The Clairvoyant Countess (18 page)

“If I’d known I was going to have guests,” the woman said with dignity, “I’d have put on my dress. I have a very good dress,” she explained to Madame Karitska and for just a second her eyes flashed.

In the light from the window Pruden saw that she was younger than he’d thought at first, and proud. Very proud, he thought, noticing the way she held her head, the way she ignored any impressions the room might have on them, refusing to explain or to apologize but looking at them fiercely and squarely, almost defiantly. She was tough as a nut, and proud. It was probably the reality of her helplessness that had made her tough; the helpless didn’t survive for long.

“A witch indeed,” she was saying to Madame Karitska with a sniff. “I’m not a witch, and I’m not a pauper either, no matter what you may be thinking.”

She ignored Pruden, speaking to Madame Karitska alone, and Pruden admitted he couldn’t have handled the interrogation half as well. She said that she owned the house free and clear and that it had been her home long before the accident. It had been a car accident, she said, and her husband and only child had been killed and she’d been left crippled. She didn’t want charity, and she couldn’t help it if the neighbors thought her unfriendly, but nobody had ever come to see her, and she couldn’t get around or out much. “Except at night,” she said.

“And what do you do at night?” asked Madame Karitska.

“Collect junk,” she said. “I take my son’s wagon and bring home junk. I sell it, it’s my income.”

“This isn’t a very safe way for you to live,” said Pruden. “All these newspapers and magazines—”

“Well, I’m not much of a housekeeper,” she said bluntly. “Doesn’t seem any reason to be, if you know what I mean. And two of the dogs sleep inside every night—”

Pruden had already guessed this from the smell.

“—and two stand guard outside. They take turns. Very intelligent dogs,” she added, and her face lighted up at this.

Madame Karitska nodded and rose. “Thank you for talking to us, I think we’ll be going now but we’ll be back. I will at least,” she said with a quick glance at Pruden. “We appreciate your letting us in.”

“My dogs liked you,” the woman said, her face softening. “The children on the block—oh, I hear what they say sometimes. If it weren’t for my dogs—”

She left the rest unspoken, escorted them back through the tunnels of junk to the door, and opened it for them.

Once outside Madame Karitska said, “I hope you’re not going to report this.”

“I really should,” he told her in a troubled voice.

“It isn’t as if she were eighty years old. She seems quite healthy.”

“What did you think of her?”

“Very lonely,” said Madame Karitska briskly, “but not at all sorry for herself. She has, I think, made her peace with life. She’s narrowed it down to what she
can manage and closed out the rest. In her way she is probably happier than anyone on this street.”

“How can you say that?” asked Pruden, startled.

“Because she’s stripped her life to the essentials,” pointed out Madame Karitska. “Quite Tao, actually. There is a line in one of the translations of
The Way
that goes—” She stopped at the gate, closing her eyes for a moment. “ ‘In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.’ ”

“You think her a middle-aged hippie then?” said Pruden, amused.

She regarded him with exasperation. “When I was young, my dear Lieutenant, the eccentrics were what gave life flavor and excitement. They no longer seem to be tolerated in America now, which seems a great pity. Your Thoreau was an eccentric, and your Emerson was no conformist. Can you wonder that your young people court eccentricity and individuality when so many adults are predictable and bland? She is eccentric but she is
not
a witch.”

“I didn’t think so,” Pruden said, opening the door of his car. “I’ll take you home. I’ve got to interview the girl who shot out windows last night.”

“Is there,” asked Madame Karitska, “any reason I cannot accompany you?”

“Well, it’s not exactly regulations but I certainly don’t want to be accused of being predictable and bland,” he said grinning. “It’s only across the street, let’s go.”

The steps of number 813 were occupied by a very pretty young girl of fifteen or sixteen, and two boys somewhat older. Madame Karitska looked them over
casually, one by one: her impression of the girl was one of long tanned legs, long blond hair, and a sense of self-importance. The boy on her right closely resembled her, his hair very blond, his face healthily flushed with sun tan, but he looked hostile, his eyes like splinters of glass. The boy on the left was dark and intense, his eyes admiring as they rested on the girl.

Pruden introduced himself and displayed his ID card. “I’m looking for a Miss Kathy Dunlap.”

“That’s me,” the girl said eagerly. “Is it about last night?”

Pruden nodded.

“Well, I’m Kathy and this is my brother Birch,” she said, pointing to the blond boy beside her. “I guess you’d like to go inside, right? My mother doesn’t like me to talk to strangers.” She stood up and brushed off her skirt.

“And who are you?” Madame Karitska asked the unintroduced young man.

Kathy said carelessly, “Oh, that’s Joe Lister, he works at the auto-body shop. So long, Joe.”

Lister turned scarlet and stood up. Putting his hands in his pockets he mumbled, “See ya,” and slouched off, looking considerably diminished by Kathy’s indifference.

Mrs. Dunlap was summoned from upstairs and came into the living room looking harassed. “It was terrible, just terrible,” she said. “It went on nearly the whole night and we couldn’t get a doctor; it was Sunday you know, their day off, and the hospital told us to bring Kathy in but we simply couldn’t get her into the car. Please sit down, won’t you?”

The chairs were arranged very symmetrically and as Pruden sat down, inadvertently moving one, he saw the
pained look on Mrs. Dunlap’s face. He carefully moved the chair back in line with the other. “Can you explain how she acted?”

“Delirious,” said Mrs. Dunlap simply. “Out of her head completely and yet no fever, no fever at all. She wouldn’t sit down, she wouldn’t lie down, she roamed the whole house—babbling—and when we tried to get her to rest she screamed at us. It was terrible.”

“What do you remember of it?” Pruden asked Kathy.

“That’s what everyone’s asking,” she said, “but—well, it was like waking up from a nightmare this morning. I can’t remember anything except how horrid the nightmare was. I was exhausted. Mum made me stay in bed until ten. I still feel restless and itchy,” she admitted, “but I don’t remember any gun at all, or screaming, or anything like that.”

“It’s my husband’s gun, all properly registered,” the woman added hurriedly. “He has a very nice collection of guns in the basement. He’s a member of the Target Club. And we did
not
call the woman across the street a witch, as people are saying.”

“Did you happen to notice if the pupils of Kathy’s eyes were dilated?”

Mrs. Dunlap indignantly shook her head. “No, I didn’t notice. But I can assure you, Lieutenant, that both my children are
good
children. Birch,” she said with a proud glance at her son, “is a top honor student at school, he studies hard and gets all A’s. Kathy isn’t quite an honor student but she’s on the Dean’s List. We’re very strict with them, I can assure you, and if either of them so much as touched drugs they
know their father’d whip them. We find this terribly embarrassing, all of it.”

Pruden hazarded the guess that Kathy didn’t find it embarrassing but was rather enjoying the attention. “Yes—well …” he murmured, and stood up.

“I’ll see you to the door, sir,” Birch said, jumping to his feet.

“Well, at least the boy had manners,” Pruden said when they were on the street again. “Any impressions?”

“Only as we approached them on the street,” said Madame Karitska. “I felt a sharp stab of alarm, of something being very wrong, but of course something
has
been very wrong, or was last night.”

Pruden stopped and looked up at the second floor, where a glazier was fitting glass into one of the windows. “Some of these model children don’t always tell their parents about their less model-like experiments, of course. I just wish a doctor had been called.” He consulted his memo book. “Crystal Jamison’s away for three days—her grandmother died—so we can’t call on her. Let’s see if Johnny Larkin’s family called a doctor.”

“The first child to become ill?”

He nodded and guided her to his car. “Around the block, next street.”

The Larkin family turned out to be very different from the Dunlaps. Nothing was symmetrical in their living room, which was filled with plants, a coffee table piled high with books, and a weaver’s loom crowded into one corner. Mrs. Larkin wore dungarees and a sweat shirt and apparently had a sense of humor. “I’ll call him,” she said, “if I can pry him away from his
microscope. Meals don’t do it, maybe a live policeman will.”

Johnny, when he arrived, turned out to be a very small twelve-year-old with auburn hair, glasses, and the gravity of an adult. His mother very tactfully withdrew, leaving him alone with Pruden and Madame Karitska.

He nodded to Pruden’s query about a doctor. “Yes, he came, Mother called him, which I really didn’t think awfully necessary. I certainly wasn’t as sick as I hear Kathy was.”

“And what did the doctor say?”

“He said I had to have been taking drugs,” Johnny said firmly. “Except I hadn’t taken any. Of course,” he added scrutinizing Pruden frankly, “you needn’t believe that. The doctor didn’t.”

“How did you feel?” asked Pruden. “Can you remember?”

“Oh yes,” Johnny said, to his surprise. “I like to observe things and I wasn’t that sick. The pupils of my eyes were dilated—huge, actually—and I couldn’t see very well. I minded that most of all, you know—I couldn’t read or look through my microscope, which made it awfully dull. At first I felt very lightheaded but then I became what I think you’d call ‘manic.’ I had a terrifying amount of energy. I finally went out in the yard and built a stone wall. You can see it if you’d like,” he said generously. “I had the feeling, you know, that if I didn’t use this terrible energy I’d go quite mad. My father says I carried rocks that he couldn’t have carried, and he weighs two hundred.”

“And you?” asked Madame Karitska with a smile.

“Ninety-eight pounds.”

Pruden said with respect, “Have you any—uh—theories about this, Johnny? For one thing it does seem to be only young people who’ve been experiencing this—this—”

“Phenomenon?” suggested Johnny. “But that’s not true, you know. Cas Johnson said he’d had it too, and he’s twenty-four, I think.”

“Cas Johnson,” echoed Pruden.

Johnny nodded. “He works part time at the auto-body shop.”

“That would be Lister’s auto-body shop?”

Johnny stood up and walked to a rear window. “As you can see, it’s directly in back of our house, it’s how I cut through to school and to my friends on Mulberry Street. It’s got a great yard for playing catch and everything and Mr. Lister never minds our hanging out there. He’s a really relaxed guy. And then we used to sit in the old junked cars when we were kids and pretend we were driving.” He explained this as if it were a century ago. “They brought Daredevil Demon’s car there last week,” he added in an awed voice. “It was right there in Mr. Lister’s auto-body shop for six days. We were in school when Daredevil Demon came for it though.” This made him sad; he looked sad, as if being twelve was a cross to be born.

“Well, Johnny, you’ve been very helpful,” Pruden said, rising. “If you remember anything else I’d certainly appreciate your letting me know.”

“I’d be glad to,” the boy said gravely. “I can go back to my work now?”

Pruden nodded, and he left.

“And what did
you
think of the doctor’s diagnosis?”
Pruden asked Mrs. Larkin when she met them in the hall.

Johnny’s mother considered this thoughtfully. “I thought it a little ridiculous, actually. Of course I refuse to be the kind of mother who insists her son can do no wrong and won’t try something
once.
As you can see from meeting Johnny, he
could
try something once, being, alas, hopelessly scientific even about how he eats his breakfast. But I also believe him when he says he took nothing druggy because he knows he can tell us the truth, and he never lies. He has,” she added reflectively, “a scientific respect for truth.”

“The scientific part I certainly noticed,” Pruden said dryly.

Mrs. Larkin laughed. “I thought you might. By the way, is Mrs. Trumbull a bona fide witch? I do horoscopes myself, and I’m tremendously interested in that sort of thing.”

“No, she’s not a witch. You’ve met her?”

Mrs. Larkin shook her head. “No, I’ve never stopped in. The dogs, you know …” She looked a trifle guilty.

They left, and with a glance at her watch Madame Karitska announced that she would have to get back to her apartment now. “Reluctantly,” she added, “but I have a half-past-one-o’clock appointment. You are very good, you know; this has been very instructive, observing you at work.”

“Thanks,” said Pruden, feeling inordinately pleased. “Climb in, I’ll drop you off.”

That was Monday. On Wednesday Pruden phoned and said flatly, “I thought you’d want to know—”

“Mrs. Trumbull?” said Madame Karitska.

Pruden was somewhat taken aback. “What makes you say that?”

“Because I had an impression of change hanging over her, something for the better. I felt confident for her.”

“Well, your ESP must have suffered a short circuit,” he said grimly, “because one of her dogs got out of the yard yesterday and attacked a child. A neighbor beat off the dog with a stick and called the police. The child was taken to the hospital—twenty wounds needed cauterizing—and has had to begin rabies injections.”

“Plakhoy,”
murmured Madame Karitska, lapsing into the language of her childhood. “But this is bad, very bad,” she explained.

“Exactly,” he went on. “The police notified the ASPCA and Mrs. Trumbull was ordered to bring her dogs to the shelter today, but she didn’t show up. Now she’s been given a summons to appear tomorrow in Magistrate’s Court.”