“Morrow seems to have bad luck too.” Bascombe finished a piece of pie and pushed the plate away. “Don’t we all?”
“You picked yours.”
“Don’t labor the point. Coming?”
Sands said he was not going back to the office. He had an appointment at the Ford Hotel.
Fifteen minutes later he was facing Lieutenant Frome across a small writing desk at the Ford.
Frome was very stiff and very military. In clipped tones he told Sands that he had recently finished his Transport Officer’s course at the Canadian Driving and Maintenance School at Woodworth. He was now waiting to be transferred overseas. It was his last furlough and he had intended to spend it getting married. How he actually was spending it was sitting around this dreary hotel waiting for Polly Morrow to make up her mind.
As he talked Frome became less a soldier and more an ordinary man with a grievance.
“I can’t understand it,” he told Sands. “She’s got some idea in her head that I’ve walked out on her. What I did was come down here. The rest of the family didn’t want me there. Why should they? I’m a stranger to them.” He forgot that Sands was a policeman on official business. Sands let him talk uninterrupted. He liked listening to people’s problems, it was a little more personal than the want ads.
“Martin’s been O.K.,” Frome said. “He says Polly likes to boss people around until there’s an emergency and then she has to be bossed. I don’t understand women. I’m from the West, Alberta. Women don’t act like this out there.”
“Don’t they,” Sands murmured.
“In fact, the whole thing has been a mess from the time I met her family. Practically before we said hello we had to run into a train wreck.”
“Oh? Who was with you?”
“Polly and her father and Martin. I was so damn nervous anyway about meeting her family — I’d only known her for three weeks. And then running into that mess and ending up by picking up bodies...” He looked bitterly at Sands, as if Sands had engineered the whole thing. “All right. What did you want to ask me?”
Sands smiled. “Nothing. Not a thing. Just dropped in to see how you were.”
Still smiling, he walked across the lobby, pausing at the door to wave his hand cheerfully.
“Everybody’s crazy,” Lieutenant Frome told the bartender some time later. “Everyone’s crazy but me.”
“Sure,” the bartender said. “Sure.”
Chapter 10
On the day of Cora’s death Lucille was transferred to a room of her own and put in the charge of a special nurse.
Miss Eustace had a highly specialized and difficult job. She called herself a free-lance psychiatric nurse. She worked in institutions and private homes, taking over twenty-four-hour-a-day care of violent or depressed patients to prevent them from doing harm to themselves or to others.
Her reputation and her wages were high, and she was regarded with awe by the other nurses, who felt the strain of even eight-hour duty on a disturbed ward. Over forty now, Miss Eustace considered herself a dull woman and was always surprised when she was praised for her skill and endurance and patience. In addition to these qualities Miss Eustace had a firm belief in God, a working knowledge of judo, and the ability to sleep and awaken as quickly as a dog. Only once had she been injured on a case, and that had been with one of her own knitting needles. She subsequently gave up knitting, and for amusement she played solitaire and wrote letters or simply talked.
Lucille refused food for nearly a week and on the fourth day Miss Eustace force-fed her by tube.
When it was over Miss Eustace said calmly, “It’s very undignified, isn’t it? Especially for a pretty woman like you.”
Almost unconsciously Lucille turned her head toward the mesh-covered mirror. Pretty? Me? Where is my hair?
“Tonight we’ll have a bit of soup together,” Miss Eustace continued. “You can’t possibly starve yourself to death, you know. It takes too long.”
Miss Scott, trained in a different tradition, would have been horrified to hear Miss Eustace speaking of “death” or “starving” to a patient. On the level of pure theory Miss Scott may have been right, but Miss Eustace got results. For supper Lucille had a bowl of soup and a custard, and some faint trace of color returned to her pallid drawn face.
But she was losing weight rapidly. Her clothes sagged on her body, and there were hollows beneath her cheekbones and a little sac of flesh under her chin. She never bothered to comb her hair and had to be told when to wash her hands. Though she seemed to listen quite attentively when Miss Eustace was talking, she rarely answered, and what talking she did was at night after she had been given a sedative. At these times she was like a person who, after a certain number of drinks, feels he is thinking and talking very clearly and brilliantly, with no consciousness of his blurred speech.
Miss Eustace went on playing solitaire and marking down her score. Out of one hundred and forty-nine games she had only won eleven. (But then it was, she wrote to her mother, a very difficult type of solitaire.)
“All of it is Mildred’s fault,” Lucille muttered into the shadows. “Mildred...”
(“My case is just popping off to sleep,” Miss Eustace wrote, steadily. “So please excuse the writing as just the floor light is on and it isn’t very bright in here.”)
“Miss Eustace!”
“Here I am,” Miss Eustace said pleasantly. “Would you like a drink?”
“I keep thinking about Mildred.”
“Turn over and think about something else.”
“What have they done with my hair?”
(“She wants to know what they’ve done with her hair,” Miss Eustace wrote. “They do think of quite the oddest things to say sometimes.”)
Lucille turned over in the bed. Think about something else. Not about Mildred. But look, see Mildred’s hair. How coarse it looked, each hair as thick as a tube, moving, writhing like snakes, oh, Miss Eustace, oh, please God.
(“I really feel sorriest of all for the family. After all, they’re still sane. My case’s family came today, visitors’ day, but they couldn’t see her, Dr. Goodrich’s orders.”) The snakes writhed and bled in spurts, covering Mildred’s face with their blood — go away, go away — I won’t look at you...
“Bloody, bloody,” she said, softly.
(“The language some of them use! I declare, for a Christian woman, I do know some of the awfullest words. I’d blush to repeat them. It even disturbs me when someone refers to our darling Lassie as a ‘bitch.’ I just can’t get used to it. Give Lassie a bone for me and tell her I’ll be coming home soon.”)
“I can’t sleep,” Lucille said.
“You’re trying too hard. Just close your eyes and think of something nice and soothing, like rain or grass waving or trees.”
Grass. I am thinking of grass and trees. The park, late at night, black, but moving, astir with shapes and shadows — be careful, look over your shoulder, there is something there — careful! Ah. It’s only Martin, don’t be afraid. Martin? Is it Martin, or Edith? It’s too dark, I don’t know. But it’s a friend, I can tell. Such a nice face, so wide and frank and candid.
Suddenly it closed up like a fist. Where the eyes and mouth had been there were only folds of skin, and two holes for a nose and little buds of ears.
“I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!”
“What can’t you stand? You just tell me and we’ll fix it in a jiffy.”
“I see — things...”
“How about some nice warm milk? I find warm milk puts me off just like that.”