Praying for Sleep (26 page)

That was the extent of physical contact in the L'Auberget family.

Lis heard a clatter not far away. The wind had pushed over a set of aluminum beach chairs beside the garage. She told her sister she was going to put them away and started down the hill. Portia headed up to the house.

Pausing in the driveway, Lis felt a sharp gust of wind — an outrider of the storm. Ripples swept across the surface of the lake and a corner of the tarp covering the sand snapped like a gunshot. Then calm returned, as if the breeze were a shiver passing through a body.

In the silence that followed she heard the car.

The tires crunched on the glistening white stone chips that she and Owen had spread in the driveway last summer during a heat spell. She'd feared then for their hearts under the scalding sun and insisted that they finish the job after dusk. Lis Atcheson knew that the visitor tonight was driving over fragments of premium marble from a quarry somewhere in New England. But for some reason the thought came to her that the sound was of wheels on crushed bone and once there the horrid image would not leave.

The car moved urgently through the stand of pines through which the serpentine driveway ran. It pulled into the parking area, paused then headed toward her. Blinded by the beams, she couldn't identify the vehicle, which stopped a dozen yards away.

Lis stood with arms crossed, her feet separated, frozen like a schoolgirl playing statue. For a long moment neither she nor the driver moved. She faced the car, whose engine was still running, lights on. Finally, before uneasiness became fear, she cleared her throat and walked forward into piercing shafts of white light.

16

"They haven't caught him yet?"

Lis motioned with her hand toward the back door and Richard Kohler preceded her into the kitchen.

"No, I'm afraid not." He stepped to the counter and set a small backpack on the butcher block. He seemed quite possessive about it. His thin face was alarmingly pale.

"Lis, there's a car —"

Portia walked into the doorway and paused, glancing at Kohler.

Lis introduced them.

"Portia?" Kohler repeated. "Don't hear that name much nowadays."

She shrugged and neither sister said a word about the burdens of being the daughter of a man utterly devoted to the business of fortified wine.

"I'm going to tape the west windows. In the parlor. That's where it'll hit worst."

"You're right. We forgot to do those. Thanks."

When she left, Lis turned to the doctor. "I don't have much time. As soon as we're finished here, we're going to a hotel for the evening." She added pointedly, "Because of Hrubek."

It was the moment when he'd tell her there was nothing to worry about, the moment when he'd laugh and say that his patient was harmless as a puppy. He didn't.

What he said was, "That's probably not a bad idea."

On the other hand he didn't seem particularly alarmed or suggest that they get the hell out of the house immediately and flee for safety.

"Do they know where he is?"

"Not exactly, no."

"But he is going away from here? East?"

"I saw one of the men tracking him not too long ago. He's still east of the hospital but it looks like he may have gone east and then turned around."

"He's coming west?"

"I'd say he's more likely wandering in circles. He isn't as disabled as some people are making him out to be, but, I don't think he'd be able to get this far."

"What exactly can I do for you, doctor? I'd like to be out of here in twenty minutes or so."

"I'm worried about Michael. I'd like to find him before the police do. Not many people know how to handle a patient like him. He could hurt himself or somebody else; if they try to arrest him like any other prisoner."

"Well, what can I do?"

"I understand he sent you a letter not long ago."

"In September."

"It had to do with the... incident last May?"

"It doesn't seem to have to do with anything. It's mostly gibberish."

Kohler lifted his eyes but not his head and stared directly at her. "Mrs. Atcheson, I need to know about Indian Leap. Will you help me?"

Six large water spots were evident on the counter beside the sink. Lis lifted a sponge and rubbed them away.

"You see, I'm Michael's attending psychiatrist. But frankly don't have a clue about what's going on in his mind tonight. What happened last May was very... significant in his life."

"Significant?" she repeated, appalled at the word.

"I don't mean to downplay the tragedy."

"Well, what exactly can I tell you?"

"I've read some newspaper stories. I have a few files. But Marsden hospital's practically broke. We have very sketchy records. I don't even have a transcript of his trial."

This struck her as the epitome of bureaucratic nonsense, and she said so.

"Transcripts cost two dollars a page," he explained. "Michael's would have cost six thousand dollars. The state can't afford it."

"It seems to be just common sense to spend money like that."

He gestured in concession.

"I really don't think there's time." She nodded outside. "My sister and I have hotel reservations. And the storm..."

"It won't take long." He curled two fingers of his right hand around two fingers of his left, and Lis pictured the gangly teenage Richard Kohler asking a pretty girl to dance.

"The fact is, I'd rather not talk about it."

"Yes, of course..." Kohler hesitated and seemed to be examining her. "But you have to understand my perspective. It's important that I find him quickly. If he wanders up to someone's house... If he gets scared and panics. People could get hurt. Inadvertently."

Lis stood silent, looking down at the ruddy tile floor.

"That's what I'm concerned about, you see. Getting him back before there's an... accident. And, I have to tell you, there is a chance he's on his way here. Very slight, but it is a possibility. If you help me I might be able to prevent that."

After a long moment Lis said, "Cream and sugar?"

Kohler blinked.

"You've glanced at the coffee maker three times in the last minute." He laughed. "I've been trying my best to stay awake."

"I'll give you twenty minutes, doctor. Not a minute more."

"Thank you very much," he said sincerely.

She stepped to the cupboard.

"Hope it's no trouble." His eyes were hungrily fixed to can of Maxwell House.

"Can I ask a question?"

"Please."

"Could you fall asleep now?" Lis asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"If you were home now would you be able to fall asleep?"

"At home? Yes. In my car, yes. On your front lawn. On your kitchen floor. Anytime, anyplace."

She wagged her head at this miracle and watched the pot fill with black liquid. Impulsively she decided to have a cup too. "I won't be asleep before eleven tomorrow night, whatever happens tonight."

"Insomnia?" he asked.

A condition on which she was an expert, she explained. Warm milk, hot baths, cold showers, hypnosis, self-hypnosis, valerian roots, biofeedback, medication. "You name it, I've tried it."

"In my practice I work with patients' dreams a lot. But I've never done much with sleep disorders."

She doctored her coffee with milk. Kohler took his black. "Let's go in here," she said.

With their thin mugs of steaming coffee in hand they walked into the greenhouse, at the far end of which was an alcove. As they sat in the deep wrought-iron chairs, the doctor looked about the room and offered a compliment, which because it had to do only with square footage and neatness meant he knew nothing of, and cared little for, flowers. He sat with his legs together, body forward, making his thin form that much thinner. He took loud sips, and she knew he was a man accustomed to dining quickly and alone. Then he set the cup down and took a pad and gold pen from his jacket pocket.

Lis asked, "Then you have no idea where he's going tonight?"

"No. He may not either, not consciously. That's the thing about Michael — you can't take him literally. To understand him you have to look behind what he says. That note he sent you, for instance; were certain letters capitalized?"

"Yes. That was one of the eeriest things about it."

"Michael does that. He sees relationships between things that to us don't exist. Could I see it?"

She found it in the kitchen and returned to the greenhouse. Kohler was standing, holding a small ceramic picture frame.

"Your father?"

"I'm told there's a resemblance."

"Some, yes. Eyes and chin. He was, I'd guess... a professor?"

"More of a closet scholar." The picture had been taken two days after he'd returned from Jerez, and Andrew L'Auberget was shown here climbing into the front seat of the Cadillac for the drive back to the airport. Young Lis had clicked the shutter as she stood shaded by her mother's protruding belly, inside of which her sister floated oblivious to the tearful farewell. "He was a businessman but he really wanted to teach. He talked about it many times. He would've made a brilliant scholar."

"Are you a professor?"

"Teacher. Sophomore English. And you?" she asked. "I understand medicine runs in the genes."

"Oh, it does. My father was a doctor." Kohler laughed. "Of course he wanted me to be an art historian. That was his dream. Then he grudgingly consented to medical school. On condition that I study surgery."

"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. She added, "Why?"

"How's that?"

"Why psychiatry?"

"I wanted to work with schizophrenics."

"I'd think you'd make more money putting rich 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 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 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 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.