“You’re probably right.”
The person who’d stalked me had warned me first. Other victims had died without warning.
Sometimes I thought about the others and thanked God that Robin and I had been lucky.
Once in a while I thought about the night the house had gone up in flames and found my hands clenching so hard they hurt.
Maybe I wasn’t the right therapist for Lucy.
On the other hand, perhaps I was eminently qualified.
CHAPTER
3
Robin and Spike came home at 4:15. Robin’s green sweatshirt was smudged with dirt. The green played off the auburn in her hair.
She kissed me and and I put my hands under the shirt.
“I’m filthy,” she said.
“Love a dirty woman.”
She laughed, kissed me harder, then pushed me away and went off to bathe.
Spike had tolerated the display of affection, but now he looked put-upon. A visit to the water bowl perked him up. I fed him his favorite dinner of kibble and meat loaf, then took him for a waddle on the beach and watched him ingest silica. The tide was low, so he stayed mostly on track, pausing from time to time to lift his leg at the pilings of other houses. Neutered, but the spirit remained.
Robin spent some time soaking and reading and I polished a report to a family court judge, a custody case where a happy ending was too much to hope for. I just hoped my recommendations could save three kids from some of the pain.
At 7:30, I checked in with my service; then we left Spike with a Milk-Bone and a rap-music fest on MTV and took my old ’79 Seville past Pepperdine University and the Malibu pier to Beauvilla.
It’s a French place on the land side, ancient by L.A. restaurant standards, which means post-Reagan. Monterey colonial architecture, a bit of water view past a public parking lot, beautifully cooked ProvenÇal cuisine, genuinely friendly service, and a slouching, smoking pianist who used to play soap-opera sound tracks and manages to turn a Steinway grand into a Hammond organ.
We had a quiet dinner and listened to a weird musical medley: “Begin the Beguine,” something from Shostakovich, a slew of Carpenters’ songs, the sound track from Oklahoma! As we were having coffee, the maÎtre d’ came over and said, “Dr. Delaware? You have a call, sir.”
I picked up the phone behind the bar.
“Hi, Dr. Delaware, this is Sarah from your service. I don’t know if I did the right thing, but you got a call a few minutes ago from a patient named Lucy Lowell. She said it wasn’t an emergency, but she sounded pretty upset. Like she was trying not to cry.”
“Did she leave a message?”
“No. I told her you were out of the office but I could reach you if it was an emergency. She said it wasn’t important; she’d call you tomorrow. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but she seemed really nervous. When I deal with the psych patients I like to be careful.”
“I appreciate it, Sarah. Did she leave a number?”
She read off an 818 exchange that I recognized as Lucy’s home number, in Woodland Hills.
Peter’s sleepy voice answered my call. “We’re unable to come to the phone right now, so leave a message.”
As I began to speak, Lucy broke in: “I told them there was no reason to bother you, Dr. Delaware. I’m sorry.”
“It’s no bother. What can I do for you?”
“Really, it’s okay.”
“Long as I’m on the phone, you might as well tell me what’s up.”
“Nothing, it’s just the dream—the one I was having when I first started seeing you. It went away right after the first session, and I thought it was gone for good. But tonight it came back—very vivid.”
“One dream?” I said. “A recurrent one.”
“Yes. The other thing is I must have sleepwalked, too. Because I dozed off on the couch watching TV, the way I usually do, and woke up on the kitchen floor.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine, I don’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than it is—it was just a little weird, finding myself that way.”