Conundrum Read online

  Conundrum

  A novel by C. S. Lakin

  Copyright 2011 C. S. Lakin

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Conundrum

  Books by C. S. Lakin | Contemporary Suspense/Mystery

  Fantasy | The Gates of Heaven Series:

  Sci-Fi

  Chapter 1 | June 1986

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  Connect with C. S. Lakin | Twitter: @cslakin | Facebook: C. S. Lakin Facebook Page

  A Preview of Intended for Harm | Prologue

  Part One: 1971–1974 | Exodus

  1971 | Smiling Faces

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, or actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Books by C. S. Lakin

  Contemporary Suspense/Mystery

  Someone to Blame

  Innocent Little Crimes

  A Thin Film of Lies

  Intended for Harm

  Fantasy

  The Gates of Heaven Series:

  The Wolf of Tebron

  The Map across Time

  The Land of Darkness

  The Unraveling of Wentwater

  The Crystal Scepter (2013)

  The Tower of Sand (2013)

  The Seventh Gate of Heaven (2014)

  Sci-Fi

  Time Sniffers

  To my mother

  If only . . .

  Chapter 1

  June 1986

  The conundrum went like this:

  A man walks into a nondescript restaurant tucked away in an alley. It’s taken him years to find such a place, and his agitation is palpable. He orders albatross—broiled. With trembling hands, he picks up his fork and knife and slices off a piece of the seared white flesh. Juices drip onto his plate as he brings the morsel to his mouth. The aroma nauseates him as he squeezes his eyes shut and bites down.

  The man’s weathered face relaxes. He sighs, sets the knife and fork down on the starched linen tablecloth, and places a hand over his heart, as if to calm its beating.

  He smiles at the waiter, who bows politely and attends to the other diners. Relief washes in absolution. He raises his eyes to heaven and whispers, but no one hears him.

  “Thank God, I’m free.”

  Of all the wacky conundrums Raff piled on us over the years, that was the hardest—if I discounted the convoluted tale of the surgeon who performed a highly skilled operation, yet was supposed to be missing an arm. It took Neal and me three days of battering Raff with desperate yes-or-no questions to arrive at the answer. I remembered him gloating, sporting that sixties’ Beatles haircut so popular back then, his black straggly bangs falling into his brooding pubescent eyes. He never relinquished hints—even when we begged out of frustration. Even when we beat him with pillows and punched his arms as hard as we could. Raff loved to wield his secret knowledge over us measly peons of his intellectual kingdom, a king with the power to wave his scepter and send dissenters to the gallows of humiliation—something he often did.

  And the answer was so simple, as most of those conundrums were.

  A group of starving shipwrecked soldiers during World War II resorted to cannibalism before an unexpected rescue. But to alleviate guilt, one group ate human flesh, and the other, albatross—the only meat they could find on their deserted island. No one knew which they were served; thus, they could assuage their consciences, live in blissful ignorance. But the man in our conundrum had spent his life in anguish, needing to know. Until that question was answered, he would have no peace. He somehow had to find a way to taste albatross before he died. The truth—so late in coming—set him free.

  I wondered—as I tromped up the fourth flight of stairs—what would have happened if he had taken that bite and didn’t recognize the albatross, recoiling in the realization he had eaten various body parts of his friends? Would he still have felt free? The gist of the conundrum implied no, but that fabricated story begged the question: does freedom lie in the absolving of guilt . . . or in the liberating wings of truth?

  Was discovering truth what really set him free?

  That’s what I needed to know, random musings as I marched up the stairwell of Hillcrest Hospital and Mental Health Clinic on the drab, foggy morning of June sixteenth.

  The sixth floor. It could have been worse.

  One time I’d had a podiatrist appointment in the city and forgot to ask. Already out of breath from finding a parking spot seven long blocks away, my heart berated me when I checked in at the lobby reception desk and learned my doctor’s office was situated on the seventeenth floor. I nearly turned and headed back out the beckoning glass revolving doors—my right foot coaxing me with unrelenting pain. No way was I going to make it up seventeen flights of stairs in my Hopalong Cassidy gait.

  I allowed myself only a token glance at the elevator doors. How smoothly they opened, their shushing sound so inviting. But I knew their deceptive appearance wouldn’t fool my gut. I’d be clawing the slick metal walls of the elevator by the third floor—it didn’t matter how big and roomy the space. I asked the receptionist to let my doctor know I’d be late, then found the stairs and hoofed it to her lofty office that boasted a sweeping view of the Golden Gate Bridge half buried in a shroud of fog. I had arrived sweaty and disheveled, with my foot on fire. I never made that mistake again.

  I stopped at the landing of the hospital’s fifth floor and caught my breath. Nausea racked my body, and a wave of dizziness made me grab the railing. I consciously slowed my breathing and clamped down on all the fears battering the door to my heart, insistent on breaking in and trampling me down. Why, in the midst of my own maelstrom, did Raff have to do this? I had neither the time nor the energy to face him and his demons, when my own were a clamoring mob at the edges of my sanity.

  I couldn’t get that T. S. Eliot poem out of my head. Prufrock. Raff used to recite it, among hundreds of others. When he wasn’t rattling off pi to the hundredth digit—just because he could. Or Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,”—in French, no less. I still can recall the first few lines from, what, sixth grade? “Hibou et Minou allèrent à la mer, dans une barque peinte en jaune-canari . . .” That was during his French phase in junior high school, when he thought the girls would find him hopelessly attractive, fashioned after some nineteenth-century Don Juan, with a swath of hair falling into his mooning eyes, spouting poetry from the Rom
antic era.

  Neal and I never thought to ask why. Why in the world memorize everything under the sun?

  So, as I pounded one step after another, the phrases tumbled into my brain effortlessly. “And indeed there will be time to wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and ‘Do I dare?’ Time to turn back and descend the stair . . . with a bald spot in the middle of my hair . . .”

  The poem lent itself to a nice cadence as I arrived, finally, to the sixth floor stairwell door, a bit out of breath from my recitation.

  “Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

  Now was the moment of decision. Like I had a choice? No one else in our family dared talk Raff out of his slouch toward destruction. I snorted as I pushed the heavy metal door open to a shiny bright corridor with glossy linoleum floors—so spotlessly clean I saw my scowling face looking up at me in all clarity. What made me think I could help him, when a half dozen doctors and psychiatrists couldn’t?

  “Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent. To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ Let us go and make our visit.”

  That was all the prompting I needed.

  Raff had checked himself into this facility two days ago amid protests from both his wife and therapist. “They tell me it’s all in my head,” he said from a pay phone near his office, before he drove toward North Beach that morning. “You think? Styron calls it a brainstorm. Of course it’s in my friggin’ head! Like suicidal depression rages in your big toe?” All I could think of while he ranted in his manic passion was: Could he make it to the hospital without smashing his beautiful lipstick orange Ferrari 412? Kendra would throw a hissy fit over that.

  He didn’t want visitors, but tough, he would see me. I’d play the only role I was good at in this family—caretaker and nurturer. What a joke, I thought, with my life unraveling like a sweater thread caught in a blender.

  My mother told me in her typical cryptic manner not to indulge Raff in his misery. That he was only having a temporary breakdown; give him a few days and he’d be back home with his wife and kids, making loads of money at the bank so he could keep up the payments on his palatial estate in Tiburon. Keep it all hush-hush, no one needed to know. Give him forty-eight hours, a drug cocktail, and this too shall pass.

  I could just see my mother restraining her seething with a tight smile. “Get a grip, Raff,” she probably said. For the children’s sake. More like for her sake. Nothing like a little drama to put a crimp in her schedule. I mean, those jaunts from Marin into the city to the hospital were such inconveniences.

  But forgive my embellishing. I thought nothing of the kind that day. My whole mind wrapped around only Raff and his pain. Ungrounded, unprovoked, and entirely unacceptable pain.

  I heard how he fell apart at work the week before. Kendra had to come get him, between dropping the twins off at ballet and picking up Kevin from baseball practice. Raff had locked himself in his office and was trying to crawl out the transom window of his ninth-story office, yearning for the ledge and oblivion below. Good thing he was a hefty six foot two and the window was a bit too narrow for his bulk. Good thing Raff had a problem with broken glass—the way I had a problem with balloons. I couldn’t even stand in the same room at birthday parties with a clown twisting those skinny balloons into wiener dogs and rubber crowns without going into simulated cardiac arrest. Besides, I imagined those glass panes in Raff’s fancy banking center were shatterproof, and possibly even bulletproof. He hadn’t gotten very far by the time security had hacksawed through the dead bolt and pried him away from the window, where he collapsed in a weepy mess into a guard’s arms.

  So my mother had told me—although Kendra would have denied it. In the thirteen years they’d been married, I’d never seen my brother’s wife lift more than an eyebrow in ire. Not an elevated pitch in tone, not a single curse word under her breath. She could win the award for stalwart and unruffled under adversity. What adversity? You couldn’t tell me living with my brother was a walk in the park. Or did Raff only dump his histrionics on his blood relatives? Well, he knew how to keep up appearances too.

  I found Raff sitting on the edge of his neatly made bed in what could have passed for a rundown Motel 6 room, albeit without windows. The nurse at the entrance station had pointed me down an echoing hallway, where I marched to the end, trying not to glance at the other patients populating the ward. But they sure noticed me. Eyes locked so tightly, my breath squeezed from my ribcage. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas . . .”

  Raff’s face was pasty and lined. Bits of skin flaked across his forehead and his hands trembled in his lap, as if he had palsy. He looked fifty, not thirty-three. I awkwardly waited for him to stand and embrace me, but he only sat there and lifted his face, his slippered feet dangling slightly off the side of the high bed, making him look even more lost and little. He forced a smile, but I could see in that simple gesture how much it cost him.

  “Hey, welcome to the Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like . . .”

  “But you can never leave.” I grinned like a gawky high school girl trying to make conversation with the cute boy at the lockers. “Well,” I said, taking in the pukey green walls and drab furniture. “Not five-star accommodations, but . . .” I shrugged. My brother, swimming in wealth, who traveled first class and ordered only the most expensive wines—the cost of one bottle more than Jeremy brought home in a week. I wondered if Kendra had visited yet. If she would.

  “For twelve hundred a day, they could at least give us better food. If you aren’t sure you want to die before you check in, the green Jell-O and powdered mashed potatoes remove all doubt.” A chuckle escaped his chapped lips, but it was empty of joy. I could tell he shaved, but with the taboo on razors in this place, I guessed he used an electric shaver. I caught him looking longingly at my purse.

  “Sorry,” I said. “They went through it at the nurse’s station. Took my gun, switchblade, and my bottle of prescription pills.” Raff’s eyes radiated hunger and disappointment.

  He stood and walked over to the doorway and looked toward a lounge area. “I tried to scrounge some plastic bags out of the trash. They’re thorough here. Years of experience. Hard to suffocate on a Baggie or a candy bar wrapper. Ever try it?”

  A few patients sat in front of a TV mounted on the wall, looking fairly drugged. But maybe that’s how everyone looked when they watched the soaps for endless hours a day.

  “All the windows have bars. No bathtubs. No stoppers in the sinks. You don’t even get plastic knives with dinner. They cut up your food.”

  I pictured green Jell-O in little cubes. Tough, overcooked, and unidentifiable meat in small bite-size squares. Twelve hundred a day.

  Raff continued. “This is like going through your second childhood—in case you missed your first. Except this one’s more warped, like something out of Kakfa.” He shifted into a dramatic voice. “ ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin.’ You know, most translators used the word insect, but the German word implies an unclean animal. Fitting for this place, wouldn’t you say? One day you’re a normal human being, the next . . . vermin.” His voice sounded hoarse, his throat dry.

  “Will they let me bring in Chinese?” I shook the image of Raff as a giant cockroach out of my head.

  “And take a chance you’d laced it with arsenic, to speed me on my merry way? Deprive them of their joy in handing me my plastic tray full of slop three times a day? Not gonna happen.” Raff started shuffling down the hallway and I followed. “Let me give you the five-cent tour.” His voice carried and bounced off the scrubbed and shiny walls. No one noticed.

  As Raff ambled, he pointed out the drug station where they handed him a paper cup of water and his meds three times a day. He named the patients we passed, who loitered around
or sat with pained expressions on their faces. Pain filled every space of this place, thick and contagious.

  “That’s Gladys,” he said, nodding at an older woman in a shabby housedress. “She’s been here for years. Slicing wrists her forte. Whereas Josh over there”—I looked over at a young guy, nearly emaciated, flipping a deck of cards in his hand—“loves pills. Any shape, any color. The more the merrier. Pops M&Ms just to keep in practice.”

  My mind wandered as Raff droned on, evidently growing pleased with his crass humor. And perhaps glad to have a riveted audience giving him undivided attention. Here, he would be listened to. Not like in the real world, where his antics for help fell unnoticed. Or, rather, were squelched in embarrassment. When you made tons of money, had a beautiful wife and three adorable kids—when you were the envy of your community and coworkers—you had no right to behave badly. Stop whining, chin up, take Prozac, and pretend your pain isn’t ravaging your soul. Millions of Americans suffered from depression—and they took pills and were fine, just fine. Except for the ones that did manage to off themselves. But, that’s not polite conversation in upscale circles. Designer drugs, yes. Suicidal mania, no.

  My heart literally wrenched in pain. Like someone had grabbed it and squeezed hard, forcing tears out my eyes. “Hey,” I said, when we had returned to his room. I sat in the only seat—a stained, heavily upholstered armchair that looked like the ones adorning those old downtown hotel lobbies. Something from a bygone era. “Remember those conundrums you used to tell?”

  His eyes brightened. “Yeah, all of them. That was a while back. Let’s see. You remember the guy who takes the elevator down from his apartment to the first floor? By the time the doors open, he knows his wife is dead.”

  Oh, that one. Something about a wife hooked up to an iron lung and the power going out. I threw one out that came to mind. “What about the one where the guy gets ready for bed, turns out the light, and in the morning hears something on the radio—then kills himself?”