Endings by Linda Richards (portable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

day at the office. The doctor, meanwhile, is just warming to his topic.

“Different issues!” The five syllables come out on a snort. “These are like different planets.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say …” but Helmet Head doesn’t get to finish. The doctor is a horse galloping downhill. The thin reins she is holding will not stop him.

“But yes, they are! Don’t you see? Even Sigmund Freud understood—at the very infancy of psychoanalysis—that we are not all created equal. The reparation of a brain such as William Atwater’s is beyond the capabilities of psychiatry.”

“You are suggesting then that he can’t be rehabilitated? That he can’t be cured?”

“That’s right!” The response is an explosion. “As Freud maintained, for psychoanalysis to have a hope of working, it is essential for the subject to be of good character. We are talking about the true nature of Evil.” I hear the capital on “Evil.” It’s in the way he pronounces the word. And then a further and even more dire pronouncement. “For what is wrong with William Atwater, there is no cure.”

There is more, including a sort of mildly horrified backpedaling from the interviewer. What the doctor had said was so outside of Western thought and also how we think about doctors answering. Weren’t they meant to help everyone? That was part of what she said and also part of what I thought. And yet he had said that he felt that, for someone like William Atwater, there was no hope.

That he is beyond hope.

Though the faces on the screen have changed, I am still thinking about what the doctor said—and about the nature of evil—when a familiar face startles me. I sit up and pay attention even though the crawl has told me the story at a glance. “Atwater accomplice stole RV at knifepoint.”

At knifepoint? That was quite the innovation. And the frightened face of the sales guy I’d dealt with fills the screen. It is horrible in HD.

“At first you thought she was like any other customer,” prompts the trim blond reporter. She might have been the younger, less confident sister of the helmet-haired one I’d just seen. The microphone she is holding in front of the RV salesman’s face is quivering faintly with her excitement. This can be career-making. We can smell that in the zealous way she licks her top lip, flips back her shellacked hair. She is almost overcome with the excitement of it all. She has caught a prized peach. She is going to squeeze all the juice out of him that she can.

“That’s right. She even had a suitcase. She wheeled it into my office.”

The best and most solid lies are built on a well-created foundation of truths. Every liar knows this. I watch the screen carefully to see where the lies kick in. It is seamless. The guy is good.

“At what point did you know you were in danger?”

I snort at the TV. The interview keeps rolling.

“Like I said, at first I thought she was just like any other customer. The suitcase made me wonder a bit, but that didn’t seem impossible. I sell RVs, after all. But then when we sat down to make a deal and she pulled the weapon on me. Demanded the keys. That was really when I knew.”

“Did she mention Atwater?”

“No, she didn’t. But the RV she took from me was the one they found him in, so it stands to reason.”

Actually, he is right enough about that, which would explain the seamless lying. But for the knife, he thought it was the truth. I retract my scorn. He is pretty much going with the script I’d fed him. All systems go.

“But you haven’t come forward until now, nearly a week later. Why?”

“She had my home address.” This is a lie, of course. Though still seamless. “I don’t know how she got it. But she threatened my family.”

“And you’ve come to us now.”

“She asked me to keep it to myself for a week. But then the RV was returned to me by the police.”

The tidy blond ends the segment by turning to the camera. “The possibility of Atwater having an accomplice has not been floated before now. Dana, we don’t know if this person is a lover, relative, friend … or something else entirely. But learning of her existence has raised many questions. And with William Atwater at large, it might be some time before we have acceptable answers. This is Sebring Mahoney reporting from San Pasado. Back to you, Dana.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THE POSSIBILITY OF an accomplice spreads quickly through the media circus. In a culture dominated by the news cycle, new fodder is candy and this is all of that. All news sources in all mediums and medias jump on it instantly. It is like watching a worm wriggle under the sand. You can follow the shape of the thing, but you can’t quite see what it is.

It is something new to chew on while I watch. Really, while the whole country watches. Maybe the world. There are implications here. For one thing, it seems possible to me that the laser-like attention being leveled on Atwater and San Pasado might bring some negative responses. Not just people resentful that their charming little town is now notorious: the center of attention in a heinous crime. Beyond that, though, the news cycle is a monstrously hungry beast. Spit it up and move on. There needs to be some new aspect to the story constantly in order for it to stay fresh and on top. But, of course, real life just doesn’t work that way: new things don’t appear just so that the story currently under the microscope stays daisy fresh. So sometimes, in apparent desperation to keep their stories going, some of the connections offered up are pretty thin. That’s how it seems to me anyway. And it strikes me that it is possible that this RV angle—and with it the presence of an “accomplice”—is one of those: a thin