Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [7]
Dr. Polk said he would take care of everything.
As promised, Felix Polk wrote a letter to the court explaining why Susan Bolling had run away and received permission for her to come home. In exchange, the court mandated that Susan return to her therapy with Dr. Polk and attend a continuation school to complete her ninth grade studies.
Ironically, the psychologist whom Susan had been sent to see for a simple evaluation had somehow become the person responsible for her freedom.
Felix Polk, it seemed, was going to be a powerful force in Susan’s life.
Chapter Two
MORTAL COMBAT
On the night of October 13, 2002, floodlights broke the darkness and illuminated chunks of the brick walkway that led to the guesthouse of the Polk’s rambling Orinda residence. Set high in the hills on a steep slope, the house had several levels—with two bedrooms, including the master suite, on the top floor. Another bedroom and a laundry area were one floor below. The main living area and a home office were situated on the first floor.
It was sometime after 10 PM when forty-four-year-old Susan Bolling Polk climbed the flagstone steps to the guesthouse, built adjacent to a free-form swimming pool. Flashlight in hand, she entered the small redwood cottage through the living room door. Inside, her husband of twenty-one years sat reclined in an oversized leather chair. It was a brisk night, yet Felix was clad only in a pair of black briefs, seemingly engrossed in a novel, The Company, about the CIA.
At seventy, the doctor was still in decent shape; he was tanned and toned from the long jogs that were part of his regular routine. Tired and worn from his nearly 800-mile roundtrip drive to Los Angeles that day, remarkably he was still awake when Susan came to speak to him that night. Aside from the redwood paneling, the rectangular living room of the pool house looked somewhat like Felix’s old Berkeley office on Ashby Avenue, with a couple of leather chairs and a busy tapestry rug of reds and blues. The couple had done little to update the sprawling property since purchasing it for nearly $2 million eighteen months earlier. In an attempt to realize Felix’s dream of living in the now-wealthy suburb of Orinda, the family had overextended themselves financially and the monetary pressure was adding to the already stressful home life.
Within minutes of Susan’s entry into the cottage, the couple was arguing—a common occurrence ever since Susan announced four years earlier that she wanted to leave the marriage.
“You’d better think of the consequences,” Felix had warned her in an annoyed voice at the time. “You’ll never get the kids! You’re not fit!”
Her husband’s angry retort hit a nerve with Susan. His words were like an assault. Felix had always been a kind of Svengali to Susan, and she believed everything he told her. She thought that he had the power to commit her if he wanted to, and for Susan, there was nothing scarier than being put in a mental institution. She had already been committed once to the Kaiser mental facility when she was fifteen—and she’d never go back again.
Susan had spent much of her life trying to keep her anxiety and panic under control. She had managed to run a household, raise three boys, and take care of the family’s personal finances, yet throughout their marriage, Felix repeatedly threatened to play his trump card—to proclaim that she had a mental illness and have her locked up. It was never clear to Susan that she was sick, but she was unwilling to take the chance that such a diagnosis might be believed.
The Polks’ oldest son, Adam, who was currently a sophomore at the University