Blunt Darts

SEVENTH

– ¦ After I left the police station, I drove around Meade for an hour, just taking streets to see where they went and to get an idea of how many ways there might be for a fourteen-year-old boy to leave town. Even Meade's finest must have checked with bus drivers and the few cabs that plied the town. My guess was a cross-country hike until he was out of Meade and then maybe hitchhiking northwest to Worcester, northeast to Boston, or even southeast to Providence, Rhode Island. From any city, his transportation opportunities were limitless. Even with publicity, the chances that someone would come forward to say, "Yeah, I picked up the kid," were astronomically small. Without publicity, there was no chance at all to trace his route. I was going to have to be very lucky and hope that I could deduce what city he'd chosen as his jumping-off point.

I cut short my wanderings and drove to the outskirts of Brookline, a beautiful bedroom suburb of Boston, but really a small city in its own right. I stopped at a telephone booth in a gas station. The telephone book showed two Dr. D. Steins in Brookline but one was eliminated by his D.D.S. degree. Dr. Stein the psychiatrist was in a large, old stone medical building on Beacon Street across from the 1200 Beacon Motel. I eased the rent-a-car into one of the slanted center divider parking spaces, crossed the street, and entered the foyer.

I found Stein's door on the fourth floor and opened it. The foyer below and the hallway above were nondescript, but the psychiatrist's waiting room was elaborately furnished with a comfortable-looking sofa and four easy chairs arranged around a midsize oriental rug. The walls were a soft beige, with nonstrident landscapes and seascapes. If Dr. Stein intended his patients' surroundings to be soothing, his intention was successfully realized.

As I closed the door, I heard a low-toned bong. There was no receptionist, and indeed no desk or interior window for a receptionist. I was halfway to the inner office door when it opened.

"Yes?" said a tallish, slim man about forty. His initial smile of greeting faded as he failed to place me. He had a beard that was redder than the moplike sand-colored hair on his head.

"Dr. Stein?" I said.

"Yes."

"I'm John Cuddy. I believe Mrs. Kinnington called you?"

"Kinnington? She may have. I've been in group most of the morning. Kinnington?"

"I have a letter from her." I lifted it from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. He looked down at it.

"Yes,. well…" He seemed only to skim the letter, but he nevertheless kept it in his hand when he looked back up. "I'll have to check my service. I never take calls when I'm in group. I'll be another fifteen minutes or so and then I can see you. Please sit down and I'll be back to you."

He withdrew into the inner office and closed the door. I sat down and scanned his eclectic magazine collection. I flipped through two old New Yorker magazines (which I read only for the cartoons) and was halfway through my third Field and Stream article (in their largemouth bass annual issue) when the inner door reopened and a string of two men and three women of varying ages tiled out. From the distrustful looks they gave me as they passed, I think the waiting room's soothing qualities were pretty well wasted on them.

Stein was last out. He smiled at me and beckoned. I followed him in. Seating himself in a highback chair behind his desk, he bade me sit as well, so I dragged a visitor's lowback up to the front of the desk.

"I am sorry about disturbing you before," I said. He waved me off as he sank, somewhat relieved, into his desk chair. "Not at all, not at all. In fact, despite what they say in clinic, I think an occasional interruption may be good for a group." He shot me a mischievous smile. "It's certainly good for me." I smiled back. He reached for the telephone and hit one button.

"Checking my service," he said to me as an aside.

He spoke with the service for a while, taking down several quick notes on a pad. He said, "She did?" several times, then said thank you and hung up.

"Well," he said to me, "it seems your Mrs. Kinnington was quite insistent on reaching me. Virtually threatened my service with legal action if she were not put through."

"She's a very determined woman. And quite concerned about Stephen."

"Stephen, Stephen, yes, yes," he said as he looked at Mrs. Kinnington's letter again, and then rose and crossed to one of six file cabinets in the room. He pulled back a drawer, retrieved a file, and, opening it, returned to his seat.

As he turned the pages of the file, he spoke to me.

"Mrs. Kinnington says in her note only that Stephen is missing. According to the file here and my recollection as well, Stephen's father was the family member most involved with Stephen's… ah, stay at Willow Wood."

I chose my words carefully. "Mrs. Kinnington was out of the country at the time. Both she and the judge are doing everything possible to locate him. You are just one link, but perhaps an important one, in that chain."

"Yes, yes, of course." Whatever momentary reticence he had had now seemed to dissolve. "Well then, how can I help you?"

I breathed an inner sigh of relief and plunged on.

"We don't know why Stephen has disappeared. We thought you might be able to give us some idea."

Stein pursed his lips and flipped back to the front of the file. "According to my records, I last saw Stephen over three years ago. Aside from my file entries, I really have little recollection of him."

I leaned forward a bit. "What I am really interested in is why Stephen, after apparently doing so well for so long, suddenly does an about-face. Now, it may have been a new occurrence and it may have been a recurrence of something from his past. If we know what caused him to act, we may have a starting point for tracing him."

Stein tented his lingers and gave me a superior smile. "That's assuming that he departed of his own accord. Has that been established?"

"Not conclusively, but all the available evidence points toward his having run away rather than to kidnapping."

Stein nodded. He looked to his left and again reread Mrs. Kinnington's letter. He seemed to be trying to memorize it. "I assume that time is of the essence, as the lawyers say?"

"Yes. The longer it takes us to find the key, the lower our chances of finding the boy."

Stein came to his decision and swung his desk chair and the folder around sideways. "Let's go through the file." I hitched my chair around so that we sat side by side at the narrow end of the desk.

The file was in reverse chronological order, so that you had to read from the bottom of the lower page to the top of the higher page. That awkwardness mastered, it took relatively little time to review.

Stephen was signed into Willow Wood by his father within twenty-four hours of his mother's death. He was diagnosed catatonic upon his arrival, and was treated with half a dozen drugs over the first two months. He slowly came out of the trance, showing exceptional manual dexterity and imagination. Group therapy efforts were aborted nearly as soon as they were begun, Stephen preferring individual sessions, though not really coming around to any one analyst or therapist. The entries suggested Stephen most enjoyed outdoor activities and the library, shunning team sports and leadership roles.

"What kind of place is Willow Wood?" I asked.

Stein shrugged. "It's a low-security, very prestigious facility. In the old parlance, it would have been a sanatorium. It is set on the grounds of a beautiful estate about eight miles from Tanglewood. A friend of mine from medical school is head of staff there. Quite a plum position, but she was a superior doctor at a time when few women were entertained in medical school. She refers me all her discharging patients who are returning to the Boston area."

"There doesn't appear to be any indication of who referred the judge to Willow Wood."

"No, but any knowledgeable psychiatrist would know of Sarah-that's my classmate. Sarah might have a recollection of it, but surely it would be easier for you to just ask the judge."

"Right," I said, hopefully not too quickly. "Tell me about the course of care at Willow Wood, generally."

"Well, the course of care varies, of course, with the condition being treated. Willow Wood specializes, so to speak, in difficult, long-term cases of seriously ill, but not dangerous, individuals."

"Arts, crafts, and canoeing versus straitjackets and shock treatment?"

Stein snorted. "In a blunt sort of way, yes."

I returned to the file. Stephen seemed to improve month by month, if you compared a given week's entry to one four or five weeks later. The drugs dropped off, and the assessments of his progress steadily rose. About eight months after his initial admission, he was released to his father, with a forwarding referral to Dr. Stein.

I looked up at him. "Doctor, I don't quite understand something from the records here. What exactly was wrong with Stephen?"

"Well," said Stein, clearing his throat and shuffling through the file, "it's often difficult to diagnose exactly what was 'wrong' with a patient. One treats the apparent condition, or symptom, if you like, and then varies the treatment if earlier efforts prove unsuccessful. As you can see, Stephen was catatonic upon arrival at Willow Wood. Then slowly, by an evolving alternation of drugs, counseling, and therapeutic activities, he came back to us, so to speak."

"In layman's terms, you varied your prescriptions until he seemed to come out of it."

"Yes, but that can pretty generally be said about any patient."

"Then you can't really be sure of what was wrong with him to start with."

"Well, not in some microscopically, conclusively proved sense, no. When Stephen arrived at Willow Wood, he was literally in a trance. One can only identify the symptom or condition. One can't, despite magazine and television to the contrary, ever be sure of what's 'wrong with him,' in the sense I think you mean it."

I let it lay there while I returned to the file. The remaining pages were pale blue. "Are these blue pages yours?"

"Yes," he said, hopscotching with a pointed finger. "I first saw Stephen there, then a week later, then two weeks later, then one month later."

I read his entries. To me they seemed the sort of bland evaluation an assistant principal might give a kindergarten teacher. Stein's notes indicated good readjustment to home life, eagerness to return to school, intellectual curiosity, etc.

"I take it you came to no independent diagnosis of Stephen's illness."

"Well, no, but perhaps for a different reason. You see, by the time he came to me, he was no longer exhibiting any symptoms of any condition. He appeared to be a normal, well-adjusted boy of-he consulted his entries-"ten, nearly eleven years old. Since he wasn't sick, so to speak, there was nothing to diagnose. Hence only the few increasingly spaced visits."

"Do I understand then, Doctor, since neither Willow Wood nor you determined what was wrong with him, you don't know for sure that his mother's going off the bridge caused it?"

Stein blinked several times, and his mouth opened before he began to speak. Then he lapsed into a smile and gave me a patronizing look. "Given the chronological proximity of the event and the onset of the condition, what else could have caused it?"

I thanked him for his time and left.