Randolph, a truly desperate patient: a woman telling him about ghosts, about her husband trying to drive her insane, a woman clearly on the brink.

A patient, at last, who would give Harry a chance to redeem his life.

That night he didn’t bother with dinner. He came home and went straight into his den, where sat stacked in high piles a year’s worth of the professional journals that he’d never bothered to read since they dealt with serious psychiatric issues and didn’t much affect the patients in his practice. He kicked his shoes off and began sifting through them, taking notes. He found Internet sites devoted to psychotic behavior and he spent hours online, downloading articles that could help him with Patsy’s situation.

Harry was rereading an obscure article in the Journal of Psychoses, which he’d been thrilled to find — it was the key to dealing with her case — when he sat up, hearing a shrill whistle. He’d been so preoccupied... had he forgotten he’d put on the tea kettle for coffee? But then he glanced out the window and realized that it wasn’t the kettle at all. The sound was from a bird sitting on a branch nearby, singing. The hour was well past dawn.

At her next session Patsy looked worse than she had the week before. Her clothes weren’t pressed. Her hair was matted and hadn’t been shampooed for days, it seemed. Her white blouse was streaked with dirt and the collar was torn, as was her skirt. There were runs in her stockings. Only her makeup was carefully done.

“Hello, Doctor,” she said in a soft voice. She sounded timid.

“Hi, Patsy, come on in... No, not the couch today. Sit across from me.”

She hesitated. “Why?”

“I think we’ll postpone our usual work and deal with this crisis. About the voices. I’d like to see you face-to-face.”

“Crisis,” she repeated the word warily as she sat in the comfortable armchair across from his desk. She crossed her arms, looked out the window — these were all body-language messages that Harry recognized well. They meant she was nervous and defensive.

“Now, what’s been happening since I saw you last?” he asked.

She told him. There’d been more voices — her husband kept pretending to be the ghost of her father, whispering terrible things to her. What, Harry asked, had the ghost said? She answered: what a bad daughter she’d been, what a terrible wife she was now, what a shallow friend. Why didn’t she just kill herself and quit bringing pain to everyone’s life?

Harry jotted a note. “Did it sound like your father’s voice? The tone, I mean?”

“Not my father, ” she said, her voice cracking with anger. “It was my husband, pretending to be my father. I told you that.”

“I know. But the sound? The timbre?”

She thought. “Maybe. But my husband had met him. And there are videos of dad. Peter must’ve heard them and impersonated him.”

“Where was Peter when you heard him?”

She studied a bookshelf. “He wasn’t exactly home.”

“He wasn’t?”

“No. He went out for cigarettes. But I figured out how he did it. He must’ve rigged up some kind of a speaker and tape recorder. Or maybe one of those walkie-talkie things.” Her voice faded. “Peter’s also a good mimic. You know, doing impersonations. So he could do all the voices.”

“ All of them?”

She cleared her throat. “There were more ghosts this time.” Her voice rising again, manically. “My grandfather. My mother. Others. I don’t even know who.” Patsy stared at him for a moment then looked down. She clicked her purse latch compulsively, then looked inside, took out her compact and lipstick. She stared at the makeup, put it away. Her hands were shaking.

Harry waited a long moment. “Patsy... I want to ask you something.”

“You can ask me anything, Doctor.”

“Just assume — for the sake of argument — that Peter wasn’t pretending to be the ghosts. Where else could they be coming from?”

She snapped, “You don’t believe a word of this, do you?”

The most difficult part of being a therapist is making sure your patients know you’re on their side, while you continue pursuing the truth. He said evenly, “It’s certainly possible — what you’re saying about your husband. But let’s put that aside and consider that there’s another reason for the voices.”

“Which is?”

“That you did hear something — maybe your husband on the phone, maybe the TV, maybe the radio but whatever it was had nothing to do with ghosts. You projected your own thoughts onto what you heard.”

“You’re saying it’s all in my head.”

“I’m saying that maybe the words themselves are originating in your subconscious. What do you think about that?”

She considered this for a moment. “I don’t know... It could be. I suppose that makes some sense.”

Harry smiled. “That’s good, Patsy. That’s a good first step, admitting that.”

She seemed pleased, a student who’d been given a gold star by a teacher.

Then the psychiatrist grew serious. “Now, one thing: When the voices talk about your hurting yourself... you’re not going to listen to them, are you?”

“No, I won’t.” She offered a brave smile. “Of course not.”

“Good.” He glanced at the clock. “I see our time’s just about up, Patsy. I want you to do something. I want you to keep a diary of what the voices say to you.”

“A diary? All right.”

“Write down everything they say and we’ll go through it together.”