come in?'
'Well, again, it's a guess,' he replied, 'just a guess---but assuming that it is conversion hysteria stemming from guilt, then the second personality is simply the agent who handles the punishing. If Regan herself were to do it, you see, that would mean she would recognize her guilt. But she wants to escape that recognition. Therefore; a second personality.'
'And that's what you think she's got?'
'As I said, I don't know,' replied the psychiatrist, still evasive. He seemed to be choosing his words as he would moss-covered stones to cross a stream. 'It's extremely unusual for a child of Regan's age, to be able to pull together and organize the components of a new personality. And certain---well, other things are puzzling. Her performance with the Ouija board, for example, would indicate extreme suggestibility; and yet apparently I never really hypnotized her.' He shrugged. 'Well, perhaps she resisted. But the really striking thing,' he noted, 'is the new personality's apparent precocity. It isn't a twelve-year-old at all. It's much, much older. And then there's the language she was speaking....' He stated at the rug in front of the fireplace, thoughtfully tugging at his lower lip. 'There's a similar state, of course, but we don't know much about it: a form of somnambulism where the subject suddenly manifests knowledge or skills that he's never learned---and where the intention of the second personality is the destruction of the first. However...' The word trailed away. Abruptly the psychiatrist looked up at Chris. 'Well, it's terribly complicated,' he told her, 'and I've oversimplified outrageously.'
'So what's the bottom line?' Chris aspect.
'At the moment,' he told her, 'a blank. She need an intensive examination by a team of experts; two or three weeks of really concentrated study in a clinical atmosphere; say, the Barringer Clinic in Dayton.'
Chris looked away.
'It's a problem?'
'No. No problem.' She sighed. 'I just lost Hope, that's all.'
'Didn't get you.'
'It's an inside tragedy.'
The psychiatrist telephoned the Barringer Clinic from Chris's study. They agreed to take Regan the following day.
The doctors left.
Chris swallowed pain with remembrance of Dennings, with remembrance of death and the worm and the void and unspeakable loneliness and stillness, darkness, underneath the sod, with nothing moving, no, no motion.... Briefly, she wept. Too much... too much... Then she put it away and began to pack.
She was standing in her bedroom selecting a camouflaging wig to wear in Dayton when Karl appeared. There was someone to see her, he told her.
'Who?'
'Detective.'
'And he wants to see me?'
He nodded. Then he handed her a business card. She looked it over blankly. WILLIAM F. KINDERMAN, it announced, LIEUTENANT OF DETECTIVES; and tucked in the lower-left-hand corner like a poor relation: Homicide Division. It was printed in an ornate, raised Tudor typeface that might have been selected by a dealer in antiques.
She looked up from the card with a sniffing suspicion. 'Has he got something with him that might be a script? Like a big manila envelope or something?'
There was no one in the world, Chris had come to discover, who didn't have a novel or a script or a notion for one or both tucked away in a drawer or a mental sock. She seemed to attract them as priests did drunks.
But Karl shook his head. Chris immediately grew curious and walked down the stairs. Burke? Was it something to do with Burke?
He was sagging in the entry hall, the brim of his limp and crumpled hat clutched tight with short fat fingers freshly manicured. Plump. In his middle fifties. Jowly cheeks that gleamed of soap. Yet rumpled trousers, cuffed and baggy, mocked the sedulous care that he gave his body. A gray tweed coat hung loose and old-fashioned, and his moist brown eyes, which dropped at the corners, seemed to be staring at times gone by. He wheezed asthmatically as he waited.
Chris approached. The detective extended his hand with a weary and somewhat fatherly manner, and spoke in a hoarse, emphysematous whisper. 'I'd know that face in any lineup, Miss MacNeil.'
'Am I in one?' Chris asked him earnestly as she took his hand.
'Oh, my goodness, oh, no,' he said, brushing at the notion with his hand as if swatting at a fly. He'd closed his eyes and inclined his head; the other hood rested lightly on his paunch. Chris was expecting a God forbid! 'No, it's strictly routine,' he assured her, 'routine. Look, you're busy? Tomorrow. I'll come again tomorrow.'
He was turning away as if to leave, but Chris said anxiously, 'What is it? Burke? Burke Dennings?'
The detective's drooping, careless ease had somehow tightened the springs of her tension.
'A shame. What a shame,' the detective breathed, with lowered eyes and a shake of the head.
'Was he killed?' Chris asked with a look of shock. 'I mean, is that why you're here? He was killed? Is that it?'
'No, no, no, it's routine.' he repeated, 'routine. You know, a man so important, we just couldn't pass it. We couldn't,' he pleaded with a helpless look. 'At least one or two questions. Did he fall? Was he pushed?' As he asked, he was listing from side to side with his head and his hand. Then he shrugged and huskily whispered, 'Who knows?'
'Was he robbed?'
