“Serene and placid,” Sarah said, looking out over the lake. “Like the waters of Babylon. Who told you I was ‘seriously disturbed’? Who was that, Mr. Hope?”
“A man named Mark Ritter.”
“Ah. Sure,” she said, and nodded. “My mother’s attorney. The man who blew the whistle. At her insistence, of course. he’s been the family attorney for years. If Mama so much as crooks her little finger, Mark Ritter will do handsprings for her. And if you know that fat bastard, handsprings don’t come naturally to him.” She paused. “My language offends you,” she said.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Then what’s that look on your face?”
“I was trying to visualize Mark Ritter doing handsprings.”
Sarah burst out laughing.
Her attendant — Jake, she had called him, which seemed an appropriate name for a redheaded, no-neck redneck with the muscles of a dedicated weight lifter — was still standing some hundred yards away from us, leaning against the stone wall of the building. He pushed himself suddenly off the wall, as though Sarah’s laughter was cause for alarm and perhaps drastic action. To me, her laughter sounded delightful. But it was clear from the expression on Jake’s face that he considered it ominous at best. He seemed ready to spring forward in our direction. He glanced about, as if hoping another attendant — preferably one in possession of a straitjacket — was somewhere in the immediate vicinity. He looked at us again. He was actually taking a step toward us when the laughter stopped.
“Let me tell it the way it happened,” Sarah said, “all the villains in place. This was on September twenty-seventh, almost the twenty-eighth, in fact, since it was ten minutes to twelve when the police officer came into my bedroom...”
I listened in the dappled sunlight.
As Sarah told it, she was lying peacefully in bed reading — she could still remember the title of the book; it was Stephen King’s Christine — when someone rapped on her door. She asked who it was and her mother answered, “It’s me, darling,” and then the door opened and standing there were Mama, and attorney Mark Ritter, and a uniformed policeman. The policeman’s eyes darted around the room frantically — she learned later that he was looking for the razor blade with which she’d allegedly attempted to slit her wrists — and then he said something like, “Better come along quiet now, miss,” obviously scared out of his wits by this raving lunatic he was supposed to escort to the Dingley Wing at Good Samaritan Hospital. Sarah informed me, and I hadn’t known this, that the wing had been named after Daniel Dingley, who’d been one of Calusa’s great philanthropists and who — now that he’d gone to his final reward — might not have been too pleased to learn that the hospital’s mental unit was now familiarly called the Dingbat Wing.
Sarah admitted that she’d tried to punch the policeman when she’d learned where they were planning to take her.
She further admitted that she had spit in her mother’s face and called her a “fucking whore.”
She told me they had taken her to Good Samaritan in handcuffs, and that she had been admitted there — according to the emergency admission provision of the Baker Act — as a person believed to be mentally ill and likely “to injure herself or others if allowed to remain at liberty.”
“Why won’t you tell me how the children are?” the woman on the adjacent bench asked.
“I did tell you, Becky,” the young man with her said. He was still holding her hand.
“No, you didn’t,” she said, her voice rising.
“The children are fine,” he said wearily.
An attendant standing on the shore, apparently staring out idly over the still waters of the lake, suddenly turned to look at the couple.
“Uh-oh,” Sarah said.
“How are the children?” the woman asked.
“I just told you, They’re fine.”
“How’s little Amy?” she asked. She had pulled her hand out of his. Both her hands were now clenched in her lap.
“She’s fine. She brought home an A in—”
“Does she still have those snakes in her hair?” the woman asked.
“She doesn’t have snakes in her hair,” the young man said gently. “You know that, Becky.”
“With fangs,” Becky said. “Those fangs.”
The attendant was moving toward them now, swiftly and purposefully.
“Someone should do something about the snakes in her hair,” Becky said. “Before they bite her.”
“I brush her hair every night,” the young man said. “Fifty strokes, the way you taught me.”
“How’s your snake?” Becky said, and suddenly grinned lewdly. “Have you been stroking your snake?” and she grabbed for his crotch. “Do you want me to bite your snake?” she asked, her hand tightening on him. “Do you want my fangs on your big, beautiful—”
“Mrs. Holly?” the attendant said gently, suddenly looming before the couple, his shadow falling over the bench. “How we doing here, Mrs. Holly?”
Becky sat upright, pulling her hand back, folding both hands in her lap like a reprimanded schoolgirl.
“Fine, sir,” she said, lowering her head.
“Maybe we ought to go back for a little rest, huh, Mrs. Holly?”
“No, thank you, sir, I’m not tired,” she said.
“Well, even so,” the attendant said. “If you’ll excuse us, Mr. Holly, I think your wife would like to go back now, get a little rest.”
“I want to bite your cock,” Becky said to the attendant.
“Well, That’s okay,” he said, taking her gently by the arm. “Let’s go now, okay?”
“Who’s this man?” Becky asked, looking at her husband.
“Come on now,” the attendant said, easing her to a standing position.
“Why is this man allowed to disturb the peace?” she asked.
“Let’s go now,” the attendant said. His grip on her arm was firm. Over near the building, Jake was watching, ready to come over should his assistance be needed.
“Say good-bye to your husband now,” the attendant said.
“don’t be ridiculous,” Becky said. “A common criminal.”
She sniffed the air haughtily, and then fell obediently into step beside the attendant, who was still holding her arm tightly, just above the elbow. I watched them as they walked away from the artificial lake. On the bench, Becky’s young husband sat forlornly, his hands clenched and dangling between his knees, his head lowered, his eyes staring blankly at the ground.
Sarah sighed heavily.
“Give my regards to the governor,” she said.
I said nothing.
“Sexual fantasies tend to run rampant here,” she said.
I still said nothing.
“Do you want to hear the rest of this?” she asked. “Or are you afraid I’ll pull a Becky on you?”
“I want to hear the rest of it,” I said.
2
“All was done in strict observance of the statute,” Mark Ritter said.
Like a giant white Buddha he sat behind his desk in the corner office of Ritter, Randall, and Goldenbaum, on Peachtree and Blair, not six blocks from my own office. It was my contention that Mark Ritter never allowed the sun to touch any part of his body. I had seen him waddling about the tennis courts swathed like an Arab, only his eyes peering out from a burnoose that covered his entire head and face. He was dressed completely in white now: rumpled white suit, sweat-stained white shirt, food-stained off-white tie, soiled white buckskin shoes. Monday-morning sunlight glanced through the window to the east and twinkled in the modest platinum tie tack that fastened his tie to his shirt. Mark Ritter resembled nothing so much as a beached, blanched, and bloated sea slug.