Center who saw him at last. And then, because that sounded so dirty, he added, “A particular woman.”
“And you think we might know where she is?”
He nodded.
“What was her name?”
“Lara Morgan.” He spelled it. “I don’t know if that was her real name or not. I never saw any identification.”
“Then we’ll hold off running it through the computer for a moment. Can you describe her?”
“About five foot nine. Red hair to her shoulder blades. Dark red. Auburn, is that what you call it?”
The buck-toothed woman nodded.
“Very pretty—beautiful, in fact. Viridian eyes. A lot of little freckles. A buttermilk complexion, you know what I mean? I doubt if I’m much good at estimating women’s weight, but maybe a hundred and twenty pounds.”
“Viridian, Mr … ?”
“Green—viridian’s a bluish green. You’ll have to excuse it. I sell tape decks and so on now, but I used to be in small appliances. Viridian has more blue than avocado.”
“I see. And how was this woman dressed the last time you saw her?”
He bit back the impulse to say she wasn’t. “A green dress. Silk I guess, or maybe it was nylon. High-heeled boots, I think lizard, though they might have been snake. A gold necklace and a couple of gold bracelets—she wore a lot of gold jewelry. A black fur coat with a hood. Maybe it was fake, but it looked and felt real to me.”
The buck-toothed woman said, “We haven’t seen her, Mr. Green. If someone who looked and dressed like that had come here, I’d know about her. If she’s seeing someone, which I doubt, it’s a private psychiatrist. What makes you think she may be disturbed?”
“The way she acted. Things she said.”
“And how did she act, Mr. Green?”
He considered. “Like, she didn’t know about ice-makers. She went to the refrigerator one time to get ice—she was going to make lemonade—and she came back and said there wasn’t any. So I went and showed her how it worked, and she said, ‘How nice, all these little blocks.”’
The buck-toothed woman frowned, putting her hands together fingertip to fingertip like a man. “Surely there must have been something more than that.”
“Well, she was afraid that somebody was going to take her back. That’s what she told me.”
The buck-toothed woman’s expression said now we’re getting someplace. She leaned toward him as she spoke. “Take her back where, Mr. Green?”
He started to ask how she knew his name (he had refused to give it to the temporary receptionist) but he thought better of it. “She didn’t say, Doctor. Through the doors, I guess.”
“The doors?”
“She talked about doors. This was just before she left—the doors, or one door anyway, that was how she got here. If they came to take her back, they’d pull her through a door, so she was going to go on her own first.” When the buck-toothed woman offered no comment, he added, “At least, that was the way it seemed to me.”
“These doors would appear to indicate an institution of some kind, then,” the buck-toothed woman said.
“That’s how they sounded to me.”
“Has it struck you that the institution might be a prison, Mr. Green?”
He shook his head. “She didn’t seem that way. She seemed, well, smart. But a little disconnected.”
“Intelligent people who’ve been institutionalized often do. I take it she was about your own age?”
He nodded.
“And you are … ?”
“Thirty.”
“Then let us say this beautiful woman who calls herself Lara Morgan is thirty also. If she had committed a serious offense in her teens—a murder, perhaps, or if she’d had some complicity in a murder—she would have been sent to a girls’ correctional center until she was of age, and then transferred to a women’s prison to complete her sentence. Thus she might easily have spent the last ten or twelve years in one or the other, Mr. Green.”
He began, “I don’t think—”
“You see, Mr. Green, escapees from our mental hospitals are not punished. They are ill, and one does not punish illness. But prisoners—criminals—who escape are punished. I’m glad that you’ve come back to us, Mr. Green. I was getting rather worried about you.”
He was shaking when he left the Center; he had not really known he cared about Lara so much.
The Downtown Mental Health Center stood on one corner of a five-way intersection. The five streets were all congested, and when he looked down each they seemed to spin around him like the spokes of a wheel, each thronged, each noisy, each straight and running to infinity, thronged, noisy, and congested. None was like the rest; nor were any—when he looked again—exactly the way they had been when he had come in. Hadn’t that theater been a bowling alley? And weren’t fire trucks supposed to be red, buses yellow, or maybe orange?
Were the doors here? “It may be something like a guy-wire supporting a telephone pole.” That was what Lara had written. Looking up, he saw that he stood under a maze of wires. There were wires to hold traffic signals, thin
