“Lithium requires a lot more patient cooperation than Sonia will provide. You can’t drink, you have to have regular blood work, and it’s dangerous to your whole body if you go off it cold turkey. Anyway, it’s not used much these days. We have her on one of the new generation of atypical antipsychotics—Depakote, if you want to know. You shouldn’t drink alcohol with Depakote either, but it doesn’t stay in the system the way lithium does, and you can’t go into shock the way you can when you stop lithium abruptly.”

I described how I’d found Sonia, barely breathing under the iron staircase leading up to the floor above the Lion’s Pride. “Would that be the interaction of Depakote with alcohol?”

He shrugged again. “It could be. She’s not in good shape, and thirty years of antipsychotics, even with her going off them for five years when she went out east . . . it makes her more vulnerable to side effects. And her drinking, of course. When the police officer came this morning to tell me Sonia was hospitalized, I phoned the ward head and the on-call doctor, but there’s not a lot they can do until they get the tox screen back, except see that she remains hydrated and breathing.”

“You keep taking her back here because of Chesnitz and Kiel?” I ventured.

He nodded. “It’s not fair to the other residents. We get complaints in group meetings, and I try to be honest, not to sugarcoat it. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing for them to see that everyone with a job faces unpleasant choices. Or that’s my rationalization.”

We sat silent for a minute. I was watching the birds in the grasses, but Marx was staring at the bulldozers. His jaw worked in rhythm with their teeth, as if he’d like to chew something or someone up the way they were chewing the ground.

He roused himself at length. “I have another group-therapy session in five minutes. Do you have what you came for?”

“Sonia talked on the phone about seeing my missing pair at a cemetery where her truelove died. I need to know where that cemetery is. The cops told me there are five in town.”

Marx drained his coffee cup and smacked it on the table. “Forget it: that’s one of her persistent rants. Fantasies. A lover who was murdered by her father, or one of her father’s colleagues, or the military, or the FBI. She journals about him, she talks about him—it gets none of us anywhere. You’d be a new audience for her, so she was probably trying to seduce you into listening to her by giving you what you want—a sighting of your runaways. I’m sure she made it up.”