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banks of phone lines, "You think we can handle all this? John's going to turn us loose alone after tonight."
    "I hope so," I answered. And I did devoutly hope so. Suicides-in-progress seemed to make up only about ten percent of the calls coming in, but the range of crises was formidable. Would I say the right thing? Do the right thing?
    As it turned out, we made a good team. Working side by side in the cluttered two rooms on the top floor of the building, we seemed to be able to communicate in emergencies without even having to speak. If one of us got a caller on the line who was actually threatening suicide, we would signal the other to call the phone company and put a trace on the line.
    The wait always seemed endless. In 1971 it took almost an hour to get a trace and an address if we had no hint about the area of town from which the call was coming. The one of us who was on the line with the would-be suicide would attempt to maintain a calm, caring tone while the other raced around the offices making calls to get help to the caller. We had callers who became unconscious from overdoses many times, but we always managed to keep the lines open. Then there would be the welcome sound of Medic I crews

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    breaking in, sounds of their voices in the room with the caller, and finally, the phone would be picked up and we would hear "It's O.K. We've got him; we're on the way to Harborview."
    If, as many people believe today, Ted Bundy took lives, he also saved lives. I know he did, because I was there when he did it. I can picture him today as clearly as if it were only yesterday, see him hunched over the phone, talking steadily, reassuringly-see him look up at me, shrug, and grin. I can hear him agreeing with an elderly woman that it must have been beautiful indeed when Seattle was lit only by gas lights, hear the infinite patience and caring in his voice, see him sigh and roll his eyes while he listened to a penitent alcoholic. He was never brusque, never hurried.
    Ted's voice was a strange mixture of a slightly western drawl and the precise clipped phraseology of an English accent. I might describe it as courtly.
    Shut off from the night outside-with doors locked to protect us from the occasional irrational caller who tried to break in-there was an insular feel to those two offices where we worked. The two of us were all alone in the building, connected to the outside world only by the phone lines. Beyond the walls, we could hear sirens screaming as police units and Medic I rigs raced up Pine Street a block away toward the county hospital. With the blackness outside our windows broken only by the lights in the harbor far below us, the sound of rain and sleet against the panes, those sirens seemed to be the only thing reminding us that there was a world of people out there. We were locked in a boiler room of other people's crises.
    I don't know why we became such close friends so rapidly. Perhaps it was because we dealt with so many life-and-death situations together, making our Tuesday nights intense situations that bound us together the way soldiers in battle often are. Perhaps it was the isolation, and the fact that we were constantly talking to other people about their most intimate problems. •
    And so, when the quiet nights came, the nights when the moon was no longer full, when the welfare money had run out with no money left to buy liquor, and when the street people and the callers seemed to be enjoying a spate of serenity, Ted and I talked for hours to each other. 26

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
    On the surface, at least, it seemed that I had more problems than Ted did. He was one of those rare people who listen with full attention, who evince a genuine caring by their very stance. You could tell things to Ted that you might never tell anyone else.
    Most of the Crisis Clinic volunteers gave our time because we had endured crises ourselves, tragedies that made us more able to understand those who called