Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  “The woman with the hair?” And the Cheetos. “You’re seeing her for treatment?”

  “I am. She’s having a lot of trouble. I guess it’s not too surprising, considering. She’s coping by becoming a little Nancy Drew, trying to solve the mystery of what happened to her therapist.”

  “Isn’t it kind of odd seeing her? Given what happened.”

  “You don’t think it’s a problem, do you?”

  I wasn’t sure. Psychologists are prohibited from treating people with whom they have another existing relationship. It means, for instance, that I couldn’t treat Grace’s preschool teacher, when Grace gets around to having one. But I didn’t know if the fact that both parties had been present when a possible murder victim’s body was discovered really constituted a preexisting relationship. The issue had never come up before in any of the ethics discussions I’d had.

  I didn’t want to make Diane crazy, so I immediately resolved my ambivalence by saying, “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Good. Anyway, I’ve referred a few of Hannah’s other patients to other therapists in town. Don’t be hurt. I’m not ignoring your talents-they all wanted female therapists, baby. But most of them decided not to continue for now. I’m still having her office phone lines forwarded to my number. The hardest part of the whole thing has been letting people who hadn’t heard what happened to her know that she is dead. And, you know, how she died.”

  “I can imagine.” We took two more steps. “Is it possible you spoke with her?”

  “With whom?”

  “Mallory.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it possible she was one of the people who called who hadn’t heard about Hannah’s death?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s possible. I had a couple of difficult calls… a woman asked… she was young-I guessed a CU student-wanted ‘Dr. Grant.’ I’m not sure I ever got a name. I told her what had happened and she… hung up. Oh my God.”

  “When was that call?” I asked.

  “Last week. Maybe Monday. Oh my God, I may have talked with her.”

  “Do you remember what you said?”

  “I’ve been upset,” Diane said, her voice suddenly hollow. “I might not have handled it well. When Hannah’s patients asked me how she died, I…”

  “Suggested the possibility she’d been murdered?”

  “It’s not just me, Alan. Everybody-the papers-I’m not the only one…”

  I touched her. “It’s okay.”

  “The kid was really upset. I offered to meet with her, but she hung up.”

  What did it mean that Diane might have talked with Mallory a few days before she disappeared? Maybe nothing. But it was possible that Mallory walked away from the conversation believing that her therapist had been murdered.

  “What about the other call? You said there were two difficult calls.”

  “The other one was from a man. Wanted to know what would happen to his therapy records. I assured him I had custody of them and that they’d stay confidential. He wouldn’t give me his name, either. He asked how he could get the records. I told him. He didn’t want a referral. He was almost… belligerent.”

  I didn’t reply right away. Diane wanted to move on. “Speaking of records, Hannah’s attorney-the guy who drew up her will-called me a couple of days before Christmas and asked if she had left any records that would allow final bills to be prepared.”

  “For her patients?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s rude. Who’s the attorney?”

  “Guy named Jerry Crandall. I don’t know him. He’s a general-practice guy, doesn’t do much divorce work.” Diane did do a lot of divorce and custody work; she knew all the family-law attorneys in town. “But that’s what I told him, too, that it was kind of cold. He said he had a fiduciary responsibility and that Hannah’s accounts receivable are an asset of her estate.”

  “Fiduciary responsibility aside, I’m not sure I’d like to get a bill from my dead therapist.”

  “He’s a lawyer. Can I finish?” Diane didn’t wait for me to say yes. “I told him I’d take a look and get back to him. While you guys were up skiing I checked through Hannah’s practice calendar and matched things up with her recent process notes, gave him a list of unbilled sessions. When I compared all her records I realized that the session with this kid wasn’t in her calendar, didn’t have any notes, and had never been billed. It was the only one not in her calendar.”

  “No other sessions without notes?”

  “None that I found. Hannah was Hannah.” Loud exhale. “What do I do, Alan?”

  “In a word, nothing. Hell, Diane, you’re not even sure it was Mallory. I think the kid is entitled to confidentiality, so you can’t reveal what you know from the session.”

  “It was her,” Diane said.

  I ignored that. “Any hint of abuse during the consultation?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t tell anyone then, including the police.”

  “What if the police knew Mallory had been kidnapped? If the parents got a note, or a ransom demand. Would that change things?”

  I thought about it for the length of time it took to try, and fail, to pass three young mothers pushing strollers wheel hub to wheel hub on the bricks of the Mall. It was the pedestrian equivalent of trying to drive past some recalcitrant semis that were rolling side-by-side on the highway.

  “Sure. Then it would be a whole different ball game. By definition a kidnapped kid is a kid who’s being abused, and abuse changes all the privilege rules. If you thought you knew something that could aid the investigation into her kidnapping-once the authorities decided it was a kidnapping-you would have an ethical and legal responsibility to divulge it to the police because of the child-abuse exception.”

  Diane said, “But the police say she ran. As long as that’s the current theory, I can’t play the I-think-she’s-been-kidnapped card.”

  The holiday lights that were strung on the trees on the Mall began snapping on block by block, and within seconds snakes of twinkling dots wrapped the skeletal forms that stretched out in front of us. Diane and I both watched the spectacle develop for a moment.

  “That was pretty,” I said. “Sorry, your hands are tied.”

  Hers may have been figuratively tied; mine were literally going numb from the cold and the weight of the shopping bags I was carrying.

  “I suppose this means that I probably shouldn’t prepare a bill for the intake and send it to Mallory’s father.”

  Diane’s last comment was intended sardonically, but I recognized some fuzzy edges at the margins; the ramifications weren’t as clear as she might have expected. “It’s an interesting point, Diane.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you were looking for a way to tell her father that you know something, sending him a bill would probably be an ethically acceptable excuse for letting him get a toe inside the consultation room door.”

  “And why would I want to do that?”

  “I’m not sure you would. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say you believed that what you learned from Hannah’s consultation might help track down Mallory.”

  “And if I did believe that…”

  “The fact that no bill has gone out yet might give you an avenue to breach confidence with her father. If you were sure the kid was Mallory. Did Hannah say anything about billing arrangements for her session with the girl?”

  “Not a word. But I have to work under the assumption that the kid didn’t want her parents to know about the therapy, don’t I? Knowing Hannah, I bet she did the session pro bono, anyway.”

  “Why? Why would you assume that the girl wouldn’t want her father to know about the therapy?”

  “Why? Because the kid just showed up without an appointment, and she told Hannah that he was up to something and she wasn’t happy about it.”

  I played devil’s advocate. “But what if he’s t
he one who sent her to see Hannah? What if her father already knows all about whatever it was that caused her to go? Ninety-nine out of a hundred kids are in psychotherapy because somebody sends them, and the someone is usually one of the kid’s parents. A kid doesn’t often go on her own.”

  Diane’s tone grew dismissive. “If Mallory’s father sent her into treatment he’d have told the police that his daughter had seen a therapist recently, right? That would be important information to consider after her disappearance.”

  “You would think.”

  “And the police would have contacted that therapist, right? To try and find out what the kid was troubled about.”

  I knew where she was going. “Unless the police already knew that the therapist was dead.”

  “But if they knew that Mallory was seeing Hannah and that Hannah was dead, they would have sent whoever had legal custody of her practice records-c’est moi-a subpoena in order to get access to the treatment notes.”

  “Agreed. If the cops were thinking.”

  “Well, none of that happened. None of it. Nobody from the police department has contacted me about Mallory. And I certainly haven’t been subpoenaed.” As she began to connect more of the dots Diane’s foot speed kept pace with her mouth speed, and I had to hustle to keep up with her. “So I’m left thinking that Mallory sought out Hannah for treatment on her own, which would tell me that she didn’t want her father to know what she was up to. Or… her father had sent Mallory to Hannah, which-given his subsequent silence on the matter-would tell me that for some reason he doesn’t want the police to know what his daughter was up to.”

  I said, “That about covers the possibilities.”

  “As a therapist, I don’t especially like either theory. But I’d put my money on Mallory as the one who was trying to keep the secret.”

  We arrived at the intersection with Broadway. The pedestrian signal was red and enough traffic was humming past us to rule out jaywalking. I lowered Diane’s shopping bags to the bricks and lifted my hands so I could show her that my fingers were curled into hooks. I asked, “Do you mind taking these bags back? My hands are frozen.”

  She looked imposed upon.

  And I realized, belatedly, why her husband refused to shop with her.

  13

  I had an additional tie to the Miller family, one that certainly fit any definition of tangential anyone might wish to apply, one that was marked by the requisite degree or two of separation. The link didn’t come into focus for me until my solitary psychotherapy appointment late on the afternoon of the day that I played reluctant Sherpa for Diane as she trolled the Mall for Christmas bargains. The source of the connection was someone I never would have anticipated.

  Bob Brandt.

  Bob had been coming to me for individual psychotherapy for almost two years, and progress had been glacial. Pre-global-warming glacial. The meager speed of the treatment neither surprised nor particularly disappointed me. Diagnostically, Bob’s underlying character was a caustic blend of toxic pathologies. Had he been using health insurance to pay for his treatment-he wasn’t-the DSM-IV code his insurer would have required would have had as many digits as a Visa card.

  The first five of those digits would have spelled out the cipher for schizoid personality disorder. In addition to having a serious schizoid character, Bob was also a chronically depressed, mildly paranoid guy. Forty-three years old, he’d been ensconced in the same dead-end clerical position in the physics department at the University of Colorado for almost two decades.

  His mother and an older brother were his only living relatives. Bob had maintained contact with his mom for most of his adult life. A few years before, however, his brother had written him a letter notifying him that their mother was moving to an assisted-living facility near his house in southern Colorado. Bob had interpreted the missive as his brother’s order to “butt out,” and he hadn’t spoken with either his mother or his brother since.

  Where did reality lie? Sadly, I didn’t know. Nor was it clear to me exactly how Bob felt about the artificial estrangement. He deflected all my inquiries about it, and resisted my occasional attempts to question his harsh appraisal of his brother’s letter.

  Bob had no current friends or romantic relationships and no history that I could uncover of any significant friendships since childhood, or of romantic relationships, ever. His sole social outlet was occasional attendance at local Scrabble clubs and tournaments. Mostly, though, he preferred to play his games online.

  The Internet, for all its interpersonal anonymity, is a schizoid’s dream.

  Schizoid.

  The dictionary, nonpsychological meaning of the word is the “coexistence of disparates.” Something that is part this, part that. In mental health terms, schizoid has surprisingly little in common with either its Webster’s definition or its similar-sounding, polysyllabic psychopathology cousin, schizophrenia. Unlike schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder isn’t a disorder of thought or perception.

  Not at all. Schizoid personality disorder is a disorder of relating.

  People with the malady have a history, often since early adolescence, sometimes even before that, of aloofness from relationships, emotional coldness, immunity from praise or criticism, generalized anhedonia-the inability to experience pleasure-and limited affective range.

  The portrayal fit Bob like a custom-made wet suit.

  Bob was, by his own description, “a dork, a geek, a nerd, a snarf-you pick the synonym for loser, that’s me.” He had a head shaped like the bow of a boat, and I surmised that his hair had been receding from his temples since the second or third grade. Exploratory surgery would be necessary to determine if he actually possessed a chin. His eyes were tiny and at times they seemed to shake in their sockets. The effect was so disconcerting to me that early in the treatment I’d actually referred him for a neurological evaluation to have those vibrating orbs assessed.

  The neurologist had a name for the condition, which he assured me was benign. As was my style, I’d managed to forget the specific medical terminology by the time I was reading that night’s bedtime story to my daughter.

  Bob liked cars, or, more accurately, was enamored of his own car. He had a thirty-something-year-old Camaro with a big motor that he’d bought from a guy in Longmont who’d lovingly restored it to its original ebony luster. Every time Bob mentioned the old muscle car, which seemed like at least once a session, he reminded me that its condition was “cherry,” and every month or two he assured me that it was a “matching numbers car.”

  After two years of reminders I still didn’t know what that meant.

  Bob lived in a couple of rooms he rented above the detached garage of a modest house near Nineteenth and Pine. He described his landlords as “old people,” and maintained that he never spoke with them at all. Despite the fact that they lived less than fifty feet from his rented rooms, he mailed his rent check to them every month.

  He could walk to work at the university from his flat and used the classic Camaro primarily to cruise around downtown or the Hill or other student haunts on weekend nights. In a rare flash of insight he’d once acknowledged that he drove his prize around town on pleasant evenings hoping that someone would find his ride cool, though the few times that he and his car had generated attention out in public he’d been pretty certain that the students had been taunting him.

  After a lifetime feeling that he’d been born with the birthmark of a bull’s-eye on his chest, Bob was familiar with being taunted and appeared immune to it. Frankly, the incidents with the university students hadn’t seemed to trouble him. He was perplexed, however, that the kids didn’t find his car cool.

  To Bob, that was crazy.

  Over the last year he had begun to visit Boulder’s clubs and bars with some regularity, at least a couple of times a month. His pub-crawling wasn’t designed to accommodate a drinking habit-a period of severe bingeing in his early twenties had actually caused him to swear off alcohol. Regardle
ss, he was way too cheap to splurge on nightclub-priced drinks. And he didn’t go out to the clubs to hang out in the glow of the pretty people. After a firm confrontation from me one day-“Come on, Bob, why do you go?”-he admitted that he went out to nightspots to “watch them.”

  I guessed that he meant the girls, but I couldn’t get him to admit it. So I reserved judgment, aware that Bob could just as well have been spying on the boys. In my presence, he’d never admitted to any feeling that I would categorize as either romantic or sexual toward people of either gender.

  That’s all he would say about his clubbing predilection, that he went to “watch them.” I was left to wonder: If the watching wasn’t some once-removed sexual thing, was it voyeuristic? Anthropological? Maybe part of some arcane sociological experiment? After almost two years of trying to understand such things about Bob I still wasn’t sure, and on those Tuesday nights when I was driving home after I’d completed a session with him and found myself still musing about Bob’s narrow life, the fact that there was so much I didn’t know troubled me.

  I suspected that the pretty objects of Bob’s fascination were at least equally troubled when they looked up to discover Bob’s shimmying eyes locked on to their own as they downed designer cocktails in Boulder’s latest trendy nightspot.

  I also had little doubt that Bob would avert his eyes the moment his prey noticed that he was staring. I knew it because in two years of sessions Bob had never held eye contact with me for more than a split second.

  Other than the regular interaction he had with his boss in the physics department at the university-it was at her insistence that he’d sought therapy-the psychotherapy with me was, to my knowledge, Bob’s primary ongoing human relationship that didn’t include at least one cyber-buffer. Although I suspected that he trusted me more than he trusted his boss, I reminded myself that he didn’t even trust her enough to allow her the responsibility of keeping the begonia on his desk watered during his infrequent holidays from work.

  He certainly didn’t trust me enough to accept my oft-repeated suggestions about the potential benefits of psychopharmacology. I raised the issue occasionally, but never pressed it. Although I held out hopes that the right antidepressant might dent his veneer of despair, the odds of medication impacting Bob’s underlying character disorder were slim. But then-I had to admit-so were the odds that psychotherapy would ever make any profound difference in his functioning.