I took Emily off her lead and slipped my fingers beneath her collar. I asked her if she wanted to go see Peter. Her ears perked up at the question. She'd loved her days hanging out in the barn with him while I was at work. Then I mouthed, "Hey Peter, take my back," as I moved the brick aside and pushed the door open with the toe of my shoe.
The space was flooded with light from the skylights on the shed roof. But the glare was from the west and everything I could see was in shadows. I knew the layout of the space well— Peter and I often drank beer and talked at the end of the day as he cleaned up the shop after he'd shut down his tools.
The barn was mostly one big room. Along part of the east wall was an old animal stall that Peter had finished out and rocked-off for painting and staining his pieces. A large exhaust fan had pulled fumes from the space.
On the southern wall was a counter with a small refrigerator, and Peter's throne. Up two steps, behind a lovely mahogany outhouse door with a curved quarter-moon, Peter had framedoff an area no bigger than a large closet. Inside was a toilet. The stainless steel, composting contraption had been state of the art when Peter installed it. He'd been quite proud of the thing. Environmentally. Design-wise. Craftsmanship. Everything. He'd called it "The Good Head" and happily showed it off to anyone who visited his studio.
The area under the center gable was wide open, divided only by support beams and posts, ventilation ducts, Peter's power equipment, his workbenches, lumber storage racks, a complex system of dust-collection hoses, and the carcasses of a few projects that he'd left unfinished when he died.
I let go of Emily's collar. "Go find Peter. Good girl."
She took off as though she were heading into the brush after a red fox. I choked up a couple of inches and followed her inside.
TWENTY.ONE
MY ONLY other patient suicide had happened years before, early in my career. A knock on my door by a Boulder cop—a detective I'd never met named Sam Purdy—and a simple but loaded question: "You have a patient named Karen Eileen Hart?"
Sam Purdy had found his way to my Spanish Hills door to inform me that my patient, Karen Hart, had ingested a lethal overdose of antidepressants and alcohol in her Maxwell Street apartment near downtown.
He had a few questions for me. She had been depressed, yes. It was why I was treating her. And, yes, I had arranged for the consultation with the psychiatrist who had prescribed the antidepressant she used to overdose. Would I have considered her suicidal? No. Far from it. Had someone asked me the day before she died I would have listed Karen among my therapeutic success stories. She had been getting better. Sure, every therapist learns early on in his or her training that the most dangerous time for a suicidal patient is the brief transition after they begin to appear clinically brighter.
But it wasn't like that for Karen. She
was
getting better.
She'd recently gotten braces, for God's sake, and had begun to end her extended self-imposed social isolation.
Who gets
braces,
I remember wondering,
when she's planning to kill
herself?
The pieces explaining the tragedy fell together in the months following her death as I came to understand what had hap pened to Karen Hart, and what—or more precisely, who—had precipitated the acute despair and hopelessness that had led her to swallow the antidepressants and the vodka. I'd never gotten over her needless death, though. Nor did I ever expect to.
My personal history had taught me that some stains never bleach.
Some days are never forgotten. They are indelible.
The most eerie part of the second suicide? The one that day in Peter's barn? Kol's body was still swinging when I discovered it.
I looked away, gagging down vomit. It took half a minute to compose myself before I could look a second time.
Kol's body swung in a tiny arc, no more than two or three inches back and forth. My eyes followed the sway involuntarily. This way, that way. A slow-motion tennis match.
The look on his face was more shock than agony. His eyes were open and aghast; his tongue fat and protruding from his lips as though he'd died from gagging on a piece of raw meat.
The look on his face was
Holy shit, I didn't know it would
feel like this!
His neck was clearly broken. The cincture's single harsh tug had snapped his head to the side at an angle that no intact cervical vertebrae would permit. I saw no evidence that he'd used his fingernails to scratch at his throat or at the rope locked around his neck. I couldn't imagine that anyone suffocating, no matter how intent he had been on dying, could refrain from scratching at a ligature strangling off his airway. I concluded that the cruel yank of the initial fall had killed him.
The fall killed him.
I hoped that the fall had killed him. I had read somewhere that dying from the fall wasn't the rule with hangings—most victims died a more excruciating death from asphyxiation. That Kol didn't appear to have died in prolonged agony made it easier to be in the room with his body.
His knees were hanging at my eye level; his feet were about four feet from the floor. Much higher up, the rope was attached to a crossbeam that ran east to west near the top of the center gable of the post-and-beam barn. That location would have given him just enough room to sit on the beam while he tied off the thick rope, fashioned a noose, placed the noose around his neck, and . . .
Jumped. The jumping part had to have been hard.
Jesus.
The swiftness of the jerk as the rope finished playing out its slack? It would be like—what? I wanted to never know.
"Were we here, girl?" I asked Emily. "When he did this?"
How big had the initial arc of the swing been? How long does
it take for a pendulum of a certain length, traveling a certain
initial arc, carrying a certain weight, to stop moving?
I actually tried to remember some physics from high school. I failed.
Michael McClelland wanted me to see this.
My next thought:
Bingo.
Emily didn't bark when she ran inside the barn ahead of me. She hadn't sensed danger. But she had sensed something.
She ran to the floor below Kol's body and did two familiar things. First, she did a series of patented Bouvier des Flandres four-footed leaps—levitating, spinning moves that carry the big dogs straight up on all fours. Emily reserves the quad leaps for times when she is eager to be able to fly. She'll use them to close the gap on a squirrel in a tree, or to get closer to a particularly annoying raven perched above her. She uses them to let traffic helicopters know what she thinks of them hovering over the turnpike near her home. She once used one to try to nip at a
757 making a western approach into DIA during an upslope. On a good four-footed leap Emily can get a yard—maybe a little more—off the ground. At that altitude she's capable of completing a 540-degree spin while she's in the air. It's an impressive spectacle.
She completed three leaps and then did something else that is peculiar to the breed—she sat and looked up at the man dangling on the rope, and she started talking.
Bouvier talking is difficult to describe. It is not barking. Bouvier barking, especially serious Bouvier barking, is not easily misconstrued as anything other than what it is. Bouviers bark in order to warn, to get attention, to give orders. If a Bouv is barking, it is clear that the Bouv expects someone or something to heed.
The wise listener does just that. But Bouvier talking is something else. It is a throaty, not quite whiny, openmouthed sound that is modulated by the dog's cheeks. The sounds have multiple inflections and can go on for long enough periods of time that it often seems as though some punctuation is called for.
After many years as a companion to Bouviers I've deluded myself into believing that I can understand some of the conversational nuances when my dog talks to me.
That time, no. I didn't think Emily had a schema for the dead guy hanging from the rafters in Peter's barn. She was as perplexed as I was. Were I to guess, that's what I would have guessed she was talking about. That she didn't quite get the guy on the rope.
As with Karen Hart's death so many years before, I didn't see this suicide coming.
Had there been warning signs? If there had been, I'd missed them.
After the inevitable lawsuit was filed and after Kol Cruz's rich mother's fancy attorney finally got a chance to depose me, or after some judge granted the lawyer access to my therapy notes, I would need to reveal the embarrassing fact that over the time I'd been seeing Kol I had not scratched out one single concern about suicidal ideology, let alone any specific suicidal threat. Kol, my notes would maintain, hadn't been currently depressed. Hadn't expressed any suicidal ideation.
Suddenly I thought:
history?
Did Kol have a history of suicidal behavior?
Ideation? Gestures? Attempts? I had never asked. I had never done a suicidal history with him. I had never perceived a need for one. In fact, I hadn't done a formal mental-health history with Kol. My failure to take a history—my "professional negligence" is how Kol's mother's attorneys would characterize it—wouldn't look good for me. My malpractice carrier would not be pleased.
"Well, Dr. Gregory,"
some lawyer would ask at my deposition,
"what did Mr. Cruz say when you asked him about his
history of prior suicide attempts?"
Shit.
How bad at a profession can one person be?
Most therapists had never lost a single patient to suicide. I had now lost two.
Double bingo.
The bat was heavy in my hands. It was as useless as I felt.
I bent my knees a little, raised the wood to a ready position behind my left ear, and took a smooth swing through the middle of an imaginary strike zone. In my mind the pitch was a slow curve that broke as though it had rolled off the edge of a table. A Sandy Koufax curve.
I misjudged the break completely. My errant swing made strike three.
When I looked up from my reverie, Kol was still there.
But Emily was gone. I did what almost any dog owner would do. I said, "Emily, come." It was a command that she obeyed about three times out of ten. I figured she knew what the words meant. I also figured that she knew that as the purported leader of her pack I wasn't much of a disciplinarian. The consequences of ignoring me were quite tolerable. I wrote off the 30 percent compliance rate to chance, or canine generosity.
A few feet away Kol was still swinging on his rope. The arc was growing smaller. The sway that I could initially measure in inches would soon require millimeters. Before long the pendulum keeping time to his death would find neutral.
I cupped my hands into a horn and made the low bass call that I'd demonstrated for Sam earlier in the day. Emily didn't come at the sound. But she talked to me. The particular vocalization was half-bark, half Bouv-talk. The last time I'd heard that mix of sounds from her, Emily had been straddling the entrance to an earthen den convinced she had a prairie dog cornered. She had been wrong. The prairie dog had simply descended into that particular tunnel before he transferred to an alternate line in the great rodent subway system, amused that the big dog was sniffing for clues at the wrong station.
I followed Emily's sounds, stepping over to the longest of Peter's workbenches. With the bat I lifted the hem of one of the shrouds covering the bench. Emily was sitting below the table, her nub of a tail in frantic motion. She looked at me for an instant, her ears straight up, before she returned her gaze to her discovery.
What had she found? An air mattress and a sleeping bag. A cheap foam pillow without a pillowcase. The bag was laid out on the mattress, which was inflated. It appeared that someone had slept in the setup recently. My first thought was that the lair had been Kol's, but I soon recalled the bandanna on the front doors of the barn and I thought, no. I felt a shiver shoot up my spine.
Michael McClelland had been sleeping two dozen steps from my front door.
From my sleeping wife. From my playing daughter.
My left hand tightened on the handle of the bat. "Come on,
girl," I said to Emily. To my surprise, she stood up and heeled. I re-clipped the lead to her collar.
It took us a few minutes to complete a slow search of the rest of the barn. I used the bat to lift the corners of the various shrouds that covered the planer and the jointer and the sanders and the saws, looking for further evidence that someone had been living in Peter's studio.
Emily and I didn't find much more evidence. The veneer of dust was disturbed on some surfaces. The little refrigerator was plugged in. I used a shop rag to tug it open. Inside I found two sealed containers of yogurt, some cheese, some hard salami, and a half-eaten loaf of organic Rudi's sourdough. All of it was fresh.
The walled-off room that Peter once used to put finishes on his work was empty. After so many years it still stank of shellac and stain. Peter's throne room showed no indication of recent use. The years of dust on the toilet and on the floor around it hadn't been disturbed.
Out loud I said, "You're much too calm, Alan. You know that, don't you?" The truth was that given the circumstances I was much too calm. Kol's death was a complete shock to me. His suicide? Almost unfathomable. So unfathomable, in fact, that I was reluctant to believe it. My eyes kept returning involuntarily to his hanging body while my mind kept returning to the image of the bandanna that was tied on the barn door handles outside.