Deep Water (13 page)

       "I can't find his pulse!" Melinda said hysterically. "Call Dr. Franklin!"

       "I'll call him!" Evelyn ran toward the house.

       "That may not mean anything," Phil said quickly. "Go ahead." He was feeling Charley's left wrist.

       Vic was on his knees facing Charley, lifting the bony, thin-skinned rib cage, letting it go, lifting from under the armpits. "Does this look right, Horace?"

       "It looks right," Horace said tensely. He knelt beside Vic, watching Charley's face. "You're supposed to keep the mouth open," he said, reaching unhesitantly as a doctor into Charley's mouth, pulling the tongue forward.

       "Do you think we should hold him up and drain the water out of him?" Phil asked.

       "No, you don't do that," Horace said. "You don't waste time with that."

       Vic lifted the ribs higher. He had never tried to give artificial respiration before, but he had read about it very recently in the 'World Almanac', one evening when Charley had been at the house, Vic happened to remember. But he remembered, too, that the book advised artificial respiration if the breathing had stopped and the heart was still beating, but Charley's heart was not beating. "Do you think," Vic said between strokes, "we should turn him over and try to massage his heart?" and though he thought he was calm, he felt it was a stupid, excited question, and just the kind of question he might have been expected to ask.

       "No," Horace said.

       "You're not doing it 'right'!" Melinda shrieked on her knees beside Vic.

       "Why? What's the matter?" Phil asked.

       "Do you think I should get a blanket?" Mary's high-pitched voice asked.

       "You're not doing it 'right'!" Melinda began to cry, to moan between the jagged sobs.

       "Let me take over when you get tired, Vic," Phil said. He kept feeling for a pulse in the left wrist, but from his frightened face Vic knew that he had not felt a flutter.

       Evelyn came running back. "Dr. Franklin's coming right away. He's calling the hospital and they're sending an ambulance."

       "Don't you think we should get a blanket for him?" Mary said again.

       "All right, I'll get one," Evelyn said and went off to the house again.

       "What do you think happened?" Phil asked. "Cramp?" Nobody answered.

       Melinda moaned, rocking from side to side, her eyes shut.

       "I wonder if he hit his head? Was he diving, Vic?" Phil asked. "No. He was paddling around—" Vic released the unelastic ribs—"in the shallow part."

       "He seemed all right?" Mary asked.

       "Yes," Vic said.

       Then Phil pushed Vic away. "Let me take over."

       A siren wailed in a slow, mournful rise and fall, came closer, and wailed still lower and stopped. Phil went on intently with the lifting and dropping of the ribs and shoulders. A couple of white-clad interns ran across the lawn toward them, carrying an oxygen tank.

       The light on the scene was ghastly—the dismal, blanching light of dawn. Nobody could come back to life in a light like this, Vic thought. It was a light for dying. Watching the interns bustling about, asking questions, recommencing the artificial respiration, Vic realized his own fatigue. He seemed to awaken from a trance. He realized for the first time that, if De Lisle were revived, he was doomed. That hadn't even crossed his mind while he had been giving him artificial respiration. He had simply done the best he could with the artificial respiration, he was sure of that, made the same movements he would have made if it had been Horace under his hands. He had gone through the proper motions, but he hadn't 'wanted' De Lisle to come back to life. Then, for a moment, it seemed unreal that he had drowned De Lisle, seemed like something he had imagined rather than done. Vic began to watch De Lisle's face intently, as all the others did—all the others except Melinda, who still wailed and whimpered, still stared into space in front of her as if she were out of her mind.

       An intern shook his head in discouragement.

       Vic heard a door slam. Then Dr. Franklin, a spry, serious little man with gray hair—the doctor who had seen Trixie into the world and who had set broken arms, treated acute indigestion, lanced boils, prescribed diets for, and tested the blood pressures of all of them—hurried across the lawn with his little black bag.

       "You've been giving the artificial respiration since you called me?" he asked, feeling De Lisle's wrist, lifting one of his lids.

       "Since before," Evelyn said. "Since a few minutes before."

       Dr. Franklin, too, gave a displeased jerk of his head.

       "You don't think there's any hope?" Evelyn asked.

       Melinda moaned louder.

       "Doesn't look like it," Dr. Franklin replied in a cheerless voice. He was preparing an injection.

       "Oooooooh-hooo-oo-hooooo!" Melinda covered her face.

       Dr. Franklin, apparently used to emergency night calls and to what he found on them, paid absolutely no attention to her, though he would have, Vic thought, if it had been he who had drowned. Dr. Franklin would have had time for a word to a wife. He stuck the needle into De Lisle's arm.

       "We should know in a few minutes," Dr. Franklin said. "Otherwise—" He was holding De Lisle's left wrist.

       Phil stood up, moved a few feet away, then Evelyn came over to him. Horace and Mary joined them, as if they were compelled to relieve their tension by putting a little distance between themselves and the dead man. Vic bent and took Melinda gently by the arm, but she shook him off. Vic joined the others.

       Phil looked ashen, as if he were about to faint. "I suppose we could all use some coffee," he said, but nobody moved.

       Everybody was glancing back at the cluster of interns and doctor, at the body half covered by the steamer rug.

       "I'm afraid there's nothing we can do," Dr. Franklin said, standing up. "We'll take him to the hospital."

       "He's 'dead'!" Melinda screamed at them, and leaned back on her hands on the grass in a curiously relaxed position.

       Then, as they put De Lisle on a stretcher, she jumped to her feet. She wanted to go to the hospital. Vic and Phil had to restrain her physically. One of her fists caught Vic in the ear. Her fight tore her dress in front, and Vic saw one of her breasts quite bare, trembling like a maenad's breast in her fury. Vic had her elbows now, behind her. He released her, suddenly ashamed, and she bolted forward and collided with Phil, gave a shriek of pain, and held her nose. They guided her toward the house.

       When they got to the kitchen, Evelyn was coming toward t hem with a cup of coffee. "There's a couple of phenobarbs in it," 'she' said in a low voice to Vic.

       Melinda accepted the coffee with a kind of insane greediness and drank it off, although from its steaminess it must have been very hot. Her nose was bleeding, and her breast was still bare. Vic took off his toga and put it around her, held part of it against her nose, and she made a sudden wild swing at him and knocked some glasses and cups off the drainboard. Then she collapsed on a straight chair, dragging Vic, who had been trying to hold her, down with her. Vic's knee came down on a piece of glass. Then Melinda was suddenly quiet, her head back and her eyes staring up at the ceiling. The blood slid down her upper lip, and Vic blotted it with the toga until Evelyn came with some paper tissues and an ice cube for the back of her neck. Melinda gave no sign that she felt the ice cube against her hot skin.

        Vic glanced behind him. Horace and Mary stood together near the stove, Phil was in the middle of the kitchen, looking dazed and frightened, and it crossed Vic's mind that Phil would look guiltier than anyone else in the room if anyone suspected that De Lisle had been murdered and that one of them must have done it.

       "You don't suppose he wanted to kill himself, do you?" Phil asked Vic.

       Melinda's head came up. "Of course he didn't want to! Why should he want to with the whole 'world' at his feet and every—every gift and talent a man could ask for!"

       "What was he doing when you left the pool, Vic?" Phil asked. "He was paddling around. Floating on his back, I think."

       "He didn't say anything about the water being cold?" Evelyn asked.

       "No. I think he'd said earlier it was pretty chilly, but—"

       "'You' did it," Melinda said, looking at Vic. "I bet you hit him on the head and held him under."

       "Oh, Melinda!" Evelyn said, coming toward her. "Melinda, you're upset!"

       "'I bet you hit him and drowned him!'" Melinda said in a louder voice, throwing Evelyn's hands from her. "I'm going to call the hospital!" She jumped up.

       Phil caught her arm, but her momentum swung her against the refrigerator. "Melinda, don't do that! Not now!"

       "'Vic killed him. I know he did!'" Melinda shrieked, loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear her, though there were no houses for a quarter of a mile around. "He 'killed' him! Let me go!" She swung at Vic as he approached her, swung short, and then Horace stepped in, trying to catch one flailing wrist. "I'm going to ask them to look at his 'head'!" Then suddenly with one of her arms held by Phil, the other by Horace, Melinda was rigidly still, her wild hennaed head lifted, her wet eyes closed.

       "We'd better try to get her to bed here, Vic," Evelyn said. "What about Trixie? Will she be all right?"

       "She's with the Petersons. She'll be all right," Vic said.

       Horace had released his hold on Melinda's arm. He came toward Evelyn with a tired smile on his lips. "We'll take off, Evelyn—unless there's anything else we can do."

       "I don't guess there is, Horace. I think she could stand two more of these, don't you?" she asked him quietly, the phenobarbitals in her palm poised over another cup of coffee. "They're only quarter grains."

       "Absolutely," Horace said. He turned to Vic. "Good night, Vic. Call us, will you? Don't let—don't let anything get you down." He patted Vic's arm.

       In spite of his low voice, Melinda heard, broke her trancelike rigidity and shouted at Horace. "Get him down? He should be down! He should be at the bottom of that pool!"

       "Melinda!"

       "Melinda, stop it!" Phil said. "Here, drink this!"

       Melinda did not shout again, but it was nearly an hour before they got her to bed in the guest room upstairs.

       Phil called St. Joseph's Hospital in Wesley as soon as Melinda was quiet. They told him that Charles De Lisle was dead.

Chapter 10

Vic drove home with Melinda about noon. She did not say a word to him in the car. She had hardly said a word since she had come downstairs at eleven o'clock. Her eyes were puffy and she seemed still groggy from the sleeping pills. She had not put on any lipstick, and her mouth looked thinner, set in a straight line as she stared through the windshield. Vic left her at the house, put on a pair of slacks and a clean shirt, then drove to the Petersons' to pick up Trixie. He supposed he should tell the Petersons what had happened. They would think it unnatural of him if he didn't.

       Vic said, when he was standing in the driveway with the two of them, out of earshot of the children, "There was an accident last night at the Cowans'. A man drowned in their swimming pool."

       "'What!'" Katherine Peterson said, her eyes stretching.

       "Who?" Peterson asked.

       Vic told him. They had never seen De Lisle, but they had to know all the details, how old he was, whether he had had anything to eat before—Vic didn't know—and how long he had been in the water before anybody found him. Vic said he couldn't be sure, because De Lisle had been swimming around when he got out, perhaps seven minutes before. It was apparently an attack of cramp. The Petersons agreed that it sounded like an attack of cramp.

       Then Vic drove Trixie back home. She was in her Sunday best, because she had just been to Sunday school with Janey Peterson. She was telling Vic about a plastic glider you shot with a rubber on a stick that some of the boys at the Sunday school had. Trixie wanted one, and Vic stopped at the newspaper store in town and bought one for her out of the front window, but he was thinking of something else. There were two things that kept repeating themselves in his mind—the matter of the Wilsons and what Phil Cowan had asked him this morning. Between the two, Phil's question bothered him more. Phil had simply asked in a puzzled way this morning, "Is Melinda in 'love' with De Lisle?" And Vic had replied, "I don't know anything about it, Phil." It was a question that would have occurred to anybody. Certainly Melinda was acting as if she were in love with De Lisle, and Vic had no doubt that people were going to remember and talk about the way she had behaved with Charley all evening, about the duet they had played on the piano, and about Melinda's history of liaisons. It was not guilt or fear of detection that bothered him, Vic felt, it was the sharp pang of shame that Phil's direct question had given him. The Wilson matter was vaguer. This morning Evelyn had said during their coffee and orange juice, "It's a wonder the Wilsons didn't notice anything when they were going home. Don left the house just about the time it must have happened. Don't you remember, Phil?" (But Phil didn't remember.) Evelyn said that the Wilsons had left practically as soon as she and Melinda had come into the house to get the aspirin for Melinda's headache, and that Don had come back a minute later for something—she couldn't remember what—that his wife had forgotten. Vic's question was, if Wilson had gone by on the lawn and seen their struggle in the pool, would he have gone on to his car without saying anything? That wasn't very likely. It was only that Wilson was such an odd, secretive character that the possibility even crossed Vic's mind.

       Melinda was drinking a Scotch and water when Vic got home with Trixie. She did not even say hello to Trixie, and Trixie, though she had seen her mother disheveled and out of sorts in the mornings before, knew that something worse than usual had happened. Rut after a long stare Trixie went into her room to change her clothes without asking any questions.