There was a brusque quality to each contact, and more than once he was dismissed sharply. There were more than a few terse “What the hell is this all about?” questions, to which he lied that a former patient had somehow managed to obtain a list of his relatives’ names and he was concerned that they might be contacted. He left out the possibility that someone might be facing a threat, which, he wondered was probably the biggest lie of all.

It was already approaching ten p.m., which was closing in on his bedtime and he still had more than two dozen names on the list. So far, he had been unable to discern anything enough out of the ordinary in any of the lives he’d checked to warrant further investigation. But, at the same time, he was doubtful of his own questioning abilities. The odd vagueness of Rumplestiltskin’s letter made him fear that he might have simply missed the connection. And, it was equally possible that in any one of the brief conversations he’d experienced that evening that the person contacted by the letter writer had not told Ricky the truth. And, mingled in with the phone calls had been several frustrating nonanswers. Three times he’d had to leave stilted and cryptic messages on answering machines.

He refused to allow himself the belief that the letter delivered that day had been a mere charade, although that would have been nice. His back had stiffened up. He had not eaten and was hungry. He had a headache. He rubbed a hand through his hair, and then stroked his eyes before dialing the next number, feeling a sort of exhaustion that bordered on tension pounding behind his temples. He considered the pain of his headache to be a small penance for the realization that he was being greeted with: that he was isolated and estranged from the majority of his family.

The wages of neglect, Ricky thought to himself, as he readied to dial the twenty-first name on the list provided by Rumplestiltskin.