Molly stared at him. “Are you trying to make me feel guilty for insulting your profession?”
Dr. Mindle smiled tolerantly. “No. It happens all the time. I’m used to it. Besides, maybe you really don’t need a shrink.”
Molly drummed her fingertips silently on the padded chair arm. “David said you and he worked out at the same gym.”
“That’s right, we do.”
“Friends? Weightlifting buddies?”
“You could say that.” Dr. Mindle’s smile changed to one of amused understanding. “I’m charging you for this visit, Mrs. Jones.”
Molly let herself relax and settle back in the chair. “Good. I feel better now.”
“That’s the idea, Molly, making you feel better. I can’t solve your problem in a short time. That is, if I can solve it at all.” Another soothing smile. “If you have a problem.”
“David thinks I do.”
“Well, he might be right.”
“He told you everything?”
“Yes.”
“Then he told you more than he told me.”
Without changing expression, Dr. Mindle stood up and walked out from behind his desk. He went to the window and faced the view of office buildings and searing blue sky. His voice was so soft she had to strain to understand his words. A stratagem, no doubt.
“This city, Molly, is a monster. It doesn’t eat people alive all at once, but it eats them. Some of them from the inside.”
Molly quietly watched him, a classic, inverted-triangle male figure silhouetted against the light. Pigeons cooed softly on a nearby ledge. Traffic hummed.
“You agreed to come here to see me,” Dr. Mindle continued, “so it must be that you admit to yourself at least the possibility that none of this is true. That no one is stealing your clothes. That no one tried to kill you.” His padded Armani shoulders rose in a subtle shrug. “Just the possibility, mind you.”
Molly felt anger rise in her. She held up her hands, scraped and blistered from frantically bending and twisting the iron grill over the storage room window. “Exhibit A, as they say in court.”
He turned around to face her. His expression was mild, composed. He barely glanced at her hands; the mind was his province. “We’re not in court, Molly. But if we were, the prosecution would say that you acted out and deliberately splintered that storage room door then injured yourself escaping from someone who thought you were a prowler. That apartment building isn’t in a crime-free neighborhood. Nowhere in New York is crime-free.”
“But suppose Deirdre was really there. And trying to kill me.”
Dr. Mindle faced the window again, slipping his hands into the pockets of his suit’s pleated slacks. “What would be her motive?”
“What if she’s trying to steal my life?” Molly said. “To take my place with my husband and son? To become me?”
“Then I’d say she should be here and not you. But you’re the one whose husband is concerned with your actions lately. And they’ve disturbed him enough to talk you into coming here.”
“Well, don’t we usually put away the people who disturb us, rather than the people who are disturbed?”
“Sometimes,” Dr. Mindle said. “Though not nearly as often as we used to, I assure you. And it seems to be you and no one else who sees yourself as a candidate for confinement. I see before me a badly frightened young woman, but not one who’s necessarily mentally ill. Fear can exist in perfectly normal people and still have no basis in reality. Sometimes when we remove the fear, reality again becomes clear.”
Molly sighed and stood up. Slick word games she didn’t need. “You’re trying to bullshit me, Doctor.”
He turned toward her and smiled. “That’s my job, bull-shitting you. It’s also my job to be honest with you. It’s a balancing act. And you have to be honest with me at least some of the time. We might get somewhere that way.”
Molly knew the hopelessness of what he was saying and felt the familiar desperation and fear take control of her. “We might,” she told him. “But like you said, Dr. Mindle, it would take time.”
Her right knee and hip still ached from her ordeal in the apartment building basement. She tried not to let her pain show.
Limping slightly, she strode from the office.
The receptionist in the anteroom glanced up at her and smiled. “A man just poked his head in here and looked around to see if anyone was waiting to see the doctor. Might he be with you?”
“No,” Molly said. “No one is with me.”
37
It was dark when Lisa Emmons left the movie and made her way along East Fifty-seventh Street toward the subway stop. Beside her in the street, light traffic hissed along in the dampness of a recent drizzle. The remnants of the audience that had left the theater with her and walked in the same direction were thinning out, going down side streets or getting into cabs. Lisa’s mind was still on the movie-a satisfying drama about three independent women who got even with the abusive men in their lives then formed an investment company and became millionaires-when she was aware of someone walking behind her, whistling the theme song from the movie.
Lisa slowed her pace and glanced back, then stopped and turned all the way around. The sidewalk wasn’t crowded. There was no one within fifty feet of her. A panhandler who’d appeared from somewhere was standing half a block away with a cup and a cardboard sign. A short man with puffy dark hair was bustling away in the opposite direction. It was possible that he was the whistler. Even the beggar might have followed and whistled the tune. He didn’t necessarily have to have seen the movie; he might have picked up the melody from some other member of the audience who’d walked past him.
Or the whistler might have ducked into a nearby all-night deli or entered the shop Lisa had just passed that had an assortment of jade figurines displayed in its lighted window.
There was no way for her to know for sure. That was one of the problems with a city like New York that lived late into the night; there were too many possibilities.
Her heart beating faster, Lisa continued on her way. She thought, for only a few fleeting seconds, that she heard the whistling again. A sound of the night that might have been the trailing notes of a faraway emergency siren, or an echo from blocks away. Sound carried that way sometimes in the nighttime canyons of tall buildings, the way images sometimes appeared out of their proper place in the desert.
She began walking faster. There had been a monotonal quality to the whistling that was oddly threatening and made her afraid to look behind her again. Yet without looking, she was sure she was being followed.
A cab turned the corner and drove toward her. She ran a few steps, her arm raised.
But despite the fact that the cab’s rooflight showed it to be available, Lisa saw a passenger slumped in back, and the cab accelerated and spattered droplets of rainwater on her as it sped past.
A horn blared at her, and she realized she was standing off the curb, almost a yard into the street. She hurriedly moved back up onto the sidewalk just as a string of cars roared past.
The blare of the horn and her sudden action had jolted her mind. She was angry with herself now. This was absurd. She wasn’t exactly alone-this was midtown Manhattan and there were other people on the streets. She had done nothing and had no reason to be afraid of anyone.
Holding her breath, she stood and stared back in the direction she’d come from along the wide, shadowed sidewalk. There were two women walking away from her, holding hands. Lovers? Mother and daughter? Merely fast friends?
A tall man in baggy pants and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up emerged from the shop that sold jade. He glanced her way, then drew something from his pocket and appeared to be studying it. Two business types in suits and ties walked past the man toward Lisa. She stood and waited while they passed. “…should never have traded so much to get him,” the man on the left was saying, gesticulating with his right arm.