There had to be people he hadn’t helped. Or had helped less. Or had lapsed from the understandings that analysis brings, back to some prior state. Crippled again. In despair again.

But Rumplestiltskin presented a far different portrait. The tone of his letter and the message relayed to his fourteen-year-old great-niece showed a calculating, aggressive, and perversely confident person. A psychopath, Ricky thought, giving a clinical term to someone still unclear in his mind. This was not to say that he didn’t think that perhaps once or twice over the decades of his career he hadn’t treated individuals with psychopathic tendencies. But none who had ever displayed the depth of hatred and fixation that Rumplestiltskin did. Yet someone whom he’d treated less than successfully was connected to the letter writer.

The trick, he realized, was determining who these ex-patients were, and then tracing them to Rumplestiltskin. Because that was clearly, now that he had thought about it for a few hours, where the connection rested. The person who wanted him to kill himself was someone’s child, spouse, or lover. The first task, Ricky thought aggressively, was determining what patient had left his treatment on the shakiest of circumstances. Then he could start backtracking.

He maneuvered amid the mess he’d created back to his desk and picked up Rumplestiltskin’s letter. I exist somewhere in your past. Ricky stared hard at the words, then looked back at the piles of notes scattered about the office.

All right, he said to himself. The first task is to organize my professional history. Find the segments that can be eliminated.

He sighed out loud. Did he make some mistake as a hospital resident more than twenty-five years earlier that was now returning to haunt him? Could he even remember those first patients? While he was undergoing his own analytic training he had been engaged in a study of paranoid schizophrenics who had been committed to the psychiatric wards at Bellevue Hospital. The study had been about determining predictability factors for violent crimes and had not been a clinical success. But he’d come to know and been involved in some treatment plans for men who went on to commit serious crimes. It had been the closest he’d ever come to forensic psychiatry and he hadn’t liked it much. When his work with the study was finished, he’d immediately retreated back into the far safer and physically less demanding world of Freud and his followers.

Ricky felt a sudden thirst, as if his throat were parched by heat.

He realized he knew absolutely next to nothing about crime and criminals. He had no special expertise in violence. Indeed, he had little interest in that field. He doubted that he even knew any forensic psychiatrists. None were included in his extremely small circle of occasional friends and professional acquaintances with whom he kept current.

He glanced over at the textbooks lining his shelves. Krafft-Ebing was there, with his seminal work on sexual psychopathology. But that was it, and he rather doubted that Rumplestiltskin was a sexual psychopath, even with the pornographic message he’d sent to Ricky’s great-niece.

“Who are you?” he said out loud.

Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said slowly. “First, what are you?” And then, he told himself, after I can answer that, I will determine who you are.

I can do this, Ricky thought, trying to bolster his own confidence. Tomorrow I will sit down and rack my memory and create a list of former patients. I will divide them into categories that represent all the stages of my professional life. Then I will start to investigate. Find the failure that will connect me to this fellow, Rumplestiltskin.

Exhausted, not at all certain that he had accomplished anything, Ricky stumbled out of his office and into his small bedroom. It was a simple, monklike room with a bed stand, a chest of drawers, a modest closet, and a single bed. Once there had been a double bed with an ornate headboard and colorful paintings on the walls, but after his wife’s death he’d given away their bed, choosing something simpler and narrower. The bright knickknacks and artwork that his wife had once decorated the room with were mostly gone as well. Her clothing he’d given to charity, her jewelry and personal items had been sent to her sister’s three nieces. He kept a photograph of the two of them on the bureau, taken fifteen years earlier outside their farmhouse in Wellfleet on a clear, azure summer morning. But since her death he’d systematically erased most of the other, outward signs of her onetime presence. A slow and painful death followed by a three-year erasure.

Ricky slid out of his clothes, taking time to carefully fold his slacks and hang up his blue blazer. The button-down shirt he wore went into a laundry hamper. He dropped his tie on the bureau surface. Then he plopped down on the edge of the bed in his underwear, thinking that he wished he had more energy. In the bedside drawer, he kept a vial of rarely used sleeping tablets. They were significantly past their expiration date, but he guessed that they would still be potent enough for him that night. He swallowed one and a tiny piece of another, hoping that they would quickly deliver a deep and deadening sleep.

He sat for a moment running his hand across the rough cotton sheets and thought it oddly hypocritical for an analyst to face the night and desperately long that his rest not be marred by dreams. Dreams were important, unconscious riddles that mirrored the heart. This he knew, and they were generally welcome avenues to travel. But this night he felt overwhelmed, and he lay back dizzily, feeling his pulse still moving swiftly within him, eager for the medications to push him beneath the veil of dark. Utterly exhausted by the impact of a single threatening letter, he felt far older in that moment than the accumulation of his fifty-three years.

His first patient on this final day before his projected monthlong August vacation arrived promptly at seven a.m., signaling her arrival with the three distinctive peals of his waiting room buzzer. The session went well, he thought. Nothing particularly exciting, nothing dramatic. But some steady progress. The young woman on the couch was a third-year psychiatric social worker, seeking to gain her psychoanalytic certificate while bypassing medical school. It was neither the most efficient, nor the easiest route to becoming an analyst, and was a course frowned on by some of his stodgier colleagues because it didn’t include the traditional medical degree, but was a method he’d always admired. It took real passion for the profession, a single-minded devotion to the couch and what it could accomplish. He often conceded to himself that it had been years since he’d been called upon to utilize theM.D. that followed his name. The young woman’s therapy centered around a set of overly aggressive parents who’d created an atmosphere in her childhood charged with accomplishment, but lacking in affection. Consequently, in her sessions with Ricky, she was frequently impatient, eager for insights that dovetailed with her textual readings and course work at the midtown Institute for Psychoanalysis. Ricky was forever reining her in, trying to get her to see that knowing facts is not necessarily the same as understanding.

When he coughed slightly, shifted in his seat, and said, “Well, I’m afraid that’s all the time we have for today,” the young woman, who had been describing a new boyfriend of questionable potential, sighed. “Well, we’ll see if he’s still around a month from now…”-which made Ricky smile.

The patient swung her feet off the couch and said, “Have a nice vacation, doctor. I’ll see you after Labor Day.” Then she gathered her pocketbook and briskly exited the treatment room.

The entire day seemed to fall together in routine normalcy.