The sixth book in the Alex Delaware series, 1991

Special thanks to Beverly Lewis, whose sharp eye and soft voice make a big difference.

To Gerald Petievich, for an insider’s view- of lots of things.

And to Terri Turner, California Parole Department, for her efficiency and good cheer.

A therapist’s work is never over.

Which isn’t to say that patients don’t get better.

But the bond forged during locked-door three-quarter hours- the relationship that develops when private eyes peek into private lives- can achieve a certain immortality.

Some patients do leave and never return. Some never leave. A good many occupy an ambiguous space in the middle- throwing out occasional tendrils of reattachment during periods of pride or sorrow.

Predicting who’ll fall into which group is an iffy business, no more rational than Vegas or the stock market. After a few years in practice I stopped trying.

So I really wasn’t surprised when I came home after a July night-run and learned that Melissa Dickinson had left a message with my service.

First time I’d heard from her in… what? It had to be nearly a decade since she’d stopped coming to the office I once maintained in a cold-blooded high-rise on the east end of Beverly Hills.

One of my long-termers.

That alone would have made her stand out in my memory, but there had been so much more…

Child psychology’s an ideal job for those who like to feel heroic. Children tend to get better relatively quickly and to need less treatment than adults. Even at the height of my practice it was rare to schedule a patient for more than one session a week. But I started Melissa at three. Because of the extent of her problems. Her unique situation. After eight months we tapered to twice; at year’s anniversary, were down to one.

Finally, a month shy of two years, termination.

She left therapy a changed little girl; I allowed myself a bit of self-congratulation but knew better than to wallow in it. Because the family structure that had nurtured her problems had never been altered. Its surface hadn’t even been scratched.

Despite that, there’d been no reason to keep her in treatment against her will.

I’m nine years old, Dr. Delaware. I’m ready to handle things on my own.

I sent her out into the world, expecting to hear from her soon. Didn’t for several weeks, phoned her and was informed, in polite but firm nine-year-old tones, that she was just fine, thank you, would call me if she needed me.

Now she had.

A long time to be on hold.

Ten years would make her nineteen. Empty the memory banks and be prepared for a stranger.

I glanced at the phone number she’d left with the service.

An 818 area code. San Labrador exchange.

I went into the library, dug into my CLOSED files for a while, and finally found her chart.

Same prefix as her original home number, but the last four digits were different.

Change of number or had she left home? If she had, she hadn’t gone very far.

I checked the date of her last session. Nine years ago. A birth date in June. She’d turned eighteen a month ago.

I wondered what had changed about her. What was the same.

Wondered why I hadn’t heard from her sooner.

The phone was picked up after two rings.

“Hello?” Voice of a stranger, young, female.

“Melissa?”

“Yes?”

“This is Dr. Alex Delaware.”

“Oh. Hi! I didn’t… Thanks so much for calling back, Dr. Delaware. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you until tomorrow. I didn’t even know if you’d call back.”

“Why’s that?”

“Your listing in the phone boo- Excuse me. Hold on for one second, please.”

Hand over the phone. Muffled conversation.

A moment later she came back on. “There’s no office address for you in the phone book. No address at all. Just your name, no degree- I wasn’t even sure it was the same A. Delaware. So I didn’t know if you were still in practice. The answering service said you were but that you worked mostly with lawyers and judges.”

“That’s basically true-”

“Oh. Then I guess-”

“But I’m always available to former patients. And I’m glad you called. How are things, Melissa?”

“Things are good,” she said quickly. Clipped laugh. “Having said that, the logical question is why am I calling you after all these years, right? And the answer is that it’s not about me, Dr. Delaware. It’s Mother.”

“I see.”

“Not that anything terrible’s- Oh, darn, hold on.” Hand over the phone again. More background conversation. “I’m really sorry, Dr. Delaware, this just isn’t a good time to talk. Do you think I could come and… see you?”

“Sure. What’s a good time for you?”

“The sooner the better. I’m pretty free- school’s out. I graduated.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. It feels good to be out.”

“Bet it does.” I checked my book. “How about tomorrow at noon?”

“Noon would be great. I really appreciate this, Dr. Delaware.”

I gave her directions to my house. She thanked me and hung up before I could complete my goodbye.

Having learned much less than I usually do during a preappointment call.

A bright young woman. Articulate, tense. Holding back something?

Remembering the child she’d been, I found none of that surprising.

It’s Mother.

That opened up a realm of possibilities.

The most likely: She’d finally come to grips with her mother’s pathology- what it meant to her. Needed to put her feelings in focus, maybe get a referral for her mother.

So tomorrow’s visit would probably be a one-shot deal. And that would be it. For another nine years.

I closed the chart, comfortable with my powers of prediction.

I might as well have been playing the slots in Vegas. Or buying penny stocks on Wall Street.

I spent the next couple of hours on my latest project: a monograph for one of the psych journals on my experiences with a school full of children victimized by a sniper the previous autumn. The writing was more of an ordeal than I’d expected; the trick was to make the experience come alive within the confines of a scientific approach.

I stared down at draft number four- fifty-two pages of defiantly awkward prose- certain I’d never be able to inject any humanity into the morass of jargon, scholarly references, and footnotes I had no clear memory of creating.

At eleven-thirty I put my pen down and sat back, still unable to find the magic voice. My eyes fell on Melissa’s chart. I opened it and began reading.

October 18, 1978.

The fall of ’78. I remembered it as a hot and nasty one. With its filthy streets and septic air, Hollywood hadn’t worn its autumns well for a long time. I’d just given Grand Rounds at Western Pediatric Hospital and was itching to get back to the west side of town and the half a dozen appointments that made up the rest of my day.

I’d thought the lecture had gone well. Behavioral Approaches to Fear and Anxiety in Children. Facts and figures, transparencies and slides- in those days I’d thought all that quite impressive. An auditorium full of pediatricians, most of them private practitioners. An inquisitive, practical-minded bunch, hungry for what worked, with little patience for academic nit-picking.