Ghost Trackers (5 page)

“Tell me how your day’s been going, Rick.”

Rick’s brow furrowed as he thought. He rubbed his bandaged fingers together, but he didn’t scratch at them, and Drew took that as a good sign.

“Lunch was good. We had chocolate pudding today. I like chocolate.”

Drew smiled. “Me, too. I like a tall glass of cold milk to go along with it.”

Rick gave his head a quick shake. “Not me. It takes away from the chocolate taste. Makes it like you never ate it in the first place, you know?”

Drew nodded as if he understood what Rick was talking about. “Anything else?”

Rick’s scowl deepened, as if he were having trouble finding the memory. “We made collages during art therapy today. I like cutting pictures out of magazines, but I hate having to use those plastic scissors with the round ends. They don’t cut too well.”

Which is why residents have to use them
, Drew thought. Most of the patients at Oak Grove had a history of violence on some level. The worst ones weren’t even allowed to use safety scissors. They had to draw with crayons and eat with plastic spoons under strict supervision. Rick had been nonviolent since the day he’d been committed, but even he wasn’t allowed to use real scissors, just in case.

Aloud, Drew said, “What kind of pictures did you use to make your collage?”

Rick shrugged. “Nothing special. Cars. People wearing nice clothes. Disemboweled animals . . .”

His tone didn’t change as he said this, but
Drew noted the slight upturn at the corner of his mouth, as if he were enjoying a private smile. Drew wasn’t shocked by Rick’s words. He’d heard far worse in his career. But Rick had never used any violent imagery in their sessions before. If a patient was delusional, it was sometimes best to let a comment like Rick’s pass without comment. But the almost-smile playing about his mouth made Drew suspect that the man was quite aware of what he was saying, so he decided to confront him about it.

“I find it hard to believe Ms. Shewalter would bring any magazines with pictures like that to class.”

Rick’s smile widened, and his gaze—which was usually a trifle unfocused—sharpened in a way that Drew found disquieting.

“The dog pictures weren’t
literally
in the magazines, Drew. I made them out of combinations of other pictures—colors and shapes combined to give the impression of disembodied dogs. Like Rorschach blots.”

A mocking edge had come into his voice, one Drew had never heard before, and his speech patterns were different, the phrasing more sophisticated, the rhythms more complex. He remembered how Rick had once claimed to hear voices, and he wondered if the man was hearing one now and if it was telling him what to say or perhaps even speaking through him as if he were a ventriloquist’s
dummy. Of course, any voice Rick heard would be a manifestation of his own damaged psyche, but the effect was damned eerie.

“What made you decide to make pictures like that, Rick?”

He shrugged again, but the gesture was different this time. Smoother, almost sinuous. It put Drew in mind of the way a reptile might shrug.

“It gave my hands something to do while I imagined burying an ax in Ms. Shewalter’s head.”

Despite himself, Drew felt a chill at Rick’s words. No, he realized. The sensation of cold was more than a simple emotional reaction. The temperature in the office had dropped by several degrees in the last few minutes. He could feel the cold on his face, his hands, the back of his neck, and inside his mouth, throat, and lungs as he breathed. He’d known cold like this before, cold that did more than chill the flesh. Cold that penetrated deep into the core of your being, wrapped its icy fingers around your soul, and began to squeeze.

Drew? Trevor? Why is it so cold?

“You miss them, don’t you?” Rick said.

The man’s voice yanked Drew out of the memory. “Who?”

He continued as if he hadn’t heard Drew’s question. “You miss both of them but especially
her
.”

He lifted a bandaged hand to his mouth and
began tearing off his adhesive strips with his teeth, spitting them onto the carpeted floor one by one. He continued speaking as he worked, the words muffled at times but clear enough.

“You really haven’t had any friends since them, have you? Haven’t allowed yourself to get close to anyone. Oh, you have dozens of acquaintances, and you date now and again, but you’re going through the motions, aren’t you? Pretending to live, when in truth, you’re hiding behind walls so thick and high that nothing can get through. Better that way, right? Safer.”

Rick finished uncovering the last of his scarred fingertips. He examined his hand for a moment, looking like someone checking out a manicure he’d just received. And then he inserted the tip of his index finger into his mouth.

The room felt as cold as an Arctic plain now, and Drew saw his breath turn to wisps of vapor as it hit the frigid air.

This isn’t possible
, he told himself.
I’m experiencing some sort of delusion
. But even as he thought these things, he knew he was lying to himself. Whatever the source of the cold, he did his best to ignore it. He had more important things to worry about right then.

“Don’t do it. I understand that you’re feeling a compulsion to hurt yourself. It’s OK to feel that way, but it doesn’t mean you have to give in to that compulsion.”

Rick’s gaze locked onto Drew’s, but he didn’t remove his finger from his mouth as he talked. “You’re going to see them again. Your friends, I mean. Very soon.”

Rick bit down on his finger, gently at first, and then with increasing pressure. Drew began shivering from the cold. Whatever was happening here, it wasn’t—

Natural
.

—helping Rick. He wanted to leap to his feet, rush over to Rick, grab hold of his arm, and yank his hand away from his mouth. But he forced himself to remain seated. He didn’t want to sit and watch while Rick mutilated himself, but he knew from both training and experience that it wasn’t a good idea to make any sudden moves when a patient began exhibiting violent behavior.

Drew rarely felt threatened when he worked with patients, whatever their pasts, and he’d never felt any threat from Rick during their previous sessions. But he could sense the potential for violence in the air now, like the energy that gathers before a powerful thunderstorm, and for the first time in his career as a psychologist, he was afraid. Afraid for himself and afraid that Rick might hurt himself far worse if he tried to stop him.

And so he watched as the already raw skin on Rick’s finger split under the pressure of his jaws, and blood began to flow, running over his lips and
onto his chin in a thin trickle. Rick’s eyes glimmered with madness, and, still biting down on his index finger, he grinned at Drew.

“I’m starting to get the feeling that our session is about over, but before you send me back to my room wrapped in a straitjacket and carrying a circulatory system full of tranquilizers, allow me to leave you with this. She will call for you again, just as she did before. Only this time, you won’t be able to help her.”

Drew felt a pit open up in his stomach at Rick’s words, but before he could ask the man what he meant, Rick bit down on his finger as hard as he could, and the blood began flowing in earnest. Rick laughed at first, but his laughter quickly faded to silence. His eyes rolled white, his jaw went slack, and his bloody finger slipped out of his mouth as his hand fell to his lap. At first, Drew feared the man had gone catatonic or worse, suffered a stroke, but before he could get up to go check on him, the man’s eyes came back into focus, and he blinked in confusion.

“What . . . happened?” His voice was soft, little more than a whisper. “I remember we were talking about something. Pudding, I think, and then . . .” He frowned. “Why does my finger hurt so bad?”

Before Drew could explain, Rick raised his hand and saw his wounded finger.

“Aw, no . . . And I was doing so
good
. . .”

He began to cry, and Drew rose from his chair and—professional distance be damned—walked over to him, leaned down, and put his arms around the sobbing man.

A half-hour later
, Drew was back in his office, sitting at his desk, typing up his notes from Rick’s disastrous session. A chill still lingered in the air, real or imagined, and he’d turned up the heat.

He had typed several paragraphs so far, but he read over them, scowled, and deleted all but the first couple of lines. He kept
At first, Mr. Johansen appeared to display signs of progress in dealing with his obsessive-compulsive hand mutilation, and our initial conversation proceeded along the usual lines of making small talk about his day
. But he didn’t know what to say after that. At first, he’d tried to describe the events as objectively as he could, but when he reached the part about the room temperature dropping, he’d stopped and started hitting the delete key.

Drew was a rational man who used his intelligence and education to help him deal with sometimes very irrational people. In a way, he saw his patients as sailors lost at sea, their ships surrounded by fog and night. Therapy was a lighthouse, a shining beacon of hope that could help them find their way out of the darkness, and he viewed himself as the lighthouse keeper.

He could explain Rick’s cryptic pronouncements—
You miss them, don’t you? She will call for you again, just as she did before
—as the ramblings of a deeply troubled mind. It had only seemed to have meaning because he himself was tempted to ascribe meaning to it. Basic psychology, the kind of stuff undergrads learned in Intro to Psych. And the temperature drop could be explained as easily. It wasn’t uncommon for people to experience sensations of cold during traumatic events. Given his specialty in posttraumatic stress disorder, he knew this better than most. Just because he was a psychologist didn’t mean he was immune to experiencing trauma himself. It was always tough to watch a patient have a psychotic break. He’d had an emotional reaction to Rick’s meltdown, one that had manifested as a sensation of cold. Simple as that.

But that was his mind talking. His instincts, his
feelings
, told a different story, and over the years, Drew had learned to rely on his feelings as much as his intellect when it came to dealing with patients. And his feelings now told him that whomever he’d been speaking to, it hadn’t been Rick, and the temperature drop he’d experienced had been real, not a symptom of intense stress. So that meant . . . what? That Rick had been possessed?

He gave his head a quick shake. No way. It was ridiculous. That was the sort of crazy theory that Trevor might come up with for one of his books. Drew was a man of science. He—

His cell phone sat next to the computer on his desk, within easy reach. It rang, and he picked the phone up and answered it, grateful for the distraction. And while he supposed he should have been surprised to hear Trevor’s voice on the other end, he wasn’t.

Amber knew She
shouldn’t have a second glass of merlot, not with the meds she was on. She told herself she’d just sip this one slowly and make it last.

The hotel bar was upscale for Ash Creek: chrome, glass, and black-lacquer décor, lighting pitched at just the right level, not so dim as to be depressing but not so bright as to be garish. A banner hung behind the bar, “Welcome Back, Ash Creek Grads!” written in red letters that looked a little too much like blood for her taste. Nineties pop music played in the background, programmed for the reunion crowd by the hotel staff, she guessed. “The Sweetest Taboo” by Sade was on now, the song the aural equivalent of a syringe full of Thorazine, but the effect was lost on her. As nervous as she was, she doubted the real thing could have calmed her down.

She’d chosen a corner table and sat with her back to the wall. She liked having something solid behind her, liked being able to see the entrance.
Less chance of someone sneaking up on you from
behind this way, and easier to make a fast escape if you need to
, she thought. She knew it was only partially a joke, and not a very funny one, but she forced a smile and took a sip of her wine.

She managed two more sips before deciding that the alcohol was, if anything, only increasing her anxiety level, and she was about to get up and leave when Drew walked into the bar.

Although she hadn’t seen him in fifteen years, she recognized him instantly. He hadn’t changed much. A few more pounds, the skin beneath his eyes a bit puffy and discolored, as if he hadn’t been getting enough rest. But the changes in Drew’s appearance were minor. All in all, he looked as handsome as she remembered. More so, because he carried himself with a casual confidence that she not only found attractive but also envied. It had taken all of the courage she could muster to force herself to leave her room after she’d checked in.

Drew stopped inside the entranceway and looked around. He wore a white polo shirt, dark jeans, and running shoes. He looked more like a grocery-store clerk than a psychologist, but then Drew had never cared what other people thought about him. Another quality he possessed that made her envious.

The bar was about three-quarters full of people drinking, talking, and laughing, and Amber half hoped that Drew wouldn’t notice her among the crowd. After all, it
had
been fifteen years,
and those years hadn’t been kind to her. She was afraid of what Drew would think when he saw her, and she regretted letting Greg talk her into coming here. But then Drew saw her and smiled with such warmth that her regrets melted away. As he approached her table, she rose to meet him.

“Hello, Drew.” She held her hand out for him to shake, but she wasn’t surprised when he ignored it and gathered her in for a hug. He’d always been a touchy-feely kind of guy but in a genuinely affectionate, noncreepy way. She felt so fragile in his embrace, as if she were made of paper skin and brittle twig bones, but he held her gently, and for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long, she felt safe and protected. But then he let go and stepped back, and she was surprised to feel a pang of sadness as the contact ended.