Free When the Day of Evil Comes by Melanie Wells

sneak in unnoticed … unless you saw the gash.
    The other issue was that I’d somehow ended up involved in both boys’ dreams. Zocci had told me about his dreams during therapy, and Gavin claimed I’d actually appeared in his. They both seemed credible to me. I believed them. It was too much of a stretch to be a coincidence.
    Next question—the jewelry. I intended to make progress on that one by the end of the day. I was hoping Lurch would shed some light on the likelihood of my mother’s ring being stolen the day of the funeral, as Silverstein had suggested. Perhaps whoever took it had simply returned it out of guilt.
    That didn’t explain the rest of the gifts that day at Barton Springs, however. All wrapped identically to the ring. Was the whole thing an elaborate ruse to distract from the ring’s return? That didn’t make any sense to me. The gifts had been carefully chosen and did, in fact, match the desires of their recipients. John Mulvaney had indeed expressed a desire for a new Day-timer, for instance. He’d reminded me of that the night he came to my house.
    John Mulvaney. Another mess of unresolved questions. Who had written on his calendar, copying my handwriting precisely, suggesting we meet for supper? And how had heended up with such a twisted version of that rather odd event?
    The latter question was the only one so far I could answer. The man was an oddball. A misfit. Completely unable to process normal social cues. It would be natural for him to miss the boat entirely on what had transpired that night.
    Moving on to the flies. What was that about? Odd as that battle had been, I was willing to chalk it up to bizarre coincidence. Maybe I had flies in my house. Maybe there was a little fly maternity ward somewhere that I didn’t know about, turning out big fat flies one by one.
    The boiled eggs? I’d never studied the presence of smells in dreams, but it had to be a fairly common phenomenon. That one would be easy to research.
    Erik Zocci. This was the kicker. Why would anyone make such a dreadful accusation against me, using the name of a former patient? A former dead patient. A former dead patient who had committed suicide.
    And what was the suicide about? Had this boy been so haunted by the Peter Terry-like figure that he’d thrown himself off a twelfth-floor balcony? Surely there was more to it than that.
    I resolved to do some digging to find out what had been going on in Erik Zocci’s life.
    As I pondered this last item, I realized it was the one that was pressing the hardest on me.
    As horrifying as suicide is, it is usually explainable, at least in hindsight. You could almost always retrace the steps of the person and find the path that led him to that terrible decision. It’s harder to spot in present time, of course. But often perfectly clear after the fact.
    That’s one reason suicide is such a cruel choice. It leaves the survivors with nothing but the certainty and guilt of hindsight.
    I’d never had a patient commit suicide on my watch. Theguilt I felt—though this young man had been in my care only briefly, a full year before he took his own life—was profound. Somehow, ludicrous as it looks in the light of day, I felt I should have prevented it. That I’d missed something toxic in this boy that had eaten him from the inside.
    I felt like the physician who misses the tumor on the X-ray, only to find out a year later that the patient had succumbed to a treatable but virulent strain of cancer.
    What had I missed? Why had this boy, haunted by Peter Terry, sought me out? Why had he abruptly ended therapy? Was he frustrated with me at the time because he felt I wasn’t helping him? Had I failed to listen to him? Had I dismissed something important? Had I been careless? Frivolous with his pain?
    As I pulled off 1-35 onto the Hillsboro exit, I reached for my map, relieved to have something else to do with my mind. Erik Zocci, I knew, would haunt me as Peter Terry had haunted him. And