An Old Friend of the Family

“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 could 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.