“I’m afraid not, except for me, and even there we kept it very professional. I mean she never spoke about her social life, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did she meet any men there? I mean like relatives of the youngsters you treat.”
“Not really. There were some other professionals around but nothing more than idle chitchat from what I could see and hear. Oh, once some doctor from Mt. Sinai met her here. I think his name was Henry something. I only saw him the one time, but he seemed as awestruck with her as some of the young kids, yet in an obviously romantic way. He seemed to get all steamed up when he was waiting for her in the lounge and she came out of the counseling wing talking to our resident senior social worker.”
“What do you mean steamed up?”
“It wasn’t anything he said, but I could see in his eyes. The jealousy, I mean. I think he might have smacked her right there if they were alone, but nothing happened. At least while they were here in the lobby.”
Wisdom draws a breath and thanks her for her time. Then he remembers.
“It was Wilkie Collins.”
“Excuse me?”
“The author of
“I’m impressed,” she said, the voice now much stronger than a few moments earlier. “I’m not used to policemen who read so extensively.”
“And I’m not used to female rabbis,” answered Wisdom.
“Well, I don’t have a long beard, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Wisdom laughs, says he never imagined her with a beard, and then asks her how she managed to find such a profession.
“That part wasn’t hard. My father is still a rabbi in Cleveland. And pretty modern. At first I had a hard time finding a pulpit, but then I came around to thinking that social work was more important. It’s that simple.”
Wisdom has nothing more to say although a part of him wants to stay on the phone and hear more about the Heidi no one else seems to have known. The few seconds of silence that follows tells him that there isn’t anymore. He thanks her again, repeats his number in case she remembers anything else, and promises to call whenever they find out something.
It is only later, when he’s home after changing into worn jeans and an old sweater, that the full impact of what she’s told him sinks in. Seems that Heidi wasn’t always the calculating predator of a person he thought she was. And it pisses him off even more that he’ll likely never get to know the real person.
And then there’s Henry who just keeps popping up like a garden weed. He also realizes he’s thinking of Heidi in the past tense, notwithstanding what the rabbi said. “She’s dead,” he announces to an empty kitchen. “So let’s see what our suspects think when she turns up at their doorstep. Especially Henry.”
CHAPTER 10
Henry Stern’s life is falling apart, yet he seems to sleepwalk through the metamorphosis.
Memories of Heidi crowd out everything else that ever seemed to matter. His interest in medicine and in particular his residency in radiology evaporates. Three months after Heidi’s disappearance, he is summoned to the office of the chief resident in radiology and given a warning to improve both his attendance and concentration levels. Despite this caution, he’s unable to lessen the rate of his descent into melancholia. In one increasingly rare coherent moment, he confides to a colleague that if Heidi were there she would be able to treat his symptoms. But Heidi is not there and her absence is driving him over the edge.
He takes to sleeping in her apartment for which he still pays rent. He showers where she once did, and massages her shampoo into his hair until the recollection of her scent chokes him with memories of lust. He scrubs his teeth with her brush as he tries to suck the taste of her mouth back into his, but after the first month the essence of her presence has vanished as she did, leaving only a tasteless peppermint film on the stiffening bristles.
Her closet is barely filled as she has always disregarded the value of much clothing, but the pink-and-white dress that she wears for him on special occasions is missing. He knows she wore it on the day she disappeared from what the people on the bus reported. He knows how sensual she looks in that dress, and on more than one morning he lays half awake there in her bed and believes that she is in the other room wearing that particular dress, waiting for him to ask her to come back to bed. He begins to touch himself at first gently, then with more urgency and calls out to her. He actually calls out to her to join him, but as sleep slips further away, the reality of her absence seizes him more firmly, his partial erection vanishes and he can only sink a sobbing head into her pillow.
His performance at work further deteriorates and by the end of August he is put on an involuntary medical leave, but he is, in effect, suspended with the unlikely prospect of ever regaining his position. With nowhere to go, he wanders aimlessly through Manhattan streets. He takes up smoking again and begins to drink, but then just as suddenly stops the alcohol, preferring to ingest the Percocets he has accumulated from the hospital for his own use. There’s also the Seroquel. He’s taken it on and off for fifteen years after a shrink in New York said it would cure some of the hallucinations he used to have. There are times when he stops cold turkey, and then just as suddenly takes it up again. The day after he saw Heidi and some intern together he felt he was going completely nuts and started up again. Then a week later when he failed to satisfy her on that last night they spent together he knew it was due to the Seroquel. Now he’s been off it for months, and he knows when he’s off it he sees things no one else does. He also knows he’s stayed off it because he’s been hoping to find Heidi alive and anxious to get into bed with her again. But he feels he’s losing control and needs to regain command of the search, so he decides to ease his way back on the meds. He can always stop later.
The dreams begin in earnest a few weeks after Labor Day. Slivers of such images have appeared and vanished over the past four months, but they are always so fleeting that he wakes with little recall except for the vaguest presence of Heidi. This is different. The dreams are full blown, exact in every detail and sound, and unlike any vision he’s ever experienced.
The theme recurs. He is walking along an empty beach. To his right the ocean pants and growls as it pounds the sand. To his left the beach dissolves into clusters of scrub grass, which sporadically intersperses with jagged cliffs whose bases are partly eroded as if great chunks were bitten from a large cheese. The sun drops into the dunes behind him as he walks to the east. The air becomes cooler. The muted shriek of shore birds and the surf are the only sounds. Isolation welcomes him like a friend. He is almost at peace when he hears a plaintive cry. At first he doesn’t recognize it, but then as the voice becomes stronger and more assertive, he knows it’s Heidi’s.
The voice comes from somewhere high and to his left. When he looks, all he sees at first is a gentle slope that rises from the beach. Beach grass and underbrush give way to sand pines and clusters of cedar. He strides up the slope with increasing urgency until it barely begins to level off amidst a thick stand of trees. He stops and listens for the sounds, which have become less frequent, then turns through a wide arc until he sees the shadow of a man carrying a body. The man is walking away from him so he cannot see the face, but the body he carries is clothed in pink and white. He knows it must be Heidi’s. He bursts into a run, but actually falls behind the man no matter how hard he tries to keep up. He looks down and sees the sandy soil suck at his feet and pull him back as if he’s mired in quicksand. In the end he’s immobilized. He calls out to wait, but the man keeps walking until he disappears from view, and all Henry can do is drop to his knees and scream, a sound that always wakes him and is no longer part of the dream.
After the third night with the same tortured images, he concludes that Heidi was taken by one of the men out near the beach. He knows it’s either Welbrook or Posner and this deduction makes the decision to stalk both men until he finds her whereabouts that much easier.
He arranges for a neighbor to pick up his mail, reserves a room at the motel in East Hampton he’s used before, packs a bag, and rents a car at the neighborhood Avis. He feels better once he’s on the road. As the city falls away behind him, he looks ahead at the still-crowded expressway, knowing that in less than two hours he will be that much closer to Heidi, and with the conviction that after everything’s over, he’ll be the one to save her from her abductor. His dream convinces him that she’s still alive, hidden somewhere out there near the beach, and waiting for him to find her. And he will. He promises himself. That’s all he has to do.
He arrives just as the sun sets and avoids the motel so he can drive to the nearest beach. He wants to
