The two sets of tracks led to the town center, but there he lost them in a sudden welter as though a party had broken up somewhere. A left turn at the first traffic light would lead him ultimately to Amanda’s house; Justin persevered instead to the darkened volunteer fire station. At the back, as he had hoped, was the small police station, its lights swallowed up by drawn Venetian blinds.
The dispatcher on duty—even in his distraction it struck Justin that he looked like a heavily moustached Mona Lisa—put aside a thick volume on real-estate practice and listened attentively, although his gaze had lingered over the deep fresh scratch on Justin’s wrist. At the mention of Mrs. Balsam he frowned, held up a staying finger, and pulled open a drawer. “There was something on her in the day report.”
Justin lit a cigarette, his hand surprising him with a slight unsteadiness. The dispatcher scanned the sheet in front of him, shook his head in silent disgust at something, flipped it over. “Here we are. At one-nineteen, patrol car two responded . . .” He trailed off, evidently feeling that the official entry was not for Justin’s ears, read briefly, and glanced up. “Mrs. Balsam was found unconscious outside her house and taken by ambulance to the hospital,” he said. “It looked like a stroke to the attendant.”
Justin listened to the few details in blank astonishment. A natural disaster had never occurred to him in connection with Amanda’s lighthearted, energetic aunt, although now that he thought about it he remembered Amanda, not a nagger, raising her eyebrows occasionally over Mrs. Balsam’s brisk plying of the salt shaker at lunch or dinner. Hypertension?
Plus the discovery that she had unwarily left a door unlocked and become the victim of malicious mischief? The smashed mustard jar would be in keeping, if a semiliquid substance would have stayed dampish that long, and so might the severing of the telephone cord. Justin had not opened any drawers; for all he knew, they might have disclosed all kinds of unpleasantness.
But this theory did not explain the concealment of Mrs. Balsam’s handbag, unless the parcel-delivery service girl who had found her had put it there for safekeeping, and car theft did not come under the head of mischief. Much more urgently, where was Amanda?
The dispatcher, watching with his Mona Lisa eyes, pushed the telephone across. “Maybe she’s home right now,” he suggested.
Justin dialed with a sense of futility. Still, he gave Amanda time to wake out of a deep sleep, peer at the clock, and walk from her bedroom to the living room at a snail’s pace before he hung up.
A call came in. The dispatcher swung his chair around, did some alert jotting, and then pressed keys and spoke into a transmitter, relaying an address and a string of numbers. When he turned back to Justin he was tolerant but brisk.
Women of all ages were eccentric, his shrug and spread hands implied, and young women changed their minds with frequency. What more likely than that Miss Morley had borrowed her aunt’s car with her own out of commission? He did not actually say that Amanda had decided to rejoin her male companion of earlier that evening, but the possibility was clearly on the air. So was his desire to get back to his real-estate book.
Justin contained himself. He said that he had every reason to believe that his fiancee (he had boldly identified Amanda as such in order to obtain a hearing at all) had done no such thing, and that under all the circumstances he was extremely worried about her. Would the dispatcher at least put out a description of the car along with a request that Amanda call him at once?
Small-town police forces did this kind of thing routinely, and after all Mrs. Balsam was a resident. The dispatcher made a few good-tempered notes. Justin did not know the Volkswagen’s plate number, so with a queer wrench at his heart he added what her driver’s license said of Amanda but did not really describe her at all: five-feet-six, brown hair, hazel eyes. The child in question was about two.
“May I—” an urgent notion had entered his head “—use the phone again? It’s just possible that my fiancee is at the hospital.”
He didn’t believe it, he didn’t believe any of the suggestions offered to him, particularly that of Amanda haring off after Williams with little Rosie Lopez in tow, but here he might happen upon a trace of her and gain some enlightenment about Mrs. Balsam at the same time.
“Help yourself,” said the dispatcher, furtively sliding his hook closer. “Might be quickest to call Ace Ambulance and find out where they took her.”
It turned out to have been St. Swithin’s. By firmly establishing himself once more as Amanda’s fiance, Justin learned that Mrs. Balsam’s condition was somewhat improved although still guarded; she had, in fact, been able to send a communication to her niece, to whom the nurse at the other end of the line had spoken.
“When?” asked Justin, stunned and staring at the man across the desk.
“Oh, I’d say about fifteen or twenty minutes ago.”
“At her house?” Idiotic; where else could they have reached her?
“I would assume so. It’s the number she left with us, anyway.”
“Did Mrs. Balsam say—” began Justin, and was interrupted with a certain crispness: “I’m afraid you’d have to ask Miss Morley about that.”
Justin thanked the nurse and hung up. Unnecessarily, because her voice had quacked clearly around the small office, he said, “She’s home. They just talked to her.”
The dispatcher tore his sheet of notes from the desk pad, crumpled it, and dropped it into a wastebasket.
All’s well that ends well,” he said cheerfully, and had his book
