An Old Friend of the Family d-3 Read online

  Trusting her instincts, she finished gathering the clothes before she hurried back to her own room. The old man waited for her, solid as the chair he sat on, dressed as he had been yesterday in a black topcoat over a dark suit. His soft, dark hat was in his lap.

  “Here,” said Judy. “I even got a bra, though more often than not Kate doesn’t wear one.”

  “Ah,” said the old man. The word was not exactly embarrassed, but perhaps he didn’t know just what to say. He got up from his chair and held open a small, dark bag that Judy had not noticed before. Into it she dropped the clothing bundle. “Now,” he said, tucking the bag under one arm, “since we are co-operating so well, do you suppose it might be possible to obtain the key to the family mausoleum in Lockwood Cemetery?”

  “What for?” Again she asked the question automatically. But this time thinking it over only confirmed her right to ask. Hands jammed in the pockets of her robe, she stood waiting for an answer.

  The old man seemed to think his answer over carefully before he gave it. “Your father mentioned to me that some of the larger and, ah, less costly pieces of his pottery collection have been relegated to that mausoleum. Should he ever question you about the key, you might mention that you gave it to me so I could look at those items without intruding any more upon his grief. Of course, if he never notices that the key is gone, we need not bother him about the matter at all. Would you concur?”

  “You have a neat way of not answering questions.”

  “Would you concur?”

  “I guess so. Dr. Corday?”

  “Yes?”

  The question Judy really wanted to ask would not quite come out, even when she tried to tell herself again that she might be dreaming. Instead she said: “I think I know where Father keeps all the keys we don’t use much. On a big key ring in his desk in the study. They’re all tagged, or most of them are. But I’m pretty sure the desk is locked.”

  Her visitor smiled at her. He had a nice smile. “In that case we need not worry about it tonight. I shall ask him for the key another time.”

  “Dr. Corday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Kate alive?” Now it was out.

  For once it seemed he could not find an answer he was happy with. “Would you believe me, child, if I said she was?”

  “Don’t call me a child, please. Do you think I am one?”

  “No.” He bowed, fairly deeply. “I am sorry. No, I do not think that at all. I would not have wasted half an hour from my duties, sitting here, to watch a child sleep.”

  What he had just said was something that Judy did not want to have heard; and anyway she did not want to be distracted. “Give me an answer. Is she?”

  He studied her in silence.

  Judy pressed on. “I’ve dreamed about her. Last night, and again tonight, before you came. In the dream I see her alive, but locked up somewhere. She keeps calling for Joe, but he can’t hear her. And now you ask me for the mausoleum key, and for her clothes. Why do I trust you? But I do.”

  “Yes, that is very good, you must trust me, Judy. And you must make up your mind that you are never going to see your sister alive again.”

  “How can I believe that when you won’t swear to me that she’s dead?”

  “To others I can lie. I am very good at telling lies. But to you . . . I am prevented.”

  “Then she is—”

  “Consider her dead, I tell you!” There was a sudden ferocity in the old man’s voice. “And say nothing, nothing, of these feelings and these dreams of yours to anyone but me. It would be very bad for family morale.”

  “I—know that.” Suddenly Judy was on the brink of tears.

  He stood over her, a strong tower offering safety, of which now she felt very much in need. “Judy, you must go back to sleep. And you must dream again. Since you have the power of dreams that are so—so vivid, it may be that we can use them. Hear me. Dream not of Kate. Leave Kate to me now. Dream of your brother. Dream of John. Dream . . .”

  It seemed to Judy that even as the old man’s eyes vanished and his voice ceased, that she was waking up. She was alone in her room, in bed, well tucked beneath her covers, still wearing her robe over her nightgown. Outside the undraped window, the lake-sky showed a dull, gray dawn. Her brother’s cries, silent but terrible, were ringing in her mind.

  TEN

  The phone awoke Joe Keogh from some dark nightmare, the sound an overwhelming relief because it meant nightmares were over and it was time to go to work. He had the receiver in his hand before the memory came that this was supposed to be another day off for him. And why it was.

  “Hello Joe, this is Judy.”

  “Judy—what’s up?” It was broad day. His watch, still on his wrist, said after ten. Last night he had drunk too much, finishing a bottle of scotch alone. He didn’t notice any hangover, though, just a dullness. All life was a hangover, these days.

  Judy’s phone voice said: “There’s something you have to know.”

  Now sitting naked on the edge of his single bed, Joe was staring at a curl of house-dust on the bare hardwood floor under the small bedside table that held the phone. That curl had been there when Kate was still alive.

  “What is it?” But before he finished asking, he was sure he knew the answer. Johnny’s body had been found.

  “Kate’s body,” the phone-voice told him, and he had a sudden sensation of re-entering a bad dream that he had been through once before. He did not answer immediately.

  Judy went on: “She—her—she’s missing from the morgue this morning. The Chicago police called us about half an hour ago.”

  “Missing.” Rubbing his eyes made things no clearer. “Are you sure it was really the police who called?” A kidnapping-mutilation and a mysterious death in the same prominent family were sure to draw warped jokers to the scene.

  “Yes, the other police are still tapping our phone. And the Chicago police had Dad call them back. It really happened.”

  Judy’s voice sounded more hopeful than dismayed. Well, she was a little weird sometimes. Joe sighed. “It wasn’t just some mixup at the morgue? Someone took the wrong body to be buried?”

  “It doesn’t sound like it could be anything like that. One doctor remembers seeing her there yesterday afternoon. This morning some other doctor went to look, getting ready for the examination. And she was just gone.”

  He could make no sense of it. “How are you managing, Judy?”

  “Mom and Dad are just numb, I think. Gran seems more upset by this than they are.”

  “Oh. But I meant you.”

  “Me? I’m coping okay. You sound like you are, too.”

  “More or less. Look, did you hear from Dr. Corday this morning?”

  There was a pause on the line. “Why do you ask? Did he get back to his motel okay last night?”

  “Yeah, I dropped him off. Look, just hang in there, kid. I think I’m going to come over and see you.”

  As Joe hurried into his clothes, his mind was fixed on the remembered face of the old man who last night had been so intent on getting into the morgue. He turned the image from fullface to profile and back again, as if Corday were standing before the black-on-white hatched inchmarks of the lineup. Put on your hat, take it off. No, no face that Joe had ever seen before.

  Kate—gone. But that wasn’t accurate. Kate had really been gone for days. The body on the right slab or the wrong slab had been hers, but it was not her any longer, and he could feel no vital concern for anything that happened to it. This morning’s bad dream wasn’t a new tragedy, only a new craziness.

  Dressed and shaved, he called the Shores Motel. Dr. Corday was registered there, all right, but his room didn’t answer.

  Joe decided to give himself time for one cup of instant coffee—after all, there was no way in the world that the old guy could have stolen the body last night, in the five or six or seven minutes he had been out of Joe’s sight. Joe dropped two slices of bread into the toaster. Of course, he coul
d have returned to the morgue again later. . . .

  He sat at the small table in the dining alcove of his small apartment, and tried to get his thinking back into a police track. In police work you couldn’t very often accept that strange happenings were just coincidence; last night the rather strange old man had prowled around the morgue, and this morning she was gone.

  In police work also, on the other hand, you had to start with what was possible. In fact, the old man could not even have got into the building there last night. Someone had, though—or did Judy have the story garbled?

  Still chewing toast, Joe picked up his phone, dialed a number in Homicide, and asked for Charley Snider.

  “Charley? This is Joe Keogh. What is it, what’s the story?”

  “Oh yeah, the story. I’ll give it to you straight, man. I know what this must be like for you.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “The thing is, she was there as of about ten P.M. last night. Everybody swears all was in order then, at least. Then, man, as of six-ten this A.M., when one of the junior pathologists decides he wants a preliminary look, she was just not there. Empty bin’s correctly labeled. All the paper work’s in order, as near as we can find out. No bodies were officially removed from the morgue in those eight hours. The only other funny thing is the lockers where the clothes and other personal effects of the, uh, customers are kept; somebody had been digging around in there, it looks like. No locks broken, but the stuff’s all scrambled, and we don’t know yet if Kate’s property is missing or not.”

  “Family hadn’t claimed her things?”

  “Not yet they hadn’t.”

  “No signs of a break-in?”

  “None we’ve discovered, it’s a big place. We got our men still swarming through there. We’re checking out everyone who was on duty there last night. So far’s we know, no weirdos among them.”

  “That’s something.”

  “Hey, man, one more thing. Remember, we found Kate’s Lancia in the pound? It had been towed away from that hydrant. Anyway someone left a big fat thumbprint right on the rearview mirror, angle seemed to show it was someone reaching from the right seat. It’s being checked out in Washington now.”

  “It’s probably some garage man’s. No, it’s probably mine; I’ve ridden in that car a lot.”

  “If you got any ideas we can try, I’d like to hear.”

  “No, no ideas.” His suspicions of the old man, if they really were suspicions, had to settle into some kind of a sane pattern before he threw them out as a tip. An old friend of Clarissa’s, after all. “Thanks, Charley. I’m going over to the Southerlands’ for a while, in case you want to reach me.”

  He sat there for a minute staring at the cradled phone, but seeing the old man. Then he took a jacket from the closet and went out the door.

  * * *

  Snow, gentle-falling, soft as white night, dimmed the scorch of day to muted gray for the old man, dulled for him the multicolored windows of stained glass that in bright sun would have been explosions of discomfort. He needed rest and sleep. Not, as yet, to the point where his survival was in question, so he stayed on his feet and active. Tomorrow, though, he was certainly going to have to sleep.

  Besides dulling the sun, another eminently satisfactory effect of the snow was that it seemed to discourage visitors to Lockwood Cemetery. Or perhaps Americans were just not as enthusiastic as Europeans about visiting their dead. Anyway, during the whole morning he had heard no more than three or four vehicles whispering around the gravel roads of the cemetery, one of them a pickup truck with snowplow attached, that seemed to make but little progress in getting the drives clear.

  Gently, but very insistently, the snow continued to fall. By two o’clock it lay ankle-deep on the broad lawns and weathered stones of the cemetery’s old section, and clung to the wrought-iron fences, obscuring the signs that warned about the guard dogs being loosed here after dusk. The snow and the dogs were all fine with the old man who stood looking out from inside the Southerland mausoleum, his eye to a small chink he had broken in one window of stained glass.

  He supposed that this mausoleum was old and large, as such things went in this young country. It was a one-room house of marble no warmer and no colder than the snow, or than the bones it sheltered—or than the living but unbreathing flesh that it concealed today.

  At intervals, when he grew weary of looking out, five or six long paces took the old man from one end of the cold room to the other. This included a slight detour around the empty sarcophagus and the decorative urns that had been planted in the middle of the space. Looking at them, he could see why Andrew had exiled them here, ugly decorations no one wanted to behold. The central sarcophagus was unoccupied; so far all internments had been in the vaults built into the thick outer walls. Southerlands and their kin who had died in the past seventy years or so were there, behind the waist-high doors of green-patinaed bronze.

  Kate was lying just above one such door, on a wide marble ledge set below another stained-glass window. She had been lying there since just before the wintry dawn, curled up like a sleeper, wrapped in a sheet that revealed only her head.

  Kate lay on her left side, facing the room, but with eyes closed. One arm tucked beneath her head, she had scarcely moved for hours. The coarse sheet wrapping her from toes to neck bore on one corner the stamped legend, PROPERTY OF COOK COUNTRY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE. While she was not fully awake, she was not fully asleep either; which was one reason why the old man, finding himself thrust into the role of midwife for her new life, hesitated to leave her alone, even though other important matters demanded his attention.

  This half-sleeping condition of Kate’s had him somewhat puzzled. No reason, he thought, why she should not be able to sleep the daylight hours away, in this her native sepulcher. In fact when he brought her here he had expected her to slip into a deep sleep at once.

  He came back now from another squint out of the broken window, to stand motionlessly regarding her. His black topcoat was open, his dark hat set at a slightly jaunty angle, his dark glasses off, his hands behind his back.

  Suddenly Kate’s eyes flew open. “I don’t know you,” she said, in dazed mistrustfulness. Her speech was newly awkward: sometimes she forgot to take a breath before she started talking, for breath was no longer a requirement of her life; sometimes she drew in too much air, and the end of a phrase was punctuated with a sharp puff of the surplus.

  She had protested that he was a stranger enough times for him to have lost count. But if patience with her confusion was costing him an effort, he had not let that effort show as yet. “I am an old friend of the family, Kate,” he repeated, yet again. “Of your Grandmother Clarissa’s in particular. I have brought you here for your own protection.”

  Kate moved her body substantially now for the first time in hours, rising on one elbow. “How did you bring me here?”

  This question and answer too, they had been through several times before. “Think back, girl—what do you remember of our journey?”

  Kate’s blue eyes looked into the distance. This time round she was going to manage to take the conversation at least one step farther than before. “There were doors, somewhere . . . in a couple of different places . . . and you told me that because it was after dark we needed no keys; we could slip through.”

  “What else?”

  “It seems to me that I can remember—flying. Like something in a dream.”

  “Trust your memory, Kate. It was no dream. Now, what is the last thing that you can recall before our journey? Think carefully.”

  Obediently she retired into her own thoughts, to surface again in a few moments. “I can remember being at a party.”

  “Excellent! We are making progress. Where was the party?”

  “I . . . can’t remember.”

  “Try.”

  Kate seemed to be trying, but had no success. He pressed on: “After the party, then. You perhaps left with someone?”

  “Ye
s . . .”

  “Who was it?” The old man could hear, perhaps half a kilometer away, the snowplow scraping slowly.

  “He said . . .” Suddenly Kate sat bolt upright on her shelf, clutching the sheet about her. “He said his name was Enoch Winter.”

  “You have said that name before.” The questioner nodded with satisfaction. “And what does Enoch Winter look like, little one?”

  “He’s big. Very tall. Very strong.” The last word ended with a little shudder, wherein horror and repulsion were mingled with the memory of delight.

  “Taller than I am? Look at me.”

  Obediently Kate looked. “Oh, yes. By several inches.”

  For a long time, he mused, I was considered very tall myself. Now I am scarcely above the average, I suppose. Shall I someday qualify as a midget?

  Aloud, he asked: “His hair? His eyes? His face?”

  “Dark curly hair. Sort of a deep voice, but much rougher than yours. His eyes are blue, or maybe gray. I’ll know him if I see him again.”

  “Indeed, I should think you—” He broke off, watching her with great intentness.

  Kate’s gradual return to full awareness had reached a critical point. Now she was looking with terror at the marble walls, the stained glass, and the tombs surrounding her. “What is this place?” Her breath momentarily forgotten, the question fell into a mere soundless mouthing of the words. Then she drew in a gasp of air. “I know where I am. I know what this is.”

  “I am your friend,” the old man said with iron will, “and you are safe.”

  Words, even from him, were not enough. Kate screamed and leaped in mad panic from her shelf, a corner of the sheet trailing like a cape. She landed awkwardly, but with catlike new strength supporting unsprained ankles. Without a pause she sprang toward the single door of the mausoleum.

  Before she reached it, though, the old man was beside her, and had an arm around her waist. Despite the new strength with which she struggled, he drew her back and soothed her like a child. “No, no. You do not understand the dangers yet.”