After Mrs. Fulraine was killed, he completely fell apart, fell into a deep depression.'

As Izzy peers at me, I detect traces of an old grief. Perplexity too, for even after so many years he still hasn't reconciled himself to Dad's suicide.

I wrote him, as I did to my old art teacher, Hilda Tucker, to say I'd be back in Calista over the summer and hoped he'd find time to meet with me and talk. Izzy answered right away. He remembered me well, he wrote, was sorry to hear of my mother's passing. My father, he wrote, had been his most promising protege, the man he'd hoped would build upon his legacy.

Izzy's gaze is kindly. 'You look so much like him, David. Uncannily so. Even your gestures and the way you hold your head. I understand why you changed your name, but to me you'll always be Tom Rubin's boy.'

There's only one piece of art in the room. It hangs above the fireplace: a large black and white etching of six wolves' heads peering out of the branches of a tree, with the words 'The Wolfman's Dream' inscribed across the bottom in brilliant red.

As we talk, my eyes keep wandering to this picture. What is it, I wonder, about the Wolfman Case that so intrigued Dad? Izzy notes my interest.

'The etching's by Jim Dine, a gift from colleagues when I gave up directorship of the Institute. Perhaps you know that the patient Freud called The Wolfman made his own sketch of the wolves he saw in his famous dream. Here Dine reinterprets that vision, matching, I think, the artistry one finds in Freud's case study. Freud, of course, wrote many great papers, but in certain ways for us in the profession, The Case of the Wolfman is the holy grail.' Izzy pauses. 'How arrogant of Tom to think his analysis of Mrs. Fulraine could match such a dazzling penetration.'

Izzy, I know, is a generous man. And he truly loved Dad as he said. But in his last remark, he shows his ambivalence. Dad, it seemed, had overreached, dared to fly too close to the sun, and so he had fallen – literally, in fact, from the window of his office into a snow-covered doctor's parking lot below.

'Let me tell you about that dream,' Izzy says. 'Tom thought he had it figured out. You probably saw where he was heading – toward a father/infant daughter seduction interpretation. As a child, Mrs. Fulraine was sexually touched by her father. Her ‘Dream of the Broken Horses’ was a vision of that trauma triggered by a deep sense of guilt and loss brought on by her own daughter's abduction. Tom felt that a good interpretation along those lines would help her overcome her erotomania. I had my own ideas. I still remember Tom coming to me after their first session. He was so excited. ‘Izzy, this is what I've been waiting for my entire professional life, a multilayered dream with rich erotic content that cries out to be solved and written up.’'

Izzy smiles. 'Of course, I encouraged him. No question he'd lucked into a glamorous patient. So many of our patients are tiresome. Listening to their drivel three and four hours a week – you can imagine what a drain that is. Now, of course, there aren't enough patients, with psychoanalysis so out of fashion.'

Izzy's sharp eyes tear up. His voice, soothing till now, starts to break.

'For all Tom's hopes, things didn't work out. He had this screwy idea he should ‘enter in,’ step inside her neurosis, work on it from the interior. He wasn't the first to try a move like that. But before you attempt something so extreme, you must closely examine your motives. Are you in love with the patient? In lust with her? Has she so entranced you that you're looking to therapeutically justify an affair? If she hadn't been murdered – God knows how it might have ended!'

He excuses himself, returns with two bottles of German beer, then suggests we sit outside.

His garden is subtly beautiful, a medley of muted greens and grays. A lively creek, winding through the property, creates a soothing sound. We sit on an old wooden bench, stick out our legs, and listen to the water running over smooth stones.

The garden, he tells me, was crucial to Lindstrom's concept for the house.

'I explained how my work involved me in turmoil. ‘Give me a safe haven,’ I said, ‘a place to escape from other peoples' craziness.’ Lindstrom liked that. It was a way to create a contrast to the clean, sharp lines of the building.'

He turns to me. 'Martha loved this place. That final summer, when she knew she was dying, she'd have me wheel her out here, then we'd sit for hours just listening to the water.'

I remember Martha Mendoza, a quiet, sad-eyed lady, a talented art weaver who'd had several successful shows in New York. We had one of her strange, dark yarn sculptures hanging in our house.

'Listen, David, you have every right to look into your father's life. But I must advise you that the deeper you delve, the greater the possibility you'll become upset and depressed. So… as long as you're aware…'

I assure him I am.

'Well, then, I'll tell you what I know. As I said, Tom was devastated when Mrs. Fulraine was killed. In his paper, he tells us proudly how he parried her seductions. In fact, I believe, he was seduced. It was the most sever case of countertransference reaction I'd ever seen.'

Izzy shakes his head. 'He knew what was happening. At first he tried to convince himself it was just sex. She aroused him – simple as that. But it was so much more. He wanted her, needed her, lived for their sessions. When he came to me for help and I put him back on the couch, he told me his fantasy: that he'd solve her dream, show her how she could be happy, then, after a decent interval, divorce your mother and marry her. They'd become this great romantic couple, the rich girl and the shrink who'd cured her. I told him that was pretty much the story Scott Fitzgerald had written in Tender Is the Night, except the marriage in that novel turns out badly and in the end the shrink finds himself used up and destroyed.'

Izzy takes a deep breath. 'Then something happened, a clue to what she was up to. There was this columnist-'

'Waldo Channing?'

Izzy nods. 'Nasty man, but he could turn a phrase. One day that summer Channing ran what they call a blind item. Knowing you were coming today, I dug it out.'

He pulls a yellowed clipping from his breast pocket, puts on his glasses, reads the item out loud:

'‘A little birdie tells us a certain well-known divorcee, one of Our Happy Few, has lately been making whoopee-do with her shrink. We know those weird guys use couches and get their patients to yap about sex, but this is the first we've heard of one getting down and dirty in the office. Guess all that sex talk can stir the bodily juices… so to speak.’'

Listening, I'm struck by Channing's viciousness.

Izzy takes a sip of beer. 'It hit Tom and your mother very hard. The giveaway was Channing's ‘Happy Few.’ Since his crowd consisted of a couple dozen people, it was obvious whom he meant. So was Tom making ‘whoopee-do’ with the lady? I asked him point-blank. That's when he told me she'd masturbated in his office. ‘For God's sake,’ I told him, ‘you've got to get out of this! She's unstable. She'll end up suing you for malpractice!’

'Tom assured me that wouldn't happen, that he and Barbara were on the verge of a breakthrough.' Izzy shakes his head. 'For me it was clear. The woman was malicious. Her relationship with the gangster was part and parcel of her fantasy that she was some kind of femme fatale in a real-life film noir. Most likely she'd planted the item with Channing. Now she was pulling Tom into her vortex, and he was so besotted he didn't see it. ‘She'll destroy you,’ I told him. ‘That column item's just a taste. Turn her over to someone else. If you like, I'll take her on myself.’

'Tom, I can tell you, was not at all happy to hear that. This was going to be his Great Case, and he wasn't turning it over to anybody, least of all me.' Izzy looks at me. 'You know about the condom?'

I shake my head.

Izzy gives me a quick glance. Over the last weeks of her life, Mrs. Fulraine received a number of enveloped addressed in block capitals. No writing inside, just artifacts, including, in one case, a condom.'

I stare at him. 'In what condition? I mean, was-?'

'-it used?' Izzy shrugs. 'It was filled with some sort of substance, then tied off at the top. Today, of course, with DNA testing, a semen sample, if indeed it was semen, would make powerful forensic evidence. But it was the sequence of those envelopes that was so disturbing, the ascending expression of rage. To Tom it looked like a cleverly contrived campaign of intimidation and terror.'

'That's so vile! Why didn't Mrs. Fulraine go to the cops?'

'Tom urged her to, but she refused. She told him she believed the letters came from someone with whom she'd had a major falling out, that they were some sort of complex message about her daughter, money, and sex. I didn't believe that. I thought it was much too pat. I suggested to Tom that the letters were bogus, that she may

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