An Air That Kills

Twenty-one

Thelma’s Christmas card that year consisted of an enlarged snapshot of her son standing in a shallow wading pool, staring sober and wide-eyed into the camera. He was now some fifteen months old, a handsome child, dark-haired like his father, stockily built like his mother.

The enclosed letter to the Turees was unlike any Thelma had written before. Even her handwriting had altered: it was larger, less controlled, and the lines slanted ebulliently upwards.

Nancy was extremely happy over the news. “I think it’s terribly romantic.”

“Indeed,” Turee said. “How do you know he’s not marrying her for her money?”

“What money? All she has is the settlement out of Ron’s estate.”

“Do you happen to know how much it was?”

“No, and neither do you, smartie. Esther won’t discuss it.”

“Other people aren’t so particular. One of the assistant professors in the French Department is related by marriage to Martindale, the attorney Thelma hired. It seems that right after Thelma left town, Martindale bought himself a new house and car with his percentage of the take. So the take must have been considerable.”

“Even so, you have no reason at all to believe that this Charley is marrying Thelma for her money. She says right in the letter he has a house of his own, so he can’t be exactly poverty-stricken. You’re an incurable cynic, that’s all.”

“Really.”

“I still consider the whole thing very romantic.”

“You needn’t shout,” Turee said. “Oh, there’s one more point that occurs to me. If I were Charley, I think I’d be a little suspicious of my wife having no contacts whatever with her own past.”

That spring Turee received an offer of a guest lectureship at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California for the summer session. The pay was excellent, he couldn’t afford to turn it down. Nor, on the other hand, could he afford to transport a wife and four children across the continent and rent adequate housing for them. They were all very eager to go with him and emotions were running at an all-time high when Esther unexpectedly provided a compromise solution to the problem. She decided to take the two boys to Europe for July and August and offered Nancy and the children the use of the lodge while she was gone.

Nancy accepted with gratitude, and the Turee household returned more or less to normal. Tempers calmed down, tears stopped, sulks disappeared, and preparations for the summer began.

Turee departed in early June, traveling by bus as far as Detroit and then by air coach to the West Coast. He intended to live as cheaply as possible during the summer so that he could return home not merely with some memories and experiences but with some hard cold cash. With this objective in mind, he rented a small furnished apartment at the rear of an old house set in the middle of a lemon grove near the campus.

Time passed quickly at first. There was work to be done, and sightseeing, and exploring the strange little Spanish city crushed between the mountains and the sea. The members of the faculty and their wives were friendly and hospitable. They invited Turee to dinner, to concerts, to barbecues; but there were still left some long evenings to spend by himself, especially over the weekends when his colleagues were busy with their own families. It was on one of these evenings, a Friday, that the thought occurred to him of going down to Santa Monica the next day and trying to find Thelma.

He knew that the idea must have been in the back of his mind before he even left Toronto because he had packed in his suitcase Thelma’s last letter enclosed in the Christmas card with the snapshot of Ronnie on it. He remembered packing it, surreptitiously, without mentioning it to Nancy, and as he took it out now to reread, he realized that he had intended, from the first moment he’d been offered the appointment in California, to find Thelma. He wasn’t certain why, whether he wanted to see her again out of curiosity, or for old times’ sake, or merely to make sure she was all right.

He read the letter over twice, looking for facts. Then he got out his AAA tour books, a map of Southern California and a scratch pad to make notes.

Charley. Last name unknown. Occupation: not stated. A preyer on women, for all I know, Turee thought grimly. Age: a widower with grown children, which might place him between forty-five and fifty. Maybe older, but this wasn’t likely, in view of Thelma’s infatuation. Other facts: he owned a house in Santa Monica, and a dog which bit, and he sometimes visited the beach at Malibu.

Turee checked the map and the tour book. There were miles and miles of beach along Malibu, and the city of Santa Monica, to the south, was listed as having a population in excess of seventy-one thousand. The chances of finding a middle-aged man named Charley who owned a house and a biting dog seemed extremely remote.

The letter, then, was useless, as far as leads were concerned. This left the picture of the boy, Ronnie. It was sharp and clear, and the boy’s unsmiling features quite distinct. It had obviously been snapped by someone more skillful with a camera than Thelma. Probably by Charley. Maybe Charley was a camera bug. That hardly narrowed the search down, though; camera bugs were as common in California as bleached blondes.

But as Turee studied the picture he felt a growing sense of excitement, as if an idea had already begun to germinate in the depths of his mind and was trying to push its way up through several layers of consciousness.

A very cute kid, he thought. Looks strong and healthy. Thelma probably watches him like a hawk, and has him checked by the doctor at least once a month. Not just any old doctor, either, but a specialist. A pediatrician.

Pediatricians. Of course. It’s so simple, why didn’t I think of it before? To hell with Charley, who needs him?

Once again he consulted the tour book — Santa Barbara, population about 50,000 — then he picked up the local telephone directory. In the yellow pages, listed under Physicians and Surgeons, he found eight pediatricians. If Santa Monica had a similar ratio, he could expect to find about a dozen.

A dozen pediatricians and a picture of a little boy. Perhaps, with luck, that would be enough.

He checked the southbound bus schedule by telephone, wrote an enthusiastic note to Nancy outlining his plan, set his alarm for five, and went to bed.

That night in a dream he saw Thelma walking along a wide and desolate beach, her long fair hair streaming in the wind. Suddenly from behind a boulder a man appeared with a little dog. The man pointed toward the sea, and Thelma turned and walked slowly and methodically into the water until it covered her head. The man laughed, and the little dog began to bark, and the air was filled with the screaming of gulls and the black whirring wings of cormorants.

He woke up with one alarm ringing in his ears and another, shriller one in the back in his mind.

It was still dark, and the cool foggy air pushed heavily into the room, redolent of lemon blossoms. Turee got up and closed the windows. The smell was sickeningly sweet. Like flowers at a funeral. He thought of Thelma drowning in his dream, and the last letter she had written with its strange alteration of style and handwriting which Nancy had explained away by saying people’s writing changed with their moods, that at last Thelma was happy.

Perhaps she had not written that letter at all. Perhaps, even then, she had been dead, and Charley himself had sent the letter to mollify Thelma’s friends and at the same time discourage them from trying to find her.

And the boy, Ronnie? He, too, might be...

“No,” Turee said aloud. “No. It’s those damn lemon trees. The smell makes me sick. The kid’s all right.”

It was the damn lemon trees.

“The kid’s perfectly all right,” he repeated, as if someone in the room had denied it.

He reached Santa Monica shortly after nine o’clock, obtained a map of the city at the bus depot, and, with the aid of a telephone directory, made a list of the pediatricians in the area. Checking two of them by phone he learned that they would be in their offices only until noon, since it was Saturday.

That gave him two and a half hours. And a decision to make. He made it, with a silent apology to Nancy: he committed his first extravagance of the summer by hiring a car.

Neither his wife nor his friends considered Turee very methodical or efficient. Working against time, he turned out to be both. Instead of visiting the doctors in alphabetical order, he grouped them according to address. Five he was able to eliminate at once — they practiced in one building as a children’s clinic. None of them remembered seeing the boy in the picture.

A sixth was on vacation in Montana. A seventh had gone to Los Angeles to see a patient at Children’s Hospital.

It was half-past ten when Turee reached the eighth name on the list, a Dr. Hamilton who occupied an office in a diagnostic clinic. Turee was informed at the main desk that Dr. Hamilton was at St. John’s Hospital but expected back any minute. Could his secretary do anything to help? Down the hall, three doors to the left.

Dr. Hamilton’s secretary turned out to be a harried-looking blonde wearing spectacles and a snug white uniform. “I’m Miss Gillespie. Are you waiting for Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“He should be in any minute. He has a patient scheduled for 10:45. Please sit down.”

“Thank you.”

He didn’t sit down, however. He looked at his watch, picked up a magazine and discarded it, paced the length of the room twice, until finally Miss Gillespie said, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Well, perhaps. How long have you worked for the doctor?”

“Over three years.”

“My name is Ralph Turee. I came from Toronto in the hope of finding an old friend of mine. I know she lives — or lived — in Santa Monica but I’ve lost her address. Since moving here she has remarried and I don’t know her new husband’s name.”

“Are you sure you came to the right office? Dr. Hamilton is a pediatrician.”

“Yes, I’m coming to that. The woman I’m looking for has a little boy. The only hope I have of finding her is through this boy. She sent me a picture of him last Christmas. He’d be nearly two years old now. His name’s Ronnie.”

“We have dozens of Ronnies,” Miss Gillespie said with distaste, as if every single Ronnie gave her a pain in the neck. “Perhaps if I could see the picture? Actually, I know Doctor’s patients better than he does. I’m the one who entertains them and keeps them quiet until their turn comes. And if you think that’s easy, just come around some afternoon about four when we’re running behind schedule and emergencies keep popping in like flies and the kids are all howling and the phone’s ringing — well, you get the idea.”

“Vividly. I have four of my own.”

Turee handed her the picture of Ronnie and she studied it intently for a moment. “Yes, he’s one of our patients, I’m sure of it. Comes in quite frequently. He’s allergic — chocolate, eggs, milk, and so on.”

“Who brings him in?”

“His mother. She’s one of these fussy mothers, doesn’t care in the least about getting Doctor out of bed at one o’clock in the morning if the kid has the slightest symptom. Overprotective.”

It sounded like Thelma. She was not dead. It had been the lemon trees, after all. He said, “What does she look like?”

“Oh, nothing much. I mean, it’s hard to describe an ordinary-looking woman. Except her hair, it’s really beautiful.” Miss Gillespie glanced at the picture again and handed it back with a puzzled frown. “Did you say the boy’s name was Ronnie?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken. Or I am. One of us is.”

“Why?”

“That boy is little Harry Bream.”