The House in the Pines(61)

Maya curled into a ball, drawing her knees to her chest.

“And anyway,” he said, “those programs aren’t just for alcoholics. They have them for all kinds of addicts.”

The word made her wince. The first step of a journey Maya had no interest in taking. She didn’t want to go to meetings, or find God, and when she thought about being sober all the time, she wasn’t sure life would be worth living. She felt an urge to remind Dan that it was a doctor who had written her first Klonopin prescription—that this was his fault. Or that, until the last few days, she had cut back dramatically on her drinking. Or that she could—she would—straighten herself out on her own, no need for anything as dramatic as an Anonymous program.

But instead, she said, “Okay. I’ll go.”



* * *



— The problem with the word addict was that it meant you were supposed to do something about it, as if Maya didn’t have enough to deal with. But she had told Dan that she would, so after lying in the dark awhile, no longer tired, she searched for AA meetings on her phone. She found a chapter not far from their apartment in Boston and texted Dan to let him know. He wrote back with a heart, and she replied with ten, and told herself that she would go to meetings if it would make him happy. She would do a lot for him.

Even if she wasn’t ready to admit she was an addict. She was physically dependent on medication. Wasn’t there a difference?

The night was long, and she was acutely aware of the gin left in the bottle on her nightstand. She poured it down the kitchen sink. This wasn’t going to be easy, but it was for the best. She had to stay sharp. She sat at the antique writing desk in her old room with the pen and flowery notepad her mom had left out for future guests and began to list what she had learned tonight, starting with what Steven had told her at Patrick’s.


1. Cristina was planning to move into Frank’s cabin. A chilling thought now that Maya knew the place didn’t exist.

2. He has clients of some sort. She shuddered to think of what services he might provide. She’d look into this.

3. His dad was a professor at Williams. She still knew almost nothing about Frank’s dad other than his name, which was Oren. She had searched for him online seven years ago but not found anything and given up after Dr. Barry convinced her to drop it. She hadn’t thought much about Oren Bellamy since.

4. Oren . . . She recalled the apparent glee he took, the night she met him, in directing her to a cabin that he’d have known wasn’t real.



Then hadn’t Frank told her something about him in the clearing? Maya’s brow creased. Her grasp of these newly recovered memories was tenuous, even more imperfect than might be expected of a night seven years ago. Yet somehow writing it down helped her think, helped pull the sunken past back up to the surface. Oren . . . she wrote, was the reason Frank built the cabin.

She remembered this now. Frank built his cabin to get away from his father.

She picked up her phone. Adding “Williams College” to her search for “Oren Bellamy” didn’t turn up anything, but eventually she found references to two journal articles he’d published in the 1980s. One article was titled “Observable Personality Traits Associated with High Absorption Scores on the TAS,” but when Maya clicked on the article, it had been taken down.

The other article he’d published had also been taken down, but back issues of the journal were available in print through the website. The journal was called Experimental Neuropsychology, and its website hadn’t been updated in over a decade. Maya got her debit card and purchased Volume 17, October 1983, the issue Dr. Bellamy’s article appeared in, typing her credit card info into a beige website that looked almost vintage.

So Oren had been a psychologist, and either Williams College had erased all connection with him or he’d never really taught there.

She searched for “Dr. Oren Bellamy,” “psychologist,” and, glancing over her list, threw in the word “clients,” and there he was. Dr. Oren Bellamy, PhD, CHT. Not just his name but his face, a close-up of him in a plaid blazer, smiling at his desk with a bookshelf behind him. In the picture, he looked to be in his fifties, younger than when she’d met him.

The site was for a place called Clear Horizons Wellness Center. The website looked current, if not very professional. The design was shoddy, the font garish, and the logo—an orange sun on a blue horizon—looked like clip art. It was hard to tell exactly what kind of services the center offered.

Reading the “About” section didn’t help much. Dr. Oren Bellamy’s “proprietary therapeutic method” apparently had a 100 percent success rate when it came to curing a long list of “life-crippling ailments” such as addiction, phobias, anxiety, and depression, as well as facilitating weight loss, smoking cessation, and “moving past grief.”

Several clients testified: “It isn’t too much to say that Clear Horizons saved my life.”—Carol M. “Finally, something that works!”—Mike R. “I never thought I could get over losing my sister, but then I met Dr. Hart!”—Susan P.

The final testimonial was a video. Maya clicked on it, and an elderly man began to speak. He sat in what looked like a therapist’s office, in front of a window looking out on a forest. Serene music played in the background. “When my Diane died,” he said, “I thought I might as well die too. Figured what was the point?” The man smiled, his eyes dreamy and unfocused. Maya felt her blood curdle. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Dr. Hart,” the man said. “Dr. Hart helped me go on living.”