Gregg Hurwitz - Do No Harm

Again, the clerk was listening to the Dodgers game, staring at the radio as though that would enhance the experience. He broke off his intent focus to glance at the skimpy file. "Not much there, huh?" he said.

David flipped open the file, revealing a single sheet. The note at the top: Admitted 8/13/73 for NPI study under Dr. J. P. Connolly.

A tingling swept across David's body: the feeling of nailing a difficult diagnosis.

August 13. The day of Nancy's attack. Clyde had been admitted for the study twenty-eight years before-to the day. He would have been ten years old. The study was a likely source of his fear of the Neuropsychiatric Institute and of Dash as its representative. Maybe the date had been an unconscious trigger, a precipitating event for Clyde's assaults. Psychologists refer to the phenomenon as the anniversary syndrome-people entering depressions on the anniversaries of the deaths of their loved ones, post-traumatic stress victims feeling their anxiety escalate on the anniversaries of the original trauma.

The study's lead researcher, Dr. J. P. Connolly, had been a world-renowned psychologist. A close friend of David's parents, he had grown somewhat cantankerous in the final years of his life. He'd passed away about a decade ago.

David glanced down the page. The only other note indicated a respiratory infection Clyde had sustained in September of '73-the reason for the file's existence in Medical Records as opposed to the NPI's.

David picked up the phone and reached Dash at the office. He took a few steps away from the counter, lowering his voice, though the desk clerk seemed immersed in the ball game. "Hi, Dash. Did you look for that NPI file I asked you about?"

"Despite my better judgment. Nothing came up under either name."

"I found a peds file for Clyde Slade. Shows he was entered in a study run out of the NPI by Connolly in August of '73."

"That's odd. There's nothing here under Slade-I did a thorough search. Hang on a sec, I'm logged on right now." The sound of keyboard strokes. "Nothing about a Connolly study in August either. Of any kind."

"Why would files be missing?"

"I don't know. Restricted, maybe. Or Connolly could have kept his files at home. He did have funding from a variety of sources."

"But shouldn't there at least be copies at the NPI?"

"Yes. And the journal in which the study was published. But there's nothing."

"All right. Thanks for your help." David hung up, his enthusiasm undercut by the nagging sense of something askew.

The walkway was as David remembered it as a child, a thin path twisting through gardens to the front door. The gardens themselves, however, were hardly recognizable, so overgrown were they with weeds and patches of sourgrass. The trademark marigolds drooped in limp clusters, baked brown by the heat.

David had not been to the Connollys' house in over twenty-five years. He recalled dark leather furniture, thick carpeting, and the pervasive, comforting smell of a pipe. When he knocked on the front door, a distant, warbling voice sounded from within. "Just a minute, please."

Mrs. Connolly's estimate was overly ambitious; it took her nearly two minutes to get to the door. Clutching a tissue that had been worried to shreds, she gazed up at David. Old and quite frail, she wore a heavy cotton nightgown decorated with flowers. The skin of her arms draped in wrinkled sheets over her bones. "Yes?"

"Hello, I'm David. Janet Spier's son." David realized too late that he'd neglected to mention his father.

"Oh my goodness." The woman's eyes grew watery. Her hand described a fretful arc in the air with the tissue. "David, I haven't seen you since God knows. I just can't believe it. How handsome you are." She reached out and stroked the front of his white coat once, reverently.

"It's good to see you, Mrs. Connolly."

"I remember you used to run around wearing your mother's white coat. It would be down to your shins." A faint, sad grin etched itself on her face. "I was so sorry to hear about her."

"Thank you. My father too."

"Oh dear," Mrs. Connolly said. "Oh dear."

"And I'm sorry about your husband. I don't believe we've spoken since he passed. Dr. Connolly was a great psychologist."

"Yes." Her head bobbed with tiny nods, perhaps a Parkinson's tremor. She stepped back, opening the door. "Please come in. It's been so long since I've had a visitor. What prompted you to stop by?"

"I… I actually wanted to know if your husband kept any of his old files and records."

Her face fell with disappointment, and David could have killed himself for it. "Oh, of course. You stopped by on a work matter. You must be awfully busy."

She turned and shuffled slowly back into the musty interior of the house, steadying herself by setting her trembling hands on counters and the backs of chairs.

"My J.P. kept all his files and records. They're in his study, every last one of them, organized by date, color, size. He was very protective about them, but I'm sure he wouldn't mind Janet Spier's son having a look around." She raised her arm up in the air with a giggle, and David recognized, for the first time, the younger Mrs. Connolly he remembered. He followed her patiently down a long, thickly carpeted hall, gripping her arm gently from behind. She paused before a door. "You'd better open it, dear. It sticks. I'm afraid I don't have the strength anymore."

David found he had to throw a little shoulder into the door to get it open. Dr. Connolly's office sat virtually untouched. A magisterial desk and leather chair, a wall of filing cabinets, rows of meticulously organized medical journals. A thick film of dust covered everything, and the smell of pipe smoke that David recalled still tinged the air.

Mrs. Connolly stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the room. "I haven't seen the inside of this room in some time." She shook her head once, as if throwing off sad thoughts, and forced a smile. "Take your time, dear," she said. "I'll be in the living room, watching the TV."

David waited to make sure she safely navigated the dark hall, then closed the door and surveyed the room. Dr. Connolly kept his office impeccably organized, and David located the relevant files in the cabinets in no time. Fear's Legacy-1973.

He pulled out the two general files and set them on the desk. Swirls of dust lifted from the leather blotter and refused to settle. The abstract sat at the front of the first folder. It was titled

FEAR'S LEGACY: SORROW,DISTRESS, AND ANGER.

Fear arousal can be obtained using several stimuli, including but not limited to: noise; sudden change in illumination; sudden unexpected movement; rapidly approaching objects; height; strange people; familiar people in strange guises; strange objects and strange places; threatening animals; darkness. Often, two or more of the above items can be combined to achieve a higher degree of fear arousal (i.e., darkness and the noise of a growling dog's rapid approach). When confronted with fear, children respond in three distinct and predictable ways: They grow immobile, or "frozen"; they increase their distance from one type of object (snakes, loud noises, flashes of light); they increase their proximity to another type of object (mother figures).

Twenty-seven boys between the ages of six and ten were selected from foster homes, orphanages, and delinquent holding facilities. Each subject was removed from his "home" for a period of six weeks and taken through a twelve-phase series of fear-arousal experiments, four trials a day, seven days a week, increasing in intensity. Each set of subjects lived together through the six-week trial, barracks-style, so the contagious effects of fear might also be analyzed. All trials occurred within a controlled environment.

Feeling a growing sense of nausea, David paused to rub some dust from his eyes. Dr. Connolly had chosen children without families. That way, there were no parents to complain. No one to notice if the children deteriorated emotionally as a result of the experiments, or developed abnormal attachment patterns. Further, the study evinced bad science. There was no control group-Connolly had selected children who already, in all likelihood, were emotionally fragile. The experiments were biased before they even got off the ground.