Mitch looked at her and felt completely helpless and frustrated. He didn’t know what to do but it was obvious that he couldn’t just ignore things and hope for the situation to improve by itself.

“I really think you should see someone about this, Carolyn, and soon.”

“What good would that do? No shrink is going to bring them back or make this pain go away. This isn’t like the Dr. Phil show, where you just get fixed like magic!” She looked at Mitch and his heart sank because he knew she was right, but he was scared, so he insisted and finally she agreed to get some counseling.

Their family doctor recommended she see the psychiatrist who was affiliated with the group, and the following week she had her first session. He was a thoughtful man, who listened carefully to her story, nodded sagely, responded with an occasional hmm …, and constantly jotted down notes. At the end of the session, he set up another appointment and sent her off with prescriptions for a cocktail of antidepressants, sleeping pills, and anti-anxiety medications. Carolyn filled the prescriptions and, when she arrived home, lined up the bottles in a neat row in front of her on the kitchen table. It looked as if she was starting a small pharmacy of her own.

If Mitch thought Carolyn was leading a double life by sinking deeper into depression while putting on a happy face for everyone in the world but him, he would have been astonished had he been able to step back and honestly see the insidious influence the murders were having on him. But that was hardly possible, because the darkness was creeping into his life in imperceptible increments, unbeknownst to him, in much the same way it had crept into Danny’s life. They say you are only as sick as your secrets, so clearly Mitch was sinking fast, because his secrets were multiplying at warp speed and were hell-bent on leading him to destruction.