'Nevada?'
'I doubt it. I'm hardly famous enough to attract out-of-state patients.'
The remark seemed forced.
'Would Ketchel's address be in the clinic records?'
'It might, at that. But why are you so interested in Mr. Ketchel?'
'I don't know yet. I just am.'
I threw him a question from far left field. 'Wasn't it just about then that Roy Fablon committed suicide?'
The question took him by surprise. For a moment his face was trying on attitudes. It settled on a kind of false boredom just behind which his intelligence sat and watched me.
'Just about when?'
'The picture of the Ketchels was taken in September 1959. When did Fablon die?'
'I'm afraid I don't remember exactly.'
'Wasn't he your patient?'
'I have a number of patients and, frankly, my chronological memory isn't so good. I suppose it was around about that time but if you're suggesting any connection-' 'I'm asking, not suggesting.'
'Just what are you asking, again?'
'Did Ketchel have anything to do with Fablon's suicide?'
'I have no reason to think so. Anyway, how would I know?'
'They were both friends of yours. In a sense you may have been the connection between them.'
'I was?'
But he didn't argue the point. He didn't want to go into it at all.
'I've heard it suggested that Fablon didn't commit suicide.
His widow raised the question again tonight. Did she raise it with you?'
'She did not,' he said, without looking at me. 'You mean he was drowned by accident?'
'Or murdered.'
'Don't believe everything you hear. This place is a hotbed of rumors. People don't have enough to do, so they make up rumors about their friends and neighbors.'
'This wasn't exactly a rumor, Dr Sylvester. It was an opinion. A friend of Fablon's told me he wasn't the sort of man to commit suicide. What's your opinion?'
'I have none.'
'That's strange.'
'I don't think so. Any man is capable of suicide, given sufficient pressure of circumstances.'
'What were the special circumstances of Fablon's suicide?'
'He was at the end of his rope.'
'Financially, you mean?'
'And every other way.'
He didn't have to explain what he meant. Towed by Ella, his wife hove into view. She had slipped another mental disc and was in a further stage of drunkenness. Her mouth was set in grooves of dull belligerence. Her eyes were fixed.
'I know where you've been. You've been in bed with her, haven't you?'
'You're talking nonsense.'
He fended her off with his hands. 'There's nothing between me and Marietta. There never has been, Aud-'
'Except five thousand dollars worth of something.'
'It was supposed to be a loan. I still don't know why you wouldn't co-operate.'
'Because we'd never get it back, any more than the other money you've thrown away. It's my money just as much as yours remember. I worked for seven years so that you could get your degree. And what did I ever get out of it? The money comes in and the money goes out but I never see any of it.'
'You get your share.'
'Marietta gets more than her share.'
'That's nonsense. Do you want her to go under?'
He looked from me to Ella. Throughout the interchange with his wife, he had been talking to all three of us. Now that his wife was thoroughly discredited, he said: 'Don't you think you better come home? You've made enough of a spectacle of yourself for one night.'
He reached for her arm. She backed away from him grimacing, trying to recover the feel of her anger. But she was entering a fourth, lugubrious stage.
Still backing away, she bumped into the mirror. She turned around and looked at herself in it. From where I stood I could see her reflected face, swollen with drink and malice, surmounted by a loosened sheaf of hair, with a little trickle of terror in the eyes.
'I'm getting old and heavy,' she said. 'I can't even afford to take a week in residence at the health farm. But you can afford to gamble our money away.'
'I haven't gambled in seven years, and you know it.'
Roughly he put his arm around her, and walked her out. She was tangle-footed, like a heavyweight fighter at the end of a bad round.
14
THERE WERE LIGHTS In the Jamieson house as I passed, and a single light in Marietta Fablon's. It was after midnight, a poor time for visiting. I went to see Marietta anyway. Her husband's drowned body seemed to be floating just below the surface of the night.
She took a long time to answer my knock. When she did, she opened a Judas window set in the door, and peered at me through the grille. She said above the sound of the wind: 'What do you want?'
'My name is Archer-'
She cut in on me sharply: 'I remember you. What do you want?'
'A chance to talk seriously with you.'
'I couldn't possibly talk tonight. Come back in the morning.'
'I think we should talk now. You're worried about Ginny. So am I'
'Who said I was worried?'
'Dr Sylvester.'
'What else did he say about me?'
'I could tell you better inside.'
'Very well. This is rather Pyramus and Thisbe, isn't it?'
It was a gallant effort to recover her style. I saw when she let me in to the lighted hallway that she was having a bad night. The barbiturates were still playing tricks with her eyes. Her body, un-corseted under a pink quilted robe, seemed to have slumped down on its fine bones. She had a pink silk cap on her head, and under it her face seemed thinner and older.
'Don't look at me please, I'm not lookable tonight.'
She took me into her sitting room. Though she only turned on one lamp I could see that everything in the room, the print-covered chairs and settee and the gay rug and the drapes, was faintly shabby. The only new thing in the room was the pink telephone.
I started to sit on one of the fragile chairs. She made me sit on another, and took a third herself, by the telephone.
'Why did you suddenly get concerned about Ginny?' I said.
'She came home tonight. He was with her. I'm close to my daughter - at least I used to be - and I could sense that she didn't want to go with him. But she was going anyway.'
'Why?'
'I don't understand it.'
Her hands fluttered in her lap, like birds, and one of them pecked at the other. 'She seems afraid to go, and afraid not to go with him.'
'Go where?'
