Praying for Sleep

16

“They haven’t caught him yet?”

Lis motioned with her hand toward the back door and Richard Kohler preceded her into the kitchen.

“No, I’m afraid not.” He stepped to the counter and set a small backpack on the butcher block. He seemed quite possessive about it. His thin face was alarmingly pale.

“Lis, there’s a car-”

Portia walked into the doorway and paused, glancing at Kohler.

Lis introduced them.

“Portia?” Kohler repeated. “Don’t hear that name much nowadays.”

She shrugged and neither sister said a word about the burdens of being the daughter of a man utterly devoted to the business of fortified wine.

“I’m going to tape the west windows. In the parlor. That’s where it’ll hit worst.”

“You’re right. We forgot to do those. Thanks.”

When she left, Lis turned to the doctor. “I don’t have much time. As soon as we’re finished here, we’re going to a hotel for the evening.” She added pointedly, “Because of Hrubek.”

It was the moment when he’d tell her there was nothing to worry about, the moment when he’d laugh and say that his patient was harmless as a puppy. He didn’t.

What he said was, “That’s probably not a bad idea.”

On the other hand he didn’t seem particularly alarmed or suggest that they get the hell out of the house immediately and flee for safety.

“Do they know where he is?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“But he is going away from here? East?”

“I saw one of the men tracking him not too long ago. He’s still east of the hospital but it looks like he may have gone east and then turned around.”

“He’s coming west?”

“I’d say he’s more likely wandering in circles. He isn’t as disabled as some people are making him out to be, but I don’t think he’d be able to get this far.”

“What exactly can I do for you, Doctor? I’d like to be out of here in twenty minutes or so.”

“I’m worried about Michael. I’d like to find him before the police do. Not many people know how to handle a patient like him. He could hurt himself or somebody else if they try to arrest him like any other prisoner.”

“Well, what can I do?”

“I understand he sent you a letter not long ago.”

“In September.”

“It had to do with the… incident last May?”

“It doesn’t seem to have to do with anything. It’s mostly gibberish.”

Kohler lifted his eyes but not his head and stared directly at her. “Mrs. Atcheson, I need to know about Indian Leap. Will you help me?”

Six large water spots were evident on the counter beside the sink. Lis lifted a sponge and rubbed them away.

“You see, I’m Michael’s attending psychiatrist. But I frankly don’t have a clue about what’s going on in his mind tonight. What happened last May was very… significant in his life.”

“Significant?” she repeated, appalled at the word.

“I don’t mean to downplay the tragedy.”

“Well, what exactly can I tell you?”

“I’ve read some newspaper stories. I have a few files. But Marsden hospital’s practically broke. We have very sketchy records. I don’t even have a transcript of his trial.”

This struck her as the epitome of bureaucratic nonsense, and she said so.

“Transcripts cost two dollars a page,” he explained. “Michael’s would have cost six thousand dollars. The state can’t afford it.”

“It seems to be just common sense to spend money like that.”

He gestured in concession.

“I really don’t think there’s time.” She nodded outside. “My sister and I have hotel reservations. And the storm…”

“It won’t take long.” He curled two fingers of his right hand around two fingers of his left, and Lis pictured the gangly teenage Richard Kohler asking a pretty girl to dance.

“The fact is, I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Yes, of course…” Kohler hesitated and seemed to be examining her. “But you have to understand my perspective. It’s important that I find him quickly. If he wanders up to someone’s house… If he gets scared and panics. People could get hurt. Inadvertently.”

Lis stood silent, looking down at the ruddy tile floor.

“That’s what I’m concerned about, you see. Getting him back before there’s an… accident. And, I have to tell you, there is a chance he’s on his way here. Very slight, but it is a possibility. If you help me I might be able to prevent that.”

After a long moment Lis said, “Cream and sugar?”

Kohler blinked.

“You’ve glanced at the coffeemaker three times in the last minute.”

He laughed. “I’ve been trying my best to stay awake.”

“I’ll give you twenty minutes, Doctor. Not a minute more.”

“Thank you very much,” he said sincerely.

She stepped to the cupboard.

“Hope it’s no trouble.” His eyes were hungrily fixed to the can of Maxwell House.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Please.”

“Could you fall asleep now?” Lis asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you were home now would you be able to fall asleep?”

“At home? Yes. In my car, yes. On your front lawn. On your kitchen floor. Anytime, anyplace.”

She wagged her head at this miracle and watched the pot fill with black liquid. Impulsively she decided to have a cup too. “I won’t be asleep before eleven tomorrow night, whatever happens tonight.”

“Insomnia?” he asked.

A condition on which she was an expert, she explained. Warm milk, hot baths, cold showers, hypnosis, self-hypnosis, valerian roots, biofeedback, medication. “You name it, I’ve tried it.”

“In my practice I work with patients’ dreams a lot. But I’ve never done much with sleep disorders.”

She doctored her coffee with milk. Kohler took his black. “Let’s go in here,” she said.

With their thin mugs of steaming coffee in hand they walked into the greenhouse, at the far end of which was an alcove. As they sat in the deep wrought-iron chairs, the doctor looked about the room and offered a compliment, which because it had to do only with square footage and neatness meant he knew nothing of, and cared little for, flowers. He sat with his legs together, body forward, making his thin form that much thinner. He took loud sips, and she knew he was a man accustomed to dining quickly and alone. Then he set the cup down and took a pad and gold pen from his jacket pocket.

Lis asked, “Then you have no idea where he’s going tonight?”

“No. He may not either, not consciously. That’s the thing about Michael-you can’t take him literally. To understand him you have to look behind what he says. That note he sent you, for instance; were certain letters capitalized?”

“Yes. That was one of the eeriest things about it.”

“Michael does that. He sees relationships between things that to us don’t exist. Could I see it?”

She found it in the kitchen and returned to the greenhouse. Kohler was standing, holding a small ceramic picture frame.

“Your father?”

“I’m told there’s a resemblance.”

“Some, yes. Eyes and chin. He was, I’d guess… a professor?”

“More of a closet scholar.” The picture had been taken two days after he’d returned from Jerez, and Andrew L’Auberget was shown here climbing into the front seat of the Cadillac for the drive back to the airport. Young Lis had clicked the shutter as she stood shaded by her mother’s protruding belly, inside of which her sister floated oblivious to the tearful farewell. “He was a businessman but he really wanted to teach. He talked about it many times. He would’ve made a brilliant scholar.”

“Are you a professor?”

“Teacher. Sophomore English. And you?” she asked. “I understand medicine runs in the genes.”

“Oh, it does. My father was a doctor.” Kohler laughed. “Of course he wanted me to be an art historian. That was his dream. Then he grudgingly consented to medical school. On condition that I study surgery.”

“But that wasn’t for you?”

“Nope. All I wanted was to be a psychiatrist. Fought him tooth and nail. He said if you become a shrink, it’ll chew you up, make you miserable, make you crazy and kill you.”

“So,” Lis said, “he was a psychiatrist.”

“That he was.”

“Did it kill him?”

“Nope. He retired to Florida.”

“About which, I won’t comment,” she said. He smiled. Lis added, “Why?”

“How’s that?”

“Why psychiatry?”

“I wanted to work with schizophrenics.”

“I’d think you’d make more money putting rich people on the couch. Why’d you specialize in that?”

He smiled again. “Actually, it was my mother’s illness. Say, is that the letter there?”

He took it in his short, feminine fingers and read it quickly. She could detect no reaction. “Look at this: ‘… they are holding me and have told lIes About Me to waShingtOn and the enTIRE worlD.’ See what he’s really saying?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Look at the capitalized letters. ‘I AM SO TIRED.’ ”

The encoded message sent a chill through her.

“There are a lot of layers of meaning in Michael’s world. ‘Revenge’ contains the name ‘Eve.’ ” He scanned the paper carefully. “ ‘Revenge,’ ‘eve,’ ‘betrayal.’ ”

He shook his head then set the letter aside and turned his hard eyes on her. She suddenly grew ill at ease. And when he said, “Tell me about Indian Leap,” a full minute passed before she began to speak.

Heading northeast from Ridgeton, Route 116 winds slowly through the best and the worst parts of the state: picturesque dairy and horse farms, then small but splendid patches of hardwood forests, then finally a cluster of tired mid-size towns studded with abandoned factories that the banks and receivers can’t give away. Just past one of these failed cities, Pickford, is a five-hundred-acre sprawl of rock bluffs and pine forest.

Indian Leap State Park is bisected by a lazy S-shaped canyon, which extends for half a mile from the parking lot off 116 to Rocky Point Beach, a deceptive name for what’s nothing more than a bleak rock revetment on a gray, man-made lake about one mile by two in size. Rising from the forest not far from the beach is what the State Park Service, still overly generous, calls a “peak,” though it’s really just a flat-topped summit six hundred feet high.

These rocks have their ghosts. In 1758 a small band of Mohegans, trapped on the side of this mountain, jumped to their deaths rather than be captured by rival Pequots. The women flung their screaming children before them then leapt to the rocks below with their men. Lis could still recall in perfect detail the bad, earnest illustration in her fifth-grade textbook of a squaw, looking more like Veronica Lake than a princess of the Mohican Confederacy, reaching for her tearful child as they were about to sail into the air. The first time she’d come here, a skinny wan girl, Lis walked these trails close to tears, thinking of the sorrow-whole families flying through the air. Even now, thirty years later, sitting across from Kohler, she felt the chill horror the story had evoked in her childhood.

Six months ago, on May 1, the Atchesons and the Gillespies-a couple they knew from the country club-planned a picnic at Indian Leap. Accompanying them were Portia and a former student of Lis’s, Claire Sutherland.

The morning of the outing-it was a Sunday-had begun awkwardly. Just as Lis and Owen were about to leave, he got a call from his firm and learned that he had to go into the office for several hours. Lis was used to his zealot’s schedule but was irritated that he acquiesced today. He’d worked almost every Sunday since early spring. The couple fought about it-genteelly at first, then more angrily. Owen prevailed, though he promised he’d meet them at the park no later than one-thirty or two.

“I didn’t realize until later how lucky it was that he won that argument,” she told Kohler softly. “If he hadn’t gone into work… It’s funny how fate works.”

She continued with her story. Portia, Claire and Lis rode with Dorothy and Robert Gillespie in their Land Cruiser. It was a pleasant two-hour drive to the park. But as soon as they arrived, Lis began to feel uneasy, as if they were being watched. Walking to the lodge house to use the phone she believed she saw, in a distant cluster of bushes, someone looking at her. Because she had the impression that there was something of recognition in the face, which she took to be a man’s, she believed for an instant that it was Owen, who’d changed his mind and decided not to work after all. But the face vanished into the bushes and when she called her husband’s office, he answered the phone.

“You haven’t left yet?” she asked, disappointed. It was then noon; he wouldn’t be there before two.

“Fifteen minutes, I’ll be on my way,” he announced. “Are you there yet?”

“We just got here. I’m at the gift store.”

“Oh”-Owen laughed-“get me one of those little pine outhouses. I’ll give it to Charlie for making me come in today.”

She was irritated but agreed to, and they hung up. Lis went into the store to buy the souvenir. When she stepped outside a moment later and rejoined the others at the entrance to the park, she glanced over her shoulder. She believed she saw the man staring again, studying the five of them. She was so startled she dropped the wooden outhouse. When she picked it up and looked back again, whoever it might have been was gone.

Kohler asked her about the others on the picnic.

“Robert and Dorothy? We met them at the club about a year ago.”

The foursome had coincidentally picked adjacent pool-side tables. They became friends by default, being about the only childless couples over thirty in the place. This mutual freedom broke the ice and they gradually got to know one another.

Owen and Lis were initially no match socially for their friends. Not yet inheritors of the L’Auberget fortune, the Atchesons lived in a small split-level in Hanbury, a grim industrial town ten miles west of Ridgeton. In fact the country-club membership itself, which Owen had insisted on so that he might court potential clients, was far too expensive for them, and many nights they’d eaten sandwiches or soup for dinner because they had virtually no cash in the bank. Robert, on the other hand, made buckets of money selling hotel communications systems. Owen, a lawyer in a small firm with small clients, masked his chagrin under careful smiles but Lis could see bitter jealousy when the Gillespies pulled up in front of the Atchesons’ tacky house in Robert’s new forest-green Jag or Dorothy’s Merc.

There was the matter of temperament too: Robert had lived in Pacific Heights and on Michigan Avenue, and spent several years in Europe. (“No, no, I kid you not! It was Tourette sur Loup. Ever hear of it? A medieval city in the mountains northwest of Nice, and what do we find in the town square? A cross-dressing festival. Really! Tell ’em, Dot!”)

He seemed ten years younger than his forty-one and you couldn’t help but feel the tug of his boyish enthusiasm. With Robert, all the world was a sales prospect and you willingly let yourself be hawked. Owen had more substance but he was quiet and had his temper too. He didn’t like taking second place to a handsome, wealthy charmer who resembled JFK in both appearance and charisma.

But then last March, when Ruth died, the Atchesons became wealthy. This had little effect on Lis, who’d grown up with money, but it transformed Owen.

For her part Lis too had felt some reservations about the foursome. Her discomfort, though, lay mostly with Dorothy.

Dorothy, with the voice of a high-school cheerleader. With the perfect figure-and the clothes to showcase it. With a round, Middle Eastern face, and dark eyes always flawlessly made up.

Lis could honestly say though that she felt more pique than jealousy. It was mostly Dorothy’s fawning that irritated her. The way she’d stop whatever she was doing to run errands for her husband, or errands she thought he’d want done. Robert seemed embarrassed by this excessive obeisance, which always seemed put-on, calculated, and Lis silently played the woman’s game of spouse sniping, concluding that what Robert really needed in a mate was a partner, not this little geisha, even one decked out with world-class boobs.

Yet when it was clear that they’d never be close friends, the reservations Lis felt about the woman faded. She grew more tolerant and even asked for Dorothy’s advice on makeup and clothes (about which she was a generous wellspring of data). They never became sisterly but Dorothy was someone to whom Lis could confide sins down to, say, the fourth level of hell.

It had been Dorothy, Lis recalled, who’d heard that the weather the next Sunday was supposed to be particularly beautiful and had suggested the picnic.

“And who was Claire?”

Eighteen years old, the girl had been in Lis’s English class her sophomore year. She was intensely shy, with a pale, heart-shaped face. “She was somebody,” Lis explained, “you hoped wouldn’t become too beautiful because it seemed there was no way she could handle the attention.”

But beautiful she was. Seeing her on the first day of class, several years ago, Lis was struck immediately by the girl’s ethereal face, still eyes and long, delicate fingers. Teachers peg students instantly, and Lis had felt an immediate fondness for Claire. She’d made an effort to stay in touch as the girl made her way through her junior then senior years. Lis rarely singled out any youngsters from school; only on one or two other occasions had she maintained relationships with students, or former students, outside of class. She generally kept her distance, aware of the power she had over these young people. When she wore light-colored blouses she noticed boys’ eyes lose control and dart across her chest while their cheeks grew red and their penises, she supposed, irrepressibly hard. The shy or unattractive girls worshipped her; those in the inner clique were disdaining and jealous-for no reason other than that Lis was a woman, and they were not quite. She handled all of these feelings with consummate dignity and care, and usually kept home and classroom absolutely separate.

But she made an exception for Claire. The girl’s mother was a drunk and the woman’s boyfriend had served time for sexual abuse of a stepchild in a prior marriage. When Lis learned Claire’s history, she began letting the girl into her life in small ways-occasionally asking her to help in her greenhouse or to attend Sunday-afternoon brunches. Lis knew this attraction to the girl had an enigmatic, almost a dangerous, side-the time, for instance, that Claire had stayed after class to discuss a book report. Lis noticed a tangle in the girl’s shimmery blond strands and with her own brush began working it out. Suddenly, she realized: teacher-student contact, with the door closed! Lis virtually leapt from her chair, away from the startled girl, and vowed to be more circumspect.

Still, over the past two years, they’d seen each other often, and when Claire mentioned wistfully on the Friday before the picnic that her mother would be away all Sunday, Lis didn’t hesitate to invite her along.

That May 1 the picnickers set up camp on Rocky Point Beach. Portia left immediately for a run-an improvised 10K through the winding canyons. She runs marathons, Lis told Kohler.

“So do I,” the doctor said.

Lis laughed, astonished, as ever, that people actually engaged in this sport for fun.

“We sat on the beach for a while, Dorothy, Robert, Claire and I. Watching the boats. You know, just chatting and drinking soda and beer.”

They had been there for about a half hour when Dorothy and Robert began to argue.

Dorothy had left Lis’s book in the truck. “Hamlet,” she explained. She’d been preparing for final exams and had carted along a well-read and annotated volume. “I had my hands full with picnic things and Dorothy said she’d get the book. But it had slipped her mind.” Lis had told her not to worry; she wasn’t in the mood to work anyway. But Robert leapt up and said he’d get it. Then Dorothy made some sour comment about his doing anything for anybody in a skirt. It was supposed to be a joke, Lis supposed, but it fell flat-since she’d managed to insult both Lis and Robert at the same time.

“Robert asked her what she meant by that. Dorothy waved her hand and said, ‘Just go get the fucking book, why don’t you?’ Something like that. Then she told him he ought to jog all the way to the parking lot. ‘Work off some of that fat. Look, he’s getting tits.’ ”

Lis was embarrassed for Claire’s sake. Robert jogged off angrily and Dorothy sullenly returned to her magazine.

Lis had pulled off her shorts and unbuttoned her workshirt, beneath which she wore a bikini. She lay back on a warm rock and closed her eyes, trying not to go to sleep (daytime naps are taboo for insomniacs). Claire, with whom Robert had struck up an immediate friendship en route to the beach, had seemed the most anxious of anyone for him to return. After he’d been gone a half hour, she stood and said she was going to look for him. Lis had watched the girl as she strolled toward the towering, weathered rocks. Repulsive and fascinating, the cliffs seemed hard as polished bone. They reminded her of the yellow skull sitting on the lab table in the school’s biology classroom.

Lis noticed Claire standing in the mouth of the canyon about a quarter mile from the beach. Then she vanished.

“And I thought suddenly,” Lis told Kohler, “where is everyone? What’s going on? I felt very concerned. I picked up my purse and started toward the place where I’d seen Claire disappear.” Then she saw a flash of color ahead of her. She believed it was yellow, the color of Claire’s shorts, and leaving Dorothy behind she hurried into the canyon. Lis was perhaps a hundred yards into the ravine when she found the blood.

“Blood?”

It was right outside a cave. The entrance had been chained off at one time but the post holding the chain had been pulled out of the ground and flung aside. No way, she thought, was she going inside. But she knelt down and looked into the passageway. The air was chill and it smelled of wet stone and clay and mold.

Then she felt a shadow over her. A huge man appeared just feet away, standing behind her.

“Michael?” Kohler asked.

Lis nodded.

Hrubek started howling like an animal. Holding a bloody rock, he looked right at her and screamed, “Sic semper tyrannis!”

Richard Kohler held up a thin hand, indicating for her to wait. He made his first notation of the evening.

“You didn’t think of going to find a park ranger?” Kohler asked.

Lis suddenly grew angry. Why had he asked her this? It was the sort of question the lawyers had asked, and the police. Did I think of looking for a ranger? Well, for God’s sake, wouldn’t we always do it differently if we could? Wouldn’t we recast our whole lives? That’s why time doesn’t reverse, of course-to keep us sane.

“I thought about it, yes. But I don’t know, I just panicked. I ran into the cave.”

Inside, it wasn’t completely dark. Thirty, forty feet above her, shafts of pale light streamed inside.

The walls rose straight up to an arched roof full of stalactites. Lis, breathless and frightened, leaned against a wall to steady herself. A high-pitched moaning of some sort filled the air. It was like wind over a reed, like someone imitating an oboe. Terrible! She looked at the trail at her feet and saw more blood.

Then Hrubek slipped through the cave opening. Lis turned and raced down the path. No idea where she was going, not really thinking, she simply ran. Once out of the main chamber she fled down a long corridor, about eight feet high. Hrubek was somewhere behind her. As she ran she noticed the tunnel was growing smaller. By now it had shrunk to six feet, and the sides were closing in. Once she slammed into a rock, cutting her forehead and leaving a scar that still remained. By then the chamber had narrowed down to five feet and she was running crouched over. Then, four feet. Soon she was crawling.

Ahead of her the tunnel grew even smaller though on the other side of a very narrow opening it seemed to widen and grow brighter. But escaping that way would mean crawling through a tunnel that was no more than twelve or so inches high. With Hrubek right behind her.

“The thought of being, well, exposed to him like that. I mean, wearing just my swimsuit… I couldn’t do it. I turned to my left and crawled through a larger entrance.”

It was black, completely black, but she felt cool air circulating and assumed it was a large space. She climbed inside, feeling her way along the smooth floor. Looking back she could see the entrance-it was slightly lighter than the surrounding walls. Slowly it darkened then grew less dark again, and she heard a hissing sound. He was in this small cave with her. She lay flat on the ground and bit a finger to keep silent while she sobbed.

“You have no idea what noise is until you’ve been in a place like that. I was sure my heartbeat or the sound of blood in my ears would give me away. I think I could hear my own tears falling on the floor of the cave.”

All the while Hrubek was shuffling around her. He passed her, no more than five feet away. Then he paused and sniffed the air and muttered, “There’s a woman in here. I can smell her pussy.”

Lis ran. She couldn’t bear it any longer. “I scrambled to the opening and turned back down the narrow corridor, the way I’d come. That is, I thought I did. But somehow I took a wrong turn.”

In one sense it was lucky. The light was better here and the roof of the cave high. She saw discarded cigarettes and beer cans-which led her to believe she was heading toward an exit. She kept moving toward the light.

“Then I felt a breeze stirring and way up ahead I heard running water. I ran toward it as fast as I could. Then I turned the corner. That’s where I found the body.” She gazed through the misty windows into the yard, now filled with a blustery wind. “I didn’t recognize it at first. There was too much blood.”