weapon from her fingers. His wide lips twitched and he ran fingers through his mop of carroty hair.
“God in heaven,” he fumed. “Let’s get together on this. What do you and what don’t you know? What am I supposed to know and what am I supposed not to know?”
“Did I-d-did I k-kill my mother?” she managed to get out between quivering lips.
“That’s the third time you’ve asked me,” he told her irritably. “Suppose you come clean with your end of the story. What do the police think?”
“I don’t know.” She wrung her hands and peered appealingly at him from beneath lowered lashes. “They asked me a lot of questions and told me to stay in my room.”
“Whereupon you sneaked over here to be comforted.” Shayne poured out two more glasses of cognac and pressed one into Phyllis Brighton’s fingers. Then he filled the water glass and put it into her other hand.
“Put the liquor down without taking a breath and follow it with a big gulp of water.”
She did as she was told, and her eyes grew brighter as the dose coalesced with the previous drink she had taken.
Shayne sipped at his glass and said, “Start at the beginning. From the moment your mother arrived.”
She swallowed hard and averted her eyes. “They wouldn’t let me go to the station to meet her. I just saw her a few minutes before dinner and then at the table. She was upset because Mr. Brighton wasn’t well enough for her to see him, and she went to her room to lie down after dinner. I didn’t feel very well and I-went to bed and to sleep and-and I didn’t wake up until you came to tell me what had happened.” She raised her eyes miserably to Shayne’s face. He was peering at the liquor in his glass.
He said mildly, “That’s the story you told the police. All right. It’s a good one. Stick to it. But you’ll have to tell me the truth if I’m going to help you.”
“I have,” she cried wildly. “That’s the absolute truth. Unless-unless-” She began sobbing brokenly.
Shayne said, “Ah?” and waited.
“You were there,” she reminded him. “I thought maybe you knew something else. I-sometimes I do things and don’t remember.”
“I’ve heard,” said Shayne to his glass, “of convenient losses of memory. But this is the most remarkable case I’ve ever personally contacted.”
“Don’t you believe me?” she asked wildly. She jumped to her feet. “If you don’t believe me it’s no use.” Her hand darted for the pistol.
Shayne caught her wrist and forced her back to the chair. “Hell, I don’t know what to believe,” he growled. “There’s a lot of angles-” His voice trailed off as he stared speculatively at her.
He emptied his glass and set it down with a thump. “You and I,” he told her, “have got to learn to talk each other’s language.” He took a handkerchief from the pocket of his robe and wiped the sweat from his face. His voice was faintly incredulous. “You don’t remember anything from the time you went to sleep and when we came crowding in your room?”
“No!” she cried, her eyes bright. “You must believe me.”
“What the hell are you worrying about then? Didn’t they tell you that your door was locked on the outside?”
“Yes.” She shuddered. “But they seemed to think there was something awfully peculiar about that.”
“What do you think about it?” demanded Shayne.
“I don’t-know what to think.”
His heavy brows came down fiercely over his eyes. Phyllis Brighton watched him apprehensively.
“Taking your crazy story for something to start on,” he said finally, “how long have you been having these spells of doing things and forgetting?”
“You do believe me!” She clasped her hands and looked almost happy.
“I learned a hell of a long time ago in this business not to believe anybody or anything-not even what I see with my own eyes. Let it pass. We’ve got to start somewhere. I asked you a question.”
“It’s been going on for months,” she told him breathlessly. “That’s one of the symptoms that Doctor Pedique has been treating me for. And the worst part is the way things that I really do get mixed up with things I’m just thinking about doing before I lose track.”
“Say that again. More slowly. It doesn’t quite make sense.”
“It’s-hard to explain,” she faltered. “When I wake up I sometimes have hazy memories of doing things. And when I check up, I find I really did some of the things I remember-and others didn’t happen at all.”
Shayne was staring at her with hard eyes, but his voice was soft.
“I’m guessing you’ve got some hazy memories about this evening that you haven’t mentioned.”
She jerked back as though he had struck her. “I-they’re so mixed up that I don’t know whether any of them are real or just my imagination.”
“That,” said Shayne glumly, “is what I was afraid of.”
“Are you-keeping anything back from me?”
Shayne nodded slowly and rubbed his chin. “Some things that don’t check up-yet.”
Phyllis’s eyes were very bright. “I remember, or imagined, some things about you.”
It was awfully quiet in the room. Outside, the drone of late-evening traffic sounded distantly faint. Shayne twirled his glass between heavy fingers and did not look at the girl. He finally said, “Yeah?” without raising his eyes.
He could hear Phyllis’s breathing quicken. “Did you see me before you came to my room with the others and wakened me?”
“What makes you ask that?” He looked at her.
She was frowning perplexedly. She looked older than he had thought her this afternoon. Twenty, maybe. And she was beautiful.
“Because I remember, or dreamed, that you talked with me. That you put your arm around me and walked with me. That you-made me take off my nightgown in front of you.”
Shayne couldn’t stand that look of tortured questioning in her eyes. She was thinking about that locked door. It was the one thing that stood between her and the belief that she had committed matricide. If he took that away from her-
He shook his head. “That’s a hell of a thing to imagine, youngster, even for Freud. You’ve got a lot of goofy ideas. I’m not the kind of a guy to watch a girl take off her nightgown in a bedroom-and not do anything about it. You can mark me out of your dream.”
“I-wondered.” She shivered and swallowed hard, looked away from him. “There are some women who don’t-appeal to men that way.”
“What are you getting at?” he growled.
“I’ve been reading some of Doctor Pedique’s books. He lent them to me to study so I might understand myself better when he discovered what he thinks is my-unnatural love for Mother.”
Her voice trailed off, and again there was only silence in the room. Shayne sipped his cognac and fought to keep a rational grip on himself. Something inside him was beginning to feel sick. The girl’s voice began again, quite impersonally, as if the whole thing were hateful but she was resigned to it. “His books are full of case histories of people with curious sexual complexes. I didn’t realize-I didn’t know there were that sort of people in the world.”
“There are lots of things you’d be just as well off not knowing.”
“But it was important to me. It fascinated me after Doctor Pedique hinted I wasn’t-normal that way. I read everything he had, to try and find out for myself whether he was right.”
Shayne’s fist thumped on the table. “He was screwy to give you those books to read. You’re too young and you’ve got too much imagination. It’s not healthy to study that sort of stuff.”
“I wanted to,” she cried wildly. “I had to find out about myself.”
“Well, did you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I thought I recognized the same feelings inside of me as the books described.”
“Autosuggestion,” Shayne muttered. “You were wide open to that sort of stuff.”
“I’ve got to know, now.” She leaned toward him pleadingly. “I can’t go on any longer without being sure. You’ve got to help me.” She caught his hands in hers.
