Melissa had been born in June of that year. Arthur Dickinson had missed the unveiling of his most prized work by weeks.
Something else about the picture struck me: older, shorter, homely man. Taller, younger, beautiful woman.
The Gabneys. The way Leo had tried, unsuccessfully, to embrace his wife’s shoulders.
He was of normal height, the disparity less dramatic, but the parallel remained striking.
Maybe it was because the Gabneys had stood in that same spot this morning.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one to have noticed it.
Identification between therapist and patient.
Similar taste in men.
Similar taste in interior decorating.
Who’d influenced whom?
Chicken-egg riddles, which had come to me as I sat in Ursula’s office, returned with brain-pecking vengeance.
I went over to the vertical rack. Handwritten labels under each slot listed artist, title, descriptive data, dates of execution and purchase.
Hundreds of partitions, but Arthur Dickinson had been an organized man; the collection was alphabetized.
Cassatt, between Casale and Corot.
Eight slots.
Two of them empty.
I read the labels.
The rest of the six accounted for, framed and glassed. I pulled them out carefully. All black-and-white, no mother and child scenes.
The two best prints gone.
One for the patient’s gray room, one for the doctor’s.
I recalled the way the Gabneys had behaved this morning.
Leo trying to project sympathy. But making sure to tell me that Chickering’s suicide theory was nonsense.
Damage control.
Ursula operating on a whole other level.
Touching the Chaucer doors as if they led to a shrine.
Or a treasure trove.
I thought of Gina’s unaccounted “petty cash.” Two million…
Had the gifts gone beyond art?
Therapeutic transference as a pathway to riches?
Dependency and terror could create a cancer of the soul. Those with the cure could name their price.
I thought of gifts I’d been offered. Mostly handmade creations of little children- potholders, popsicle-stick picture frames, drawings, clay sculptures. My office at home was full of them.
In the case of adult offerings, I had a policy of accepting only tokens- flowers, candy. A yellow-wrapped basket of fruit. I turned down anything of significant and lasting value. Doing it graciously was sometimes an ordeal.
No one had ever shoved a piece of rare art in my hands. Still, I liked to think I would have turned that down, too.
Not that accepting gifts was indictable; ethically, it lay somewhere in the fuzzy area between felony and bad judgment. And I was certainly no saint, immune to the pleasures of a bargain.
But I’d gone to school to learn how to do a certain job, and most responsible therapists agreed that any sizable gift, in either direction, reduced the chances of doing the job correctly. Shaking the therapeutic balance by immutably altering the relationship that forms the core of change.
Apparently the Gabneys disagreed.
Perhaps a treatment that involved house calls and open-ended sessions lent itself to a relaxation of the rules; I thought of how much time
Foraging in the attic.
But
As opposed to?
Melissa had reacted to the bond between her mother and Ursula with growing suspicion.
Reactions discounted by everyone, including me, because Melissa was a high-strung kid, dealing with dependency and separation and threatened by anyone who got close to her mother.
Little girl who cried wolf?
Was any of it relevant to Gina’s fate?
Another visit to the clinic seemed in order, though I wasn’t sure how I’d approach the Gabneys.
Picking up Gina’s chart- saving them the price of postage?
And then what?
God only knew.
Today was Sunday. It would have to wait.
Meanwhile, there were lamb chops to deal with. A meal I was willing to bet would be first-rate. Too bad my appetite had waned.
I restored Arthur Dickinson’s hideaway to its original condition and went downstairs.
27
I ate by myself in the big dark dining room, feeling more like hired help than lord of the manor. When I left the house at one-fifty, Melissa and Noel were still up in the bedroom, talking in low, earnest tones.
I intended to head for home but found myself driving past the Gabney Clinic. A gunmetal-gray Lincoln and a wood-sided Mercury station wagon were parked in front. Ursula’s Saab sat at the mouth of the driveway.
Gina’s therapy group, one day early? Emergency session to deal with her death? Or another group led by the dedicated doctor?
Two o’clock. If the one-to-three schedule was adhered to, the session would be over in an hour. I decided to keep an eye on the building, call Milo while I was waiting.
I looked for a phone. Directly across the street were houses. Farther to the south, the neighborhood was completely residential. But cater-cornered a block north stood a row of storefronts: a prewar golden brick building with limestone insets and domed brown awnings over each shop. I cruised past slowly. The first establishment was a restaurant. Then a real estate office, a candy shop, and an antique gallery with hall trees and odd tables out on the sidewalk. Beyond that, another couple of commercial blocks, then apartments.
The restaurant was my best bet. I turned around, pulled up in front of it.
Cute little bistro affair. LA MYSTIQUE in frosted script on the windows.
Inside were eight tables covered with blue-and-white checkered cloths, sprigs of daisies and lavender in blue glass vases, white chairs and walls, European travel posters, an open kitchen behind a low Plexiglas partition in which a Hispanic man wearing a chef’s toque labored. Two of the tables were occupied, both by pairs of conservatively dressed middle-aged women. What was on their plates tended toward the green and leafy. They paused to look up as I entered, then resumed playing with their food.
A conspicuously busty, fair-haired woman of around thirty came forward, holding a menu. She had a full,
