Delirious Page 5

  “Each PowerPoint file has associated properties. These properties tell when a file was created, modified, and who made it. Any file created by a person on the SoluCent network will list that person’s name as the author. This is your file, Jerry, so I’m guessing your name is the listed author.”

  Charlie clicked the file menu in PowerPoint, moused down to the properties entry, and opened the pop-up window. He clicked on the summary tab in the pop-up.

  Charlie stared at the screen but couldn’t register what it said. Several attendees coughed, and at least one person let out a gasp of surprise. It wasn’t Jerry’s name that was listed as the author, or even Anne Pedersen’s. And the file hadn’t been created days ago, as Charlie had claimed. According to the file’s date and time stamp, it had been created just yesterday morning. And the name in the author field was Charlie Giles.

  Chapter 7

  Charlie’s walk from the main entrance to his BMW, parked in an early bird front lot space, felt interminable—as though he were stepping through molasses along an ever-expanding horizon of asphalt. The once energizing campus had morphed into something ominous and foreboding. Glancing behind him, at the tall brick-and-glass buildings of SoluCent, Charlie’s mind flooded with questions.

  Rising above that noise, the most consistent and resounding of these jumbled thoughts was the need to get away as fast as he could.

  Once inside his car he felt safer, cocooned in the familiar. He stared forward, through the spotless windshield, and reconstructed her face from memory. As her image came into sharper focus, he felt a calming sureness that Anne Pedersen was real, even though all logic seemed to lead to the conclusion he refused to believe. Anne Pedersen did not exist.

  The image faded. He thought of Leon Yardley. The CEO had been kinder than Charlie had expected, or deserved. His only insistence was that Charlie leave for the day as he and other managers tried to get some clarity and perspective on the situation.

  A little distance might be the only way to figure out what was going on and how he could clear his name. As Charlie turned the ignition, the BMW fired up with a quiet hum. Monte’s pillow in the backseat was empty, and Charlie had never felt more alone. The In-Vision system spoke in soothing tones from his newly installed Polk speaker system.

  Each of the early prototype models of InVision had been code-named after famous explorers. This dovetailed with the Magellan code name of his executive team, while exploring new territory was a running operational theme throughout his organization. The system in his car was the Columbus prototype—a top-of-the-line model and only two generations removed from what he believed would be the first mass-produced line.

  “Hello, Charlie. I hope you’re having a great day,” it said.

  “I’m having a fucking fantastic day,” Charlie said. “Jim Hall, ‘Alone Together,’ please.”

  Soft chords from Hall’s guitar spilled out from the speakers, rounded out by Ron Carter’s mesmerizing, but wandering bass line. Charlie sat motionless and waited for the distinctive melody of Jim Hall’s guitar solo to follow. He focused on Hall’s playing in particular, picturing each note in his mind, while his fingers danced against an imaginary fret board. The stress of the SoluCent acquisition had inspired him to pick up his guitar again. Thanks to muscle memory, it had taken months, not years, to return to his past fluency. And because his fingertips had quickly callused over, practicing had stopped hurting after a few days of regular playing.

  Of all the jazz guitar greats whose style and compositions he had mastered, Hall was an elusive favorite. “An undiscovered gem,” his father once called him, Hall had a gift for improvisation, which Charlie himself was unable to exemplify in his own playing. Imitation, it turned out, was Charlie’s musical specialty, while spontaneous creative expression was not. His lack of looseness had kept him out of the recording studio and away from live gigs. Technical precision was fine for the living-room player, but on a CD or when playing live, it was all about feeling and improvisational ability. Someday he would become that player, Charlie promised himself—free and unencumbered by his overthinking each measure and demanding perfection. All he needed to do was to keep listening to Hall.

  Charlie pulled out of the driveway and onto the main thoroughfare that would lead him to Route 128 and eventually onto Route 2 toward Boston. In his head he replayed events from the last several days, hoping that something would jar a memory or give him some direction.

  The small green car icon displayed on the InVision street map screen—the color indicating that he was “on course”—should be red, Charlie thought. If InVision were a mind reader, it would be red.

  “I met Anne Pedersen last Thursday. It was twelve thirty. We were in the Omni Way cafeteria,” he muttered. With little effort he could see her face; her fine porcelain features; the lean, long legs; dark brown, shoulder-length hair; smile warm and embracing; teeth white and straight. “Anne Pedersen gave me this file, dammit!”

  Charlie squeezed the USB key with white-knuckling force, imagining for a moment that he crushed it under the pressure and somehow, with its destruction, ended the nightmare.

  “She forwarded me the invite to the meeting….” Charlie’s voice trailed off. “She forwarded me the invite,” he said again. “Of course. I have her e-mail!”

  Charlie’s eyes lit up as he reached in the pocket of his blazer and extracted his BlackBerry. Practiced at driving without giving it his undivided attention, Charlie turned on the device and accessed his e-mail over the network. He switched to calendar view and noticed, with a growing sense of dread, that the invitation he had in Outlook for the executive steering committee meeting was gone.

  Blood pressure rising, Charlie fumbled with the device, nearly rear-ending a car as he inadvertently changed lanes. He scanned through several days’ worth of e-mail, looking for Anne Pedersen’s first e-mail message to him, the one where she requested they meet face-to-face. That e-mail wasn’t there. It wasn’t in his deleted folder, either.

  He thought about his next move. He saw no point in contacting Caroline Ramsey, even though Anne Pedersen had claimed she was positioning herself for a job in Caroline’s group and had given that as her reason for warning Charlie about Jerry’s power play. If the company had no record of Anne Pedersen’s existence, it was certain that Caroline Ramsey would have no knowledge of her, either.

  Charlie knew it was counterproductive to keep asserting that Anne Pedersen was a SoluCent employee. Leon Yardley had already taken Charlie aside to ask if pressure from the pending product launch was impacting his mental health. It was obvious what the CEO had been implying—that Charlie had invented Anne Pedersen as a way of self-sabotaging his career. Of course, Charlie had denied that was true. To clear his name, however, Charlie needed to find out who Anne Pedersen really was, without further raising Yardley’s suspicions.

  Before departing SoluCent, Charlie had returned to the Omni Way cafeteria but had left frustrated that not a single employee remembered serving him or his lunch companion. He wasn’t a regular at the cafeteria, a cashier had explained, otherwise he would have chatted with Charlie and perhaps remembered him coming through. There was no point in trying to find out if an Anne Pedersen had swiped her security badge at the Omni Way cafeteria, either. As far as corporate was concerned, Anne Pedersen did not exist. But perhaps someone had lost a badge or had had theirs stolen? It was worth checking into. In addition, Charlie wanted a log of his Outlook access. Someone might have been messing around with his system. Perhaps they’d changed property files on the PowerPoint document or sent and deleted his e-mails.

  One thing he knew for certain was that he had read Anne’s message. It had stood out from the others, for the simple reason that he hadn’t known who she was. Besides, he reasoned, without that e-mail, how would he have known to meet her at the cafeteria? To accept any other explanation would be to embrace the possibility that they had never met. That Anne Pedersen, as Yardley had implied, was his invention.

  Char
lie switched the BlackBerry to phone mode and dialed Solu-Cent. He asked to be connected with Lawrence Washington in IT.

  “Lawrence here,” a husky voice growled into the phone.

  “Lawrence, Charlie Giles. How are you?”

  “What do you want?”

  Charlie found it ironic that those in IT who manned the help desk were often the least friendly and helpful people in the company. Lawrence was no exception. Even though he liked Charlie and respected his level of technical acumen, years on the job had made Lawrence a hard man.

  “I need a favor, Lawrence.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  “This is serious,” Charlie said.

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “I need to know if my e-mail has been compromised.”

  “Why do you think it has?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Trust me. I just need to know all the times I’ve logged into my e-mail. I need to know the exact date and time.”

  “Might take me a little while. When do you need it?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Big surprise. That it?” Lawrence asked.

  “No,” Charlie said. “I need to know if anyone has reported a stolen or lost employee ID. I need it over the last few months.”

  “Can’t give that out, Charlie.”

  “Lawrence … I … need to know.” Desperation had replaced the confidence in Charlie’s voice.

  “Sorry,” Lawrence said. “But that ain’t your business.”

  “Are the Red Sox yours?”

  Lawrence paused.

  “This Saturday. Green Monster, against the Jays,” Charlie said.

  “That’s bribery, Giles.”

  “It’s the Red Sox,” Charlie said.

  “No e-mail. I’ll drop by with a disc. You can see the names.”

  “And I’ll drop by with the tickets tomorrow.” They’ll cost only a hundred and fifty dollars each from Corner Ticket.

  Charlie slid the BlackBerry back into its holder and caught the yellow flash from the sticky note he’d found days earlier and taped to the inside flap. He read it again.

  If not yourself, then who can you believe?

  The words had taken on an almost prophetic significance. What was happening to him? First a note that he didn’t recall writing, then a woman who didn’t exist, then a presentation he apparently authored without any recollection.

  A sickening thought swept through him, like a wave of grief. Could Yardley be right? Perhaps the pressure was more than he could handle, and now his subconscious mind wanted a way out.

  Charlie shook his head side to side.

  “No. It can’t be,” he said aloud. “I know what I saw … don’t I?”

  He looked back down at the sticky note on the inside flap of his BlackBerry holder, resting open on the passenger seat. His handwriting looked both familiar and alien.

  “When did I write this?” he asked. “And why?”

  He pulled the Post-it note from his BlackBerry holder and stuck it to the inside cover of a notebook he kept in the glove compartment. He didn’t want to give the note any more thought, but he wasn’t prepared to crumple it up and toss it away, either. At least not until a few other mysteries were solved.

  Charlie drove as if on autopilot into a hazy midafternoon sun as he replayed the events of the day. Assuming Anne Pedersen did exist, it still did not explain his authoring the PowerPoint presentation, the missing e-mails, or unfamiliar notes in his handwriting.

  Is it the pressure, Charlie?

  Yardley’s biting words came to him again.

  It had been obvious from the man’s eyes that he had already embraced that conclusion. If Yardley was thinking that way, Charlie lamented, the others would soon follow.

  I’m going to be branded a nutcase.

  Step one, Charlie decided, was to prove that wasn’t even a possibility. It seemed inconceivable that work pressures could trigger his creating an elaborate fantasy world—the sort of altered reality he associated with Joe or his father. If it wasn’t the pressure, could it be some sort of mental illness? Charlie was knowledgeable enough about his brother’s disease to know that symptoms manifested themselves in the late teens, midtwenties on the outside, but almost never in someone as old as he was. But was it possible?

  Jerking the steering wheel hard right, Charlie swerved the BMW in front of a fast-traveling Toyota 4Runner. The driver reciprocated with a customary Bostonian salute of his middle finger. Hitting the exit ramp at forty mph, the wheels of the BMW hugged the road with the advertised precision and control. Charlie shot over the overpass, got into the left lane, downshifted into second, then turned onto the entrance ramp heading in the opposite direction on Route 128, back toward Waltham.

  If he could medically disprove the possibility of work pressures or some late-blooming brain disease as the cause, it would go a long way toward reestablishing trust within SoluCent’s leadership team. That would give Charlie access to the necessary corporate resources to find the real culprits.

  “Please dial Mother,” Charlie said aloud.

  “Dialing Mother,” responded InVision.

  The phone rang six times before someone finally answered.

  “Hello.” The voice on the other end was heavy, as though the person to whom it belonged had been roused from a deep slumber.

  “Joe.”

  “Charlie? That you?”

  “I need a favor. I need you to look up a number for me.”

  Joe said nothing for a moment. “You need a number?”

  It seemed to Charlie an exceptionally long time to process information, only to repeat the request. “Yes. That’s what I said,” he said.

  “What number do you want, Charlie?”

  “Rachel Evans,” Charlie said.

  Charlie could hear the surprise in Joe’s voice. “What? Why do you want to talk with Dr. Evans?”

  “Why do you care?” Charlie said.

  “She’s my psychologist, Charlie. There’s a reason to care.”

  “It’s research, Joe. Nothing more.”

  Charlie had heard Rachel’s name mentioned dozens of times over the years. Joe was besotted with her. He praised her with a sense of wonderment typically reserved for the divine. And admittedly, since joining her experimental cognitive therapy program, Joe had made remarkable progress.

  All Charlie wanted was an expert ear. Hers was the only name he had.

  Joe gave him the number and Charlie thanked him.

  “Are you going to come visit Mom?” Joe asked. “I’m sure she would appreciate it.”

  “I can’t today, Joe,” Charlie said, hanging up without another word.

  Research, Charlie thought. Yeah. That’s what it is. Research.

  He shifted the car over into the fast lane and dialed Rachel’s number. The receptionist patched him through.

  “Dr. Evans,” a friendly voice said.

  “Dr. Evans, this is Charlie Giles, Joe’s brother. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  Chapter 8

  The redbrick edifice of Walderman Mental Health rose from its perch atop a grassy knoll and cast an eerie, elongated shadow as the late-day sun settled in the west. Charlie drove his black BMW up the winding driveway. He noticed xenon headlights automatically turned on, as onboard sensors determined dusk was approaching. Charlie downshifted into first and glided his car to a gentle stop in the farthest corner space in a parking lot void of other vehicles.

  He had been to this place only once before. It had been a few months after moving back east; Charlie had asked his mother if he could attend a group therapy session at Walderman Hospital. This had brought a look of surprise to her face, since she’d been asking him to participate in Joe’s therapy for years. In her mind, for Charlie to spring this on her out of the blue had been nothing short of a miracle. He had never admitted that the request was more selfish than selfless. He had found it embarrassing to live so close to Joe and still have the same uneasiness he remembere
d feeling as a boy.

  Doctors had diagnosed Joe as epileptic just after Charlie’s eighth birthday. That disease hadn’t disturbed Charlie in the least. Perhaps because his brother’s seizures were internal events, more like an altered mental state. Joe didn’t convulse when he seized, the way a boy in Charlie’s school had who was also epileptic. Unlike that boy’s, Joe’s eyes didn’t roll back in his head; nobody had to stick something into his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue. The only clue Joe was even having a seizure was his trancelike detachment.

  The schizophrenia, diagnosed years later, however, was far less discreet and had permeated every facet of Charlie’s relationship with Joe. Joe would hear voices, complain of strangers reading his thoughts, or express fear that he was being followed. Sometimes his brother would spontaneously burst out into song or converse bizarrely with a stranger, which always embarrassed Charlie. For a fifteen-year-old boy, Joe’s breakdown had been at first haunting, soon scary, and had ultimately driven a wedge between the once close siblings.

  It had angered Charlie to feel so apprehensive, scared even, around Joe. He had interpreted those feelings as a sign of weakness in himself. He’d known his fear was irrational, but rather than try to overcome it, Charlie had taken another approach—avoidance. It was a passive solution, but an effective one as well.

  Charlie had attended a group therapy session at Walderman Hospital in an effort to substitute his long-standing apathy with empathy. It was then that Charlie had found himself in a small, windowless basement room with about eight patients, two doctors, and a half dozen or so relatives.

  Claustrophobia had overwhelmed him. Trying to rein in his anxiety, Charlie had stood while the others took their seats. He’d gone over to a small kitchenette and poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee in a Styrofoam cup, added some Coffee-mate, and, when glances from the staff made it clear that his standing was a distraction, found a seat closest to the door.