Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [244]
CHAPTER 32
The minute Maggie walked into Dr. James Kernan’s office she felt like a nineteen-year-old college student again. The feelings of confusion, wonder and intimidation all came back to her in a rush of sights and smells. His office, set in the Wilmington Towers in Washington, D.C., and no longer on the University of Virginia’s campus, still looked and smelled the same.
Immediately, her nostrils were accosted by stale cigar smoke, old leather and Ben-Gay rubbing ointment. The tiny space was littered with the same strange paraphernalia. A human brain’s dissected frontal lobe bulged in a mason jar filled with formaldehyde. The jar acted as a makeshift bookend, ironically holding up such texts as Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and what Maggie knew to be a rare first edition of Alice In Wonderland. Of the three, the last seemed most appropriate for the professor of psychology who easily conjured up images of the Mad Hatter.
On the mahogany credenza across the room were antique instruments, their shapes and points intriguing until they were recognized as surgical instruments once used to perform lobotomies. On the wall behind the matching mahogany desk were black-and-white photographs of the procedure. Another equally disturbing photograph included a young woman undergoing shock treatment. The woman’s empty eyes and resigned posture beneath the ominous iron equipment had always reminded Maggie more of an execution than a medical treatment. Sometimes she questioned how she could be involved in a profession that, at one time, could be so brutal while pretending to cure the ailments of the psyche.
Kernan, however, embraced the eccentricities of their profession. His office was simply an extension of the strange little man. A man as notorious for his crude jokes about “nutcases” as he was for his own version of shock treatment, which he had perfected on his students.
The man loved mind games and could lure and trick a person into them without warning. One moment he would drill an unprepared freshman with rapid-fire questions, not allowing the poor student to even answer. The next minute he’d be in a corner of the classroom, standing silently with his face to the wall. Then still later, he’d climb atop a desk and lecture while teetering from one desk to another, his small, stocky but aging body threatening to send him falling while he lectured and did a balancing act at the same time. Even the se-niors in his classes had no idea what to expect of their odd professor. And this was the man the FBI trusted to determine her sanity?
Maggie heard the familiar clomp-squeak of his footsteps outside the office. Instinctively, she sat up straight and stopped her browsing. Even the man’s footsteps transformed her into an incompetent college kid.
Dr. Kernan entered his office unceremoniously and shuffled to his desk without recognizing or acknowledging Maggie. He plopped down into the leather chair, sending it into a series of creaks. Maggie couldn’t be sure that all the creaks came from the chair and not the old man’s joints.
He began rummaging through stacks of papers. She watched quietly, her hands folded in her lap. Kernan looked as though he had shrunk since the last time she had seen him, over ten years ago. Back then he had seemed ancient, but now his shoulders were hunched, his hands trembled and were speckled with brown spots. His hair, just as white as she remembered, was thin and feathery, revealing more brown spots on his forehead and the top of his head. Tufts of white hair protruded from his ears.
Finally he appeared to find what he had been so desperately in search of. He struggled to open the tin box of breath mints, took two without offering any to Maggie and snapped the container shut.
“O’Dell, Margaret,” he said to himself, still not acknowledging her presence.
He sorted through the rubble again. “Class of 1990.” He stopped and thumbed through a folder.