Read Online Twisted by Jeffery Deaver - Free Book Online Page A

had been carefully applied but the buttons on her blouse weren’t done properly. Either she’d dressed in a hurry or hadn’t paid attention. And one of the straps on her expensive, tan shoes wasn’t hooked.
    She rose. “Thank you, Doctor . . . It’s good just to be able to tell someone about this.”
    “We’ll get everything worked out. I’ll see you next week.”
    After Patsy had left the office Harry Bernstein sat down at his desk. He spun slowly in his chair, gazing at his books—the DSM-IV, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the APA Handbook of Neuroses, volumes by Freud, Adler, Jung, Karen Horney, hundreds of others. Then looking out the window again, watching the late-afternoon sunlight fall onthe cars and taxis speeding north on Park Avenue.
    A bird flew past.
    He thought about the shattered ceramic sparrow from Patsy’s childhood.
    And Harry thought: What a significant session this has been.
    Not only for his patient. But for him too.
    Patsy Randolph—who had until today been just another mildly discontented middle-aged patient—represented a watershed event for Dr. Harold David Bernstein. He was in a position to change her life completely.
    And in doing so maybe he could redeem his own.
    Harry laughed out loud, spun again in the chair, like a child on a playground. Once, twice, three times.
    A figure appeared in the doorway. “Doctor?” Miriam, his secretary, cocked her head, which was covered with fussy white hair. “Are you all right?”
    “I’m fine. Why’re you asking?”
    “Well, it’s just . . . I don’t think I’ve heard you laugh for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you laugh in your office.”
    Which was another reason to laugh. And he did.
    She frowned, concern in her eyes.
    Harry stopped smiling. He looked at her gravely. “Listen, I want you to take the rest of the day off.”
    She looked mystified. “But . . . it’s quitting time, Doctor.”
    “Joke,” he explained. “It was a joke. See you tomorrow.”
    Miriam eyed him cautiously, unable, it seemed, to shake the quizzical expression from her face. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
    “I’m fine. Good night.”
    “ ’Night, Doctor.”
    A moment later he heard the front door to the office click shut.
    He spun around in his chair once more, reflecting: Patsy Randolph . . . I can save you and you can save me.
    And Dr. Harry Bernstein was a man badly in need of saving.
    Because he hated what he did for a living.
    Not the business of helping patients with their mental and emotional problems—oh, he was a natural-born therapist. None better. What he hated was practicing Upper East Side psychiatry. It had been the last thing he’d ever wanted to do. But in his second year of Columbia Medical School the tall, handsome student met the tall, beautiful assistant development director of the Museum of Modern Art. Harry and Linda were married before he started his internship. He moved out of his fifth-floor walk-up near Harlem and into her town house on East Eighty-first. Within weeks she’d begun changing his life. Linda was a woman who had high aspirations for her man (very similar to Patsy, in whose offhand comment several weeks ago about her husband’s lack of ambition Harry had seen reams of anger). Linda wanted money, she wanted to be on the regulars list for benefits at the Met, she wanted to be pampered at four-star restaurants in Eze and Monaco and Paris.
    A studious, easygoing man from a modest suburb of New York, Harry knew that by listening to Linda he was headed in the wrong direction. But he was in love with her so he continued to listen. They bought aco-op in a high-rise on Madison Avenue and he hung up his shingle (well, a heavy, brass plaque) outside this three-thousand-dollar-a-month office on Park and Seventy-eighth.
    At first Harry had worried about the astronomical bills they were amassing. But soon the money was flowing in. He had no trouble getting business; there’s no