The Syndrome (31 page)

I’m disappearing
, he thought.
Whoever I am …

SeaSpray was a powder-blue Cape Cod on 4th Street, just around the corner from the beach.

Sparsely decorated, and slightly forlorn, it was a beach cottage with mismatched furniture and amateur seascapes on the walls. A faint, but pervasive smell of mildew hung in the air as Duran lay down on the rattan couch in the living room, and gazed at the ceiling in a funk.

In the kitchen, Adrienne sat down to make a list.

1. Slough
—she wrote, then sat back with a sigh. She had to call in. She
should have
called in—long ago—from the real estate office or a pay phone on the road. It was 10:30 already, which made her more than late: she was missing in action. So she really had to call in, only … what could she say? What could she possibly say without sounding like a lunatic?

She imagined the scene at work. When you counted the paralegals, the interns, and the court reporter, at least a dozen people would have assembled for the McEligot deposition. First, there would have been a grace period. Maybe fifteen minutes of chitchat, ending in a certain amount of frowning. Nervous glances at the clock, followed by expressions of bewilderment and concern.
Where could Adrienne be? I hope she’s all right!
People would begin to make calls, go out for coffee, read the paper, look over their notes. Half an hour later (if that), counsel for the plaintiff would put away her notes and get to her feet—even as Bette placed calls to Adrienne at home, and to Slough in San Diego.
What? What do you mean she’s not there?

She heard Duran get up and turn on the television. Canned laughter floated toward her through the doorway to the kitchen.

2. Call Bill Fellowes—name/phone of memory witness

3. Insurance co.—re Duran’s tapes of Nikki

4. Shopping: food, clothes, hairbrush

5.

There wasn’t any 5. And, truth to tell, there wasn’t any point in adding to her list until she’d crossed off the first entry. Everything else was stalling. So she gritted her teeth, gave herself a Nike pep talk—
Just do it!
—and dialed Bette’s number at Slough, Hawley. Then she listened as it rang—or almost rang—and hung up.

It wasn’t so much that she was afraid. She just didn’t know what to say. Curtis Slough was not what you’d call a stand-up guy. On the contrary, his reaction to the news that she’d grown up an orphan had been a kind of embarrassed alarm—as if she’d confessed to having an unpleasant, and possibly contagious, disease. How, then, might he react to the news that she was sharing a beach cottage with a maniac, while running from a killer who’d murdered two people—including one of the firm’s own investigators? And if to that she added the information that all this had something to do with her sister’s recent electrocution, itself brought on by false memories of Satanic abuse …

Slough, Hawley was an old and respected Washington firm. Most of its lawyers were graduates of Ivy League schools, William & Mary and Stanford. They were ambitious and tightly-wrapped people who were bright, bland, and dependable. They did not stay in Comfort Inns. They were not orphans. And they never, ever “went on the run.” So …

This isn’t going to get any easier
, Adrienne told herself, and began dialing.

Bette answered on the first ring.

“Bette. It’s me—Adrienne.”

“Oh my God!
Scout!
What
happened
to you?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

A nervous laugh. “It
better
be hard to explain. D’you realize what a
meltdown
we have here? We are talking fifteen people, including two partners just …
standing
there … looking at one another for almost an hour and—the Old Man’s ballistic. Tell me you were hit by a car! Tell me you were killed! Were you?” This last, hopefully.

“No.”

“Then—
what?”

“There was a … an emergency.”

“What
kind
of ‘emergency’?”

“A
sudden
emergency.” Before Bette could question her any further, Adrienne hurried on, explaining where to find the file on the McEligot depo. “It’s not the final draft,” she said. “I was going to work on it at the motel—”

“What motel?”

Ignoring the question, Adrienne plowed on. “It’s in the
asphalt
folder on my computer. I think I called it—”

“Wait a second—you mean you’re not coming
back?
What am I gonna tell Curtis?”

“
I’ll
call him.”

“And tell him what? That you had ‘an emergency’?”

To Adrienne’s ear, her friend sounded more excited than worried. “Exactly.”

“But he’ll want to know what
kind
of emergency—other than ‘sudden.’ ‘Sudden’ won’t cut it.”

“Then I’ll tell him it was ‘a female emergency.’”

“A what?”

“You heard me.”

“But I don’t even know what that is,” Bette protested. “I mean, what’s that supposed to
mean?”

“I don’t know—but I do know Slough and, trust me, he won’t ask.”

As soon as she hung up, she gritted her teeth and called Slough in San Diego—where, to her delight, she found he wasn’t in. So she left a message:

Then she called Bill Fellowes who, to her surprise, was unaware
of the morning’s fiasco. “I just got in myself,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Remember that divorce case you worked on when you were interning with Nelson?”

He thought about it for a moment, then said, “No.”

“I think it was a divorce case. The guy worked for the SEC—”

“Oh, you mean the Brewster case!”

“Right!”

“That was a lot more than ‘a divorce case.’ But, what about it?”

“You had an expert witness—a shrink or something. Knew a lot about memory.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Well,” Adrienne said, “I was wondering if I could get his name—”

“Ray Shaw!” Fellowes boomed. “Neuropsychiatrist to the stars!”

“You know where I could find him?”

“Last I looked—Columbia Medical School.”

“And he’s good?” she asked. “On memory?”

“Bulletproof. He wrote the Encarta entry.”

She laughed. “Okay, but … is he in court a lot?”

It was Fellowes’s turn to chuckle. “You mean, is he a professional witness?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I think Brewster was his first time out. And he only testified
then
because he went to school with the guy.”

“So he’s the real deal,” Adrienne said.

“Absolutely. Hang on. I’ll get you his numbers.”

She did and he did, and then she thanked him and they said good-bye. Canned laughter rose and fell just past the door. What would she say to Shaw? And what did she expect from him?

I’m with this man, Doctor, who thinks he’s a psychologist—but he’s not. He was treating my sister when she committed suicide and, since then, someone’s been trying to kill me—or

maybe us, I’m not sure. Anyway, he isn’t who he thinks he is—that person’s dead, too—and I was hoping you could help him recover his memory—so we can figure out what’s going on—and maybe I can get my life back together.

Hmmmnn. Maybe not. He gets that call, and the first call
he
makes is to Bellevue.
There’s a madwoman on the phone …

She turned to a new page in the pad, and wrote
Shaw
at the very top. Then she tapped her pen against the page a few times, and added:
Lawyer—Fellowes—Brewster case

She sighed. If she knew a little more about the Brewster business, that would be good. It wouldn’t seem as if she were coming out of left field. The easy thing to do would be to look it up on Nexis.

Nikki’s laptop was in the car. All she needed to access the Web site—which archived the full text of more than five thousand newspapers and journals, going back twenty years—was the law firm’s user-ID and password. Which she knew by heart. Everyone did. The user-ID was
1SLOUGH1
, the same as Curtis’s license plate. And the password was
torts
—one of the boss man’s little jokes.

Leaving the kitchen to get the laptop, she passed through the living room, where Duran was lying on the couch. She paused to see what he was watching. Jenny Jones. “You watch this stuff a lot?”

He thought about it for a moment, and shrugged. “I guess.”

He was completely affectless, as if he’d been tranquilized to the point of sleep. It was weird. Weird enough to make her think of Gertrude Stein’s remark about America (or was it just Berkeley?), saying there was no
there
, there. That’s the way Duran was in front of the TV There wasn’t any
him
, in him.

Removing her sister’s laptop from its pink carrying case, she set it down on the kitchen counter and waited for the machine to boot up. The first thing she’d do was send the McEligot
memo to Bette and Slough, attaching it to an e-mail—that way, at least they’d know she hadn’t been slacking.

Searching in the carrying case for the external modem, she found a pack of Orbit gum, two pink hair clips and a little bottle of pills. Although the bottle resembled the kind you’d get from CVS or RiteAid, there wasn’t any refill number or physician’s name. All it said was:

And under that, in Nikki’s bold hand:
Placebo 1.
What? She opened the bottle. The pills inside—she spilled them into her open palm—were capsules, filled with a dusky brown powder. They bore no pharmaceutical imprints or identifying marks. What were they? Vitamins? Maybe. But it didn’t look like a vitamin bottle. It looked like a medicine bottle. And
Placebo 1?
Was that supposed to be a joke?

She put the bottle on the counter, thinking she’d ask Duran later. But first: Nexis.

She found the modem in the carrying case, hooked it up and rebooted. Then she logged on to Nexis-Lexis, using her firm’s password and ID. The Web was slow, and it took her half an hour to download the stories she was looking for: a
New York Times
profile of Doctor Shaw, a handful of articles about memory, and a couple of shorter pieces about the Brewster divorce.

Shaw was fifty-seven years old, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn College, and Yale Medical School, where he’d studied neurobiology and psychiatry. A photograph showed a genial man with unruly eyebrows, wearing a turtleneck sweater under a tweed sports jacket. According to the profile, Shaw was “the dean of research biologists” at Columbia University’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, as well as a popular lecturer in the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry. A frequent contributor to
The New England Journal of Medicine
, he’d written as well for general interest magazines like Harper’s and the
Atlantic.

All his articles were available from Nexis, and she downloaded them to a floppy. That done, she spent an hour reading about explicit and implicit memory, cognitive displacement, hypnosis, and the role of the hippocampus in long- and short-term memory.

None of it stuck.

So she turned her attention to the Brewster case, which was discussed at length in an old issue of
The American Lawyer.

Shaw was a witness for the defense. At issue was Mrs. Brewster’s “assisted” recollection of her husband’s allegedly violent behavior, behavior that was otherwise undocumented.

Under questioning by Socrates Nelson, Shaw undertook to explain the relationship between learning and memory. According to the neurobiologist, memories were dynamic, rather than static, and had a physiological basis. In other words, they changed, and the changes took place on a physical and cellular level.

“If this didn’t happen,” he told the court, “we couldn’t learn.” By way of example, Shaw discussed the complex task of learning to hit a baseball. This task involved at least three different kinds of memory—motor memory, visual memory, sequential memory—each of which took place in a different part of the brain.

Most people never got very good at hitting a baseball. But even the most limited competence at the task required repeated trials, efforts in which the most recent attempt was compared to its predecessor. This was what physical learning was all about—the refinement of technique by feedback. And what made it possible was the fact that each attempt to hit the ball
changed
the neurological framework of the memory itself. When the novice finally made contact, the relevant neurons encoded the information as a successful attempt. Whereupon, the encrypted data became a kind of template for all future at-bats.

“It’s just common sense, really. Memories are transformed
by new experiences. We understand this on a gut level,” Shaw testified, “but what we may not understand is that the same mechanism which allows us to learn—that is to say, which allows us to modify memory—makes it possible for us to remember the past in a defective manner.

“When my wife and I recall a shared incident—a concert, an argument, a trip—we seldom remember
the same
incident. Through a process called ‘chunking,’ our memory of the concert is affected by memories of other concerts, including concerts we’ve seen on television and in the movies, even concerts we’ve only
heard
about. And all of these memories exchange details with one another—so that our recollection of an afternoon at Lincoln Center is changed by the documentary that we saw about Woodstock, and also by what we’ve read of Wagner—not to mention the dream we had of porpoises swimming through La Scala.

“It works like this: every memory is connected by neuronal highways to every other. But inasmuch as no two people have had the same experiences, each of us has a unique matrix of memories and neuronal connections. So when my wife and I attend a concert, we have similar, but different, experiences—and similar, but different, recollections of that same event. And not only that: since these memories are themselves subject to constant and further evolution, my wife’s recollection of the concert may one day be entirely unrecognizable—at least, to me.”