Animal Appetite

support. I dove into the car, threw myself in the driver’s seat, and locked the door. Just as I started the engine, Gareth began to pound on the rear window. I don’t know why it didn’t break. The shouting alone should have cracked glass. As Gareth hammered his fists on the side window and bellowed about rats, poison, Oscar Fisch, and the father who hadn’t died, I found a break in the traffic and tried to escape. Gareth chased my Bronco. Smack in the middle of Harvard Square, I got stuck at a red light. The rearview mirror gave me a nightmarish image of a shouting man dressed in a purple parka. Rage contorted his face. The light seemed to stay red for two or three hours. He reached the rear of my car. As his bare fist pounded the glass, the light turned green and the cars ahead of mine moved. The next traffic light was yellow. Sounding my horn at the pedestrians, I slammed my foot on the gas and narrowly missed hitting two kids. Only when I pulled into my own driveway did I make the connection. Desperate to escape, I could have killed those children: just like Hannah Duston.
     

Fifteen

     
    “Psychotic rage,” Rita diagnosed. “Now you understand why we want people like this to take their medication.”
    I’d snagged her when she’d arrived home between patients to eat lunch and walk Willie. We were in my kitchen. Dressed for work in a gray wool skirt with a white silk shirt and a bright scarf, she was feeding herself tiny spoonfuls of low-fat raspberry yogurt. She looked utterly civilized. I felt better already.
    “But why don’t they?” I asked. “I don’t understand why someone like that wouldn’t take his medication.”
    Rita shrugged. “I’ve heard people complain that when they do, they don’t feel like themselves, which may sound laughable, but I think there’s a sort of truth there, too. Sometimes, they’re too disorganized, cognitively, to remember or to follow through and do it. Even if they’re just supposed to have injections every week or two, sometimes it’s too much for them to get to the doctor’s office.”
    “If they were sane enough to take their medication, they wouldn’t need it.”
    She smiled. “More or less. Actually, less. Plenty of people do take their meds and function very well.”
    “In dogs,” I said, “rage syndrome is—”
    “Please!”
    “I’m serious! It occurs in springer spaniels. It’s genetic. It’s well documented in springers, but it’s believed to occur in other breeds.”
    “Well, in an individual like this Gareth, there’s undoubtedly some organic basis.”
    “I was sort of wondering the opposite. I wondered whether he hadn’t been driven crazy by something to do with his father’s murder. Plus, for all that his mother is a professor, there’s something strange about her. She doesn’t quite connect. It’s also possible that she’s a sort of, uh, strange kind of kleptomaniac. And giving me that crime-scene picture of Jack’s body was really peculiar.” Rita nodded. “And the daughter—”
    “Brat’s eccentric,” I admitted. “She’s unusual. But when you’re with her, you don’t get that creepy feeling that you’re off in space somewhere. You don’t with Oscar, either—Claudia’s second husband, the one she’s married to now. That’s something else I don’t understand. Oscar is perfectly capable and focused. So why doesn’t he see to it that Gareth is... I don’t know. In a halfway house, maybe. Or a hospital? Rita, he really isn’t—”
    “It isn’t as simple as that. These days, even for flagrantly psychotic people, the insurance companies don’t want to pay for anything except brief hospitalizations. The family probably couldn’t get Gareth hospitalized unless he was in the kind of state he ended up in today.”
    “Rita, he is really violent. He could kill someone.”
    “First of all, Holly, contrary to popular myth, most psychotic people aren’t like that. Most of them are absolutely no threat to anyone except themselves. And this guy scared the daylights out of you, but he didn’t actually do you any harm.”
    “Because I ran away! And even before that, Rita, you should’ve seen him eating out of the trash! He was shoveling garbage into his mouth. There was something so sick and so pitiful about it. And he has all these crazy ideas about rats and poison. Meanwhile, he’s scavenging like a rat and probably getting botulism. I don’t know why someone doesn’t—”
    “Holly, the family