“I’m sorry,” I said to Sarah. An involuntary gulp forced me to pause. “Sorry to put you—” She hushed me, kissed me.

Her lips planted on my own felt life-giving, something like emotional CPR, and I felt too the psychic power granted me every so often—not by madness, but by deep and abiding intimacy—to read my wife’s thoughts. I’d worried that she would see a stranger in me this day—a vile murderer, in fact—but she saw only the same old me, the man she loved, and who loved her.

As our kissing continued, people in the visitor’s room teased us with a chorus of “Wooo!” until we stopped.

We took adjacent seats on the bench at our round orange table. We held hands and gazed at each other. Sarah was dressing her age in a button down lavender blouse with a string of white pearls, her honey-blonde hair pulled back in a bun. Somehow, the makeup merely highlighted the ebbing of her youth. I could see new lines embedded in her pretty baby face, wrinkles that looked as if they’d been there for years, not days. I thought, I could be Rip Van Psycho. She could be about to tell me Ellie just graduated from Yale. Instead, she said, “We’re going to get through this, Argus.”

“Of course we are.” Suicide was a mad notion to me by now. Ever since my blood test results. Now I had the Prozac a mission in life provides—or the rankling desire for revenge.

We moved to another table to get closer to a television, perched high in a corner of the visitor’s room. It was showing CNN’s live coverage of the funeral of John Helms.

John had been proud of his lengthy American roots, which traced back almost four centuries, so I wasn’t surprised that he’d elected to be buried near his family’s ancestral home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Among the famous mourners in attendance was the vice president of the United States, James Sinclair, standing in for the president, who, the broadcaster whispered, was overseas at an international summit meeting. I caught glimpses of Sinclair’s Secret Service team, but didn’t recognize any of them.

I’d left the Service ten years earlier, and not many agents last a full decade on protection detail. It’s the stress of being hyper-alert all day, listening to the constant flow of worry in your earpiece, eyes forever moving, scanning the high vantage points, sweeping endless faces in crowds, fretting about hands in pockets or the sight of a bulky overcoat on a mild autumn day. It’s the unspoken fear of dying.

I estimated with my crowd-practiced eye that about two hundred guests were at the funeral. Along with the vice president and other high-ranking government officials stood business titans from around the globe and scores of John’s relatives, friends, and employees.

The media came from all over too, quarantined in the distance behind a rope barrier, their cameras whirring, steady as the cicadas. At the sight of the casket, I thanked God that I couldn’t remember my horrible deed, or the moments surrounding it, except in scrambled shards of bloody phantasmagoria.

Sarah squeezed my hand while I prayed for John’s forgiveness and for peace within his soul. As the casket lowered into the ground, I couldn’t help but think, We’re all wealthier than John Helms now. We all have breath.

I turned to Sarah. I asked about Ellie, then the baby in her belly, then Duke, my mother, her parents in California. Sarah’s reports weren’t comforting, yet no one was any worse than could be expected, we agreed, and so then I finally told her what I’d just been bursting to tell her.

“This is not my fault.”

“Course not,” Sarah said. “It’s my fault as much as yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on now, Argus, we’ve been playing a game. All these years. A dangerous game. No more games, huh?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re a sick man, Argus. You always have been since I’ve known you. You never would believe it, though, and I didn’t want to either. I’m ashamed of how little I knew about your disease until now. I’ve been like . . . like co-dependent.”

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

“Doctor Shields, of course. And now this Doctor Woods.” Her eyes began misting. She dug in her purse for a Kleenex.

“Did Doctor Woods tell you about my blood test?”

“Oh, I had so many excuses, Argus, right from the start. You were older, you were smarter, more educated—”

“Would you listen?”

“And it was your disease, after all, and you should know what you could do, I told myself. And I could see what you’d already accomplished in your life. I just buried my head in the sand. Because I was so in love with you, man! And I wanted a baby so bad and . . .” Sarah cried into her Kleenex.

“My blood test,” I said. “Do you know about my blood test?”

Sarah nodded, blew her nose. “You stopped taking your pills weeks ago, Doctor Woods says.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“She says it’s a common thing with paranoid schizophrenics.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You had a relapse. The crazy side of you took over, and crazy Argus didn’t think he had a problem anymore, so there was no need to take the pills. Something like that.”

“But I was taking my pills! I was!”

Surprise mixed with Sarah’s grief. “Are you sure?”

She rarely saw me take my Risperdal pill in the mornings, I realized. Weekdays, she and Ellie would awaken an hour after I did, just in time to see me off in their nightgowns. And on weekends, my daughter and I would digest breakfast before Sarah ever stirred beneath her blankets.

“Absolutely sure,” I said.

“Every day?”

“Yes,” I said. “Every day.”

“You’re really absolutely sure?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Shit fucking god damn son of a bitch sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “That sure.”

“This is not the disease talking?”

“No,” I said. “And there’s a way to prove it.”

After a brief look of confusion, Sarah gave me a nod. At the same time, she whipped out a cell phone from her purse, the pink one with a dangling pair of dice-size, clear plastic squares—phone earrings, she calls them—that blink light whenever a call comes in and she has the ringer off, because she’s in a quiet restaurant somewhere. Certainly not the library.

“I’ll call Darla,” she said, punching in a number.

“Who’s Darla?”

“Duh!” she said. “The new housekeeper! We need someone to check your pill bottle in the medicine cupboard, right?”

I could hear the telephone at our home in Georgetown start to ring. “No, hang up.”

“Why?” she said, but hung up.

“You have to do this yourself. Get in your car and go check the pill bottle yourself. Now. Please.”

“Why?”

“This is too important to trust to anyone else.”

“Oh, I get it,” Sarah said, nodding to herself. “What you really mean is you can’t trust in anyone else. You’re still a little paranoid. Doctor Woods warned me about this.”

Then she laughed. The woman has a husky, hearty laugh that, when aimed my way, makes me feel like I’ve just been caught trying on her panties.

Seeing my embarrassment, she said, “I’m not laughing at you, honey, honest. I’m laughing at myself. You really had me going there for a while.”

“But Sarah,” I said, “don’t you see what this means?”

“Only too clearly.”

“We know it’s not the case that my pills stopped working, like Doctor Shields says might happen one day. Because there wasn’t a trace of Risperdal in my system when they brought me in here. Either I stopped taking my pills voluntarily—which flatly contradicts my own memory, and my own history—Flatly!—or I’ve been taking dummy pills! Placebos! Whatever you call them!”

“Dummy pills?” Sarah said. “That looked just like your real pills, I suppose?”

“Yes!” I said. “I think I’ve been set up!”

“But Argus, who on Earth—”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, but I do know we have a state-of-the-art security system protecting our home, which means the new housekeeper is our prime suspect. She’d have the easiest opportunity of anyone to switch my real pills for the dummies.”

“What about Ellie?” Sarah said, smirking. “Or Duke? You know, you really can’t trust those Irish setters.”

“This is no laughing matter!”

“Relax, Argus,” Sarah said. “You’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Listen to me, Sarah! Please! You’ve got to listen to me!”

“I’m listening.”

“But you’re convinced I’m still paranoid!”

She nodded, smiling sweetly.

“Stupid little shit stain.” It was Darth whispering in my ear suddenly. “Tell her just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“What?” Sarah said.

“N-n-nothing, never mind.” At least Darth’s voice was growing weak and infrequent.

“How’s he doing?” The question for my wife came from Keisha Fallon as she sat down at our table. “I won’t bother to ask the man himself.” Her sneering glance stabbed at my heart.

“Oh, Keisha!” I burst up out of my seat to hug her, but she put a traffic cop-type hand in my face, freezing me in a hunched, mid tackle position.

“No more touchy-feely from you, mister.”

“I’m sorry. So sorry. I—”

“Oh, Keisha!” Sarah said, rising, wrapping her arms around the other woman without meeting resistance. “They told me what he did. I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”

For a moment, the two women sneered at me together.

I dropped back down in my seat.

“He’s better now,” Sarah said, patting Keisha’s shoulder.

“He better be,” Keisha said, throwing me her coldest stare.

Sarah complimented Keisha on her outfit—embroidered blue jeans with a hot pink top that Sarah was correct in saying did go well with Keisha’s beautiful bronze skin.

“Why aren’t you at the funeral?” I asked my employee.

“Rebecca Helms fired us yesterday.” Oops. Ex-employee.

“Oh, Keisha!” Sarah said. More hugging and patting and squeezing ensued, myself once more excluded. “You poor thing!”

“Poor is right!” Keisha said. “No job now, but I’ve still got all my bills. House payment, car payment, food and gas, water and electricity. And no man to help out.”

She turned teary-eyed. Sarah too, in sympathy. My wife turned to me. “Argus you have to do something.”

“Oh!” Keisha said, sniffles mixing now with more sneers in my direction. “Wish I’d never left the Service. ‘Big future,’ the man said. ‘Big money.’ Oh!”

“Argus,” Sarah said, “you have to find a place for Keisha. Of all people.”

“If we have any accounts left,” I told her and turned to Keisha. “So we lost the Helms account. But what about Helms Technology?”

With a haughty head tilt and downcast eyes, Keisha said, “We still have it. For now.”

“Let me make some calls, and I’ll see if I can find you a place out there. For now.”

“Thank you.” Big sniffle. “And by the way, we found their missing man for them, that Jeremy Crane.”

Keisha’s anger at me dissipated as she related her story. Two nights before, the North Carolina state police had discovered Jeremy Crane’s black Ferrari Maranello abandoned in a restaurant parking lot in Kitty Hawk. They’d located him shortly after dawn the next morning, about five miles away, wandering an otherwise deserted beach on a slender peninsula no wider than a freeway.

“He was dehydrated,” Keisha continued, “disoriented, and wearing nothing but his pale ass birthday suit. Not only that, but—get this—he’d shaven his head bald, he’d shaven off all his body hair, and he’d applied a shiny coat of silver metallic paint to his skin. Every pore, head to toe. Doctor says he might’ve asphyxiated himself if the beach sand hadn’t ground away the paint on the soles of his feet.”

Keisha produced a small photograph and held it up for my inspection. It was a digital copy of Jeremy’s booking photo. In it, he was still painted. His bald, shimmery silver cranium was bulldog-like. His rapt eyes glistened. He saw terror.

I snorted at the image. “What’s he charged with?”

“Just indecent exposure.”

“What the hell was he doing like that?”

“Don’t know yet,” Keisha said. “He didn’t talk to the cops, they terrified him. He shit in the backseat of their cruiser.”

“Has he been evaluated?”

“There’s a preliminary diagnosis, but it’s confidential. Privacy issue, or something.”

I didn’t really need to hear the diagnosis after hearing of Jeremy Crane’s strange adventures. I was now certain that I hadn’t imagined that bottle of anti-psychotic medication in the man’s bathroom cupboard. But I was still too unwell, and too obsessed by now with my own enormous personal and professional problems, to care much about yet another paranoid schizophrenic slipping out of orbit around John Helms. It would be some time before I grasped the significance.

Next Chapter: Chapter Fifteen