Stone Barrington 06-11 by Stuart Woods Read Free Book Online

landing, waving him up. Stone climbed the floating staircase and was greeted by a distinguished-looking man in his sixties, wearing a well-cut suit. Stone thought he would make an impressive witness, if it came to that.
    “Mr. Barrington? I’m Jim Judson.”
    “Please, call me Stone.”
    “Thanks. Come into my office, and let’s talk for a moment, before we see Arrington.”
    Stone followed him into a large, sunny office and took a seat on a sofa, while Judson sat across from him in a comfortable chair.
    “I want to tell you what I know, thus far, so that you’ll be prepared when you see Arrington,” he said.
    “Please do.”
    “Arrington was brought here by an ambulance on Saturday evening, at the request of her personal physician, Dr. Lansing Drake, a well-known Beverly Hills doctor. She was alternately hysterical, disoriented, and lethargic. Dr. Drake explained briefly what had occurred at her residence, and he and I agreed that she should be sedated. I injected her with twenty milligrams of Valium, and she slept peacefully through the night.
    “When she awoke on Sunday morning she seemed quite calm and normal, and she immediately asked that you be contacted. She said that you were on an island in the Caribbean called St. Mark’s, and that she was supposed to meet you there. My staff made repeated attempts to contact you there, without success. I reassured her that we would find you, and she seemed to accept that. She slept much of the morning, had a good lunch. When she questioned why she was here, I said that she had collapsed at home, and that I thought it a good idea for her to remain here for observation for a day or two. She accepted that.
    “Late in the afternoon, her mother arrived, having flown in from Virginia. I was in the room when they met, and it became immediately apparent that Arrington was very disoriented. She seemed not to understand that she was married to Vance Calder, saying that she was supposed to interview him, but that she had changed her mind and had decided to meet you in St. Mark’s instead. When her mother mentioned Peter, her son, she became disturbed again, but after a few moments seemed to understand that she had a son and that Calder was the father. Her mother, quite wisely, turned the conversation to trivial things, and after a few minutes she left. Arrington immediately went to sleep again.”
    “And what do you make of all this?” Stone asked.
    “It seems clear that Arrington is undergoing periods of anterograde amnesia, brought on by the shock of her husband’s murder. Anterograde amnesia is a condition during which the great mass of old memories, prior to a certain point, remain intact, while the subject does not have access to more recent memories, or those memories are intermittent or scrambled—this, as opposed to retrograde amnesia, during which the subject may lose memory of all prior events, even her identity.”
    “Forgive me, Jim—are you a psychologist?”
    “A psychiatrist. This is, primarily, a psychiatric clinic, although we do some work with patients who have substance abuse problems.”
    “Is Arrington likely to recover all her memory?”
    “Yes, if the basis for her amnesia is emotional, not physical, and that seems the case. Her mother had spoken with her on the previous Sunday and said that at that time she seemed perfectly normal. If she should show signs of not recovering her memory, then I think a brain scan would be in order, to rule out a physical basis for her problem.”
    “Does she know that Vance is dead?”
    “That’s hard to say; I haven’t asked her that, directly, and when the police came here, I refused to allow her to be questioned.”
    “You did the right thing,” Stone said.
    “Arrington seems to have an idea that something may be wrong, but she tends to divert the conversation if it heads in a direction she doesn’t want it to go. She may very well be, unconsciously, protecting herself emotionally from a situation that