“I prayed you would come,” she said. “Really. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? I mean somebody I’d never met before. But there wasn’t anything else left to pray for. There wasn’t anybody else. Dad… seems to have given me up as hopeless.” She hesitated. “I couldn’t even make myself go outside the cabin. Just wait and hope you’d come.”
Emmett did not say anything.
“He tried to kill me,” she said. “He tried to kill me!”
“Take it easy,” he said, watching the road.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Really, I’m all right. I won’t make another exhibition of myself. Don’t sound as if you thought I… I’m all right.”
“I know you are,” he said.
She said, “… and suddenly I began to wonder if the other time, eighteen months ago…” Her voice trailed off. “I never really remembered,” she said after a while. “It was just the same way. She gave me the pill, I was getting one every night, then; and when I woke up they were doing things to me and everybody said I’d tried to… But I never really remembered doing it.” Her voice died away and started over again. “In those days I was having so many dreams. I’d often thought about… I didn’t really know… It was easier just to let them think… I wanted to go to the hospital.” She kept running down, and having to wind herself up again. “But she saved me, that time. At least they said it was she who found me. And it was he who treated me for it. Shouldn’t that prove they didn’t…? It gets all mixed up when I try to think about it.”
The car rolled out across the mountain meadow at the bottom of the canyon, crossed the bridged stream in the center, and began the long grind up again in second, finally in low.
“In Boyne,” she said, “you saved my life, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
She glanced at him, and he heard her sigh as if giving up the idea of thanking him.
“I still can’t see anybody,” she said presently, raising herself to look through the rear window. “Are you sure—?”
“He may have spotted your car at the Lodge and headed back to town to telephone,” Emmett said. “If he does, we’re sunk. There are only two ways to go from Summit: back toward Denver, or west across the pass. With your dad’s money, he can probably manage to have both ends covered, if he’s notified in time. But I’m hoping the guy didn’t dare take the gamble of leaving us to hunt for the telephone, for fear we’d take a couple of Mrs. Pruitt’s horses and head back into the mountains before he could get back to keep an eye on us.” He shrugged. “Well, we’ll find out.”
Ann asked, “What happens if Dad catches us?” Emmett did not answer at once, and she said, “He wants to have me committed to an institution, doesn’t he? I heard him talking to Dr. Kaufman.”
Emmett nodded.
She asked, “What will he do to you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “He threatened to have me blackballed if I didn’t cooperate. I’ll believe he can do it when I see it happen.”
“Then… you’re taking quite a risk for me.”
“I’m glad you appreciate that,” he said dryly. “And don’t forget the ten thousand dollars.”
“Ten thousand!”
“That he offered me for letting him know if you got in touch with me.”
She glanced at him, remaining silent.
He said, “Not to mention the check for five hundred that I tore up in Boyne. For saving your life and keeping my mouth shut.” He let his voice change. “Don’t be silly, Nicholson. Let’s not get started on big words like gratitude and appreciation.”
She hesitated. “I wish you wouldn’t call me Nicholson,” she said at last.
“All right: Ann,” he said, and paused a moment, as if her given name had raised an obstacle to going on. “Look, Ann,” he said, “I’ve spent my whole life being sensible. I became a chemist when I wanted to become a free-lance photographer—that’s why I still keep lugging that damn camera around; I worked my way through college with the thing—because I didn’t quite have… well, I didn’t know if I had what it took to make a living in a cut-throat field like that. I knew I could always get some kind of a routine job in chemistry. Then the war came along. I wanted to go; and still, I didn’t particularly like the idea of getting killed, and I again wasn’t quite sure that I had what was needed. So I compromised: I figured I’d do the best I could as a civilian and leave the decision up to the draft board.”
The car lurched, throwing her shoulder against him; he stiffened his arm to support her.
“Hang on,” he said. “Well, the trouble with being sensible is that it’s a sort of self-limiting reaction. Every time you make another safe, prudent decision, you raise the pressure another notch. One day the time will have come when you just say to hell with it. You say, this time, just once, I’m going to act like a reckless damn fool. This one time I’m going to play my hunches and blow the works and get it out of my system.”
“And… am I one of your hunches?” the girl beside him asked.
He did not answer her directly. He said irritably, “People trying to bribe me. People trying to scare me. People trying to kid me with double-talk. It was,” he said, “well, sort of a challenge.”
The car negotiated the last rise and the headlights burst out into the open barren country, the road two deep ruts across the high meadows. Every so often the transmission would hit bottom with a scraping sound.
She glanced at him. “In other words, you’re not doing it for me, you’re sort of doing it for yourself.”
He ignored the trace of amusement in her voice. “That’s right,” he said. “And for a gent from the FBI who claims to think I’m a communist agent with designs on Reinhard Kissel’s life.”
He felt her start. “A com—!” She caught her breath. “But that’s just ridiculous!”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Did he really say that?”
“Yes,” Emmett said. “You were my Trojan horse, so to speak. I was planning to use you to get in and see Kissel, whom I would then shoot with a gun disguised as a fountain pen.”
Ann laughed uncertainly, clearly half convinced that he was joking.
“I’m not kidding,” he said. “That’s what the man said. Of course, we can make a distinction between what Comrade Kirkpatrick says and what he means, Comrade Nicholson. If the federal Comrade really wanted you to be kept from seeing Dr. Kissel, why did he have Mrs. Pruitt get in touch with me, instead of turning you over to your dad, who’d have been delighted to take you out of circulation?”
“You mean, he knew I was—?”
“Damn right, he knew,” Emmett said. “That woman back there talks in circles, too, but she let me know that much.”
“Oh, I liked her!” Ann protested.
“Yes, I love her like a mother, but she will be cryptic,” Emmett said ruefully. “However, there’s no doubt from what she hinted that Kirkpatrick knew you were there; and I suspect he pretty well told Mrs. Pruitt how to behave. I can’t see Mrs. Pruitt sticking her neck out as far as she did without orders. Suppose you’d been lured up to her place by some blackmailing Casanova; she hadn’t seen me for ten years, how did she know what kind of a heel I’d turned out to be? She was taking an awful risk of having her place in the papers as another weekend love-nest; she could have been ruined, with your dad and your doctor calling up like that. Granted that she has a heart of gold, it was an awful chance to take for a girl she’d never seen before and a guy she’d met only once for a couple of weeks ten years ago. No,” he said, “I think she had her instructions.”
“But why…?” Ann licked her lips.
“If I knew that,” Emmett said, “I’d be a lot happier. I mean, is he giving you rope to hang yourself with; or is he setting a trap for somebody else?”
“But why should the FBI be interested in Dr. Kissel at all?” she demanded. “I don’t understand. I thought he was just teaching at Fairmount University.”
Emmett told her.
; “I don’t like that,” she whispered when he was through, her voice barely audible over the sound of the motor. She clung to the back of the seat, looking through the rear window. There was nothing there, Emmett saw, glancing at the mirror; only the black saw-toothed horizon of pines against a gun-metal sky. “I don’t like that!” Ann breathed, a small edge of hysteria in her voice now. “It’s as if people were going out of their way to make things complicated.”
Emmett said, “Are you just beginning to catch on? They are.” She did not say anything, and he went on, abruptly changing the subject, “You woke up in Boyne, knowing that Dr. Kaufman had tried to kill you, yet you didn’t mention it to anybody. You came out of the room on his arm, letting him touch you, the man who’d tried to murder you; you drove off, with him in the car. Not a word about his trying to poison you; at least your father seemed to have no suspicions of Kaufman when I saw them in Denver.” He glanced at her quickly. “What’s the matter, were you afraid your dad had something to do with it, that they were both in it together? Were you afraid to bring it out into the open? Is that why you ran away instead of accusing Dr. Kaufman?”
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 the
y 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.”
The Steel Mirror Page 13