Ricky smiled. He saw one immense advantage he had. Rumplestiltskin’s world was one accustomed to conclusions. Ricky’s was the opposite. One of the tenets of psychoanalysis is that even though the sessions draw to a close, and the daily therapy finally finishes, the process never is completed. What the therapy brings, at its best, is a new way of looking at who one is, and allowing that new definition of one’s life to influence the decisions and choices that come with the future. At best, then those moments are not crippled by the events of the past, and the selections made are oddly relieved of the debts everyone owes to their upbringing.
He had the sensation that he was reaching the same sort of non-end ending.
It was either dying time, or continuing time. And whichever it was would be defined by the next hours.
Ricky accepted the coldness of his situation, and stared out the window at the scenery. As the bus droned on toward the Cape, Ricky noted that the trees and shrub bushes seemed to lessen in stature. It was as if life in the sandy soil not far from the ocean was a little harsher, and that it was harder to grow high when pummeled by the sea winds in the winter.
Outside of Provincetown, Ricky spotted a motel on the strip that is Route Six, that hadn’t already blinked on its no vacancy sign, probably a result of the desultory weather forecast. He paid cash for the weekend, the desk clerk taking the money in a bored and disinterested fashion, assuming, Ricky guessed, that he was nothing more than a confused middle-aged Boston businessman, finally giving into fantasies, descending upon the town with its gaudy summertime nightlife for a few days of sex and guilt. He didn’t do anything to discourage this presumption, and, in fact, asked the clerk where the best clubs were in town. The types of places where single folks went searching for companionship. The man gave him some names and left it at that.
Ricky found a camping goods store, and purchased more bug repellent, a powerful flashlight, and an oversized olive drab pullover poncho. He also bought a wide-brimmed camouflage hat that was clearly ridiculous in appearance, but which had one critical feature: Attached to the brim was a shroud of mosquito netting, which could drop over the head and shoulders. Once again, the weather forecast for the weekend helped: humid, thunderstorms, gray skies, and warm temperatures. A sickly sort of weekend. Ricky told the man behind the counter that he was still going to be doing some gardening, which made each of the purchases establish perfect and unforgettable sense within that context.
He walked back outside and saw the first of what he suspected would be a line of huge thunderheads building up in the west. He listened for a distant rumble of thunder and surveyed the graying skies above him that seemed to usher in the arrival of evening. He could taste the coming rain on his tongue, and he hurried to make his preparations.
The day was stretched long by light that lingered, as if contending with the sweep of weather heading toward him. By the time he reached the road that led to his old house, the sky had taken on an almost crippled brownish hue. The bus that traveled Route Six had dropped him a couple of miles away, and he had jogged the distance easily, his backpack crammed with his purchases and his weapon riding comfortably on his back. Ricky remembered running the same route nearly a year earlier, and he recalled the sharpness in his breath, the way the wind was sucked out of his lungs by panic and the shock of what he’d done and what he still had to do. This run was oddly different. He felt a sense of strength, and at the same time, a sense of isolation tinged with complacency, as if what he was racing toward wasn’t so much a place where he had parked so many memories, as much as a place that spoke of change. Each step of his route was familiar, yet surreal, as if it existed on a different plane of existence. He picked up his pace, pleased that he was stronger than he was when last he’d run the race, eager that no onetime neighbor would come rolling out of a driveway and spot the dead man running toward the burned-out home.
Ricky was lucky, the road was deserted at this the dinner hour. He pulled in to the driveway, slowing his pace to a walk, and was immediately concealed by the stands of trees and shrub brush that spring up quickly on the Cape in the warmer months. He did not know exactly what to expect. It half occurred to him that whatever relative had managed to seize hold of Ricky’s property might have cleared the area, even started construction of a new place. His suicide letter had designated the land be turned over to a conservation group, but he expected that when the members of his distant family had caught wind of what the actual value of a prime slice of buildable Cape property was worth, that it had been tied up in lawsuits. The thought made him grin, struck by the irony that it was likely people he barely knew who were fighting over his estate, when he’d died the first time months earlier to protect one of them from the man Ricky believed was hurrying toward him that night.
When he came out from beneath the trees, he saw what he’d hoped for: the still- charred remains of his home. Even with the growing season upon the land, the earth was still blackened for yards around the gaunt skeleton of the old farmhouse.
Ricky walked up to where the front door had once stood, passing through the weeds of what had once been his garden. He stepped inside, moving slowly midst the ruins of the home. Even after a year, he could still smell the gasoline and burnt wood, but then, realized that was nothing more than his mind playing tricks on him. There was a roll of thunder in the distance, but he ignored it, and maneuvered as best he could through the spaces, allowing his memory to fill in walls and furniture, artwork and carpets. And when all those recollections had built his old home up around him, he allowed his memory to paint in moments with his wife, long before she sickened, and before she was robbed of strength, vitality, and finally life, by disease. It was both pleasant and eerie for Ricky, as he wandered through the wreckage. It was, in an odd way, both a return and a departure, and he felt a little as if he was embarking that night upon something that would take him somewhere far different, and that finally, he was able to say goodbye to everything that had been Dr. Frederick Starks, and ready himself to greet whatever person emerged from the night that was falling swiftly around him.
The spot he’d hoped to find was waiting for him, directly to the side of the center chimney that had graced the fireplace in the living room. A slab of ceiling and thick wooden beams had tumbled to the side, making a sort of decrepit lean-to, almost a cave. Ricky donned the poncho, seated the bug hat on his head, and removed the flashlight and semiautomatic pistol from his backpack. Then he crawled back into the darkness of the wreckage, concealed himself, and waited for night, the approaching thunderstorm, and a killer to arrive.
He saw some humor in it: What had he done? He had behaved like a psychoanalyst. He had provoked electric, runaway emotions in the person he wanted to see. Even the psychopath was vulnerable, Ricky thought, to his own desires. And now, just as he had for so many years of his own analytic practice, he was waiting for this last patient to come through the door, bearing with him all the anger, hatred, and fury, all directed at Ricky the therapist.
He fingered the trigger guard on his weapon and clicked off the safety. This session, however, wasn’t intended to be quite so benign.
He leaned back and measured every sound, and memorized every shadow as they lengthened into darkness around him. Vision was going to be a problem that night. The moon would be obscured by clouds. The ambient light from other homes and distant Provincetown, would fade beneath the coming rain. What Ricky expected to rely upon was both certainty and uncertainty: The ground where he’d selected to wait was the most familiar tract in his life. This would be an advantage. And, more important, he was relying upon Rumplestiltskin’s uncertainty. He won’t know precisely where Ricky is. He is a man accustomed to controlling the environment in which he operates, and this, ultimately, Ricky hoped, was the least-controlled situation he could be placed in. A world the killer was unfamiliar with. A good place to wait for him that night.
Ricky was supremely confident that the killer would arrive, and soon enough, searching for him. As the man drove east from New York, he will understand that there were really only two potential locations for Ricky’s presence. The beach where he’d faked drowning, and the home he’d burned down. He will come to these two spots, hunting, because despite what he might have learned from the clerk at the
Chapter Thirty-Five
