Vanish in an Instant

by Margaret Millar

  “Perhaps I haven’t any reason. I’m not sure. She’s acting peculiarly.”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s hard to . . . well, I think she’s avoiding me. This morning, for instance, she left the house, without breakfast, without saying a word to anyone. She disappeared, in fact.”

  “She’s probably downtown shopping.”

  “Then why didn’t she tell me where she was going? Surely that would have been the natural thing to do? I was right there, having breakfast with Virginia and Paul in the dining room, and Alice went past the door and that’s the last I saw of her. It seems odd, doesn’t it?”

  “Everything seems odd until it’s explained.”

  “Outside of the family, you’re the only person she knows in town. I had the notion that she would come to you, if something was—if she had anything on her mind.”

  “What would be on her mind?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.” It was a positive yet some­how unconvincing statement.

  “She might come here. If she does, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you. You realize that I’m very fond of Alice, she’s a very dear girl.” She paused. It was a significant pause, Meecham thought, and he waited for the but. It came. “But I didn’t hire her to go running off like this.”

  She emphasized the word hire quite carefully, as if to put Alice in her place, through Meecham. Meecham resented her tone, but stronger than his resentment was his feeling that Mrs. Hamilton was a desperate woman fighting with her back to the wall against shadows that Meecham couldn’t see and shapes he didn’t recognize. He thought of Mrs. Loftus in her twilit world where everything was shadow, and shapes were molten and confused. The two women had nothing in common but despair. Yet it seemed that some­where, at some point, their separate worlds had collided like wandering planets, and one had lost part of itself and the other had cracked through the middle.

  “Mr. Meecham, are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll let me know for sure then, if Alice turns up?”

  “I’ll let you know. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Meecham.”

  Meecham replaced the telephone on his desk, and looked at it thoughtfully, then moved it half an inch to the right. “You could have told her you were going shopping.”

  “I didn’t want to face her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t trust her any more. She’s changed.”

  “That’s why you came here, to tell me she’s changed?”

  “No.” Alice turned and looked down at the busy street. “A man came to see her last night. I saw him, and I think she knows I saw him.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m sure she didn’t want me to see him, that the meeting was to be a secret.”

  “How did you get in on it?”

  “I heard a knock on the front door, not the chime, just a short knock, like a signal. I’d been in my room lying in bed, sort of thinking things over. When I heard the knock I got up to answer it because I—well, I thought it might be you. That’s another bad sign, isn’t it? Every time the phone rings or there’s a knock on the door or footsteps on the side­walk, every time a car stops I think it might be you.”

  “That’s the worst yet,” he said, smiling. “Go on.”

  “I put on my robe and slippers and went down the hall. I got as far as the corner where the hall bends and then I heard voices. I looked around the corner and saw Mrs. Hamilton standing at the door talking to a man, a stranger. I don’t know why but I suddenly felt furtive. I wasn’t spying or eavesdropping, I couldn’t even hear what they were saying. But I had the feeling that the meeting was wrong somehow and the man shouldn’t have been there at that time of night.”

  “What time?”

  “Nearly eleven.”

  “Where was the rest of the household?”

  “Carney sleeps out, and the cook was in her room. . . . She has a television set and hardly ever leaves it. And Vir­ginia went with Paul to a movie. The celebration dinner had been kind of a flop. Virginia was terribly nervous so someone suggested a movie.”

  “Which someone?”

  “I think Mrs. Hamilton mentioned it first. Virginia agreed that it was a good idea, and she invited me to go along. It was very—thoughtful of her, wasn’t it?”

  “Very. But I wonder what the thought was.”

  “You mean they were trying to get rid of me for the night, Virginia and Mrs. Hamilton?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. It’s also possible that Vir­ginia invited you because she took a liking to you. She’s unpredictable.”

  “She didn’t take anything to me, like or dislike. She ig­nored me until the movie business came up, and then she tried to sound very cordial and friendly. I don’t know, maybe she was being cordial and friendly. I can’t tell. My judgments of people have gone haywire, so I can’t trust my . . .”

  “Don’t get excited.” He put his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. “You refused the invitation?”

  “Yes. I said I was going to bed early, and I did. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about you, and what you said about me going back home as soon as possible. I wasn’t worried about them trying to get rid of me for the evening. I was worried about you trying to get rid of me forever.”

  “It seems I failed.”

  “Miserably.”

  “It’s my nicest failure, to date,” he said. “You may regret it, though.”

  “Meecham, I’m trying to tell you something, only every­thing seems to come around to us, just us.” She frowned. “I should try to be impersonal, don’t you think?”

  “By all means. Be impersonal.”

  “I—don’t look at me then.”

  “All right.” He looked at the wall. “Go on.”

  “Well, they stood there in the hall talking. The man could have been anybody, a friend, or someone selling in­surance or Christmas cards or something. If he had come in the daytime, I’d never have noticed him or thought twice about him. It was the secrecy that disturbed me—the late­ness, the soft knock on the door instead of the chime, their low hurried voices. But I didn’t try to hear what they were saying. I went back to bed. Then a few minutes later Mrs. Hamilton came down the hall very quietly. If I hadn’t been listening for her, I don’t think I’d have heard her. She didn’t go to her own room directly. She stopped at my door. I could actually hear her breathing, very heavy labored breathing like someone whose air had been cut off, someone who’d been choked. Not that I—not that I really think she was choked. . . .”

  “What do you think?”

  “That she’d had a shock, a bad shock, and that she was checking up on me to make sure I hadn’t seen or heard anything.”

  “You didn’t hear anything, though.”

  “No.”

  “And all you saw was a stranger at the door. Was the hall light on?”

  “One of them was.”

  “You must have had a fairly good view of him then.”

  “For a minute I did. He was a tall man, rather handsome, with light hair and a reddish face. He was about forty, I think, and he was wearing a bright green plaid top­coat. I never thought of it before, but he might have been a policeman.”

  “He might have been,” Meecham said. But he knew he wasn’t a policeman. He remembered the man and he re­membered the green plaid coat hanging with the other coats on the hall rack, swinging in the wind from the open door. This is my husband, Jim.

  Jim Hearst and Mrs. Hamilton. Another equation to be solved, he thought, and each new equation led to still an­other, and on and on into the infinity of the human mind. He felt stunted and inadequate, an engineer without a slide rule, a chemist without a formula.


  “Of course he was a policeman,” Alice said, sounding ir­rationally pleased, as if she too had discovered an equation and had solved it quite simply, by counting on her fingers. “I guess I was just depressed and dreamed up a lot of non­sense, didn’t I?”

  For a minute he couldn’t answer. He was not sure how much to tell her, or even how much he himself knew.

  “Didn’t I, Meecham?”

  “I suppose you did.”

  “Things seem so much worse at night, in the dark.”

  “They do when you’re alone.”

  “I’ll never be frightened with you, Meecham.”

  “No.” He took her in his arms again. She was warm and soft in her innocence, eager in her new love that would en­dure forever, burn through the dark of night and the chill of winter. He wondered, with a detachment that was crud­er to himself than it was to her, how long it would last.

  He said, “You’d better have a story ready for Mrs. Ham­ilton.”

  “All right. What?”

  “You went to get your hair done.”

  “But it isn’t done.”

  “Get it done.”

  “All right,” she said meekly. “Meecham, how did you know? About the bleach, I mean.”

  “I have little birds spying for me all over town.”

  “No. I mean it. How did you?”

  “A blind guess, darling.”

  “I wouldn’t like to think you knew too much about women,” she said, frowning. “Other women, I mean. I don’t care what you know about me. Naturally I’ll try to act mysterious sometimes.”

  “When you do I promise to act mystified.”

  “Oh, Meecham. I feel—I feel just overcome with love. Do you think I’m making a mistake telling you that? Should I keep you guessing?”

  “It’s a little late for that,” Meecham said. “Besides, I’m tired of guessing. I ought to buy a new slide rule or go back to counting on my fingers like you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.” He kissed her lightly on the temple. “Run along now and get your hair done.”

  “When will I see you? Couldn’t we have lunch together, perhaps?”

  “Not today. I have to go out to the hospital to see Loftus.”

  “Loftus again,” she said, flatly.

  “Loftus again.”

  “Why?”

  “I have some money that belongs to him. I want to know what to do with it.”

  “Why should he give you money? Why should you still be involved with him like this?”

  “There’s no involvement.” He knew there was, though. First a moral and mental involvement, and then gradually a physical one which had him trapped in a net of human ropes. Every way he turned he found new knots in the net. He couldn’t fight or talk or buy his way out of it; each knot, tighter and more intricate than the preceding, must be loosened and picked apart—the old lady, the Garinos, Virginia and her mother, the dead Margolis, Emmy Hearst and the husband she despised, and Loftus himself, the first and the final knot, and the most difficult of all.

  16

  The county hospital was a heterogeneous group of old and new buildings about three miles to the south of town. The so-called prison ward was not a ward but a two-story yellow brick house separated from the other build­ings by some fifty yards and a steel fence. Originally the house had been the superintendent’s quarters, but as addi­tional hospital facilities became necessary, the superintend­ent moved out and the house was used as an isolation ward for victims of the more highly contagious diseases like diphtheria and typhoid. Immunization gradually de­creased the number of these diseases to almost nothing, but no immunization had been found against crime, and the number of county prisoners had increased consider­ably. Some of them were physically sick and needed atten­tion, and some were mentally sick and needed even more. This latter fact was recognized after a series of spirited board meetings, newspaper editorials and a petulant state­ment from the local congressman who was running for re-election.

  The conversion from protecting society from diph­theria to protecting it from its own bastard, the criminal, was accomplished with simple economy. The curtains were removed from the windows and bars were substituted; the fence was constructed; nurses were replaced by orderlies, and what had been first the superintendent’s parlor, and then the children’s ward, was now furnished as a combina­tion chart room, office and lounge for the orderlies.

  A sign on the door said, Ring and Walk In. Meecham rang and walked in.

  The orderly on duty was sitting at a small desk in the corner reading a chart.

  “Good morning, Gill,” Meecham said.

  Gill looked up from the chart, frowning. “How did you get past the gate?”

  “The trusty’s an old friend of mine.”

  “We have rules, Meecham, you know that.”

  “I’m not breaking anything.”

  Meecham had known Gill for a year or more. The or­derly was a stocky young man whose principal interest was disease. He was the only employee of the hospital who could listen, with intense concern, to the complaints and symp­toms of every patient under his care. He was, accordingly, very popular and much more useful than he himself real­ized. Migraines and stomach cramps, asthmatic attacks and cardiospasms, had been talked away into Gill’s recep­tive ear, and many a fear had been drowned in his liquid brown eyes.

  At his own request he had been transferred to the prison ward because he wanted to study the relationship between crime and disease. He was very conscientious about it; he kept a notebook in which he jotted down all kinds of medi­cal lore and symptoms, and observations and remarks made by his charges. But so far he had reached no conclusion be­yond the fact that the prisoners were on the whole quieter and made less fuss over their pains than the men in other wards.

  “I just want to talk to him for a minute,” Meecham said.

  Gill fingered the stethoscope he wore around his neck. It was his own stethoscope, he’d bought it a week ago, and one of the interns was teaching him how to use it and in­terpret the meaning of its sounds correctly. He wore it with great pride and self-consciousness, like a diamond necklace.

  “I told you over the phone, Meecham, no visitors. He’s a very sick boy.” To Gill all his patients, of any age, were boys, as. if by becoming sick they had retrogressed into childhood. Meecham wondered if Gill knew how close to the truth this was.

  “I’m not a visitor.”

  “He had to have a blood transfusion last night. They took a test when they brought him in yesterday morning and they found out his percentage of myleo—myeloblasts was very high.”

  “What’s a myeloblast?”

  Gill colored. “It’s a bad sign, anyway, very bad. The transfusion perked him up, though. In fact, he got restless and couldn’t settle down and go to sleep. He wanted to talk so I stayed with him.”

  “All night?”

  “Sure. I didn’t have anything else to do except sleep, and I never had a leukemia case before. The fact is, I think it’s a coming disease, so I want to find out as much about it as I can. Then by the time I can afford to go to medical school I’ll know a lot of stuff the other guys won’t know, the real inside stuff.”

  “Like myeloblasts,” Meecham said. “What did he want to talk about last night?”

  “What most of the boys talk about. Himself and women.”

  “What women?”

  “His mother, for one. It seems his mother is an alcoholic. I’ve often noticed that there’s a history of alcoholism in most . . .”

  “What other woman?”

  “He called her Birdie. She was his wife, but he gave her a raw deal and she left him. Say, what do you want to know stuff like this for?”

  “I’m interested. You’re interes
ted in Loftus’ myeloblasts and I’m interested in his wife.”

  “Are you trying to find her or something?”

  “Just out of curiosity, yes.”

  “You must be awfully curious, to want to go where she’s gone.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s dead,” Gill said. “She was killed in a car ac­cident in Las Vegas about a year and a half ago.”

  “Killed?”

  “Not outright. She died several days later in the hospi­tal.”

  Meecham felt a little dizzy and off-balance, as if one of the knots in the net of ropes had been cut away under his hand and left him swinging in air.

  Birdie was dead, had been dead for a long time. She hadn’t just vanished for an instant around a corner, she had walked away into the shadows of some strange street.

  “That’s—too bad,” he said finally.

  “It sure is.”

  “He didn’t tell me about it.”

  “People tell me a lot of things, I don’t know why. But I never heard anyone talk as much as Loftus did last night. He must have been crazy about that woman. Birdie this, Birdie that, I damn near went to sleep a couple of times ex­cept the chair was so hard. The funny part of it is that he never mentioned what he was in here for until I asked him. And then I got the impression that the murder seemed to him a very trivial thing, like parking beside a red curb. I’ve had a couple of psychopaths in here and that was their attitude. But Loftus shows no signs of being a psychopath. Except for that one blank spot, the murder itself, he’s a very moral and responsible man. Do you know his mother?”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “From what I heard, she’s quite a case, eh? You know, I’ve been sort of thinking things out this morning and I was wondering when I get enough money to go to medical school if I shouldn’t concentrate on psychiatry. I haven’t got any education, just what I picked up here and there, but you’re an educated man, don’t you think psychiatry’s the coming thing?”

  “We could all use a little.”

  “That’s what I mean. When they get most of the physical diseases licked in a test tube, then I’ll have my psychiatry, I won’t be left flat on my rear.”