The Seal of Solomon (Alfred Kropp #2)(2)

He nodded.

“I haven’t told anybody since I came home,” I said.

He promised me anything I told him would be held in strictest confidence, so strictly confidentially I told him everything.

Then he promptly sent me into the waiting room and I listened as he picked up the phone and called the social worker assigned to my case. He had left his door open, so I could hear almost every word.

“Clinically depressed,” I heard him say. “Borderline psychotic with delusions of grandeur and paranoid fantasies . . . the death of his mother when he was twelve . . . the murder of his only surviving relative six months ago . . . issues with his father abandoning his mother before he was born . . . Alfred believes he is descended from the knight Sir Lancelot. . . . Yes, that Lancelot, and that he was involved with an international spy organization in an operation to rescue Excalibur from what he calls ‘Agents of Darkness.’ He also reports encounters with angels, particularly Michael the archangel, whom he believes took the Sword to heaven following Alfred’s own death and resurrection as ‘the Master of the Sword.’ He also believes the Sword wounded him, endowing his blood with magical healing powers . . .”

Then he said, “Intensive therapy to work out his issues of abandonment, guilt, and betrayal. . . . I’m recommending a CAT scan and an MRI to rule out any physiological abnormality. . . .Yes, such as lesions or tumors. I’d also like to start him on Thorazine, which has been proven effective with paranoid schizophrenia.”

I couldn’t believe it. He was telling the social worker everything, not five minutes after he promised he wouldn’t, and he was a doctor. If I couldn’t trust somebody like him, who could I trust? I felt lonelier than ever.

When Betty Tuttle, my foster mom, showed up to drive me home, Dr. Benderhall took her into his office, closed the door, and when she came out thirty minutes later, it looked like he had hit her upside the head with a baseball bat.

“I’m not crazy,” I told her in the car on the drive to the pharmacy to fill the prescription for the crazy drug.

“Oh, no, no,” she said, bobbing her head up and down. “Just a bump in the road, Alfred. Just a bump in the road.”

I overheard the Tuttles arguing late that night. Horace wanted to get rid of me.

“He’ll lose it completely one day, Betty,” he said. “Murder us in our beds!”

“The doctor said—”

“I don’t care what the doctor said!”

“Maybe it’s something simple,” Betty said. “Like a brain tumor.”

“Listen to you: ‘Something simple like a brain tumor’! I say we send him back to Human Services. I didn’t sign up to be a foster parent to a lunatic!”

Every day I palmed the pill and slipped it into my pocket. Then, after dinner, I flushed it down the toilet. I thought about that a lot—if I was crazy. If everyone around you thinks you’re crazy, does that make you crazy, even though you might not be?

I thought about proving to Dr. Benderhall I wasn’t making it up by putting him on the phone with Abigail Smith, the field operative with OIPEP, who had given me her number and told me to call anytime.

And I did call her about six months ago, after I got home from England. She asked how school was going and I told her not very good, and she said working for OIPEP was more like a calling than a job. I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that.

“Normally we won’t consider anyone under twenty,” she told me, which made me wonder why she gave me her card in the first place. “And, of course, the training is quite rigorous.”

I guessed she meant I was too young and too out of shape.

“So what should I do?” I asked.

“Alfred, I know it’s difficult for you now, trying to return to a normal life after what you’ve experienced. I told you we were interested in your development and we are. Very much so.” Then she told me to stay in school, work on my grades, and maybe they’d be in touch after I graduated.

I never called back after that and she didn’t contact me. I guessed my jet-setting, world-saving days were over, and in a way I was glad and not glad at the same time.

I was wrong about that too.

2

On the way home from school, I saw the bald baby-faced man from the video store again, this time through the back window of the school bus. I always sat in the last row, because if I sat anywhere else I inevitably got popped in the back of the head with a paper wad or spitball. One time somebody even threw their dirty gym shorts at me. I bet that Kropping earned them at least four points.

Mr. Baby-Face was driving a silver Lexus ES, so clean and polished, you could see the sky and clouds and trees reflected in the hood.

After I got off the bus, I waited to see what Mr. Baby-Face would do. He just kept driving; he didn’t even glance in my direction.

You’re losing it, Kropp, I told myself. Maybe Dr. Benderhall was right. Maybe I was delusional.

I walked two blocks up Broadway to the Tuttles’ house. Neither of them had a job: they were professional foster parents. At any given time there were six or seven kids stuffed into their little old house.

My current roomie was a skinny kid named Kenny, with a face that looked like it had been shoved into a vise and squeezed. His eyes were very close together and sort of crossed, so he always looked angry or confused or both. I didn’t know his background but, like most of the Tuttles’ foster kids, it couldn’t have been very pleasant.