The Devil's Analyst

by Dennis Frahmann

  Nothing to say about my latest confession, doc? Well, I got a lot to say.

  I can’t know for sure why I started all this. I hardly knew the kid when his mother died. Back then I was in high school and he was still in middle school. Needless to say, we didn’t hang out together.

  But I could see there was such a dogged air about him, and I could tell even then that he was gay. It made me notice Danny, watch him, and somehow I became fascinated. I could have protected him, but I liked the power of being in control. It filled some inner need for me to know that I had facts no one else had.

  Danny’s father didn’t pay attention to his boy. I don’t think the guy had the slightest clue to the way Pete Peterson was invading his son’s life. You know, Pete was a crummy guy. Took advantage of young boys. Believe me, I know. But there was something about Danny that changed Pete and made him want to be a better person. It didn’t make sense to me that Danny could somehow do that and still escape Pete’s grasp. It was Danny’s innocence that turned Pete into that crazy kook showing movies on his garage door.

  But that was the year when I began to think Danny was really something special. He held some kind of grace that I didn’t understand. But then I thought, maybe he just needs more testing.

  I discovered he was working at the same summer resort as Oliver—little mean Oliver. What a prick that one was. A few years before, I learned how easy it was to manipulate him when his family vacationed for the summer down the road. I gave him the idea to harass Pete. Oliver was always ready to try something new as long as it would let him fit in. It made him feel important to create a gang of summer kids that targeted an old fag. Oliver never was good for much else.

  Of course, Oliver loved my suggestion to taunt Danny. I just wanted to know if the kid would act out his true sexuality. Oliver got carried away. Maybe he even cared too much. Caring does that to you. But if I had known what Oliver planned, I would have snuck into the back of that cabin that night so I could have seen firsthand Danny’s expression when he discovered that he had been betrayed by the one he loved. That would have told me so much.

  Trouble is none of these tests were ever satisfactory. They never told me what I wanted to know. I wasn’t trying to answer a question; I had a goal. I wanted Danny to fall into despair. Everyone falls into despair, but yet the kid always hung on. He kept landing on the side of hope. I can’t abide that. It gives a lie to everything I believe.

  That’s why I finally needed to make that call to Kenosha. That’s why I prompted the search for my secret room. Danny needs the final test.

  And Danny can take it only when he finally knows the truth about Josh Gunderson.

  Doc, I think we’re about done here.

  PART FOUR

  DISCOVERY

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Secrets

  Danny stepped into Josh’s hidden room, which was pleasant, almost comforting, with its upholstered furniture, warm lighting, and wooden textures. A bit of Josh remained in the room—a familiar mixture of Calvin Klein cologne mixed with Josh’s slightly woody and musky body odor. Even as the hint of fragrance elicited a momentary worry about Josh’s whereabouts, Danny felt awash in an unwanted wave of betrayal.

  How many more times would he have to handle the gut-wrenching experience of realizing that the people who meant so much to him were so willing to hurt him? Did they even know they were doing it? He tried to block out one disturbing possibility: did his actions encourage such extreme acts?

  Kenosha asked, “You really didn’t know this room existed?”

  Danny had almost forgotten she was with him. She circled the room, taking everything in, mentally conducting an inventory, and trying to take charge. Danny had to forgive her for as it was her nature, but luckily she knew enough to avoid direct eye contact.

  “Not a clue.” His voice quavered. He was so close to crying. An unbearable truth crept into his mind. Josh wanted him to find this room. Why else did he leave Kenosha the message? And if that was the case, there must be a reason for making the room known. There seemed only one possibility. Danny couldn’t voice it to Kenosha, but he feared this disclosure was Josh’s way of saying good-bye. Maybe Josh had foreseen that, like Chip, he couldn’t come back from wherever he was.

  “Maybe he meant this place to be a safe room,” Kenosha ventured. “You know that’s the latest thing among the rich. In case you need a place to escape during a home invasion.” Danny didn’t respond. “Or a fallout shelter.”

  Kenosha was grasping at straws. There was only one explanation for why Josh needed to have this room—to keep secrets from Danny. And now Josh was forcing Danny to look for those secrets.

  Danny hated secrets. He recalled the quiet bedroom in Thread the day his mother took her overdose of pills. That afternoon, as he exited the school bus and walked up the driveway, kicking through the falling leaves of autumn, he sensed something was wrong, but he was cursed. Always aware when danger lurked, but never able to do anything about it.

  The house was so quiet. And cold. No one had started a fire in the wood furnace of the old farmhouse. The fall winds pulled every bit of heat through the poorly insulated walls. He remembered how clean the place smelled. But that was wrong. On a Friday afternoon, the aromas of his mother’s weekend baking should have spilled from the kitchen to take over every inch of his home, but instead of cinnamon and fried dough, which were the constant accompaniments to her Friday donut making, only remnants of Lysol and Pledge lingered. Everything was in its place, neat and correct—except for the Friday bakery smell of normalcy.

  It was all horribly wrong. In the housekeeping order, he found an auger that everything in his life was about to tumble into disorder. Danny didn’t even call out for his mother. It was as though he already knew she couldn’t answer. There was a closed door to the bedroom. She could have been sleeping. She might have had a headache. Anything was still possible in that moment before he looked.

  But his stomach, if not his brain, knew that wasn’t the case. When he walked into the room, he found her cold body on a properly made bed, an empty bottle by the bedside, in a scene serenaded by the slow mechanistic ticking of the windup alarm clock. After all these years, Danny still felt guilty that he didn’t rush to phone for an ambulance. There might have been a chance his mother was still alive. But he didn’t even allow for the fantasy of that possibility. His advance warning had left him only the energy to sink to the floor and to wait.

  A dead mother in a cold room. An empty room chilled by a missing partner. They turned out to be not at all that much different.

  Danny collapsed into one of the overstuffed chairs. It felt broken-in. Josh must have used it often. Kenosha came over to sit on the arm. Luckily the chair was stout and easily took the weight. “Danny,” she began, “what should we do now?”

  Kenosha’s question suggested that there could be a joint action ahead, but it was an empty possibility because the weight of the moment fell fully on him. “I think,” Danny stated, and then stopped. He couldn’t continue for a moment. “This room must always have been here. There was a reference to it in a book about Augustus Cambrian. The author described a room like this where Cambrian stored special props. Probably Josh discovered it during the renovation and decided to keep it.”

  His statement was meant to defend the action of Josh, but even he judged the room damnable. He avoided Kenosha’s eyes as much as she avoided his.

  “But why didn’t he tell you?”

  People never told him anything. They just did what they wanted.

  “You know Josh. Always dramatic. I’m sure he thought it was fun to have his own little hideaway.”

  Kenosha had the grace to avoid commenting. Maybe it was good that Josh chose to tell him about the room through a message to Kenosha. If Danny had received the phone call directly, he would have dismissed the entreaty as nonsense. Or, worse, he would have sought out the room alone, and he couldn’t have survived that discovery.

  So melodramat
ic. Hadn’t he survived his mother’s suicide and the fact that she didn’t leave her son any message of explanation? After her funeral, he tore through his childhood home, convinced that she left a message somewhere and that he would find some note that had been overlooked. All he ever found was an unexpected envelope of trivia in a trunk of old keepsakes.

  The packet was filled with a handful of clippings and photos. Some were in Finnish, and none answered his questions. Later in life, he often wondered about the source of that envelope. As a child, he frequently rummaged in that trunk and he was certain the envelope had not been there in the weeks before his mother’s death. But it did little good to wonder any more about the envelope and its contents since he destroyed any possibility of ever learning what the mementos meant. In anger, he burned everything he found that day. He flung them, one by one, into the wood furnace and watched as every bit flamed up to disappear as smoke. It took less than a minute. The moment the items were gone, he wanted each and every one back.

  All he kept was a single photo. It was of his mother and him as a baby. It also showed an old friend of his mother’s named Pauline. For some reason, he treasured that photo and still kept it in his wallet. Once he tried to talk about the picture with his father, but the man refused to say anything other than the snapshot was taken just before Danny’s first Christmas. Feeling an urge to look at it again, he took it out and wondered what it meant.

  “What’s that?” Kenosha wanted to know.

  “Just a snapshot of me as a baby, with my mom and one of her friends.”

  “You look like your mother,” Kenosha said, “That’s the Finnish blood, I think. You even resemble that other woman. She must have been a relative.”

  “I don’t think so.” He changed subjects. “I could never accept the way my mother committed suicide without leaving any message. I feel the same way finding this room. I can’t explain it. There are so many things I should worry about, like why Josh hasn’t called, or where he is. But I can’t get past wondering why he wanted me to find this room. What’s in here? What does he want me to know?”

  Kenosha had an answer. She always did. “Danny, think about it. He is trying to tell you something. That’s so Josh.”

  Danny wasn’t listening. Since being a small child, he always tried to do the right thing. He believed in behaving and following the rules, because that’s what good people were supposed to do. He had been blessed. He had acquired a small bit of fame as a blogger and that was followed by plenty of money. His friends were many and loyal, and he always felt that Josh let him achieve more than he could ever have done by himself.

  Yet throughout his life everything was taken away from him—his mother, his father’s attention, his pillars of strength, and his innocence—so much. And the pattern just seemed to continue. Based on Orleans’s gloomy predictions, everything they had including their houses could soon be repossessed. And now he faced this ultimate loss—learning that his own lover could not be trusted.

  “I don’t care,” Danny said. “It’s already too much.”

  “Danny, listen to me. Maybe you aren’t the joking, jovial guy at the party, but at your core, you don’t know how to give up. Don’t do it now. Let’s look around. Isn’t it better to know the full truth? We need to find whatever Josh hid in this room.”

  Danny looked around the room wondering where to begin. The first object that caught his attention was the large mannequin in a corner. Walking over, he saw that the figure was in a doctor’s uniform and that its monstrous head was some kind of latex movie mask.

  “I think that’s left over from Cambrian’s horror movie collection,” Kenosha said. “I recognize the face. The character was in one of those early 1930s movies. Some film about a mad psychiatrist.”

  “Gives me the creeps,” Danny replied.

  The room was lined with rows of shelves, many holding archival filing boxes. He couldn’t imagine what would be in them. In all likelihood, these were nothing more than the records of Josh’s various real estate investments but he knew he would have to examine them in detail. Then he noticed it: a tattered blue fishing hat. Seeing it scared him, but still he walked directly over to the shelf, picked up the hat, and inspected it closely.

  “I know this hat,” he said.

  “Okay,” Kenosha said tentatively.

  Danny realized she didn’t know that someone wearing a hat like this had been following him, or that Chip reported such a person tailing him.

  “So what about it?” she asked.

  “Chip and I both thought someone was watching us, and we both remembered the person wearing a hat like this. Someone we knew years ago in Thread named Pete always had this same kind of hat. That’s why we noticed it.”

  “You think Josh was following you and wearing this hat?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” Danny replied, “but that’s not what bothers me.”

  “What does?” Kenosha sounded perplexed.

  “This hat doesn’t just look like Pete’s. It is Pete’s hat—the very one he used to wear all the time. I recognize it. But Pete’s dead. Murdered years ago. How could Josh have his hat?”

  Memories. Betrayals. Danny could not let his life be defined by what others did. At some point, the world he inhabited was the world he decided upon. He deeply admired those people who could respond to any downfall with a smile, and he wanted to be that kind of person.

  But it was so hard. Early yesterday, Kenosha and he completed their quick inventory of the room. Afterwards he insisted Kenosha go home. He had discovered far too much already, and he didn’t want her around as he surely learned more. He wouldn’t listen to any of her arguments for staying, no matter how valid they might be. Being forced to see that Josh hid something so massive was like tumbling down the many flights of the stair streets that tiered the hills of their neighborhood. One couldn’t suffer such unexpected trauma and still stand up. The bruises were there; they were severe; and having someone next to him didn’t make them hurt less. While it might be true that the call that Josh made to Kenosha proved he was still alive, that was just another black-and-blue hurt, and, maybe, it was the most painful of all. Danny hoped that Josh might contact him directly at any moment, but having Kenosha at his side would only keep him from saying what must be said.

  Instead of the security of being surrounded by people, Danny longed for the comfort of routine. He wanted rote actions, lists, and the pleasure of falling into what he knew learning experts called executive motor routines—to let his body take over and complete actions without any thought, like it did with the beating of the heart, the breathing of the lungs, or the crying of his eyes. If Danny had been a runner, he might have dashed into the trails of the nearby park and jogged for hours along the crests and canyons of its scrub-covered hills. Perhaps he should have taken to the routine of his stairs, descending to the boulevard below and then struggling back up, over and over until he dropped in exhaustion. But instinctively he knew that wouldn’t suffice.

  Instead, Danny transformed into his mother, who had often been a compulsive cleaner and organizer. In one way, the only thing she left behind on the day of her death was an immaculate house, which over time Danny learned was its own form of confession.

  He walked out of the secret room, left its door ajar, and returned to his home’s more familiar spaces. He pulled out the cleaning supplies and started on the top floor, dusting every room, vacuuming every floor, and placing every item in its proper location. Between the weekly housekeeper and Danny’s own behavior, the house was seldom disorderly. As a result, his manic cleaning could only last so long. It wasn’t many hours until he found his way back to the basement level. The shadows were deep, as the sun had lowered behind the trees near the bottom of the lot. The lamp from inside the secret office cast its cascade of light through the wine cellar and drew a rectangle of light across the darkened game room, like a yellow carpet of illumination to draw him back in.

  The wine cellar’s air conditioning, designed t
o keep every precious bottle at the right temperature, fought with the warm air issuing from the hidden den, and created a slight breeze, like a spring day struggling to fight the winter. Danny shivered, but nevertheless walked in.

  Outside the room, the house phone rang. Likely Kenosha once more. Throughout the day, she tried his cell phone, but he always ignored it. Now she was trying the landline. He still wouldn’t answer. He needed solitude.

  Amazing how much one room could embody another person’s spirit. If Danny saw a picture of this office, positioned with other individuals’ work spaces in some decorator’s lineup of potential culprits, there would have been no question that this belonged to Josh. The color of the paint, the placement of the furniture, and the casual disorder on the shelves—it all spoke of Josh.

  Something in this room had to make sense of all the bizarre, unsettling incidents of the previous weeks. Others had tried to find this room. He was convinced there was no other explanation for the attempted break-ins, despite Josh’s lying to him and telling him nobody was targeting them. One couldn’t ignore reality. That was the thing about entering the room . . . the space was more than just the physical representation of a betrayal. Its physicality broke through his consciousness like the tip of the iceberg thrusting above a sea of lies. But beneath that, like the frozen bulk that could ram a ship and sink it, there were the sudden questions of a lifetime.

  But if he allowed himself to sink low enough beneath the turbulence, he could sense the bottom and the beckoning of some type of calm. If there was nothing left in the house for him to clean, there still remained a multitude of unknown items to inventory. Whatever it took, he would account for everything in this room. That listing would fashion something meaningful. Josh made this happen when he called Kenosha. Josh forced him to look for this room, to find its entrance, and to discover things Danny didn’t want to know. He wouldn’t betray Josh now by turning back.