The Syndrome

by John Case

  “And how’s that going to happen?”

  “Well, we’ll do some hypnosis work, try to regress you with guided imagery—see what we get. We know a few things about you. Adrienne says you like chess, and… I gather the Caribbean has some meaning to you, and… you seem to know how to sail a boat.”

  Duran smiled. “I’ve got a good idea,” he suggested, “why don’t we charter a sloop, and play a few games on our way down to Jamaica?”

  Shaw chuckled. “Don’t tempt me.”

  Two hours later, Shaw sat back in his chair in one of the consultation rooms at the end of the hall. It was a clean and pleasant space, not at all hospital-like, with track lights, museum posters, and upholstered furniture set around a chrome coffee table.

  The psychiatrist crossed an ankle over his knee and found Duran’s eyes. “I know you’re disappointed,” he told him, “but I think we made some progress.”

  “What? I remember sailing? I remembered that before.”

  Shaw swung his head to the side. “No you didn’t. Not like this. You didn’t remember sailing in a regatta. You didn’t remember that you’d raced. Which means you were a competitive sailor, at some point. Probably—given your age—when you were a student. That gives us something to work with.”

  Duran frowned. “Like what?”

  “It seems likely you lived near water, at one time or another. Maybe went to a school that had a sailing team.”

  “‘Maybe,’“ Duran said. “Then, again…”

  “Give it a chance,” Shaw said. “With most amnesiacs, memories don’t come back all at once. They surface in a piecemeal way and often, quite slowly. It’s typical that the memory of the traumatic event—a car crash or whatever it was that triggered the amnesia—which you’d think would be particularly memorable, will be the last thing to come back. If it comes back at all.”

  “Sometimes it doesn’t?”

  “Quite often. Quite often that particular memory—since it has few associations and isn’t chunked with other recollections—well, it’s just gone.”

  “Really.”

  “So don’t be discouraged. The truth is, you’re suffering from as extreme a dissociative state as I have ever encountered. To cope with that, you’ve reinvented yourself. Now the task is to get you back to who you really are. This will bring you face-to-face with a lot of the trauma you’ve repressed. It’s not going to be easy. I can tell that, already.”

  “What do you mean?” Duran asked.

  “I’m getting a lot of resistance—deep resistance. Even in a trance, you’re constantly dancing away from anything that might connect you to your real past. The resistance is profound.”

  “Why would that be?”

  Shaw smiled, his eyes kind and reassuring. “Something happened to you. Something your mind can’t accept. Maybe there was a sailing accident, and someone you loved drowned. Perhaps you felt responsible. Perhaps you were responsible.” The psychiatrist paused. “It’s just a possibility” he added. “Who knows?” He paused a second time. “We’ll try another tack tomorrow.”

  After dinner, Duran walked the halls for a while, and talked to Adrienne by telephone. Then he sat down with a copy of Sail that Shaw had left for him. It was strange. The beauty of the boats was a delight, but occasionally, his eye would fall on something in the background—a swatch of landscape or the figure of a person hiking out—and it would be as if the sun were sliding behind a cloud. A low and anxious feeling would come over him, and…

  He tossed the magazine aside, and snapped on the television.

  Fresh from the shower after a long, cold run in the park, Adrienne toweled off and put on her underwear. Then she slipped into a skirt and sweater, and made herself a cup of coffee in the little kitchenette beside the door. Moving to the desk in front of the window, she looked out upon a construction site that was even deeper than it was wide. Finally, she sipped her coffee, and began to sort through her sister’s mail.

  She’d almost forgotten about it. Bound with a thick rubber band, it had been sitting in the backseat of the Dodge for days. Now, it was time to take a look.

  The first envelope she opened was from the bank. There were shrunken photocopies of Nikki’s bank statements and checks, which turned out to be less interesting than Adrienne had hoped. Nikki lived on about $4,500 bucks a month—give or take $500, one way or the other. Every once in a while, every few months, there was another deposit, also by wire transfer: three grand this September, for instance, and almost $8,000 back in February. The statement did not identify the source of the money, which led Adrienne to make a note on the Mayflower’s stationery: Transfer—$ from where?

  It was a minor mystery, at best, since Adrienne was pretty sure that she knew where the money came from: the settlement her sister had made with the Riedles. Bonilla had mentioned a bank in the Channel Islands. In fact, he was going to fax her the specifics about the bank sending funds to Nikki’s account in the States. The European account might be nothing more than a convenience, or it might contain the bulk of Nikki’s settlement with the Riedles. In either case, it was a clue to Nikki’s past. Unfortunately, Bonilla never got the chance to follow through on his promise. Adrienne made a note: Query Riggs.

  The checks were more or less transparent. Rent and utilities accounted for more than two grand. Duran’s fees took another big bite. There was forty-seven dollars a month to the cable company, a couple of checks to the vet. Payments to Visa, and checks to Harlow’s (Nikki’s hair salon).

  So much for the checks.

  The next envelope was from Chevy Chase Bank, which was the issuer of Nikki’s Visa card. Curious, she scanned the transactions, trying to make sense of them—which wasn’t hard. Marvellous Market: $19.37. Safeway: $61.53. America Online: $19.95. Amtrak: $189.60. Blockbuster—

  Huh?

  The Amtrak entry didn’t say where she’d gone, but subsequent charges made it obvious: Hertz (Orlando): $653.69. La Resort at Longboat Key: $1,084.06. Tommy Bahama’s @ St. Armand’s Circle: $72.91. Moe’s Stone Crab: $18.94. She looked at the dates.

  Conch House Eat Place

  10-08

  $21.03

  Sarasota Sunglasses

  10-09

  $226.05

  All of the Florida transactions, or what looked like Florida transactions, were in the same time period, October 7 and October 12. About a week or two before Nikki died.

  Which made sense. This was when Nikki had taken Jacko to the kennel. Dimly, she remembered Duran telling her that her sister had missed an appointment about a week before her suicide, and that the last time he’d seen her, she had been tan. And not just tan, she said she’d been at the beach. Some beach. A beach whose name her sister didn’t remember, or wouldn’t say.

  But there it was: Longboat Key. Which was—where?

  Adrienne was excited now, but frustrated, too, because Nikki’s laptop had gone up in smoke with the house in Bethany Beach. If she had a computer, she could look it up—and not just the place, but La Resort, too. Maybe the Mayflower rented laptops—but, no. A phone call to the front desk elicited an apology, and the information that the easiest thing to do would be to go to Kinko’s. There was one just up the street, about two blocks away.

  A moonlighting college kid took her credit card, and signed her on to AOL. She put Longboat Key into the Lycos search engine and hit Return. Seconds later, she was looking at an aerial photograph of an eleven-mile long barrier island off the coast of Florida. Switching to a map, she saw that the island was about an hour south of Tampa, and connected to Sarasota by a causeway.

  Which raised the question: what was Nikki doing there? Did she have a boyfriend? Maybe, but if she did, you’d think that she’d have mentioned it. What, then? What was important enough to make Nikki put Jacko in a kennel—which Adrienne happened to know her sister thought of as a “dog jail”—and then take a train all the way to Florida. And why a train? She wasn’t afraid to fly.

  She tapped her foot. Thought about it.


  Oprah. She’d go to Florida to audition for Oprah (“The Devil made me do it!”). But wouldn’t Oprah buy the tickets, and wouldn’t they be plane tickets? And wasn’t Oprah in Chicago, anyway?

  What, then?

  The truth was there was only one thing that had interested Nikki in the past year, and that was Satanic Abuse. It was all she talked about. So… maybe there’d been a conference of some kind. A conference for “survivors.”

  She decided to try Nexis, recalling the Slough, Hawley’s user-ID and password. When the search screen came up, she entered Longboat Key—and satanic and limited the search to the past year. The computer digested the information, and came back with… absolutely nothing. No stories. So she revised the search words, substituting recovered and memory for satanic.

  This time, six documents were listed. But five of them turned out to be variations on a story about a conference on Marine Ecology. The conference had been held at the Holiday Inn on Longboat Key over the weekend of October 9. And at that conference, a great deal of time seemed to have been spent discussing how well the manatee population had recovered from its decimation by red tide, and how the memory of that event was still fresh in the minds of marine biologists. The remaining article concerned stolen cars that the Longboat Key police department had recovered with the help of memory chips.

  She tried a new search, this time deleting the words memory and recovered. Maybe if she just found out what had been going on at Longboat Key from October 7 to the 12th, she could take it from there. Connect the dots.

  Her new search yielded ninety-eight stories. She looked through the KWIK cites, which listed the headline, the name of the newspaper it appeared in, the date, and the byline. Most of the pieces were useless—announcements of Wine Fests, gallery openings, tennis tourneys and golf matches. But there was one story that was different from all the others, and it almost stopped her heart when she saw the headlines:

  RESORT SHOOTING

  BAFFLES POLICE

  WHEELCHAIR MURDER

  SHOCKS VISITORS

  SNIPER VICTIM

  WAS PROMINENT,

  LONGTIME RESIDENT

  Now she knew why her sister had taken the train. You can pack a rifle on the train… She pulled down the text of a story published October 11 in the Tampa paper.

  Longtime resident Calvin F. Crane was shot to death yesterday evening as he sat in his wheelchair on the boardwalk at La Resort, watching the sunset.

  According to police, Crane, 82, was killed by a high-powered—and apparently silenced—rifle. The shot, which severed the elderly man’s spine, is believed to have been fired from one of the high-rises overlooking the beach.

  Crane was pronounced dead on arrival at Sisters of Mercy Memorial Hospital.

  Sources close to the police called the crime a baffling one. “The man was dying of cancer,” the sources said. “Doctors gave him a year to live at the outside.”

  Crane’s Jamaican nurse, Leviticus Benn, was questioned by the police, and released.

  Adrienne read on, scanning the stories, galvanized by the words “sniper” and “high-powered rifle.” According to the newspapers, the Jamaican caretaker had not realized that his charge had been shot—until someone screamed, and he saw the blood. “I didn’t hear a thing,” he told police, “or see anyone with a gun.” Neither, it seemed, had anyone else, which led the police to suspect that the killer had used a “suppressor.” Adrienne remembered the fat black tube in the lime-green case under her sister’s bed.

  Complicating the investigation was the fact that the caretaker had wheeled Crane from the beach to the pool area before he realized that his charge had been shot. The fact that the victim had been moved made establishing his location at the time of the shooting difficult, which in turn made it impossible to reconstruct with any accuracy the trajectory of the bullet. Because of this, determining the position from which the sniper fired was “nothing but a guessing game,” according to police.

  Adrienne read the stories about the shooting, and searched for follow-up articles, hoping against hope that the case had been solved. But, of course, it hadn’t. Two weeks after the murder, the police had no motive, no suspects, no useful witnesses, and no weapon. They were mystified.

  As was Adrienne. It seemed obvious that her sister was involved, maybe even responsible—but why?

  Sitting back in the plastic chair that she’d been given, she looked up at the fluorescent lights, and stretched. She wasn’t a cop. She didn’t know how to run a murder investigation. But she knew that most investigations were as much about the victim as the perpetrator. Moreover, in this particular case, she had a distinct advantage over the police: that is, she had a good idea who the killer was.

  But who was the victim? Who was he really? All she knew for certain was that her sister had traveled a thousand miles to kill him—and that he was, by all accounts, a dying old man with a fondness for sunsets. How had the headline described him? As “a prominent longtime resident.”

  Or… no. That wasn’t it. Not quite.

  She went back to the first story, and saw at a glance that the headline had a comma in it. “Sniper Victim Was Prominent, Longtime Resident.” Which is to say, he was prominent, and a longtime resident. Not just some old guy that everyone knew.

  Okay, she thought, turning back to the computer. How prominent? Why prominent?

  Chapter 30

  Shaw and Duran sat across from one another in the staff cafeteria at Columbia Presbyterian, ignoring the clatter of trays and silverware, the to-and-fro of nurses and physicians all around them. Cutouts of cardboard turkeys decorated the walls. It was Thanksgiving.

  Shaw wore a puzzled expression as he looked at Duran over a bowl of Pritikin noodle soup. Finally, the doctor crossed his arms in front of his chest, and confessed, “I’m not sure how to proceed.” He paused. “What I’m getting is an increased, rather than a decreased, tendency toward dissociation.”

  “Really?” Duran asked. In the wake of the operation, he felt peculiarly alert—as if he’d been seeing the world through beige-tinted eyeglasses, and living under sedation.

  Now, that feeling was gone. And while the thrill of well-being had begun to fade, his clarity of mind had not. Everything seemed bigger and brighter, the colors more intense, the sounds louder and more precise.

  Shaw pressed his fingers together, as if in prayer. Then he leaned forward, and confided, “I’d like to try sodium pentathol.”

  Duran looked surprised. “Truth serum?”

  Shaw shrugged. “A small dose. I don’t know what else to do, though I suppose we could always just… wait. As it is, I’m not getting anywhere. You’re blocking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t get in. You’re like a black box. Every time I try to explore your past, I come up against a wall. And I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why.”

  “And you think sodium pentathol—”

  “Will help? Yes, I do.”

  Duran thought about it. “How can you be sure that what you’re seeing is ‘resistance,’ rather than organic damage?”

  “Because we’ve done our homework,” Shaw told him. “There’s no evidence of brain damage—none at all. What we’re dealing with is a pathological aversion.”

  “To… ?”

  “Your identity.”

  Duran sipped his soup, and thought it over. Then he leaned forward, and said, “So what you’re saying is, I’ve got the psychiatric equivalent of an autoimmune disease.”

  Shaw blinked. Laughed. “Exactly. But that’s not the only thing that’s bothering me.” He paused. “You’re becoming depressed.” Before Duran could deny the diagnosis, the psychiatrist hurried on. “Now, depression isn’t all that unusual after surgery, but in your case, it’s a little deeper than I’d expect.”

  Duran shook his head. “I don’t see it. On the contrary, I feel so alive.”

  “I know. I can see it in your face. But then it goes, and… “ He he
sitated. “You lose affect. I’ll be honest with you,” Shaw went on. “I’m worried that you may be manifesting a rapid-cycle, bipolar state.”

  Duran frowned. “And if I am?”

  Shaw ran his hand back through his hair. “Well, we can back off, and wait for the lab report, but… I’m concerned about your treatment in the long run.”

  “Why?” Duran asked.

  “Well, we haven’t really talked about your living situation, but you can’t go back to being a therapist—you’re not qualified.”

  “As far as we know.”

  The psychiatrist smiled. “Touché! ‘As far as we know.’ But what, then? Are you independently wealthy?”

  Duran thought about it. “My parents died suddenly. There was some insurance.”

  “These parents—you mean Mr. and Mrs. Duran?”

  “I guess.”

  “Huh.” Shaw frowned. “But you do have some money. You weren’t relying on your two clients to keep body and soul together. Because if you were, your rates must have been even higher than mine.”

  Duran responded with a weak smile. “I don’t remember worrying about money. I suppose I could call my bank…”

  Shaw nodded, and cleared his throat. “And, uhh… what about Adrienne?”