Doctor Carberry swung a chair around to the bed, straddling the back of it. “Maybe I’d better talk for awhile,” he said, but the words didn’t come right away. Finally, “Nettie dropped a letter in my mailbox before she went to see Roger, telling me the whole story. I found it after you called, but I didn’t mention it for fear of frightening you and since Betty Lou needed immediate help, I had to tend to her first.” He shook his head, as though hardly able to believe was he was saying himself. “Then shortly after taking you to Roger’s, Oscar came back. He said he’d taken you to the Van Buren place, but as he put it, the whole thing smelled fishy to him. I called the police immediately, in view of what I already knew and what Oscar had told me. But... they... the police arrived too late.”
I shuddered. Betty Lou had been right after all. Betty Lou! “Is Betty Lou all right?” I cried.
“Betty Lou doesn’t have typhoid,” Doctor Carberry said. “Though Nettie thought she did. That’s why she was afraid to call me.”
“The... then it’s all true?” I still couldn’t believe it.
Doctor Carberry drew a long breath. “Yes, I’m afraid so. When Roger was about ten years old, both he and his father caught typhoid. The father died. The boy lived. And miraculously, Nettie didn’t get the disease at all. They were living abroad at the time. After her husband died, Nettie and Roger moved back to the States. Everything was fine. Then the summer Roger graduated from high school, there was a typhoid flare-up, as happens every now and then. You’ve probably read how the board of health investigates these outbreaks. They’re very thorough. Nettie knew this and became alarmed, figuring that Roger was the most likely culprit since he’d once had the disease, though he’d never been tested.”
“But how could she be so sure? I’ve never even heard about typhoid carriers. Who are they anyway? Just people who have had the disease?” What a crazy thing.
“Three out of every hundred people who have recovered from the disease become carriers. There are about five thousand known carriers, that is people whose bodies harbor a living germ. But—” Doctor Carberry sighed. “But there are other thousands unknown. Oddly, some of the carriers have never been consciously ill or shown symptoms of typhoid.”
“Poor Nettie,” I murmured. “But how could she do it?”
“I don’t know. I guess she couldn’t bear the thought of her only child being confined someplace, so she took him and ran, changed her name, disguised her face, kept to herself so that she and the boy couldn’t be traced.” Doctor Carberry got up from his chair. “They were both very careful, you know, so don’t judge either of them too harshly. Roger allowed no food on the school premises, he stayed away from restaurants, he insisted that all children and all regular school personnel have typhoid shots every three years, all that. You had a shot, didn’t you, Marta?”
I nodded. It had slipped my mind entirely. “What about Agnes Drury? How come she got it?”
“According to Nettie’s letter, Agnes Drury refused to have shots of any sort, said she was too old for that nonsense. It made Roger furious, and Nettie too. I guess that’s why Agnes became suspicious, but by that time it was too late.”
“You mean she finally caught the disease from Roger?”
“Agnes thought she had typhoid and Nettie was sure she did, but — I don’t know.” Doctor Carberry squeezed the bridge of his nose, then, abruptly, crossed the room and stood looking out the window with his back to me. “Agnes’s suicide was handled very routinely,” he said after awhile. “Death by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Simple. I called the coroner and signed the death warrant myself.” He whirled around and faced me. “I performed no autopsy, nothing. I was negligent! Too busy. Too hasty. Too careless. Negligent. That’s what I was.”
I tried to think of something decent to say. “Well, Doc,” I said finally, “Whatever you did or didn’t do would have had no effect on Christine. And, after all, she was the one who pulled the trigger. Rog couldn’t marry her, was that it?”
Doc blinked a couple of times. “No, marriage was impossible for Roger. Being married would be much too intimate an arrangement for a typhoid carrier, especially one who is unwilling to acknowledge it. That’s the thing that disturbed Nettie the most. She panicked when Roger began showing an interest in anyone. She was certain that if ever the time came when he couldn’t control his emotions, the secret would be out and that would be the end of him.”
“Oh, no. I deliberately—” I stared at Doc. If I hadn’t gone after Roger he might still be alive. And Nettie, too. And Christine. I had killed them all. Me. “Oh, God,” I whispered, “I’m to blame.” It’s awful to come face to face with yourself.
Doctor Carberry cleared his throat. If he’d spoken before I hadn’t heard him. “I guess we’re both too anxious to blame ourselves, Marta. Oddly enough, the real culprit never even knew.”
“What do you mean?”
“Post-mortems, which I got back this morning, show that Roger was not a typhoid carrier at all,” Doctor Carberry said.
I jerked straight up. “What are you talking about? All this was a big farce then?”
“No,” Doc shook his head. “Nettie was the typhoid carrier.”
“Nettie?”
“Yes, Nettie. And she never even knew it.”
“Nettie!” I gasped, feeling suddenly as if the whole world had gone over a big bump.
“Poor Nettie.” Doctor Carberry sighed. “Think of the years of suffering she could have spared herself and her son if she’d only faced her problem squarely and been willing to accept its limitations.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess there are some things you can’t run away from or scream about or get even with or anything.”
“You’re so right, Marta,” Doc said, smiling a little, at my bad grammar, I suppose.
The next day I went home and the day after that Brad called, saying he’d seen my name in the papers and was I all right. I was cool, but very polite. Really. Funny thing, I didn’t feel like kicking him in the stomach any more. And, as my mother says, for me that’s something.
Double Damned
by C. G. Cunningham
It seemed the best of all possible worlds... a beautiful mother-in-law and a heavily insured wife.
The sun reflected in shimmering ripples on the fiberglass windbreak beside the pool when Louise dived in. I would have been content to sit there and watch, slung in the comfort of the dacron hammock — enjoying the advantages of marrying the daughter of a rich woman, but Louise called to me.
“Come on lover... your mother-in-law might drown and need your strong arm for rescue.”
I snuggled deeper into the hammock. “Ha. You swim like you had scales.”
“But I don’t. Come feel.” She grinned and her slim body sliced the water as she started toward me. She tryed water as she cupped a handful of it and shoved it my way. The pool had been freshly filled and the water hit my chest in a frigid, splattering ball. She disappeared beneath the surface as I made a lunging dive into the pool.
I broke the surface trying to keep my teeth from chattering. She slid up out of the water beside me laughing. She rammed the blunt prow of her hand in my direction drenching my face with its miniature surf. Then with the grace of an eel she disappeared in a surface dive.