Quiet Months

It would be dishonest to pretend that the next three months were anything but delightful.

I had not, until then, understood what it was to be useful without being afraid. At Scotland Yard I had been the clever outsider, summoned when everything else had failed and dismissed with gratitude the moment I was no longer needed, like a locksmith. In Philadelphia, after Ellie Kincaid, I was something I had never been: expected. Doors were held open. Coffee appeared at my elbow. Detectives who had never spoken to me in the corridor began to lean in the doorway of my small borrowed office and say, with elaborate casualness, "Hey, Doc, got a minute?"

I always had a minute. I had, I discovered, a great many.

In September, a bank in Wilmington was defrauded of two million dollars by a cashier who hummed when she lied, and I spent a Tuesday in a glass interview room watching her hum. In October, I gave a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania to two hundred undergraduates, who laughed at all my jokes and asked me whether it was true that I could tell what a person had eaten for breakfast. (It is not. I can tell what they have not, which is often more useful.) In November a woman from a podcast called Dark Hours drove up from Baltimore to record an hour with me in a coffee shop on Walnut, and afterward sent me a card with a smiley face and a gift voucher for a cheese shop.

I ate a great deal of cheese. I slept five hours a night, then six. I bought a plant.

It died in nine days. I bought another.

…

In the first week of November a package arrived at my office from St. Christopher's Hospital.

It was a flat brown envelope with a child's address label and a great deal of tape. Inside was a sheet of heavy white paper, folded in four, and on the paper, in waxy purple and orange and green, a picture.

It was a picture of a man.

I say a man, but in fact he consisted of a tall rectangle with a smaller rectangle on top of it, both colored a rich and confident brown. He had a yellow circle for a head, two blue dots for eyes, and a large red smile that extended well past the edges of his face. He wore a pair of round spectacles, rendered in black, and in his right hand, held upright like a lance, he carried a long thin line with a point at the bottom. Above his head, in the top right-hand corner, the artist had drawn a star. It was a very big star. It had been colored in so enthusiastically that the paper had worn through in the middle.

At the bottom, in careful letters that ran slightly uphill, she had written:

TO THE DOCTER MAN WHO NOTISES. LOVE ELLIE.

I put it on the wall of my office, over the filing cabinet, with two pins. It stayed there for the rest of that autumn. People who came in would look at it and look at me, and I would say that it was an excellent likeness, and they would laugh.

I did not tell them what I thought, in the evenings, when I was alone with the lamp on and the light fading from the window, and I glanced up at that large red smile. I thought: this is what I wanted. I thought: it was all I ever wanted. I had never put it to myself so plainly. I had wanted to be the man with the pen and the star.

It was rather a shock to discover that it was possible.

…

On the fourteenth of November, Leo gave me the folder.

He did it in the corridor, outside the squad room, on his way to a meeting. He came up behind me, stopped, thrust a bulky brown paper parcel into my hands, and said, without breaking stride, "Hold onto this for me, will you? I'm clearing the cabinet. The Commissioner wants it for the evidence room."

"Evidence room? I thought—"

"Just hold onto it." He was already ten feet away. "It's yours if you want it. I don't."

I carried it back to my office. It was wrapped in butcher's paper and tied with string. I knew what it was. I laid it on the desk beside the lamp, and sat looking at it for some time, and then I did what I imagine many men would have done in my position, which is nothing. I did not untie it. I put it in the bottom drawer, beneath the plant food and a box of unused business cards, and I turned the key.

From time to time over the next fortnight I opened that drawer. I always had a reason: a pen, a stapler, a pot of ink. I always looked at the brown paper parcel, and always shut the drawer again, and always felt, as I did so, the faint cold tug of something I had agreed not to feel.

I told myself it was finished. I told myself I had done what was reasonable. I told myself that a man may close one door without becoming a coward, and that it is not cowardice to wish to be happy.

I told myself all of it extremely well. I am a trained professional.

…

It was a Tuesday morning, a fortnight later, when I heard about the girl in the elevator.

I was in the kitchenette of my flat, making tea. Outside, a fine gray rain was falling on Pine Street, and the radio on the windowsill was playing something orchestral, and the whole room smelled of toast. The television in the corner of the sitting room had been left on from the night before, tuned to a local news program with the sound turned very low. I could hear it, as one hears a neighbor's argument through a wall. A smooth female voice. A snatch of music.

"—found in an elevator in Center City," said the voice. "Police say there are no signs of foul play."

I went on pouring.

"Katherine 'Kaylee' Rhodes, thirty-three, better known to her more than two million followers as the host of the online channel Tea with Kaylee. Ms. Rhodes was discovered shortly after midnight in an elevator at the Calloway Tower, a luxury high-rise on Market Street, where she had been trapped for several hours between floors. Authorities say Ms. Rhodes appears to have suffered a sudden cardiac event, possibly brought on by a panic attack, during the extended entrapment."

The kettle clicked off.

"She leaves behind—"

I put down the pot.

I walked into the sitting room. On the screen a pretty young reporter in a yellow coat stood in front of a tall glass building, with rain streaming down her umbrella. Behind her, a line of tape. A parked ambulance. A crowd of people holding phones. In a corner of the picture, a still photograph of a girl with an enormous smile and an extraordinary quantity of hair.

"Social media has erupted with tributes," said the reporter, "though some of Ms. Rhodes's critics have questioned—"

I turned the sound off.

I stood there with my cup of tea in my hand and watched the silent pictures go by. The ambulance. The crowd. The yellow coat. And I felt, in my chest, a thing that was not alarm. It was colder than alarm, and less dramatic. It was the sensation of a man who has been walking down a street for some time and realizes, with no particular concern, that he has been going in a circle.

Elevator. Trapped. Panic. Cardiac.

I went to my desk and sat down and took out a sheet of paper and a pen. I did it without thinking. I wrote the date at the top, as I do with all my notes. I wrote K. Rhodes. I wrote elevator, midnight, panic, heart. I wrote no signs of foul play.

And in the middle of the word foul, the nib of my pen stopped moving.

It stopped for a full three seconds. I watched it, as one watches a thing that has nothing to do with oneself: a small gold point on a sheet of white paper, trembling very slightly, with a blot of black ink swelling at its tip. Then, without any decision on my part, the hand moved on and finished the word, and what it wrote was fowl.

I stared at it.

I have written a great many words in my life. I have written, I should estimate, perhaps four million. And in all that time, I do not recall having once spelled a word wrongly. It is a vanity of mine. I am slightly ashamed of it. I had never made a slip of the pen, and I did not make one now through any fault of grammar or haste.

I put down the pen.

I looked at the sheet for a time. Then I tore it in two, and in two again, and dropped the pieces in the wastebasket.

It's not your case, I told myself, clearly, like a doctor to a patient. It isn't a case at all. There's no evidence. There is a woman who was afraid of small spaces and had the misfortune to get stuck. It happens. It is not for you to say.

I said it twice. I said it a third time.

I am very good at saying things.

…

I switched off the television.

The room went dim. The rain went on against the glass. A bus passed, and the headlights swept a long pale bar across the ceiling and over the wall and out again, and left the room darker than before. On the shelf above the fireplace stood my row of books. The Cambridge texts. The monographs. A single slim volume bound in green cloth, with a title in gilt that I could not read from where I sat, but which I knew by heart.

The Silent Heart. M. Kane.

I did not look at it.

I got up, rinsed my cup, wiped the counter, and put on my coat. It was a quarter to nine. I had a consultation at ten, a bank manager, a missing fifty thousand dollars, a cheerful little puzzle with a man who clicked his tongue. I would go. I would sit across from him and observe, in my customary fashion, his habits of blinking and swallowing, and give him my customary opinion.

It would be an excellent morning. I was sure of it.

At the door of the flat I paused, with my hand on the latch.

Behind me the room was quite silent. The television screen was dark. And in the black glass, where the picture had been, I saw for a moment the faint reflection of a man in a gray overcoat, with gold spectacles and a pen in his breast pocket, standing very still.

He looked, I thought, like somebody who had been told that he might go.

I turned off the light.