Of Sound Mind Read online

  Dedication

  To Nicole, Lauren, and Jordan

  and their future reading adventures

  Published 2016 by Medallion Press, Inc., 4222 Meridian Pkwy., Suite 110, Aurora, IL 60504

  The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO

  is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  Copyright © 2016 by James Waltzer

  Cover design by Michal Wlos

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress

  ISBN #9781942546214

  Acknowledgments

  As a structure and a symbol, Philadelphia City Hall captures the imagination. I salute the many men who risked their lives to construct this massive building, and the sculptor of the iconic bronze statue of William Penn that tops it: Alexander Milne Calder.

  Literary agent Nat Sobel first saw the potential in this story. I thank him.

  Numerous editors and publishers over the years have given my scribblings a home. I thank them.

  Foremost, I am indebted to the gang at Medallion Press: Emily Steele and Traci Post for their sharp-eyed and thoughtful editing, Jim Tampa and his art designers for their noir sensibility, Brigitte Shepard for her marketing muscle.

  PROLOGUE

  It’s an old bedsheet that he holds out from his chest, the cotton thinned by many wash cycles, and no match for his veiny wrists and hands. He tears off a strip, and the sound rips through the small, dim room.

  Her eyes flare. She whimpers.

  Keep quiet.

  His voice is subdued, businesslike.

  She sits on a wooden chair that has been pulled out from the table. Nylon rope runs across her chest and around the back of the chair, tied tightly so that her arms are pinned to her sides. She recoils and lets loose a strangled scream—more of a sob trying to grow into a scream—when he wraps the strip of bedsheet around her head, forcing it between her lips, then her teeth, then knots it at the base of her skull. He is economical in his movements, and his knot is tidy, expert even. A square knot, the ends frayed where they were torn. Hunched over as he works, he looks at her dispassionately. She sees only forehead sweat crowning soulless eyes.

  I told you to keep quiet. I’m not going to rape you.

  He takes a new length of the nylon rope and ties her right ankle to a chair leg. Again, the assured knot.

  She wriggles for an instant, then gives him her left, eases it toward him as if she were submitting it for a pedicure or a shoe fitting.

  Once more, he winds rope around ankle and chair leg.

  He stands and appraises his handiwork. A gasp catches in her throat. She whimpers again, a plea suppressed by the gag. When he slides the chair forward a few inches, it scrapes the bare floor. She stops muttering. He pulls up a second chair and sits next to her as if he’s going to tell her a bedtime story. Her breathing ceases.

  Something inside her ignites.

  Her legs thrash against their restraints, the left one summoning enough terrified energy to undo the knot and break free, her head shaking furiously and her foot shooting out, the toe of her running shoe nailing him on the shin. He grunts with the surprise impact, then darts below her flailing leg and resecures the rope, this time binding it tightly enough to threaten circulation. Her eyes water, and her consciousness retreats to this clamp of intimate horror.

  He tugs the gag and is satisfied with its tautness. She is motionless, and the room is still and silent. He stands over her and, for a moment, seems to be calculating his next move.

  It comes fast.

  He forms a fist and strikes her with a short, unerring, right-hand punch, his knuckles cracking fragile cheekbones. She is unconscious.

  He shakes his punching hand in one vigorous movement, as if trying to get rid of mud or a landed wasp. He looks at the hand, flexing it several times, each contraction re-forming the fist.

  There is more for that hand to do.

  No, he is not going to rape her.

  ONE

  At nighttime, the city is a sprawling showcase of diamonds. No matter that some lights reflect the architect’s design, while others serve strictly an industrial utility. To birds on the wing and to passengers on planes in descent, they are all glittering gems.

  They civilize the darkness.

  The lights define the tall buildings that rise from the floor of the city, for their features identifiable in daylight are unavailable. The structures’ relative heights and distinctive shapes are suggested by their contained arrangements of lights that, collectively, offer assurances of life and purpose and stability. Every large city’s nocturnal face gives onlookers a feeling of confidence and a sense of order, a belief in tomorrow. Within cocoons of security, the keen-eyed in window seats and the gazers from high floors of skyscrapers mark highways and bridges, towers and spires, the landmarks and boundaries that impart uniqueness and comfort with familiarity.

  But many people who inhabit the city often abandon this charm of recognition as they go about the business of living their lives, daytime and nighttime. Theirs is a constant battle of coping, of avoiding dangers that surface with surprising suddenness.

  Though they erupt with fierceness, such dangers are often unapparent from a distance.

  Some evade detection even when they’re right under your nose.

  Sounds ruled his consciousness. They unnerved him, enchanted him, woke him in the wee hours, sent him hurtling around street corners to escape, came to his ear as little messengers, singed him like a bullet delivering a flesh wound. He heard things that dogs could not. He had an earful of the planet.

  It had been so as far back as he could remember. Kids in the neighborhood said he was strange, freakish. He heard the swish of its tires before a car turned the corner and appeared on his block. Thunder while it was still in the sky’s throat. Preternatural: that’s what his mother called his hearing. Spooky, his father said.

  But they didn’t trust him when it mattered most. When he heard it happen. When he was the only one to hear, who could hear.

  Other than, of course, the little girl herself and her father. They heard it, unless the horror froze their eardrums. Her gasping, her petrified whimpering, came through the walls and permeated his bedroom like steam from a vent. Small sounds muted by inches-thick plaster and wood but loud enough for his ears, those ultrasensitive instruments.

  The little girl’s sounds invaded the sanctuary of his room with its wallpaper of cowboys aboard bucking broncos—actually, the same cowboy and bronco repeated several dozen times, each imprint separated from its replica above, below, and to either side by blank beige. He heard the sounds and, at first, didn’t know precisely what they meant, but he knew instinctively that something was very wrong. He lay there, paralyzed and smothered in blankets. He heard but did nothing, didn’t even wake his parents. Only later, the following afternoon, when the sun had long since chased the night’s fears, did he tell them. But by then it was too late, far too late, and the workaday row-house neighborhood had seen evil’s nocturnal delivery, the little body sheeted and strapped, wheeled out on the gurney, all the more terrifying in the sanitizing daylight.

  And now, more than two decades later, it was a stain that would not yield to the mind’s harshest corrosives, a memory that clung like a spider’s gossamer stickiness, a
trap not to be escaped.

  As surely as the eardrum played to the brain, he was caught in this trap.

  It is a 3:00 a.m. bugle blast, three nights a week. A delivery truck pulling up alongside the twenty-four-hour convenience store adjacent to his high-rise apartment building, the unloading ramp banging the street, instantly waking him despite the rubber plugs wedged into his ears. Heavy boxes tossed from inside the truck thudding onto the metal ramp. Booted feet trampling in the darkness. A half hour of this and then the motor’s rumble and the flurry of warning beeps, a high-pitched piercing staccato that seems injected into his ear.

  Richard Keene will be wide awake, flinging back the bedcovers, standing and looking out the window, as if his gaze could do anything, could reverse the disturbance that has taken place, or preclude any future such disturbances. Twenty-two floors up, he can see nothing of his tormentors at the foot of the sheer drop. But he might raise the microblinds anyway and have a look at the vast, spangled city, glittering at this no-man’s hour, its towers empty but lit like the backdrop of a stage production. He might look beneath him at squatter buildings, where the racket of rooftop compressors is just as likely to interrupt his sleep. He might listen for sounds emanating from apartments above, below, and beside his. Though the building is a fortress with extra layers of foam insulation, he can hear faint footsteps, coughing, sighing, stubborn drains, beeping microwaves.

  Sometimes he remains under the sheets, eyes shut in defiance yet ears straining to defeat the plugs, a triumph of instinct.

  When he’s up and out of bed, prompted by the noise and something far from the surface, something deep in his gut, he switches on the desk lamp and its harsh light staggers him. The room is spare and ordered. Compact, matching oak bureaus stand side by side against one wall; they’ve been hewn from one tree, the finish natural, the dovetailing expert and all wood, not a screw or nail anywhere. It reminds him of the knots he learned to make when he was a Boy Scout, all those slip knots, loop knots, and square knots, interlaced cord or twine drawn into tight, perfect nodes.

  The desk is by the same hand, a Japanese furniture maker discovered in bucolic Bucks County north of Philadelphia by Richard’s style-conscious mother, Evelyn. A queen-sized bed and box springs sit on apartment-standard, dishwater-colored carpet, and the warped shelves of a shiny, black bookcase are filled except for a small rectangle of space at the top. A few volumes of poetry, including Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, huddle on the middle shelf. Elsewhere, history and crime titles predominate: presidential biographies, thick studies of the Civil War and the two World Wars, and several accounts of small-town murder, the victims’ children. Alone at one end of the top shelf, Richard’s favorite work of fiction—The Stranger by Camus—leans against the varnished wood, its paperback pages billowed from use. He reread it twice during his stay at the clinic.

  Richard Keene has just turned thirty, and his world continues to be a fearful place. The milestone passed without notice, except for a card and a phone call from his parents. No acknowledgment from anyone else, but how could there be? Richard long ago lost touch with the few relatives he’d known in his extended family, an aunt here, a cousin there. And he has no close friends, no girlfriend. Sometimes, he’s not even sure whether he has himself. After the breakdown, after he’d been confined to the room with no mirrors, he would lie on his bed and relive the sensation of facing his image in the full-length mirror that hung on his bedroom door at home. He had discovered the dread in that exercise as a young boy, the out-of-body feeling of it, a fizz of fear like tiny insects inside his skin, the unthinkable notion that he did not exist, at least not as he understood it. He would stand there and stare at himself and feel the desperation come over him. He could not quite recognize the image in that mirror. It would take a forced recitation of familiar things and concepts (his name, his birthday, his parents’ names, the fact that the sun comes up in the morning) to stave off total panic and return him to a point where he could function. Nothing scared him more than this sensation, and sometimes he could re-create it—even without the mirror’s spell—if he concentrated hard enough.

  Richard confessed all this to his doctors, whose designated, mirrorless rooms were intended to discourage more than just imaginary fright. They taught him how to parry his fear through self-distraction, diverting it at or before the onset with unrelated thoughts. It’s a technique he has continued to use on the outside. So now, this morning, once the sun has snuck some light into the concrete canyon beyond his window, Richard stands before the bathroom mirror, mouth unhinged, and gives his teeth a thorough flossing. He thinks of his dentist and the pretty technician who cleans his teeth twice a year, her long lashes and sweet breath. No thoughts of the paranormal at present, no worries that existence is an illusion. He rinses and spits into the sink—not a trace of blood, thanks to his daily rigors. He looks up, and active brown eyes in an angular face stare back at him. Sometimes they seem to him like marbles about to pop out and roll down the slope of the sink. He knows not to keep looking into those eyes for more than a few seconds, though he can’t help checking the pupils, which tend to shrink and dilate unequally. Below his sharp chin, a columnar neck attaches to a bony torso. If he lingers, the strange fears may rise, so he busies himself with movement. Shaving is quick and electric, his beard narrow and light. He applies deodorant, runs a comb just once through his unruly black hair. He pulls on an undershirt and a short-sleeved Arrow shirt, chinos, a pair of Rockports. Dress is casual at his workplace.

  Lastly, he tethers the iPod to his ears. Never leaves home without it. Music is his faithful traveling companion, and he wants no intrusion from an iPhone’s jarring ring.

  In the pallid hallway, a tame scent rises from the vacuum-stroked carpet. The elevator requires patience, a wait of three to four minutes or sometimes more. He won’t make a musical selection from his downloaded iTunes catalog until he leaves the building. Several floors up, muted chimes distinct to Richard’s ear signal stops, the subsequent drone a resumption of the elevator’s down rush. Now a loud chime fires an embedded light, and the door opens, revealing bodies from any one of the twenty higher floors. Richard tries to find a corner or at least some wall space, some breathing room. They all stare straight ahead and don’t notice his jaw ripple as he gnashes his teeth. The young woman wearing a navy suit jacket and a broad belt cinching her matching skirt looks up at the panel of numbers to monitor the elevator’s descent. At sixteen, a heavyset man gets on, leading with his stomach. As the others press more closely about him, Richard feels his chest tighten, but with the elevator descending once more and the lobby rushing up to meet them, he knows that release is imminent. When the elevator reaches ground level, Richard bolts off, gulps air.

  The polished tile of the lobby floor reflects light beams from bulbs recessed in the ceiling, as do the mirrored wall panels that flank the elevator doors. Richard walks past the front desk, through the automatic sliding glass doors, and into the sunshine of a mid-September Tuesday morning.

  Richard’s new home, the 42s (fashionably named for the number of stories it rises above Locust Street), races upward toward a docile sky. Summer has only a week to run, but it seems in no hurry to depart. The city is warm and sticky, and Locust Street is crammed with faces expectant, blank, or disconcerted. Cell phones, cupped by hands, bloom out of ears. Richard reaches into his pocket for his iPod and dials up some music, his fingers nimble on the small touch screen; he is a fan of classical in particular, knows all the great names and their greatest works. He turns up Fifteenth Street and dodges trash cans, no-parking signs, and pedestrians too oblivious or arrogant to give way. Through his earbuds he hears the clarion tones of a Chopin polonaise as the city’s muffled cacophony swirls about him.

  Clamped down in an iPod world, Richard can still hear the outside fury, in nuance and volume, better than most of those unencumbered. His other senses, too, are quite sharp, if not as exceptional as his hearing. The morning’s creased light outlines ever
y object he sees. In the alleyway outside a hash house on the corner at Sansom Street, a stuffed Dumpster emits the scent of sour milk. At Market Street, the number of traffic lanes doubles, and Richard moves smartly across when the silvery Walk icon beckons. He’s a reflex quicker than everyone else as he strides down the steps to the subway concourse to the busy stop below City Hall.

  Once on the underground platform, he spies the light in the distance burning a hole through the black tunnel and braces himself for the onrushing train and its deafening roar. He steps back as it blurs past, closing his eyes, inhaling the dankness. Chopin’s crystal notes rain on him, bursting through the train’s thunder.

  Inside, the seats are all occupied, and Richard stands, grasping a shiny metal pole. At Race/Vine, Fairmount, and Girard, more people get on than off, and the tide engulfs Richard, pressing him against his gleaming pole, his life raft. As the train lurches into motion, he is sweating, the world closing in on him, but he takes two deep breaths and, slowly, convinces himself not to panic. Gradually, he has been learning to cope with this phobia. Sweat evaporates. He settles into himself, feels warmth spreading across his chest. Heroic chords fill his head.

  Richard gets off at Olney Avenue and surfaces through soiled passageways leading to a wide, concrete staircase. Preston Medical Tower is directly across a perilous intersection, where multicar crackups are commonplace, participants seemingly encouraged by the convenience of Logan General Hospital on the next block of Broad Street. In the Preston lobby, Richard enters a waiting elevator and retreats to the rear when two uniformed nurses arrive, giving him their backs. He removes his earbuds and stashes them with the iPod in his pants pocket.