"Drink it all, and then we look into the dregs of your cup, your life."
"Just promise me you won't tell anyone I made a house call." Henrietta smiled as she snipped the last of the sutures. "Fortunately, most people forget that a psychiatrist is also an MD. If you rat on me to the tenants, I'll be spending all my free time listening to their aches and pains."
"Not a word," said Charles.
Either she was a wildly gifted stitcher, or he was simply beyond pain. Shock could do that, he supposed.
"It's been a long time since I worked on flesh and blood." She applied the gauze and then the adhesive over the stitches in his hand.
"So what do you think of our resident medium?"
"It all fits," she said. "Other things have happened here over the years."
"You mean the murder of Allison Warwick?"
Henrietta nodded. "I didn't know George Farmer very well. I'd just moved in. He was only a nodding acquaintance when we met in the halls. But you could see the progress of the paranoia even if you weren't looking for it. I watched him change over a period of about six weeks. By then, I'd come to know Edith very well. She told me about the automatic writing."
"Don't tell me. George walked in one day and saw a message written on the wall."
"Right. The tenants were in the habit of just walking in without knocking, a custom of the house. The writing was about Allison. Edith told me she had no memory of writing it. I'm guessing there'd been quite a bit of writing on the walls in that six weeks. Whatever he saw, it ate away at him."
"It must have been something heinous."
"Not necessarily. People in love are only one step away from psychosis, and you can quote me on that. It wouldn't have taken anything blatant. Edith had time enough to tear him down."
"That was years ago. Has she done any more recent damage?"
"I've watched other things happen on a smaller scale, one tenant pitted against another. I have my suspicions about Herbert's divorce. I didn't tell you because Edith was part of your family. I'm sorry. Poor judgment on my part. Can you tell me any more about these people, these suspects? Do you have a sense that one might be more dangerous to Mallory than the rest?"
"It's a crapshoot," said Charles. "Unless you want to rule out the women. People keep telling me it's not a woman's crime."
"No, I wouldn't rule them out. Is Edith on familiar terms with any of them?"
"She's met Gaynor once, and Redwing the medium, but none of the others that I know of.
"Then, I'd go with the medium. Edith would work in her own territory, the surest ground, and Gaynor's probably a more stable personality. Do you have the woman's address?"
"Well, there's nothing in the telephone book under Redwing. Somehow I didn't think there would be. I have an idea Sergeant Riker might be able to get it for me."
"Good. But let's try to suppress the white-knight syndrome, okay? Better to just send the police. Think of Mallory. You want someone with a gun to get there first."
"Right, and if she's not in trouble, the worst thing that can happen is that she wipes up the floor with me for interfering."
He dialed the phone and listened to it ring at the police station. After the fourteenth ring, to discourage those who were not seriously robbed, beaten or raped, the phone was answered.
"Sergeant Riker, please."
A recording advised him that all lines were busy, and would he please hold on.
Could he? It had been a long busy day, and no, he didn't think he could hold on any longer.
The cup was half-empty when Redwing closed her eyes and began to sway back and forth. Mallory swayed with her, spilling a bit of tea in the motion. She sipped from her cup and listened to the heavy breathing. It seemed natural that the walls should move in and out as they breathed. She could feel the heartbeat of the house keeping time, beat for tick, with the clock on the wall.
Redwing crooned nonsense words. Mallory rocked with her in the same thick sea of boiling air.
The boy ceased his own swaying. Eyes rolled back to whites, he was going through the motions of making invisible tea, pouring the water into each cup, dipping each bag, unscrewing the cap of a bottle and pouring the contents into one cup but not the other.
Mallory ceased to sway. She slowly looked down at the dark liquid which sloshed to the sides of her cup. A yellow residue made a ring above the dark sweet tea.
Drugged.
She smashed her cup to the floor. The linoleum rolled under her in waves. She fell twice before she stumble-walked through the kitchen door and into the front room where the television was pouring out the stink of sound and sight that seared her eyes and hurt her ears. She fell again and moved forward on all fours. Redwing walked placidly beside her as Mallory crawled along the dirty carpet to the door, dragging the carpet's store of matted hair and crumbs snagged in her broken fingernails. Redwing opened the door wide and smiled.
Mallory stumbled to her feet and fled into the hallway, running now for the stairs. The hall telescoped, elongating with every step. And then she was falling, head hitting hard corners of the stairs, then a shoulder, a leg, assaulted by the unforgiving stone steps. She smelled her own blood on her hands. It poured out of every wound and filled the narrow lobby, spilling into the street as she opened the door and swam through it, an ocean of blood.
Out on the street, swirling stars were flying past her, and then the stars screamed at her with horns and shrieks. She listened to louder noises of the blood rushing in her veins. She could taste the color red as it ran from her eyes and flowed in rivulets into her mouth. The flying stars pulsed with color and grew fat and exploded like bloated pimples of pyrotechnics.
Markowitz was calling her. What was he saying? She smelled baking soda and floral air-freshener.
"I'm dying," she screamed at him inside her brain where he lived in a corner of her gray matter that looked much like the old house in Brooklyn. Markowitz smiled. "Don't be a sucker, Kathy."
"You listen to your father," said Helen coming in from the kitchen of Mallory's mind, wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves, holding out a lunch box. "Do you have your quarter, Kathy?" And then Mallory was crying and wiping blood from her eyes to feed coins into a silver slot. "I'm dying! She's killed me! Redwing killed me with the tea!" she screamed into the phone, over the wire, to terrify a gentle man, eight city blocks away, who never bothered to hang up the telephone nor lock his door behind him.
The fluorescent hospital lights made everyone look ill, but Charles thought Jack Coffey looked much worse than Mallory. By the eyes shot with red, the condition of the man's clothes and the stubble of beard, he guessed it had been at least twenty-fours hours since the policeman had last seen his bed. With Sergeant Riker, it was more difficult to tell.
Mallory, asleep, achieved a look of innocence she could never have managed with her green eyes open. A bandage at the back of her head covered the worst of the cuts. But for the fresh bruises flowering on her bare arms, she was a study of white on white, palest skin showing above the crisp sheets. A white bandage covered the place on the inside of one arm where a tube joined her to a bottle suspended on a T-bar and dripping fluid into her vein. A machine by her bedside kept track of her life signs with low blips of sound and light.
Riker sat in the only bedside chair, eyes trained on the blips as though he were wired into them. And perhaps he was.
"Redwing's shrewd, but not too bright," Jack Coffey was saying as he leaned back against the wall by the bed. "Just for openers, we got her on possession of drugs. She had enough stuff in that apartment to open a store. It was all lying around in the open, like she didn't think we'd come looking."
Coffey was staring down on the sleeping Mallory, and Charles detected something between tenderness and aggravation in the man's expression.