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Jack rode downtown with me to talk to Nick Grivett, the local police chief; we both knew him well. Jack had, after all, found a dead body; and it had disappeared. He had to report that. But we decided, on the way down in my car, that he'd report just those bare facts, nothing more. We couldn't explain his delay in reporting, so we decided he'd alter the time sequence a little, and say he found the body last night, instead of the morning before; it might just as well have happened that way.
Even at that, there'd be a little delay to account for; why hadn't he phoned the police last night, then? We decided Jack would explain that Theodora was upset and hysterical; he couldn't think of anything else till she was taken care of, and had rushed her to a doctor, me. She'd had a bad shock, so they were staying at my place, and Jack had gone home to pick up some clothes before phoning the police; and then he'd discovered the body was gone. We figured Grivett would bawl him out a little, but there wasn't much else he could do. Smiling, I told Jack to act as dopy and absent-minded as he could, and Grivett would put it all down to his being an impractical literary type.
Jack nodded and smiled a little at that, then his face went serious again. "Forget the fingerprints, too, you think? When I talk to Grivett?"
I shrugged and grimaced. "You'll have to. Grivett would have you committed if you mentioned that." We'd pulled up at the police station, Jack got out, and I gri
Chapter nine
But I was in a bad mood when I parked my car – on a side street near my office, just out of the parking-meter zone. Worry, doubt, and fear were twisting through my mind as I walked the block and a half to the office, and the look of Main Street depressed me. It seemed littered and shabby in the morning sun, a city trash basket stood heaped and unemptied from the day before, the globe of an overhead street light was broken, and a few doors from the building where my office was a shop stood empty. The windows were whitened, and a clumsily painted For Rent sign stood leaning against the glass. It didn't say where to apply, though, and I had the feeling no one cared whether the store was ever rented again. A smashed whisky bottle lay in the entranceway of my building, and the brass nameplate set in the grey stone of the building was mottled and unpolished. All up and down the street, as I stopped for a moment to look, not a soul was out washing down a store window as the shop-owners usually were of a morning, and the street seemed oddly deserted. It was simply the mood I was in, I told myself; I was looking at the world in fear and worry, and I reprimanded myself; it's no way to let yourself feel when you're diagnosing and treating patients.
A patient was waiting when I got upstairs; she had no appointment, but I was a little early, so I worked her in. She was a Mrs. Seeley, the quiet little woman of forty who had sat in this same chair a week before telling me that her husband wasn't her husband at all. Now she was smiling, actually squirming with relief and pleasure, as she told me her delusion was gone. She'd talked to Dr. Kaufman last week as I'd suggested, she told me; he hadn't seemed to help her much, but last evening, unexplainedly, she'd "come to her senses."
"I was sitting in the living-room reading," she said eagerly, clasping her hands nervously on her purse, "when suddenly I looked up at Al across the room; he was watching the fights on television." She shook her head in happy bewilderment. "And I knew it was him. Really him, I mean – Al, my husband. Dr. Be
When she'd told me, finally, what Dr. Kaufman had said, and what she had said, and I'd listened, and nodded, and smiled, I got her out of the office – still talking – in a fairly reasonable time. She'd have stayed all afternoon, bubbling over, if I'd let her.
My nurse had come in while Mrs. Seeley was talking, and brought in my appointment list. I glanced down it, now, and – sure enough – there was the name of one of the three mothers of high-school girls who had called on me so frantically the week before. She was down for three-thirty, and later that afternoon, when my nurse ushered her in, she was smiling, and before she even sat down, began telling me what I knew I'd hear. The girls were all right, and fonder than ever of their English instructor. The teacher had accepted their apologies gracefully, showing some understanding of what had happened; and she'd made the sensible suggestion that the girls simply explain to their schoolmates that it had all been a joke, a schoolgirl hoax. They'd done this, and successfully. Their friends, the mother in my office assured me, actually admired the girls' skill as pranksters, and now she, the mother, wasn't worried a bit. Dr. Kaufman had explained to her how easily such a delusion can affect a person, particularly adolescent girls.
The moment the happy mother had left, I picked up my phone, called Wilma Lentz at her shop, and when she answered, I asked her casually how she was feeling these days. There was a pause before she replied, then she said, "I've been meaning to step in and see you about – what happened." She laughed, not very successfully, then said, "Ma
I interrupted to tell her I understood what had happened, that she wasn't to worry or feel badly, but to just forget it, and that I'd be seeing her.
I sat there for maybe a full minute after I hung up, my hand still on the phone, trying to think coolly and sensibly. Everything Ma
Almost angrily, I asked myself this: was I going to let nothing more than the absence of fingerprints on that body in Jack's basement keep all my problems and fears alive and unresolved? A picture rose up in my mind, and existed for a moment, sharp and clear; once more I could see those smudged fingerprints, horribly, impossibly, yet undeniably smooth as a baby's cheek. Then the clarity of that mental image broke and faded, and I told myself irritably that there were a dozen perfectly possible and natural explanations, if I wanted to bother taking the trouble to think of them.
I said it aloud. "Ma
I actually shook my head to clear it; then I smiled, a little ruefully. This in itself was more proof of how right he had been, fingerprints or not; proof of just what he'd explained – the incredible strength of the weird delusion that had swept Santa Mira. I lifted my hand from the telephone on my desk. The late-afternoon summer sunlight was slanting in through my office windows, and from the street below I heard all the little sounds of a normal world moving through its daily routine. And now what had happened last night lost its strength, in the routine, activity, and bright sunlight all around me. Mentally tipping my hat to Ma