a call I’d like you to make before I leave.”
“We’ll go back to the house.” It was clear that Mellery wanted to put distance between his guests and anything that might be related to his current difficulties.
On the way, Gurney explained that he wanted him to call Gregory Dermott and ask for more details about the history and security of his post-office box and any additional recollections he might have concerning his receipt of the $289.87 check, made out to X. Arybdis, which he had returned to Mellery. Specifically, was there anyone else in Dermott’s company authorized to open the box? Was the key always in Dermott’s possession? Was there a second key? How long had he been the renter of that box? Had he ever before received mail misaddressed to that box? Had he ever received an unexplained check? Did the names Arybdis or Charybdis or Mark Mellery mean anything to him? Had anyone ever said anything to him about the Institute for Spiritual Renewal?
Just as Mellery was beginning to look overloaded, Gurney pulled an index card from his pocket and handed it to him. “The questions are all here. Mr. Dermott may not feel like answering them all, but it’s worth a try.”
As they walked on, amid beds of dead and dying flowers, Mellery seemed to be sinking deeper into his worries. When they reached the patio behind the elegant house, he stopped and spoke in the low tone of one fearful of prying ears.
“I didn’t sleep at all last night. That ‘nineteen’ business has been driving me completely out of my mind.”
“No connection occurred to you? No meaning it might have?”
“Nothing. Silly things. A therapist once gave me a twenty-question test to find out if I had a drinking problem, and I scored nineteen. My first wife was nineteen when we married. Stuff like that-random associations, nothing anyone could predict I’d think of, no matter how well they knew me.”
“Yet they did.”
“That’s what’s driving me crazy! Look at the facts. A sealed envelope is left in my mailbox. I get a phone call telling me it’s there and asking me to think of any number I wish. I think of nineteen. I go to the mailbox and get the envelope, and the letter in the envelope mentions the number nineteen. Exactly the number I thought of. I could have thought of seventy-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-one. But I thought of nineteen, and that was the number in the letter. You say ESP is bullshit, but how can you explain it any other way?”
Gurney replied in a tone as calm as Mellery’s was agitated. “Something is missing in our concept of what happened. We’re looking at the problem in a way that’s making us ask the wrong question.”
“What’s the right question?”
“When I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know. But I guarantee you it won’t have anything to do with ESP.”
Mellery shook his head, the gesture resembling a tremor more than a form of expression. Then he glanced up at the back of his house and down at the patio on which he was standing. His blank look said he wasn’t sure how he had gotten there.
“Shall we go inside?” Gurney suggested.
Mellery refocused himself and seemed to have a sudden recollection. “I forgot-I’m sorry-Caddy’s home this afternoon. I can’t… I mean, it might be better if… what I mean is, I won’t be able to make the call to Dermott right away. I’ll have to play it by ear.”
“But you will do it today?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll just have to work out the right time. I’ll call you as soon as I speak to him.”
Gurney nodded, gazing into his companion’s eyes, seeing in them the fear of a collapsing life.
“One question before I leave. I heard you ask Justin to talk about ‘internal dichotomies.’ I was wondering what that referred to.”
“You don’t miss much,” said Mellery with a small frown. “‘Dichotomy’ refers to a division, a duality within something. I use it to describe the conflicts within us.”
“You mean Jekyll-and-Hyde stuff?”
“Yes, but it goes beyond that. Human beings are loaded with inner conflicts. They shape our relationships, create our frustrations, ruin our lives.”
“Give me an example.”
“I could give you a hundred. The simplest conflict is the one between the way we view ourselves and the way we view others. For example, if we were arguing and you screamed at me, I would see the cause as your inability to control your temper. However, if I screamed at you, I would see the cause not as my temper but your provocation-something in you to which my scream is an appropriate response.”
“Interesting.”
“We each seem to be wired to believe
“I get the point.”
“That’s just the beginning, hardly scratches the surface. The mind is a mass of contradictions and conflicts. We lie to make others trust us. We hide our true selves in the pursuit of intimacy. We chase happiness in ways that drive happiness away. When we’re wrong we fight the hardest to prove we’re right.”
Caught up in the content of his program, Mellery spoke with verve and eloquence. Even in the midst of his current stress, it had the power to focus his mind.
“I get the impression,” said Gurney, “that you’re talking about a personal source of pain, not just the general human condition.”
Mellery nodded slowly. “There’s no pain worse than having two people living in one body.”
Chapter 16
Gurney had an uncomfortable feeling. It had been with him on and off since Mellery’s initial visit to Walnut Crossing. Now he realized with chagrin that the feeling was a longing for the relative clarity of an actual crime; for a crime scene that could be combed and sifted, measured and diagrammed; for fingerprints and footprints, hairs and fibers to be analyzed and identified; for witnesses to be questioned, suspects to be located, alibis to be checked, relationships to be investigated, a weapon to be found, bullets for ballistics. Never before had he been so frustratingly engaged in a problem so legally ambiguous, with so many obstructions to normal procedure.
During the drive down the mountain from the institute to the village, he speculated on Mellery’s competing fears-on one side a malevolent stalker, on the other a client-alienating police intervention. Mellery’s conviction that the cure would be worse than the disease kept the situation in limbo.
He wondered if Mellery knew more than he was saying. Was he aware of something he’d done in the distant past that could be the cause of the current campaign of threat and innuendo? Did Dr. Jekyll know what Mr. Hyde had done?
Mellery’s lecture topic of two minds at war inside one body interested Gurney for other reasons. It resonated with his own perception over the years, reinforced now by his Mug Shot Art efforts, that divisions of the soul are often evident in the face, and most evident in the eyes. Time and again he had seen faces that were really two faces. The phenomenon was easiest to observe in a photograph. All you had to do was alternately cover each half of the face with a sheet of paper-along the center of the nose, so only one eye was visible each time. Then jot down a character description of the person you see on the left and another of the person you see on the right. It was amazing how different those descriptions could be. A man might appear peaceful, tolerant, wise on one side- and resentful, cold, manipulative on the other. In those faces whose blankness was pierced by a glint of the malice that led to murder, the glint often was present in one eye and absent from the other. Perhaps in real-life encounters our brains were wired to combine and average the disparate characteristics of two eyes, making the differences between them hard to see, but in photographs they were hard to miss.
