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your meds?”
    “Is that what this is? Checking up? Spying on me? You’re always spying on me .”
    “I’m not spying, Richard.”
    “Bullshit. You come around all the time, asking questions.”
    She often stopped by, just to be sure he was okay. She drove him to the psychiatrist at the clinic for his weekly sessions. She dropped off his prescriptions.
    “Goddamned doctor sent you here, didn’t he? Fucker’s never trusted me.”
    “No one sent me. I’m just worried about you.”
    “I’m taking the damn meds.”
    He was on olanzapine, an antidepressant. When taking the drug, he displayed hand tremors and tics of the mouth and eyebrows. She wasn’t seeing those side effects today.
    That was the trouble with treating schizophrenia. The patient was his own worst enemy. Richard was too paranoid to dose himself on a regular basis. He got to thinking the meds were poison.
    If he were in a supervised environment, he would have to take the pills. But she couldn’t have him committed unless he’d been determined to be a danger to himself or others. Otherwise, he could check himself out of an institution at any time.
    Besides, there were times when he was lucid. Those times gave her hope, even though objectively she knew that schizophrenia was cyclical, varying from dormancy to the more dangerous active phases.
    He appeared to be in an active phase now.
    “It’s important to stay on your dosage, Richard.”
    “You don’t have to tell me.”
    “I just hope you aren’t —”
    “I said, you don’t have to tell me !”
    Nothing would be gained by bullying him. If she came on too strong, he would simply retreat further. The trick was to speak slowly, to be gentle and supportive. And not to let him see how much it hurt her to be here with him.
    “The manager says your rent is overdue,” she said.
    “Fuck him.”
    “It’s March fourth. You’re supposed to pay on the first of the month. We’ve talked about this.”
    “Talk, talk, all you ever do is talk.”
    “We can set up automatic payments from your bank account, the way we discussed —”
    “I don’t want any damn computers digging around in my money. They’ll steal it. Like you want to.”
    “I don’t want your money, Richard.”
    “Like hell you don’t.” He jerked away from her, shoulders hunching. “That’s all you care about. It’s the only reason you’re here.”
    Richard, still unaffected by the disease when their mother died, had inherited the liquid assets and family papers. By now he should have been ruled incompetent to handle the money, but she knew that if she ever tried, it would only exacerbate his paranoia. Anyway, there wasn’t a lot of money left.
    The thought of the family documents in his possession raised a possibility in her mind. “Did you ever look through those old papers? The ones Mom passed down to you?”
    “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”
    “Was there anything in there about our great-grandfather?”
    “Who cares about him? He’s dead, dead as a door nail, dead and buried.”
    The word dead reverberated in her, eliciting a series of sympathetic vibrations that brought up images of the skeletons in the crypt. “I know he’s dead, but...did any of the documents say when he moved into the house? Was he the original owner?”
    He gave her a shrewd look. “Lots of questions. Why so curious?”
    “I found something in the cellar that may have belonged to him.”
    “Found what?”
    “It’s not important.”
    “So it’s a secret .”
    “Richard …”
    He picked up a pair of scissors from a table. Large scissors with long sharp blades. He worked the handles, snipping at the air.
    “You’re always keeping secrets from me,” he said, his voice sliding into a lower register, a dangerous rasp. “Hiding things behind my back.”
    She stayed very still, trying not to fixate on the scissors. “Do you remember anything about our great grandfather? Anything at all?”
    He kept opening and shutting the scissors,