Free Dry Ice by Stephen White Page A

it."
        "Well," he said. "Bravo, Alan. I didn't think you had it in you, but I commend you for coming around to the sane way of thinking."
        "Your way is the sane way?"
        "You haven't noticed?" He smiled. "You ready to revisit the wisdom of the Reagan Revolution?"
        I laughed.
        "How long have you felt this way?" he asked.
        "A while. While he was locked up, I convinced myself that it didn't make any difference whether he was in the state pen or the state hospital. Now it does. He wouldn't have escaped the state pen."
        "So why did you cut him all that slack?"
        "What you said before about me believing that because of other things he'd been through in his life what he did was out of his control, and that he shouldn't be held responsible—that's not it. Some traumas leave marks, they stain people in, in . . . ways that leave them predisposed to certain behaviors. Most people overcome those predispositions . . . but some don't."
        "You're saying McClelland didn't?"
        "I'm saying McClelland didn't. I had—or I wanted to have—a belief that the predisposition he was fighting argued for a different judicial path, a different empathy . . . Now, I'm not so sure. I'm thinking that if other people with the same damage could overcome the predisposition, so should he."
        "Well, he's out now. One thing I do know? If he's heading this way, or worse, if he's already here, I don't think he's coming to thank you for all your efforts on his behalf."

ELEVEN

    I DIDN'T spot the purse that had been discarded in the yard the next morning, but my nine-thirty patient did.

    The building that Diane and I owned in downtown Boulder— the one with the newly serene waiting room—was an old house remarkable not for its understated Victorian architecture, but rather for its terrific location two blocks from the Pearl Street Mall. Land within walking distance of the heart of downtown Boulder at Pearl and Broadway was apparently plentiful back in the 1890s when the house was constructed because our lot was big and our backyard, especially, was spacious.
        Raoul, Diane's entrepreneur husband, had been encouraging us to sell the land to a developer who was eager to combine our place with a couple of adjacent lots. The developer wanted to construct some building that would have the maximum footprint and fill out the maximum bulk-plane that the city planning board would permit. I imagined something designed more by an engineer than an architect.
        After the effort she'd invested in the recent waiting-room makeover, Diane wasn't receptive to Raoul's suggestion to scrape our offices, so I wasn't worrying about the developer's hot breath on my neck. I figured in downtown Boulder there would always be a developer, or six, who coveted our land, and I was in no hurry to sell.
        I really didn't want any drastic changes in my life. The thought of selling, packing, and moving gave me a headache. Or made the headache I had worse.

    The handbag in the yard was resting on a clump of patchy bluegrass near the six-foot-deep planting bed that hugged the rickety thirty-inch-high wood slat–and-wire barricade that had at one time probably been consistently vertical enough to have been called the back fence. Or at least the backside of the rabbit pen.
        The purse wasn't concealed in any way and it wasn't difficult to spot. If I had taken the time to stand at the back window of my office that morning to enjoy the southern view toward Chautauqua, or if had I taken even a single step out the french door that led to the yard from my office, I would have seen the purse on the grass. But I hadn't. I'd walked into work without even a glance at our superfluous yard.
        My nine-thirty patient eyed the bag as she glanced out the window on the way to her chair.
        "There's a purse out back," she'd said, pausing and pointing. "In your yard. By the fence. See it? I think