said I shouldn't tell anybody about the pills, or something bad would happen to me. I don't know for certain if what I heard next was the man talking or one of the voices in my head, but I seem to remember him saying something about meeting some woman under a Christmas tree, and she'd give me more of the pills. Then he started running up the block, but he stopped when he saw this boy standing on the corner up ahead of him. Then this girl comes around the corner at the other end of the block, and they both start walking toward the man. He tried to run across the street, but the boy cut him off. He kept trying to run away, but the kids-they looked like teenagers-kept cutting him off. Finally they grabbed him. The girl took something out of her purse and put it to the back of his head. I think it was a gun. I didn't hear any shot, but I think she killed him; he slumped all of a sudden, like he was dead, and the kids had to hold him up by his arms. They dragged him away into the next block. I couldn't see much by just the light from the streetlamps, but it looked like they just kind of threw him away. They tossed him into the air, and he disappeared.'
I sighed, averting my gaze from the woman's pain-filled eyes, glanced down at the bag of capsules, which suddenly seemed to weigh very heavily in my hand. My good intentions had bitten me on the bottom, and I was greatly saddened. Margaret Dutton's apparent resurrection from madness hadn't been so miraculous after all, had in fact represented only a transition from one psychotic state to another which, in its way, was even more bizarre than her Mama Spit persona. Her story about being given the capsules by a man who was then shot and 'thrown away' by a couple of teenagers was obviously a fantasy. Margaret Dutton was still delusional, which probably meant that her ugly alter ego was lurking just below the surface, waiting to spit, as it were, into action. I had no training in psychiatric nursing, the brownstone was no mental hospital, and I would be doing her absolutely no favors by keeping her with me. I couldn't let her keep the capsules, I couldn't, for both our sakes, allow her to keep living in Garth's apartment, and I couldn't simply toss her back into the rough ocean of the streets. Just exactly what I was going to do with Mama Spit was something I was going to have to think on.
'We're going to have to discuss this further, Margaret,' I said, rising off the couch and heading for the door. 'But not now. I have to go to a meeting. I don't want you to worry; I'll see that you're taken care of. You can go back to work now, if you want to. If you're too upset to work, you can just stay up here and rest. We'll talk more later, or in the morning.'
I went up to my apartment and locked the bag of black-and-yellow capsules in my safe. Then I walked the ten blocks to my corporate client's headquarters on Avenue of the Americas. The board of directors was impressed with my report, but had in fact already decided on their choice even before I delivered her clean bill of health. They gave me a generous check, and I was out in less than forty-five minutes.
It wasn't yet noon. There was plenty of work to do back at the office, and I had tentatively planned to take a late-afternoon flight to Pittsburgh to take the preliminary steps in a HUD investigation that had been farmed out to Garth and me by a Senate subcommittee. But the situation with Margaret Dutton was forcing a change in my travel plans, and I didn't want to go back to the office, for fear I would have to spend the rest of the day looking at the anxiety and supplication that were so clearly mirrored in the woman's expressive eyes. I hadn't even started to think about what I was going to do with her, and so I decided to play hooky for the rest of the day.
Normally, having not found Garth's missing sweater in his apartment, I would have called or faxed to tell him to forget it, that he'd just have to make do between now and New Year's with the half dozen or so other sweaters he'd taken with him. But the sun was shining, the wind was up, it was surprisingly mild for late November, and the water in the Hudson would still be relatively warm compared to the air; the possibility of getting in just one more sail on my brother's fourteen-foot catamaran was too great a temptation to resist, and the quest for Garth's sweater was just the excuse I needed to remove myself from the city and my distractions.
I drove out of New York and up the Palisades Parkway to Garth and Mary's home in Cairn, a small, very artsy town on the banks of the Hudson thirty-four miles to the north. I found the sweater he wanted in the bottom drawer of a dresser in his bedroom, threw it on the back seat of my Volkswagen Rabbit. Then I stripped and put on the black rubber wet suit I kept there, went down to the boathouse beneath the eaves of the music room, then huffed and puffed the cat down across the beach to the shoreline. I set sail, and with eighteen-knot winds was soon streaking across the vast expanse of river between Haverstraw and Piermont that the early Dutch settlers had dubbed the 'Tappan Sea.' There was nobody and nothing else on the river, and conditions were ideal, if perhaps just a bit nippy. I whizzed back and forth across the river between Cairn and Westchester for almost four hours, dumping only once when a wind shift crossed my stern while I was flying a hull. I ran the cat back up on the beach behind Garth's home just as the blood-red sun was sinking behind the craggy, black outline of Hook Mountain, to the south.
I felt at once completely relaxed yet exhilarated. I took a long, hot shower, then drove south to Nyack for dinner and a movie at Cinema East. By the time I got out of the movie and headed back toward the city I was ready for sleep, for I had decided what I was going to do about Margaret Dutton.
First, I would turn the capsules I had taken from her over to the police, who would probably tell me they were some new kind of illicit drug; how and where Mama Spit had gotten them would undoubtedly remain a mystery, for she obviously couldn't remember. Then it was going to be time for a lot of tender, loving care and attention to the woman's needs. Margaret would no doubt be disappointed in me for in effect turning her out, but it was my hope that she would continue to trust me; as long as I stayed by her side and walked her through the process every step of the way, I thought she might at last be amenable to letting the city's Social Services Department help her. I was going to have a serious chat with a social worker friend of mine to map out a detailed plan for getting Margaret into a controlled clinical setting and keeping her there, at least until she was officially released as an outpatient under the supervision of doctors. And Frederickson and Frederickson would subsidize some of the cost, if it came to that.
When I got home I barely had enough energy to brush my teeth and strip down to my shorts before collapsing into bed, pulling the blankets up over me, and immediately falling asleep. I didn't sleep long. Muffled screams and what sounded like crashing, overturned furniture first materialized in my mind as a dream about the demolition of some theater where there were still people inside, and then yanked me into consciousness when I realized the sounds were real, coming up through the floor from Garth's apartment below me. I jumped out of bed and without even stopping to pull on my pants raced out of the apartment and down the stairs, through the door of Garth's apartment, and into the bedroom. What I saw stunned and horrified me.
Mama Spit had returned with a vengeance. The flannel nightgown I had bought her was half torn from her body and hanging from her shoulders in shreds. Her hair tangled and matted with sweat, Margaret Dutton was once again caught in the throes of madness. Alternately screaming and muttering obscenities, she was slapping at her body and stomping her feet as she slowly circled the nightstand, which she had placed in the center of the room. She would occasionally halt her mad dance and snatch at the empty space on the wooden table where her bag of capsules had been before I'd taken them away. The bedspread and carpet were spattered with blood; bright crimson arterial blood oozed from her eyes, ears, nose, mouth, vagina, and anus. Margaret Dutton not only had snapped back into violent insanity but was slowly bleeding to death from every orifice in her body.
She glanced over to where I was standing just inside the doorway gaping at her, paralyzed with shock. She screamed, spat blood in my direction, and charged, but by then I was already on the move. Heart pounding, thoughts tumbling around in my mind in a kind of prayer that I knew what was wrong and was not too late, I sprinted back up the stairs to my apartment, my safe. For a few terrifying moments I couldn't remember the combination, and I forced myself to stop and take a series of deep breaths to calm myself. The combination came to me. I opened the safe, grabbed the bag of capsules, and raced back downstairs.
I took her low, around the waist, literally tackling her and driving her back on the bed. There I climbed up on top of her and sat on her chest, pinning her arms to her body with the insides of my thighs-no easy task since she was thrashing wildly, probably weighed as much as I did, and was a foot taller. As she opened her mouth to scream at me, I popped one of the capsules down her throat. Then, just as her first benefactor had done, I clamped one hand over her mouth and used the fingers of the other to gently knead her esophagus, encouraging her to swallow. She finally did, and then I lay down on top of her, wrapping my arms around her body to keep her from flailing, burying my face to the side in the bloody bedding to avoid the fusillades of blood and saliva that spewed from her mouth. I held on tight and waited for something to happen-or stop happening.
Gradually she stopped struggling, and her breathing became deep and regular. I carefully eased my weight off her, raised my head to look into her face. She was sound asleep, and the bleeding from her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth appeared to have stopped. I rose and went into the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and saw that I was covered with Margaret Dutton's blood. I turned on the shower, used towels soaked with warm water to gently
