Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

“But that wasn’t for you?”

“Nope. All I wanted was to be a psychiatrist. Fought him tooth and nail. He said if you become a shrink, it’ll chew you up, make you miserable, make you crazy and kill you.”

“So,” Lis said, “he was a psychiatrist.”

“That he was.”

“Did it kill him?”

“Nope. He retired to Florida.”

“About which, I won’t comment,” she said. He smiled. Lis added, “Why?”

“How’s that?”

“Why psychiatry?”

“I wanted to work with schizophrenics.”

“I’d think you’d make more money putting rich people on the couch. Why’d you specialize in that?”

He smiled again. “Actually, it was my mother’s illness. Say, is that the letter there?”

He took it in his short, feminine fingers and read it quickly. She could detect no reaction. “Look at this: ‘… they are holding me and have told lIes About Me to waShingtOn and the enTIRE worlD.’ See what he’s really saying?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Look at the capitalized letters. ‘I AM SO TIRED.’ ”

The encoded message sent a chill through her.

“There are a lot of layers of meaning in Michael’s world. ‘Revenge’ contains the name ‘Eve.’ ” He scanned the paper carefully. “ ‘Revenge,’ ‘eve,’ ‘betrayal.’ ”

He shook his head then set the letter aside and turned his hard eyes on her. She suddenly grew ill at ease. And when he said, “Tell me about Indian Leap,” a full minute passed before she began to speak.

Heading northeast from Ridgeton, Route 116 winds slowly through the best and the worst parts of the state: picturesque dairy and horse farms, then small but splendid patches of hardwood forests, then finally a cluster of tired mid-size towns studded with abandoned factories that the banks and receivers can’t give away. Just past one of these failed cities, Pickford, is a five-hundred-acre sprawl of rock bluffs and pine forest.

Indian Leap State Park is bisected by a lazy S-shaped canyon, which extends for half a mile from the parking lot off 116 to Rocky Point Beach, a deceptive name for what’s nothing more than a bleak rock revetment on a gray, man-made lake about one mile by two in size. Rising from the forest not far from the beach is what the State Park Service, still overly generous, calls a “peak,” though it’s really just a flat-topped summit six hundred feet high.

These rocks have their ghosts. In 1758 a small band of Mohegans, trapped on the side of this mountain, jumped to their deaths rather than be captured by rival Pequots. The women flung their screaming children before them then leapt to the rocks below with their men. Lis could still recall in perfect detail the bad, earnest illustration in her fifth-grade textbook of a squaw, looking more like Veronica Lake than a princess of the Mohican Confederacy, reaching for her tearful child as they were about to sail into the air. The first time she’d come here, a skinny wan girl, Lis walked these trails close to tears, thinking of the sorrow-whole families flying through the air. Even now, thirty years later, sitting across from Kohler, she felt the chill horror the story had evoked in her childhood.

Six months ago, on May 1, the Atchesons and the Gillespies-a couple they knew from the country club-planned a picnic at Indian Leap. Accompanying them were Portia and a former student of Lis’s, Claire Sutherland.

The morning of the outing-it was a Sunday-had begun awkwardly. Just as Lis and Owen were about to leave, he got a call from his firm and learned that he had to go into the office for several hours. Lis was used to his zealot’s schedule but was irritated that he acquiesced today. He’d worked almost every Sunday since early spring. The couple fought about it-genteelly at first, then more angrily. Owen prevailed, though he promised he’d meet them at the park no later than one-thirty or two.

“I didn’t realize until later how lucky it was that he won that argument,” she told Kohler softly. “If he hadn’t gone into work… It’s funny how fate works.”

She continued with her story. Portia, Claire and Lis rode with Dorothy and Robert Gillespie in their Land Cruiser. It was a pleasant two-hour drive to the park. But as soon as they arrived, Lis began to feel uneasy, as if they were being watched. Walking to the lodge house to use the phone she believed she saw, in a distant cluster of bushes, someone looking at her. Because she had the impression that there was something of recognition in the face, which she took to be a man’s, she believed for an instant that it was Owen, who’d changed his mind and decided not to work after all. But the face vanished into the bushes and when she called her husband’s office, he answered the phone.

“You haven’t left yet?” she asked, disappointed. It was then noon; he wouldn’t be there before two.

“Fifteen minutes, I’ll be on my way,” he announced. “Are you there yet?”

“We just got here. I’m at the gift store.”

“Oh”-Owen laughed-“get me one of those little pine outhouses. I’ll give it to Charlie for making me come in today.”

She was irritated but agreed to, and they hung up. Lis went into the store to buy the souvenir. When she stepped outside a moment later and rejoined the others at the entrance to the park, she glanced over her shoulder. She believed she saw the man staring again, studying the five of them. She was so startled she dropped the wooden outhouse. When she picked it up and looked back again, whoever it might have been was gone.

Kohler asked her about the others on the picnic.

“Robert and Dorothy? We met them at the club about a year ago.”

The foursome had coincidentally picked adjacent pool-side tables. They became friends by default, being about the only childless couples over thirty in the place. This mutual freedom broke the ice and they gradually got to know one another.

Owen and Lis were initially no match socially for their friends. Not yet inheritors of the L’Auberget fortune, the Atchesons lived in a small split-level in Hanbury, a grim industrial town ten miles west of Ridgeton. In fact the country-club membership itself, which Owen had insisted on so that he might court potential clients, was far too expensive for them, and many nights they’d eaten sandwiches or soup for dinner because they had virtually no cash in the bank. Robert, on the other hand, made buckets of money selling hotel communications systems. Owen, a lawyer in a small firm with small clients, masked his chagrin under careful smiles but Lis could see bitter jealousy when the Gillespies pulled up in front of the Atchesons’ tacky house in Robert’s new forest-green Jag or Dorothy’s Merc.

There was the matter of temperament too: Robert had lived in Pacific Heights and on Michigan Avenue, and spent several years in Europe. (“No, no, I kid you not! It was Tourette sur Loup. Ever hear of it? A medieval city in the mountains northwest of Nice, and what do we find in the town square? A cross-dressing festival. Really! Tell ’em, Dot!”)

He seemed ten years younger than his forty-one and you couldn’t help but feel the tug of his boyish enthusiasm. With Robert, all the world was a sales prospect and you willingly let yourself be hawked. Owen had more substance but he was quiet and had his temper too. He didn’t like taking second place to a handsome, wealthy charmer who resembled JFK in both appearance and charisma.

But then last March, when Ruth died, the Atchesons became wealthy. This had little effect on Lis, who’d grown up with money, but it transformed Owen.

For her part Lis too had felt some reservations about the foursome. Her discomfort, though, lay mostly with Dorothy.

Dorothy, with the voice of a high-school cheerleader. With the perfect figure-and the clothes to showcase it. With a round, Middle Eastern face, and dark eyes always flawlessly made up.