Death Trap (20 page)

“You’re very good to look at, Vicky.”

“I—I bought these today. There’s a shop down the way. This sort of thing is not my usual dish of tea. I feel a little theatrical. I thought it would be good for morale.”

“Mine?”

“Please, Hugh. What did happen?”

I went through all the rest of the things that had happened. I had planned to keep it factual, but I could not help getting off into personal conjecture, subjective evaluation of the facts. It seemed to take quite a long time to finish.

“Then this is what you believe,” she said. “You believe Mackin had a double motive. He is legally murdering his own wife. He had to get rid of Jane Ann. Maybe, in addition to the blackmail, she would never have permitted her sister to marry him. You think he has his sights on Nancy. That was why he went to such extremes to make it look as if Al had done it. And you believe that, seven years ago, it was Mackin who attacked Nancy when she was a child.”

It seemed as good a time as any, so I told her about the card that had been tossed into Frank Leader’s car, how I had found out about it, and what Tennant planned to do with the information. Her reaction startled me. Ever since I had seen her at Mrs. Hemsold’s house, there had been a darkness in her. I knew part of it was resentment at me and the way I had treated her long ago. But most of it was despair at what was happening to her brother.

Her face changed suddenly. She was a lost and hungry child who had somehow found her way home, and found everybody waiting with ice cream and cake. It was as though a light went on behind her blue eyes, and it made her whole face luminous. I knew then that she had, for the first time, completely accepted my unproven suspicions of Billy Mackin. For the first time in dreary months she knew the quick taste of hope.

She was quite still for a moment, eyes glowing, lips apart. Then her face crumpled just a little and she flung herself against me with strange awkwardness for one who always moved so lithely. As I held her and as she wept I acquired a deeper understanding of the strain she had been under. Her body quivered and tears like hot wax fell against the side of my throat.

My only intent had been to hold her and comfort her and try to share what strength I had. But we were vulnerable, both of us. Unlike the last time together, this was not the result of any sly and careful campaign. If there was blame, indeed if there was any cause for blame, it had to be shared equally. There was no sudden change. Mood shifted and meshed into another mood. Small fires glowed and then flamed up. There had been no need for words. There were no restraints, no hesitations. We shared each other without words, meeting with such a great need, such a wonderful sensitization to each other that it could have been the second thousandth time we had been with each other rather than the second. The great need made for quickness, and then there was a half slumberous time like a glow of embers, and then the rise of need again, and it lasted long. Very long. That was the best of it, the long way it went and the long time it lasted.

When she left me, she left quickly, and I heard the click of the latch of the bathroom door. I turned on the bed lamp, and I dressed. I knew that never again would there be time in my life for the brassy ones, the bold ones, the coarse ones. I had taken this strange dark girl of shyness and passion and her I would keep.

The orange slacks lay crumpled beside the bed. I found a hanger for them, and I picked up the rest of her clothing.

When she came out of the bathroom she was wearing a pale gray robe. It made her eyes look very blue in the moment she glanced at me and looked away, her face turning pink. Her feet were bare. She looked very small. She had scrubbed her face, combed her hair, replaced her lipstick. She came up to me, head bent, hooked her fingertips in my belt and leaned her forehead against my chest. I looked down at the clean white part in her black hair.

“Sorry?” she whispered.

“What a ridiculous question. I should ask it.”

“I’m not sorry. I thought of it happening again and thought I would be ashamed of letting it happen again. Ashamed of being weak and wanting you. I’m not ashamed.” She leaned up suddenly and brushed her lips across mine and turned away to say, far too casually, over her shoulder. “But I’m all grown up now. I’ve gotten over a lot of stupid ideas, darling. This time there are no obligations.”

“Come now!” I said softly. “Stick to the script. Demand marriage. You’re a betrayed maiden. Don’t turn into a sophisticate on me.”

She whirled and leaned against the dressing table. “Now don’t tease. I was very young—that first time.”

“I think I was the younger one.”

“No obligations. I insist.”

“All right, then. None. No obligations at all for this time. But I owe you for the first time. Remember the way I didn’t say it when you were waiting to hear it? I love you. See? It’s easy to say. Marry me. That’s easy too.”

She shook her head. “No answers yet, Hugh. Not until things are—settled.”

“They will be.”

“I could almost believe you. What if Quillan is dead? Then both of you will be—in that place.”

“I won’t be. His threat is on record. Arma took it down.”

“But what do we do?” she asked, moving toward me.

“We start thinking. And the first step is you go right back where you were and you stay over there and I’ll try not to look at you too long or too often.”

She made a face and went back to the dressing table and sat on the bench in front of it. We thought out loud. I paced. I went through four cigarettes. I tried to sum up our progress. “Okay. Maybe Nancy could discredit him if she could remember. But it was such a bad shock to her it drove the whole incident underground. She has no conscious memory of it. The only symptom she showed was that queer kind of trance she went into.”

Vicky bit her lip. “Hugh—is it like—this sounds weird—combat fatigue? I mean I read about some of the men in the war not remembering. Didn’t they give them drugs and then they could talk?”

I thought that over. “Fine. Just slip her the needle. How do we go about that? Ask Paulson? ‘Dick, we want to give Nancy a little jolt of this here mystery drug. You hold her.’”

“But, darling, you said you liked Don Higel so well and he seemed to like you. Wouldn’t he co-operate?”

“That’s a hell of a thing to ask him, Vicky.”

“But we could do one thing, couldn’t we? We could at least tell him about all this and tell him how Nancy acted and see if he thinks our guess is right.”

I sighed. “It’s a starting place. Suppose you go to bed. I’ll go make myself unpopular with Higel.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You’re staying here, Vicky.”

“This time I’m going to be with you.”

“No!”

Don Higel had built his office onto the front of a small frame house not far from the business area of the village. After I had checked his garage and found the station wagon gone, and had seen no lights in office or home, I went back to the car and moved it down the street into a dark place where the street lights were dim.

“What do we do now?” Vicky asked.

“Wait for him. I can’t think of anything else to do. Cigarette?”

“Please.”

We waited for twenty-five minutes. Don Higel turned into his driveway at twenty minutes after two. He drove into the garage. When he came wearily out to pull down the overhead door, I stepped out of the shadows, startling him.

“Oh—it’s you.”

“How is Quillan?”

“He’s in Warrentown General with a fractured skull, multiple abrasions and lacerations.”

“Serious?”

“He’ll live, Hugh. Your lawyer was here. He left in disgust. You aren’t his favorite client. And the police want a nice chat with you.”

“He was trying to kill me, Don.”

“I suppose so. Want some coffee?”

“I’ll be leaving a lady out in the cold. I do want to talk to you.”

He looked toward my car. “Who is it?”

“Vicky Landy.”

He sighed. “Go get her. This looks like a longer night than I thought it was going to be.”

Don and I sat at the kitchen table. Vicky made coffee and toast. When I began my story he looked bored. He became very alert when I started to talk about Nancy. It was as though he had snapped to attention. Several times he seemed on the verge of interrupting me. I finished up by saying. “That’s the story. We know Alister is innocent. But we need the information Nancy has. And I think it’s locked away where we can’t touch it. I know this is asking a lot, but we wondered if there’s any way you could help us, Don.”

Vicky was sitting across from me. Don ordered her to put her fingers in her ears. Then he cursed fluently, emphatically, for at least thirty seconds. We stared at him.

“What’s the matter?” I asked when he had slowed down.

“Matter? The matter is that some stupid people seem to think it’s necessary to conceal facts from the family doctor.” He shoved his chair back and got up. “Am I supposed to carry a crystal ball? You know where I’ve come from? Right from the Paulson house. Two patients. Nancy and her father.”

We both stared at him. He sat down. The anger went out of him. “I could take care of Paulson. I’ve treated him before. I keep him under constant sedation. But when he gets too excited, he gets another attack. Auricular fibrillation. Then he’ll run a pulse over two hundred until I can knock it down.”

“Will it kill him?” I asked.

“Eventually. There’s some damage, of course. It puts a hell of a load on the heart. Maybe some time I won’t be able to stop it and it will quit from pure muscular exhaustion. The extreme remedy is to go in there and grasp the heart and stop it for a moment and hope that when the beat continues it will be somewhere near normal. I treated him this afternoon. I stopped in at midnight after another house call, just to check. He was sleeping. The rate was way down when I checked it. I’d given him enough to keep him out for twenty-four hours. That’ll give it a chance to rest. I started to leave. Mrs. Paulson, acting scared to death, asked me to look at Nancy. She said her husband wouldn’t approve of her asking me to take a look at her, but she said she was worried. And I damn well didn’t blame her.

“The girl was in bed and her room lights were out. Mrs. Paulson turned on the lights. She was on her back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Pulse, respiration and temperature were all subnormal. She would follow simple orders. Semi-catatonic. Very little response. Lift her hand over her head and release it and she would hold it there, and then slowly let it come down. Her pupils responded very slowly to light. I suspected dementia praecox. It hits often at that age. Withdrawal. Out of my field. She seemed to be highly suggestible. I closed her eyes and ordered her to sleep. She went into a deep sleep almost immediately. Then I went downstairs with Mrs. Paulson and questioned her. No, Nancy hadn’t been acting strange lately. There had been some kind of trouble in the afternoon. Some man annoying her. Mr. Paulson hadn’t given her the details. Nancy had acted queer and far away ever since she had come home. She hadn’t eaten. I knew, of course, that she’d had some severe emotional shocks—her boy friend killing her sister. I guessed this was a delayed reaction. I told Mrs. Paulson I’d arrange for a Warrentown man to come over and examine her tomorrow. Rikert. He’s good. So now, damn it, I find out why.”

“Can you do anything?”

“The best word I can think of for her condition is hysteria. She has an insoluble problem, Hugh. She’s been far too subservient to her father’s will. She has been the ‘good’ child, and Jane Ann was the ‘bad’ child. You prodded subconscious memories. Enough of that memory came to the surface to put her into this condition. I think she’s been fed enough nonsense about her father’s heart to feel that if she remembers the whole incident, it will kill her father. Yet there is love and sympathy for Alister. She has tried to bury that. Maybe she senses a relationship between the buried incident and the death of her sister. Here is what will happen to her. She may drift from hysteria into a complete withdrawal, into clinical mental illness. Or perhaps she can be forced to face the hidden incident and relive it.”

“Can you force her to do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Can you try?”

“I can try. She’s suggestible enough so I could attempt hypnosis first, try an age regression technique on her if she responds. Then scopolamine if that doesn’t work. The trouble is, I may be meddling. I could do her more harm than good. And another thing, people. Even though hypnosis is an accredited medical technique and used one hell of a lot more often than you’d think, if word gets around that young Doctor Higel is using it, my practice here will go thud. Even so, I have the feeling the sooner we do it the better. Look, you pour yourselves some more coffee. I’m going to see what Rikert thinks.”

After he left the kitchen Vicky reached over and squeezed my hand hard.

“Keep your fingers crossed,” I said.

The minutes seemed very long. At last Don Higel came back. His face seemed to sag with weariness behind the brave mustache. I could tell nothing from his expression. He sat and sipped his cooling coffee.

“Rikert wasn’t too happy about three a.m. consultations,” he said. “The case interests him. That’s pure luck. He wants to do it himself. Tomorrow morning. I mean this morning. At eight o’clock. We’ll take her over there. He’ll be at the Hillbrook Sanitarium. I told him that there were legal matters involved, and asked him if he would mind an audience. He said he wouldn’t mind at all. I imagine you both want to be there. Her mother will have to be there. Who else do you want?”

“John Tennant,” Vicky said.

“And a man named Arma,” I added. “With the State Police.”

“I’ll drive the girl and her mother over. You better come separately.”

We had two and a half hours’ sleep at the motel, and I drove between the stone pillars and up the curving drive of the Hillbrook Sanitarium at ten after eight. When we asked for Doctor Rikert, the receptionist directed us down a long corridor to a waiting-room at the end of the corridor. There was a morning clatter of breakfast trays, a hospital odor of disinfectant and medication, the starched whisper of nurses, soft code bells sounding from the corridor speakers.