Late in the afternoon McCracken, a San Francisco police department bomb-expert, arrived. After examining all the fragments of this and that which he could sweep up, he gave us a preliminary verdict that the bomb had been a small one, of aluminum, charged with a low-grade nitroglycerine, and exploded by a crude friction device.
“Amateur or professional job?” I asked.
McCracken spit out loose shreds of tobacco—he was one of the men who chew their cigarettes—and said:
“I’d say it was made by a guy that knew his stuff, but had to work with what he could get his hands on. I’ll tell you more when I’ve worked this junk over in the lab.”
“No timer on it?” I asked.
“No signs of one.”
Doctor George returned from the county seat with the news that what was left of Fitzstephan still breathed. The doctor was tickled pink. I had to yell at him to make him hear my questions about Fink and Gabrielle. Then he told me Fink’s life wasn’t in danger, and the girl’s cold was enough better that she might get out of bed if she wished. I asked about her nerves, but he was in too much of a hurry to get back to Fitzstephan to pay much attention to anything else.
“Hm‑m‑m, yes, certainly,” he muttered, edging past me towards his car. “Quiet, rest, freedom from anxiety,” and he was gone.
I ate dinner with Vernon and Feeney in the hotel café that evening. They didn’t think I had told them all I knew about the bombing, and kept me on the witness stand throughout the meal, though neither of them accused me pointblank of holding out.
After dinner I went up to my new room. Mickey was sprawled on the bed reading a newspaper.
“Go feed yourself,” I said. “How’s our baby?”
“She’s up. How do you figure her—only fifty cards to her deck?”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s she been doing?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking.”
“That’s from having an empty stomach. Better go eat.”
“Aye, aye, Mr. Continental,” he said and went out.
The next room was quiet. I listened at the door and then tapped it. Mrs. Herman’s voice said: “Come in.”
She was sitting beside the bed making gaudy butterflies on a piece of yellowish cloth stretched on hoops. Gabrielle Collinson sat in a rocking chair on the other side of the room, frowning at hands clasped in her lap—clasped hard enough to whiten the knuckles and spread the finger-ends. She had on the tweed clothes in which she had been kidnapped. They were still rumpled, but had been brushed clean of mud. She didn’t look up when I came in. The nurse did, pushing her freckles together in an uneasy smile.
“Good evening,” I said, trying to make a cheerful entrance. “Looks like we’re running out of invalids.”
That brought no response from the girl, too much from the nurse.
“Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Herman exclaimed with exaggerated enthusiasm. “We can’t call Mrs. Collinson an invalid now—now that she’s up and about—and I’m almost sorry that she is—he-he-he—because I certainly never did have such a nice patient in every way; but that’s what we girls used to say at the hospital when we were in training: the nicer the patient was, the shorter the time we’d have him, while you take a disagreeable one and she’d live—I mean, be there—forever and a day, it seems like. I remember once when—”
I made a face at her and wagged my head at the door. She let the rest of her words die inside her open mouth. Her face turned red, then white. She dropped her embroidery and got up, saying idiotically: “Yes, yes, that’s the way it always is. Well, I’ve got to go see about those—you know—what do you call them. Pardon me for a few minutes, please.” She went out quickly, sidewise, as if afraid I’d sneak up behind her and kick her.
When the door had closed, Gabrielle looked up from her hands and said:
“Owen is dead.”
She didn’t ask, she said it; but there was no way of treating it except as a question.
“No.” I sat down in the nurse’s chair and fished out cigarettes. “He’s alive.”
“Will he live?” Her voice was still husky from her cold.
“The doctors think so,” I exaggerated.
“If he lives, will he—?” She left the question unfinished, but her husky voice seemed impersonal enough.
“He’ll be pretty badly maimed.”
She spoke more to herself than to me:
“That should be even more satisfactory.”
I grinned. If I was as good an actor as I thought, there was nothing in the grin but good-humored amusement.
“Laugh,” she said gravely. “I wish you could laugh it away. But you can’t. It’s there. It will always be there.” She looked down at her hands and whispered: “Cursed.”
Spoken in any other tone, that last word would have been melodramatic, ridiculously stagey. But she said it automatically, without any feeling, as if saying it had become a habit. I could see her lying in bed in the dark, whispering it to herself hour after hour, whispering it to her body when she put on her clothes, to her face reflected in mirrors, day after day.
I squirmed in my chair and growled:
“Stop it. Just because a bad-tempered woman works off her hatred and rage in a ten-twenty-thirty speech about—”
“No, no; my stepmother merely put in words what I have always known. I hadn’t known it was in the Dain blood, but I knew it was in mine. How could I help knowing? Hadn’t I the physical marks of degeneracy?” She crossed the room to stand in front of me, turning her head sidewise, holding back her curls with both hands. “Look at my ears—without lobes, pointed tops. People don’t have ears like that. Animals do.” She turned her face to me again, still holding back her hair. “Look at my forehead—its smallness, its shape—animal. My teeth.” She bared them—white, small, pointed. “The shape of my face.” Her
