“Is she hurt, Alex?”
“I don’t think so. She came running down the road, and then she tried to run away again. She put up quite a battle when I tried to stop her.”
As if to demonstrate her prowess as a battler, she freed her hands and beat at his chest. There was blood on her hands. It left red dabs on his shirt-front.
“Let me go,” she pleaded. “I want to die. I deserve to.”
“She’s bleeding, Alex.”
He shook his head. “It’s somebody else’s blood. A friend of hers was killed.”
“And it’s all my fault,” she said in a flat voice.
He caught her wrists and held her. I could see manhood biting into his face. “Be quiet, Dolly. You’re talking nonsense.”
“Am I? She’s lying in her blood, and I’m the one who put her there.”
“Who is she talking about?” I said to Alex.
“Somebody called Helen. I’ve never heard of her.”
I had.
The girl began to talk in her wispy monotone, so rapidly and imprecisely that I could hardly follow. She was a devil and so was her father before her and so was Helen’s father and they had the bond of murder between them which made them blood sisters and she had betrayed her blood sister and done her in.
“What did you do to Helen?”
“I should have kept away from her. They die when I go near them.”
“That’s crazy talk,” Alex said softly. “You never hurt anybody.”
“What do you know about me?”
“All I need to. I’m in love with you.”
“Don’t say that. It only makes me want to kill myself.” Sitting upright in the circle of his arms, she looked at her bloody hands and cried some more of her terrible dry tears. “I’m a criminal.”
Alex looked up at me, his eyes blue-black. “Can you make any sense of it?”
“Not much.”
“You can’t really think she killed this Helen person?” We were talking past Dolly as if she was deaf or out of her head, and she accepted this status.
“We don’t even know that anybody’s been killed,” I said. “Your wife is loaded with some kind of guilt, but it may belong to somebody else. I found out a little tonight about her background, or I think I did.” I sat on the shabby brown studio bed beside them and said to Dolly: “What’s your father’s name?”
She didn’t seem to hear me.
“Thomas McGee?”
She nodded abruptly, as if she’d been struck from behind. “He’s a lying monster. He made me into a monster.”
“How did he do that?”
The question triggered another nonstop sentence. “He shot her,” she said with her chin on her shoulder, “and left her lying in her blood but I told Aunt Alice and the policemen and the court took care of him but now he’s done it again.”
“To Helen?”
“Yes, and I’m responsible. I caused it to happen.”
She seemed to take a weird pleasure in acknowledging her guilt. Her gray and jaded looks, her tearless crying, her breathless run-on talking and her silences, were signs of an explosive emotional crisis. Under the raw melodrama of her self-accusations, I had the sense of something valuable and fragile in danger of being permanently broken.
“We’d better not try to question her any more,” I said. “I doubt right now she can tell the difference between true and false.”
“Can’t I?” she said malignly. “Everything I remember is true and I can remember everything from year one, the quarrels and the beatings, and then he finally shot her in her blood–”
I cut in: “Shut up, Dolly, or change the record. You need a doctor. Do you have one in town here?”
“No. I don’t need a doctor. Call the police. I want to make a confession.”
She was playing a game with us and her own mind, I thought, performing dangerous stunts on the cliff edge of reality, daring the long cloudy fall.
“You want to confess that you’re a monster,” I said.
It didn’t work. She answered matter-of-factly: “I am a monster.”
The worst of it was, it was happening physically before my eyes. The chaotic pressures in her were changing the shape of her mouth and jaw. She peered at me dully through a fringe of hair. I’d hardly have recognized her as the girl I talked to on the library steps that day.
I turned to Alex. “Do you know any doctors in town?”
He shook his head. His short hair stood up straight as if live electricity was running through him from his contact with his wife. He never let go of her.
“I could call Dad in Long Beach.”
“That might be a good idea, later.”
“Couldn’t we take her to the hospital?”
“Not without a private doctor to protect her.”
“Protect her from what?”
“The police, or the psycho ward. I don’t want her answering any official questions until I have a chance to check on Helen.”
The girl whimpered. “I don’t want to go to the psycho ward. I had a doctor in town here a long time ago.” She was sane enough to be frightened, and frightened enough to cooperate.
“What’s his name?”
“Dr. Godwin. Dr. James Godwin. He’s a psychiatrist. I used to come in and see him when I was a little girl.”
“Do you have a phone in the gatehouse?”
“Mrs. Bradshaw lets me use her phone.”
I left them and walked up the driveway to the main house. I could smell fog even at this level now. It was rolling down from the mountains, flooding out the moon, as well as rising from the sea.
The big white house was quiet, but there was light behind some of the windows. I pressed the bell push. Chimes tinkled faintly behind the heavy door. It was opened by a large dark woman in a cotton print dress. She was crudely handsome, in spite of the pitted acne scars on her cheekbones. Before I could say anything she volunteered that Dr. Bradshaw was out and Mrs. Bradshaw was on her way to bed.
“I just want to use the phone. I’m a friend of the young lady in the gatehouse.”
She looked me over doubtfully. I wondered if Dolly’s contagion had given me a wild irrational look.
“It’s important,” I said. “She needs a doctor.”
“Is she sick?”
“Quite sick.”
“You shouldn’t ought to leave her alone.”
“She isn’t alone. Her husband’s with her.”
“But she is not married.”
“We won’t argue about it. Are you going to let me call a doctor?”
She stepped back reluctantly and ushered me past the foot of a curved staircase into a book-lined study where a lamp burned like a night light on the desk. She indicated the telephone beside it, and took up a watchful position by the door.
“Could I have a little privacy, please? You can search me on the way out”
She sniffed, and withdrew out of sight. I thought of calling Helen’s house, but she wasn’t in the telephone directory. Dr. James Godwin fortunately was. I dialed his number. The voice that eventually answered was so quiet and neutral that I couldn’t tell if it was male or female.
“May I speak to Dr. Godwin?”
“This is Dr. Godwin.” He sounded weary of his identity.
“My name is Lew Archer. I’ve just been talking to a girl who says she used to be your patient. Her maiden name was Dolly or Dorothy McGee. She’s not in a good way.”
“Dolly? I haven’t seen her for ten or eleven years. What’s troubling her?”
“You’re the doctor, and I think you’d better see her. She’s hysterical, to put it mildly, talking incoherently about murder.”
He groaned. With my other ear I could hear Mrs. Bradshaw call hoarsely down the stairs:
“What’s going on down there, Maria?”
“The girl Dolly is sick, he says.”
“Who says?”
“I dunno. Some man.”