Dead Echo

  *

  Skate sat in front of her computer screen and looked at what she’d written. She put down abstracts on each patient who filed through her office and right now she didn’t like what she was seeing. John had called her not four hours before, and in a voice that hinted at certain possibly explosive things left unsaid, he’d told her what she knew. Looking at it now caused an angry buzz in her head. A man, Miles Placard, was missing. So far no sign of foul play, save for the fact that he was not where he could usually be found. His car, on the other hand, had been found, in his garage, nothing obviously stolen. The house, likewise, empty, nothing damaged, nothing gone. Altogether something out of her league, saved for the likes of the police force. But that wasn’t why James had called her. This missing man, this Miles Placard, an accountant from some easily forgettable firm, had previously lived at the very same address as a certain, interesting, new patient of hers, a Mrs. Patsy Standish. And oddly enough, this man’s wife had died under mysterious circumstances not long before he sold the thing and moved away. But not far, just away. That was the part that kept sticking. Why? She looked up both addresses and there was really nothing monetarily that separated them. Same relative square footage, close to the same price. But just far enough away.

  She didn’t like it.

  She’d learned to trust her intuition and it was ringing like hell right now. Of course, she could see leaving a house where a loved one had died. It didn’t take much to see the reasoning there, but she’d found people, generally, if they moved at all from the sight of a tragedy, tended to move…let’s face it, away. Not right across town, even if town happened to be out in the suburbs. They usually uprooted, the whole shit and shebang, and just got the fuck out. But he hadn’t. And now he was missing. She wasn’t even clear on who’d reported it, and that was one of the things (one of many) she wanted to discuss with James at his earliest possible convenience. It had been awkward, sure, at least on her end, but she could tell right there near the end that he had been just as willing as she’d been intrigued.

  She looked down at her notes on the new client, Patsy Standish. Pretty much standard grief progression, but there had been the stuff on the girls. Those dangerous ones she’d spoken of. Skate still remembered the look in her eyes when she’d said it, and she couldn’t count the times she’d seen the same one before. But in most of those instances the client (patient, more times than not) had been a confirmed psychotic.

  But not the Standish woman.

  Granted, she did come from a postcard of an unforgiving background: bad childhood, poor upbringing, clinging to the first powerful male figure she came across, but that wasn’t it. Most of the women Skate had dealt with with these same fixations often confessed to an intense love of their children too, but the emotional impact, more times than not, had not been a part of it. This seemed a key difference with Standish. The woman had conveyed her pain with the clarity of a set of nails dragged across a chalkboard. This was rare. Most times it proved purely lip-service spilled out of a small pool of intellect, intended to buffalo the listener. She’d heard it enough to write a paper, a fucking book. But it hadn’t been like that with Patsy. Skate never liked to let herself get involved with a patient (after all, they were all that in the end) but something about the woman had struck a nerve. Why else would she be staring at the aftermath of an abstract at two thirty in the morning?

  The thought stopped her in her tracks, took her mind off, even, the longing she’d felt pulling at her psyche from the ghost of her own past. She bit her lip and tried to concentrate, but the thread she’d been attempting to unravel eluded her. She put a forefinger to her nose, tried to hunt out the key to this perplexity, but it was no use.

  However there was James, goddammit, there was that…