“What do you know already?” he spoke to himself in the empty room.
Someone knows my routine. Knows how I let patients into my office. Knows when I break for lunch. What I do on the weekends. Was also clever enough to ferret out a list of relatives. That took some ingenuity.
Knows my birthday.
He breathed in sharply, again. I have been studied.
I did not know it, but someone has been watching me. Measuring me. Someone has devoted considerable time and effort to creating this game and not left me much time for countermoves.
His tongue remained dry and his lips parched. He was suddenly very thirsty, but unwilling to leave the sanctity of his office for the kitchen and a glass of water.
“What did I do to make someone hate me so?” he asked.
This question was like a quick punch in the stomach. Ricky knew he enjoyed the arrogance of many caregivers, thinking that he had delivered good to his small corner of the world through understanding and acceptance of one’s existence. The idea that he’d created some monstrous infection of hatred in someone somewhere was extremely unsettling.
“Who are you?” he demanded of the letter. He immediately started to race through the catalog of patients, stretching back over decades, but, just as swiftly, stopped. He understood he might have to do this eventually, but he would need to be systematic, disciplined, dogged, and he wasn’t ready to take that step yet.
Ricky didn’t think of himself as very qualified to be his own policeman. But then he shook his head, realizing that, in a unique way, that was untrue. For years he’d been a sort of detective. The difference was truly the nature of the crimes he’d investigated and the techniques he’d used. Buttressed slightly by this thought, Ricky Starks sat back down at his desk, reached into the top right-hand drawer and removed an old, leather-bound address book so frayed around the edges that it was held together by a rubber band. For starters, he told himself, we can find the relative who has been contacted by this person. It must be some former patient, he told himself, one who cut his analysis short and plunged into depression. One who has harbored a near-psychotic fixation for a number of years. He guessed that with a little bit of luck and perhaps a nudge or two in the right direction from whichever of his relatives had been contacted, he would be able to identify the disgruntled ex-patient. He tried to tell himself, empathetically, that the letter writer-Rumplestiltskin-was really reaching out to him for help. Then, almost as quickly, he discarded this wishy-washy thought. Holding the address book in his hand, Ricky thought about the fairy tale character whose name the letter writer had signed. Cruel, he told himself. A magical gnome with a black heart that isn’t outfoxed, but loses his contest through sheer bad luck. This observation did not make him feel any better.
The letter seemed to glow on the desktop in front of him.
He nodded slowly. It tells you much, he insisted. Blend the words on the page with what the writer has already done, and you’re probably halfway to figuring out who it is.
So, he pushed the letter to the side and opened up the address book, searching for the number for the first person on the list of fifty-two. He grimaced a little and he started to punch the numbers onto the telephone keypad. In the past decade, he had had little contact with any of his relatives, and he suspected none of them would be very eager to hear from him. Especially given the nature of the call.
Chapter Two
Ricky Starks thought himself singularly ill suited at prying information from relatives surprised to hear his voice. He was accustomed to internalizing everything he heard from patients in his office, keeping close reins on all observation and insight. But as he dialed number after number, he found himself in unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. He was incapable of designing a verbal script that he could follow, some standard salutation followed by a brief explanation of why he was calling. Instead, all he could hear was hesitation and indecision in his voice, as he stumbled through hackneyed greetings and tried to extricate an answer to the stupidest question: Has something unusual happened to you?
Consequently, his evening was filled with a series of genuinely irritating telephone conversations. His relatives either were unpleasantly surprised to hear from him, unhappily curious as to why after so much time had passed he would be telephoning out of the blue, busy with some other activity that he was interrupting, or simply rude. There was a brusque quality to each contact, and more than once he was dismissed sharply. There were more than a few terse “What the hell is this all about?” questions, to which he lied that a former patient had somehow managed to obtain a list of his relatives’ names and he was concerned that they might be contacted. He left out the possibility that someone might be facing a threat, which, he wondered was probably the biggest lie of all.
It was already approaching ten p.m., which was closing in on his bedtime and he still had more than two dozen names on the list. So far, he had been unable to discern anything enough out of the ordinary in any of the lives he’d checked to warrant further investigation. But, at the same time, he was doubtful of his own questioning abilities. The odd vagueness of Rumplestiltskin’s letter made him fear that he might have simply missed the connection. And, it was equally possible that in any one of the brief conversations he’d experienced that evening that the person contacted by the letter writer had not told Ricky the truth. And, mingled in with the phone calls had been several frustrating nonanswers. Three times he’d had to leave stilted and cryptic messages on answering machines.
He refused to allow himself the belief that the letter delivered that day had been a mere charade, although that would have been nice. His back had stiffened up. He had not eaten and was hungry. He had a headache. He rubbed a hand through his hair, and then stroked his eyes before dialing the next number, feeling a sort of exhaustion that bordered on tension pounding behind his temples. He considered the pain of his headache to be a small penance for the realization that he was being greeted with: that he was isolated and estranged from the majority of his family.
The wages of neglect, Ricky thought to himself, as he readied to dial the twenty-first name on the list provided by Rumplestiltskin. It is probably unreasonable to expect one’s relatives to embrace sudden contact after so many years of silence, especially distant relatives, with whom there was little he shared. More than one had paused when he said his name, as if trying to place precisely who he was. These pauses made him feel a little like some ancient hermit coming down off a mountaintop, or a bear in the first minutes after a long winter’s hibernation.