speaking as she went. “That’s mine. I left it in my jacket pocket.” The ring stopped before she was halfway through the hall.
When she returned she was holding her phone in her hand and frowning at the screen.
“Lost the signal?” asked Madeleine.
“I think so.”
“The service is tricky around here. You have to pick your spots pretty carefully.”
Jane nodded, looking worried, and laid the phone on the sideboard under the window. She watched it expectantly for a few moments before turning her attention back to Gurney. “Sorry. You were saying . . .?”
“I was saying that I’m confused. Richard won’t agree to your hiring a lawyer, but hiring a private investigator would be okay?”
“No, it won’t be okay at all. He’ll hate the idea. But it needs to be done, and he can’t stop me from doing it. I can’t legally hire a lawyer to represent him, but I can hire someone to look into the case for me.”
“I’m still confused. It doesn’t sound to me like he’s simply too exhausted or depressed to deal with this situation. His active objection to receiving outside help gives me the feeling there’s something more going on here.”
Jane came over to the round pine breakfast table and sat down with Madeleine, Hardwick, and Gurney.
“I don’t know if I should be telling you this story. But I don’t know what else to do.” She looked down, addressing herself to her hands folded tightly in her lap.
“Early in his career, which wasn’t all that long ago, Richard published a case history that got a lot of attention. It was about a man who was tortured by exaggerated fears. These fears would sometimes dominate him completely, even though in his clearer moments he understood that these horrible things had no factual basis.” She paused, biting her lip and glancing nervously around the table before going on.
“One day the man discovered a problem with his car. He’d left it in a parking lot at JFK for a three-day business trip, and when he returned he discovered that he couldn’t open the trunk because the key wouldn’t turn in the lock. He thought maybe someone had tried to break into the trunk but only succeeded in breaking the lock. So he put his suitcase in the backseat and drove home. But later that night another idea entered his mind—a very peculiar idea, that someone might have hidden a dead body in his trunk. He knew this wasn’t a very likely scenario—that a murderer would drive his victim’s corpse to an airport parking lot, break into a stranger’s trunk, and transfer the corpse from his own trunk to another. That would be an absurd way to get rid of a dead body. But that didn’t stop the man from dwelling on it, obsessing about it. The more he thought about it, the more credible it became in his own mind. First of all, there was the JFK airport location—an area in which Mafia-connected bodies had actually been found in the past. And he remembered news stories about mob killings in which the victims were found in abandoned cars.”
“Not quite the same thing, is it?” said Hardwick.
“Not at all. But wait—there’s more. He couldn’t open the trunk himself without destroying it with a crowbar, but he was afraid to have a locksmith open it for him. He was afraid to have anyone else see what might be in the trunk. This fixation would come and go, like the seasons of the year. When the time came two years later to trade in the car, not only was the fixation still with him, he was completely paralyzed by it. He’d think, what if the car dealer or the new owner opens the trunk and finds a dead body or something equally horrible?”
She fell silent, took a slow deep breath, and sat motionless, staring down at her clasped hands.
After a moment Hardwick asked, “So how the hell does this story end?”
“One day the man backed into someone’s bumper in a parking lot, and the trunk popped open. Of course, there was nothing in it. He traded the car in, got a new one. That was that. Until the next terror grabbed hold of him.”
Hardwick shifted impatiently in his chair. “The point of this story is . . . what?”
“The point is that the man in the case history that Richard published, the man with the periodic paralyzing fears, was Richard himself.”
At first no one reacted.
This wasn’t, at least in Gurney’s case, because of any shock at the revelation. In fact, he’d suspected that’s where her narrative was heading from the start.
Hardwick frowned. “So what you’re telling us is that your brother is half psychological genius, half nutcase?”
She glared at him. “What I’m telling you is that he has profound ups and downs. The great irony is that this is a man who can help virtually anyone who comes to him, but when it comes to his own demons he’s helpless. I believe that’s why I’ve been put on this planet—to take care of a man who can’t take care of himself, so he can take care of everyone else.”
Gurney couldn’t help wondering in exactly what ways Hammond had taken care of the four patients who were now dead. But there was another issue he wanted to address first.
“Does he have that same fear now—that if more people start investigating the deaths of his patients, they may somehow find evidence that implicates him?”
“I think that’s it exactly. But you have to understand that his fear is based on nothing. It’s just another imaginary body in the trunk.”
“Except now we have four bodies,” said Hardwick. “And these ones are real.”
“What I meant was—”
She was interrupted by her phone chirping on the sideboard where she’d left it. She hurried over to it, looked at the ID screen, then put the phone to her ear. “I’m here,” she said. “What? . . . Wait, your voice is breaking up. . . . Who’s doing what? . . . I’m losing half of what you’re saying. . . . Just a second.” She turned toward Madeleine. “It’s Richard. Where can I get the best reception?”
“Come over here.” Madeleine got up and pointed through the French doors. “Out there, just beyond the patio, between the birdbath and the apple tree.”
Madeleine opened one of the doors for her, and Jane walked quickly out over the snow-covered ground, the phone at her ear, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Madeleine closed the door with a little shiver, went to the mud room, and a minute later was out by the apple tree handing Jane her jacket.
Hardwick flashed a fierce grin. “Love that wild trunk bit. So what do you think, Sherlock? Is the doctor a manic-depressive saint with paranoid delusions? Or is everything we just heard a total crock of shit?”
Jane was still out under the apple tree, engaged in a visibly stressful phone conversation, when Madeleine rejoined the two men at the table.
Hardwick eyed her concerned expression. “The hell’s going on out there?”
“I’m not sure. I may have misheard what Jane was saying, but I got the impression her brother was telling her that he’s being followed.”
Gurney’s face reflected his discomfort. He spoke as much to himself as to Madeleine and Hardwick. “And his solution to all this is not to hire a lawyer or a private security firm, but just dump it all on his big sister?”
The sky was clouding over. Gusts of wind were pressing Jane’s loose-fitting pants against her legs, but she showed no awareness of the cold.
He turned to Hardwick. “What’s her real agenda here?”
“Bottom line? She wants you to come to Wolf Lake and find out why those people committed suicide after visiting the lodge. Naturally, she wants you to discover a reason that has nothing to do with the fact that all four of them were hypnotized by her brother.”
Madeleine,