“Stop it!” Edith said. “Stop your wrangling. It’s indecent.”
Dr. Goodrich returned to the room.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought it was advisable for Mrs. Morrow to go to her room. She seems far more irrational this afternoon than she did this morning.” He glanced, with sympathy, at Andrew. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out better. But there is a good deal of trial and error in these cases, it’s the only way we learn. In its present stage psychiatry has many classifications and rules, but far more exceptions. What I am trying to tell you is not to expect results too soon.”
“I see,” Andrew said slowly.
“And for the present I think your wife should have no visitors.”
“I’m not to come again?”
“I’ll let you know when I think it’s advisable. Meanwhile it would be a good idea to send her gifts, flowers and fruit and little things. She must be given the feeling that her family care for her and are thinking of her.”
“We are,” Polly said. “We think of very little else.” Odd girl, Dr. Goodrich thought fleetingly. He shook hands with Andrew. “By the way, Dr. Morrow, if you’re driving back to town, perhaps you’d give a lift to someone here.”
“Certainly.”
“He’s had a bad time. His — one of his relatives is here and became disturbed. His face is scratched. I’d like to feel he’ll get home all right.”
“We’ll be glad to take him.”
In the corridor a nurse was standing talking to a thin shabby man. The man had his hands in his pockets, and his head was bent over as if he was too tired to hold it up any longer.
“Mr. Hammond,” Dr. Goodrich said. “Dr. Morrow is going into town and will be glad to give you a lift.” Hammond raised his head. His face was very pale, the only color in it was in the red-rimmed eyes and the three long scratches down his cheek.
“Thanks,” he said huskily. “Very nice of you.”
He didn’t look at anyone. When he walked down the corridor he moved as if his whole body was in pain.
Chapter 8
There’s a man and woman and kid down here,” the desk sergeant told Sands on the phone. “They’ve got the damnedest story I ever heard. I don’t know exactly where to send them.”
“You have every intention of sending them up here,” Sands said.
“Seems up your alley, Inspector, but I don’t know.”
“Send them up.”
The Maguire family was escorted into Sands’ office. The boy was about ten, and looked intelligent and thoroughly awed by his surroundings. He had to be prodded into the office by his mother’s large competent thumb.
The Maguires looked respectable lower-middle-class, and uncertain, and the combination, Sands knew, would merge into belligerence unless he could restore their self-assurance.
“I’m sure I don’t know whether I’m doing right or not,” Mrs. Maguire said loudly. “I told John, I said, maybe we should just phone, or maybe we should come right down.”
“Personal interviews are so much more satisfactory,” Sands said. “Few people are intelligent enough to do as you’ve done.”
It was broad, but so was Mrs. Maguire. She relaxed far enough to sit down, although giving the impression that she considered all chairs booby-traps.
“It’s like this. Tommy was out playing this morning; it’s Saturday and no school, and sometimes, he goes down to the lake. I don’t know, he just seems crazy about water, he can swim like a fish, and his father and me don’t take to the water at all.”
“Let me tell it,” Tommy said. “Let me tell it.”
“That’s a fine way to behave in front of a policeman! You hold your tongue.” Mrs. Maguire opened her purse and brought out a parcel wrapped in newspaper. She laid it on the desk, as if she was reluctant to touch it. “I put the newspaper around it myself. After I saw what was in the box I couldn’t hardly bear to wrap it up again.”
“You’re telling it wrong,” the boy said.
“Show some respect to your mother,” Mr. Maguire said.
“I found it on the beach,” the boy said, ignoring both his parents. “I often find things there, once fifty cents. So when I found this box I thought there’d be something in it, so I took it home.”
“First, I could hardly believe my eyes,” Mrs. Maguire said in an agitated voice. “I didn’t even recognize what it was. It was sort of swollen, being soaked in the water and all.”
Sands removed the newspaper and revealed a water-soaked cardboard box which almost fell apart under his hands. Mrs. Maguire turned her head away, but the boy watched, fascinated.
A few minutes later Sands was in Dr. Sutton’s office. “Take a look at that.”
Sutton looked. “Been robbing graves?”
“What is it?”
“A finger. To be exact, a forefinger, probably male, and sliced off by an expert. The bones are badly crushed, probably had to be amputated.” He grimaced. “Hell-of-a-looking thing. Take it away. The joke’s over.”
“It’s just beginning,” Sands said.
“Where did you get the thing?”
“A boy found it on the beach. I think someone flung it into the lake last Monday, but the waves washed it up. It couldn’t have been in the water long, the box would have fallen apart.”
“Got a corpse to fit it?”
“Not yet,” Sands said. “Possibly it doesn’t belong to a corpse.”
“Maybe not,” Sutton said. “Maybe the guy that owns it is going around looking for it.”
“Your humor is nauseous stuff, Sutton.”
“Can’t be helped. Leave the thing here and I’ll examine it in the lab.”
“Don’t die laughing about it, will you?” Sands said and went out of the room. He felt unjustly irritated with Sutton who was, he knew, a kind and simple young man. Perhaps too simple. To Sutton the finger was merely a finger, bones and skin, gristle and ganglia. To Sands it was part of a man, once warmed and fed by flowing blood, articulated and responsive to a living brain, knowing the feel of wind and grass, the touch of a woman.
He went back to his office and put on his hat and coat, slowly, because he dreaded the job he had to do.
Ten miles west of Toronto stand the iron gates of Penwood, protecting its inmates against the world and the world against its inmates. At the ornamental apertures in the gates society could press a cold peering eye, but inside, the little colony carried on, undisturbed and uncaring. It grew most of its own food, ran a diary farm, handled its own laundry, and sold samples of needlework, watercolors, and wicker baskets to a curious public. (“Made by a crazy person, imagine! Why it’s just as good as I could do!”)
The colony was fathered by its superintendent, Dr. Nathan, a psychoanalyst turned business executive, and mothered by its host of nurses, chosen for their quality of efficient and cheerful callousness. No nurse who confessed to daydreaming, or sentimentalism, or an interest in art, was accepted on the staff. A surplus of imagination could be more dangerous than stupidity, and a weakness for emotionalism could destroy the peace of a whole ward.
Miss Scott had none of these undesirable qualities. In addition to her vital lacks she had a sense of responsibility and a detached fondness for all of her charges. Miss Scott listened and observed and because she had a poor memory she committed her observations to paper, thus doubling her value. She pitied her patients (while impersonally noting that there were lots of people worse off than they were) but when she went off duty at night she was able to forget the day entirely and devote herself to her succession of boy friends.
Incapable of a grand passion, she was the kind of woman who would one day make an advantageous marriage, stick to it, and produce curly-headed and conveniently spaced offspring.