The Door To December

At first he had been taken aback by her. She hadn't been his idea of the head of a major university psychology department. But then he had noticed that on one full shelf of the bookcase behind her desk were more than twenty volumes that bore her name on their spines.

'Doctor Gelkenshettle—'

She held up a hand, interrupting him. 'The name's impossible. The only people who call me Doctor Gelkenshettle are students, those colleagues whom I loathe, my auto mechanic — because you've got to keep those guys at a distance or they'll charge you a year's salary for a tune-up — and strangers. We're strangers, or the next thing to it, but we're also professionals, so let's drop the formalities. Call me Marge.'

'Is that your middle name?'

'Unfortunately, no. But Irmatrude's as bad as Gelkenshettle, and my middle name's Heidi. Do I look like a Heidi to you?'

He smiled. 'I guess not.'

'You're damned right I don't. My parents were sweet, and they loved me, but they had a blind spot about names.'

'My name's Dan.'

'Much better. Simple. Sensible. Anyone can say Dan. Now, you wanted to talk about Dylan McCaffrey and Willy Hoffritz. It's hard to believe they're dead.'

'Wouldn't be so hard if you'd seen the bodies. Tell me about Dylan first. What did you think of him?'

'I wasn't head of the department when Dylan McCaffrey was here. I only moved into the top job a little more than four years ago.'

'But you were teaching here then, doing your own research. You were on the faculty with him.'

'Yes. I didn't know him well, but I knew him well enough to know I didn't want to know him any better.'

'I understand he was very dedicated to his work. His wife — she's a psychiatrist — called him a severe obsessive-compulsive.'

'He was a nut,' Marge said.

* * *

The two new Paladin agents walked away from the suspicious telephone-company van and came directly to Laura's front door. Earl Benton let them in.

One was tall, the other short. The tall one was thin and gray-faced. The short man was slightly pudgy with freckles across the bridge of his nose and on both cheeks. They didn't want to sit down or have coffee. Earl called the short one Flash, and Laura didn't know if that was his surname or a nickname.

Flash did all the talking while the tall one stood beside him, his long face expressionless. 'They're steamed that we blew their cover,' Flash said.

'If they don't want to be made, they should be more subtle,' Earl said.

'That's what I told them,' Flash said.

'Who are they?'

'They showed us FBI credentials.'

'You wrote their names down?'

'Names and ID numbers.'

'Did the ID took real?'

'Yeah,' Flash said.

'What about the men? They seem like Bureau types to you?'

'Yeah,' Flash said. 'Sharply dressed. Very cool, soft-spoken, polite even when they were angry, but that underlying arrogance. You know how they are.'

'I know,' Earl said.

Flash said, 'We're heading back to the office, check this out, see if the Bureau employs agents with those names.'

'You'll find the names, even if these guys aren't legit,' Earl said. 'What you've got to do is get photos of the real agents and see if they look like these guys.'

'That's what we figure to do,' Flash said.

'Get back to me as soon as you can,' Earl said, and the other two turned toward the door.

Laura said, 'Wait.'

Everyone looked at her.

She said, 'What did they tell you? What reason did they give for watching my house?'

'Bureau doesn't talk about its operations unless it wants to,' Earl told Laura.

'And these guys didn't want to,' Flash said. 'They'd no sooner tell us their reasons for watching you than they'd kiss us and ask us to dance.'

The tall man nodded agreement.

Laura said, 'If they were here to protect Melanie and me, they'd tell us, wouldn't they? So that means they must be here to snatch her back.'

'Not necessarily,' Flash said.

Earl put his revolver back in his shoulder holster. 'Laura, see, the situation may be just as unclear and confusing to the Bureau as it is to us. For instance, suppose your husband was working on an important Pentagon project when he disappeared with Melanie. Suppose the FBI's been looking for him ever since. Now he turns up, dead, in peculiar circumstances. Maybe it hasn't been our government funding him these last six years, in which case they're bound to wonder where he's been getting his money.'

Again, Laura felt as if the floor were tilting under her, as if the real world that she'd always taken for granted were an illusion. It almost seemed as though true reality might be the paranoid's nightmare world of unseen enemies and complex conspiracies.

She said, 'Then you're telling me they're out in that telephone-company van, watching my house, because they think someone else may come for Melanie, and they want to nab them in the act? But I still don't understand why they didn't come to me and tell me they were going to be watching.'

'They don't trust you,' Flash said.

'They were angry with us for revealing their presence not just to anyone who might've been watching out there,' Earl said, 'but to you as well.'

Puzzled, she said, 'Why?'

Earl looked uncomfortable. 'Because, as far as they know, maybe you've always been in this thing with your husband.'

'He stole Melanie from me.'

Earl cleared his throat and looked unhappy at having to explain this to her. 'From the Bureau's point of view, could be that you let your husband take your daughter, so he'd be able to experiment on her with no notice or interference from family or friends.'

Shocked, Laura said, 'That's insane! You see what's been done to Melanie. How could I be a party to that?'

'People do strange things.'

'I love her. She's my little girl. Dylan was disturbed, maybe crazy, okay, so he was too unbalanced to see or even care how he was hurting her, destroying her. But I'm not unbalanced too! I'm not like Dylan.'

'I know,' Earl said soothingly. 'I know you're not.'

She saw belief in Earl Benton's eyes, trust and compassion, but when she looked at the other two men, she saw an element of doubt and suspicion.

They were working for her, but they didn't entirely believe that she had told them the truth.

Madness.

She was caught in a whirlpool that was carrying her down into a nightmare world of suspicion, deception, and violence, into an alien landscape where nothing was what it appeared to be.

* * *

Surprised, Dan said, 'Nut? I didn't know psychologists used words like that.'

Marge smiled ruefully. 'Oh, not in the classroom, and not in published papers, and certainly not in a courtroom if we're ever asked for testimony in a sanity hearing. But this is in the privacy of my office, just between almost-strangers, and I tell you, Dan, he was a nut. Not certifiable, mind you. Not close. But not merely eccentric, either. His primary area of research was supposed to be the development and application of behavior-modification techniques that would reform the criminal personality. But he was always off on a tangent, riding one odd hobbyhorse or another. He regularly announced a deep commitment—"obsessed" is the right word — to some new line of research, but after six months or so, he would completely lose interest in it.

'What were some of those hobbyhorses?'

She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her breasts. 'For a while, he was determined to find a drug therapy that would combat nicotine addiction. Does that sound sensible to you? Help smokers get off cigarettes — by getting them onto drugs? Hell's bells. Then for a while, he claimed to be convinced that subliminal suggestion, subconscious programming, could enable us to set aside our prejudices against a belief in the supernatural and help us open our minds to psychic experiences, so we'd be able to see spirits as easily as we see one another.'