Marsha got up quickly and walked around so that she could see him, and he could see her. I thought I saw him flicker recognition at her.
“Hello, Kitt,” she said.
Nothing. Frozen.
“Are the demons quiet enough for you to hear me? They will soon pipe down, Kitt. I promise you that. We’ll keep giving you medicine until they do. Can you talk to me?”
I didn’t see his mouth move, but I heard the sound, “Daaaa.”
“That’s right. Dr. Sandy.”
She waited. Nothing.
Marsha looked up toward the mirror and shrugged at me. I thought she looked terribly sad and discouraged, a feeling I shared, since I had frequently seen my mother behaving like that. Kitt Blackstone, I recognized, was mired in a quicksand of insanity that had sucked him so far down that he was now virtually paralyzed; he still had his nose above the murk, he was still breathing, but that was all; the rest of him was pinioned by the great, compressing, terrifying mass of the quicksand. My perception was confirmed when Marsha left Kitt alone a few minutes later and joined me on the other side of the mirror.
“He’s having a very bad psychotic episode, Jenny,” she said, eyeing me at the same time, evidently to see how I was taking it. She must have been reassured by the view because she continued: “I haven’t seen him this sick since the last time I put him in the hospital.” She sighed and thrust her hands in the coat pockets of her suit. “This is really painful for me to see. He was making pretty good progress—very good progress, considering how ill he’d been. He’ll be going back into the hospital now, and there’s no real telling when he’ll get out again. I hate this.”
“Will we ever know what he saw or did?”
She shrugged. “I doubt it.”
“Marsha, what’s the importance of that biblical story to him? Is there anything more to it than the fact that he thinks he’s inhabited by demons?”
She leaned the upper part of her body against the wall behind her and sighed again. Speaking slowly, as if trying to do him the honor of being accurate, she said, “He has always had an extraordinarily objective understanding of mental illness from the inside as well as the outside. He’s quite intelligent and perceptive. He understands how other people view him. It is clear to him that when he’s crazy the rest of the world views him with the same fear and loathing with which the townspeople in that biblical story viewed the man named Mob.”
“In his story,” I said, “are you Jesus’?”
She smiled a little. “When he started getting well, he was so grateful that at first he did try to turn me into Jesus, and when I wouldn’t accept that, he wanted to think of me as his exorcist, but I couldn’t allow that either. I believe it is more helpful to him to think of his illness as just that—as an illness and one that can be treated with the proper balance of medications and therapy, as migraines can be treated, or cancer. I believe in miracles, but I would rather that my patients think of their recoveries in a more mundane way, as something they can control on a day-today basis. I want them to take the responsibility rather than to be supine, waiting for miracles. To my way of thinking, taking that responsibility is usually miracle enough. If the hand of God shows in their cure, I believe it is at that intersection at which effective help is available and they are willing to take it.”
We were quiet for a few moments with our own thoughts.
I bestirred myself. “Mother never felt capable of taking total responsibility for anything.” I thought about that for another moment. “Except when things went wrong. She always assumed responsibility for anything that went wrong—in all our lives. She was always apologizing for things she hadn’t done and couldn’t help.” I looked up to find Marsha gazing at me. “So who are the pigs?”
“In the story?” She shifted against the wall, placing her hands flat against it as if she were pinned there. “He didn’t actually focus on that particular story until a few years ago, around the time he met that poor old woman who collected pigs. I think that through a process of simple association, he began to think of his demons as being the demons in the pig story. Anyway, in Kitt’s view the pigs are all the people in the world who think he’s crazy and they’re not. He thinks, and I agree with him, that when normal people are around a crazy person, it turns them a little crazy with fear and loathing. We are so afraid of crazy people that our fear makes us crazy, he says.” She looked back at the frozen man on the bed.
“You ready to go?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, still looking at him. “But let’s go.”
She had to leave him then, and hope for the best from that young, inexperienced-looking attorney, because she had other patients waiting. I was glad to be along to do the driving on the way back, so that she could rest. The sun was out, the temperature had risen, the snow was melting, and the drive was easier on the way home.
While she napped, I used the silence to think about those drowning pigs in Grace Montgomery’s bathtub. I’d probably never know for sure, but I had a feeling that Mob had been in that house, that Mob had put them there, and that his message, as clear as he knew how to make it was: “Help me. Somebody else is crazy. I did not do this thing.” Because my natural sympathies lay with him, this was one time when I didn’t know whether to trust my own intuition.
43
I let Marsha off at her office and went to work myself. About an hour later, I heard a tentative:
“Jenny?”
It was Faye, who stood in my doorway smoothing her skirt with her hands, like a soldier trying to make a good impression on her commanding officer.
“May I talk to you, Jenny?”
“Sure,” I said, halfway glad of a distraction.
Faye waited for me to gesture her into a chair before she took the liberty of sitting down. I sensed apology and mortification in the air.
“Derek finally answered the messages I’ve been leaving on his phone machine,” she told me. “And he told me where he was staying, and I insisted that he let me visit him because I just wanted to be sure he was all right. And so this morning”—she glanced timidly at me, as if to say, do you mind?—“I went to see him at that girl’s house.” She said “girl” as others might say “slime.” “I was absolutely appalled, Jenny, at what happened to him, at his reasons for being there, at her …”
“I feel the same, Faye.”
“And I just want to tell you that now I understand that you aren’t to blame. He’s done this to himself. I don’t know why; I don’t understand any of it; it just seems so awful and sordid to me, but it’s clearly Derek who’s doing it, not you. So I thought I owed you more of an apology than I’d given you before. I was an idiot, and I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“It was understandable,” I said, trying not to sound smug and magnanimous. “Perfectly understandable.”
She screwed her face up in an expression of puzzlement and frustration. “Why? That’s what I want to know. I understand why Derek’s there—it’s guilt and sex, if you ask me. But why does she want him?” She blushed a little and looked ashamed. “That sounds awful, and I don’t mean anything against Derek; he’s as cute as my boys, and I love him to death, but what could she see in him? He’s too nice for her! She’s just a greedy little … little bitch… and he doesn’t even have a job now. So what does she want with him?”
I felt myself staring at her. “That is a very good question, Faye. That is probably the most intelligent question I’ve heard in the last month.” She was staring back at me as if she expected me, like Sister Ignatius, to explain it all to her. “I wish I had an equally intelligent answer.”
But that wasn’t why she was looking at me expectantly. It was Faye who had the answer. She was merely waiting, politely and diplomatically, for me to voice it first. When I didn’t, she cleared her throat tactfully.
“It’s because she’s scared,” Faye said.
“Scared?” I was startled. “She? Who?”
“The girl, what’s-her-name—”
/>
“Sammie.”
“She reminds me of my children when they were afraid of the boogeyman, and they’d resort to practically any trick to keep me in their bedrooms, so they wouldn’t be alone in the dark. Didn’t she make you think of that, Jenny?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Well,” she said kindly, “you’re not a parent.”
She was exactly right: The day I had talked to Sammie Gardner in her former home, she had been jittery, had even seemed reluctant to lose my loathsome company. Much like Marianne Miller had seemed after the murders, and as Grace Montgomery had seemed when, in her crazy way, she had tried to persuade me to stay and sleep on her roof. None of them had wanted to be alone with the boogey man.
“Who’s the boogeyman?” I asked Faye.
“Oh, it’s just her imagination,” she said dismissively.
But on that point, I thought she was wrong.
“If we want to help Derek,” I said, thinking out loud, “maybe we’d better learn a little more about Miss Sammie.”
“What can I do?” Faye said quickly.
Another good question, I thought, gazing at her. “All right. First, let’s find out about that aunt who left her all the money. Can you telephone and ask Derek?”
“I don’t think he’d be alone.”
“Well, I don’t know who else to ask, except maybe her old neighbors. I’ll call the artist, see what she knows.” I snapped my fingers, suddenly inspired. “Faye, I know what you can do, and you’ll love it.” I smiled at her. “Call Michael Laurence at his new real estate office and see what he can find out for you about the sale of Sammie’s old house and the purchase of her new one. It’s probably a wild-goose chase, but we might learn something interesting about why she moved and how she financed it. It’s certainly better if you ask Michael than if I do—he likes you.”
She wisely refrained from editorializing on that comment and simply got up from the chair and strode purposefully back to her desk.
“Faye, there’s something else you can do.”
She looked back at me.
“I want you to advertise for a new secretary for the foundation.” Before her shock had a chance to turn to dismay, I continued: “We’ll need one immediately, what with you being promoted to assistant director.”
She was staring openmouthed at me. I smiled at her. She closed her mouth and then, with an impressive show of dignity and restraint, smiled back.
“Thank you very much,” she said. “I’ll try to deserve it.”
44
Marianne Miller was home, working, when I called, but she sounded uncharacteristically abrupt, almost rude. This time, she seemed very much to mind the interruption.
“I’ll be brief,” I promised, feeling guilty at disturbing an artist in mid-inspiration. The idea of Artist At Work created a sort of awe in me; the whole process seemed so far removed from my left-brained person, so important and mystical, as compared to my own calculating way of being. My rationale for interrupting Marianne was that it might benefit her eventually—if only Faye and I could retrieve Derek from Sammie Gardner. “Can you tell me anything about Sammie Gardner’s aunt, the one she and Rodney lived with?”
“Dorothy Rhodes,” Marianne said, in a snappish tone that carried oddly over her next words. “Nice lady, I liked her a lot, as different from that little tramp as you can imagine. But she never could see anything wrong with Sammie, or with creepy Rod either, for that matter. Mrs. Rhodes was so kind to them. She gave them the run of her house for, I don’t know, I guess at least three years.”
“When did she die?”
“Oh, I guess it’s been two or three years now.”
“And she left Sammie a lot of money?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Her voice shook with what sounded like anger. “That’s what I heard anyway; that’s what Perry said, and he ought to know.” She laughed briefly, bitterly. “After she died, they took the money and bought their house.”
“Why didn’t they just live in her house?”
“What?”
“I said, why didn’t Sammie and Rod continue to live in Mrs. Rhodes’s house after she died? Wouldn’t that have been logical?”
“Well, it would if there was still a house, I guess. But her house burned down, you know—”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Yeah, that’s how she died, in the fire, it was awful. You know, it was the house on the empty lot next to the church basement. Oh, Christ.” She astonished me by starting to cry. “Oh, Christ, so many awful things have happened; I just want out of here so bad …”
“Marianne, what’s wrong?”
Through her tears, she said in a hopeless voice, “Have you seen Derek? Does he say anything about me?”
I’d made a mistake, I realized, in not telling her the truth earlier; she was suffering, and this unrealistic pining for Derek only exacerbated it. “Marianne, I should have told you this earlier, but I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Derek is living with Sammie Gardner, in her new condo—”
“What?” She shrieked it, and then, unaccountably, began to laugh and cry at the same time. “Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God …”
She hung up, leaving me staring at the receiver in my hand.
When I had finished shaking my head in amazement, and when my mouth finally closed, I pressed another phone line into service and called the police department.
“Geof,” I said, accusingly, “did you know that Sammie Gardner and Rodney used to live with Sammie’s aunt, a Mrs. Dorothy Rhodes, on Tenth Street, and that the house burned down, and she died in the fire?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding puzzled that I’d even brought it up. “Of course I know that. But Jenny, there wasn’t anything to that fire—it wasn’t arson, if that’s what you’re thinking. I wasn’t on that case, but I talked to the detectives who were, and they said it was a case of faulty wiring in an electric stove. We double-checked with the fire department, and they told us it was tragic, but it was definitely an accident. She died of smoke inhalation. I believed them, and I think you ought to believe me. I’m sure about this.”
“All right,” I said, reluctantly, “I believe.”
“It never hurts to ask me, though,” Geof said, in the nice way he has of making me feel less foolish. “Oh, and I did ask MaryDell Paine why she chose that site.”
“What’d she say?”
“She admitted that even if it hadn’t been the best site in town, she would have rammed it through her committee, because it was a place where her brother had been happy. She thought he’d be more likely to go there again, since he knew it from the time it was a church. And it was for sale, had been for some time.”
“And that was it?”
“Well, it was comparatively cheap, too, which was important if she had to ask her husband for some of the money.”
“Since he hates her brother.”
“Yes,” Geof said, drawing it out, “he does.”
I hung up just as Faye walked back into my office.
“Michael asked around,” she announced, with a familiarity that made me smile inwardly, “and then he called me back. Michael says that Rodney and Sammie Gardner originally bought their house on Tenth Street and then resold it to the same person.”
She handed me the telephone-message sheet on which she’d written a name. I felt the third point of a triangle snap into position. One. Two. Three. As easy as …
“I think this ought to mean something,” I said, looking up at Faye.
“If it does, I’m sure you’ll think of it,” she assured me, sounding very much like my old grade-school teacher and some of my trustees. It seemed like misplaced faith to me, but maybe Geof could make something of it. I decided to pay him a visit instead of simply calling him with this new and possibly worthless piece of information.
He didn’t think it was worthless.
In fact, we spent the rest of that afternoon hashing it over with the other detectives.
What did it mean? How did it fit?
Answering those questions required other phone calls, as well as a couple of additional interrogations by the police of certain persons who had already been thoroughly interviewed. All that effort, carried late into the evening, eventually resulted in a single theory.
It sounded good to me. More to the point, it sounded plausible to Geof and to the other detectives. But proving it, aye, that was the rub.
45
Life goes on. Even in the middle of a murder investigation—one that was winding to a resolution—there were still meals to eat, people to see, bills to pay, and foundation business to conduct. The appraisal on the old church basement had come in, and it was satisfactory. A title search had shown the property to be free of liens. We were set for closing, and I was now anxious, after all that had preceded this moment, to get it over with, once and for all.
I called the landlord’s house, and again got Mrs. Butts on the line.
“Triple A Realty,” she said, sweetly.
“This is Jenny Cain, and—”
“I’ll get him!”
I nearly laughed. Such is the power of the threat of a lawsuit these days. When her husband came on the line, I said, “How would you like to be tens of thousands of dollars richer today, George?”
He opined as to how that would be lovely, and he promised to meet me at the church basement.
As I approached the double front doors, I was nervous: so many things had conspired against this moment, that I couldn’t trust it. Though not ordinarily a pessimist, as I walked in I found myself expecting things to go awry. At the last minute, he might find something unacceptable about the deal; or, all things considered, I might even chicken out. I doubted that I would—too much preparation had gone into this moment, and the cause was too dear to my heart—but you never know what might happen next in any real estate transaction. Hell, old George might keel over from a heart attack; stranger things have happened….
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