a victim of racial profiling. Holly and Barbara give each other one of those telepathic looks—as if. Then they burst out laughing again.
A very good day, and Chet Ondowsky hardly crosses Holly’s mind until her phone rings at six o’clock that evening, just as she’s settling in to watch Animal House. That call, from Dr. Carl Morton, changes everything. When it finishes, Holly makes one of her own. An hour later, she receives another call. She takes notes on all three.
The next morning she’s on her way to Portland, Maine.
December 16, 2020
1
Holly gets up at three o’clock in the morning. She’s packed, she’s printed out her Delta ticket, she doesn’t have to be at the airport until seven and it’s a short ride, but she can’t sleep anymore. She would not, in fact, think she had slept at all except for her Fitbit, which registers two hours and thirty minutes. Shallow sleep and precious little of it, but she’s made do on less.
She has coffee and a cup of yogurt. Her bag (overhead bin–sized, of course) is waiting by the door. She calls the office and leaves a message for Pete, telling him she won’t be in the office today and maybe not for the rest of the week. It’s a personal matter. She’s about to end the call when something else occurs to her.
“Please have Jerome tell Barbara that she should watch The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Harper for the ‘fiction’ part of her private investigation report. All three movies are in my collection. Jerome knows where I keep the spare key to my apartment.”
With that done, she opens the recording app on her phone and begins to add to the report she is making for Ralph Anderson. She’s starting to believe she may have to send it to him, after all.
2
Although Allie Winters is Holly’s regular therapist, and has been for years, Holly did some research and sought out Carl Morton after she returned from her dark adventures in Oklahoma and Texas. Dr. Morton has written two books of case histories, similar to those of Oliver Sacks but too clinical for bestsellerdom. Still, she thought he was the right man, he was relatively close, and so she sought him out.
She had two fifty-minute sessions with Morton, enough to recount the complete and unvarnished story of her dealings with the outsider. She didn’t care if Dr. Morton believed all, some, or none. The important thing, as far as Holly was concerned, was getting it out before it could grow inside her like a malignant tumor. She didn’t go to Allie because she thought it would poison the work the two of them were doing on Holly’s other issues, and that was the last thing Holly wanted.
There was another reason for going to a secular confessor like Carl Morton. Have you seen another one like me somewhere? the outsider had asked. Holly hadn’t; Ralph hadn’t; but the legends of such creatures, known to Latinos on both sides of the Atlantic as El Cuco, had been around for centuries. So… maybe there were others.
Maybe there were.
3
Toward the end of their second and last session, Holly said, “May I tell you what I think you think? I know that’s very impertinent, but may I?”
Morton gave her a smile probably meant to be encouraging but which Holly read as indulgent—he wasn’t as hard to read as he perhaps liked to believe. “Go right ahead, Holly. This is your time.”
“Thank you.” She had folded her hands. “You must know that at least some of my story is true, because the events were well publicized, from the rape-murder of the Peterson boy in Oklahoma to the events—some of them, at least—that occurred at the Marysville Hole in Texas. The death of Detective Jack Hoskins, from Flint City, Oklahoma, for instance. Am I right?”
Morton had nodded.
“As for the rest of my story—the shape-changing outsider and what happened to him in that cave—you believe those are stress-induced delusions. Am I right about that?”
“Holly, I wouldn’t characterize—”
Oh, spare me the jargon, Holly thought, and then had interrupted him—a thing of which she would have been incapable not so long ago.
“It doesn’t matter how you characterize it. You’re welcome to whatever you believe. But I want something from you, Dr. Morton. You attend lots of conferences and symposiums. I know this, because I researched you online.”
“Holly, aren’t we wandering a bit from the subject of your story? And your perceptions of that story?”