“you’ve talked to Miss Whittaker, I assume?”
“Yes, sir. Several times on the telephone and once—”
“Have you talked to her in person? Have you met her?”
“I was about to say... yes, sir, I went out to Knott’s and we talked for quite a long time.” I hesitated and then said, “She seemed all right to me.
“The man who just left this office seems all right, too,” Helsinger said. “Except that in his head It’s hurricane season all year round.” He sighed deeply. “Sarah Whittaker is not all right, Mr. Hope. She is a very sick young woman.”
“We spent two hours together. She seemed perfectly lucid, and organized, and... sane, Dr. Helsinger. Admittedly, I’m not—”
“No, you’re not,” Helsinger said at once. “Did she mention her father to you?”
“Only to say that she’d inherited a substantial amount of money from him.”
“Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to be exact.”
“Yes. That was the figure.” I hesitated again. “It’s also the figure mentioned in the guardianship papers.”
“Her mother has been appointed guardian of her person and property, yes,” Helsinger said.
“That’s a lot of money,” I said.
“Is it? What do you know about the Whittaker family, Mr. Hope?”
“Virtually nothing.”
“Then let me fill you in. Horace Whittaker came here from Stamford, Connecticut, when he was a young man. In Sarasota, Ringling was putting up villas and hotels for all his circus pals, and the town was beginning to boom. If it could happen in Sarasota, why not Calusa? Horace bought up all the land he could lay his hands on — it could be had for peanuts back then, the place was truly nothing but a small fishing village, bounded on the west by the Gulf of Mexico and on the east by Calusa Bay. He began selling off his real-estate holdings after the war — I refer to World War II, Mr. Hope, the only realistic war we’ve fought in the past forty years. Land Horace had bought for two hundred dollars an acre was then selling for two thousand. Gulf-front property today is worth five thousand dollars a running foot. The Whittaker family still owns choice gulf-front property it doesn’t yet choose to sell. Alice Whittaker inherited all of it when her husband died. The estate was valued at close to a billion dollars.”
“I see.”
“By comparison, Horace left his only daughter a mere six hundred and fifty thousand. Does that still seem like a lot of money to you?”
I said nothing.
“The oversight may have precipitated the elaborate delusional system Sarah had constructed,” Helsinger said. “It’s difficult to say. In any event, delusional perception is only one of the so-called first-rank symptoms of schizophrenia.”
I knew next to nothing about mental disorders. To me, a woman with “delusions” was someone who believed she was Queen Elizabeth or Catherine the Great. Sarah Whittaker believed she was Sarah Whittaker, and she further believed she was sane.
“What are the other symptoms?” I asked.
Helsinger looked at his watch.
“If you have the time,” I said.
“you’re asking me, in effect, aren’t you, to defend my diagnosis,” Helsinger said. “And the confirming diagnosis of Dr. Bonamico at Good Samaritan. And the corroboration of the entire medical staff at Knott’s, who unanimously agree that Sarah Whittaker is a paranoid schizophrenic.”
“If you have the time,” I said again, “I really would like to know the basis of your diagnosis.”
Helsinger sighed again. He did not look at his watch this time, but like a professor patiently lecturing to a dullard class in Psych 101, he began ticking off the symptoms of schizophrenia on the fingers of first one hand and then the other.
“One,” he said, “hearing your own thoughts aloud as you think them. Two, hearing hallucinatory voices discussing you or arguing about you. Three, hearing those same voices commenting on your actions. Four, believing that your body is being influenced or controlled by uncanny powers. Five, believing that your thoughts are similarly controlled. Six, believing that your thoughts are not your own — we psychiatrists call it ‘thought insertion.’ Seven, believing your thoughts are being broadcast to the outside world. Eight, believing that everything you do, feel, think, experience is being controlled by someone or something quite other than yourself. And lastly, the delusional perception I spoke of earlier.”
“Which manifests itself in what way?” I asked. I kept thinking that Sarah Whittaker had not behaved or sounded like anyone but the person I assumed she actually was.
“Let me quote C. S. Mellor. In commenting on Schneider’s work — That’s Kurt Schneider, who formulated the diagnostic criteria I just outlined for you — he said, ‘Schneider described the delusional perception as a two-stage phenomenon. The delusion arises from a perception which to the patient possesses all the properties of a normal perception, and which he acknowledges would be regarded as such by anyone else. This perception, however, has a private meaning for him, and the second state — which is the development of the delusion — follows almost immediately. The crystallization of an elaborate delusional system following upon the percept is often very sudden. The delusional perception is frequently preceded by a delusional atmosphere.’ Does that explain it, Mr. Hope?”
I did not feel particularly enlightened.
“And Sarah Whittaker was exhibiting all of these symptoms when you examined her?”
“Many of them,” Helsinger said. “It’s not necessary for all of the first-rank symptoms to be present in order to diagnose schizophrenia.” He looked at his watch again. “Enough of the symptoms were present, however.”
“And these symptoms included — what did you call it? — delusional perception?”
“Indeed.”
“Whom does Sarah believe herself to be?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“doesn’t a delusional system—”
“Oh, Napoleon, you mean,” Helsinger said, and smiled. “Yes, of course, That’s often the case. Sarah’s delusion, however, is more elaborate. You must understand, Mr. Hope, that a delusion is a belief — not a view, not an emotion, not a feeling, but a firm belief — that has absolutely no basis in reality but is nonetheless unshakably held despite factual evidence to the contrary.”
“And Sarah’s belief is what?”
“She believes — she knows with certainty — that she is being persecuted, deceived, spied upon, cheated, and even hypnotized by her mother and/or people in her mother’s employ.”
“You said a little while ago that the delusional system may have been triggered by the comparatively small inheritance—”
“Perhaps. But the delusional atmosphere must have been present long before her father died.”
I took a deep breath.
“Dr. Helsinger,” I said, “I saw no evidence that Sarah Whittaker is functioning under any sort of delusional system.”
“She told you she was sane, didn’t she?” Helsinger said. “She wants you to get her out of the hospital, doesn’t she? She’s being kept there against her will, isn’t she? Her mother had her committed wrongly, isn’t that her story?”
“Yes, but—”
“That’s all part of her delusional system. Persecution, deception—”
“Unless she really is being persecuted and deceived.”
“Yes, but where’s the basis in reality for such a belief?”
“You find no such basis, is that correct?”