Stephen White: Blinded

So I didn’t delay at the door. I didn’t want this to be any harder to do than it felt like it was already. I took my left hand out of my pocket, extended a finger, and touched the doorbell.

He came to the door quickly, within seconds. I could see the shadow of his eyeball as it darkened the peephole. He didn’t open the door quickly, though. He stood behind the closed door and watched me, and watched me, and watched me through the tiny lens embedded in the door.

I checked my wristwatch after a while and began timing our little standoff. In other circumstances, with another person, I might have chosen a strategy other than dawdling, perhaps peppering the doorbell with repeated pushes, or maybe calling out, “Come on, open the door.”

But not then. Not with him. With him I stood back a step and allowed him to see me clearly. Every couple of minutes I pulled my hands from my pockets and turned completely around so that he could be confident that I wasn’t hiding anything behind my back.

Six minutes and ten seconds passed before he finally relented to some internal pressure I probably couldn’t fathom and opened the door. When the time came, he didn’t open it just a crack. He flung it wide open as though that had been his plan all along.

His physical appearance was a bit of a shock to me. He was wearing gray cotton sweats on top of a nylon running suit, had dark glasses over his eyes, and had a bandanna tied over his mouth and chin like he was Jesse James preparing to knock over a bank.

“Hello, Craig,” I said. “I think I have something of yours. Can we talk?”

“You’re the one,” he said. “You’re the one.”

Craig didn’t invite me inside, which didn’t surprise me. I sat on the steps leading up to his town house while we talked. The whole time he stood a few feet from me with his back to the front door. He was more wary of me than he was during our office visits, but I’d anticipated that he might be. The therapy session that Sharon Lewis had busted in on and aborted late the previous afternoon was certain to take a considerable toll on someone like Craig, especially in the trust-your-therapist department.

Within minutes of sitting down on Craig’s porch I reached a clinical decision about what I needed to do, but I didn’t decide exactly how to go about doing it until another fifteen minutes passed. When I explained my thinking to him, Craig was so agreeable with my plan that I guessed he’d arrived at some version of it himself long before I’d arrived at his door. I’d hoped he would be cooperative, but I was prepared to do it the hard way if I had to.

His anesthesiologist parents lived in a lavish house they’d recently built a few blocks away on Third Street. To their credit, they both rushed to their son’s home within minutes when I phoned and told them what I had in mind.

Craig chose to take an ambulance to the psychiatric hospital across town, not to ride over with his parents. Although I didn’t understand his reasons, I supported his decision. Reluctantly, his parents did, too. When I phoned for the ambulance, I requested that a police patrol car come by, as well. I hadn’t placed a person on a seventy-two-hour mental health hold for a while, and I had to ask the patrol officer for remedial instruction on how to go about it. Despite the fact that Craig was agreeable to being admitted to the hospital, I didn’t want him changing his mind and discharging himself before he was stabilized by the combination of medicine and a safe, controlled environment.

I didn’t accompany the Adamson family to the hospital. As the ambulance drove off, I turned my collar back up, stuffed my hands back into my pockets, and commenced the short stroll back to my office. I had a few calls to make to assure medical backup for Craig’s admission and to get initial orders to the nurses on the unit.

I’d see Craig again the next day as an inpatient. I thought I knew where the psychotherapy session with him would begin. Craig had already admitted calling me that night about Adrienne’s fake malpractice case. He’d denied, however, that the listening equipment that had been planted in my office belonged to him.

That troubled me. That’s where I thought we’d start.

Carmen and I could have lost some important seconds by engaging in a how-could-I-be-so-stupid contest, but we mutually decided not to bother. We both knew it would have ended up a draw.

If the Malone home was a good example of the breed, whatever elegance and purity of design the Craftsman-era architects had built into the floor plans of their bungalows did not extend into basement layout. Holly’s basement was a dark, confusing warren of tiny rooms with low ceilings. The aroma in the cellar was of moist concrete, standing water, and air freshener. I thought it was the same flowers-in-a-can Glade that Sherry liked to make such a show of spraying after I used the bathroom.

On our way down to the basement I was a few risers above Carmen. The stairs didn’t squeak as we descended. Not a peep, which I thought was evidence of rather impressive construction.

Rooms opened up onto each side of the postage-stamp-size landing at the bottom of the stairs. We paused at the landing, our bodies touching at our hips. The phone was still at my ear. Once again I whispered, “Gibbs?”

Nothing came back into the earpiece. I shook my head at Carmen. She nodded and tilted her head to the left, so that’s the direction we headed first.

She was still walking point.

Cellar noises? Nothing I didn’t expect. Furnace sighs, plumbing burps, old-house creaks. But no more pounding. Above us the scampering of feet as children and parents rushed from the house had stopped.

The first room to our left was a furnace room with an alcove that had a workbench built in under a window well.

In the dark basement my eyes found shapes but no details. As I followed Carmen toward the door that would take us to the next surprise space in the maze, my foot brushed something on the floor that I hadn’t seen. Carmen heard the noise I made. She stopped.

I crouched down and felt along the cold concrete surface with my hand.

I lifted a woman’s shoe. A clog. Not really a clog; Sherry used another name for shoes like it, but I couldn’t remember what. Why? I really didn’t care.

Had Holly been wearing clogs in the kitchen that morning? I should have remembered, but the picture in my head of Holly preparing the turkey didn’t go all the way down to the floor.

Carmen leaned over to touch the shoe. Feeling what it was, she took it from me and set it aside. With her head close enough that I could feel her breath on my cheek, she said, “Let’s go.”

The next room was small and seemed to be full of stuff. Holly probably called it her storage room. But I could tell from the haphazard pattern of shadows that it was the place she stashed the junk she didn’t know what else to do with. Storage is one thing. Sticking stuff in a room is another thing entirely. There’s a big difference. Sherry did storage. I stuck stuff in rooms.

Carmen’s eyes must have adjusted to the dark better than mine. She found a path through the stuff, and we were across that room and through another door in seconds.

The next room we entered was a bathroom. A window well provided enough light that I realized that “bathroom” was a generous description for the space. It was a tiny concrete room with inelegant plumbing and a couple of fixtures that existed in the time warp between modern and antique. Despite the shadows I could see streaks of rust on the porcelain surfaces of both the sink and the toilet.

Carmen reached behind her and held out her hand to stop my progress. Her fingers found me just below my belt.