“You do?” His mouth was full of sugared coconut.
“I sure do. I’m Candy Garth, and I’m one of your dad’s best friends.”
“Did he tell you to come here and get me?”
“Huh uh. I just happened to come here because I wanted to check this big old suitcase in one of their lockers. In a minute we’ll do that, and we can put yours in with it so you won’t have to carry it around until you get settled someplace. Did your dad know you were coming?”
“I think so.”
“Well, I kind of wonder about that because he never mentioned it to me at all, and I think he would have. We were talking just this morning about what we were going to do today. Did your mamma write him a letter?”
“She said she’d phone him after I was on the bus,” the boy said. “She didn’t want to wake him up, and it was real early.”
“Uh huh. Only she thought he still lived at Mr. Free’s, I bet. The phone got taken out of there. It sounds like she had something pretty important to do, if she put you on the bus alone without making sure first there’d be somebody here to meet you.”
“She was going someplace with Uncle Mike.”
“Uh huh. Did she say when they’d be back?”
“Pretty soon.”
“Uh huh.” Candy sat silently, looking at the boy out of blank, china-blue eyes, a fat, pink girl in a white plastic raincoat and a good wool dress that seemed a bit too old for her.
The boy stared back at her from dark eyes like his father’s. There was much of his father, too, in his high, square forehead and expression of innocent cunning.
“I guess I promised you some candy, didn’t I?”
Ignoring the earlier half bar, Candy fumbled in her purse and brought out one of the stolen Almond Joys. “Here. Have some candy from Candy. That way you won’t forget who I am. Candy Garth.”
The boy said thank you.
“I’m going to have kind of a busy day today, Little Ozzie. I want to say I can’t drag you around while I’m doing all this stuff, but honest to God, I can’t think of anything else to do with you—anybody to park you with. I’m supposed to meet your dad tonight, and—”
“Are you?”
“Yeah, we’re all going to meet back at the Consort—that’s the hotel. After that, I don’t know what the hell we’re supposed to do. And before then, I want to find a place to stay. We’ll see. Anyway, what I was going to say was that I might even run into him sooner. You never know. Meanwhile you’ll just have to tag along with me. Right now, I’m supposed to be going over to the hospital to talk to this certain person I helped doctor once. He’s kind of sick. You want to come along?”
“Okay.”
“Fine. Now you come and help Cousin Candy put the bags in the locker. You might even help me get in to see him—I’ll explain on the way over.”
Belmont Hospital was a pile of gray stone, a monument (as Ben Free’s house had been in a much smaller way) to the constructive urges of the last century. Its eight stories were overshadowed by the steel and glass towers of this one, but it spoke with every thick stone windowsill:
Belmont was psycho, of course, but it was possible it was also correct, as so many of the mad are at last discovered to be. The long-necked yellow machine might have battered those granite blocks for weeks and only disfigured them; and who would dare to use dynamite when the steel and glass towers were so near? As it was, they dropped their eight-foot panes in every wind.
Candy and the boy went up Belmont’s wide steps as though they had legitimate business there, the boy skipping ahead, perhaps because his energies had been refueled by chocolate, almonds, and coconut, perhaps only because they had been restored by a trifle of soiled affection, a hug on the bus. Candy labored after him, her cheeks puffed like Boreas’s and as red as two apples.
“I’m his sister,” she told the nurse inside. And then, recalling that she did not in the least look like Sergeant Proudy, “Not really his
“I don’t know whether that makes you a relative or not,” the nurse said doubtfully. She was a pallid, sharp- chinned woman with untidy black hair.
“Legally it does,” Candy announced firmly. “Legally, I’m his sister. We have the same mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. John Proudy.” She was already sorry she had qualified her initial assertion.
“I meant emotionally. After all, that’s what we should really consider, isn’t it? If we’re going to let visitors in and get the patients upset and disturb the whole routine of the hospital, it has to be because we feel it will do the patients some good. What does them good, we think, is seeing someone to whom they are emotionally attached.” She swiveled to face a computer terminal, and her fingers danced across the keys. “He must be quite a bit older than you. He’s forty-two.”
“I’m twenty-one,” Candy said automatically.
“That’s over twenty years.”
“He was always such a kind big brother,” Candy fantasized desperately. “He used to take me fishing. On hot
