Like a dream within a dream.
The only memory he had — if it even was a genuine memory — was of cutting open a woman’s chest. And that image had been vivid, too, not at all like the fuzzy half-obscured flashes he’d had before.
In the dream, he’d reeled in the fish line and scrambled out of the stream, hurrying to a motor home parked in the middle of a flat grassy area a couple of hundred feet from the stream’s edge.
Though he had no memory of where the vehicle had come from, it nevertheless seemed familiar. His heart had begun pounding as he neared the van, but when he went inside, nothing was amiss. There certainly was no sign of anything like the hideous butchery he could also clearly remember. In one of the compartments in the vehicle’s undercarriage, he found a Makita saw, its blade removed. In one of the galley drawers he found a handle for an X-Acto blade, but again there was no blade attached to it. He could find no signs of blood anywhere in the motor home, but after putting on his clothes — the same clothes he was wearing now, as he talked to Gordy Farber’s nurse — he’d searched the woods surrounding the grassy clearing.
He’d found nothing.
He’d been on his way back to the motor home when he blacked out again.
“Mr. Jeffers?” the nurse asked. “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” Glen replied. “And it is an emergency. I really need to talk to Gordy.”
The nurse hesitated, as if trying to decide if he was lying, then apparently decided to let her employer make the decision for himself. “I’ll see if the doctor can be disturbed.”
Tinny Muzak dribbled from the speaker for a moment, then Gordy Farber’s voice came on the line. “Glen? Where are you? What’s going on? How come you hung up on me?”
“Can I come in and see you?” Glen asked. “I can be there as soon as you have some time open.”
“I’ll make the time,” Gordy Farber told him, reading the fear in Glen’s voice. “Can you get here in fifteen minutes?”
“I’ll be there,” Glen replied.
It was actually only ten minutes later that Glen walked into the doctor’s office. It would have been less, but as he set off to walk the eight blocks down to the hospital complex, he’d seen a motor home just like the one in the dream. He peered into its windows, and his heart had raced as he recognized what little of the interior he could see. He tried the doors, found them locked, and only then continued on to Group Health and Farber’s office.
The heart specialist insisted on a thorough examination despite Glen’s protests, then, satisfied that his patient wasn’t on the verge of a second attack, he gestured Glen to a chair and rested his own weight against his big walnut desk, arms crossed, eyeing the seated man carefully. Whatever had occasioned Glen’s worried phone call, it didn’t appear to be a medical emergency; in fact, from all signs, it appeared as if Glen’s physical recovery was proceeding satisfactorily. “So,” he asked, “what is this all about, Glen?”
“I don’t know,” Glen replied.
Gordy Farber stared at him. “You don’t know?” he echoed. “What the hell kind of answer is that? You were making an appointment. The doorbell rang, and then you came back, were barely civil to me, and hung up. So don’t tell me you don’t know. Who was at the door?”
Glen shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “I remember talking to you, and I remember the doorbell ringing. After that, the whole day is a mess. I woke up on the sofa twenty minutes ago, but I don’t think I was there all day. But it’s all crazy. I have this memory of waking up earlier, but that time I wasn’t even in the house. I was standing in a stream up in the mountains. I was fishing.” He reddened and his eyes shifted away from the doctor. “And I was stark naked.” Slowly and carefully, Glen repeated everything he remembered. When he was finally finished, he looked up at the doctor, fear blazing in his eyes. “The thing is, I’m starting to wonder what’s real and what’s a dream. My God, Gordy, what’s happening to me? And don’t try to tell me this is something that normally happens after a heart attack.”
The specialist moved around his desk and dropped into his chair. “You don’t have any memory of driving up to the mountains, or driving back?”
Glen shook his head. “I don’t even have a motor home. But the weird thing is, the one in my dream, or whatever it was, is parked half a block from my house. I just have the two memories — cutting up the woman, and then looking for her body in the motor home.”
“Obviously, you didn’t do either of those things,” Farber told him.
“What if I did?” Glen countered.
Farber frowned, then switched on the intercom. “Could you bring in this morning’s Herald, please?” he asked his nurse. “The front page.” A moment later the door opened and the woman appeared, a folded newspaper in her hand. When Farber nodded toward Glen, she handed it to him.
“Will that be all?”
“Yes, thanks,” Farber replied. As the nurse closed the door behind her, he turned back to Glen. “Take a look at the front page.” Glen unfolded the paper to see Anne’s story on the murder of Rory Kraven spread across the lower half of page one. “Did you read that this morning?” the doctor asked. Glen nodded. “Then I think we can identify the source of that dream,” Farber observed, a thin smile curving his lips. “Come on, Glen — that story doesn’t just talk about what happened to the guy they found across the street. It describes what he did to those two women, too. And one thing you can say for your wife — when she draws you a verbal picture, it’s vivid. So if you read that article this morning, and dreamed about cutting open a woman’s chest this afternoon, I don’t think it’s rocket science to find a connection between the two events.”
Glen shook his head doggedly. “But it doesn’t account for the blackouts. And what was I doing fishing in the nude?”
Gordy Farber grinned. “It was only a dream, Glen, remember? Hell, if it had been my dream, I might have been tempted to try it myself.” When his attempt to lighten Glen’s mood was only met by a dark look, Farber’s smile faded. “All right, I admit it’s a weird dream. But it’s also way out of my field. The kind of stuff you’re talking about, you need a shrink for. Want me to call someone?”
Glen hesitated. The image of the woman’s torso — and his own hands cutting into it, first with the X-Acto knife, then with the Makita — filled his mind. “Do you know someone good?” When the heart specialist nodded, he made up his mind. “Set me up.”
Jake Jacobson was ten years younger than Glen, five inches shorter, and forty pounds heavier. By the time Glen arrived in Jacobson’s office, the psychiatrist had already pulled his medical history from the central computer, and as his new patient came in the door, the doctor looked at him critically. “Well, at least you don’t look crazy,” he offered in an attempt to put Glen at his ease.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Glen asked.
“If you don’t want me to make you feel better, why did you come?” Jacobson countered.
For the next half hour he listened while Glen related as much as he could remember about his state of mind since he’d had the heart attack, and especially the strange, surreal experiences of the past few days. The psychiatrist took some notes, but didn’t interrupt Glen’s story until he had finished.
“The human mind is a very complex organ,” Jacobson observed when Glen at last fell silent. “We already know that a very simple suggestion can implant false memories that are every bit as vivid as genuine ones. We’re seeing it all the time in alleged child sex-abuse cases. I don’t question your belief that what you remember about this afternoon is real. All I question is the validity of that belief.” He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his ample belly. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume the experience in the river was real. You yourself were unable to find any evidence of what you think you did.” He smiled. “A saw and a knife, neither of them with a blade?”
“I could have thrown them away anywhere,” Glen said, his voice obstinate. “I didn’t even look for them.”
“But you did look for a body, and didn’t find one. Nor did you find any blood, or any sign of a struggle, or anything else that might rationally lead you to believe you’d actually killed someone. It was all a dream, Glen. As for the motor home, obviously you saw it at some point this morning. You probably even looked in the windows earlier, so when you had the dream, the images were already in your mind.” He began ticking points off on his fingers. “Your next-door neighbor was murdered in a manner not unlike what you dreamed. There is a motor home like the one you dreamed of, sitting almost in front of your house. Your wife has been writing about Richard Kraven for years, and one of the things I remember about him is that he liked to go on fishing trips in a motor home. I can’t
