Chance

Free Chance by Kem Nunn Page B

Book: Chance by Kem Nunn Read Free Book Online
Authors: Kem Nunn
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Thrillers
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    He dropped his daughter off at his former house before which a realtor’s placard flapped forlornly in the afternoon wind from a corner of the property, and watched her inside. From there he drove directly back to his office. The building was closed for the day. He went along its familiar steps and corridors, letting himself into his own suite then rummaging in his files till he’d found Jaclyn Blackstone’s. Some of what it contained were the questionnaires she had filled out at the time of her initial visit that would be certain to contain both her current address and phone number. He left in possession of the document, exchanging pleasantries with the night watchman in the lobby and feeling for all the world as if he were getting away with something.

     
    He sat that night alone in his apartment. It was becoming routine. He’d thought to finish with his evaluation of Doc Billy, as the relative in Oregon was pressing for action and the case was expected to go to trial by summer’s end, but he could not quite summon the required resources. He sat instead with his by now customary bottle of wine, watching as the fog rolled up the sidewalks outside his window, and considered instead the problem of Jaclyn Blackstone.
    If, in the fullness of her paranoia, she was to be believed, the thingwas a conundrum in which one felt blocked at every turn. He could not help noting in his initial report her use of a neuroleptic medication—somehow she had been started on Trilafon, and had remarked at the time, “She may be experiencing akathisia as a side effect of her dopamine-blocking medication, perphenazine.” He considered this anew. It had been his concern that a worsening akathisia be misperceived as a worsening anxiety, to be treated with still higher doses of dopamine blockers and so further aggravating the situation, at least with regard to her anxiety and paranoia, exacerbating the very fears she would have to overcome if she were to free herself from her predator. But then he had visited her in the hospital. The concussion was no fantasy. Nor were the broken bones or the entrapped muscle. She might well have sustained permanent damage. He saw such people every day of his life, broken creatures aboard a carousel of cognitive and pharmacology therapies, beset by memory loss and hallucination. They were, after all, his stock-in-trade. He looked once more over the file from his office, rereading yet again what he had written at their initial meeting. “I believe,” he had said, “it is important for this warded-off aspect of her personality to be addressed and, ideally, integrated into her basic persona.” And so she had tried to do, following his advice, and gotten for her troubles a berth in the trauma center at Mercy General, medical bills that would stalk her for years to come.
    There was one other bit that caught his eye: “One cannot rule out masochistic features in her ongoing relationship with her husband.” That might have been true. But she had moved to end the relationship after only weeks of therapy. The husband was the sick one. Chance had confronted the monster himself and been found wanting. He thought once more of how she had appeared to him at the time of their first meeting, her somewhat affectless description of the split in her personality. Rarely, he concluded, had life pitched him such a curve. Suffice it to say that what most of the people he saw in the course of his practice had in common was that they had already reached a place of no return. What set Jaclyn apart, what she shared with Mariella Franko, as far as that went, and very few others, was her ability to provoke in him the belief that there was still time, that some form of interventionwas not yet beyond the pale. And while that was generally where such feelings ended, save but once, this Jaclyn Blackstone was carrying him into deeper waters. Perhaps it was no more than her coming to his office, her pulse on his palm, because

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