'How do you propose to help her?'
'I'm going to take her home with me.'
Godwin stood up shaking his head.
'You can't stop me. I've been her guardian since her mother died. The law wifi back me up.'
'I think not,' Godwin said coldly. 'Dolly's of age, and she's here of her own free will.'
'I'd like to ask her that question for myself.'
'You're not going to ask her any questions.'
The woman took a step toward him and thrust her head forward on her neck. 'You think you're a little tin god, don't you, masterminding my family's affairs? I say you've got no right to keep her here under duress, making us all look bad. I've got a position to keep up in this county. I spent the day with some very high-level people from Sacramento.'
'I'm afraid I don't follow your logic. But keep your voice down, please.' Godwin himself was using the slow weary monotone that I had first heard on the telephone twenty-four hours before. 'And let me assure you again, your niece is here of her own free will.'
'That's right.' Alex came forward into the verbal line of fire. 'I don't believe we've met. I'm Alex Kincaid, Dolly's husband.'
She disregarded his hand.
'I think it's important for her to stay here,' he said. 'I have confidence in the doctor, and so has my wife.'
'I'm sorry for you then. He had me bamboozled, too, until I found out what went on in his office.'
Alex looked inquiringly at Godwin. The doctor turned his hands out as if he was feeling for rain. He said to Miss Jenks:
'You graduated in sociology, I believe.'
'What if I did?'
'From a woman of your training and background, I'd expect a more professional attitude toward the practice of psychiatry.'
'I'm not talking about the practice of psychiatry. I'm talking about the practice of other things.'
'What other things?'
'I wouldn't soil my tongue with them. But please don't think I didn't know my sister and what went on in her life. I've been remembering things--the way she used to primp and preen Saturday mornings before she came in to town. And then she wanted to move here, to be closer.'
'Closer to me?'
'So she told me.'
Godwin's face was white, as if all its color had been drawn into the darkness of his eyes. 'You're a silly woman, Miss Jenks, and I've had enough of you. I'll ask you to leave now.'
'I'm staying here till I see my niece. I want to know what you're practicing on her.'
'It would do her no good. In your present mood you'd do no good to anyone.' He moved around her to the door and held it open. 'Good night.'
She didn't move or look at him. She stood with her head down, a little dazed by the anger that had gone through her like a storm.
'Do you wish to be forcibly removed?'
'Try it. You'll end up in court.'
But a kind of shame had begun to invade her face. Her mouth was twitching like a small injured thing. It had said more than she intended.
When I took her by the arm and said, 'Come on, Miss Jenks,' she let me lead her to the door. Godwin closed it on her.
'I have no patience with fools,' he said.
'Have a little patience with me, though, will you, doctor?'
'I'll give it a try, Archer.' He took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. 'You want to know if there's any truth in her innuendo.'
'You make it easy for me.'
'Why not? I love the truth. My entire life is a search for it.'
'Okay, was Constance McGee in love with you?'
'I suppose she was, in a way. Women patients traditionally fall in love with their doctors, particularly in my field. It didn't persist in her case.'
'This may strike you as a foolish question, but did you love her?'
'I'll give you a foolish answer, Mr. Archer. Of course I loved her. I loved her the way a doctor loves his patients, if he's any good. It's a love that's more maternal than erotic.' He spread his large hands on his chest, and spoke from there: 'I wanted to serve her. I didn't succeed too well.'
I was silenced.
'And now, gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I have hospital rounds in the morning.' He swung his keys.
Alex said to me in the street: 'Do you believe him?'
'Unless or until I have proof that he's lying. He's not telling all he knows but people seldom do, let alone doctors. I'd take his word ahead of Alice Jenks's.'
He started to climb into his car, then turned back toward me, gesturing in the direction of the nursing home. Its plain rectangular facade loomed in the fog like a blockhouse, the visible part of an underground fortress.
'You think she's safe there, Mr. Archer?'
'Safer than she'd be on the streets, or in jail, or in a psycho ward with a police psychiatrist quizzing her.'
'Or at her aunt's?'
'Or at her aunt's. Miss Jenks is one of these righteous women who doesn't let her left lobe know what her right lobe is doing. She's quite a tiger.'
His eyes were still on the front of the nursing home.
Deep inside the building, the wild old voice I had heard that morning rose again. It faded like the cry of a seabird flying away, intermitted by wind.
'I wish I could stay with Dolly, and protect her,' Alex said.
He was a good boy.
I broached the subject of money. He gave me most of the money in his wallet. I used it to buy an airline ticket to Chicago and return, and caught a late flight from International Airport.
chapter 19
I left the toll road, which bypassed Bridgeton, and drove my rented car through the blocks of housing tracts on the outskirts of the city. I could see the clump of sawed-off skyscrapers in the business district ahead, and off to the left, across the whole south side, the factories. It was Sunday morning, and only one of their stacks was pouring smoke into the deep blue sky.
I stopped for gas at a service station and looked up Earl Hoffman's address in the telephone directory. When I asked the attendant how to get to Cherry Street, where Hoffman lived, he pointed in the general direction of the factories.
It was a middle-class street of substantial two-story houses which had been touched but not destroyed by the blight that creeps outward from the centers of cities. Hoffman's house was of grimy white brick like the others, but the front porch had been painted within living memory. An old Chevrolet coupe stood at the curb in front of it.
The doorbell didn't work. I knocked on the screen door. An old young man with more nose than chin opened the inner door and looked at me through the screen in a sad way.
'Mr. Haggerty?'
