Tight Lines Page 7

  I climbed the wide steps onto the back porch and found two doors there, side by side, under a bright overhead light. One of the doors was heavy and solid-looking with no windows. In the center of it was a small brass plate on which “Dr. Warren McAllister” was etched in fancy lettering. The other door had a window in it with a curtain drawn across from the inside. Beside each door was a bell. Over the doctor’s bell was a neatly hand-lettered sign that said “Ring and then come in.”

  I pressed the bell beside Dr. Warren’s door, but I decided to wait rather than enter, and a minute or so later the door opened.

  “Mr. Coyne?” he said.

  He was a couple inches taller than my six feet, angular and a little stoop shouldered, with a bushy thatch of silvery hair that flopped over the tops of his ears. His eyes were deep-set and sharp blue. His face was seamed with what are called wrinkles on women, but on men are known as “character lines.” I guessed he was in his late fifties.

  He was wearing a Harris tweed jacket, with earth colors predominating, a blue oxford shirt that matched his eyes, a dark green tie, and tan trousers. He held a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses in one hand.

  He extended the other hand to me. I shook it and said, “Dr. McAllister. I appreciate your seeing me.”

  “No problem, Mr. Coyne. Glad you could make it. Well, why don’t you come on up.” He turned and I followed him up a flight of stairs that corkscrewed its way to the third floor. At the top was another door that opened into a small sitting room, the place where his patients waited until their fifty-minute hour session began, I assumed. It was furnished with an oxblood leather sofa and two matching easy chairs, a coffee table stacked with New Yorker and Yankee magazines, an aluminum coffee urn, and a large, densely populated tropical fish tank. Several cheerfully amateurish watercolors in cheap frames adorned the walls.

  McAllister paused inside the waiting room for me to catch up. Then he said, “We can talk in my office, if you don’t mind.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  He pulled open a door and we entered a room nearly as big as my entire apartment. I noticed that there was another door, this one opening into the office. A double check on his patients’ privacy, I deduced.

  The floors were wide pine planks, with several braided rugs scattered about. Large windows on two walls looked out into the treetops. The other two walls were lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves. A wood stove stood in one corner. Two comfortable-looking armchairs sat facing each other in front of the wood stove. A big wooden desk, its top littered with papers and books, crouched under one of the windows. In another quadrant of the room was an upholstered chaise. A straight-backed chair sat by its head.

  McAllister waved his hand. “Here’s where I work,” he said. “We can sit over here, if you want.”

  He led me to the two armchairs by the stove. I took one. He sat across from me. He fitted his glasses onto his face, leaving them low on his nose so that he looked at me over the top of them. “About Mary Ellen Ames,” he said. “I’m sure it’s redundant for me to reiterate the constraints that we’ll have to place on this conversation. You must deal with matters of confidentiality now and then.”

  I nodded. “Happens a lot. I place a lot of value on discretion in my practice.”

  He nodded and smiled. “Yes, good. Both of us must be careful to protect our clients’ privileged status with us. So if I appear less than forthcoming with you, Mr. Coyne, I want you to know that it’s not because I don’t care or am not as concerned as you are.” He cleared his throat and arched his eyebrows at me.

  “Sure,” I said. “I understand. You are concerned about Mary Ellen Ames, then?”

  He nodded. “Yes. She’s my patient. I’m concerned about all my patients.”

  “Do you have a particular reason to be concerned in Mary Ellen’s case?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you want, Mr. Coyne.”

  So I did. I told him about Susan and my frustrated efforts to find Mary Ellen. He was a good listener. Those sharp eyes studied my face as I talked. He nodded frequently and murmured, “Certainly. Mm hm,” when I paused in my narration, or, “Yes. Of course.” When I mentioned going into her place and finding the prescription for Pertofrane with his name on it, he blinked but said nothing.

  When I stopped, he said, “So you’re asking me if I know where she is.”

  I shrugged. “Yes. That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”

  He slowly removed his glasses and gazed down at them as he held them in his lap. Then he looked up at me. “Perhaps you were wondering why I was so agreeable about meeting with you.”

  I nodded. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact. I didn’t expect you to be so—cooperative.”

  “I wouldn’t be normally. But Miz Ames has missed—let’s see—we meet four times a week, so counting today’s session, she has missed ten consecutive appointments. It is, quite frankly, a source of some concern to me, yes. She has not always been completely faithful about keeping her appointments, or informing me ahead of time if she’s unable to meet with me. Many patients are irresponsible about this, and when they fail to show I am unlikely to be particularly concerned, although it’s part of their therapy to keep the work going, even when it’s painful for them, and their failure to keep appointments—often a rather transparent form of passive aggressiveness directed at the analyst, you see—inevitably becomes the topic of their subsequent sessions. But Miz Ames, as I said, has missed two full weeks plus yesterday and today, and as far as I know there is no reason for it. She’s—”

  “Has it been painful for Mary Ellen recently?” I interjected.

  “Painful?”

  “Your word, Doctor.”

  He frowned for an instant, then smiled. “Oh, yes. I see. Well, I shouldn’t say it’s been unusually painful for Miz Ames lately. Difficult, of course. It always is. We’ve worked very hard together for a very long time now. She has been making slow but steady progress. There have, naturally, been some, as you say, painful times. But, no, not currently.” He cocked his head at me. “If you mean should I have anticipated her doing something, ah, desperate or destructive, no, I can’t honestly say there’s been anything particular.”

  “Desperate or destructive?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your words again.”

  He shrugged. “She’s a psychiatric patient, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Yeah, I see.” I paused. “The drug, that Pertofrane—?”

  “It’s an antidepressant.”

  “So she’s depressed, then.”

  He shook his head. The question was out of bounds, if I couldn’t figure it out for myself.

  “Has she spoken to you about a man named Dave Finn? Or Sherif Rahmanan? Or—” I squinted, trying to remember. “Or Sid Raiford?”

  McAllister smiled. He reminded me of a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover, the rural general practitioner about to remove a splinter from a tearful boy’s finger. Kindly, gentle, wise, competent. “I can’t discuss any of that with you, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “Even if you are her mother’s attorney.”

  “I need to know if she’s said anything to you that would give us a hint as to where she’s gone, that’s all I’m after.”

  “I don’t know where she is—”

  “But—”

  “But if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “But she could do something, um, desperate or destructive.”

  “I think I already indicated how I felt about that.”

  “You said, I think,” I said, “that you didn’t believe you should be held responsible for anticipating something like that, which is a little different. I’m not concerned with responsibility here.”

  “That’s not exactly what I said.” He smiled again. “I’ll bet you’re a pretty fair attorney, Mr. Coyne.”

  I waved my hand. “I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m cross-examining you. I’m just trying to find her. And I can’t, and it worries me. Mainly on Susan’s account.
Nobody seems to know where she is. Mary Ellen’s certainly got a right to her privacy, and you, I understand, are obliged to honor it. But if you have any idea how I can reach her…”

  He nodded. “I apologize. This is a bit awkward for me. Normally I would refuse even to meet with you, for fear of inadvertently overstepping the proper bounds. Hence I find myself bending over backwards not to. All I can tell you is that Miz Ames’s disappearance, or whatever we will call it, surprises me as it does you. And, yes, it does worry me. She has a great deal of work ahead of her before something like this would not disturb me. But as to the substance of our work together, I’m afraid that’s simply out of bounds.”

  He arched his eyebrows at me. I shrugged.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You have no idea where she might be, then?”

  “If I did, it would be improper for me to share it with you.” He hesitated. “I suppose I can tell you this, though. If she has gone somewhere, I have no idea where it might be or why she decided to go there. And I can say this, too. I do not believe Mary Ellen Ames is a danger to herself.” He sighed. “And I would like to terminate this discussion at this point, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not a danger to herself,” I repeated. “You’re talking about suicide?”

  “Yes. Exactly. It’s what we shrinks worry about. A patient’s suicide is our ultimate failure, Mr. Coyne.”

  “But I can tell Susan not to worry about that.”

  “I would be absolutely shocked. Honestly.”

  “Can you think of a reason why she might want to run away?”

  He shook his head. “I really do insist we close the subject.”

  I nodded. “Okay.” I held out my hand to him. “I appreciate your time.”

  He smiled. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.” He stood up. “Look, would you care to join me for a drink?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. I’ve taken enough of your time.”

  “I insist.”

  I shrugged. “Well, okay. Sure. Why not.”

  He held up his hand, palm facing me. “No shop talk, now.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Let me just find a couple things on my desk and we can go downstairs.”

  He went over to the desk under the windows and began to rummage among the papers. I wandered over to the bookcases. He had an eclectic collection—old volumes of Freud and Jung, some Plato and Aristotle, Hemingway and Faulkner, Tolstoy and Chekhov—and on one shelf, by heavens, newer books by writers such as Brooks, Marinaro, Lefty Kreh, and Nick Lyons.

  “Are you a fly fisherman, Doctor?” I said to him.

  He turned and grinned at me. “I try. I do love it. Marvelous therapy. You?”

  “To the point of obsessive compulsion.”

  “There, Mr. Coyne, is a subject which I can discuss without inhibition. The fly-fishing neurosis in all of its guises.” He stared at the disarray on his desk and frowned. Then he shrugged. He looked up at me and grinned. “Come on. I bet you’re a bourbon man.”

  He headed for the door. I followed him. “How’d you know that?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Bourbon.”

  “We shrinks are skilled at inferential reasoning, Mr. Coyne.” He turned at the head of the stairs and smiled at me. “You’re a smoker, too, aren’t you?”

  “That’s amazing.”

  He tapped his head with his finger. “Medical school training, years of analysis.”

  “God, I hate to be that transparent.”

  “Nobody but a trained psychiatrist would ever figure out things like that about you, Mr. Coyne.”

  12

  I FOLLOWED DR. WARREN McAllister down the stairs. At the landing he opened an inside door and we entered a large kitchen. Piano music—Chopin, I thought—filtered through hidden speakers. Ferns and pots of herbs and garlic braids and copper-bottomed cookware hung from big beams. There was a giant fireplace on the inside wall. In the corner stood a round table by a large window.

  A woman was seated at the table. She had long dark hair sparsely streaked with gray and pulled back into a careless ponytail. She was wearing a pale blue T-shirt and faded and stained blue jeans. Her feet, under the table, were bare. A newspaper was spread open on the table in front of her. A coffee mug sat on one corner of the paper and an ashtray littered with butts sat on another corner.

  She looked up and smiled when we entered. “Hi,” she said. She had blue eyes almost exactly the same shade as McAllister’s. Her face was long and thin, with prominent cheekbones and a wide mouth. She appeared to be about my age, which I guessed would make her about fifteen years younger than the doctor.

  McAllister went over to her and kissed her cheek. “Robin, this is Mr. Coyne, a friend of mine and a fellow devotee of the angle. Mr. Coyne, I’m proud to present Robin McAllister, my wife and the best headshrinker in the family.”

  She held her hand out to me. I went over and took it. “Happy to meet you, Mr. Coyne,” she said.

  “Call me Brady,” I said. “You’re a psychiatrist, too?”

  She made a face. “No, for heaven’s sake. I’m a nurse.” She tossed her head in Warren’s direction. “He just gets spooked because I can see right through him so easily.” She smiled.

  “Well, now,” said McAllister. “Since our business is done we can all get to first names. I’m Warren. So, Brady. Sour mash okay with you?”

  “Perfect.”

  He reached up into a cupboard and took down a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which he showed me. I smiled and nodded. “Something, dear?” he said to his wife.

  “A wee drop of the same would be nice, sure.”

  I sat across from Robin McAllister while Warren mixed our drinks. She shook a menthol cigarette out of a pack and struck a match to it. “You’re obviously not a patient, Brady,” she said to me.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  She smiled. “He doesn’t bring patients down to drink with him. Otherwise, you just can’t tell.”

  “You medical types are downright eerie, the way you draw these clever deductions. Your husband figured out that I smoked, for example.”

  “Winstons, I’ll bet,” she said.

  “How the hell do you do it?”

  “You’ve got a pack in your shirt pocket. It shows.”

  “Like I said. Amazing.” I patted my shirt pocket, took out the pack, and lit a Winston. She laughed and pushed the ashtray so that it sat halfway between us.

  She had a pleasing laugh, uninhibited and happy. I found myself liking her, liking the warmth of the McAllister kitchen, liking the casual intimacy so obvious between the two of them, liking the way Robin McAllister and I were sharing an ashtray.

  He brought three short glasses to the table. Each of us picked up one of them. Daniel’s, ice, no water. He lifted his. “To the insanity of trout fishing,” he said.

  “Amen,” I said.

  “Neurotic foolishness,” added Robin.

  We all toasted neurotic foolishness.

  Warren McAllister and I exchanged tales of large trout, eccentric fishermen, and beautiful western rivers. Robin sipped her drink and paged through her newspaper, looking up occasionally to affirm something that Warren had politely addressed to her. She had accompanied him on a few of his trips, had done some fly fishing herself. Evidently the addiction hadn’t afflicted her. I inferred that Warren wished it had.

  Robin told me she was an emergency room nurse at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Her eyes sparkled when she discussed her work. She loved the variety of it, the unpredictability, the way the adrenaline sometimes pumped, the fact that nurses in the emergency room did real medical work, saved lives. That’s how she and Warren had met. One of his patients had been admitted with gaping wounds on her wrists. Self-inflicted with an Exacto knife. Warren nodded. Robin had saved the girl’s life.

  We had a second round. We talked more fishing. Warren and I moved on to parts of the world we hadn’t yet explored. By the third round the bottle was s
itting on the table and he and I were making plans to take a month off in January for a trip to New Zealand. Robin had stopped reading. She sat back in her chair hugging her knees, her bare feet propped on the seat, watching the two of us and smiling.

  After a while she stood up. She was taller than I had expected. Her jeans and T-shirt fit her snugly. She looked good in them. “I’ve got to be at the hospital at seven,” she said. “Hate to be a party pooper, but I’m going to bed.” She kissed her husband on the top of his head and smiled at me. “Good night, boys. Very nice to meet you, Brady.”

  I nodded. “Me, too.”

  After she left the room, Warren McAllister said, “Helluva lady, Robin.”

  “You’re lucky,” I said.

  “The thing is, I know it. Sixteen years, all with the same woman, and it’s still an adventure. Pretty rare. You’re not married, Brady?”

  “Divorced,” I answered.

  “Sure,” he said. “I knew that.”

  “Any kids?”

  He shook his head. “We never wanted any. Selfish, I guess. Our careers are important to us. And both of us see so much sadness in the world, all the ways that people go wrong, I guess we just haven’t wanted to risk it.” He shrugged. “We still talk about it. Robin just turned forty. A critical stage in a woman’s life. The tick-tick of her biological clock. What about you?”

  “Me? Oh, I’ve got two boys. Nice guys, both of them.”

  “You’re fortunate.” He sighed. “I don’t know. We may yet try. Robin’s getting restless. She’s very dedicated to her work, but lately she’s gotten into botany. By way of sublimation, I suspect. On her days off she’s usually over at the Arnold Arboretum for classes or traipsing around the countryside looking for rare plants.” He shrugged. “To each his own. I like fish, myself. Sunday is my day. I go fishing on Sundays.”

  I nodded and lifted my glass to him. “To fish.”

  He touched my glass with his. “To trout.”

  We drank, splashed a little more sour mash whiskey into our glasses, and drank some more. We tried to refine our New Zealand plans. We debated the relative merits of North Island and South Island. We took turns yawning. After a while, I pushed back from the table. “Better hit the road,” I said.