“Theodore Waverly is Dr. Reynolds’s father,” he tells me, the connection between the two men slithering down my spine. Registering my shock, Simka says, “I’ve been doing some research for you. You called the other day on my landline—I thought it odd until I realized you were probably trying to keep our meeting private. I have a friend, a very close friend, on the Correctional Health Board. I asked him about Dr. Reynolds. I had to convince him—”
I open up to Simka freely, speaking comfortably to him, an old friend. Simka jots notes on a yellow legal pad, as is his custom when listening to me speak. I tell him about Albion, about Mook. I rehash Timothy’s threats against me.
“Dr. Reynolds has his own troubles,” says Simka. “I don’t know why he wanted your case specifically. Maybe it was because he had you in mind for Waverly, I don’t know. My hands were tied when you were arrested in Dupont Circle that night—the Correctional Health Board demanded changes because of the felony drug charge. I tried to keep you under my care, but Dr. Reynolds lobbied hard to have you transferred to him. I don’t know why—”
“What troubles?” I ask him.
Simka opens the folder he’d brought with him. “Dr. Timothy Reynolds’s file,” he says. “It’s relatively common for people in my field to undergo therapy once we start practicing, as sort of professional oversight to make sure we’re not adversely affected by the work we’re doing. Timothy and I both saw the same doctor for a number of years. This file represents the information our doctor kept about their sessions together—”
“How did you get his file?”
“Like I said, I called in favors from some influential doctors,” says Simka. “The doctor that Timothy and I both saw is a mentor of mine, a very old friend. I explained the severity of the situation—”
“You don’t need to discuss any of this with me,” I tell him. “I don’t want you to feel you have to, if you’ll get in trouble—”
“Sharing patient information goes against everything I believe in as a doctor,” says Simka. “But I’m worried—”
“What’s going on, Dr. Simka?”
“Reynolds is not his real last name,” says Simka. “When these files start, he goes by the name Timothy Billingsley. Before that he was Timothy Waverly. He has a history of spousal abuse, he’s been in and out of legal trouble—”
“Spousal abuse? Did he hit his wife? Timothy told me he wasn’t a very good husband, but I never thought—”
Simka leafs through the contents of Timothy’s file before saying, “I want you to look at these—”
He unfolds sheets of newsprint—drawings, the same type of memory maps I made with Simka, but these drawings are exceptional. The first several are of the Christ House, the house Waverly had donated to his wife’s congregation—that home for women. Timothy as Waverly’s son, living in that Christ House, his mother running the place. All of Timothy’s Christian bullshit starts coming into focus.
Simka finds another drawing and spreads it open on the table. The drawing’s a reimagining of a Rossetti, of a woman brushing her crimson hair.
“Albion—”
“Reynolds struggled with violence and depression,” says Simka. “Survivor’s guilt, after Pittsburgh. He was addicted to pornography, hard-core stuff. Violent. He and his therapist talked about this problem extensively. The treatments ended abruptly—the final report says that Timothy called his therapist from the hospital. He says he was born again—”
“He tore out his own Adware,” I tell him. “He told me all about it—”
“Almost killed himself,” says Simka.
Simka lets me leaf through the other drawings in the file, there are several here—all extraordinarily realistic, made with colored pencils or charcoal. Simka paces his shop, cleaning up odds and ends, keeping his hands busy, obviously troubled that he’s breaching his oath of patient privacy. Timothy’s old doctor had arranged these drawings in groups: several of the Christ House, several of Albion. The third group grows startlingly brutal. A woman chained by her wrists in a dungeon. Two women handcuffed in bed. A woman drowning in what looks like bog water, surrounded by swamp grass. Another of a woman buried in river mud.
“Jesus—”
It’s her, oh Christ, it’s her—
“What is it?” asks Simka.
Nine Mile Run drawn accurately. A woman’s body half buried in river mud, abandoned down a steep slope from the jogging path that worms through the park. The river’s drawn in like a black ribbon. Staring at this drawing, the scene recurs to me—kneeling in the cold mud, seeing the white flesh and the grime-darkened hair. Hard rain must have rinsed away the shallow burial, or the river rose, exposing her body—tugged by currents, the face of the woman I’ve been tracking, drawn here.
“This is Hannah Massey,” I tell him. “This is the crime scene. This is the body, it—”
“Are you sure?” asks Simka. “Are you absolutely sure? I’ll call the police—”
“No, no, that’s not the best for this,” I tell him. “I’ll get in touch with Kucenic. There are protocols to follow for something like this. Jesus. The regular police don’t care about crimes preserved in the City-Archive, and will only muck it up. Kucenic will know what to do—”
I tell Simka I need to think. He says he’s planning on staying up, combing through the minutiae of Timothy’s files to see what else he can uncover, if he can find any information that can help me. Nearing one in the morning, we return to the house through his wife’s garden. Simka makes up the guest bedroom for me, two comforters, in case I get cold.
“It’s a drafty house,” he says. “We can talk more in the morning—”
I climb into bed, the cooling grip of crisp sheets. My mind races. Staring into darkness, listening to the unfamiliar pops of the settling house. Autoconnect to Norwegianwood, Simka’s Wi-Fi. Thinking—
Maybe Waverly never intended me to find Albion—
Maybe there is no Albion, maybe there never was—
Albion the name of Waverly’s sailboat, nothing more—
Waverly and Timothy, father and son, bringing me into the fold because I found the body of Hannah Massey. Maybe they brought me in because they want to keep me under tabs, figure out how much I know, what to do with me—
Tangle me up in the fiction of Albion, keep me distracted—
A sickening certainty of comprehension, but some things don’t click: Albion exists, of course she does, because Timothy drew these pictures of her for his old doctor, years ago. And why would Waverly, a man like Waverly, need to go through all the bother of having me search for Albion just so he can keep tabs on me? He could hire someone to follow me, or… or something could be arranged—I wouldn’t be missed for long. Quivering with the thought, the panic in my nerves breaking down my disbelief—I don’t believe Waverly will have me killed, or Timothy, or try not to believe, but those drawings of women’s bodies are like confessions and the possibility of death grows around me like ice.
I ping Kucenic that I need to see him. Messages wait from Timothy in my in-box, vague warnings about my treatment—he seems to know I’m with Simka right now. Kucenic doesn’t respond so I ping him again.
Two a.m. I register for a chat session at the World News Catalog’s twenty-four-hour reference desk. An e-librarian joins me, some AI interface with a Hello Kitty avatar.
How may I help you?
I request a search in the hard archive of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for the name Timothy Billingsley—the results are immediate. Timothy’s face. Thinner years ago, with a scruffy beard hiding his thin lips, but the eyes are his. I read. Domestic disturbances, arrests. I ask the AI to run a face match without limiting the news source and the bot returns hits from the Times-Picayune—under the name Timothy Filt, arrested for the murder of his wife, a woman named Rhonda Jackson from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. She was found in her apartment, her head caved in from the strike of an aluminum baseball bat. He’d been pulled over for a broken taillight and connected with the crime. Blood in the car, a DNA match. Scheduled for the death sentence but never executed—political influence and an eventual pardon from the governor of Louisiana.