He started to make a modest list of people who also might have failed to help Claire Tyson and her three young children when they were in need: Was there a landlord in New York who demanded rent from the destitute woman? If so, they were probably on the street somewhere, wondering what happened to their building. A social worker who failed to get her into an assistance program? Had they been ruined financially, and now forced to apply for the same program? A priest who had listened to her entreaties and suggested that prayer might fill an empty stomach? They were probably praying for themselves, now. He could only guess how far Rumplestiltskin’s revenge reached: What happened to the city power worker who had turned off the electricity at her house when she failed to pay a bill on time? He didn’t know the answers to these questions, nor did he know precisely where Rumplestiltskin had drawn his dividing line, separating the people he’d judged guilty, from however many others there might be. Still, Ricky knew one thing: A number of people had once upon a time come up far short and were now paying a price.
Or, more likely, had paid their debt. All the people who had neglected to help Claire Tyson, so that her only choice was to take her own life in despair.
It was the most frightening concept of justice that Ricky had ever imagined. Murders of both the body and the soul. It seemed to Ricky that he had often been scared since Rumplestiltskin had entered his life. He had been a man of routine and insight. Now, nothing was solid, everything was unsettled. The fear that ricocheted within him now was something different. Something he had difficulty categorizing, but he knew it left his mouth dry and a bitter taste on his tongue. As an analyst, he had lived in his well-to-do patients’ worlds of convoluted anxieties and debilitating frustrations, but these seemed now to be uniformly petty and pathetically self-indulgent.
The scope of Rumplestiltskin’s fury astounded him. And, at the same time, made perfect sense.
Psychoanalysis teaches one thing, he thought: Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. A single bad act can have all sorts of repercussions. He was reminded of the desktop perpetual motion machines that some of his colleagues had, where a group of ball bearings were hung in a row, and if one was lifted slightly, so that it swung against the others, the force would cause the last in the line to swing out and then bounce back, making a clicking sound and starting an engine of momentum that would only stop when someone injected their hand into the works. Rumplestiltskin’s revenge, of which he’d been only a single part, was like that machine.
There were others dead. Others destroyed. He alone, in all likelihood, saw the entirety of what had taken place. Perpetual motion.
Ricky felt shafts of cold drip through his body.
These were all crimes that existed in a plane defined by immunity. What detective, what police authority, would ever be able to link them all together, because the only thing the victims had in common was a relationship with a woman dead for twenty years.
Serial crimes, Ricky thought, with a thread so invisible that it defied imagination. Like the policeman who had blithely told him about the R carved in Rafael Johnson’s chest, there was always someone far more likely to wear guilt than the vaporous Mr. R. The reasons behind his own death were blatantly obvious. Career in tatters, home destroyed, wife dead, finances in ruins, relatively friendless and introspective, why wouldn’t he kill himself?
And one other thing was abundantly clear to him: If Rumplestiltskin learned that he’d escaped, if he even suspected that Ricky still breathed air on this planet, he would be on Ricky’s trail instantly with evil intentions. Ricky doubted that he would have the opportunity to play any game the second time around. It also occurred to him how easy it would be to dispatch his new identity: Richard Lively was a nonentity in the world. His very anonymity made his own quick and brutal death a relative certainty. Richard Lively could be executed in broad daylight, and no policeman anywhere would be able to make the necessary connections leading him back to Ricky Starks and some man called Rumplestiltskin. What they would find out was that Richard Lively wasn’t Richard Lively and he would instantly become a John Doe, planted with little ceremony without a headstone in some potter’s field. Perhaps a detective would wonder idly who he truly once was, but, inundated with other cases, the death of Richard Lively would simply be shunted aside. Forever.
What made Ricky so safe, also made him utterly vulnerable.
So, upon his return to New Hampshire, he greeted taking up the simple routines of his life in Durham with unbridled enthusiasm. It was as if he hoped he could lose himself readily in the steadiness of getting up each morning and going to work with the rest of the janitorial force at the university, of swabbing floors, cleaning bathrooms, polishing hallways, and changing lightbulbs, exchanging a joke or two with coworkers, speculating about the Red Sox’s prospects for the upcoming season. He functioned in a world so insistently normal and mundane that it cried out to be painted in institutional pale blues and light greens. Once, when operating a steam cleaner across the carpet of the faculty lounge, he discovered that the sensation of the machine humming, vibrating in his hands, and the swath of clean rug that it created was almost hypnotically pleasant. It was as if he could disappear from who he once had been in the new simplicity of this world. It was a strangely satisfying situation; alone, a job that shouted out routine and regularity, the occasional night spent manning the telephone bank at the suicide prevention line, where he recalled his skills as a therapist, dispensing advice and throwing lifelines in a modest, controlled fashion. He discovered he didn’t much miss the daily deposit of angst, frustration, and anger that characterized his life as an analyst. He wondered, some, whether the people he’d known, or even his late wife, would recognize him. In a curious way, Ricky thought that Richard Lively was closer to the person that he had wanted to be, closer to the person who’d found himself in summers on the Cape, than Dr. Starks had ever realized treating the rich and powerful and neurotic.
Anonymity, he thought, is seductive.
But elusive. For every second that he forced himself to grow comfortable with who he was, the revenge persona of Federick Lazarus shouted contradictory commands. He renewed his physical fitness training, and spent his free hours perfecting marksmanship skills on the pistol practice range. As the weather continued to improve, bringing warmth and bursting with color, he decided he needed to add outdoor skills to his repertoire, so he signed up for an orienteering class operated by a hiking and camping company under the name of Frederick Lazarus.
In a way, he’d been triangulated, in much the same way one finds his location when lost in the woods. Three pillars: who he was, who he’d become, who he needed to be.
He asked himself, late at night, sitting alone in the near-darkness of his rented room, a single desk lamp barely denting the shadows, whether he could turn his back on everything that had happened. Simply abandon any emotional connection to his past and what had befallen him, and become a man of complete simplicity. Live paycheck to paycheck. Take pleasure in basic routine. Redefine himself. Take up fishing or hunting or even just reading. Connect with as few people as possible. Live life with monklike style and a hermit’s solitude. Turn his back on fifty-three years of life, and say that it all started anew from the day he’d set fire to his home on the Cape and gone forward from there. It was almost Zenlike and tantalizing. Ricky could evaporate from the world like a puddle of water on a hot, sunny day, rising into the atmosphere.
This ability was almost as frightening as the alternative.
It seemed to him that he had reached the moment where he had to make a choice. Like Odysseus, his screen name, the route lay between Scylla and Charybdis. There were costs and risks with each selection.
Late at night, in his modest rented room in New Hampshire, he spread out on his bed all the notes and connections he had to the man who had forced him to erase himself from his life. Bits and pieces of information, clues and directions that he could follow. Or not. Either he was going to pursue the man who’d done this to him, risking exposure. Or he was going to toss it all and make what life he could out of what he’d already established. He felt a little like some fifteenth-century Spanish explorer, standing unsteadily on the pitching deck of a tiny sailing ship, staring out at the wide expanse of deep green ocean and perhaps a new and uncertain world just beyond the horizon.