Hamilton, Donald - Novel 02 (17 page)

 
          
Her
face had turned to him, suddenly shocked. “Oh, no!” she gasped. “I never—!”

 
          
“Well,
your dad’s behavior is a little queer,” Emmett said.

 
          
“No,”
she said. “Really, no. He… he’s just fed up with me, Mr. Emmett. He can’t quite
decide whether I’m a hysterical female who likes to play sick, or really crazy,
and he’s worried about some congressional investigation, and he has really
decided that the best place for me is an asylum. You can’t suspect Dad. It’s…
it must be very hard for him. Mother, too. Sometimes I wish… Sometimes I think
it would have been much better for everybody if I’d never come back. I keep
remembering how glad they were to see me; and now, they look sort of… sort of
beaten,
when they look at me. And I can’t—”
She swallowed, and did not go on. After a long time she said, “Please don’t
think of Dad like that, Mr. Emmett.”

 
          
“Well…”

 
          
She
said, “Please remember, it’s not an intellectual puzzle; it’s my family.” Her
voice carried an impressive dignity.

 
          
“I’m
sorry,” he said.

 
          
She
said, “The first nurse died.”

 
          
He
glanced at her quickly, startled.
“What?”

 
          
“The
first nurse,” Ann said softly. “She died.”

 
          
They
were back among the small mountain pines again, the headlights flickering among
the trunks on either side of the road.

 
          
“It’s
like a nightmare,” Ann said. “You’re with people you know, and maybe you like
them and maybe you don’t, but they’re still civilized human beings; and you
wouldn’t dream of being afraid of them; then you look at them and suddenly
their faces have changed and their teeth have changed and they start to close
in on you like vicious animals…”

 
          
Emmett
said, “What do you want to do, have us both in hysterics?”

 
          
She
glanced at him, a little of the tenseness leaving her face.

 
          
He
said, “Stick to the facts; leave the atmosphere alone. Don’t work yourself into
a tizzy. What about this nurse you had that died?”

 
          
“She
just… died.”

 
          
“How?”

 
          
“She
was killed in an accident. The man with her—he’s still in the hospital; there’s
something wrong with his back—claimed a drunken driver had forced them off the
road. They hit a culvert.”

 
          
“I
see,” Emmett said, without expression, watching the road ahead. “And after that
you got Helene Bethke?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“How?”

 
          
Ann
glanced at him, frowning.

 
          
He
repeated, “How? Who recommended her? Did she just walk in the door and say: ‘Here
I am, folks’?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Ann said slowly. “I think… well, I think Dad just hired her through
ordinary channels. But…”

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“If
you knew Dad, and if you know what most nurses look like, you’d know she was a
certainty for the job. I mean, I’ve never seen Dad—” She smiled reminiscently. “—seen
Dad hire a woman who had bad ankles or a flat chest if he had any choice at
all. Even Miss Lewis, the one who died, wasn’t bad looking in a
school-teacherish sort of way. He never does anything about it, as far as I
know, but he likes them to look nice… She was a little flushed and embarrassed.

 
          
Emmett
grinned. He said, “So with Miss Lewis out of the way, Miss Bethke could pretty
well count on getting the job against run-of-the-mine competition?”

 
          
“Yes,
I…” She hesitated. “You don’t think I’m… It isn’t too fantastic, is it?”

 
          
He
shrugged his shoulders. “What doctor did you have at this time?”

 
          
“Oh,
old Dr. Shearing. I’ve been going to him since I was a child.”

 
          
“And
what happened then?”

 
          
“I…
They said I’d tried to kill myself.”

 
          
“And
Kaufman,
not
Dr. Shearing, saved you?”

 
          
“Yes.”
Ann looked at him briefly, and back to the dark road behind them. “Miss Bethke
explained afterwards that she’d tried to reach Dr. Shearing but he was out on a
call, so she telephoned Dr. Kaufman, whom she had met on a previous case,
knowing that he lived quite close.”

 
          
“It
seems odd,” Emmett said, “to call a psychiatrist to pump out a stomach… And
after that, Kaufman took over?”

 
          
“More
or less,” she said. “The folks were grateful to him, of course, for saving my
life. And Dr. Shearing agreed that it seemed to be… to be a case for a
psychiatrist rather than a G.P.”

 
          
The
left wheels of the car, front and rear in immediate succession, pounded into
the same hole in the road, and he had to hold her with his elbow to keep her
from being thrown across him.

 
          
She
caught herself and looked at him. “You don’t believe me, do you?” she asked.
“Do
you?”

 
          
He
said, “You haven’t said anything yet. If you mean, do I believe that Kaufman
and Bethke together conspired to get rid of your previous nurse and insinuate
themselves…”

 
          
He
glanced at her. “What do you think their motive is?”

 
          
He
felt her hand on his arm. “Please. I’m not crazy. Don’t look at me like that,
Mr. Emmett. I know how… how melodramatic…” She paused to take a breath. “That
morning in
Boyne
,” she said flatly. “I knew he had tried to
kill me, but it didn’t really make sense. Do you know what I mean? There he
was, polishing his glasses on a nice clean handkerchief, and he’d tried to kill
me, but I couldn’t really believe it. After all, he’d even managed to mention
quite casually a number of people he’d talked to in Denver the night before,
while he was apologizing to Dad for not getting his message to come to Boyne. I
knew they’d all laugh at me if I said anything. It would sound completely,
well, fantastic. Or they’d have looked at me sort of shocked and hurt, and then
explained to me carefully how I’d imagined it, as if I were four years old and
not very bright. It’s funny, but sometimes it’s easier just to go ahead and get
killed than it is to be laughed at or have people think you’re crazy. I even
wondered if perhaps I hadn’t dreamed it; even though I knew I hadn’t tried to
kill myself, this time.” She took her hand away, to catch herself by the back
of the seat as the convertible lurched sharply. “And then, riding in the car
with him and Dad, I began to think how much this had been like the last time. I’d
never really questioned the last time before, don’t you see? I mean, when you
wake up like that sick and headachey and they tell you you’ve tried to… It
never occurred to me to question it. Oh, sometimes I’d wondered if it hadn’t
been an accident, if I hadn’t just got up to take another pill to make me sleep
and forgotten how many… But now everything I remembered about it seemed to
become sinister. Do you know what I mean? Little things that I’d never really
thought about before. The way they had been very formal with each other while
the folks were in the room… and then when they thought they were alone… She
glanced at him quickly, almost guiltily. “I learned in
Germany
that when you’re not quite sure what’s
going to happen, the best thing to do is act sick and stupid. And I heard them
when they thought I was too sick to notice; I couldn’t hear what they said, but
they weren’t being formal any longer… I thought they were having a love affair.
I told you, remember. I thought they were using our house as a meeting place.
That’s what I’ve thought about them all along, and it wasn’t really any of my
business… But driving away from
Boyne
that
morning I began to wonder if it wasn’t something else they had between them,
and suddenly I remembered how conveniently Miss Lewis had been killed.
He
was sitting right beside me, all of
us in the front seat. I couldn’t even look at him. I would have been sick if I’d
looked at him. It seemed as if the whole world had turned into a dreadful plot
against me…”

 
          
Emmett
said, “Hold it. You’re off again.”

 
          
He
heard her breath catch sharply. Then she swallowed and said, her voice a little
stiff but quite normal, “Thank you. I… I’ve been in a complete panic for two
days; it’s a little hard… After I got away from them I managed to hold on to…
to keep control of myself long enough to buy some clothes and find Mrs. Pruitt’s
place. I even managed to shower and change and smoke a cigarette; I was proud
of myself; and suddenly there was a noise outside and I seemed to come all
apart… Well,” she said, “you saw me. It’s a little hard to come back to
civilization after being a frightened animal hiding in a hole. I’m sorry if I
keep slipping now and then. I’m still all tight and shaking inside. I don’t
know if you know what I mean.”

 
          
“I
can guess,” he said. “If you’d rather not talk about it—”

 
          
“Oh,
no!” she cried. “Please. You have to keep talking to me. I’ll be all right as
long as I can keep talking.” After a moment, she asked, “You don’t believe it,
do you? What I’ve just told you? You think it’s the product of… product of a
disordered imagination: that’s the phrase, isn’t it?”

 
          
He
did not answer at once.

 
          
She
said quickly, “You don’t have to humor me; I won’t start eating the upholstery;
I won’t even begin to cry, I promise you.”

 
          
He
said, “I’m just trying to fit it into some other things that have happened.” He
told her of his experiences in
Denver
. She was silent and intent until he had
finished. He thought his description of the scene with Helene Bethke shocked
her a little. He said, “It was phony as hell. If all he is is a reputable
psychiatrist, and if she’s just a registered nurse, then they certainly take
their cases seriously, to go making with the guns and the Mickey Finns. It didn’t
correspond with my idea of professional behavior, even if your disappearance
had kind of put them both on a spot. My opinion is that your dad may think they
were trying to help him, but I doubt if he’d ever have heard any information
they got from me, if he hadn’t come in and squeezed it out of them.”

 
          
“Then
you do believe—”

 
          
He
said, “They’ve got some game they’re playing on their own, all right.”

 
          
She
glanced at him, hesitated, and when she spoke her voice sounded a little
distant. “Did you really… throw a drink in her face? And knock her across the
table?” She laughed quickly. “You’re rather a surprising person, aren’t you?”

 
          
He
said, “Yes, I keep amazing myself all to pieces.” He did not like to think of
the incident. There were too many queer little emotions involved, beside the
sense of outrage at discovering that the blonde girl had tried to drug him.

 
          
“I
wasn’t blaming you,” Ann said. “I think it was wonderful.” She added with tart
amusement, “It’s a pity you had to spoil the effect by standing there gawking
at her naked figure while he came up and took the gun away from you.”

 
          
Emmett
grimaced. “It doesn’t pay to be honest. I should have censored it a little, I
guess.”

 
          
He
heard her laugh. There was something cheerful in the sound, now, not strained
or bitter as her laughter had been; and it seemed to him that his minor
discomfort had brought them measurably closer.