But Horace Whittaker had been president of the corporation at the time.
And Horace Whittaker was the only one of the officers who made his residence in Calusa, Florida.
It was a possibility.
A strong possibility.
I remembered that Sarah had described her father as “a faithful, generous, decent, hardworking man. Faithful, yes. To my mother and to me. No cuties on the side, Matthew.”
I remembered that Mrs. Whittaker had said, “Horace was a faithful, decent, loving man. I trusted him completely.”
But Bloom remembered what Sylvia Kazenski, alias Tiffany Carter, had said about Tracy: “The younger guys went for her, naturally — she was their dream girl next door, you know, all peaches and cream, that honey-blonde hair and those blue eyes flashing like lightning, sweet as a virgin and built like God you could die just seeing her move her pinkie. But she got an even bigger play from the older guys, the geezers who it took all night for them to get a hard-on. She played to these guys like she’d been waiting all night for them to walk through the door...”
Had Horace Whittaker walked through the door of Up Front one night, and had Tracy strutted her stuff on that stage for him, made him feel like a million bucks when she went to his table?
Had he taken her away from there in July, set her up in the apartment on Whisper Key, given her the use of the company telephone and car, visited her whenever opportunity allowed?
Tracy Kilbourne wanted to be a movie star.
Was she Horace Whittaker’s personal star?
If so, there was another woman in Whittaker’s life, and Sarah was not crazy.
“The girl is nuttier than a Hershey bar with almonds.”
Mark Ritter talking.
“In this ‘elaborate’ delusional system I am alleged to have evolved, Daddy was having an affair with one or perhaps many women, it varies from day to day — we lunatics are not often consistent, you know — which naturally infuriated his only daughter because it deprived her of the love and affection to which she was entitled as her birthright.”
Sarah speaking.
But if Horace Whittaker was keeping Tracy Kilbourne, then it was not a delusion.
In which case...
“Either I believed, still believe, my father was having an affair — or I don’t believe it, and didn’t then. If I’m sane, I didn’t go running off after a person who existed only in my mind.”
Sarah again.
But Tracy Kilbourne did exist, and not only in Sarah’s mind.
Then why protest?
Why the hell protest, pretend, that a delusional system was invented for her when all along the primary aspect of that alleged system was firmly rooted in the truth?
The truth, Bloom reminded me, only if Horace Whittaker and Tracy Kilbourne were indeed romantically linked.
Contradictions and convolutions.
“She said she’d been out searching for her father’s phantom lover...”
Pearson’s words.
But Tracy Kilbourne was no phantom.
“Voices had commanded her to find ‘Daddy’s bimbo,’ as she called her, confront her, get back the money that was rightfully hers — Sarah’s, that is — stolen from her by her mother and her father’s mysterious girlfriend.”
Well, damn it, was there a girlfriend or wasn’t there? Did a delusional system exist, or didn’t it? Everyone involved with Sarah’s hospitalization had done his or her best to convince me that Horace Whittaker’s lover was a figment of Sarah’s imagination. Sarah herself had told me flatly that she did not believe her father was involved with another woman. But Tracy Kilbourne was a reality, and the apartment owned by Archer Realty was another reality, and Tracy had been living in that apartment and using the company car, and Horace Whittaker was the only officer of the corporation who lived in Calusa. So where did the reality end and the delusion begin?
If indeed there had been a relationship between Whittaker and Tracy, had Sarah in fact gone out looking for Daddy’s bimbo, and had she confronted her?
“Sarah looked at me, her eyes wide, the razor blade trembling in her hand, and I... I said, I said very gently, ‘Sarah, are you all right?’ and she said, ‘I went looking for her.’ ”
Mrs. Whittaker reporting on her daughter’s condition when she’d found her in the bathroom on September 27 last year.
“So much blood.”
Sarah’s words, again as reported by Mrs. Whittaker.
But there had not been much blood from the superficial cuts she’d allegedly inflicted on her own wrist. So what was she referring to? The blood that surely gushed from Tracy’s throat when she was shot? The blood that flowed when her tongue was cut out?
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Was it possible?
Had Sarah gone searching for Tracy Kilbourne, and found her, and confronted her...
And killed her?
“She got into her car,” Mrs. Whittaker had told me. “I believe she got into her car. Yes. And went searching for another woman. And found this other woman, found her father’s lover. Found herself, Mr. Hope. Recognized herself as the phantom lover she had created. And could not bear the horror of it. And tried to kill herself.”
Or had the horror been the reality of murder?
The open Jane Doe/Tracy Kilbourne file was on Bloom’s desk.
Someone had killed her, that was for sure. Whether that someone had been Sarah Whittaker was quite another matter. And yet she had hit Christine Seifert hard enough to put her in the intensive-care unit.
“You do her a great disservice by supporting the delusion that she is sane,” Pearson had told me. “You are helping her to destroy herself.”
I sat looking bleakly at the file.
Bloom was watching me.
“Matthew,” he said, “why don’t you go home? There’s nothing you can do here till we find her.”
I nodded.
“Matthew?”
“Yes, Morrie.”
“Go home, okay? I’ll let you know.”
13
I kept wondering where Sarah was.
What she was doing.
Was she out there in the darkness of the bird sanctuary someplace, a nighttime wilderness as tangled as her mind was supposed to be?
I shouldn’t have been drinking, but I was.
I kept going over it again and again.
Sipped at my second martini and tried to remember every word she’d ever said to me, every gesture, tried to decipher every nuance of meaning.
I still could not believe she was crazy.
But she had hit Christine Seifert with the stiletto-tipped heel of her sandal.
Could have killed her.
If she was not crazy, why would she have done that? We were on the way to Southern Medical. A team of unprejudiced doctors there would have examined her and...
Perhaps supported the findings of all the other doctors.
I sighed heavily.
I remembered her urgent request for a male attendant to accompany us. Had she been planning on flight all along? She’d known the location of the Mobil Station on Xavier and Taylor. Not far from the bird sanctuary, in fact. Had she been there before? Had she calculated that a man couldn’t possibly go into the ladies’ room with her? “Jake doesn’t watch me while I sit on the toilet.” But wouldn’t even a man have walked her as far as the restroom door? Waited outside for her? Or was there a window in the ladies’ room? Had she planned on making her escape through a window? If such a window existed? Go into the restroom, the male attendant waiting outside, climb out through the window, and run off into the thicket. Forced to change her plan, though, when Knott’s insisted that Christine come along. Picked a shoe with a stiletto heel, not entirely suitable for a meeting with the men who would rule on her sanity, but a deadly weapon in the hand of a desperate woman. Clobbered Christine, left her lying on the floor — God, had she killed Tracy Kilbourne and thrown her into the Sawgrass River?