False Memory

she covered it were whiter still.
    Valet sat before her, gazing up, his ears perked, head cocked, hoping canine cuteness could counter grief.
    The third message was also from Susan, received at 3:20 in the morning; it must have come in when Dusty was washing his hands in the bathroom and when Martie was “sleeping the perfect sleep of the innocent,” as the television commercials for the patent medicine guaranteed.
    “Martie, it’s me. Martie, are you there?”
    Susan paused on the tape, waiting for someone to pick up, and in the doorway Martie groaned. Remorsefully, bitterly, she said, “Yes,” and the meaning was clear in that one word: Yes, I was here; yes, I might have been able to help; yes, I failed you.
    “Listen, if you ‘re there, for God’s sake, pick up.”
    In the next pause, Martie lowered her hands from her face and stared with horror at the answering machine.
    Dusty knew what she expected to hear next, for it was the same thing that he expected. Suicidal talk. A plea for support, for the counsel of a friend, for reassurance.
    “It isn’t Eric, Martie. It’s Ahriman. It’s Ahriman. I’ve got the bastard on videotape. The bastard—after the good deal he got on his house. Martie, please, please call me. I need help.”
    Dusty stopped the tape before the machine moved forward to the fourth message.
    The house seemed to roll with a temblor, as though continental plates were colliding deep under the California coast, but this was strictly an earthquake of the mind.
    Dusty looked at Martie.
    Such eyes, her eyes. Shock waves had cracked even the hard grief that had made them a more intense blue than usual. Now, in her eyes was something that he’d never seen in anyone’s eyes before, a quality he couldn’t adequately name.
    He heard himself say, “She must’ve been a little crazy there at the end. I mean, what sense does that make? What videotape? Dr. Ahriman is—”
    “—a great psychiatrist. He’s—”
    “—deeply committed to—”
    “—his patients.”
    That faint thereminlike music, eerie and tuneless, played in the concert hail inside Dusty’s skull: not music, actually, but the psyche’s equivalent of an acute ringing in the ears, tinnitus of the mind. It was caused by what hundred-dollar-an-hour psychologists call cognitive dissonance: simultaneously holding diametrically opposed convictions about the same subject. The subject in this instance was Mark Ahriman. Dusty was awash in cognitive dissonance because he believed Ahriman was a great psychiatrist and now also a rapist, believed Ahriman was a doctor deeply committed to the welfare of his patients and now also a murderer, compassionate therapist and cruel manipulator.
    “It can’t be true,” he said.
    “It can’t,” she agreed.
    “But the haiku.”
    “The mahogany forest in my dream.”
    “His office is paneled in mahogany.”
    “And has a west-facing window,” she said.
    “It’s crazy.”
    “Even if it could be him—why us?”
    “I know why you,” Dusty said darkly. “For the same reason as Susan. But why me?”
    "Why Skeet?"
    Of the last two messages on the tape, the first had come in at nine o’clock this morning, the second at four o’clock this afternoon, and both were from Martie’s mother. The first was brief; Sabrina was just calling to chat.
    The second message was longer, full of concern, because Martie worked at home and usually returned her mother’s calls in an hour or two; the lack of a quick response gave Sabrina cause for apocalyptic speculations. Also unspoken in the rambling message—but clear to anyone familiar with Sabrina’s skills of indirect expression—was the ardent hope that (1) Martie was at an appointment with a divorce attorney, (2) Dusty had proved to be a drunk and was now being checked into a clinic to dry out, (3) Dusty had proved to be a philanderer and was now in the hospital recuperating from a beating—a severe beating—administered by another woman’s husband, or (4) Dusty, the drunk, was drying out in a clinic after being beaten—severely-—by another woman’s husband, and Martie was at the divorce attorney’s office.
    Ordinarily, Dusty would have been annoyed in spite of himself, but this time, Sabrina’s lack of faith in him seemed inconsequential.
    He rewound the tape to Susan’s key message. In every way, her words were harder to listen to the second time than they had been the first.
    Susan dead, but now her voice.
    Ahriman the healer, Ahriman the killer.
    Cognitive dissonance.
    The answering-machine tape was not the