“Curious,” Martie said. “Yeah. He doesn’t like Dr. Ahriman.” “Who doesn’t?”
“Closterman.”
“Of course, he likes him,” she protested.
“No. I sensed it. His expression, his tone of voice.”
“But what’s not to like? Dr. Ahriman’s a great psychiatrist. He’s so committed to his patients.”
“I know, yeah, and look how much better you are just after one session. He was
Bounding around the kitchen again, ears flopping, paws slapping the tile, duck in mouth, Valet raised more quacks than a feathered flock.
“Valet, settle,” Martie commanded. Then: “Maybe Dr. Closterman. maybe it’s professional jealousy.”
Opening the book, leafing through it from the front, Dusty said, “Jealousy? But Closterman’s not a psychiatrist. He and Dr. Ahriman are in different fields.”
Ever obedient, Valet stopped bounding around the kitchen, but he continued to savage the Booda until Dusty began to feel as though they had been zapped into a cartoon starring both famous ducks — Daffy and Donald.
Dusty was mildly irritated with Closterman for laying this unwanted gift on them. Considering the discreet and yet unmistakable dislike that the internist had shown for Dr. Ahriman, his intentions here were not likely to be either kind or charitable. The act seemed annoyingly petty.
Seven pages from the front of the psychiatrist’s book, Dusty came across a brief epigraph prior to the first page of Chapter 1. It was a haiku.
— Okyo, 1890
“What’s wrong?” Martie asked.
Something like theremin music, out of a long-ago movie starring Boris Karloff, wailed and warbled through his mind.
“Dusty?”
“Odd little coincidence,” he said, showing the haiku to her.
Reading the three lines, Martie cocked her head as if she, too, could hear music to which the poem had been set.
“Strange,” she agreed.
Again, the dog made the duck talk.
Martie’s pace slowed as she ascended the stairs.
Dusty knew she dreaded hearing Susan’s voice on the answering machine. He had offered to listen alone and report back to her; but to her that would be moral cowardice.
In the upstairs study, Martie’s large U-shaped desk provided all the work space that she needed to harry Hobbits out of Eriador and across the lands of Gondor and Rhovanion, into the evil kingdom of Mordor — assuming life ever gave her a chance to get back to the sanity of Tolkien’s otherworld. Two complete computer workstations and a shared printer occupied less than a third of the territory.
Attached to the phone was an answering machine she’d used since graduating from college. In electronic-appliance years, it was not merely old but antique. According to the indicator window, the tape held five messages.
Martie stood well back from the desk, near the door, as though the distance would insulate her somewhat from the emotional impact of Susan’s voice.
Here, too, was a sheepskin pillow for Valet, but he remained with his mistress, as though he knew she would need consolation.
Dusty pushed
The first message was the one Dusty had left when he called her the previous evening from the parking lot at New Life.
The second was a call from Susan, the one that must have come in just after Martie had fallen asleep the first time, from sheer exhaustion and a little Scotch, before she woke from a nightmare and raided the medicine cabinet for a sleep aid.
Martie had retreated
Valet sat before her, gazing up, his ears perked, head cocked, hoping canine cuteness could counter grief.
The third message was also from Susan, received at 3:20 in the morning; it must have come in when Dusty was washing his hands in the bathroom and when Martie was “sleeping the perfect sleep of the innocent,” as the television commercials for the patent medicine guaranteed.
