And then the background static was buried under the wail of a single, high-pitched shriek that rattled the speaker. Jake jolted the phone away from his ear.

“Please. He’s coming. He’s coming. I can’t stay here! I can’t! Oh, God. Please. Let me go. I won’t tell him about you, I won’t. But if you don’t let me go, I’ll have to and then…and then—” His old man’s voice was panicked, mad. “Get away from me with that needle!”

Nurse Rachael came back on, winded. “Please, Mr. Cole.”

20

Jake shoved the door open and a little old lady with an unlit cigarette clamped in her teeth and wheeling an IV stand barked a Watch where you’re going! dodged the swinging door, and kept moving on her mission. Jake ran to the nursing station.

In the after-lunch lull, two nurses were going about various tasks at the station. A tall heavyset man in thick glasses and a thin horseshoe of gray hair looked around, smiled a public-service-announcement smile, and came to the counter. “Mr. Cole, I’m Dr. Sobel, one of your father’s physicians.”

Jake pulled up the name from the files he had been given—Sobel was a psychiatrist. If nothing else, Jake’s profession had taught him to mistrust people who said they could understand how the mind worked.

Sobel stuck out his hand. “I’ve got a few minutes until an appointment—but it’s important we talk. Could we have a follow-up tomorrow morning?”

“One of my father’s nurses called me. She said—”

Sobel waved it away, as if Jake was being melodramatic. “Rachael Macready. Yes, her shift is over.”

Jake recognized the calming tone and soothing word choice of a man trained to manipulate. “What happened?” he asked.

“Your father’s okay for now. We’ve sedated him. Again.” That last word said a little tersely, as if Jake might run out on his bills.

The psychiatrist went to a wall of cubbyholes and pulled out his father’s chart, then came around from behind the counter. He pulled Jake off into a small conference room. “I have two minutes, let’s make this count. Your father’s very agitated. I know you were here for one of his earlier episodes so I think you know what I mean. Do you have any idea what’s going on with him? What’s got him so worked up?” He closed the door.

Jake perched on the edge of the conference table. “I’m the last person who could tell you about him.”

Sobel made a note in the chart. “I’d like to tell you that it’s full-moon fever or that the coming storm is affecting him—which it probably is—but there’s something else agitating your father.” Sobel kept his eyes on the chart as he flipped through the pages.

Jake resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “He burned off his hands, Dr. Sobel. He’s in an unfamiliar environment. He’s loaded up on morphine, which is probably not the best thing for a man of his age. You’d probably prefer an anxiolytic mixed with a muscle relaxant and a sedative. Alprazolam’s your best bet. But my father’s an alcoholic so his renal function comes into question along with his age. So you go with the morphine. I know what’s going on.”

Sobel stopped flipping through the chart and looked up at Jake. “Are you a doctor?”

Jake smiled, almost laughed. “No. But I know about managing difficult personalities and you don’t have a lot of options with an old alcoholic who’s been a belligerent sonofabitch most of his life. You have to keep him—and those around him—comfortable.”

Sobel nodded and the planes of his face slid into a half-smile. “Your father’s always been an interesting man.”

“Do you know him?” Jake asked, surprised that his voice was so calm.

Sobel’s head bobbed back and forth in a no-yes-nod-shake. “My wife and I knew your mother. At the yacht club. She filled in when we needed a fourth for doubles. Your mother was a wonderful tennis player.”

Jake smiled. He hadn’t known that. “But not my dad?”

Sobel shook his head. “We had drinks a few times. But he didn’t play tennis and I know he worked a lot.” Sobel was doing a good job of making Jake feel at ease. “I own one of your father’s paintings. Bought it at a silent auction at the club in ’67 or ’68. Best investment I ever made.” He realized that he was running out of time and turned back to the chart. “How was your father living?”

Jake thought about the chunk of grass in the fridge. About the eyes sliced out of the giant Chuck Close. The barricaded bedroom door. The knives. “A little obsessive.”

“Any signs of paranoia?”

Not if he was worried about a boatload of Vikings landing on the beach. “What are you not telling me, Dr. Sobel?”

Sobel closed the metal clipboard. “I had to give your father four hundred milligrams—that’s nearly half a gram—of Chlorpromazine and it hasn’t slowed him down at all. And that’s on top of the morphine. I can’t use any more on a man his age. Hell, a man your age couldn’t take that kind of dose.”

For an instant Jake thought about arguing with Sobel.

“Your father has a tolerance for narcotics that I’ve only seen one other time in thirty years of practice. He has the metabolism of a racehorse. That, coupled with his agitation, is a formula for disaster. I am afraid that he is going to hurt himself or, God forbid, someone else. I think he needs to be restrained.”

“Are you looking for permission or absolution?”

Sobel shook his head. “Neither, Jake. I just like to speak to a man before I strap his father into bed.”

Jake opened his mouth to speak but was cut off by a white-hot howl that shattered the silence. He recognized the voice and bounced up off the table just as another scream rattled the molecules of the third floor. He raced out of the room.

The end of the hallway was sewn up with a throng of people, clad in muted hospital pastels, craning their necks to get a view into Jacob Coleridge’s room.

Jake hit the wall of flannel-and-cotton-clad flesh and forced himself into their mass, birthing into a wide semicircle of awestruck faces, held back from Jacob Coleridge’s door by some invisible force.

Inside, kneeling before the broad wall that the shadow of his chair swung across each day, Jacob Coleridge was on his knees, his bandages chewed away, the pulpy stalks of his hands contorted and cracked, oozing pus and blood and the spider legs of torn-out sutures. His legs were splayed out on either side, like a child, and he stared up at a painting he had rendered in blobs and drips and splatters of red already drying to black.

Jake froze in the doorway, his eyes nailed to the bloody painting on the wall.

Jacob Coleridge had used his fried bone and scab-encrusted fingers to render depth and hardness to his finger-strokes, thickening or thinning a line as he applied more or less pressure, and the visage he had bled was frightening, without the slightest hint of elegance about it. It was a finger painting of madness. A three-quarter-length portrait of a man.

Jacob used forced perspective to give the figure depth and it looked like it stood in front of the wall, rather than being laid flat on it. It was the bloody image of a man, head cocked to one side as if he were examining something. But he had no expression because he had no face—just a black smear of red where his features should have been.

Jacob Coleridge had chewed off his bandages and gnawed through the gauze and tape and stitches to get at the exposed bone and flesh beneath. He had smeared blood from his sutured and cauterized veins and arteries, plunking, dabbing, stroking with the fierceness that had always marked his work. Where shadow was needed, the blood was thicker. For just a hint, a thin glaze.

Jake moved slowly forward, his eyes locked on the blood-drawn man. As he moved, it shifted with his line of sight—a masterful trick of forced perspective—and for a second Jake thought he had seen it move, twitch. It smelled like the Farmers’ house last night.