Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

“It’s secured. Do you happen to know her password?”

Lucy nodded. “It’s BL-a-go-go.”

Frost keyed it in as Lucy spelled it out for him. When the home screen loaded, he opened up the calendar application. The only appointment listed for the week, other than last night’s party, was a dentist appointment for the previous day at nine in the morning. The calendar listed the dentist’s name and number, and he slid out his cell phone and dialed the office.

He explained who he was to the receptionist and asked his question. Then he hung up.

“Brynn was scheduled for tooth whitening on Thursday morning,” Frost said. “She never showed up.”

“Weird. Brynn was fussy about her teeth.”

“I’d like to know where she was that day,” Frost said.

“I’m sorry, but I have no idea. She didn’t say anything.”

Frost didn’t know if Brynn’s missing time was connected to what happened to her, but he didn’t like the fact that she was off the grid so soon before her unexplained breakdown. And that she was acting as if she didn’t even know what day it was.

“Was Brynn seeing a shrink?” he asked Lucy. “Gabe said she went to see someone about her fear of cats.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Brynn was really high on her. She said I should see her for my bridge thing.”

“When was this?”

“A few weeks ago. The shrink was pretty expensive. Her parents gave her a couple grand for the treatment. That’s how much Gabe meant to her. She didn’t want the cat thing to get in the way of their relationship.”

“Gabe thought the treatment had a strange effect on her memory.”

Lucy nodded. “That’s right. Brynn said the goal was to make you forget whatever was causing your problem. Take away the memory, take away the fear. I guess it worked. Suddenly, Brynn loved cats.”

“What was the shrink’s name?” he asked. “Do you remember?”

“Sure, because it was a little creepy. Francesca Stein. You know — Frankie Stein? Frankenstein? We joked about it. I have one of her cards. Do you want it?”

“I do.”

Lucy went over to her side of the apartment and rummaged through her nightstand drawers. She came back and handed him a business card. “Her office is right near Macy’s, so it was pretty convenient for Brynn.”

“Thank you, Lucy.”

Frost headed for the door, and Lucy hesitated, as if there was more she wanted to say. He thought she wanted to ask him out, but he knew she wouldn’t. It was too easy to follow the path you were on, rather than looking for cross-trails that might take you somewhere scary. He was like that, too.

“Well, say hi to Shack for me,” Lucy said lamely.

“I will.”

“Hey, did you ever catch the guy that killed the old woman? You know, Shack’s original owner?”

“Yeah, that was easy,” Frost told her with a grin. “He showed up at a hospital about two hours after the murder. Bleeding profusely. He had cat scratches all over his body.”

Frankie waited for her sister at Zingari, which was their traditional meeting spot twice a week. She had a glass of Russian River pinot noir in front of her, along with an order of cozze . That was her dinner. The jazz bar was loud, with a nighttime piano and saxophone duo rising in a mellow beat over the voices of the crowd. A candle flickered on her table. She leaned back into the cushioned bench and watched the reflections of faces in the mirrored wall.

Pam was late. As usual. But it didn’t matter. She sipped wine and lost herself in the noise. The garlic mussels were perfect.

She checked e-mails on her phone. Most of the messages were business related, which she could answer in a sentence or two. Follow-up on articles she’d published in scientific journals. Queries from colleagues. Conference invitations from around the world. She’d spoken on memory reconsolidation on nearly every continent over the past decade. In her field, she was widely known, but her fame had also brought controversy. Many of her peers disagreed bitterly with the ethics of her treatments, and they’d waged an academic war to discredit her.

Frankie didn’t care. What mattered to her was the outcomes for her patients.

Fame as a therapist had other strange side effects, too. Every night, when she scrolled through her e-mail, she found messages from ordinary people. Some were harmless. Some were desperate. Others were hate mail she’d learned to ignore. She clicked on one as she drank her wine:

You are playing God. You are going to Hell, and I am praying for your salvation.

She deleted the message, along with several others in a similar vein. She kept the e-mails from people who had read her book and wanted to share stories of how their own painful memories had taken over their lives. Many wanted help, and she could reply to those from her office in the morning.

There was one message left that she hadn’t opened. The e-mail had no subject line. When she checked the date stamp, she saw that it had come into her in-box only five minutes earlier.

Frankie opened the message, which contained one line:

Remember me?

There was nothing else. No signature. No attachment. She checked the return address of the sender and saw,

thenightbird@gmx.com

Frankie’s brow furrowed with puzzlement. Something about the message unnerved her more than the others. She wasn’t sure what it was. She’d received much worse from strangers. This was nothing. And yet—

She realized what was bothering her. When she checked her name, she saw that the message had come to her personal e-mail account, not the business e-mail address from her website. Her personal address was private. She gave it out only to family and friends, and to a very small number of patients whom she considered at risk of suicide. Even when she muted her phone at night, that e-mail address was programmed to ring through and alert her to a new message.

“Fan mail?”

Frankie looked up. Her favorite waiter, Virgil, hovered over her table with a bottle of wine. He had a luxuriant wave of shock-white hair that even women envied. His dark eyes were wicked, and his lips curled into a permanent smirk. He was tall and wore a tight black shirt and black pants.

She put down her phone. The battery was low, so she removed a portable charger from her purse and connected it. “Someone’s praying for my soul again.”

“Well, you and me need all the help we can get,” Virgil replied. “I figure I’m on the smite list if God gets bored. I keep looking up at the sky for a lightning bolt.”

“This is California, Virgil. When the smite comes, it’ll be an earthquake.”

Virgil spread his long arms wide. “Did you feel that? Was that a tremor?”

Frankie laughed. Virgil could always make her laugh.

“More fruit of the vine?” he asked her.

“Definitely.”

Virgil refilled her glass. His pours were generous. She was a regular, and she tipped well. The other servers at the restaurant knew that Virgil took the table whenever Frankie, Pam, and Jason came in. Frankie liked him. He was a San Francisco party child, always short of cash and crashing with gay friends. He was technically homeless, but nothing vanquished his sense of humor, which Frankie admired. He was proof that you could still live off the kindness of strangers.

“Where’s your sister tonight?” he asked.

Frankie was about to answer when a voice called from behind him: “I’m here, I’m here!”

Pam threaded her way toward the table through the Friday crowd. She had a way of parting the seas as she walked. A shopping bag from Nordstrom Rack dangled from one finger. With a toss of her long bottle-blond hair, she slid into the chair opposite Frankie and gave Virgil a grin. She slid off her sunglasses.