The light was beginning to fade. Somebody called the bird-hater into the building. Dutifully, he plodded in out of sight. A nurse wearing a cardigan over her white uniform approached the woman with the parasol. The two of them walked towards the building in slow time. A door closed.
Twilight sifted into the room and gradually filled it. Neither of us bothered to turn on a light. I felt as cold and still as a fish in a dark bowl.
The chair-leather creaked under Bobby’s hand. All I could see of him was his white face and his hands gripping the chair arms.
“I can’t explain why I did what I did. I couldn’t see any other way to handle it. Afterwards I just kept waiting and hoping. Waiting to hear from Phoebe, hoping that something possible would come of it. I might have known that nothing possible would.” He said in a despairing voice in which a man’s deep tones were somehow mingled: “This is going to kill my mother.”
“I don’t think so. I talked to her last night.”
“Last night she didn’t know.”
“She was suspicious, from the first. She believed that you’d done something seriously wrong.”
“Mother thought that?”
“Yes. She believed she was protecting you for a murder you’d committed.”
“That’s funny,” he said. “I felt as if I had committed a murder. I dreamed on the bus going home that I had murdered her.”
I didn’t know if he meant Phoebe or her mother or his own mother. I didn’t ask him. It seemed almost irrelevant in this slow-motion underwater world.
Dr. Sherrill irrupted into the room. He closed the door quickly behind him, as though pursuers were reaching for the tail of his smock. He switched on the desk-lamp.
“Mr. Archer, can you tell me how to get in touch with Phoebe’s father? I promised her yesterday not to, but the situation has altered.”
So had he. His face was deeply troubled in the upward light.
“Homer Wycherly should be in Terranova. We can probably reach him through the sheriff there. That can wait until you tell me what she said.”
“What she said is confidential.” The steady force behind his words was running stronger than ever. His voice shook with it.
“It will stay confidential with me.”
“I’m sorry. As a doctor, I have the right of silence where my patients are concerned. You have no such privilege under the law.”
“You’re assuming trial conditions.”
“Am I?” Sherrill threw a distrustful look at Bobby. “We’ll continue this in private, Mr. Archer.”
“You can trust me,” Bobby said. “I’d never repeat anything that would hurt Phoebe. Didn’t I prove that in the last two months?”
“This isn’t a personal matter. Please wait outside, Mr. Doncaster. All the way outside, if you don’t mind.”
Bobby got up and went out, looking dejected. When Sherrill had closed the office door, I said:
“Did the girl confess those killings? You can at least give me a yes or no.”
Sherrill’s lips were tight. They spelled the word, “Yes,” as if it tasted sour.
“Did she go into her motives?”
“She outlined the circumstances. They provide a motive, certainly. I don’t think we’d better discuss them.”
“I think we should.”
“I can’t and won’t break a patient’s confidence.” The doctor sat down behind his desk with a kind of magisterial formality.
“You may not have to. I got it from Bobby Doncaster that Merriman walked into Mrs. Wycherly’s house in Atherton and caught the two of them with her body. He used the situation to set up a blackmail scheme – not his first. Merriman and his brother-in-law Quillan had been blackmailing Catherine Wycherly before they got their teeth into Phoebe. They simply transferred the bite from mother to daughter. They kept Phoebe on ice for a while in her mother’s San Mateo apartment, then hauled her off to Sacramento and forced her to impersonate her mother – made her put on weight, wear her mother’s clothes, and so on, so that she could pass for her. The point of all this was to go on collecting Catherine Wycherly’s alimony checks, and eventually the check for the sale of the house which Merriman was negotiating for the dead woman. Phoebe had to keep her alive, you might say, long enough to cash the check and turn the proceeds over to Merriman.”
“I see you know all about it,” Sherrill said. “It was a horrible scheme, a cruel refinement of punishment. The most horrible aspect of it was that it fitted in with the girl’s need to punish herself for what she had done to her mother. She also had a very strong unconscious need – I noticed it last spring – to identify with her mother. Even the forced feeding to put on weight coincided with her unconscious urges, as well as the fact of her pregnancy.”
“You’re going too fast for me.”
“Deliberately putting on weight, as Phoebe has been doing, can be an expression of anxiety and self-hatred. The self feels itself as heavy and gross and tries to invest itself with a gross, heavy, body. I’m simplifying, of course, but the general idea is recognized in the literature – in Binswanger’s classic case-history of Ellen West, for example. Lindner’s more popularized study of bulimia in The Fifty-Minute Hour is an even closer parallel, since Ellen West was psychotic, and Phoebe almost certainly is not.”
“What is she, doctor? The question is legally important, as you know.”
“I can’t make a diagnosis. Not yet. I think she hasn’t decided herself which way she’s going to go – towards reality, or towards illness. She’s still the same essentially neurotic girl who came to me last year, but now she’s under really terrible pressures. As she keeps saying, she’s been living in hell.” Sherrill’s face drooped with sympathy.
“Why did she come to you last year?”
“I never really got to the bottom of it. I only saw her twice, and then she terminated. Her resistance was very high: I couldn’t get her to talk about herself. Ostensibly she came to me because she was concerned about her family. Her mother was suing her father for divorce at the time. Phoebe blamed herself for the family breakup.”
“Did she say why?”
“It had to do with some scurrilous letters the family had received. Apparently they were the proximate cause of the blowup between her parents. I don’t pretend to understand the situation.”
“Did Phoebe write those letters?”
“It’s possible that she did. While she didn’t come right out with it, she seemed to feel responsible for them. You have to remember, on the other hand, that she’s a self-blamer, as many neurotics are. She tends to blame herself for everything that happens. This Merriman was lucky in his choice of a blackmail victim.”
“Lucky is hardly the word. He ended up as the victim.”
Sherrill looked at me as though he intended to speak. Instead he busied himself packing a pipe from a leather pouch. He lit it with a match whose leaping flame was reflected in his glasses. The circle of light from his desk-lamp filled up with shifting layers of blue-grey smoke. He narrowed his eyes, as if he was trying to descry a permanent shape or meaning in the smoke.
“We’re all victims, Archer, until we stop victimizing each other. Not that I’m crying over Merriman. He deserved to die, if any man does.”
“We all die, anyway, sooner or later. Too bad a sick girl had to be his executioner.”
“She didn’t actually carry it out herself,” the doctor said. “At least she claims not. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you know so much already it seems pointless to hold back. She employed a professional killer to do the job, on both Merriman and – what was the other blackmailer’s name?”