Ricky sat alone for a few moments. Death, divorce, bankruptcy. Illness, despair, depression, blackmail, extortion. He thought any one or perhaps all of the words could apply to him.
The manager returned and handed Ricky another envelope, containing the cash. “Would you care to count it?” he asked.
“No, I trust you,” Ricky said, pocketing the money.
“Well, please, Doctor Starks, if we can ever be of service again, here’s my card…”
Ricky took this as well, muttering his thanks. He turned to leave, then stopped suddenly, looking back at the manager.
“You said people usually close accounts because?”
“Well, usually something very hard has happened to them. They need to move to a new location, begin a new career. Create a new life for themselves and their families. We get many closings, the vast majority, I’d say, because elderly, longtime customers pass away, and their estates, which we’ve handled, get sucked up and tossed into the more aggressive money markets or Wall Street by the children who do the inheriting. I would say that almost ninety percent of our account closings are related to a death. Maybe even a higher percentage. That’s why I wondered about yours, doctor. It just doesn’t fit the pattern that we’re accustomed to.”
“How interesting,” Ricky said. “I don’t know about that. Well, please rest assured that if I need a bank in the future, this will be the one I use.”
This placated the manager somewhat. “We will be at your service,” he said, as Ricky, suddenly chewing on what the bank manager had told him, turned and exited into the last of the day of his last day but one.
The weightless dark of early evening had descended by the time Ricky returned to the farmhouse. In the summer, he thought, the truly thick and heavy night holds off until midnight or later. In the fields adjacent to his home, crickets chirped, and above him, the first stars of night dotted the sky. It all seems so benign, he thought. A night when one should have no cares and no worries.
He half expected Merlin or Virgil to be waiting for him inside the house, but the interior was silent and empty. He flicked on the lights and then went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. Then he sat at the wooden table where he’d shared so many meals over the years with his wife, and opened the package he’d received at the bank. Inside the overnight courier bag was a single envelope with his name printed on the outside.
Ricky tore open the envelope and removed a single folded sheet of paper. There was a letterhead at the top of the page, giving the letter the appearance of a more or less routine business transaction. The letterhead read:
R. S. Skin
Private Investigations
“All transactions strictly confidential”
P.O. Box 66-66
Church Street Station
New York, N.Y. 10008
Beneath the letterhead was the following brief letter, written in a routine and clipped business tone:
Ricky read through the letter three times, before setting it down on the table.
It was, he thought, a truly remarkable document. He shook his head, almost in admiration, certainly in despair. The address and the bogus private investigation firm were surely complete fictions. That wasn’t the genius in the letter, though. The genius lay in how insignificant the letter would seem to anyone except Ricky. Every other connection with Rumplestiltskin had been erased from Ricky’s life. The little poems, the first letter, the clues and directions, all had been either destroyed or stolen back from him. And this letter told Ricky what he needed to know, but in such a manner that if someone else were to come upon it, it wouldn’t attract attention. And, it would almost directly lead anyone who might be curious to an immediate and impenetrable brick wall. A trail that went nowhere instantly.
That, Ricky thought, was intelligent.
He knew who it was who wanted him to kill himself, he just didn’t know their names. He knew why they wanted him to kill himself. And he knew that if he failed in that demand, they had the capacity to do precisely what they had promised to do from the very first day. The bill for services.
He knew the havoc that they had produced in his last two weeks would evaporate when Ricky met the deadline. The fiction of sexual abuse that had skewered his career, the money, the apartment, the entirety of what had befallen him over the course of fourteen days would unravel instantly, as soon as he was dead.
But beyond that, he thought, the worst thing of all: No one would care.
He had isolated himself professionally and socially over the past few years. He was, if not estranged, certainly cut off and distant from his relatives. He had no real family, and no real friends. He thought his funeral would be crowded with people in dark suits, wearing faces displaying sufficient fake concern and false regret. Those would be his colleagues. There would be some people in the church pews who were former patients whom he had helped, he thought. They would wear their emotions appropriately. But it is the cornerstone of psychoanalysis that a successful treatment would put all those folks into a realm where they were free of anxiety and depression. That was what he had designed for them, in years of daily sessions. So, it would be unreasonable to ask them to actually shed a tear on his behalf.
The only person likely to squirm on the hard wooden church bench with genuine emotion was the man who’d created his death.
I am, Ricky thought, utterly alone.
What good would it do to take the letter, circle the name
The man did not exist. At least, not in a plane where some local policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, at the height of the busy summer season, where crimes were defined primarily by middle-aged folks driving home from parties drunk, domestic squabbles among the wealthy, and rowdy teenagers trying to buy any variety of illegal substances, would be capable of finding him.
And worse, who would believe it? Instead, what anyone looking at Ricky’s life would discover almost instantly was that his wife had passed away, his career was in tatters due to allegations of sexual misconduct, his finances were a mess, and his home had been accidentally destroyed. A fertile groundwork for a suicidal depression.
His death would make sense to anyone glancing at it. Including every colleague he had back in Manhattan. On the surface, his death at his own hand would be an absolute textbook case. No one would pause and think it unusual for even a second.
For an instant, Ricky felt a surge of anger directed at himself: You made yourself into such an easy target. He clenched his hands into fists and placed them hard on the tabletop in front of him.
Ricky took a deep breath and spoke out loud: “Do you want to live?”
The room around him was silent. He listened, as if half expecting some ghostly
