Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

His computer chimed. Brennan said, “There it is already. Didn’t take long at all.”

“You have the file there?”

“I do,” Brennan said. “Okay.” He looked at the screen, his eyebrows rising in surprise and then lowering in puzzlement. After a minute or so, he looked at Tanner and said softly, “Okay, I see. So, well, Mr. Tanner, is there a reason you sent this to me? It just seems very personal.”

“Personal?”

Brennan turned his monitor so Tanner could see what was on the screen. “I’m not sure I should be reading this.”

On the monitor was a document headed: “McLean Hospital — Harvard Medical School.” Centered at the top of the page it said, “Psychiatric Evaluation of Michael E. Tanner.” It was signed “Dr. Raymond Osment, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry.” Shocked, Tanner skimmed the document, his glance snagging on phrases like “florid paranoid psychosis” and “delusional thinking” and “psychotic break” and “schizoid personality disorder.” He read things like “convinced his phone was being tapped” and “same people day after day” and “his computer being remotely controlled by unknown persons” and “DSM IV 295.30.”

“This is bullshit!” Tanner whispered. He looked at Brennan, who averted his eyes. “I don’t know where the hell this came from, but it’s a fraud. It’s a plant. This is just an attempt to discredit me — to make me seem crazy.”

“I know,” Brennan said gently. He stood up. “I also know how stressful the death of a close friend can be. Can I — let me walk you to the elevator.”

“I can show myself out,” Tanner snapped and stood as well.

“No, I’ll walk you there,” Brennan said.

But Tanner had already turned to leave. Now the editor had reason to believe he was out of his mind, and trying to convince him otherwise was a waste of time.

“I’ll accompany you, Mr. Tanner,” Brennan said, following him close behind. “Please don’t make me call Security.”

The house was in a wealthy part of Boston called Chestnut Hill, an area of leafy streets and large houses and private schools. It was a redbrick Georgian mansion with ten bedrooms (or so Sarah had said; he wasn’t going to double-check).

Looped around the front door handle was a device that looked like an oversized padlock. Tanner entered the four-digit code on the lockbox’s keypad, and it unlocked. He pulled it open and removed the front door key.

Inside, it smelled like apple cider and fresh paint. He’d heard that mulling apple cider in the kitchen produced a smell that most people found welcoming; maybe that was a trick Sarah had employed.

Because the owners of the house didn’t live here anymore, but you couldn’t tell that at first glance. Potential buyers would see the Persian carpets and the elegant furniture and admire the spare but perfect décor. They wouldn’t know that all the furnishings were on loan, put there by someone who specialized in staging houses for sale. In the entry hall there were fresh flowers in a glass vase on a demilune card table in a nook by the landing of a swooping staircase. The flowers were probably changed daily by the stager. In the front sitting room, on a coffee table, was a neat stack of oversized art and photography books, expertly askew, probably borrowed from the stager’s warehouse. In the kitchen, besides the pot of apple cider that he’d smelled, there were a few, mostly very expensive, appliances on the counters. A bowl of perfect fresh fruit, fresh flowers on the marble-topped island, and nothing in the Sub-Zero. The dining room table was set for a dinner party, with blue hydrangeas in low vases at the center of the table. No family photos anywhere, but that was deliberate too. They wanted buyers to imagine the house as their own.

Tanner turned on lights as he entered. He went to the kitchen, looked for a drinking glass for some water, which was when he discovered the cabinets were empty. He drank from the tap in the soapstone sink. Then he went upstairs to the master bedroom and saw, at the center of the room, a king-size-plus bed with a magnificent silk duvet cover. Not a bad place to crash.

He set the alarm on his phone to two A.M., figuring he could at least get a couple of hours of sleep.

As he tried to fall asleep, he found himself thinking about the Box again.

A few years after Tanner’s father died, he was sitting with his mother at the old kitchen table, drinking coffee from beans he’d bought in Guatemala and his company had roasted. She complimented him on the coffee and then said, “You did it, didn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“This.” She held up her coffee mug. “Your dream.”

“Tanner Roast?”

“Yes. Tanner Roast. You’ve wanted to start your own company since you were a boy.”

“I guess.”

“I’m so proud of you. Your dad would have been proud of you.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tanner said dismissively, pleased but embarrassed.

“Do you know how old I was when I had you?”

“Twenty-one, twenty-two, right? Young.”

“Daddy was twenty-six. We—” She hesitated a moment, then proceeded. “We weren’t planning on having kids just yet.”

“I was an accident?”

“Pretty much, yeah. A blessed accident.”

“You’re kidding! Is that why you guys got married then?”

“We were going to get married anyway. But that sort of sped things up. In our world, in our families, that was what you did. So Daddy knew he had to get serious. Make a living. And you know something, we wouldn’t have it otherwise for the world.”

“So the barbecue place, Tanner Q—”

“He was really thinking about a chain of barbecue restaurants, like the places he used to go when he was a kid in Kansas City.”

“So he gave up on the barbecue place and got a job in insurance because he was having a baby.”

“He had to make sacrifices. That’s what you do when you have kids. You do what you have to do. You make a choice. And you do it out of love.”

“And you put it away in the attic,” Tanner said, moved. His father had talked about throwing “that crap” away, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d kept the Box.

The Box was where you put your dreams.

The iPhone’s alarm pierced a disturbing dream. He bolted upright.

Ten minutes later he was driving in Sarah’s little green Fiat 500, which he’d parked a few blocks away. His Lexus remained parked on Huron Avenue, no doubt collecting parking tickets.

The streets were empty, and he got to Brighton in fifteen minutes. Spotting a residential-looking street, he pulled over and parked. The street was dim, lit by a distant streetlamp, the asphalt pitted and broken. A few lights were on in windows, probably night owls, but all was still.

He waited ten minutes, the radio playing quietly, and constantly checked his rearview and side mirrors. When he was sure no car was following him — as sure as he could be, anyway — he made a U-turn and drove over to Mayfield Street, three blocks from Tanner Roast, and pulled over again and waited.

After five minutes he was satisfied, again, that no one was lurking nearby.

He parked and walked, instead of directly to the office, around three sides of the block, looking for loiterers, or people sitting in dark cars, until he came to the seldom-used side door. He inserted his key card, which buzzed it open. The inner door was locked with a funky-looking narrow key. An Abloy lock, made by a Swedish company, supposedly unpickable. After a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood, Tanner had had the warehouse and office rekeyed. Only he and Lucy and Sal had keys to the exterior doors.

Of course, that didn’t mean that government agents couldn’t break in. Surely they had ways.