The Summer Man

by S. D. Perry

  Bob chuckled. “I suppose I do. I’ve written six months of editorials in the last two weeks.”

  “How are you holding up?” John asked. Bob had been friendly with Annie.

  Bob studied him for a moment, his gaze unreadable in the heavy shadow—the only light came through the living room window, pale and diffuse.

  “I don’t know,” Bob said finally. “I’ve been drinking too much, but I guess that’s nothing new. Been kind of…introspective, I guess. I’ve certainly been keeping busy, with the paper…” He trailed off for a second, then added, “And some research I’ve been doing. For the last week or so, I’ve been pursuing some crazy thoughts, I guess you’d say.”

  “Really,” John said. A deliberate opening for Bob to elaborate, if he wanted.

  “You going to analyze me, Doc?”

  John grinned. No getting anything past Bob Sayers. “Heaven forbid. Talk if you want. I promise not to give advice unless you pay me.”

  Bob sipped from his drink. He’d brought a bottle of whiskey over—he said beer was for doctors and sailors—and had been drinking it neat all evening, although John had yet to see any sign that the aging reporter was drunk. “You ever heard of anything called mass psychogenic illness, or MPI?”

  “Group hysteria?” John asked. “You think…you think that teacher and Rick Truman, killing those people…”

  “And other assorted weirdnesses,” Bob interjected. “People aren’t acting themselves lately, have you noticed?”

  John thought about Dale and Nina…and a dozen others he’d seen in the last week. It was tempting to wish there was some common cause.

  “Well, yes, but it’s not unusual for a tragedy in a small town to have an effect on the community,” John said. He felt like he’d been saying that a lot lately. “Sometimes a profound one.”

  “I wonder,” Bob said. “You said yourself that your caseload has doubled, right? I finally got around to checking the police blotter, something I’d been neglecting since Annie…since that night. You realize our crime rate has gone up about a hundred percent in the last month? Compared to June last year? Domestic abuse, vandalism, harassment complaints…granted, it’s summer, but as far as I can tell, things’ve never been this bad.”

  “Right, but two sets of murders in just a couple of weeks…” It was his turn to trail off. A great number of his current appointments had been made before the first murder. If there were some commonality…

  He promptly shook the idea. “Insanity isn’t contagious, Bob.”

  “Not necessarily insanity,” Bob said. “I got online—amazing, what’s out there now—and found some interesting things.”

  “About mass hysteria,” John said. He remembered reading a fairly recent article on sociogenic or psychogenic illnesses—groups of people, usually in small, isolated communities, who suddenly started to exhibit the same psychosomatic symptoms. There’d been a group of kids at a summer lunch program in Florida, back in the early nineties, who had all been convinced that they were suffering food poisoning—of the 150 children there, almost half were vomiting and fainting, any number hospitalized, and all because one of the kids said they felt sick, and someone had said poison a little too loud. Turned out the prepackaged food, the servers and tables, the kids themselves had tested clean…but the rumor had spread, the perceived sickness spreading with it. The article had cited a couple of other examples.

  “That’s where I started,” Bob said. “I surfed, I believe the young folks still say—I looked at anything having to do with groups of people, all being affected in some negative way. Chemical spills, mercury poisoning, copycat killers…you know, there are clusters of suicides that pop up every now and then, bunches of teenagers all cutting their wrists or turning on their cars in closed garages? Just because they heard about some other teens doing it?”

  “The Werther effect,” John said, nodding. His college roommate had done a paper on it, concerning the impact of media coverage on teen suicides. The name came from a book written by Goethe in the late 1700s about a young man named Werther who shot himself after a failed romance—and upon its publication, a number of young male readers followed suit, even dressing in the clothes that young Werther had preferred. “There’s a whole set of ethical choices that the media has to make when anyone commits suicide. They have to be especially careful with teenagers killing themselves. Developmentally, they’re particularly susceptible.”

  “Don’t teach your grandpa how to suck eggs,” Bob said, his expression amiable. “I was on a paper for something like half a century, wasn’t I? I was asking if you knew anything about it.”

  John grinned. He didn’t sit around analyzing his friendship with Bob or why he liked the man so much—he tried not to, anyway—but he thought that the fact Bob said things like don’t teach your grandpa how to suck eggs had something to do with it. “So, you think people are catching crazy? Is that what this is about?”

  He said it lightly, but Bob seemed to really consider the question, his lined face set in thought. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said finally. “I mean, there are cases on record. Isolated communities swept up in bizarre epidemics—the Salem witch trials, obviously, but there are others. Near some village in Africa—next to Kenya, I think—thousands of people were caught up in laughing fits sometime in the early sixties. This lasted for months, people suddenly breaking into episodes of uncontrollable laughter.” Bob drank, then added, “Not that it was funny. There was also a lot of crying reported, rashes, pain, breathing problems…”

  MPI again. “Let me guess,” John said. “Political instability?”

  Bob nodded. “Change of borders, change of power. The popular theory is that everyone was just stressed as hell.”

  “Port Isley isn’t exactly isolated,” John said. In the park, a string of loud pops and a teenage shout of glee.

  “Why, ’cause you can drive out of it? Because you can be in Seattle within an hour, assuming you can catch the Angeline ferry on schedule?” Bob scoffed. “We don’t feel isolated because we’ve got computers and cell phones and cable news, but we are pretty much alone out here. Port Angeles’s our closest neighbor, and she’s a twenty-minute drive on a good day.”

  “I didn’t mean geographically,” John said. “Psychologically. Having phones and the net and the news does make a difference when it comes to that kind of hysteria. We have input from the rest of the world, especially with the summer people here. Not to mention better science. And no common religion. Besides which, no one is actually sick, per se.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that,” Bob said, and sighed. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “It is interesting,” John said. Assuming you accepted the premise that an entire town was going off the deep end, trying to unravel the whys and wherefores was a challenge, at least. “You really think there’s…something going around?”

  “You’re the shrink; you tell me,” Bob said. “Are people crazier than usual?”

  John was reflexively ready with a no, of course not, but the beer, the relaxed attitude, feeling not-bad for the first night since Le Poisson, he gave it some real thought. He was getting more business, that was true—a lot more. And not the standard feed of depression, divorce, midlife crisis, what he’d mostly dealt with since putting out his shingle. People were generally too complex to fit neatly into categories, and he felt he did his clients a disservice by pigeonholing them…but it seemed, lately, he’d spent an awful lot of time just trying to find the right labels, to figure out what was going on, to try to provide some help. For lack of a better term, people were acting crazier.

  Not all of them. Marianne, his incest survivor, had canceled her last appointment with a smile in her voice. Four, five of his regular patients had cut their times, come to think of it, all for reasons of improved mental state. If there was a psychological bug going around, it wasn’t making everyone sick.

  “Are you feeling…different?” John asked.

  “Drinking too much, like I said,” B
ob said. “I’ve been thinking about my life, remembering things…nothing else, unless you count my dust-covered reporter’s instincts stirring.” He smiled and sipped his whiskey. “A last gasp, perhaps.”

  Lauren, John thought, asking himself the same question. Before his too-brief relationship with Annie Thomas, he’d been thinking a lot about Lauren, about women in general…he’d been feeling something, no question; he’d even been planning to talk to Phillip about it. But since Le Poisson, thinking differently had been par for the course. He’d been traumatized, for fuck’s sake.

  Annie’s dress, her bleeding red dress…John promptly took a healthy swallow of his own beer. He wasn’t drunk, but his pleasant buzz was starting to fade, and he wanted it back. “Actually, I’ve been feeling pretty crazy myself, lately,” he said. “But I think that’s to be expected.”

  Bob was about to say something else when the phone in John’s shirt pocket chirped and vibrated, a startling burr of motion. He held up a hand and fished the cell out to see who was calling so late. His voice mail listed his cell in case of emergencies, though he couldn’t remember the last time a patient had called the number on a weekend.

  The listing was Good Samaritan, Port Isley’s tiny hospital.

  “I should take this,” he said, and stood up on Bob’s nod of acquiescence, opening the cell as he walked to the back door, nearly tripping over one of Lauren’s flowerpots that he had yet to toss.

  “This is John Hanover,” he said, stepping into the bright kitchen, and the woman on the other end started talking, her words high and too fast.

  “Dr. Hanover, it’s Sarah Reed, Karen’s sister? Karen Haley? She was your patient for a while, after Byron died. Her husband, Byron. We met at the picnic, I was there with Karen and my son, Tommy. I’m sorry to be calling so late. Karen really needs you, can you come? Can you come right now? To the hospital?”

  “I remember you, Sarah,” John said. He kept his voice soothing and low. “Take a breath and tell me what happened.”

  “Karen was aa…” A shuddering breath, and when she spoke again, he could hear the tears in her voice. “Attacked. She was attacked and, and sexually assaulted a few hours ago at the fairgrounds. By a group of boys.”

  John felt suddenly sober. “Oh my God. Is she hurt, is she badly hurt?”

  “She’s hurt,” Sarah said. “And the police keep trying to talk to her, this Chief Vincent, he keeps asking all these questions and she’s, she’s really not doing very well. And she needs to see someone, now, and you were her doctor, she’s always spoken so highly of you…will you come? I’m sorry, I know it’s late, but I don’t know who else to call. Do you think you could come?”

  John checked his watch, assessed his ability to drive. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Sarah let out a soft sob. “Thank you, thank you so much,” she said, and hung up.

  John stepped back out on the porch. “I’m sorry, Bob,” he said. “I’ve got to cut out for a while. You’re welcome to stay—the guest room sheets haven’t been changed in a while, but it’s not like they go bad or anything, right?”

  “What’s up?” Bob asked, rising from his chair.

  “Ah, an old client of mine, she got hurt,” John said. “And it sounds like the cops are being insensitive. I have to go down to Good Sam. There’s leftover pizza in the oven; have some pizza, watch a movie or something…” His thoughts were racing, jumping ahead to finding his keys…chew some gum in the car, bottle of water on the drive…he didn’t see the look on Bob’s face.

  “Was she raped?” Bob asked.

  John stopped thinking about his keys and stopped and looked at his friend, replaying what Bob might have heard from his end of the conversation. He was pretty sure he hadn’t mentioned anything specific, although he supposed there might have been some inference—

  “Gang-raped, by a bunch of teenage boys?” Bob asked, stepping closer. His lean, weathered face was too pale. “At the fairgrounds?”

  “How did—could you hear that?”

  Bob’s expression tightened at John’s inadvertent confirmation. “I’ll tell you on the way to the hospital,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind giving me a lift. I’m not in much condition to drive.”

  “I don’t think the, ah, family would appreciate having the press show up,” John began, but Bob was shaking his head.

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “This isn’t a story. Or it is, but not one that’ll ever see print. It’s—I may have information for the police, that’s all. I won’t be bothering her family.”

  John stared at him a moment. If Bob was drunk, he still saw no sign…and the reporter’s expression was set. “Yeah, OK. You’ll tell me what this is about?”

  Bob nodded slowly. “People aren’t acting themselves,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to John. “Let me hit the head; I’ll meet you at the front door.”

  “Sure,” John said, telling himself that Sarah’s voice must have been audible to Bob somehow. It didn’t seem possible—

  —isn’t possible, his brain affirmed.

  —but what other explanation made any sense? Maybe there had been some gang rapes in Port Angeles or over in Jackson, something he hadn’t heard about. Of course, that must be it. He settled on the thought with relief; Bob had heard something about some other related crime or crimes, maybe from the police, for the paper. For a moment, John had thought…

  He shook it off; it wasn’t the time for flights of fancy. Karen needed a friendly face. He’d done a rotation through a rape counseling center as a resident, liked to think he’d at least been competent…he hoped he could be useful.

  Karen Haley. Goddamnit. He knew that rapists were troubled, broken people, that many had been victims of abuse themselves, as children…he’d never had any sympathy for their actions, but he’d tried to understand, through his filters of training, how they had come to be, what he might do if he had a client with those tendencies.

  Dead men don’t rape, he thought now, remembering the scrawled graffiti from some random wall in the city, and found that he agreed too fiercely to wonder at his sudden change of heart.

  Bob told John about the girl, Amanda, and her friend, whom he’d met and talked with at the picnic, as John drove them to Good Sam. About how Amanda had foreseen the rape, just as she’d predicted Lisa Meyers’s death…and his impressions of the two young people as honest and sincere. The doctor was skeptical, to say the least. Bob had always suspected that John was a little too bright in that way that precluded real open-mindedness—the intellectual liberal curse, perhaps, to believe that they knew everything because they’d read an article about the law of large numbers and a book or two on the invention of God.

  Still, John had the decency not to point and laugh, and Bob didn’t take offense at his less-than-enthusiastic response; John was preoccupied, worrying about his patient, and Bob had more than enough to chew over without trying to convince anyone of anything. That little punk-rock girl, all of seventeen…Bob kept trying to make the scenario plausible, imagining that Amanda and Devon had planned everything, perhaps even paid their cohorts to attack a woman, to substantiate their story—maybe they meant to sell it; maybe Amanda was plotting to become the next John Edwards, or whatever psychic marvel was popular these days, and they’d set Bob up as their credible witness. The idea was far-fetched, but certainly not as out-there as precognition. There was the even simpler explanation, that it was a coincidence. Rape wasn’t common in Port Isley, but it wasn’t unheard of, either.

  The thing was, he believed Amanda Young’s story. Not because he was open-minded, although he fancied that he was, or because he believed that there was more to life than what the sciences had figured out, although that was true, too. He just thought she was telling the truth.

  And she’s seen two separate events before they happened, now; at least two. And what did that mean? Only that he wanted to talk to her again, as soon as possible. And he needed to find Stan Vincent, to see if that
kid, Brian Glover, was a suspect yet.

  They pulled into Good Sam’s main parking lot, adjacent to the ER. There were a handful of hybrids and SUVs parked close to the entrance, summer folk, probably escorting their firecracker-injured kids through the urgent care. There were also two PIPD units parked at the reserved spots in the front, next to one of the hospital’s ambulances. One of them was the chief’s.

  What am I going to tell him? Bob considered his options as John pulled into a space at the end of the line. Stan Vincent had always struck him as a pragmatist; walking up to him and announcing that a psychic had fingered the rapist wasn’t going to fly. On the other hand, if there was a chance that Amanda might have seen something else, or was going to, maybe it’d be better to tell the truth, to establish that she shouldn’t be dismissed as a crank…

  Bob felt a tightening of his gut. If he’d believed their story, he could have prevented what had happened…but to be fair, how could he have believed it? What sane person would have?

  “I may be awhile,” John said. He and Bob both climbed out, John pocketing his car keys. “Do you want to meet up later, get a ride home?”

  “No, I’m good,” Bob said. “I’m barely a walk from here. You do what you need to do, don’t worry about me.”

  They started for the front entrance, hurrying. “Call me tomorrow, let me know…” John tried a smile. “Let me know if your teenager needs a therapist, I suppose.”

  Bob smiled back at him, sure that his own looked just as distracted. “I have to find her, first. I’ll keep you updated.”

  They walked in together and immediately saw Chief Vincent and one of his officers, Ian Henderson, standing by the pay phone at the far side of the room, talking. Bob could see their tension, their expressions, their stances betraying them, and hoped he wasn’t about to make a mistake. Bob and John exchanged farewells, and John hurried to the front desk. Bob popped an Altoid and walked toward the policemen, still not sure what he was going to say.