Concert of Ghosts Read online

  “I wonder if it would be possible for us to visit your husband,” Alison said.

  “I don’t see it would do any good,” Karen Obe replied.

  “Call it a shot in the dark.”

  “It might prove darker than you think, Miss Seagrove. He doesn’t communicate. Even if he does—on rare days—nothing makes any sense. Not to me anyway. Still, if you’re prepared to waste your time, that’s up to you.” She paused in an uncertain way. “He’s in a place just outside Oskaloosa. The institute’s called The Clinic. I like that, don’t you? No Institute for the Insane. No asylum. Nothing revealing. Just The Clinic. If I called ahead and gave permission, they’d probably let you see him. It’s going to depend on the kind of day he’s having.”

  Alison thanked the woman. She was ready to leave; Tennant sensed her impatience.

  “I wish you well,” Karen Obe said. She picked up the negative, replaced it in the envelope, then folded the paisley scarf around it. “Both of you.”

  She walked them to the door and stepped out onto the porch alongside them. She held the scarf clutched to her side. She gazed across the fields.

  Tennant followed her line of vision. Long-stalked grass grew, and weeds; a thin breeze blew through the blades, swaying them a little. It was easy to imagine people lying concealed in all that density, watching him. It was this place, that was all, this empty place, unsettling in its isolation. You could imagine anything here. A crow flew out of the grass, rising in ugly flight, as if aviation were a tremendous effort. It vanished over the house, feathers green-black in the sun.

  “One thing,” Karen Obe said. “If you ever turn anything up, let me know.”

  “Count on it,” Alison said.

  With a wave of her hand Mrs. Obe went back inside the house, moving with some reluctance. She didn’t like her solitude. She closed the door. The dog slumped on the porch as if in dismay. Tennant and Alison walked to the car.

  Tennant said, “Now I know one thing. Obe took his pictures across the street from a church called St. Mary’s. Grant and California. Don’t ask me why I know that, because I don’t have an answer. But I know it anyway.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “As sure as I can be.”

  “That’s something,” Alison said.

  “Something. Right. But what?”

  “Never discount information, Harry. Now we’ve got a precise location, which we didn’t have before, did we?” She switched on the engine, reversed the car, then swung it around toward the road. Tennant, thinking of the redbrick church in Chinatown, looked back at the upper windows of Karen Obe’s house, which were reflecting the sun like mirrors too blinding to gaze at. Then the house vanished and the rutted dirt road gave way to the cracked blacktop.

  Alison braked, studied the map, took a left turn. “Obe has a picture and he thinks it important enough to lock away, Harry. So he knew something. He saw whatever you saw outside St. Mary’s Church. He must have. The next question is, what?”

  What? Tennant thought. The biggie.

  12

  Twenty miles or so from Karen Obe’s house, Tennant became conscious of a car traveling behind them, a pale blue Toyota. It could be perfectly innocent, of course. A farmer chugging along, a banker come to begin repossession proceedings on some unfortunate landowner. He mentioned the Toyota to Alison, who’d already seen it in the rearview mirror.

  “If he’s a watchdog, he’s not up to the usual standard of performance,” Tennant said.

  “Maybe they’ve decided to become more visible. They want to make sure we behave.”

  “Keep driving. Don’t take any evasive action. Don’t suddenly turn up some sidetrack. I want to see what he does back there.”

  Mile after mile the Toyota stayed behind them. It made no move to pass, which might have been difficult anyway on so narrow a road. The blacktop finally came to an end on a wider county road; there was the option of turning either left or right.

  “Which way, Harry?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She went left. The Toyota took the same turning and stayed behind. Tennant had the feeling that some invisible chain linked the Buick to the Japanese car; wherever the Buick went, the Toyota was sure to follow.

  “He’s persistent,” Alison said.

  “Maybe he just happens to be going in the same direction as us.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Alison drove through a small town; a post office, a pencil-like memorial to war casualties, a grocery, a bar. The town was gone quickly, followed a few miles later by another almost exactly alike. A post office, a grocery, a bar. Solid frame houses, painted and maintained with great love, lurked behind ancient elms. America the peaceful. They sleep easy here, Tennant thought. They don’t have crime and they don’t have the dreariness of abandoned farmland to disrupt their view. A kid in a Megadeath T-shirt was delivering papers from a bike; a single touch of gothic in this pristine place.

  The Toyota was still behind, a pale blue nuisance.

  “Next place we come to we’ll stop,” Tennant suggested. “Find some breakfast. See if the Toyota vanishes.”

  It was fifteen miles farther to the next town, which was different from the others they’d passed through. This was a run-down community of bleak houses, shuttered windows, rusted cars, uncollected garbage spilling from trash cans. Whatever industry had maintained this place had obviously shut up shop long ago. On the porch of a green shingle house, a black man stared at the Buick, as if the passage of an unknown car might be the high point of his day. Saw a strange car today, hon, he’d tell his wife. Hell, no kidding, the wife would answer. Life goes on.

  Alison parked outside a diner, which specialized in the kind of food from which coronaries are constructed. Both she and Tennant ate hungrily, ignoring the grease in which strips of bacon floated and the single strand of hair Tennant found in his scrambled eggs. The blue Toyota had gone. It hadn’t passed—Tennant had been watching from the window; either it had stopped some way back and the driver was watching the Buick, or it had taken a side road.

  Alison shoved her plate aside. A fly swooped down into it. Tennant unfolded the map on the table. Oskaloosa was about thirty miles away, if you restricted your travel to back roads. He was suddenly sleepy, covered a yawn with this hand.

  “Do you want to find a motel and get some rest before we go on?” Alison asked.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t look it.” She reached across the table and brushed a fallen lock of hair from his forehead. “You need a shower and a haircut, Tennant. I don’t want to be seen traveling around with a bum. I’ve got my standards.”

  “And I’ve got mine,” Tennant said. Banter. Simple banter. Why not?

  “A case could be made for some cologne, at the very least.”

  “Later.” What a simple word, he thought. Later. People used it all the time without thinking that there might not be a later. He folded the map. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They walked outside. There was no sign of the Toyota anywhere.

  It began to rain on the way to Oskaloosa, a slow drizzle. The sun died in a flurry of clouds. The back roads were quiet, the countryside morose in the rain. Tennant, staring out at fields of stubble, had a sense of familiarity again, another of those quirky demonstrations of legerdemain his mind had a tendency to make. Iowa, gray fields, Oskaloosa. It was the feeling he’d had when he realized that Trebanzi was Bear Sajac. But why did he have it now? The feeling persisted weirdly, despite his efforts to cast it aside. He slumped down in the passenger seat, massaging his eyelids. He had no desire to look from the window. I don’t know this place, he thought. I don’t know Oskaloosa. I don’t even want to imagine I do. My mind’s a freak show. Stunted creatures parade back and forth and I watch them through bars. I pay my entrance fee, but I don’t understand what I’m seeing. Misbegotten things waddle, hunchbacked monstrosities totter; a world of the grotesque. How do I get out of it?

  “This is it,
Harry,” Alison said.

  Tennant looked out. A long gravel driveway led to an unassuming brown brick building. Yes yes yes, he thought. If this was déjà vu, it was the strongest he’d ever experienced. He stared at the building. A discreet sign said THE CLINIC, INC. A medical corporation. Doctors busily turning themselves into limited companies. Entrepreneurs who just happened to have sworn to the Hippocratic oath. Another sign pointed the way to the office. Tennant opened the door, hearing his feet crunch in the gravel.

  I have never been here before. Never.

  Alison stretched her arms wearily. Tennant leaned against the car. Rain fell on his face, but he didn’t feel it. It was as if there had grown around him a protective shell, shielding him from the world. It was perilously thin, this carapace, and already beginning in places to crack. Even as he walked toward the building and listened to the gravel, he was obliged to take Alison’s arm for support. Why do I think I know this place? he wondered. But the question floated away from his mind, as if he’d never asked it in the first place. Suddenly he was fine again, steady on his feet. The faintness passed out of him. He was a man visiting a clinic, that was all. No more than that. Making a call, then going on his way. Yes.

  He followed Alison inside the building. The foyer was painted a high-gloss white. A woman in a gray shirt sat behind the reception desk and smiled at Harry.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked. She had perfect white teeth.

  I wonder, Tennant thought. I really wonder.

  Alison said, “We’d like to see Sammy Obe.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” The receptionist continued to smile politely. She’d been trained in the art of being pleasant. She’d say things like have a nice day. Take care. Come again soon.

  “Not exactly,” Alison said. “But we just came from seeing his wife, and she had no objections to our visit.”

  “I’ll have to check that, you understand. Have a seat. Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be right back.” The receptionist went inside another room.

  Tennant sat on a soft beige sofa, while Alison remained at the desk. He studied the few illustrations hung around the room. They were mainly Constable prints, pastoral and placid, intended no doubt to induce in visitors a certain serenity. This place is no madhouse, you see. It’s a quietly discreet institution where people can get well. Tender loving care is the main weapon in our arsenal. And drugs, Tennant thought. Let us not forget the drugs. Thorazine, diazepam, Librium, Dilaudid, all the other little downers that lulled the deranged inhabitants into lassitude. You didn’t deal with madness, you numbed it. That made it easier for the handlers to manage the loonies.

  Restless, he got up, paced, walked to the door. Through the glass pane he could see rain sweep the gravel driveway.

  The rain. The driveway. He realized he was sweating, clenching his hands. The reactions of panic.

  Alison smiled at him in an absent kind of way. The receptionist hadn’t come back yet.

  “She’ll check with Karen, I guess. Then she’ll probably have to talk to the resident shrink. Red tape.”

  Shrink. The word stuck in Tennant’s head like a moth to a screen door. He sat down; Alison joined him. Her nearness was a comfort.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe I should turn myself in to a joint like this and see if they can fix me. Amnesia must be run-of-the-mill stuff around here.”

  “I’m sure,” the girl said.

  “I’ll make an appointment. Maybe they can do it quickly, like those eyeglass places that grind your lenses while you wait.” His voice was thin. The prints on the walls were having a bad effect on him. They changed as he gazed at them, colors seeming to mutate, lines losing their shape. They might have been the harbingers of migraine. He thought of that solitary negative in Karen Obe’s house, the faces turned away from the camera, his own hand pointing. He’d gone to Chinatown that day because, because—

  Just because.

  Maggie Silver said Look look

  But that didn’t quite make it, the voice was disembodied. Instead, he was blindly plunged inside the room in the house on Schrader and somebody was screaming, a girl, Maggie Silver, why was she screaming so—

  The receptionist had returned. “Everything seems to be in order.” She produced a register in which visitors had to sign their names. Tennant stared at the book. The blank page accused him. He took the receptionist’s pen and wrote down: Harry Rayland. She looked at him oddly, as if she’d seen through his need to be furtive. A girl screaming. The sound rolled through his head with all the piercing quality of a locomotive whistling in a black tunnel. I should be used to this. I should be accustomed by now to the synaptic explosions. But.

  A man had come into the reception room. Tall, with a long jaw and tightly curled white hair, he said his name was Dr. Paul Lannigan. He was in his early fifties and wore a three-piece green tweed suit of an old-fashioned cut. The pants were a little baggy at the knees. His accent was hard to place; it had to it a lilt that suggested Irish origins tempered by many years in the United States. He shook Tennant’s hand, then Alison’s. Charm, bedside manner, a fine wide smile, honest blue eyes. You could put your trust in this Lannigan, Tennant thought. You could give him all your troubles and he’d conjure them away. Harry imagined telling Lannigan his problems, and the man would whisk him off to a peaceful room and have him lie down on a comfortable couch and say: Now then, tell me what it is. What ails you.

  Lannigan, still smiling, said, “Rules are such a bore, but I should point out to both of you that we allow visits of no more than thirty minutes except for immediate family. Sometimes our clients become stressed by anything longer. What I’m saying is try to keep it short, if you will. I have the feeling you won’t stay long anyway. Mr. Obe isn’t a man you’d describe as, ah, well, communicative.” The doctor smiled and sucked in air, a small sound of sympathy. He had about him the aura of a general practitioner of the sort you rarely saw any more, the kind that treated everything from syphilis to tonsillitis, and who knew the names of your siblings because he’d delivered most of them himself at inconvenient hours in inclement weather.

  “If you’ll be good enough to follow me,” Lannigan said.

  They went through a doorway and down a long corridor, a bright white rectangle lined with more pastoral prints. There were doors on either side of the corridor, all closed. They passed a large window that offered a view of a dining room, empty at present.

  “We’re quite proud of our facilities here,” Lannigan said, and he glanced at Tennant as if he expected agreement. “Our cuisine is the finest. The link between nutrition and mental illness is significant. Food for the body is also food for the mind,” and he tapped the side of his skull. He looked at Tennant again, rather expectantly.

  Tennant felt compelled to say something. “Good-looking dining room.”

  “Ah,” Lannigan said. “You haven’t seen the half of it. Not the half of it.”

  From overhead came the sound of a piano being randomly struck. A woman’s voice sang tuneless lyrics that had no meaning. Ooobee ooobee doodah.

  “Our recreation area is upstairs,” the doctor said. “Music, basket weaving, painting. Games. Some of our clients seem to respond well to simple card games. Some enjoy crossword puzzles.” He paused, as if to consider something, then added, “A mind challenged is a mind on the mend, after all.”

  A mind on the mend, Tennant thought. Mend mine, Dr. Lannigan. Please.

  A door opened and a white-coated nurse stepped into the corridor, carrying a small triangular enamel pan over which lay a square of linen. Tennant wondered if a hypodermic syringe lay concealed there. An unruly patient given a suitable infusion of tranquility. He had the sudden urge to turn and run: What was he doing in this place of paper slippers, smocks, plastic forks?

  They climbed a flight of stairs. Another corridor stretched ahead. Halfway along, Lannigan stopped outside a door. “Karen Obe gave you permission to see her husband. She was vague, but she led me t
o understand that the matter is, I suppose you might say, of a somewhat personal nature.” Lannigan seemed to intend his last sentence as a question because he waited for Tennant and Alison to respond.

  The girl said, “Personal, right.”

  “I have absolutely no objection. None at all. I don’t think you’ll get whatever it is you might be looking for, but anyway, anyway …” And he knocked on the door once before opening it.

  “Sammy,” he said. “You’ve got visitors. Your wife sent them along.”

  Tennant stepped inside the room, a white room with a small high window, a narrow bed, a chest of drawers. Newspapers, carefully sliced into strips for reasons only Obe could know, lay across the floor. Sammy Obe sat on the edge of the bed, huddled, shoulders hunched. His eyes had the singularly plaintive look of a man on a journey without destination, somebody who has been to places indescribable to others. His mouth was distended in a grimace. When he turned to look at Tennant, his expression didn’t alter, as if his lips were sealed permanently in a look of contempt. But contempt wasn’t quite the word, nor was disdain. The expression was a constant, without significance, a madman’s vacantly sullen look.

  “Remember. Thirty minutes.” Lannigan touched Tennant’s arm lightly, in a way that might have been solicitous. He was apparently reluctant to leave. Eventually he said, “Well. Things to do, things to do.” He stepped out of the room.

  Alone with Obe, neither Tennant nor Alison quite knew how to approach the man. How did you ask questions of somebody reputed to speak only gibberish? How could any question be the right one, if it were destined to remain unanswered? Sammy Obe, in his loose-fitting white clothing, didn’t move.

  “I’m Alison Seagrove, Mr. Obe.” A tentative opening, a fumbling. Alison’s voice, though gentle, was filled with uncertainty.

  Obe turned his face to one side and looked up at the window, which was unreachable even if he were to stand on the bed. You could imagine Obe’s yearning, Tennant thought, for a freedom that might lie beyond that taunting little glass pane. If he yearned at all: How could you tell? Tennant studied the strips of newspaper. Obviously they hadn’t been cut with scissors—Obe would not be allowed sharp instruments—but they’d been torn fastidiously. Random columns, advertisements, sports results, there was no logic to the papers. Did he sit here all day and tear papers?