The Devil's Analyst

THE DEVIL’S ANALYST

Tales From the Loon Town Cafe

The Finnish Girl

A Novel

Dennis Frahmann

Copyright
©
2016 by Dennis Frahmann

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

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2015
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The Devil’s Analyst/Dennis Frahmann. –1st ed.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911491

Loon Town Books

www.loontown.com

ISBN 978-0692710579

“But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath,
and he will curse thee to thy face.”

Job 1:11

CONTENTS

In The Analyst’s Office

A NEW MILLENNIUM

Midnight

Session Two

Home

Session Three

Party Time

Session Four

The Partner

Session Five

CLOUDS AHEAD

Missing

Session Six

On Tour

Session Seven

Oliver

Session Eight

Reckoning

Session Nine

THE STORM BREAKS

Coping

Session Ten

Shifting Sands

Session Eleven

Dossier

Session Twelve

The Lair

The Final Session

DISCOVERY

Secrets

The Beginnings

Firmer Ground

In Hiding

Whirlwind

Josh

The Flowage

Aftermath

One Year Later

Author’s Notes

In The Analyst’s Office

Thank God
I found you. I didn’t realize how much I needed a therapist until we connected. This conflict of mine has been going on too long. I need to tell my story to someone, someone who can help me. Believe me, this will be the first of many sessions.

You’re recording this, aren’t you? I think it’s very important to keep a record of everything I say. This situation’s not that easy to understand. Sometimes I don’t understand it myself. But you’re a professional. You can make sense of it.

It’s all about a guy named Danny. Really, he should be a nobody. There’s no reason why anyone would pay one bit of attention to him. I met him a long time ago and there was something about him that made me care. He’s like that, I guess. Everyone seems to like Danny Lahti—the poor little boy whose mother killed herself.

But they don’t see him for the kind of person he really is. He’s fooled them all. But not me. I have a mission to expose him for what he is, to make him choose one path over the other.

Remember that story about how the devil convinced God to test Job to find out the truth about the man’s faith? I need to do the same with Danny. I need to test him. Maybe I’ll start when he’s in Wisconsin with his friends.

You see, I never wanted to be the person who made Danny face the truth. But that’s my job, and I’m not afraid to do it.

A NEW MILLENNIUM

CHAPTER ONE

Midnight

Twenty minutes
to midnight, and the ice on the frozen lake outside cracked. The loud reverberations of winter echoed through the night and invaded Danny Lahti’s peace.

Danny was prepared to let time move forward in whatever incremental way it chose. At that moment . . . sitting on a sofa in an enormous room near midnight . . . huddled within a century-old hunting lodge of a long-dead lumber tycoon . . . on the shoreline of a lake nearly forgotten in the isolated woods of northern Wisconsin, Danny Lahti was not concerned about the potential for a technological apocalypse as time turned to the year 2000.

But he did feel on the brink. Something was about to happen. Things should change; they needed to change. He couldn’t really say why. Danny never felt he was the introspective type. But he had always felt connected to a larger universe, one in which he received premonitions of what was to come.

The end of the century. Or maybe the start of a new millennium. It depended on the pundit. But computers only knew what they were programmed to know, and they weren’t programmed to deal with changing from 1999 to 2000. Maybe early computer scientists never thought about a century starting anew. December 31, 1999 could prove an existential threat. They called it “Y2K.” Who knows, maybe every generation deserved its opportunity to restart the clock.

For Danny, his past was too painful, but the future felt too uncertain. In a way, his life could be the snowdrift-covered lawns that surrounded this house. On the surface, the drifts were unblemished and glistening in the weak moonlight. But beneath their surface, under the shapeless accumulated flakes, were the remains of years of living. If Danny had the time and the tools and the energy, he could shovel his way into discovering the dead flowerbeds, the abandoned lawn furniture, and the century’s worth of trails across the grounds. But who could be bothered? Eventually, the warm sun of spring would surely melt the snow. Just wait. The past would be exposed.

Danny had always been the kind of person willing to wait. When he was only twelve, his mother committed suicide and he found her dead body. He waited then, always expecting someone would eventually arrive to explain what had happened and why. When his father withdrew into a hermit-like life that barely acknowledged his adolescent son’s existence, Danny still waited. Someone would surely make his father forget his dead wife and remember his child. He was still waiting.

And when Josh came into his life, promising an escape from these cold woods into the warm, loving life of the Los Angeles sun, Danny followed and waited for Josh’s direction.

He waited. He always had. Perhaps he always would. It was his nature not to rebel and not to question, to try to be good and not rock the boat. A new year, a new century, a new millennium, not even “Y2K” could change that. Because Danny Lahti had never been able to find the energy to grab the reins of his own life. And he didn’t intend to start now. And yet something was changing. He felt it.

The ice cracked again. Nineteen minutes to midnight.

“What are you
thinking?” said the woman who stood behind Danny’s sofa. Her look went beyond the large French doors on the far side of the living room, across the snow-covered fieldstone terrace, and down to the dark icy sheen of the frozen lake. She looked peaceful, just like the winter scene.

What could Danny say to his old friend Cynthia Trueheart Grant? In their high school years, she had been the bubbly cheerleader. Always an optimist, she normally made him laugh or at least smile. He wanted her energy now. In her early-thirties, she still had the perky energy of the teenage girl. They were alone in the house, since Josh and Chip had gone into town hours earlier. Chip was Cynthia’s husband and owner of a local technology firm; Josh was Danny’s boyfriend and a newfangled Internet mogul, and their lives were interwoven in a complicated way.

He knew Cynthia was truly interested in what he was thinking, but what could he say—that he never wanted to buy this oversized log manor that evoked far too many painful memories, yet Josh somehow convinced him that owning this grandiose property would somehow make up for his youth.

After the stock market crash in 1987, the arrogant former owner had lost the mansion to the bank and the house sat empty. Then last year Josh told Danny it was time to return to their little resort hometown of Thread, Wisconsin, buy the tycoon’s foreclosed home, and restore the oversized camp to its former glory. They did it all. Dug up the old rose garden that ran amok. Trimmed the colonnade of maples that graced the long drive. Filled the chinked logs after a decade of neglect, glazed the broken windows, updated the neglected plumbing and electricity, pulled out the rotting beams of the old boat dock—the list of tasks never ended. But Josh never worried about money, just as he didn’t believe in “Y2K.” He swore that the current Internet boom would underwrite all their playthings. Danny didn’t know enough about their finances to argue.

But he knew this place was filled with ghosts, not ectoplasmic ones, but emotional ones. No matter how tastefully the decorators had furnished the graceful rooms, they still evoked in Danny memories of the seventeen-year-old boy who once helped cater a party for the former owners. The Christmas-time decorations of that long-ago night, the expensive clothing of the cavalcade of wealthy and important guests, and the whispered joking about the oddities of the small nearby town of Thread—including the soft laughter about his oddly behaving father—this placed stored all of that.

Surely a new century would allow him to send all those ghostly echoes into exile. Forever. He could have tried to say all of that in answer to Cynthia, but instinctively he knew his friend would not want to hear these musings.

He lied instead. “I’m thinking how beautiful it is here.”

Cynthia sat down and faced him, leaving a coffee table between them. The moonlit scene outside silhouetted her profile, which was still striking. “Do you really believe it’s beautiful? After all, you left for Los Angeles after high school and I’m the one who stayed. But still I agree with you. Northern Wisconsin is lovely, and Chip and I are so happy the two of you restored this house. We hope you spend a lot of time here.”

Another loud boom echoed. The lake ice cracked once more.

Cynthia laughed because she was so often happy, and the sound of ice was just another part of her life. “Aren’t we the fools though? Spending New Year’s Eve in this isolated spot? In our little hideaway when the lights of the world could go out?” She laughed again at the absurdity of the possibility.

“You know that won’t happen,” Danny replied.

“Remember how much fun we used to have?” Cynthia asked. “Back when you and I worked at the Loon Town Café, and Josh and Chip would come in to eat? And to woo us. That’s the right word, isn’t it? We were wooed. All those characters in our little town, and we thought everything was possible and everyone was wonderful.”

“Well, you did.”

“Because it was true. You’re just too stubborn to enjoy everything you’ve been given. Here I am, with you, on New Year’s Eve, waiting for the men we love. Isn’t that worth celebrating?”

Truthfully Danny
would rather have been somewhere more glamorous and crowded but Josh had insisted on flying to the camp. Danny was of two minds about spending the holidays in his home town, but Josh reminded him that the place had originally been built in the nineteenth century, as though that somehow gave the mansion more cosmic energy to welcome a new millennium.

Both Josh and Chip worked in the high tech industry, so Danny understood that “Y2K” was mostly hype and wasn’t worried about the night ahead or any “Y2K” problem. In fact, he wanted not to worry about anything. The four of them were much like the favored children of myths, the ones who were blessed with a fairy-tale quality.

In such stories, Cynthia was the beloved and spoiled child who would one day marry the crown prince. Her parents, the Truehearts, owned the town’s grocery store and most of the other businesses, but it was the early investment of Cynthia’s father in the nearby American Seasons resort that made him truly wealthy. The local Coeur de Lattigeaux tribe, more commonly called the Lattigo, were the other major investors in the resort and Chip Grant was the tribe’s leader. By marrying Chip, Cynthia rose as close to royalty as could exist in this northern kingdom.

On the other hand, Danny was the woodsman’s son—the child who grew up in a household without a mother but with a father who didn’t take proper care of his son no matter how much he loved him—the kind of fairy tale kid who might get lost in the woods or thrown into the witch’s oven.

But like all fairy tales, Danny’s life was having a happy ending. He met the attractive and charming Josh, who was blessed with the Midas touch. Danny didn’t quite understand how Josh’s various Internet startups worked, but clearly they did and the two of them were a wealthy couple. Josh’s financial schemes paid for this camp, their Spanish-style mansion in the Los Feliz section of the Hollywood Hills, and a lifestyle of benevolent extravagance.

Out of the blue
, Cynthia asked Danny, “Are you happy? I want you to be happy. Are you?”

Even as a teenager, Cynthia was always concerned about everyone’s emotional well being. It was a silly question. Danny had everything.

“Of course.”

“Sometimes I worry about you. I know you hated that about me even when we were teenagers. But for a while, I thought you were my Romeo in waiting. But now I know it was never meant to be because someone else was my true other half!”

Now Danny laughed. “How philosophical. Have you been reading Plato?”

Cynthia smiled but her face betrayed a small tic—a tell that appeared whenever she didn’t understand one of Danny’s references. She wouldn’t say anything though. They were comfortable with not fully understanding each other. Beside she would prefer to think of all their fun times together, of which there had been so many.

Cynthia moved nearer the mantel of the large fieldstone fireplace. Its chimney soared to the top of the fifteen-foot ceiling of a cavernous room. The lighting was subdued. The huge first-growth timbers that framed the rooms were lost in the shadows. The ornate mantel clock chimed the quarter hour.

“Only fifteen minutes to midnight. Why aren’t Josh and Chip here yet?” Cynthia glanced toward the large noble fir decorated with German blown glass ornaments and old-fashioned bubble lights. “Maybe something’s gone wrong.”

Danny made a scoffing sound. After dinner, their two men left for the headquarters of Lattigo Industries so Chip could check the final programming corrections for his firm’s shipping and manufacturing software. It was unclear what motivated Josh to join Chip—whether Josh thought two high tech entrepreneurs should stick together, was genuinely interested, or just sought a new audience to amuse. After several days at the camp, Josh was growing restless.

“Don’t worry,” Danny said. “Chip always knows what he’s doing. Married you, didn’t he?”

Cynthia smiled again to acknowledge the compliment. “Well, I hope the two of them don’t stop at the casino. It’s bound to be a madhouse over there. Everyone making their last bet of the century.”

Cynthia thought maybe that was why Josh had been so eager to ride along. Josh always became alive at the gambling table. He did have incredible luck, or maybe a true skill, but she felt he pushed the game too hard. Sometimes she thought he lived only in those moments. It was when he seemed most alive, his eyes flashing with amusement, his quips coming fast and furious, and his charm drawing in all those around his table. He was like a loose helium balloon in a slight breeze on a summer day at the beach, untethered and rising to the sun, happy to be bounced between hands. In those moments, Danny seemed lost in Josh’s shadow.

“Do you ever think about the happiest moments in your life?” Cynthia asked. Something snapped in the flames of the fireplace, flitting shadows to dance across the room. “You know, those instances when everything comes together in a magical moment?” She really wanted to know.

Danny shook his head as though he never had such moments.

“For some reason, I’m thinking about one of those times now,” said Cynthia. “Sitting here . . . it makes me nostalgic, or maybe contented.”

For a moment, it looked as though Danny wanted to walk out of the room. Cynthia thought about all the bad times that might be floating through Danny’s mind, so she pushed through trying to force from him his happy memories.

“Do you remember Fourth of July in 1987 in Thread? Back when everything ahead seemed so bright. Remember how all that money was flowing in to build American Seasons, and every building in town had a fresh coat of paint? Everyone was so happy. I know I was.

“And the polka band was playing in the town square. Do you recall how we all danced? God, I haven’t danced a polka since then. Who even did it then, except for the old folks of Thread? But that night I wanted everyone to be on their feet. I can still picture it. How there was bunting and fresh flowers decorating every inch of town. I jumped around that dance floor with Chip, and you were with Josh.  Remember? And the old cook from the Loon Town Café was dancing with Officer Campbell. Even Reverend Willy was there. And everyone was happy.”

Danny pointed out the obvious, “But it didn’t last. Moments like that never last.”

Of course, Cynthia remembered how the euphoria of that summer proved short-lived. The 1987 stock market crashed and the Dow dropped 508 points in a single day. So many dreams tumbled that day, including the financing scheme for American Seasons. Years later, when Chip reassembled the finances that allowed his tribe to build the resort, it was significantly scaled back. Fortunes were lost that year, but, ironically, none of it affected Josh because he had already sold his parent’s land to the consortium and started his first California investments.