“Helen?” the woman asked in a doubtful tone. “Did you bring a Helen here?” To the sergeant she said, “I got twelve young men, and they’re always bringing their girls around for me to meet. Makes it hard to remember.”
“Yeah,” the bull-necked detective said disgustedly. “This guy lived here until a week ago, did he?”
Mrs. Weston looked surprised. “Until a week ago? He still does.”
Harry gazed at her with his mouth open. Sergeant Murphree glared at him, then asked Mrs. Weston in a stiff voice, “Mind if I look around his room for a minute?”
The landlady looked him over doubtfully, frowned at Harry and then apparently decided to cooperate with the police without asking questions. She led them up a flight of stairs to Harry’s old room. Harry gazed at the blank door in dread, almost knowing in advance what was on the other side.
“Gimme that key you claimed was to the apartment,” Sergeant Murphree said, holding out his hand.
Numbly, Harry handed it over. It slipped into the lock easily, and when the sergeant turned it, the door opened. Sergeant Murphree stepped aside, laid his hand on Harry’s shoulder and gently propelled him into the room first.
Harry felt no shock at what he saw, for by now his nerves were anesthetized to shock. A numbness almost approaching indifference had replaced his emotions, and he felt nothing whatever when he saw his own books on the table by the window, his alarm clock and table model radio on the bedside stand, and through the open door of the closet a rack containing his own neckties.
The thought flickered across his mind that somehow he had slipped back in time. In science-fiction stories he had read of “time faults” through which a person could accidently slip and find himself suddenly either in the future or the past. He had never heard of such a thing actually happening, and had never regarded time faults as anything but the stuff of fantasy, but how else could he explain what had happened? Perhaps Helen was still safe in Des Moines and they were not even married yet.”
He turned to look into Sergeant Murphree’s face, finding nothing there but the resigned bitterness of a cop who is long inured to spending much of his time chasing wild geese.
He asked eagerly, “What’s the date today?”
The expression on the sergeant’s face caused his eagerness to die. The man thinks I’m mad, he thought.
At the same time a matter occurred to him which shattered the time fault theory to dust. Dale Thompson had died that morning, which automatically proved he had not slipped back a few weeks in time, for once dead, the man could hardly come alive again weeks later and hire Helen as his secretary.
I am mad, he thought with an odd sense of relief. I haven’t lost Helen because I never had her. I imagined her arrival in Wright City, the apartment, our marriage, everything.
With the detached sense of standing to one side and hearing another person speak, he heard himself saying, “I guess it was all a mistake, Sergeant. Sorry to have troubled you.”
The detective’s face had flushed a dark red. He growled, “What you need is a little psychiatric treatment, Bub. You bring another wild story to Headquarters and you’ll find yourself in the observation ward at City Hospital!”
He strode out of the room and clumped down the stairs without even saying good-by to Mrs. Weston. The landlady regarded Harry strangely for a moment.
“What’s this all about, Mr. Nolan?” she asked finally. “You in some kind of trouble with the police?”
Harry shook his head at her.
“Well, I wouldn’t want a roomer in trouble with the police,” she said. “I’ll have to ask for your room if there’s any more of this kind of goings on.”
Harry merely gave her a trancelike nod. After the woman left, closing the door behind her, he stood in the center of the room for a long time without moving.
Finally, for want of anything else to do, he undressed and went to bed.
Though he almost immediately fell into an exhausted sleep, Harry did not spend a restful night. A recurrent nightmare of chasing Helen along labyrinthine corridors while Sergeant Joe Murphree held him back by the coat tails and Mrs. Weston stood on the sidelines laughing uproariously, awoke him time after time.
His periods of wakefulness were more restful than what sleep he got, for then he could lie still with a deliberately blanked mind and think of nothing. Sleep was merely a half-conscious coma in which agonized fears rose, from his subconscious to torment him.
At seven in the morning he abruptly awoke from a dream in which Helen, for the hundredth time, had just disappeared down a dim side corridor. Physically he was as exhausted as when he had fallen into bed, but he was startled to find his mental processes suddenly clear.
Last night he had gone to bed convinced he was mad, that his marriage to Helen, their week together in the apartment had been figments of a diseased imagination. This morning he knew with stark clarity he was as sane as any man ever was. And with equal clarity he knew that whatever persons or whatever supernatural forces, had created this incredible situation, Helen either was dead or in horrible danger.
While the thought caused a recurrence of all the terrors the numb conviction he was mad had deadened, it also brought relief of another sort. Aside from the natural relief of knowing he was not mentally diseased, for the first time, he faced squarely the problem of Helen’s danger and found the courage to fight it.
He started the fight by mentally going over everything that had happened from the moment his key refused to open the apartment door until his trancelike entry into the room where he now lay. Every action of his own, every word spoken by others, he reviewed in detail in an attempt to find some small point he could grip as a start toward an explanation.
He found two, but they floated into his mind so unobtrusively, it was some moments before he realized their significance. But when he finally did, he leaped from bed in excitement.
The first detail was small, and by itself probably would have escaped his attention.
It consisted merely of his recollection that Mrs. Johansen, the new landlady at the rooming house where Helen had stayed, had addressed the detective as “Sergeant,” although he had offered no introduction other than his badge. How had she known his rank, when she gave no indication that she had ever seen him before?
It was the second detail which filled him with overwhelming excitement. From Mrs. Johansen’s Sergeant Joe Murphree had driven straight to Mrs. Weston’s.
But he had not asked the address, and at no point during the supposed investigation had Harry given it to him.
Sergeant Don Murphy was not pleased to see Harry.
“I start work at four p.m.,” he said inhospitably. “You’ll find cops on duty at Headquarters.”
“Just any cop won’t do,” Harry told him. “I thought maybe you’d be interested in knowing your police department is crooked.”
The thin detective’s expression did not change and his body continued to bar the door of his small frame cottage. But his voice lost its inhospitable edge.
Without inflection he asked, “You just find that out? How long you been in Wright City?”
Harry ran his eyes over the front of the cheap but tidy cottage, glanced at the neatly trimmed lawn, which was just large enough to accommodate a single tree, and finally settled on a ten-year-old sedan at the curb. “Your car..?” he asked.
Sergeant Murphy stared at him a moment. “Yeah.”
“Sergeant Joe Murphree drives a Mercury convertible. Brand new.”
“Yeah,” Murphy repeated.
“I’ll bet he lives in a bigger home than this, too.”