Keith Ablow - Compulsion

I wanted Lilly to keep her disgust flowing, to keep her emotional wound open and let her infection drain. "He liked saying it," I said. "It excited him."

She closed her eyes. Instead of growing angrier, she blushed. "Here's something weird: It's one of the things that my husband likes, too, I guess. On the honeymoon, he asked me to let him look at me in… my panties."

"Did you let him?" I asked.

She nodded bashfully.

"He just wanted to look at you dressed that way?" I said, inviting her to divulge more.

Her cheeks turned crimson. "While I touched myself," she said quickly.

I felt as though we were only halfway to the core of the problem. Lilly hadn't attacked her husband for admiring her body. She had assaulted herself, injecting herself with dirt. The trigger for her pathology was her shame. "How about you?" I asked. "Did you like it when he watched you that way? When you were touching yourself?"

"I guess I did. I mean I…" She stopped herself mid-sentence. "You know."

"You had an orgasm," I said.

"But then, like a minute later, I felt so disgusting," she said.

"Right," I said. Lilly's trouble was in separating her adult sexuality from the confused, frightened, disgusting sexual intimacies shared by word and glance with her grandfather. "It's going to take time to get enough distance on your past experiences with your grandfather to feel good enjoying the present with your husband. You've got to expect a lot of conflicted emotions. And you've got to give yourself the time to feel them and to get over them."

"But I will?" she asked. "I will get over them?"

"Yes," I said.

"I called Dr. James's office," she said. "We have an appointment in a week."

"I'm glad." I felt gratified that she had followed up with Ted. I also felt a pang of regret that I hadn't continued seeing him myself. I missed him-his clear thinking and steady hand. I would have liked his advice on Julia. "He can help you as you remember more. You can trust him completely."

"I'll try to," she said. She looked at me in a way that showed she was still very needy and very vulnerable. "Will you stop by before I leave?" she asked. "They told me I'll be here a few more days. It would just help to know I'm not on autopilot until discharge."

"You'll handle the controls better and better," I said. "But, yes. I'll see you before you leave."

I grabbed a cab back to Chelsea and walked through the door of my loft at 9:17 p.m. By 9:22 I had already gotten the number for Dr. Marion Eisenstadt from Manhattan Directory Assistance, dialed her up, and convinced the woman at her answering service to page her. I hung on for her more than five minutes.

"Dr. Eisenstadt," she said finally. Her voice was younger than I had expected.

"This is Dr. Frank Clevenger, in Boston," I said. "I'm a psychiatrist working with the Bishop family, on Nantucket."

"Yes?" she said.

"I'm calling to…"

"You're a forensic psychiatrist," she said. "Is this a police matter?"

Having a reputation isn't always an advantage. "Not formally," I said. "The Bishops allowed me to evaluate their son, Billy. Now I'm learning as much as I can about the entire family, so I have a complete picture of him when I testify at his trial."

"Okay," Eisenstadt said tentatively.

"And Julia Bishop told me you've treated her. She suggested I call you."

A few moments went by. "I don't think I can tell you much without a release of information from Ms. Bishop."

I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my soul. First of all, Eisenstadt actually existed. Secondly, Julia was clearly her patient. "I completely understand," I said. "We haven't had time to dot our i's or cross our t's. You probably know Billy is still at large. I've had contact with him by phone. Anything you can share with me could help me-either to reach out to him now, or to help him in court later."

"Such as…" she said.

"Such as where you think he fits, in terms of family dynamics," I said, as a throwaway line. "Have you treated Ms. Bishop a long time?"

"Sporadically," Eisenstadt said, still sounding cautious.

"She summers on Nantucket, of course," I said.

Several more seconds passed. "More sporadically than that would explain. I think we've met four, possibly five times, in total. But that's really all I can say."

My confidence in Julia's story plummeted and all that weightiness settled right back inside me. I sat down. "I didn't know it was that infrequent," I said. "Perhaps you still feel you know her well enough to-"

"If you do get that release, I'd be happy to share the file."

"Would that include her letters?" I asked, reaching.

Eisenstadt was silent.

"Ms. Bishop mentioned she's written you, from time to time," I said. I could hear my tone of voice drift toward an investigator's, and I knew Eisenstadt would hear it, too.

"Without a client's written permission, I can't confirm or deny the existence of any specific item in the medical record," she said flatly. "That's the law. I'm sure you're familiar with it."

"I understand," I said. I tried taking another tact. "Shall I have Ms. Bishop specifically authorize release of the letters, or would a general release of information suffice?"

"I can't say any more," she said, coldly this time.

"Of course. Thank you for your time. I'll be in touch."

"Not at all. I'll be happy to talk with you again." She hung up.

I stood there, holding the phone in one hand, rubbing my eyes with the other. It seemed beyond the realm of possibility to think that Julia could have bonded so closely with Eisenstadt in four or five hours as to have written that Eisenstadt "sustained" her, that she meditated "constantly" on their time together, and that she had the will to live only when "I think of seeing you." Eisenstadt was female, after all-the wrong gender to inspire that kind of intimacy from Julia.

Julia had another lover. I didn't know whether that fact itself, or her lying about it, troubled me more. In any case, the investigation had missed a critical beat: Interviewing whoever she had been sleeping with at the time of Brooke's murder.

There was no telling what such an interview would yield. What if Julia and her lover had plans to run off together-plans her lover abandoned when she became pregnant with the twins? What if Julia had come to see Brooke and Tess as the only barrier between her and a fresh start with another man?

Conversely, what if her lover had come to see the twins as an obstacle? A man might do anything to have Julia.

A dull headache had cropped up at the base of my skull. I needed better news. A little relief. Ballast. I dialed State Police headquarters and asked for Art Fields, feeling like I was pulling the lever on a one-armed bandit that had just swallowed my last coin. He picked up a minute later. "Frank Clevenger calling," I said.

"Glad you called."

"Do we know whose prints are on that negative yet?" I asked.

"Just one person's," Fields said tentatively. " Darwin Bishop's."

I felt like I had hit the jackpot. But Fields's voice didn't have celebration in it. "You don't sound satisfied with that," I said.

"There aren't any other prints," he said. "Not Billy Bishop's. Not anyone's. I would have liked to see one unidentified stray-from whoever processed the roll, some clerk in a store, whoever shot the film for Bishop and turned it over to him. Somebody."

"Wouldn't those people be trained to hold the negatives without touching the surfaces?" I asked. "Don't some of them wear gloves?"

"But a lot of them screw up, don't care, or whatever," Fields said. "So you have to wonder whether someone went to the trouble to keep the negative extra clean before it made its way to Bishop. And you have to wonder why."