“Jack?”
“Jack Adair.”
“I’m feeling very well, thank you, Jack.”
“That’s wonderful. Anything you need?”
“No. I don’t believe so. Why?”
“Kelly sends his love.”
“You mean Mr. Vines?”
“That’s right. Kelly Vines.”
“Mr. Vines is such a silly man. He comes to see me almost every month, I think. Sometimes he says he is Kelly Vines and sometimes he says he is someone else. Once he said he was a movie actor but I didn’t really believe him.” She smiled. “He’s such a silly man.”
“Do you get many other visitors?”
“The coyotes come sometimes. And the deer. The deer will come almost up to this window but the coyotes don’t come nearly so close as that.”
Adair nodded his appreciation of the visiting wildlife. “Did you ever get a visit or a call from Soldier Sloan?”
“Who?”
“Soldier P. Sloan.”
“Whatever does the ‘P’ stand for?”
“Pershing.”
“I remember him.”
“Then he did visit you.”
“He died.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Before I was born.”
“Who died?”
“John Joseph ‘Blackjack’ Pershing. Born eighteen sixty. Died nineteen forty-eight.”
Danielle Adair Vines rose slowly from her chair, clasped her hands loosely in front of her and, Adair thought, suddenly looked closer to thirteen than thirty-five. She cleared her throat, lifted her chin slightly and began to recite.
“‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death,’ by Alan Seeger, born eighteen eighty-eight; died nineteen sixteen.” She cleared her throat again. “‘I have a rendezvous with Death / At some disputed barricade / When Spring comes back with rustling shade / And apple-blossoms fill the air.’”
She smiled shyly at Adair. “I know another one about the war your friend General Pershing fought in. It’s called, ‘In Flanders Fields.’”
“I think I know that one,” Adair said. “It’s also very nice. Very moving.”
She sat back down in the chair and placed her still folded hands on the table. “Will Mr. Vines come to see me again?” she asked. “He’s such a silly man.”
“I’m sure he will.”
“And will you be coming back?”
“If you like.”
“I’ll have to think about it. You’re not silly like Mr. Vines, but I still have to think about it. And I am so very sorry about your friend.”
“Who?”
“The one who died. General Pershing.”
“Thank you, Dannie,” said Jack Adair as he rose. “That’s very kind of you.”
The resident psychiatrist was Dr. David Pease, a forty-three-year-old twice-divorced Jungian, who held a twenty-percent interest in the Altoid Sanitarium. He wore a green jogging suit and had a wedge-shaped head, some thinning curly gray hair and a pair of sooty eyes that blinked so rarely that Adair was almost willing to believe they had been painted on his face.
“Dr. Altoid still with you?” Adair asked.
David Pease shifted in the chair behind his desk, didn’t blink, twitched his mouth and said, “Like Marley, Dr. Altoid has been dead these seven years.”
“Died rich, I bet.”
“Comfortable.”
“How many more months do you think my daughter will have to spend here at six thousand dollars per month?”
“We can’t provide you with a timetable, Mr. Adair.”
“What about a guess-even a wild surmise will do.”
Dr. Pease shook his head, the unblinking eyes never leaving Adair’s face. “If I guessed, you’d take it as prediction. And if it were wrong, you’d understandably hold me to account.”
“She’s out of it, isn’t she?” Adair said. “She’s floating around out there in her own private galaxy.”
“She’s much better than she was.”
“She doesn’t recognize her own father.”
“She must have her reasons.”
“Or her husband.”
“She recognizes Mr. Vines now. But not as her husband. She thinks of him as a harmless eccentric who visits her once a month.”
“Can you cure her?”
“We can help her. We obviously have helped her.”
“What if the money runs out?”
That made Dr. Pease blink. “Is that likely?”
“Considering that her father’s just out of jail, her husband’s disbarred and her brother’s dead, it’s what you might call a real possibility.”
“What about her mother?”
“Her mother can’t come up with seventy-two thousand a year.”
“We’ll keep Danielle as long as we can, of course. And if it should ever prove to be no longer possible, we will, if you like, see that she’s accepted by a well-managed state facility.”
“I didn’t know there were any well-managed state facilities.”
“Some are better run than others-like everything else.”
“How long would the state keep her?”
“Until it’s determined she’s no longer a danger to herself or to others.”
“That could be a week or ten days, couldn’t it?”
“I wish you wouldn’t try to pin me down, Mr. Adair.”
Adair rose. “Either Vines or I will be here with the money on the fifteenth as usual.”
Dr. Pease also rose until he reached his full height, which was a stooped six-foot-four. “She’s worth every cent, Mr. Adair.”
Jack Adair studied the unblinking Pease for several seconds, nodded and said, “Well, I suppose none of us reared our daughters to be bag ladies, did we?”
Adair waited for Merriman Dorr in the sanitarium’s reception area, which resembled the lobby of a very expensive residential hotel. As he sat, shifting restlessly in a deep wingback chair, Adair fretted about his daughter, longed for a drink and repeatedly ran Soldier Sloan’s cryptic notation through his mind: C JA O RE DV. But he could come up with nothing better than his original interpretation: See Jack Adair alone regarding Danielle Vines.
At exactly eight o’clock he hurried out the sanitarium’s front door just as the Land-Rover pulled to a stop. Adair climbed into the front passenger seat and was turning around, reaching for something in the rear, when Dorr asked, “How’d it go?”
“Lousy,” Adair said, facing the front again, the black cane in his right hand.
“So we don’t stay overnight or anything?”
