Blunt Darts

letter, but he nevertheless kept it in his hand when he looked back up. “I’ll have to check my service. I never take calls when I’m in group. I’ll be another fifteen minutes or so and then I can see you. Please sit down and I’ll be back to you.”
    He withdrew into the inner office and closed the door. I sat down and scanned his eclectic magazine collection. I flipped through two old New Yorker magazines (which I read only for the cartoons) and was halfway through my third Field and Stream article (in their largemouth bass annual issue) when the inner door reopened and a string of two men and three women of varying ages filed out. From the distrustful looks they gave me as they passed, I think the waiting room’s soothing qualities were pretty well wasted on them.
    Stein was last out. He smiled at me and beckoned. I followed him in. Seating himself in a highback chair behind his desk, he bade me sit as well, so I dragged a visitor’s lowback up to the front of the desk.
    “I am sorry about disturbing you before,” I said.
    He waved me off as he sank, somewhat relieved, into his desk chair. “Not at all, not at all. In fact, despite what they say in clinic, I think an occasional interruption may be good for a group.” He shot me a mischievous smile. “It’s certainly good for me.”
    I smiled back. He reached for the telephone and hit one button. “Checking my service,” he said to me as an aside.
    He spoke with the service for a while, taking down several quick notes on a pad. He said, “She did?” several times, then said thank you and hung up.
    “Well,” he said to me, “it seems your Mrs. Kinnington was quite insistent on reaching me. Virtually threatened my service with legal action if she were not put through.”
    “She’s a very determined woman. And quite concerned about Stephen.”
    “Stephen, Stephen, yes, yes,” he said as he looked at Mrs. Kinnington’s letter again, and then rose and ; crossed to one of six file cabinets in the room. He pulled back a drawer, retrieved a file, and, opening it, returned to his seat.
    As he turned the pages of the file, he spoke to me. “Mrs. Kinnington says in her note only that Stephen is missing. According to the file here and my recollection as well, Stephen’s father was the family member most involved with Stephen’s... ah, stay at Willow Wood.”
    I chose my words carefully. “Mrs. Kinnington was out of the country at the time. Both she and the judge are doing everything possible to locate him. You are just one link, but perhaps an important one, in that chain.”
    “Yes, yes, of course.” Whatever momentary reticence he had had now seemed to dissolve. “Well then, how can I help you?”
    I breathed an inner sigh of relief and plunged on. “We don’t know why Stephen has disappeared. We thought you might be able to give us some idea.” Stein pursed his lips and flipped back to the front of the file. “According to my records, I last saw Stephen over three years ago. Aside from my file entries, I really have little recollection of him.”
    I leaned forward a bit. “What I am really interested in is why Stephen, after apparently doing so well for so long, suddenly does an about-face. Now, it may have been a new occurrence and it may have been a recurrence of something from his past. If we know what caused him to act, we may have a starting point for tracing him.”
    Stein tented his fingers and gave me a superior smile. “That’s assuming that he departed of his own accord. Has that been established?”
    “Not conclusively, but all the available evidence points toward his having run away rather than to kidnapping.”
    Stein nodded. He looked to his left and again reread Mrs. Kinnington’s letter. He seemed to be trying to memorize it. “I assume that time is of the essence, as the lawyers say?”
    “Yes. The longer it takes us to find the key, the lower our chances of finding the boy.”
    Stein came to his decision and swung his desk chair and the folder around sideways. “Let’s go through the file.” I hitched my chair around so that we sat side by side at the narrow end of the desk.
    The file was in reverse chronological order, so that you had to read from the bottom of the lower page to the top of the higher page. That awkwardness mastered, it took relatively little time to review.
    Stephen was signed into Willow Wood by his father within twenty-four hours of his mother’s death. He ^as diagnosed catatonic upon his