Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

“You stole my favorite sweats?”

“I wanted to die.”

“It’s weird that sweats would make you suicidal. I’d analyze the crap out of that if I were you.”

“Do you actually wear those in public?”

“Only when I go out in them. Hey, how hard is it to diagnose PTSD?”

After a long pause, she said, “Charley, I know why you’re calling, and yes, hon, it’s painfully obvious you’re suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.”

“What? No. I’m talking about a client.”

“Mmm-hmm. And does this client have brown hair and gold eyes and talk to dead people?”

“Subtle. Don’t make me yell into this phone,” I said with an evil smirk. Twelve margaritas would make that thought very unappealing.

“Oh, for the love of God, please don’t.”

“Okay, then focus. It’s not for me. Really. How easy is it to diagnose in a child?”

“Well, unless the patient doesn’t remember anything that happened to him or her, then it’s pretty easy. I mean the symptoms are fairly universal, although each case is a little different. No matter what happened, it should be fairly straightforward. Anything from a car accident to a natural disaster to soldiers exchanging fire on the battlefield can cause it.”

I decided to take a stab in the dark. “What if something happened to a young child, but she didn’t remember what it was? Or maybe she saw something? Or heard something? Can that cause PTSD?”

“Absolutely. But that happens even to adults. I once had a case where a woman was in a car accident and couldn’t get to her crying son. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him. And before help could arrive on scene, he passed away. She heard his last cries.”

“Okay,” I said, interrupting her. “I don’t like this case.”

“I didn’t either, but I have a point.”

“Fine, then, but make it quick.”

“Afterwards, she had what is referred to as hysterical deafness, or psychosomatic hearing loss.”

“Like the guys who go off to war and go blind for no apparent reason.”

“Exactly. Their minds can’t absorb the horrors they’ve seen, so the brain refuses to process visual information. The visual cortex shuts down. It’s completely psychological. But those are pretty extreme cases. PTSD is usually much less blatant, so oftentimes people don’t even realize they have it. Like, say, a PI who was held captive and suffered great physical and emotional trauma.”

“Are we back to this again?”

“Charley, let me hook you up with a friend of mine.”

I straightened. Now she was talking my language. “Is he cute?”

“She is a very good psychotherapist. One of the best in the city.”

“Wait,” I said as another thought occurred to me.

“No more waiting.”

“What if this happened decades ago? Would it have been harder to diagnose PTSD back then?”

“Possibly. PTSD has been around since the dawn of man, but it only gained notoriety as a diagnosis around the eighties. Then it took a while to catch on.”

“Thanks.” That might explain how Dr. Penn had missed it. Why she looked so hard at other causes of Harper’s illness. I had to find more about what happened to Harper during her parents’ honeymoon.

* * *

I decided to do a quick drive-by at Pari’s place to check on Harper. The shop wasn’t open yet, it was still early for a tattoo parlor, but Tre was there looking at Internet  p**n . He had good taste.

“Where’s Pari?” I asked him.

He shrugged and I sensed a jolt of hostility. “She’s out.”

Uh-oh, trouble in paradise. He seemed really bummed. Not enough to hold my attention, though. I looked past him at the pictures of clients Pari had on her wall and pointed. “Hey, those are the Bandits.”

I stepped closer to the pic of the ragtag team of bikers. They owned my favorite mental asylum, for some bizarre reason, and the picture was of my favorite three bikers ever: Donovan, Eric, and Michael. They were showing off their tats, each of them posing like bodybuilders, but something about them clicked in the back of my mind. I’d seen them out of context recently, in another situation, another environment. It was odd. Something about their shape. Tall, medium-tall, and just plain medium.

“Okay, well, I’ll just be back here.”

Tre shrugged, his acknowledgment barely noticeable.

I wondered about the Bandits as long as my ADD would allow me to, then moved on to my childhood dream of being an astronaut and how I would’ve tried to save the world if a comet were headed toward Earth. I concluded that the human race was doomed.

“Hey, Harper,” I said, ducking into her closetlike room.

She’d been looking out a window the size of a business card and turned to me. “Hi.”

“Do you have a minute?”

“Really?” she asked, indicating her surroundings with her upturned palms.

“Right,” I said. “I hope Pari is treating you well.”

“She’s kind of different.”

“That she is.”

“Did you talk to Art?”

“Yes, and he’s definitely not our guy.”

“Oh, I know that. I was just hoping he might have figured something out.”

“Well, he did have some pretty interesting comments,” I said, my clever meaning disguised in a subtly subversive way. “He seems to think something happened to you while you were staying with your grandparents.”