Darker Than You Think (26 page)

If
she could answer even one of those restless questions that stalked
the darkness of his thoughts, her answer might be the touchstone he
needed to distinguish between fact and whisky-bred illusion.

Passing
the office, he drove on to the foot of Center Street and north on the
new river road. Glennhaven occupied a hundred well-kept acres on the
hills above the river, four miles out of Clarendon. Trees still gaudy
with autumn screened the hospital buildings and the occupational
therapy shops away from the highway.

Barbee
parked on the gravel lot behind the long main building, an impressive
three-story prison of yellow brick. He walked around the building
into the cool, dim-lit hush of a wide reception room. Austere and
opulent as the foyer of a bank, it seemed a temple to the new god
Freud. The slim girl sitting at a switchboard behind a massive
mahogany desk was its virginal priestess. He gave her his card.

"I've
come to see Mrs. Rowena Mondrick," he said.

Her
fragile loveliness reminded him of a portrait of some princess of old
Egypt that he had seen in the university museum. Her eyes and hair
were very black; her skin was pale ivory, her brow very low, her
skull oddly long. She leafed swiftly through a black-bound book, and
gave him a dreamy smile.

"I'm
sorry, sir, but I haven't your name." Her voice was a sleepy
caress. "All visits to our patients must be arranged in advance,
you see, through the doctor in charge of the case. If you wish to
leave your request—"

"I
want to see Mrs. Mondrick, now."

"I'm
very sorry, sir." Her slow smile was hauntingly exotic. "I'm
afraid that would be impossible to arrange, today. If you wish to
return—"

"Who
is her doctor?"

"One
moment, sir." Her slender ivory fingers riffled gracefully
through the black book. "Mrs. Rowena Mondrick was admitted at
eight this morning, and she's under—" The girl's limpid
voice quivered melodiously, intoning the name of a minor deity.
"She's under Dr. Glenn."

"Then
let me see him."

"Sorry,
sir," she purred. "But Dr. Glenn never sees anyone without
an appointment."

Barbee
caught his breath, and stifled an angry impulse to stalk past the
girl and see what happened. She was watching him with dark misty
eyes, and he knew she could call enough husky attendants to preserve
the temple's solemn sanctity.

He
gulped uneasily, trying to swallow the dry apprehension in his
throat. Glennhaven, he knew, was rated as one of the country's finest
psychiatric hospitals. There was no good reason, he told himself, for
his old dim terror of all mental institutions.

"Mrs.
Mondrick is a friend of mine," he told the girl. "I only
want to find out how she is."

"Any
discussion of our patients is against the rules," that fragile
priestess cooed. "With Dr. Glenn himself in charge of the case,
however, you may be certain that Mrs. Mondrick is receiving the best
care possible. If you wish to ask permission for a visit—"

"No,"
he muttered. "Thanks."

He
fled from the girl's exotic smile and that well-ordered, ruthless
hush. The blind woman was not a sacrificial victim imprisoned in this
efficiently conducted twentieth-century temple, he tried to tell
himself. Actually, Glenn was a distinguished psychiatrist; his
treatment would surely be kind and skillful.

Barbee
was glad to get outside again, however. He filled his lungs
thankfully with the cold autumn air, and hurried back to his car. One
more effort had failed, but there was still April Bell. Eagerness
hurried his breathing when he thought of that vivid redhead. It was
almost time to call her hotel. He was going to return the jade wolf
and find out, somehow, whether April Bell had dreamed—

Sight
of Miss Ulford broke his thought. A gray little wisp of a woman, the
nurse was sitting on a bench at the bus stop on the corner. He pulled
to the curb and offered to drive her home.

"Thank
you so much, Mr. Barbee." Smiling gratefully with yellow false
teeth, she got in the car beside him. "I just missed the bus,"
she said plaintively, "and I don't know when the next one is. I
suppose I could have asked the girl to call a taxi—but I hardly
know what I'm doing, I'm so upset about poor Rowena."

"How
is she?" Barbee whispered huskily.

"Acutely
disturbed—that's what Dr. Glenn wrote on her chart." Worry
rasped in the nurse's dry nasal voice. "She's still
hysterical—she didn't want me to leave, but Glenn said I
must—and they're giving her sedatives to calm her."

"What—"
Barbee's hoarse voice caught. "What seems to be the trouble?"

"She
has this obsessive dread, as Glenn calls it, and this queer
compulsion."

"Huh?"
Barbee frowned uneasily. "About what?"

"You
know how she always was about silver? Glenn calls that an obsession,
and it's worse after last night. You see, we took off that quaint old
silver jewelry this morning when we were dressing her scratches and
bruises from falling on the pavement, and she was perfectly frantic,
poor dear, when she found she didn't have it. Dr. Glenn let me go
back to the house and bring her beads and bracelets, and she thanked
me like
I
had
saved her life."

Barbee
tried not to show his shudder.

"This
compulsion?" he asked faintly. "What's that?"

"I
don't
understand it." The bent little nurse looked up at him with sad,
bewildered eyes. "She wants to see Mr. Sam Quain. There is
something she must tell him, she says, but she's quite unreasonable
about it. She won't use the telephone. She won't write a note. She
won't even trust me with her message. She did beg me to get him to
come to see her—she wanted me to tell him she had a warning for
him—but of course she isn't allowed any visitors."

Barbee
tried to swallow the harsh dryness in his throat and decided not to
ask any more questions, for fear the nurse should notice his own
disturbance. The car, he discovered, was still in second gear. He
shifted nervously into high, driving back to Clarendon along the
river road.

"I'm
so terribly sorry for poor Rowena," that plaintive whine went
on. "Blind and all, and her husband hardly cold in the ground.
She's still so dreadfully upset. She kept begging us to look for
Turk—her big dog, you know. She let it out last night, and it
didn't come back. Now she says she needs it with her, to guard her in
the dark. Glenn kept asking her what she's afraid of, but she would
never say."

Barbee
sat taut and cold, shivering at the wheel. He dared not look at the
nurse again. He was staring straight ahead but his eyes must have
been blind to the road. He heard Miss Ulford's stifled shriek, and
saw a huge truck looming close ahead on the narrow Deer Creek bridge.
Somehow, he had got to driving far too fast. He whipped around the
truck on screaming tires and grazed safely past the concrete railings
and slowed beyond, still shuddering.

"Sorry,"
he whispered to the frightened nurse. "I was thinking about
Rowena."

It
was fortunate, he thought, that Miss Ulford couldn't know what he was
thinking. He left her at the shabby old house on University Avenue
and drove back to town. It was almost noon, and he waited at his
desk, fumbling impatiently with the Walraven clippings, for the time
to call the Trojan Arms again.

All
his breathless eagerness to see April Bell again seemed to dry up,
however, when he took hold of the telephone. He stubbornly refused to
believe that she was anything more dangerous than any other alluring
redhead, but he couldn't stop the panic that possessed him. Abruptly,
he put the receiver back.

Better
wait until he got hold of himself, he decided. Maybe he'd be smarter
not to call at all, but just drop in unannounced. He wanted to be
watching her face when he mentioned that white jade pin.

It
was time for lunch, but he wasn't hungry. He stopped in a drugstore
for a dose of bicarbonate, and in the Mint Bar for a shot of bourbon.
That picked him up, and he went to the offices of Walraven's law
firm, hoping to escape all his tormenting uncertainties for a little
while and so find a fresh perspective on the alarming riddle of April
Bell.

The
bland-faced politician gave him another drink, and started telling
dirty stories about his political rivals.

Colonel
Walraven's genial good humor evaporated, however, when Barbee
mentioned sewage bonds. He suddenly recalled a pressing appointment,
and Barbee went back to his desk.

He
tried to work, but he couldn't put that guarded box out of his
thoughts, or Sam Quain's unhappy threat. He couldn't forget Rowena
Mondrick in that haunting dream, clutching her silver knife as she
stumbled blindly after him. He couldn't stop wondering what she
wanted to tell Sam Quain. And a green-eyed wolf bitch kept grinning
at him from the blank page in his typewriter.

There
was no use stalling any longer, he decided suddenly. He shrugged off
that irrational dread of April Bell as he hastily put away the
Walraven file—and a new fear seized him, that he had waited too
long.

For
it was almost two o'clock. She should have been gone from her
apartment hours ago, he knew—if she were actually a reporter on
the
Call.
He
hurried down to his car, went back to his own apartment to get the
white jade pin, and drove too fast out North Main Street to the
Trojan Arms.

It
didn't surprise him to see Preston Troy's big blue sedan in the
parking lot behind the apartment-hotel. One of Troy's more gorgeous
ex-secretaries, he knew, had an apartment on the top floor.

Barbee
didn't stop at the desk—he didn't want to give April Bell
warning enough to make up any more tales about Aunt Agatha. He meant
to drop the little jade wolf in her hand, and watch the expression in
her greenish eyes. He didn't wait for the elevator but climbed the
stairs to the second floor.

Still,
he wasn't surprised when he saw Troy's squat figure waddling down the
corridor ahead of him—the ex-secretary, he supposed, must have
moved down into a new apartment. He started looking for the numbers.
Here was
2
-A,
and
2
-B;
the next should be
2
-C—

His
breath went out.

For
Troy had stopped ahead of him, at the door of
2
-C.
Barbee stood slack-jawed, staring. The heavy little man in the
sharp-creased double-breasted suit and shrieking purple tie didn't
knock or touch the buzzer. He opened the door with his own key.
Barbee caught the haunting velvet huskiness of April Bell's voice,
intimate and low, and the door closed again.

Barbee
stumbled back to the elevator and punched the down button savagely.
He felt sick, as if from a blow in the stomach. It was true, he
reminded himself, that he had no claim whatever upon April Bell. She
had mentioned other friends, he remembered, besides Aunt Agatha.
Obviously she couldn't live here on her newspaper earnings.