1.

Rachel Phelps was trying to explain something, but Dr. Draper didn’t have a clue what. He prided himself on being a good listener, capable of temporarily banishing the analytical impulse for a more receptive, open-minded state. He’d had his own practice for fourteen years now, and about midway through that first year of private practice, still giddy in his self-employment, no longer a servant to that stultifying HMO, he’d decided to trust more in his intuition, to color outside the lines of traditional psychotherapy. So, over the years, he had slept with a couple of his patients. He often made patients sing (primarily Broadway show tunes) while he pounded away on an old Steinway, his playing exuberantly bad. Sometimes he would start a session with a new patient by shuffling a deck of cards, fanning the cards on the coffee table, and saying, “Pick three cards.” The new client would pick the cards, and Dr. Draper, a big, rotund man with a close-cropped silver beard that looked as soft as goose down, would let a silence fill up the room. He would hunker down (suggesting a sumo wrestler in an abundant blue suit and unfortunate gift-given tie), frowning, hands slapped on his knees like skull caps. Time would pass. He would lean forward and say to his cowed client (who sat there staring timidly over the top of his cards), “You think this is magic? You think this is a fucking parlor game?” Then he would jump up and shout, “I can’t read your damned mind. If you can’t tell me what cards you’re holding, I can’t help you!”

Just recently, he had taken to asking patients if they’d rather swim through shit or vomit. It was a question Ernie Bates had asked Draper in the fourth grade, and Draper had been unable to answer it. But those were the best questions, he now knew, the ones that made a person uncomfortable. An absence of ease could precipitate a breakthrough, a revelation. Since he had just initiated this new technique, his results were inconclusive; time alone would tell if the shit/vomit question was a keeper.

In any event, it wasn’t a question for Rachel Phelps, whose discomfort index did not need to be artificially boosted.

“It’s a situation,” she was saying, and Dr. Draper was aware that he had missed something. Or maybe he just had the sensation that he had missed something, because Rachel Phelps’s verbal narratives were like tumbling rivers, often diverted by silent rocks or a detritus of disclaimers, commentaries, footnotes, reservations, apologies.

She would knead her temples with the fingers of both hands and look at the ceiling and make tentative spoken stabs at some elusive truth (“…it’s rather a difference…I mean a context…or maybe analogy is better…although, no, I suppose an analogy would have to be a falsehood because…”). Dr. Draper had been seeing Rachel for two months now, and he knew she was an extremely intelligent woman, educated and articulate…well, not exactly articulate if that meant easily conveying meaning via language. Her speech might be described as hyper-verbal. In the manner of, say, Henry James or Marcel Proust or, more recently, David Foster Wallace, she was capable of some seriously convoluted sentences, and, unlike the aforementioned literary giants, many of her sentences failed to coalesce, and she lost them before they ended.

It was as though whenever Rachel attempted to delineate the nuances of her thoughts and emotions, the circumstances of her life, her spiritual condition–she believed in God, but it was not that simple–and her reflections on free will, the bounty of her internal landscape easily trumped her ability to describe it.

After eight sessions with Rachel Phelps, Dr. Draper still could not say with any certainty why she had sought him out. But he was glad she had come, and he wanted to help her. He enjoyed looking at her, loved the profile of her face, so earnest, so delicate. She could have been an actress, finding her niche in elegant period dramas where the whiteness of her skin, her neck, the curve of her eyebrows, and her large dark eyes, would indicate fragility and vulnerability, qualities Draper associated with more genteel times. He would have liked to have sex with her, but, alas, he was fairly certain that physical intimacy was not the solution here. He never slept with a patient simply because he desired her. To do so would have been unethical. Dr. Draper was unorthodox, most definitely, but he had his standards and shunned any behavior that would have compromised his notion of himself as a man of good character. The women he had slept with as part of their therapy had been singularly unattractive.

The timer on the end table next to the armchair chimed musically, and Dr. Draper said, “Where does the time go?” which made Rachel’s eyes widen and gave Draper the distinct impression that he had frightened his client, who had, possibly, interpreted this commonplace utterance as yet another difficult question she would be required to answer, a question she had, perhaps, already devoted many solitary and unhappy hours contemplating.

Dr. Draper stood up, smiled reassuringly, and extended his hand. “I will see you next Friday at eleven, Ms. Phelps.” His smile elicited one from his client.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I can see progress, or not so much progress, as, I think, more…how would you say it?…congruent patterns, clarity, as though I were coming out of a fog, or, more precisely, as though the fog were passing me, blown by a wind, you being, of course, the motive force…although I also feel as though I am the fog itself and that clarity, consequently, would be the absence of self, a death, so…” Her voice dimmed and died, and she pursed her lips and shook her head, confused, discouraged, exasperated. It was an eloquent and complex expression, and Dr. Draper couldn’t help putting a comforting arm around her shoulders as he led her out the door into the waiting room.

“We are making progress,” he said. “In the early stages of therapy, my clients often experience a period of greater confusion, which is frustrating, of course, but that is what precipitates a breakthrough. You’ll see.”

He closed the door and went back to his desk and found the file for his next client, Adam Rhodes, a small, wretched man whose wife had left him. Rhodes missed his spouse’s constant verbal assaults, and Dr. Draper would spend the first fifteen minutes of the session berating the man before getting down to core issues.

#

That night, while watching a television reality show in which contestants with various terminal illnesses tried to schedule expensive surgeries without health insurance, Dr. Draper turned and said to Mr. Trip (his cat), “I think we need to investigate her world. What do you think?” Mr. Trip was upside down on the sofa wrestling with a small stuffed dog, and he stared at Draper with an expression that a poet might describe as wild surmise.

Draper hadn’t wanted a cat, certainly hadn’t needed a cat. And this was a very fluffy, cow-dappled cat (white with black splotches), and not what Draper would have chosen even if he had been in the market. But when it was clear that Angie was dying, when they moved her into hospice, she said, “Brother, there’s just one thing I want you to do.”

“Anything,” Draper said.

“I want you to look after Mr. Trip. I know that you are terrified of responsibility, and that you have never had a pet, but I don’t want to die and go to Heaven and, a couple of days later, find Mr. Trip there and learn that he’s been euthanized because my brother refused to look after him.”

“I’ll take care of him. No problem, Angie. Anyway, you are getting way ahead of yourself because you–”

“I’m in fucking hospice, brother. Take care of Mr. Trip when I’m gone.”

“Sure.” He’d nodded his head. But he had been worried. Cats were notoriously delicate, weren’t they? And how long did they live, anyway? This one was already two years old; maybe it was on its way out. Draper knew he was going to have to do some reading on the subject. And what if Mr. Trip didn’t like him?

“Do I let him inside?” Draper asked.

Angie had rolled her eyes. “He stays inside. I can let him out sometimes in my neighborhood, but the streets are too crazy where you live. He’s strictly an indoor cat, okay?”

“Okay.” Trouble, Draper thought, but it had worked out great. It had only been three weeks since Angie’s death, and already Draper and Mr. Trip had settled into a routine. The cat was kind of a comfort, in fact.

Dr. Draper used the remote to turn the television off. He lifted the phone and placed it in his lap. In his billfold, he found the business card for Caine Investigations (“Sink or Satisfy Your Suspicions!” the card declared) and he methodically punched out the number.

“Yeah?” a voice answered.

“Is this Milton Caine?”

“If it isn’t, I don’t know who is. So, how about you? You got a name?”

“This is Dr. Draper. You’ve done work for me in the past.”

“Sure. You’re the shrink, right?”

Dr. Draper might have sought a different detective agency–he didn’t like Caine and resented the man’s manner, which was overly familiar–but Caine was a loner, and Draper liked that. The fewer people who knew that Dr. Draper occasionally had his clients investigated, shadowed like adulterers in a contested divorce, the better. Draper could argue, eloquently, that a doctor of the mind needed an objective view of his patient’s environment (just as a physician needed to see an x-ray to confirm a patient’s conviction that a rib had been fractured), but he didn’t fancy explaining that to a panel of his peers. Caine got the job done and didn’t ask any questions.

When the phone conversation ended, Draper placed the receiver back in its cradle on his lap and said, “I know it’s an invasion of privacy. But I feel some urgency here. I believe I’m witnessing the erosion of a personality.” The doctor turned toward Mr. Trip, but the cat had slipped away, leaving a stuffed dog, feet in the air, a moronic smile on its upturned face. Suddenly weary, Draper called it a day and marched off to bed.

#

On the next Friday, Dr. Draper’s ten o’clock appointment (Mrs. Fritz and her ancient Maltese, Scout) ran over the hour. Mrs. Fritz had declared that Dr. Draper enjoyed seeing her dog more than he enjoyed seeing her, and Draper had agreed, since that was clearly not the response Mrs. Fritz desired, and he wished to lead her toward an acknowledgement of her unhealthy desire to elicit praise via manipulation. Mrs. Fritz did not wait to learn the lesson behind Draper’s words. She stood up, said, “Fine! You can have him!” tossed Scout in the air and left the room in a rush, the heavy scent of her perfume lingering like the smoke from a pipe bomb packed with potpourri. Draper, lighter on his feet than his bulk might suggest, fielded the dog effortlessly, but by the time he had calmed the dog and carried it into the waiting room, Mrs. Fritz was not in evidence. He had his secretary call a cab so that the dog could be returned to his mistress–Mrs. Fritz would be regretting her fit as soon as she calmed down–and when he returned to his office, Rachel Phelps was already sitting on the sofa.

Dr. Draper closed the door to his office and went to sit in his armchair. “Well,” he said.

Rachel offered a tentative frown. “I think someone’s following me,” she said.

Dr. Draper said nothing, moving his eyebrows interrogatively.

Rachel Phelps chose and discarded words with growing frustration: “rat-like, but not really, not looking like a rat, but more like the dream a rat would have of being a person, and the suit a rat might choose, like brown paper grocery bags, oh, and a mustache that, well, if you met the man you might say, ‘I see you’ve got a mustache,’ because ignoring it would be impossible, worse than, you know, acknowledging it…” Rachel went on at length, trying to describe the man who shadowed her, and, judging by her frown, convinced that she failed in the attempt. Dr. Draper, having the advantage of knowing Milton Caine, was impressed with her powers of observation.

Dr. Draper suggested that she might be mistaken. Perhaps no one was following her. He was surprised when Rachel said, with more conviction than usual, “No. I know when they follow me. I am like a mouse that knows the shadow of the owl because the mouse must be quick or she is dead.” That would have been a good time, Draper later thought, to ask who “they” were, but he pressed on in his efforts to soothe her with his calm demeanor, the lulling rhythm of his words. Soon she was nodding her head, admitting that she might have been mistaken. “I know I imagine some things. I have thoughts that are not mine…and I have thoughts stolen, too, thoughts I cannot speak but which I know were there, because I sense the hollow, the absence, that their theft has left.”

She eventually calmed down and the session ended. She was the last patient for the day, since Adam Rhodes, the harried ex-husband, had decided he was making progress and that verbal abuse every other week would be sufficient.

Now, lying on the office couch, his hands folded on his stomach, Dr. Draper exhaled (a weary fluttering of his lips) and thought, I have been bitten in the ass by my own methodology. Poor Rachel Phelps had wasted her entire session in the work of repairing emotional, mental, and spiritual damage, and the engine of that damage was none other than her own therapist!

“I am a bad person,” Draper told the ceiling fan. He had defrauded her, really. He was no better than Microsoft Windows, causing a crash to sell you newer crashing software. He would not charge her for this wasted session he decided.

He did not enjoy self-loathing–not when there were others he could blame. He hauled himself off the sofa with a sort of lumbering, exaggerated effort, fixed himself a small tumbler of rum and Coke and drank it. Then he called Milton Caine and got a stupid answering machine message, a recording of a song, something about not having any Caine on this Brazos, then Caine’s voice directing the caller to leave a message.

Dr. Draper left a chilly message in which he used the word “ineptitude” and also the word “dumb-ass,” which he immediately regretted but which was there on the machine anyway.

2.

“It’s time and a half on Saturdays,” Caine said. “And I don’t work at all on Sundays, because that’s the Lord’s Day.”

“I didn’t realize you were a religious man,” Draper said. They were in a bar called Fat Sammy’s on the city’s seedier east side. Milton Caine was eating chicken fingers, sticking them into a little pot of honey mustard, swirling them around and biting them with unwarranted ferocity, as though they still had life enough to elude him. His mustache had acquired a yellowish hue, and his pebble eyes were sly as a feral pig’s.

“I’m a Christian and I ain’t ashamed of it,” Caine said. “You head-shrinkers….” Caine waved a chicken finger at Draper. “Sigmund Freud was a demon, you know. One of Satan’s own minions, sent to tell the world that a man wasn’t anything more than flesh and blood and a hard on. Sent to make a man despair.”

“At time and a half,” Draper said, “why don’t we leave Freud in his grave and move on to your investigation of Rachel Phelps? I trust you have given some thought to the message I left on your machine, so you can begin by explaining how Miss Phelps spotted you following her.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Caine said. He chewed on the last of the fingers in the manner of a man whose thoughts have spoiled his appetite. “Maybe I could have been more careful. I keep forgetting that the folks you want me to tail are jumpier than average. What you call paranoid, right?”

Draper said nothing. Was Rachel Phelps paranoid? Was a mouse in the shadow of an owl paranoid?

#

“As long as the meter’s running,” Caine said, “I thought we could take a little drive.” They were standing outside Fat Sammy’s on the covered porch, rain hustling across the parking lot. It was almost Christmas in Austin, a time of uncertain weather and colored lights thrown into the trees with sad abandon. “There’s somebody you should meet,” Caine said.

So Caine drove, an old rust-ravaged Lincoln that had a tendency to lean into the ditch like a drunk nodding off, waking with a start, and nodding off again.

“Careful,” Dr. Draper said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was not a native Texan but had moved south to escape the frigid Wisconsin winters, and when the cold found him anyway he felt hunted, betrayed.

They wound their way through residential streets. “He might be drunk,” Caine said. “It’s his natural state. He’s disabled APD, got wounded on the job when a crazy man got the drop on him. The crazy guy was fixin’ to kill your client.” Caine turned to smile at Draper. “That got your attention, didn’t it?”

Caine made a sharp left, drove halfway down the block, and pulled up in front of a small wood-frame house with a screened porch.

“Here we are,” he said. Yellow light from within the house leaked through slats in the blinds that masked a small window. The porch light wasn’t on, and there weren’t any Christmas lights. The whole neighborhood seemed to be suffering some kind of yuletide anhedonia. The house across the street had a life-sized plastic Santa that had fallen on its face, arms spread like a luckless drunk, and the house on Draper’s right sported a nativity scene featuring a small, wet dog on a chain. The dog was clearly assaying the donkey role, but his performance was marred by the fervor with which he gnawed on a bone…no, Draper amended, make that a doll’s plastic leg. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were small, with the occasional newer, larger, assertively-modern structure signifying the beginning of the end for the ramshackle dwellings that might still be foolishly dreaming of a new coat of paint, a new roof. All the big new houses were decorated with tiny white lights, the shameless minimalism of people with money.

Caine and Draper got out of the car and walked along the curb–there were no sidewalks–and followed a rock path to the screen door. They walked across the porch, Caine knocked on the door, and a voice from within shouted, “It’s open!”

#

After the introductions, and after Milton Caine had produced from somewhere within his brown raincoat a bottle whose contents, distributed into three squat tumblers, filled the room with a smoky, cough-syrupy effluvium, Earl Walsh, their host, raised his glass and said, “Here’s to your health, gentlemen.” He chuckled, shook his head. “Feeling healthy? I used to read these autopsy reports, and I’d read, ‘healthy lungs, healthy spleen, healthy liver,’ and I’d think, ‘Now there’s a healthy dead man!’”

“Have we come at a bad time?” Draper asked.

“We live in a bad time,” Walsh said. “I don’t see a better time up ahead. And Mr. Caine here says I’m being paid for this interview. Money is always timely.”

Their host was a narrow-faced man with gray hair that had receded to the back of his head; his eyes were hard, as were the shadows under his cheek bones, but his mouth was soft and red. He wore a long-sleeve red flannel shirt. The left sleeve was empty past the elbow.

“Don’t care for Christmas,” he said. “Your man Caine started asking me questions, and the next thing I knew he’d marched me down memory lane to the mouth of Hell. What do you think about that?”

Draper knew that wasn’t a question to be answered. He leaned forward and conjured a listening aspect, second nature after all these years.

Walsh fumbled a cigarette pack out of the pocket of his flannel shirt and shook the pack and caught a single cigarette on his lip, and a match flared and he sucked in smoke and blew it out his nose and grinned like a Doberman, pleased with his one-armed dexterity. Draper could imagine a younger man, decked out in a cop’s authority, confident, maybe arrogant.

“Thing I hate about Christmas,” Earl Walsh said, “is all the goddam lies, Santa Claus and that shit, and the baby in the manger and knowing all the blood and suffering that’s to come.”

“Everybody’s got an unhappy Christmas,” Caine said. “It’s Rachel Phelps that Dr. Draper is interested in. What we talked about.”

Walsh nodded without turning to look at Caine. He studied Draper, eyes squinting through the smoke rising out of his nostrils.

“Well, that’s it. It was Christmas the first time our paths crossed, me and Rachel Phelps.”

#

This was back in 1974, and Walsh and his partner, an older man that everyone called Geronimo although that wasn’t his name–and damn if Walsh could remember what his real name was–were dispatched to some apartments off Chicon called The Pines.

It was late afternoon, dusk, and the apartment manager was out in the street when they pulled up. “They always fighting,” he told Walsh and his partner. “’I kill you! I kill you!’ they shout. Kill each other, fine by me!” The Pines was a two-story apartment complex, shabby, cheerless, painted the color of an overcast sky: a hollowed-out rectangle with a courtyard in the middle where a swimming pool lay covered over with a tarp, like a trap for drunks. Wind-tossed plastic bags clung to brown half-dead shrubs that sheltered empty beer cans and wine bottles. A couple of busted patio chairs lay where they’d fallen during happier times. Geronimo had been to visit the Petersons before. “A nasty pair,” he said, adding, “And they hate cops more than they hate each other. So be careful. Don’t stand between them.”

The door of the Petersons’ apartment, which was on the second floor overlooking the courtyard, was closed. The officers couldn’t hear anything within, and Geronimo banged on the door with his fist. “Police!” he hollered. “This is the police.” No answer, no sound from within. His hand went to the doorknob and it turned. He pushed the door open.

Walsh saw his first on-the-job dead person then, Jeri Peterson, known to her acquaintances as JP, lying on her face in a puddle of bright red blood, her gray sweat shirt rorshacked with bloody splotches. It was a small apartment. Walsh could see across the living room to the kitchen. They shouted some more, waited, and went in cautiously. An open door on the left revealed a single bedroom and two closets facing each other in a narrow hall that led to a bathroom. The place was in disarray, the mattress pulled from its frame, a shattered television; blood was splattered on the carpet and walls. But George Peterson wasn’t there. He’d ended the argument with his wife, settling it for all time, and left before the police arrived. No one had seen him leave, but then, no one had seen him enter and it was even possible, although unlikely, that someone else had ended JP’s life.

Walsh waited in the living room, while his partner went down to speak to the manager and call in backup. Homicide would handle this one, and they were welcome to it, Walsh thought. He tried not to look at the dead woman, tried to envision the room as it had been before violence erupted, back when it was just two people’s idea of bargain-basement interior decoration. There was a Christmas tree in a corner, sitting in shadow, festooned with ornaments, and under the tree were wrapped packages, a teddy bear–

The teddy bear moved, and Walsh’s heart jumped. Jeezus! What an imagination. The teddy bear’s arms jerked up and down, flapped ineffectually; its fuzzy legs kicked. Shit! Walsh’s heart did its own jumping around, but he made himself walk to the stuffed animal and kneel down in front of it. It wasn’t moving. There was a window half-hidden by the Christmas tree, and it was dark out now. Rush hour traffic hissed by on the overhead Interstate, and the cars’ headlights cast shadows of the tree’s ornament-bedecked branches. This crabbed, stuttering light explained the illusion of motion. Walsh clutched the bear, stared into its button eyes, its cross-stitched mouth, and didn’t scream when it bucked in his hands. He’d seen what he’d seen, and he’d known it wasn’t any damned shadow trick no matter what bill of goods his reason had tried to sell him. He found the zipper in back and pulled it down.

“I was shaking so hard,” Walsh said. “I peeled that teddy bear pelt off her, and there she was, turning blue, duct tape sealing her mouth, and when I pulled it off she didn’t scream, just made this heart-breaking tiny noise that I can’t describe–I can’t even think about it–and I just stood there holding her like an idiot until other cops started coming into the room, and I made a beeline for Shirley Banks, from the lab, because she was a woman, and I just handed the baby to her and she took it. And that was my first meeting with your Rachel Phelps.”

Back then, she wasn’t Rachel Phelps. She had no name, no history. She was not JP’s child, that was a certainty; four years ago, a botched abortion had ended JP’s parenthood prospects (and just as well). No one in the apartment complex, no one among JP’s friends (consisting primarily of whores, pimps, and heroin addicts) could recall an infant or even the mention of an infant.

George Peterson might have been able to shed some light on the mystery, but he turned up dead in a dumpster two days after JP’s murder. He was missing his head, but his tattoos (pornographic and poorly executed) were unmistakable. There were no wounds (headlessness excepted) on the body, and the cause of death could not be determined with any precision. He could have been shot in the head, bashed in the head with a tire iron…any of a number of assaults to the brain could have finished George Peterson, although the exsanguinated condition of the corpse suggested that the removal of the head itself, achieved with some very sharp blade, could have done the job…provided, of course, that the assailant had access to a guillotine.

“Homicide figured it was some kind of drug thing, some gang thing,” Walsh said. “But that wasn’t exactly science. You just figure, when some marginal dopers go down in a lot of blood, it’s about street finance, retribution for some failed scam. Usually there is talk, though, and there wasn’t anything out there, not a peep from a perp.”

Earl Walsh took a long drink from his glass and said nothing. He set the glass down very slowly and looked at Draper and said, “Never did solve that one. And we never did figure out where Rachel Phelps came from. She and her sister just materialized out of thin air.”

Draper widened his eyes. “Her sister?”

Walsh smiled, pleased with the effect. “That’s what I said.”

Walsh elaborated. He had already left the crime scene, so he didn’t learn that another infant had been found in one of the closets until the next day. Smaller and weaker than Rachel but clearly her twin, the child had died on the way to the hospital.

“Like everything else, there was a mystery around that, too, her death that is,” Walsh said. “The thing is the ME, old Carstairs, no fool, said Rachel’s sister couldn’t have been alive when they found her. Her lungs, her heart, other organs weren’t fully formed. She couldn’t have caught a breath in this world. But the officer who found her, young fellow, can’t recall his name, said he guessed he knew what he saw. He said she didn’t make a sound, but she was all atremble, and her eyes were open and seeing the savage world when he lifted her out of a cardboard box full of dirty clothes and hauled her into the light.”

As the old cop talked, Dr. Draper felt his concentration waver, in part, no doubt, a consequence of the strong spirits he was imbibing, but also, he thought, a consequence of fear. But fear of what? He had no idea. He looked away from Walsh and saw Milton Caine, sitting in a straight-backed chair, his arms folded in front of his chest, thinking lord knows what.

Walsh seemed unaware of either member of his audience. “Rachel got her name from her adopting parents, Mr. and Mrs. Colin Phelps. Phelps owned a couple of car dealerships. He was a big, easy, likeable fellow, and his wife was a Hastings from Dallas. She had the seed money for her husband’s ambition, but the man would have made something of himself no matter what. They were a good couple. Jo Phelps was just as regular and good-natured as her husband, and they loved Rachel. You can see it in an old home movie I watched, the child’s ninth birthday party. She and all her friends are out on the lawn at a long table, and everyone is laughing, wild, high giggles from the girls, and Rachel Phelps looks like a movie star…by which I mean…I don’t know. Emotions just seemed to light her up–happy, sure, it was her birthday–but all kinds of shadow-and-sun feelings racing through her, leaping in her eyes, as though she was more alive than anyone else but could make you come alive too, just by watching her. And her parents are standing off to one side, big and clumsy and so proud of their little girl that all they can do is smile like fools.”

Draper knew, as he listened, that this moment of happiness would be followed by some dire event. He’d met the haunted adult.

#

It was late when Caine returned Dr. Draper to his car. The car was alone in the parking lot, and Draper got out, walked to his car, got in and started it. He waved to Caine, and Caine nodded and drove away.

When Draper unlocked the door to his house, Mr. Trip meowed loudly but did not get up from his place on the sofa. The unprecedented lateness of the hour, this departure from routine, irritated the cat, who was used to a more ordered existence.

“Hey,” Draper said, and Mr. Trip jumped down from the sofa and huffed down the hall, tail lifted high, without acknowledging Draper’s presence. It struck Draper that Mr. Trip was putting on weight, kind of waddling, more noticeable in retreat, and Draper wondered if he should be buying diet cat food.

Draper went into the kitchen and fetched a beer from the fridge–he really didn’t need any more to drink that night, but he reasoned that a beer was probably an antidote for the stuff he’d been drinking earlier, a sort of homeopathic remedy. He lay down on the sofa, grabbed the remote and turned the television on. An evangelist was telling his congregation that Jesus was coming back and this time He was hopping mad and He wasn’t going to be all light and forgiveness and turning the other cheek. This time He was going to kick some backsides. “You know who you are,” the evangelist said.

Dr. Draper carefully put his beer bottle on a coaster on the end table. He had never been married, and he knew that he could slide into slovenliness in a second, so coasters were one of his strategies for keeping slobhood at bay. Of course, coasters were no match for the second law of thermodynamics, and he knew he would someday succumb to disorder. Now Angie, she had all the energy; she could have given inertia a good run for its money. Angie.

#

A grey, reluctant light entered the room and woke him up. He was still on the sofa. A yellow legal pad lay on his stomach. He studied the notes he had written. Could so much unhappy history belong to a single person? Was Rachel Phelps cursed? Had Walsh, for reasons of his own, fabricated this outlandish history of abuse?

Draper lurched off the sofa and into the bedroom where he lay down on the bed. Mr. Trip already occupied a pillow, sprawled in blissful oblivion, plump and assured in his catness, paws tucked under his chin. They dispatched most of Sunday with sleep.

3.

On Monday, Dr. Draper went to his office, told his secretary to cancel his afternoon appointments, and dutifully set about attending to the neuroses of his morning clients, suppressing an urge to shout, “What do you know about suffering? You pathetic piker! Have you been buried underground in a coffin? Have you been raped, repeatedly, relentlessly for years? Have you been tortured and despised? I don’t think so!”

At noon he left his office and walked down Guadalupe to the main branch of Austin’s excellent library system where he spent the rest of the day reading old newspaper accounts of Rachel’s kidnapping. He’d heard Earl Walsh on Rachel’s travails, but he needed the newspaper overview.

Rachel was a little over nine years old when she disappeared–taken from her home in the middle of the night–and she was discovered almost four years later when her kidnapper, a renegade Pentecostal full-immersion Satanist who called himself Joseph Hellblood (and was, in fact, John Spease, a 42-year old former postal worker with a history of violence and mental illness) was delivered to the emergency room of Plains Regional Hospital in Clovis, New Mexico. Among the decidedly scruffy followers who had brought their prophet to the ER, a pale, skinny adolescent girl stood out, in part because she possessed a remarkable ethereal beauty and in part because she had a rope around her neck, a makeshift leash held by a small boy who could not have been more than six years old. In the ER, a man who was waiting for an injured friend to be treated and released, spied this young girl and immediately identified her as Rachel Phelps thanks to a television true-crime show which, like all such shows, recycled cold cases every couple of years. Rachel looked much like she had at nine, malnutrition and psychic trauma serving as a poisonous fountain of youth.

In the years immediately following Rachel’s return, several books recounting her ordeal were published. One such book, entitled I’m Not Who I’m Supposed To Be (supposedly the first words Rachel spoke to reporters on being escorted into court to testify against cult members) was on the library’s shelves and Draper checked it out. The author of the book was Suzanne Gilroy, and she had, apparently, written a number of true crime accounts.

More books might have been written on Rachel’s ordeal had the prophet and chief malefactor, Joseph Hellblood (aka John Spease) not died of his wounds the night he arrived in the emergency room, depriving the story of its villain. His followers, a pathetic bunch of lost souls, remained in thrall to their dead leader, and what they had to say (end-time zealotry and garbled Antichrist screeds) offered no insight into his nature. So the book Draper read felt somewhat anticlimactic, although in its loose ends, its mysteries, it possessed the unsettling power of a nightmare–and this despite the author’s garbled chronology, little-did-she-know foreshadowing, and inclination to describe people by invoking the movie star they most resembled.

Several details stuck in Draper’s mind. The stagnant, bad-smelling pond that resided in a slight declivity behind three dilapidated buildings on the commune’s property was drained and human remains were found, so deteriorated as to be forensically mute but belonging to somewhere between thirty and forty children. The vagueness of that number–thirty to forty?–evoked a queasy revulsion and something else, too…although Draper couldn’t make out the source of that secondary chill.

And there was also the matter of Joseph Hellblood’s death, the cause and nature of his wounds. He was bleeding profusely when he arrived at the ER, and his followers attributed this to an attack by demons which he had summoned but been unable to control. They were stoic in this pronouncement. Their faith had its risks, and they were aware of them. Worshipping Satan wasn’t for the faint of heart. And no, they hadn’t seen the attack, but they had heard his screams and had prudently waited until they subsided.

The ER doc who’d seen Hellblood did not characterize the man’s wounds as “demon-inflicted,” but he did say the patient appeared to have been bitten repeatedly–the marks were undeniably made by teeth–and that these bites, and the subsequent loss of blood, were the cause of death. When the police entered the cult’s compound, they found a fenced-in area containing 42 dogs, some quite vicious, and it was generally accepted that these dogs had been the engines of Hellblood’s death.

In writing the book, several years after Rachel Phelps had re-entered the world, author Gilroy interviewed a number of people, including the emergency room physician who had attended Joseph Hellblood. She asked if there was anything he could recall that he had not entered in the dictated report he’d made that day. He said that he had made a point of not entering an observation and that he remembered precisely what he didn’t say.

“Which was?” Gilroy asked.

The doctor smiled, which the author read as “an attempt to make light of this observation or suggest that it was the conclusion of a young, inexperienced, and overly-imaginative resident.”

What he said was, “I thought the bites were human. Some of them, in any event. Children, actually.”

#

On Tuesday, Dr. Draper visited Austin’s famous Claridge School where he was granted an interview with Dr. Harriet Gertz, who was Rachel’s primary counselor for the four years Rachel attended the school. Gertz held a doctorate in child psychology, her particular area of expertise being trauma–and specifically childhood sexual abuse and the dissociative states such abuse often engendered.

The Rachel who returned to her parents was not the child who had been stolen away. Deeply traumatized, she had difficulty communicating with others and often went days without speaking. Her parents enrolled her in Claridge School, a therapeutic community where teenagers with various learning disabilities were mentored by a large staff.

Rachel seemed to be improving, although Dr. Gertz warned her parents that progress was a relative term. “I told them,” said Dr. Gertz, “that their daughter might appear to be adjusting to her school, her classmates, and her home life, but her mental and emotional health might be something else again. Rachel was exceedingly good at mimicking the behavior of her peers and pleasing her teachers, but there were indications that her interpersonal skills were performances and failed to generate any emotional or spiritual growth.”

“What were the indications?” Draper asked. He was seated in a chair in front of a large desk strewn with papers and books. The woman behind the desk wore a gray suit and glasses with black frames. She was in her mid-sixties, Draper guessed, and had a somewhat austere expression and bright blue eyes that seemed busy assessing him. There was a big window behind her, and Draper could see rolling hills and, to the east, lifted by fog, downtown Austin.

“She had her violent episodes, attacking another student or, more often, attacking some inanimate object. I remember she threw a desk through a window during her history teacher’s lecture on the Holocaust. She might have been expelled–the administration was seriously considering it–but she was the daughter of Jo and Colin Phelps, and a generous endowment can cover a multitude of sins. And after a violent episode, she’d be a model student for months, would, in fact, grow agitated and tearful if someone referred to one of her destructive fits, claiming no memory of the incident and maintaining her innocence.”

Draper sighed. “I have been seeing Rachel Phelps for several months now,” Draper said. “Until recently, I was unaware of her past.”

Dr. Gertz’s eyebrows lifted. “Well. If I may ask: how did you manage that? Ms. Phelps is–here in Austin, certainly–a sort of celebrity. Everyone has an opinion regarding her, even if that opinion consists only in wishing the press would let the poor woman rest in peace. You didn’t take a history?”

Draper was embarrassed. He’d feared this question. “Well, sometimes the facts lie, or, more precisely, sometimes the facts become a story that is truer to the story than to the life. I like to encounter my patients directly, without the distortion of a personal history with all its presumptions of cause and effect. Of course–”

“To make of it a sort of game?” Gertz frowned. She tilted her head back, as though to bring him into sharper critical focus. “To entertain yourself? Surely it is never in the patient’s interest for her therapist to willfully court ignorance so that the therapist can fancy himself some sort of Sherlock Holmes who deduces everything from his client’s manner and clothing?”

“I think–” Draper stopped. He felt his face flush. “I know,” Draper said, “that her parents were murdered when she was nineteen.” He did not tell her that he had only learned this relevant detail on Saturday night, when retired cop Earl Walsh told the story, nearly incoherent with alcohol and the memory of the day that had ended his career.

#

“I had a premonition,” Walsh had said, leaning forward. “I told Danny Krenitz–and he’s never forgot it–that we were in for something really bad, and he wanted to know how come, and I said, ‘I know this house. It’s Rachel Phelps’s folks’. You know, the girl that got kidnapped by that cult?’ It wasn’t like I had any sort of specific vision. I’m not saying that. I just knew that I didn’t want to go in that house. It was a summer day, around two in the afternoon, April and a pretty day and nothing, you know, ominous.

“I didn’t recognize the address, so I wasn’t aware whose house we’d been dispatched to until we got there.

“’Look,’ I said. ‘Let’s go around the back. I don’t want to just walk in the front door. You heard that voice.’ The dispatcher had played the recording of the phone call, and Danny and me had both heard it. It was a man’s voice, amped up on speed or something, all wobbly and loose and punctuated by gasps and sobs. He hollered: ‘She ain’t gonna get away this time. I’m sending her on to her Lord and Master. And as for her false father and her false mother, I have killed them only because they asked me to.’

“That’s word for word what he said. I had the opportunity to listen to that recording plenty of times when I was writing my account.”

So Walsh and his partner went around to the back. There was a big rectangular swimming pool full of blue water and chairs around the pool, white chairs and little round tables under yellow beach umbrellas. The grass was cut–not that long ago; you could smell the sweet bruised sap of it–and the cloudless sky wrapped the visible world like a blanket. Walsh said he could hear police sirens in the distance, heading his way, and the sound filled him with a desperate need to act. And yes, maybe he should have waited on reinforcements, but he didn’t, and he couldn’t say why except that the sirens sounded faraway, a ghost of authority, irrelevant to present dangers. He saw that the glass-paneled sliding door was open half way, and he motioned for Danny to go around the garage side of the house to the front so he’d be ready if Walsh flushed anyone.

Walsh gave Danny time to get there, and then, crouching, he unholstered his gun and entered a long room with a pool table and walls of books, and on his right some big, black-leather armchairs and brass standing lamps and a low table made of dark wood. The smell of furniture polish hung in the air and some solvent suggesting scrubbing and mopping. Three low steps flanked by a wooden railing brought Walsh into the living room with its white, just-vacuumed carpet. Walsh thought he hadn’t missed the maid by much, and then he turned and saw he hadn’t missed her at all.

The blast had knocked her down the carpeted stairs that led to the second floor; the carpet was red with her blood. She’d been shot in the chest, and all that was left of her t-shirt’s white on black logo advertising her company was an “E” an “A” and an “N.” Aside from a few flecks of blood (“like freckles”), her face was untouched by violence, pale, pretty, young, a student perhaps. Now she was none of those things. Youth and beauty were rendered irrelevant, like “healthy” in an autopsy report.

This would have been a good time to stay right where he was, but Walsh couldn’t even hear any sirens now, and what he did hear, what seemed at first to come from within his skull, was a steady hissing sound which, as he climbed the stairs, grew louder until he identified it as the sound of a shower.

He moved down the hall, the gun held straight out in front of him.

“I would have shot anything that moved,” he told Draper and Milton Caine. “I’d seen enough, and I knew that anything still alive in that house deserved killing.”

At the end of the hall, a door was part way open. He moved quickly, crouched, and peered into the room. It was a bedroom. On the bed lay the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Phelps. Not that Earl Walsh could have identified them as such. The task of identification was left for later–and for other officers.

A window was open, and Walsh heard the sound of the sirens again. They seemed no closer. Perhaps they were on some other errand. Walsh entered the room and stepped quickly toward the open door of the bathroom and the sound of the hissing shower.

“Hey!” The shout came from behind Walsh, and he spun, raising his arm to fire the gun, and he saw a skinny, naked man, grotesquely daubed with blood, wearing goggles, as though he’d been swimming in blood, with yellow teeth grinning through a bloody scruff of beard and a shotgun clutched in his hands. The explosion rocked Walsh as though every part of his body had taken the hit. Walsh slid down the wall as the man ran toward him, and Walsh understood that his life was draining away through the ragged end of his left arm where his hand had mysteriously gone missing, and the man was saying something as he eased the shotgun toward Walsh’s head. Walsh still gripped the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic in his right hand, but, in that shattered instant, he couldn’t have said what that meant or what use he might have put it to.

He was watching the man’s lips move, the tongue writhing behind the teeth like some sea thing in its lair. A figure rushed past Walsh, and Walsh thought it was the angel of death, right on time, and maybe it was, but it had come for the man with the shotgun, and it raised a great silver cape which enfolded the man who half shouted and stumbled back, and the angel (naked, a naked woman) moved in a whirlwind of limbs and drove the entangled man toward the window, already open, and angel and madman, bound together by this shiny, flapping cloth, crashed through the window’s screen that gave instantly without argument, and, in the act of tumbling into the oddly canted sky, were blotted from Walsh’s consciousness by the sudden descending dark.

#

“In case you were wondering, I didn’t die,” Walsh told Dr. Draper. “Thanks to Danny Krenitz who studied to be an EMT before he became a cop.”

The arriving officers found a naked dead man in the backyard, sprawled on a shower curtain as though thoughtfully providing for easier cleanup of his messy demise. The man was later identified as Howard Morell, another disciple of Joseph Hellblood. Morell had been in prison in Gatesville when Mr. Hellblood met his end, and Morell had vowed to carry on his work. That consisted of finding Rachel Phelps who should have killed herself the moment her husband and master had died. Morell wanted to correct that oversight. He’d failed, but he had tried. Danny found Rachel Phelps bound and gagged in the bathtub. She was nude, and her feet had been pulled up toward the ceiling by a rope and pulley so that her head rested flat against the bathtub’s bottom. The water was almost over her head, her dark hair swirling around her face as water rushed from the shower head, and Danny was afraid she might already be gone, but when he pulled the gag from her mouth she coughed and her eyes opened, and Danny said, “It’s all right, it’s all right!” as she fought to get away from him, still bound, shaking her head violently from side to side, closing her eyes again, saying with every cell of her being that it was not all right, had not been all right, and would never be all right.

After the ambulance left, taking Rachel and Earl Walsh to Brackenridge Hospital, Danny went back upstairs to the crime scene and peered into the bathroom. There were puddles of water on the linoleum and a small, ragged swatch of silver plastic hanging from a shower ring: all that remained of the curtain that had been ripped away.

After Walsh had told his story, Draper asked what he thought had happened. Walsh had raised the stub of his left arm and said, “I got my arm blown off by a psycho. R.I.P. to my police career. And–regarding what I guess you are really asking–I saw the angel of death and she looked a lot like Rachel Phelps.”

#

“Give Rachel my regards when you see her again,” Dr. Gertz said, pushing her chair back and rising from behind the desk, signaling that the interview was over. “Tell her I’d love to hear from her.”

“I will tell her. I hope she calls you.” Dr. Draper stood.

Dr. Gertz smiled ruefully. “She won’t call.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“She’s not a woman who revisits the past. In fact, maybe there is something to be said for your ignorance-is-bliss approach. You haven’t scared her off.”

Draper didn’t know what to say to that, and so he moved toward the door of her office and opened it. He turned back then, “I am properly chastened, Dr. Gertz. I plan to treat Ms. Phelps’s condition with the rigor it deserves. To that effect, could I ask you what your diagnosis was?”

Dr. Gertz put a hand on Draper’s shoulder and smiled, the warmth there again. “Dissociative Identity Disorder. What else? It’s controversial, but not in Rachel’s case. I urge you–regardless of whatever opinion you have formed regarding DID–that you give it serious consideration.”

“I will,” Dr. Draper said. And, as he drove back to his house, he decided he would give Dissociative Identity Disorder some serious thought. He would begin by discovering just what the hell it was.

When he unlocked the door, Mr. Trip didn’t come running to meet him. This was odd, because Mr. Trip was generally highly sociable and liked watching the news with Draper. Draper would drink a beer and scratch the cat behind the ears and occasionally explain to the cat why some politician was a particularly odiferous piece of shit.

Draper went looking for Mr. Trip and found him in the hallway closet amid a nest of old sweaters so clotted with cat hair that they would never again be worn–for he feared taking them to the laundry he frequented, rightly fearing the wrath of old Mr. Lee, who would have looked upon these sweaters as attempts to sabotage his expensive machines.

“Hey,” Draper said, reaching into the closet and scratching Mr. Trip’s head. “How are you doing?”

The cat licked Draper’s hand, a sign that he was not sulking over some real or imagined slight, but he made no move to leave the closet.

“Okay, see you later,” Draper said, and he watched the news alone. He decided that if Mr. Trip was still holed up in the closet tomorrow, Mr. Trip was going to the vet.

Before Draper retired for the night, he filled a bowl with water and brought Mr. Trip some of his favorite cat treats.

Draper was in bed by ten and fell asleep immediately, but he woke with the distinct impression that someone was speaking to him. He sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. No one was in the room, but the bedside phone’s answering machine displayed a blinking “2” in red. The phone’s ringer had been turned off, and the speaker phone volume was set to 1. Draper turned the answering machine’s volume up, pushed the message button and listened: 1) “This is Milton Caine. I am quitting this case, Dr. Draper. I believe that your Ms. Phelps is a wanton servant of evil, a jezebel who draws men to her so that the devil can steal their souls. We been looking at this from the wrong end, thinking she’s the innocent victim. It ain’t that way at all, not close.

“I believe my soul is in jeopardy. I’ve been thinking black thoughts of lust and mayhem, and it is all on account of this surveillance. I’ve been thinking what I might do to her, how I might stop her from stealing another man’s soul. I never did tell anyone this, but I killed my ex-wife Denise with a shovel back in ‘94, whacked her on the back of the head with it. We’d been divorced for eleven years, and she didn’t see it coming. Anyway, that’s nobody’s business, and I expect you to appreciate the confidential nature of that statement, one professional to another. I’m just telling you so–There she is in the window, bold as brass! Pray for me!”

And 2) “Dr. Draper! I am…I don’t know…this is Rachel Phelps? Tentatively. I mean…I am very dispersed. But here…well, in my parents’ house which is, of course, now mine…I am, I would say, followed. But…here, I will say it…more stalked (to say it aptly) by that rat man! By which I mean, I see him outside in the cold and rain…and it is fear that I most experience…although there is more than one kind of fear, don’t you think? But I think…Help! Could you come to here and help me?”

#

It was raining again and late, after 3:00 in the morning, and it was, Draper realized, Christmas Eve–well, technically, Christmas Day–and he was driving to Rachel Phelps’s house in a state of dread. He had called 911, and the operator had assured him that a police cruiser was on its way to investigate the prowler report, but Draper felt that the future had already unfolded, dire and inevitable, and this was the same queasy feeling that had announced itself in his stomach when his sister had phoned him to say, “I’ve got a new doctor. He’s an oncologist.”

So he wasn’t surprised when he located the house and saw no evidence of police. He navigated the long driveway and stopped in front of the door. Everything was slick with ice, and he walked over the frozen grass, which crunched beneath his shoes, rather than trust his smooth-soled shoes to the glazed sidewalk.

Milton Caine opened the door before Draper could knock. “Those police officers got here right fast,” Caine said. “Seems they were in the neighborhood. Ms. Phelps thanked them and sent them on their way. Come on in. It’s cold out.”

Caine extended a hand as though to welcome Draper, and there was something in that hand. Draper’s body convulsed as a bolt of pain crackled through his arm, shook his shoulder, splintered his brain.

The first words he heard, when he came to, were, “Sorry about zapping you, Doc. But there are worse ways I could have put you down.” Slowly, Milton Caine came into focus, his face red, a wool cap pulled down over his ears.

“We are here for an exorcism,” he said. “I gave it some thought, and it ain’t your client’s fault how she is. It’s a demon that has got inside of her. There is plenty in the Bible about this condition, and you and I are gonna bear witness to the truth of it. Right here and now.”

Draper lay prone on a sofa, on his right side, his arms bound behind him, his feet tied. Rachel was tied to a straight-backed dining room chair across from him. He assumed it was Rachel. This was the way she dressed. A grey skirt, black leotards, a blue-and-white striped blouse.

“Rachel? Are you all right?”

“Dr. Draper? I am not so good?” Her voice was muffled. Her head was wrapped in a portion of a black plastic bag, and duct tape was wrapped around her throat to seal the bag. A garden hose entered the bag and was also sealed in duct tape. The hose trailed away, beyond Draper’s field of vision.

“I’ll be right back, Doc. Don’t go anywhere.” Caine left the room. Draper heard some sounds, not immediately identifiable, and then the sound of a car’s ignition. Draper knew then. Caine entered Draper’s field of vision again.

“Let her go!” Draper said.

Caine shook his head. “Can’t do that. We are gonna chase that demon out with carbon monoxide. I think that will get it.”

At first only a terrible stillness filled the room, and then Rachel began to vibrate and then Draper experienced a strange dislocation, as though he’d been injected with some powerful hallucinogen, because, as her body trembled, a second figure emerged, oscillating on a different ghostly axis around Rachel and then standing up. This second Rachel, naked and wild-eyed, screamed and fell back against the wall and took on weight and substance and the opacity of flesh as she slid down the wall. She tried to rise again but couldn’t, and she hugged her knees and looked away from Caine and spoke, a single word, only a whisper but sharp and distinct: “Father.”

“Gotcha!” Caine howled.

The front door blew off its hinges, spinning into the room and smashing into a bookcase, which toppled, vomiting books. A giant entered the room, a human form but partly beast with a great horned helmet and a white beard of twisted braids, a face half-human, half-gargoyle and missing an eye, its absence a black pit. Milton Caine backed away, holding the forked stun gun in front of him. The giant reached out and clutched the high-voltage weapon, and his huge fist held, for a moment, a nest of blue lightning. He tossed the stun gun away and drew a broad silver sword from its sheath and swung it, and Milton Caine’s head leapt up, like a startled rabbit, thumped against the fireplace mantle, and rolled under a table as though seeking shelter.

The giant walked to Rachel and gently removed the tape and the plastic from her head. He knelt and cradled her in his arms. She had passed out, but she was still breathing. The giant stood up and walked back to Draper and crouched before him and leaned down until his face was inches away from Draper’s. “I believe you are a doctor of the soul, a doctor for curing pain and the sadness of life. I want you to go from here with my daughter. I want you to help her.”

With a great effort, Draper said, “Who are you?”

“I think you do not know me. Of your profession, there are none who knows me now. Do you know of Carl Jung? He would know me. He would call me Odin or some such name. It is Christmas. You might call me Santa Claus.”

#

As in a dream, Draper drove Rachel Phelps back to his house. She was awake and she seemed alert. She kept turning her head to regard her twin in the back of the car. Her twin was dressed now in sweats and bundled in flannel blankets, and she slept, quiet and pale as one dead.

Draper parked in the garage and gave Rachel the keys to open the door that lead into the kitchen. He carried Rachel’s twin into the house and into the guest room. There were two beds in the guest room, and he lay Rachel’s twin on one and turned to Rachel.

“Both of you can sleep here tonight,” he said, “and tomorrow–” He realized he had no thoughts on the morrow. “Well, it will be another day, won’t it?”

Draper walked out into the hall and heard a faint squeaking sound. It came from the hall closet. He peered inside–of course, Mr. Trip!–and saw his cat being eaten by mice! He’d never heard of this phenomenon. Did mice occasionally rally en masse and attack their oppressors? He scooped up one of the mice and hauled it into the light. It was a kitten. This was still extraordinary. Where had Mr. Trip acquired these tiny miniatures of himself?

A light went on: Mr. Trip was not, in fact, a guy. It was just like Angie to play this last joke. But…I’m an idiot, Draper thought. How could I be so oblivious? He tried to think if he’d said or done anything inappropriate when he and Mr. Trip were just a couple of guys batching it. Well, too late to worry about it now.

And there, sitting on the rug in the hallway holding a tiny kitten in his hand, he had an authentic revelation. It was as though he had shaken a box with a thousand puzzle pieces and when he poured them onto the table they settled perfectly into that picture of windswept dunes and sea waves and a sky of clouds and seagulls. Voila! He knew, for instance, that DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) had once been called MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) a condition created by childhood sexual abuse in which a person fragments into a number of separate personalities. These personalities, or “alters” as they are often called, are created by the process of dissociation, as a way of escaping or distancing trauma.

Rachel Phelps was suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder. In her case, the additional personalities were flesh and blood entities, which was a little unusual, but then Rachel Phelps was the daughter of an ancient God so you might expect some divergence from the norm. What had Odin said when he had bid his daughter farewell? “We seek out pain for the wisdom in it. But then we must leave the pain behind and guard the wisdom.”

As Dr. Gertz noted, the disease was controversial. Some therapists discounted it entirely. The treatment was suspect. A therapist would try to address all the alters and help them merge into the single complex self from which they had fragmented. Was this something Draper could do just by reading the literature?

Why not? Bring it on.

#

The next morning, at breakfast, Dr. Draper learned that not-Rachel called herself Eve. She said she was an actress and used to live in Hollywood.

“Rachel,” Dr. Draper said, “I’d like you to meet Eve. I think you two are going to be good friends. And when you are comfortable with each other, we’ll be looking for some of your sisters. I think we’ll find quite a few of your family just outside of Clovis, New Mexico. They might be frightened, but we’ll be very kind and patient.”

They sat at a small, round table in the kitchen. They were all eating cornflakes and bananas, because that’s what Draper had. He reached out his hands and clasped Eve’s left hand and Rachel’s right.

“Can we do this?” he asked.

“Yes,” they answered.

It was weeks before Draper’s methodical mediation began to show results and weeks more before that day when he watched Rachel and Eve embrace and merge into Rachel alone, and the process was exhausting. He tended to her while she lay under the covers, bringing her food and water and trying to keep the kittens off her bed.

“I like them,” she said, and so they stayed.

Draper closed his office, referring his patients to colleagues and vowing to return in a month or two. He engaged the teenage daughter of a neighbor to look out for Mr. Trip and the kittens. He paid her very well to stay in the house.

“You are maybe worried too much,” Rachel said.

“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t really think so.

#

Clovis was the true test if tests are measured by how close they court despair. They stayed in a motel called MOTHERS. Draper maintained that the absence of an apostrophe suggested that the motel’s name was a truncated obscenity.

When they first visited the burned out shacks where Rachel had been tortured, where a host of alters had been born, where love had been brutalized and humanity demeaned, Rachel could not get out of the car. For three days in a row they drove to the site, and each day, Rachel could not walk among those ruins.

On the fourth day, when they awoke, the snow was falling thickly. They drove through it in their rented Jeep, and the white blanket blessed the land, and Rachel got out of the car and breathed deeply of the cold air.

On the third day after this, the first child came out of the woods. It seemed she might flee. But Rachel reached out her arms and called her name. And the girl had not heard her name in so long that it had a kind of magic in it, and she could not turn away.

And Angela was the first of the rest.