Pity Him Afterwards

The madman clung to the side of the hill, hidden by darkness and trees. Staring over his left shoulder he could see the lights in pairs crossing the bottom of the night, round whites when coming aslant, red dots when going. Only the circling red light atop the state police car did not move on, across the valley floor and out of sight. The ambulance had gone now, and the traffic jam had been broken up, but the state police car did not move on.

The hillface was steep here, furred with spring grass. Below was a dark mass of trees, and more trees above, but here on this steep band across the hill there was only grass. The ground was soft and moist.

It was the night of the new moon, so the stars had the cloudless sky to themselves. The madman, clinging to the side of the hill, was a darker mass against the ground. His fingers were dug into the earth and he kept looking over his left shoulder. The suitcase was on the ground beside him.

Down below him, past the trees, he could see the headlights going by. He was waiting for the state police car with the circling red light to go on, to go away with the rest of the lights, and then he could move. But the state police car didn’t go away.

And now more red lights came, borne on the stream of headlights. The madman reared up, almost losing his balance and rolling down the hill, and stared in hatred at the revolving red lights. Three more of them, all stopping by the first. Dimly amid the lights he could see men moving, and then a different kind of light appeared. A small nailhole of light in the darkness. Flashlights. Men with flashlights crossed the road down there and started up the hill, spreading out, opening like a fan. He lost sight of them all in the trees, and saw there a flicker of light, and there. And there.

They were coming after him.

The madman put his head down on the ground, his burning forehead against the cool dampness of the turf. Despair washed over him. Just after dinner he’d broken out, and before midnight he was to be caught again. They would make him scream for this, the shock every day, death and rebirth every day, going down and away to spasmodic shrieks and coming back to twitches and deafness and the cold blue eyes of Doctor Chax. (There was no Doctor Chax; all the doctors were Doctor Chax; all the doctors had the cold blue eyes and the warm brown voices, and told him while they tortured him that the torture was for his own good; he had made up the name, Doctor Chax. It was all of them.)

Voices wafted up the hill to him on the cool air. The turf was cool against his forehead. Voices wafted up, and the blundering of men upward through the trees.

He raised his head. He stared upward, toward the top of the hill, crowned with more trees. His eyes shone just slightly in the starlight.

He would not go back to Doctor Chax. He would not.

He pulled his left leg up, and then his right. Moved his left hand forward, and then his right. On hands and knees, and then upward to his feet, leaning forward into the slant of the hill. He took three staggering steps upward, always teetering just short of falling backward down the hill toward the flickering flashlights down under the trees. Then he remembered the suitcase, still lying where he’d left it, three paces back. He shook his head heavily from side to side, grimacing and growling in exasperation, and, bent far forward, thudded his fists against the turf.

There was nothing for it but to go back. The suitcase was necessity.

He scrambled back down to the suitcase and grabbed it in his right hand. He glared quickly downslope, saw the flashlights closer, nearly to the upper limit of the trees, and growled deep in his throat. (He wouldn’t talk to the doctors, and couldn’t talk to the other patients, and there was no one else to talk to. He’d gotten the habit of talking to himself, but mainly silently, in his head, with only grunts and growls coming to the surface, a mannerism common among men who live alone or work alone. It was not a symptom of his madness, but of his solitude.)

He clambered up the steep slope now like a crippled spider, dragging the suitcase. He hurried as fast as he could go, panting noisily; four years of sedentary life in the asylum had left him out of shape for running.

He didn’t slow down when he reached the trees above, but pulled himself upward through them, grasping at trunks and shrubbery with his left hand, jerking himself forward from hold to hold, the suitcase bumping and dragging along behind him. The ground here was less even, scored with thick roots and pocked with stones, dangerous with mulch-filled craters that gave no footing. But the slope was less steep, and he drove himself forward, stumbling and panting, pursued by Doctor Chax, who skimmed along effortlessly a yard above the ground, his long white coat trailing like a nightgown, his progress unencumbered by a heavy suitcase and the need to crawl on the surface of the earth rather than fly. But though he had the unfair advantages, and though he was just behind, he could never quite catch up.

The madman’s groping left hand closed on barkless wood, above him and across his path. He made a startled noise, feeling the smooth undulant surface beneath his hand, and then grasped it tighter and pulled himself upward, his feet scrabbling at the rocky ground.

A railing. A fence, fence of some sort. It was pitch-black here, under the trees. But ahead of him was grayness, as though there were a level cleared surface beyond the fence.

The fence was made of two crossbars, one about two feet from the ground and the second another two feet higher. The madman pushed the suitcase under the lower bar, then crawled between the two bars and straightened on the other side.

He was standing on gravel. He had come up at the corner of a lookout parking area beside a small blacktop road. There was no traffic on the road and, because it was a Monday night, no cars parked by the lookout. On the weekend lovers and policemen came up here.

He felt the need to keep running, but his breath was ragged and there was a sharp pain in his side. He leaned against the top railing of the fence, doubled over, trying to catch his breath and to make the pain go away, and listened for the sounds of the pursuers. But they were moving more cautiously, searching for him in crannies and behind trees, and he had outdistanced them. He couldn’t even see their flashlights any more.

When the pain lessened and his breathing grew less difficult, he straightened and turned away from the railing. Carrying the suitcase, he walked across the softly crackling gravel to the blacktop road. There was a double white line up the middle of the road, a faint smear in the darkness. He stood on the white line a moment, and considered.

He had been going up. They would expect him to continue going up. So he would fool them. He would follow the road downward.

He no longer felt the same urgency. He had outdistanced them, and outfoxed them. So he walked at a normal pace down the road, keeping in the middle, walking on the double white line. There was no traffic at all.

He walked for twenty minutes and then he came to a house and a garage. There was a light on in the office of the garage — an illuminated clock, that was all — but the garage was closed. The pumps out front were dark and the floodlights at either end of the garage property were dark and the big gasoline emblem sign was dark.

The house was behind the garage, an old two-story clapboard house, with faint lights showing in the downstairs front windows. The people who lived in the house were probably the ones who operated the garage.

The madman crept up past the garage, toward the house. The illuminated clock on the garage office wall read five minutes after twelve. It threw the faintest of light on the madman as he moved past the window, heading toward the house. He was wearing a dark gray suit, old and wrinkled and shapeless, the coat hanging open and the sleeves too short. He wore a battered hat on his head, one he’d found in a dump by the roadside on his flight from the asylum; the hat had obviously been thrown away because it was out of style, with a brim too wide for current fashion. The suitcase he carried, which forced him to walk in a lurching half-crouch, was bulky and black, fastened with leather straps. Suitcase from the driver who had given him a lift, hat from the dump, suit from the janitor’s closet in the basement of the asylum.

The house was up a short slope from the road, with uneven slate steps up the slope to the porch. The slate steps were flanked by rock gardens.

The madman left the suitcase on the ground next to the porch, then climbed noiselessly up the stoop and over the porch to the nearest window. He looked in and saw a barrelchested old man with gray hair asleep in an armchair. The armchair had maroon slipcovers with a design of great white flowers. The old man wore a dark-patterned flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and gray work trousers, and black wool socks but no shoes.

There were two light sources. One was a table lamp on a drum table beside the sleeping old man, shining on the gnarled hands resting in his lap. The other was a television set across the room, showing a commercial.

The madman moved until he could see the rest of the room. The old man was alone.

The madman crouched on the porch. What to do? He needed a place of refuge, a safe hiding place just until morning. But it would have to be indoors, where the searchers wouldn’t look. It would have to be inside this house.

The madman moaned low and soft, and shook his head back and forth. He felt very mournful, because human beings were so perverse, and they forced him to such excesses.

If human beings were good, how sweet life would be! But Doctor Chax summed them up: warm brown voice and cold blue eye. They would act friendly and sympathetic, but it was all false; just turn your back and they would betray you.

The madman hunkered on his heels, resting his back against the clapboard front of the house, between the door and the window. What he wished he could do was just knock on the door and say to the old man, “Pardon me, sir, I would very much like to abide here until morning, if I may?” If only the old man would say, “Of course! Aren’t we all brothers?”

But he wouldn’t.

And if he did, it would only be because he’d recognized him, as the driver did, and was planning to telephone to Doctor Chax as soon as he could sneak away.

That was the way people were.

The driver, too. He had seemed so good. But he had proved himself false.

The madman had been walking beside the highway. He hadn’t been actively trying to hitch a ride, because he knew that was the way to draw attention to yourself and wind up with someone phoning the police: “Suspicious-looking character thumbing a ride out on the highway.” So he’d just been walking along, in the suit and hat and sneakers — his own sneakers, the only shoes they’d let him wear at the asylum — when the car had stopped. A noisy eight-year-old Plymouth. And the driver had said, “Want a ride to the next town?”

He had gotten in. Though for a second he had hesitated, afraid the driver would ask him questions: “Where you headed?” “Where you from?” But he knew himself to be clever; he’d be able to think up lies.

The asylum had done that much for him. They’d put him away there not because he was crazy — he knew what crazy was, and it wasn’t him — but because he’d never learned to lie. All the people who thought they weren’t crazy, they told lies all the time. It was the way the world was run. Big lies, little lies. He saw truth, and told truth, and so they said he was crazy and they put him away in the asylum. And in the asylum he learned the value of cleverness — how to fool them, how to lie to them — and he learned the uses of falseness. But still they wouldn’t let him go. His rages were righteous and came only when he was strongly provoked, but they refused to accept that. And where he had learned to make do without truth when necessary, he would never learn — never even try to learn — to make do without logic and righteousness.

So, armed with the cleverness they’d taught him in the asylum, he had gotten in the car, in the Plymouth, sitting beside the driver. The driver pushed the Plymouth very fast down the highway, and pleasant soothing music came from the car radio. And the driver didn’t ask questions; instead, he talked about himself.

He was an actor, he said. He was on his way to a job in a summer theater. It was a repertory company, which would present eleven plays this summer. No packages, the actor assured him, and went on to explain that packages were touring shows, usually with a famous actor in the leading role, which went a week at one summer theater and then a week at the next, and so on. But the summer theater where the driver was going was not like that; it was true summer stock, with a company that put on all the plays itself, doing this week’s play tonight, rehearsing next week’s play this afternoon.

The driver was one of those people who loves his job so much he can never stop talking about it. He and the madman rode together nearly three hours, and the driver never stopped talking about theater. He told the madman all about the way a summer theater is run, and the kind of part for which he’d been hired, and what he had done in his career up till this point, and the names of all the people in theater he knew, and anecdotes about them, and on and on. After a while, he was repeating himself. But the madman didn’t mind. It was pleasant to listen to, and he was actually interested; at one time he himself had thought idly of a theatrical career. But that was in another life.

Behind and beneath the driver’s rambling talk the radio played music and commercials and news broadcasts and weather reports, all soothing, soporific, a pleasant soft accompaniment to the driver’s chatter. Until the eleven-o’clock news broadcast, which told all about the madman, and gave his description.

The driver had known immediately. The madman could tell. But, to try to fool him, he’d said, “Why, that description could fit anybody. It could fit me. It could even fit you.”

It was true. The driver and the madman were both approximately the same age and the same size. Their hair coloring was different and facially they looked not at all alike, but in general build and chronological age they were quite similar.

The driver was a good driver, but really a very bad actor. He would never have been a famous star, even if he’d lived. He’d let the nervousness and the false jollity show in his voice, and his true meaning had been clear when he’d said, “I’m getting hungry, aren’t you? Let’s stop at the next diner for a couple hamburgers.”

Betrayers, all of them. What business was it of his, anyway? They were fellow human beings. Shouldn’t they be helping one another? Why should the driver side automatically with Doctor Chax, without even giving the madman a chance to tell his side of the story?

He had been so enraged he had forgotten himself and done a foolish thing. He should have waited till they’d come to a stop, in the darkness outside some diner. But the betrayal was so base, his anger so strong, that he couldn’t wait. He reached out his hands and clamped them on the driver’s throat, and the Plymouth spun off the road, missing the oncoming cars, and smashed into a tree.

Still, after the foolishness he had been smart. Immediately the car had stopped, even before the flames had begun to lick up, he had grabbed the dead driver’s wallet and suitcase. Then out of the car and away, into the darkness, while behind him the flames had suddenly opened like a great mouth, engulfing the car, and all at once exploding.

Some busybody must have seen him leave the car and run away up the hill. He had planned to stay there until the police had gone, and then continue on along the highway, but some busybody must have seen him run away. Another one who sided automatically with Doctor Chax.

The old man would, too. They all did.

The madman felt very sad, not wanting to do what he knew he would have to do. But wasn’t self-preservation the prime law? He couldn’t let his emotions stand in his way, shouldn’t let weakness cause him to be captured and turned back to the tortures of Doctor Chax.

Hadn’t his father told him, time and time again, the mark of a man is that he always does what is necessary, no matter what?

But it was hard, it was so hard...

Moaning softly, the madman crept back down the stoop to the suitcase, and removed one of the leather straps. The strap was an inch wide, tough black leather, with a square brass buckle. He twisted it around his left hand, and went back up on the porch.

The door was locked. The two living-room windows were locked.

Sorrow began to be displaced by irritation, and irritation by anger. Wasn’t the task difficult enough as it was? Did it have to be made even more difficult?

He circled the house like a winter wind, seeking some crack to come in through, and found it at last in a small kitchen window, the only unlocked window on the ground floor.

It was a job getting through. The window was high, and just inside was the kitchen sink, a broad deep old-fashioned sink against which he cracked his left elbow. He gritted his teeth with the pain, and crawled the rest of the way through the window and down across the sink to the floor, and huddled there on all fours, rubbing the elbow. His head kept moving back and forth in a distracted way, like the head of a snake. He’d lost his hat on the way in, and he found it and put it back on before going any farther. He thought of it as a kind of disguise.

The kitchen was in darkness. He left it, and moved through a dark hall to a semi-dark dining room, lit indirectly from the one lamp burning in the living room.

The old man was still asleep. The television set murmured — a man at a desk was interviewing a man on a leather chair, and both were laughing, and a crowd of unseen people were laughing — but other than that the house was silent.

The madman tiptoed across the living room, his sneakers silent on the faded Persian-style carpet. He moved around behind the floral armchair in which the old man slept. He held the leather strap now in both hands and he dropped it over the old man’s head and tightened it around the old man’s neck.

The old man awoke and thrashed. But the madman had the leverage, pinning the old man back against the chair, keeping the strap tight around the old man’s throat, and after a while the thrashing subsided and stopped.

The madman switched off the table lamp before moving, because he didn’t want to see the old man’s face. He’d seen the faces of people who’d been strangled, and it always made him feel sick. The television set gave wan blue light.

In the near-darkness he crossed the room. He had seen the staircase while the light was on, and he headed straight for it and felt along the wall till he found a light switch. It shouldn’t frighten anyone if the staircase light went on; those upstairs would think it was the old man, coming up to bed.

He clicked the switch on, and a light blossomed at the head of the stairs. He climbed the stairs quickly — they were covered in gray carpet, badly worn in the center — and paused in the small second-floor hall.

There were four doors, two shut and two open. He investigated.

One of the open doors led to the bathroom. The other led to a bedroom with a double bed in it. But there was no one in the bed.

He opened the closed door on the right, and found the old man’s wife, asleep. She, too, woke up, just as the old man had, but her struggles were never as strong as his had been.

The closed door on the left led to a nursery, with a crib. But the crib was empty.

The madman was glad. He would have hated it if the crib had had an occupant.

But that was the full household. The old man and his wife, a married son or daughter and mate, and a grandchild. The younger couple and the grandchild must be away visiting. The madman was glad of it.

Though sometimes he thought the best thing would be to kill all the children. Then the human race would stop. But it was too much for one man to do. Though when he tried to argue with himself that children were for the most part better than adults — more honest, more willing to let a man alone, more apt to see truth — he could always counter the argument with the reminder that children, unless they are stopped, grow into adults.

He went back downstairs. The upstairs hall light let him see fairly well in the living room, well enough to go get the old man and tumble him out of the chair and drag him by the armpits across the room. He dragged the old man upstairs — a job that winded him again — and dumped him on the floor in the bedroom with his wife, and closed the door. Then he went back downstairs, switched on living-room lights, switched off the upstairs hall light, and unlocked the front door. He went outside and got the suitcase and brought it in with him, and locked the door again. Then he pulled the living-room shades, turned off the television set, and opened the suitcase on the floor.

He was safe now. Safe for tonight in this house. Safe for tomorrow with the contents of the suitcase. Shirts, socks, shoes, slacks, and a blue-gray suit. He could dress properly, and shave himself, and make himself presentable, and then he could go anywhere.

But go where?

He sat cross-legged on the floor, in front of the suitcase, and frowned as he tried to find an answer. All of his plans till now had been aimed at getting away from the asylum. He hadn’t thought of what to do next, what to do once he was safely free.

What could he do? Where could he go?

He couldn’t go home. He couldn’t go anywhere near home. But where else was there? He remembered enough about the outside world to know it was a world of papers and numbers. If he tried to get a job anywhere he would have to have a Social Security card, and they’d want a list of former employers, and they’d want to know if he was in the Army...

He sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at the suitcase, and tried to think what he would do tomorrow. He was on his own. No one would help him. He was alone, with the whole world ranged against him, all of them waiting for a chance to turn him over to Doctor Chax.

Maybe, if he could get out of the country, get to Mexico or Canada...

How much money did he have?

He pulled out the wallet he’d taken from the driver, and found it contained forty-three dollars. Not enough, forty-three dollars. He’d have to find more.

Maybe there was some money here in the house. Or he could find the old man’s keys and get into the garage, and get the money out of the cash register.

He put the forty-three dollars back in the wallet, and then he stopped, and looked hard at the wallet.

The wallet had more than money in it. The wallet had cards in it, all sorts of identification cards, in four plastic pockets.

He dragged all the cards out and read them, read every word. Studied them, turned them over, shuffled them back and forth in his hands. And he began to smile.

There was a driver’s license.

And a membership card in Actor’s Equity.

And a laminated reduced photostat of an Army discharge.

And a Social Security card.

He looked at the cards for a long while, and then he set them down gently on the floor, all in a row, and put the wallet down beside them, and he made a careful search of the suitcase.

There were only two things of interest in the suitcase, two large manila envelopes. In one of them were four letters, the sum total of the correspondence between the dead driver and the producer of the summer theater, in which the driver had been hired for the season. And in the other was a batch of glossy large black-and-white photographs of the dead driver in an actorish pose, arms crossed and head tilted, looking very dramatic, with dramatic lighting effects in the background. Scotch-taped to the back of each photo was a mimeographed resume of the dead driver’s theatrical career.

The madman smiled and laughed and nodded his head, and affectionately patted the cheek in the photographs, because all at once he knew what he would do. He would take the dead driver’s place. He would go on to that summer theater, and he would be safe there until the end of August, and then he would decide what to do next.

Could it be done?

The madman cocked his head to one side, and touched a fingertip to his chin. Sitting cross-legged amid the dead driver’s effects, a faint smile on his face, he looked like a child beneath the tree on Christmas morning, having been asked by a kindly uncle with which toy he intends to play first, and trying pleasurably to decide on an answer.

And could it be done?

He thought back to things the driver had told him: This was the driver’s first season at this particular summer theater. He knew no one else who’d been hired, nor did he know the producer.

But there would be a photograph. One of the glossy photographs with the résumé on the back. The driver would have sent it when he applied for the job.

The madman sucked on his lower lip between his teeth, and squinted at the darkness in the dining-room archway. Could he be clever? Could he overcome the problem of the picture?

What if it was the wrong picture?

“Why, I must have sent you the wrong picture,” the madman said aloud, smiling. “That’s my roommate’s picture. We were both sending out pictures at the same time and I must have sent you his picture by mistake.”

Was that possible? Yes, of course, but would it be believed?

What if he got more pictures like it? Tomorrow morning he could go down to the nearest city, and go to a photographer, and have the photographer take pictures of himself in the same style as these pictures of the dead driver. Then he could switch the résumés to the new pictures, and give one of them to the producer to take the place of the wrong picture in his files.

If he had legitimate-looking pictures, and all the right cards, wouldn’t they have to believe him? They wouldn’t even consider the possibility that he wasn’t what he seemed.

Unless they already knew the driver was dead.

Would they know that? The summer theater was over four hundred miles from here, in another state. The dead man’s home was three hundred miles in the opposite direction, and in a different state altogether.

Besides, it would take them a while to find out who the driver was. The car was all blown up, and the madman had the driver’s identification papers.

But it would mean that he would have to act, have to be in plays all summer. Could he do that? He didn’t have any experience in that at all.

But he did have a good memory, an excellent memory. There was a heightened clarity in his mind, because not all of it was functioning, and so the part that was working had more concentrated power. He had a really magnificent short-range memory. He tended to forget things after a month or two, forgetting much more completely than a normal mind, but to the same extent he remembered recent things with more sharpness and detail than a normal mind.

So he wouldn’t have trouble learning parts in plays. And he could remember a lot of what the driver had told him about himself.

But would he be able to act well enough to fool them? Could he convince them he was an actor?

Well, wasn’t acting simply being clever? He had consciously trained himself in being clever. Surely he was more clever than the driver had been, because he had seen the driver’s intentions at once but the driver hadn’t known he knew until it was too late.

He nodded to himself. He would at least try it. At the worst, they would decide he was a bad actor and they would fire him. There was no real risk of exposure, if only he remembered to be clever, to lie and make believe and fool them.

The driver had told him he was due at the theater on Wednesday. This was Monday night. So he had all day tomorrow to get the pictures taken and to think about his plan and see if there were any problems he’d overlooked.

But now his original idea had to be changed. He couldn’t stay here till morning. He had to leave as soon as possible, and be in the city by morning, so he could find a photographer.

He scrambled to his feet, closed the suitcase, and carried it upstairs with him. He went into the bathroom and stripped and took a quick hot shower and then dressed again, in the driver’s clothes. The shirt and suit coat fit perfectly, but the trousers were too tight around the waist. He left the button open, with the belt concealing the V opening. The shoes were too large, but that was all right. A lot better than being too small.

When he was washed and shaved and dressed, he closed the suitcase again, left it in the hall, and went into the bedroom where the bodies were. He found the key ring in the old man’s right-hand pants pocket, and then carried the suitcase downstairs. He picked up the wallet and cards, put them all together again, and stowed the wallet in his hip pocket. Then he looked at the old man’s keys, and smiled happily when he saw the silver key with GM on it. An automobile ignition key. Still smiling, he left the house.

He found the car, a five-year-old Chevrolet, parked beside the garage. He dropped the suitcase on the back seat and slid behind the steering wheel.

It had an automatic gearshift, which was a good thing. It had been a long, long time since he had driven a car, and most of his knowledge of driving had faded with the rest of his older memories. But with an automatic gearshift, he would be all right.

Nevertheless, he drove very jerkily at first, and it was a good thing there weren’t any other cars on the road. It took him about ten minutes to get used to the accelerator and brake, but finally he got the car under control.

Once the car was running the way it was supposed to, he had leisure to remember that he had neglected to get the money from the garage cash register. He got angry at himself for that, and pounded his fist on the steering wheel. But he didn’t want to go back. The forty-three dollars would have to last him. When it was gone, he could always get some more.

The narrow blacktop road wound among the hills for a long time, and finally deposited him in a small town where he found a turn-off that took him to a divided highway, the same one he’d been on before. The place where he’d killed the actor was about fifteen miles back the other way.

He drove all night, too excited to feel tired, and at eight-thirty in the morning he came to a medium-sized city and found a photographer’s shop, where the owner was just opening for business. He went in, carrying one of the dead man’s pictures, and said, “Can you make me some pictures just like that?”

The photographer looked at the picture and said, “Sure. You an actor?”

“Yes. How fast can you make them?”

“I should be able to have them ready by Thursday.”

“Oh, no! This morning.”

“This morning? Listen, I’ve got too many rush orders as it is. I’ve got a one-man operation here, my friend, and I—”

“But I need them this morning.”

Then the photographer looked sly. The madman saw it, and felt the anger rising in him, but forced it down out of sight. The photographer said, “A real hurry job like that, my friend, that’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“How many copies you want?”

“Ten.”

“Fifty dollars.”

“All right,” said the madman, knowing then he would have to kill the photographer. For being sly, and unfriendly, and unwilling to help his fellow man for the simple reason that we are all human beings together. Even if he’d had enough money to pay the photographer, he would still have had to kill him.

He posed in the same position as the dead actor in the other picture, and the photographer gave him the same kind of dramatic lighting. Then the photographer told him to come back in three hours, and he went away and had a big breakfast of pancakes and coffee, and took a nap in the car, which was parked on a residential side street. A small boy awoke him at eleven o’clock by banging on the fender of the car with a stick, and he got out of the car and took the stick away from the boy. He had the boy’s shoulder in his left hand, the stick in his right hand, and the anger was building in him, but then he saw two women with shopping carts walking toward him, and he knew he didn’t want to have to run away until he got the pictures, so he let the boy go.

The photographer had the pictures ready when he got back, and they weren’t as good as the other ones had been, but they would do. He and the photographer were alone in the shop, so when the photographer asked for his fifty dollars the madman jumped on him. He’d forgotten to bring a rock or any kind of weapon with him, but he managed to break the photographer’s left elbow-joint very early in the fighting, and that drained the photographer of strength, and then it was simple to strangle him.

He went back to the car and looked around, but the boy was nowhere to be seen, and there wasn’t time to look for him. He got into the car and stowed the new pictures in the suitcase and drove to the bus depot and left the car in a parking lot across the street. The attendant gave him a yellow ticket stub with red numbers on it. He carried the suitcase and ticket stub across the street with him and then threw the ticket stub away. He knew about license numbers and automobile descriptions, and he knew it would be dangerous to drive that car any farther.

He bought a ticket to Cartier Isle, which was where the summer theater was. He had a four-hour wait this time, so he checked the suitcase and went to a movie. He fell asleep in the movie house and got back to the bus depot just in time to get his suitcase and climb on the bus.

Mel Daniels came into Cartier Isle on the Thursday afternoon bus, twenty-four hours late for work. He’d shaved and made himself presentable, but he still had the shakes and a grinding headache. Mel Daniels and his Magic Hangover.

The bus rolled down the main street to the middle of town, and came to a stop in front of the depot, which was also a drug store, lunch counter, and newsstand. End of the line. Mel and the other four passengers climbed down to the sun-bright sidewalk, carrying their luggage. Mel had his father’s suitcase, the remnant of a matched set.

He stood squinting on the sidewalk a minute. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sun was bright enough for him to be on Mercury by mistake. He put his free hand over his eyes and hurried on into the relative dimness of the store.

A little bald man in a white coat stood behind the tobacco counter to the left. Mel went over and said, “Can you point me at the summer theater?”

“Other side of the lake.”

“Other side of the lake,” Mel repeated. He put the suitcase down, and leaned on the glass counter. “How far would that be, in miles?”

“Seven.”

“Uh huh. There wouldn’t be a bus headed out there.”

“Nope.”

“I wonder how I get there.” The hangover was making him feel sickly humorous, like a condemned man noticing the hangman’s fly is open.

“Beats me,” said the little man. “You an actor?”

“It says here.”

“What’s that?”

“It says I’m an actor.”

“The rest all come in yesterday. They sent the station wagon down. You could maybe phone.” He motioned at the phone booths in the back of the store.

“I bet that would work. Many thanks.”

He picked up the suitcase and carried it back by the booths, and put it down again. Hanging from a piece of string nailed to the wall was the phone book, a small slender staple-bound volume with a blue cover. After a lifetime spent looking up numbers in the Manhattan directory, this little blue book seemed unreal. Visions of Ray Bradbury danced in his head.

He found the theater number, stepped into the booth, and made the call. A young-sounding female voice answered, and when he told her who and where he was she said, “Oh. We were wondering about you. Just a minute.”

“What’s a minute, at this stage?”

“That’s right,” she said, and went away.

He waited, perspiring gently in the phone booth, shakes and headache both worse again now because he was standing up and no longer had the protection of the air-conditioned bus. He wanted a cigarette but he was afraid to light one, knowing what it would taste like.

The same voice came back after a while and told him to wait at the depot, someone would be down to get him. He thanked her and left the booth and went over to the lunch counter.

The little man in the white coat came over and asked him what he wanted. He asked for coffee, and then changed his mind and asked for iced coffee. The little man said, “No iced coffee. Iced tea.”

He was going to go into a Hemingway routine from that — repeat everything the little man said, and ask when the Swede came in for dinner — but he didn’t have the energy. And the little man wouldn’t get it, he’d figure Mel for a smart aleck. So he said, “All right, iced tea.”

The iced tea helped, more than he’d expected, and he tried some Nabs, little sandwiches of crackers and peanut butter. After a while he even took a chance on a cigarette, and it tasted no worse than usual. About like the one before breakfast.

Twenty minutes after the phone call, a girl in white shirt and jeans and sneakers came in and said, “Mel Daniels?”

“More or less.”

“Come on along.”

He picked up his suitcase and followed her out to all that sunlight. A pale blue Ford station wagon shimmered in the No Parking zone. They got in and she drove, westward, toward the lake. The other traffic was mostly expensive cars, Cadillacs or Rolls or Continentals, Simonized to black glory.

“Mary Ann McKendrick,” said the girl abruptly. “That’s me.”

“Greetings. You already know who I am.”

“Indeed I do. Mr. Haldemann is furious.”

“I had a going-away party. I kept going away, and going away, and going away.” He put his hands over his eyes. “I should have bought sunglasses.”

“See if there’s a pair in the glove compartment.”

He rummaged in the glove compartment and found a set of clip-ons. He balanced them on his nose and said, “An Inspector calls.”

She smiled, and said, “Have you got an excuse worked out?”

“Not really.”

“Good. Your best bet is just to tell him the truth.”

“Dear Mr. Haldemann. He was young once himself.”

“He still is.” She said it with an odd defensiveness.

He tried to look at her searchingly, but the clip-ons fell off. Did she have her cap set for Herr Haldemann? He couldn’t be sure.

Ah, well, there’d be other girls.

They were away from town now, but he couldn’t see any lake. It should be off to the right, but the road on that side was lined with tall fencing, broken now and again by iron gates at the entrance to private roads. Through the fencing he could see parklike expanses of lawn and trees. Estates along here, to go with the rich cars.

On the other side of the road, the country was wilder and scrubbier, sloping steeply upward from the road, blending into the mountains that ringed town and lake.

He closed his eyes. His instinct was to talk with her — she was female, and pleasant to look at — but he just didn’t have the strength. Faintly, he said, “Remind me to talk to you tomorrow.”

“All right.” From the sound of her voice she was smiling again.

“I’ll tell you the story of my life.”

“That’ll be nice.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence, Mary Ann Mc-Kendrick driving and Mel recuperating. The world was orange on his closed eyelids; down inside there, he was untying his nerves.

He opened his eyes when the smoothness of blacktop under the Ford’s tires gave way to the chattering harshness of gravel. Ahead of him was a red barn, but redder than any red bam he’d ever seen before, redder than Chinese red or fire-engine red, a bright bright red that made the barn look as though it were made of gleaming metal. Combined with the red were streaks and slashes of white trim, and great white block letters along the front that read:

The blue-gray gravel covered the entire expanse of ground between road and barn, and extended an additional pseudopod around to the right, between barn and house. The house — which he saw only after his eyes and brain got a little used to all that red barn — was a decrepit farmhouse, three stories high, bulging with bay windows. There had apparently been no paint left over, because the clapboard siding of the house was weathered gray, the color of driftwood.

Three cars were parked in front of the barn; a red MG — looking anemic in these surroundings — an old black dusty Dodge coupe, and a white Continental convertible. Mary Ann McKendrick stopped the station wagon next to the other three, and said, “Leave your bag here. You’d better go straight in and see Mr. Haldemann.”

“Whatever you say.” He put the clip-ons back in the glove compartment. “Is that where I live?” He pointed at the house.

“Uh huh.”

“I better buy a cross.”

She was properly baffled, like a good straight-woman. “What? Why?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “A vampire comes in, and you wave a Star of David at him, he laughs in your face.”

“Oh. I wouldn’t know about that.”

Was there a sudden chill in the air? Or was he just being oversensitive again? And why, he asked himself, did he always make a point of letting people know he was Jewish the minute he met them?

It was the wrong time for introspection; it just made his head ache more. Besides, Herr Haldemann was waiting.

He got out of the car. “Where do I find the young Mr. Haldemann?”

“Just inside. The office is to the right.”

“See you later.” But he had the feeling she didn’t like him.

He walked across the gravel to the entrance, which had been lifted entire from some defunct movie house and spliced into the front of this structure, looking odd and anachronistic and somehow tilted out of true. Eight glass doors across in a row, reflecting Mel as he came walking up.

Inside, the lobby was very shallow and functional, with a red carpet, and a ticket window on the right. There were only two doors from lobby to theater, at opposite ends of the lobby’s rear wall. The wall between was covered with a montage of black-and-white photographs of actors and actresses and scenes from plays. Posters on the left-hand wall proclaimed the season’s schedule and the names of the resident company, ten in all, six men and four women. Mel’s name was third from the bottom, with only two girls’ names beneath.

There was a juicy round blond girl behind the ticket window, smiling at him in grateful appreciation of the difference between girls and boys. He went over and said, “I’m looking for the office. I’m Mel Daniels.”

“Oh, you’re the naughty boy.”

“You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Where’s the office?”

“Through the door and to the right. I’m Cissie Walker.”

“You don’t look sissy to me.”

She giggled, and tried without success to look demure.

So the hell with Mary Ann McKendrick.

He went through the door and to the right, and saw a door with the word Office on it. “This must be the place,” he muttered, for his own amusement, and went on in.

It wasn’t a small room, but it was so crowded with furniture it looked tiny. There were three large tables and two large desks, an assortment of chairs, and filing cabinets and wastebaskets and coatracks filling the space left over. Papers and posters littered every surface.

A man of about thirty-five, prematurely balding, very tall and lean, harried-looking, dressed in blue polo shirt and gray slacks, a yellow pencil behind one ear, sat at a desk and talked desperately on the telephone. He was the only one in the office. He said, “But I need that sofa. We paid for that ottoman, Mr. Gregory... I understand that, Mr. Gregory, but...”

It went on that way. Mel cleared a stack of programs off a chair, put them on a table, and sat down. The man on the phone didn’t acknowledge his presence at all. Mel waited a few minutes, listening to half the conversation and trying to guess at the other half, and then lit a cigarette. Immediately the man on the phone shoved an ashtray toward him. He nodded his thanks, and settled back to wait.

Finally it ended. They weren’t going to get the sofa. The man hung up, looked at Mel, shook his head, and said, “It’s the same thing every year. You’re Daniels, I guess.”

“That’s right.”

“Actors are idiots, Daniels.” He didn’t sound angry or sarcastic, only long-suffering. “I don’t know why I have anything to do with them. One sends me his roommate’s picture by mistake, one shows up a day late — I just don’t know.”

“I guess you’re Mr. Haldemann.”

“I guess I am. I’m not sure any more. Mary Ann get you settled?”

“She told me to come in here first.”

“Oh. Well—” He scrabbled through the mess on his desk. “As long as you’re here—” He opened desk drawers. “There’s some forms to fill out. Withholding, and—” He kept opening drawers. “I don’t suppose you have a pen.”

“They won’t let me have anything sharp.”

“Uh? Oh. Actors are idiots? Nothing personal, Mel. Mel?”

“Mel.”

“That’s right. Bob. I mean me, I’m Bob.”

“Hello.”

“Mm. Here we go. Just clear off a space on that table there. This won’t take long.”

There was a form for the theater’s records, and a form for Equity, and the withholding form for taxes. He did the withholding form last and looked over at Bob Haldemann to say, “On this tax form. Stage name or real name?”

“What? Legal name.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

He wrote it out carefully: Melvin D. Blum. Which brought back to mind his argument with his father over the name-change. “Dad, listen. Can you see it? In great big lights on Broadway, that brand-new star, Mel Blum. Forget it.” “And what about Shelley Berman?” “Berman is Berman, Blum is Blum.” “A son of mine, to be ashamed of his heritage, is—” “What ashamed? Listen, do you know what Cary Grant’s real name is?” “Cary Grant is Jewish?” “No, he’s English. And his name is Archie Leach. You see what I mean? It isn’t heritage, it’s you got to have a good-looking name. You think anybody’s really named Rock Hudson?” “How am I supposed to hold my head up, I produced a son to change his name?” “It’s a stage name, for Christ’s sake. Everybody does it.” “Shelley Berman—”

It got so you could hate Shelley Berman.

He finished the last of the forms, and brought them over to Bob Haldemann, who was laboriously writing on yellow note-paper with a stubby pencil. He took the forms and the pen and said, “Sit down a minute, Mel.”

Mel sat down.

Bob Haldemann held the stubby pencil in both hands and, watching the pencil, said, “This is your first season of stock, am I right?”

“Right.”

“Your experience—” He riffled through the papers on his desk again. “I don’t have your résumé here. But you’ve been in a few off-Broadway shows, isn’t that it?”

“That’s it.”

“No other experience?”

“I toured with an Army show, I was in Special Services.”

“Oh?” He seemed surprised. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“No college?”

“I’m going to CCNY, part time.”

“Ah. And you’re serious about acting.”

“Sure.” He said it easily, but who knew? He didn’t know yet what he was serious about, but why rush it? He liked acting, and it put him close to girls, and if he could make a living at it, why not?

Bob Haldemann was still studying that pencil. He said, “If you’re at all like most of the young actors we get here, you aren’t particularly interested in this theater or this season. You’re here for two things, a good time with the girls and an Equity card at the end of the season.”

That about summed it up, but it would probably be bad politics to admit it. Mel sat silent, and waited.

“I don’t blame you, Mel. At your age, in your position, I’d feel the same way. But I want you to get interested in this theater, and I want you to get interested in this season. I want total commitment from you, Mel, for the next eleven weeks. We have an impossibly tough schedule here, a new play every week. You’ll have a major role in only four or five of them, but you’ll be working in all of them. You’ll be a stagehand, or you’ll run the flies, or you’ll work props. You’ll help build sets, and you’ll help strike them. You’ll work a seven-day week, and you’ll work a fourteen-hour day most of the time. You can’t do that and last the season if you don’t give a damn about what’s happening here.”

Mel grinned. “I guess I can’t be doing it for the money.”

Bob Haldemann smiled back. “I know. Thirty-five dollars a week can’t buy the kind of work we’ll need from you. Not even an Equity card can make it all worth it. The only thing that will keep you going is a commitment to this season and this theater.” He broke off suddenly, and sat back in the chair, tossing the pencil down on his desk. “I wish you’d come in yesterday,” he said. “This speech makes more sense when it’s given to a whole group.”

“I know what you’re saying, though,” Mel told him.

“Good. Do you think you can do the job?”

“You mean, on account of me coming in late?”

He shook his head and waved his hands, as though embarrassed. “No, no, not at all. That’s in the past. It was simply a rhetorical question, part of the speech. Believe me, Mel, I’m not trying to talk you into going back home. It’s just part of the speech. If anybody ever took me up on it and said, ‘No, I don’t think I can do the job, you better get another boy,’ I don’t know what I’d do. You think I could get somebody to take your place this late in the season? New York is empty by now.”

“Oh.”

Haldemann got abruptly to his feet. “Come on, I’ll introduce you around, and then you can get settled in your room.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Haldemann led the way out of the office. The theater was in semi-darkness, lit only by work-lights from the stage. Somewhere, a power saw was whirring. The stage was empty, all the way back to the wooden rear wall, where some chairs were clustered.

They walked down the center aisle and up the side steps to the stage. A young man in T-shirt and dungarees had disemboweled the light-board and was standing looking at the wreckage, holding a screwdriver. Haldemann introduced him as Perry Kent, and Kent nodded distractedly. “Perry’s run the lights for us the last three years,” said Haldemann. “Come on this way.”

They crossed the stage to the other side, toward the sound of the power saw. The stage was large — thirty-some feet wide, and almost as deep — with large wings. The light-board was to stage right, with the fly loft above. To stage left, the wing was stacked high with platforms and flats and odd sticks of furniture. High above, the flown drops swayed very slowly.

Haldemann went first, threading his way through the junk stacked up to the left of the stage, and over to a door on the side wall. He opened it, and the sound of the saw was suddenly much louder. It shut off as Mel came through the doorway.

It was a small room, with an incredibly high ceiling. Two dusty windows high up on the side wall let in practically no sun; light came from a bare bulb suspended from a crossbeam. Flats were stacked against all the walls, in a jumble of old sets, a twelve-foot pale green flat next to an eighteen-foot maroon flat with a false window overlooking mountain scenery, a white door-flat with a blue door next to a narrow ten-footer splashed with all the colors of the rainbow. Long lengths of pine jutted up above it all from one corner.

In a cleared space in the middle was a scarred worktable, and on the table the power handsaw. Next to the table stood a tall fat man with steel-rimmed spectacles, wearing a blue T-shirt and dirty white bib overalls. Haldemann introduced him as Arnie Kapow, carpenter/designer.

Kapow shook Mel’s hand, his grip surprisingly soft for such a big man. He said, “You know anything about flat sizes?”

“Some.”

“You come work with me when you get settled. All right, Bob?”

“If it’s all right with Ralph.”

“Up Ralph.” Kapow turned away and switched the saw on again. The buzzing made any more conversation impossible.

Haldemann motioned to Mel, and they went back out to the stage area. “Arnie’s not much of a talker,” Haldemann said, apologizing, “but wait’ll you see his work.”

Mel shrugged. This whole tour was a waste of time anyway. You met people by working with them, not by walking in and out of rooms. Haldemann was wasting time on him this way because he was late; Haldemann was bending over backward to show Mel it was all right.

There was a wide double door at the rear of the stage. Haldemann opened it, and they went out to the sunlight. This double door was a loading entrance, with a three-foot jump to the ground. They jumped, and walked to the left, where two girls were hosing flats, and scrubbing them with GI brushes. Haldemann explained, “We don’t have any permanent sets, so we use water-soluble paint. Kemtone. Wash it off and you can use the flat all over again.”

“Why not just paint over it?”

“Weight. You’d be surprised how much five or six coats of paint can weigh.”

Haldemann introduced him to the girls, but he didn’t get their full names. Linda was the childish-looking redhead, and Karen was the emaciated brunette. Both were sopping, and soap-covered, and desperate-looking. They stood dripping, and acknowledged the introductions with hysterical smiles. If he remembered right, they were the ones whose names appeared under his on the poster in the lobby.

From there, they went around to the front of the theater, Haldemann saying, “The rest are over at the house. You might as well pick up your bag on the way.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t mind Ralph, when you see him,” Haldemann cautioned gently. “He isn’t the most tactful person in the world. But he’s a really first-rate director. You can learn a lot from him.”

The station wagon was still out front, with the other three cars. Haldemann frowned at the dusty Dodge and said, to himself, “Mary Ann still here?” To Mel he said, “I’ll be with you in just a second.”

Mel got his suitcase and walked over to the entrance, where Haldemann was standing with one of the glass doors held open, his head tilted inside. Looking past him, Mel saw Mary Ann McKendrick behind the ticket window now, instead of the pneumatic Cissie. Mary Ann was apparently saying something, though Mel was too far away to hear it. He heard Haldemann answer, “All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then he turned, saw Mel, and said, “All right. You’ve got your bag? Yes, I see. Good.”

They walked together across the gravel toward the house. Mel said, “Mary Ann’s a local girl?”

“Yes. I thought she’d be gone by now, but she’s taken over for Cissie for a few minutes.”

They went up the sagging stoop and into the house. A dim hall stretched ahead of them, and voices came through the closed doors to their right. Haldemann opened these doors — double doors, that slid back into the wall — and stuck his head in, saying, “Excuse me, Ralph. Daniels is here.” He sounded apologetic again, as though this Ralph were the employer and Haldemann only a very minor flunky.

“How nice.” It was a coarse gravelly voice, heavy with sarcasm. “Shall we give him a drum roll?”

Mel set his suitcase down in the hall, and followed Haldemann through the doorway.

It was a long room, made by the removal of the partition between living and dining rooms, used now as a rehearsal hall. Folding chairs were scattered around in no particular order on the bare floor, and at the far end of the room there was a cleared space containing only a beat-up sofa and an old kitchen table.

Four men were sitting here and there on the folding chairs. A man and a woman stood up by the sofa, holding playbooks open in their hands. Another man stood in a corner at the back of the room, a cigar in his mouth.

Haldemann said, “Ralph Schoen, Mel Daniels.”

Ralph Schoen was the man with the cigar. He was of medium height, and very fat. The second fat man Mel had met so far today. But Arnie Kapow was fat in a solid, hard sort of way; he was barrel-shaped. And Ralph Schoen was shaped like a bag of lard, soft and sagging, with a petulant jowly face, and pudgy hands. He was wearing a gray suit and white shirt and bright red tie, the tie pulled loose from his throat and the shirt bunched at his waist where the coat hung open.

He came forward, removing the cigar from his mouth. “You’re Daniels, huh?”

The man was offensive just by his very nature. The look of him was offensive, and the sound of his voice was offensive. Added to it, he was at the moment trying to be offensive.

More than anything else in the world, Mel wanted to hit him in the mouth. But he just said, “That’s right. I’m Daniels.”

“Isn’t that wonderful. What’s your experience, Daniels?”

“What?”

“Experience, experience. You have some experience, haven’t you?”

“Four off-Broadway shows, if that’s what you mean.”

“How many lines?”

“Lines?”

Schoen grimaced. “That’s what I like,” he said. “Quick on the uptake. I’ll go a little slower for you, Daniels.” He held up one pudgy hand, extended one finger, waved it. “The first show you were in, Daniels. How many lines did you have?”

“Two.”

Another finger. “Second show.”

“None. I was in three crowd scenes.”

“Crowd scenes! Off-Broadway is getting expensive!” Another finger. “Third show.”

“Five lines.”

“And fourth show.”

“Three lines.”

“And that’s it? No more experience? Professional experience, I mean, Daniels. I’m not interested in your high-school play.”

“That’s it. Just the four shows.”

“Do you even have an Equity card, Daniels?”

“No.”

“Then tell me, Daniels.” Schoen smirked at him, and stuck the cigar back in his mouth, and talked around the cigar. “Just tell me, Daniels, do you really think you’re ready for the grand entrance yet?”

“I’m not trying to make any grand en—”

“Or am I misjudging you? Do you just happen to come from a part of the world where the calendar is different? Do you live the other side of the International Date Line, Daniels?”

Mel opened his mouth to call Schoen a fat slob, just to relieve his feelings, but Haldemann cut in first, saying, “He’s here now, Ralph. I think we can let bygones be bygones.”

“Of course.” Schoen smiled around his cigar and shook his head. “I can hardly wait for your first entrance, Daniels,” he said. “The cue is delivered, there’s a pregnant pause, everyone on stage looks toward the door where you should be coming in, and where are you?”

“Still here listening to you, I guess.”

Haldemann spoke hurriedly again, burying about half of Mel’s line: “Arnie says he can use Mel today if you don’t need him, Ralph.”

“Need him? Need him? Perish the thought. No, we went ahead and cast our first production without you, Daniels. A real shame. I’m looking forward to seeing you act.”

Haldemann touched Mel’s arm. “Come along,” he said, rather hurriedly. “You can meet the others later.”

Mel followed him out to the hall. Haldemann closed the double doors and said, “His bark is worse than his bite, Mel, it really is. If you’re afraid he’ll be down on you all season, don’t worry. He’ll forget all about this by tomorrow.”

“Great.”

“We’re all under pressure here, Mel. Don’t let Ralph get under your skin.”

“Perish the thought.”

Haldemann smiled, nervously. “You go on up and find yourself a room now,” he said. “Get changed into work clothes, and then report to Arnie.”

“Right.”

“Just try doors up there. We all keep our room doors locked. You never know who’ll come into the house here.”

Which meant, Mel knew, there’d been a history of petty thieving here. And it would be some member of the company doing it, no stranger wandering in from outside.

He was beginning to wonder if summer stock was such a good idea.

Haldemann went out, with one last encouraging smile, and Mel took his suitcase and went upstairs. There were six doors in the second-floor hall, and five of them were locked. The sixth was the bathroom. So he went on up to the third floor.

Another six doors. The first two were locked, but the third one opened. Mel stepped inside, looked around, and froze.

Cissie Walker was lying on the bed. She was wearing white socks and one sleeve of her blouse. The rest of her clothing, ripped to pieces, was scattered around the room. Her arms and legs were spread-eagled, and her fingers were curved into taut claws. Red streaked her face, and the pillow beneath her head. Her throat was livid with gray and purple bruises. Her tongue protruded, fat and dry, from her crushed mouth. Her eyes were red and staring, straining up out of her face like gory marbles. A band of yellow sunlight angled across her chest.

Mel turned, stumbling, and took two steps, and vomited in the hall.

The madman had forgotten about women.

He’d forgotten the feel of their thighs, the roundness of their rumps, the heavy promise of their breasts. He’d forgotten the clothes they wore, and the way they walked, and the way their arms moved, and the lines of their throats, and the softness of their lips, and the looks in their eyes. He’d forgotten the sound of their voices, and the way they smiled, and the way they climbed stairs or sat in a chair or bent over a table.

He’d forgotten about women; so he forgot to be clever.

The awareness hadn’t really started until he’d gotten to the theater. There had been women on the bus, and women on the streets of Cartier Isle, but then he’d been too full of his plans, thinking and scheming and trying to find fault with the way he’d worked it all out. It wasn’t until he was set, until Haldemann had accepted the idiotic story of the wrong photograph, until the madman was sure no one suspected him, that the awareness had really started.

It had begun with Mary Ann McKendrick. She had a good-looking face, but that was secondary. It was the body that drew him. She wore tight blue jeans, and he could almost feel the rough texture beneath his palm, him stroking her legs. His palms grew damp and he kept staring at her, watching the movement of her, imagining her without the blue jeans, imagining himself conjoined with her. He tried to visualize her breasts, too, but the man’s white shirt she wore was too loose for accurate observation.

He watched her all during Haldemann’s opening speech, in the theater on Wednesday afternoon. Haldemann and Ralph Schoen stood up on the stage, and the company sat in the first few rows below them. There were five actors and four actresses, the light man, the stage manager, the carpenter, and Mary Ann McKendrick. Mary Ann McKendrick wasn’t an actress. She was Haldemann’s secretary, and she did the theater’s publicity, and she would be assistant director throughout the season and hold the prompt book during rehearsals.

Mary Ann moved around a lot during that first meeting, Wednesday afternoon. She distributed the forms for all of them to fill out, and ball-point pens to those who didn’t have pens of their own. And during the speechmaking she sat on the stage apron, up where the madman could stare at her.

Haldemann talked about how much work they would do this summer, and how they would have to give the theater total commitment if they expected to last the season, and all through his speech the madman stared at Mary Ann McKendrick. Then Ralph Schoen made a speech, telling them that summer stock too often meant theater one notch below amateur, but that in his summer stock theater they were going to be professionals. From what he said, the three leads — Loueen Campbell and Richard Lane and Alden March — had all been here for other seasons and were local favorites. Ralph Schoen expected the new people to give Loueen and Dick and Alden good professional support. He would accept no less.

While Schoen grated on, the madman watched Mary Ann. He felt safe now, and comfortable. He had a place to sleep, and a way to get food, and he would be getting money every week. He had a safe refuge, complete with credentials. He had been accepted. He could relax now, and stare at Mary Ann McKendrick, and remember about women.

It hadn’t been anything to do with women, his having been sent to the asylum. He had killed two people, but they had both been men, co-workers of his.

But the four years in the asylum had changed him. The restraints of civilization had held him tenuously at best; in civilization’s attacking him with Doctor Chax and his shock therapy, with the isolation ward and the hard-handed male nurses, civilization had lost him completely.

He knew of no reason why he shouldn’t take anything he wanted.

When the speechmaking was finished, they all went over next door to have a late lunch. A woman named Mrs. Kenyon had made the lunch. She was a local woman who came every day of the season to cook the meals and clean the house. They all sat at the long table in the room beside the kitchen, and Mrs. Kenyon served them lunch.

All but Mary Ann McKendrick. She was local, too, and didn’t eat with the rest of the company. So the madman looked around the table, the hunger sharpening in him with the departure of its first object.

There were four women at the table. Loueen Campbell, the female lead of the company, was in her middle thirties, a hard-looking woman with most of the femininity beaten out of her. He looked at her, and looked away. Not her.

Linda Murchieson had bright red hair, but she looked like a child. She had a child’s vacuous face, and childishly thin arms, and childishly small breasts. There was a kind of innocent sexuality to her, but it was too subtle an appeal to reach him now. Maybe later, when the first raw ache of the hunger had been satisfied.

Karen Leacock failed for much the same reason. She looked to be in her early twenties, but she was even thinner than Linda Murchieson, with a thin face; thin-lipped, thin-nosed, bony.

His eyes were drawn to Cissie Walker.

Roundness. All roundness, but not fat. Not at all fat. Just roundnesses and roundnesses. She would be soft to the touch, soft and yielding. She would enfold him in musk and warmth and softness. Anywhere he reached, he would find a roundness to fit his cupped hand.

She saw him staring at her, and she blushed, and giggled, and dropped her eyes. And then she looked at him sidelong, and smiled.

In this house there were fourteen beds. Two on this floor, where Haldemann and Schoen had their rooms. Six on the second floor, six on the third floor. All the women had rooms to themselves, and most of the actors had rooms to themselves. Arnie Kapow, the carpenter, shared a room on the second floor with the light man, Perry Kent. And Tom Burns, the stage manager, shared a third-floor room with Alden March, one of the two male leads.

Fourteen beds. Ten rooms that contained only one bed each.

Ten rooms where he could take Cissie Walker, and ease the hunger. Four years; ten rooms; fourteen beds. The numbers circled in his mind, circling images of himself and Cissie Walker.

After lunch, he would get her away from the rest, take her to one of the ten rooms.

But after lunch there was no time. After lunch they all went to work.

Ralph Schoen cast the first play then and there, over the empty lunch dishes. The play was titled The Merry Widow of Vichy, and was a tragicomedy about the wartime years in Vichy, France, during the Petain republic. Loueen Campbell was the widow of the title, the widow of a French general who had died in the first German advance. Richard Lane and Alden March were the two politicians vying for her favor. There were only these three major parts, plus five minor roles. So only two of the ten members of the company would not have parts in the first play. The actor who hadn’t shown up yet was one, and Cissie Walker was the other. She would work in the box office, and would also take care of props.

She went away to the box office right after lunch. And the madman had to stay with the rest, had to go into the rehearsal room with them and go through a reading of the play. And then the male members of the cast were taken away by Arnie Kapow to work in the theater. They spent the next seven hours lowering backdrops from the flies, looking at them, taking them down and rolling them and putting them away at the back of the stage, moving them back and forth from one spot in the flies to another, bringing more up from the storage space under the stage. The madman and Perry Kent worked up in the fly loft, raising and lowering the drops, tying them off and reweighting the carriages. It was hot cramped work, heavy work, and the madman lost himself in the labor. For those hours up in the fly loft he was almost happy; a free human being, working his body as it was meant to be worked, stretching his muscles, straining at the ropes, and working in silent comradeship with other men. At the infrequent breaks, when he and Perry climbed down to the stage to sit with the others and smoke a cigarette, he was at peace. He forgot to be wary, forgot to be afraid. They talked together, and laughed together, and he joined with them and felt himself a part of them.

This was his true self. Not that beast forced to murder an old man and an old woman. How he’d hated that! How he hated the world that had made it necessary.

If only the whole world could be like this. Men working together in harmony, without suspicion, without fear. Without cruelty.

He hoped he would never be forced to kill any of these men. He hoped it with all his heart.

It was one in the morning when they finally stopped work, and they all trooped back to the house for a late snack in the kitchen before going to bed. The madman felt a delicious exhaustion, a comfortable drowsiness. The kitchen was bright and warm; the faces around him were happy and tired.

How good this was! He nearly wept at the beauty of it.

He was so tired, when at last they all went upstairs to their beds, that he didn’t even think of Cissie Walker. He just went into his room and undressed and crawled between clean sheets and fell immediately asleep.

Thursday morning, the mood of the night before was still with him. He reveled in the comradeship of the breakfast table, the automatic way in which the others accepted him as one of them. He glanced at Cissie Walker and was pleased by her, but only as a pleasant member of this pleasant company. The hunger of yesterday afternoon had disappeared completely.

It came back slowly during the day. In the morning, the men worked with Arnie Kapow, carrying flats out back for the girls to wash. For now, they were only concerned with the flats for the first week’s set. They carried out the flats Arnie selected, and then they went back to the stage to lay the ground-cloth and to fly the cyclorama. While the work was being done on the cyc, the madman was up in the fly loft with Perry again. Looking down through the ropes at the stage, he saw Mary Ann McKendrick moving around down there, checking the furniture list with Arnie. And Cissie Walker brought them coffee twice. She was the only girl in blouse and skirt; the others all wore blue jeans. Looking down at the stage from the fly loft, the madman watched Mary Ann McKendrick and Cissie Walker, and the hunger began again, building slowly.

And it built more after lunch. Ralph Schoen started the first rehearsal then. He didn’t need Linda and Karen, so they went back to work for Arnie some more, but he did need all the men.

Ralph gave them copies of the play, the acting version published by Samuel French. Then, while the rest of them just sat around, Ralph concentrated on the opening scene between Loueen Campbell and Richard Lane.

Loueen Campbell was playing the merry widow, a sophisticated nymphomaniac with a gift for smug repartee. Even in this first rehearsal, reading from the playbook, she was working at getting the character across. She was wearing a white blouse and black slacks, and her body was solid-looking, heavily girdled. Her hard and somewhat bitter face suited the character she was playing, adding just the slightest touch of coarseness to the widow’s sensuality.

The madman watched. He stared at her, and the imaginings began to build up again, with this time yet another leading lady, and he fabricated ways to get her alone. His mind invented entire sequences of lust with Loueen Campbell, in all of which she was, if anything, even more eager than he.

Late in the afternoon he had to answer a call of nature which was distracting him from his daydreams. There was no bathroom on the first floor, so he went upstairs, and on the way back down he met Cissie Walker coming up.

“Hi, there,” she said. She smiled. “How’s it going with mean ol’ Ralph?”

He stared at her, unable for a second to say anything at all. But he had to say something, before the silence became unnatural. “It’s all right,” he muttered finally, and grimaced at the flatness of it.

She went on by, smiling, and as she passed him she gave him another of those sidelong looks from the corner of her eye. He stopped, six steps from the bottom, but could think of nothing to say.

It wasn’t his kind of cleverness. He had learned to be clever, but only in a certain way, only in the direction of silence and deception. The kind of cleverness that found things to say to women was something else entirely.

He turned and looked up after her. Her rump switched back and forth as she went up the stairs, making the skirt flare this way and that. She was wearing loafers and white socks; her legs were bare. Looking up, he saw her bare legs halfway up the thighs, in brief glimpses through the swaying skirt. Pale shadowed thighs, hidden away within the skirt.

She was the one. Not Loueen Campbell or Mary Ann McKendrick or anyone else at all. Cissie Walker was the one.

Because she had such a round body. And because she looked at him sidelong out of the corner of her eye. And because she would be eager, he was sure of it. As eager as he himself. As eager as Loueen Campbell in his daydreams.

He heard her go on up the stairs to the third floor, and after a minute he followed her.

Cleverness. Cleverness. He had to know what he was going to say before he got there. He had to be ready to say witty things, funny things, but suggestive things.

Like the people in The Merry Widow of Vichy. They were always saying witty and suggestive things to one another, and smiling.

His own face was frozen; he looked sullen and bitter and enraged, and defiantly afraid. He stopped in the second-floor hallway to try to make his face more pleasant. He stretched his lips wide in a grimace, hoping they would fall into a smile. He pressed his cheeks with the palms of his hands, and his cheeks were cold.

Was this any way? He had to appeal to her, he had to make her want him. He couldn’t be silent and frozen-faced.

But he could think of nothing witty to say to her. And he couldn’t make the muscles of his face relax. His hands clenched into fists, and he beat his fists together, furious at himself.

He had to think. He would go upstairs, up to her room. She would look up and see him. What would she say?

She would ask him what he was doing there.

He would say...

“Life is too boring downstairs.”

He whispered it aloud. “Life is too boring downstairs.” And — “I have better things to do.”

And she would say: “Oh? What things?”

He would glance meaningfully at her breasts. “All sorts of things.”

What would she say then?

He couldn’t think. He had no idea what she would say then.

But at least he had a beginning, he had something to get the conversation going. Once they were talking together, he would think of more things to say. The important part was to get started.

He went on upstairs to the third floor.

All the doors but one were closed. He went over to the open doorway and looked in. She was sitting on the bed. She was taking off her right shoe; her right leg was crossed over the left, hiking her skirt up to her hips. A band of yellow sunlight gleamed on her bare legs.

She saw him standing there, and leaped to her feet, pushing her skirt down over her legs. She was very angry. She snapped, “What the hell are you, a Peeping Tom?”

It was the wrong beginning, but he tried to keep to his part of the script. He smiled at her, a shaky and nervous smile, and said, “Life is too boring downstairs.” The words came out flat, like the memorized speech they were.

“Listen, you get away from here,” she said. “You want me to tell Bob Haldemann?”

He stepped into the room, his hands out in front of him in a pleading gesture. “I just want to be friends,” he said.

“You pick a funny way to be friends.” She flounced over to the closet, with only white socks on her feet, and got another pair of shoes, a pair of white sneakers. They reminded him of the asylum, and Doctor Chax.

He couldn’t help himself any more. He crossed the room and reached out and touched her arms, the flesh warm beneath his fingers. “Cissie—” he said.

“Now listen.”

She was backing up, more angry than frightened, and he kept moving toward her. She tried to push his hands away, and he gripped her arms, refusing to let go. “Be a good girl, Cissie,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Be a good girl.”

“Get away from me. You crazy nut, you want me to scream?”

Scream. People coming. Shouts. Suspicion. Questions. Exposure. Doctor Chax.

She couldn’t be allowed to scream.

He moved his right hand back and formed it into a fist and drove it at her face.

Her eyes widened, and then she was falling backward, turning as she fell because his left hand still gripped her right arm. But she was still conscious, wide-eyed, her mouth red with lipstick and now red with blood and now opening wide to scream, and he hit her again. The force of it knocked her down, and the momentum knocked him down on top of her, and suddenly she was wriggling beneath him, her body hot and alive. She was squirming and struggling, trying to get free, but the movements of her tore him apart, the hunger was a physical pain, an absolute necessity.

She had to stop fighting him. She had to give in and let him feed the hunger. She had to stop trying to get away.

His hands found her throat. They tightened.

Her right ear was near his mouth, and his nostrils were full of the musk of her. He whispered, “Don’t fight me, Cissie, don’t make me hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. I want us to have fun together, Cissie, don’t make me hurt you. Stop fighting me, Cissie. Stop fighting me and I’ll let go your throat.”

But she fought and fought, she squirmed and lunged, her legs beat at him, her arms flailed, her body lifted and twisted beneath him. If she’d had shoes on they would have made a drumming racket on the floor and, though they were on the third floor and the nearest other people were two flights down, still someone might have heard the noise and come to see what the drumming on the floor was all about. But her feet were shod only in white socks. No one heard.

He clung to her, his body pressing down on hers, his hands clenched tight on her throat. He pleaded with her not to fight him, he told her over and over that he didn’t want to hurt her, he begged her to let him have what he wanted without this struggling.

And gradually, he saw, his arguments were getting through to her. Her flailing and fighting lessened and slackened, more and more, and he whispered to her more fiercely, telling her what he wanted of her, promising her pleasure, and finally she understood that he really didn’t want to hurt her this way, and she stopped fighting and lay beneath him acquiescent.

He smiled, pleased. He moved slightly, so his right hand could stroke her body, and he whispered, “I’m glad, Cissie. We can have good times. I’ve been very lonely, Cissie. But not here on the floor, that’s no good. You’ll hurt your back. On the bed, Cissie. No, don’t move, I’ll carry you to the bed. Like a bride, Cissie.”

She was dead. He knew she was dead, but he refused to know it. She wasn’t dead. He could hear her breathing in his ear, he could feel the pounding of her heart in her chest against his chest. She was only frightened, afraid to move.

He reassured her, whispering to her, telling her time and time again that he had no wish to harm her. He crawled off her and picked her up and set her down gently on the bed. “Shall I undress you?” he asked her.

Her eyes were open, but she only stared at the ceiling. She wouldn’t look at him.

Rage suddenly filled him. She wanted to cheat him. She wanted to scare him. She was playing dead. She didn’t really want to go to bed with him at all.

“We’ll see!” He yanked at her skirt, ripping it at the seam, tearing it off. “You think you can fool me! We’ll see about that!”

He tore her clothing off, ripping the blouse and skirt to pieces, so one sleeve of the blouse still remained behind on her arm. He hooked his fingers inside her bra and yanked, and material ripped. He tore her clothing off, till she wore only the white socks and the sleeve of the blouse. And then he fell upon her.

She wouldn’t move. No matter what he did, no matter how he tried to excite her, she wouldn’t move. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. He rutted on her, cursing her and pleading with her, and she refused to move.

When it was over, he suddenly knew that she really was dead. She was dead. She’d been dead all the time, since before he picked her up from the floor.

He scrabbled away from her, falling off the bed, scrambling to his feet and backing away across the room. A superstitious fear had filled him, leaving him weak and trembling. He had defiled a corpse. Her ghost had stood at the foot of the bed and watched him all the time.

He stared around the room, seeing shapes and figures and darknesses that swam and blurred, that vanished before he could focus his eyes. He heard sighing, and whispered words that he could not quite make out.

He stumbled out of the room, and down the stairs to the second floor, fleeing blindly, without plan or purpose. But in the second-floor hallway he forced himself to stop, to stand still until he could start to think again.

She was dead. The rest was unimportant, it didn’t matter. What did it matter? She was dead now, but how did he know when she died? Hadn’t he heard her breath, felt her heartbeat? She had died afterward. Or she had died during. Or so what if she had died before? He couldn’t be sure when she’d died, and it didn’t matter, it was unimportant.

She’d brought it on herself anyway.

Flaunting herself at him. Giving him the sidelong looks. Smiling in that suggestive way. Swinging her body in front of him.

She had asked for it. By first promising him release, and then by turning him away. How vicious that was! She’d deserved to die.

But what was he to do now? They would find her body, sooner or later. What was he to do?

He could run. He could run away again, as he had run away from the asylum.

But it was unfair. He was happy here. He was safe here, and content. He was with people he liked. It was unfair that he should have to give all this up, just because that stupid girl had forced him to kill her.

Could he stay?

He had an alibi. He was downstairs at the rehearsal. Yes, he’d left the room for a few minutes, but so had everybody else at one time or another. He would be suspect, but so would everyone else.

And they needn’t even think it was a member of the company. The front door was unlocked. Anyone could have come in, anyone at all. A stranger, a prowler.

He could take a chance on it. If it looked as though they might catch up with him, he would have to run away. Otherwise, he’d take a chance on it.

He hurried into the bathroom to wash his face and hands, to adjust his clothing and look at himself in the mirror to be sure he bore no signs of what had happened. There were no signs. He was clean. He could go back downstairs. He could stay on here with these people.

He loved these people. They had taken him in, they were good to him.

And all at once he felt sad. Because they had all liked Cissie Walker. They would be unhappy that she was dead. They would miss her.

He was unhappy, too, about her death. Because it would make his new friends sad. And because she had only been a foolish girl, not a mean girl. What had happened had been no more her fault than his. She had just been very young and silly, and hadn’t realized the effect she had on men. And he had been too long away from women, and hadn’t realized she didn’t really mean the promises she seemed to make.

Would this spoil things? It had been a mistake, that’s all, they’d both been mistaken, and the result had been inevitable. He hadn’t wanted to kill her, he hadn’t gone up there to kill her. He had intended to kill that old man and old woman, but he hadn’t intended to kill Cissie Walker.

He wanted them to understand that. Not Doctor Chax; he had no explanations for Doctor Chax. His new friends, they were the ones. He wanted them to know he hadn’t meant it, he wished it hadn’t happened. He couldn’t tell them so without them knowing it was he who had killed her, but he wanted them to know.

There was a bar of soap on the sink. He picked it up and wrote with it on the mirror:

That was all. They would understand. After all, he didn’t have to write that there, so they would know he meant it sincerely.

He put the soap back on the sink, wiped his hands again on the towel, and went back down to the rehearsal room. He’d been gone no more than ten minutes.

The scene was still going on. Everyone was watching Loueen and Dick. No one paid any attention to him when he came in and sat down.

Five minutes later, Ralph Schoen had them turn to another scene, in which all of them appeared. The madman carried his playbook up to the front of the room with the others, and went through the scene with them. It was a brief scene, and then Ralph talked to them, criticizing their interpretations of the characters, though most of them had simply read the lines with no attempt yet at characterization. And then they were interrupted by Bob Haldemann, bringing in the actor who was a day late. It was a short interruption, and when it ended, Ralph had them go through the group scene again.

They’d barely started reading when they heard the shouts begin. Shrill male cries: “Help! Help!” And heavy footsteps thudding down the stairs.

Eric Sondgard had been back on the job barely three days when the call came from the summer theater. Joyce Ravenfield — mayor’s daughter, City Hall receptionist, one-woman clerical staff, answerer of calls to all city departments including the police force — this Joyce Ravenfield buzzed Eric Sondgard’s office at precisely four thirty-six. “Call from the theater, Eric,” she said. “They say there’s been a murder.”

“Are they still on the line?” He hadn’t reacted at all to the terrible word; later on, he’d have leisure to wonder about that. Another psychic tooth to poke at.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Tell them not to touch anything. Call Mike, have him get out there. Tell him just hold the fort, don’t do anything.”

“Right.”

“Find Dave. He’s probably at the boat. Tell him to come here and mind the store till I get back.”

“Will do. Should I wake the boy?”

She meant Larry Temple, who was working night patrol, and who wouldn’t be waking up for another two or three hours. Songard said, “No, let him sleep. We won’t be needing any extra manpower.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Yes. Get in touch with Captain Whitsisname at the trooper barracks. You know, down at the foot of Fourteen.”

“Captain Garrett.”

“That’s it. I don’t know why I can’t remember that name. Captain Garrett. Tell him we’ve got a murder reported, and I’m on my way to check it out. If there’s anything in it, I’ll call him direct from the scene.”

“Why do you need Captain Garrett, Eric?”

“Come on, Joyce. We’re traffic cops. Even if we had the training and the experience to handle criminal investigation, which we don’t, we still don’t have the necessary equipment. Was the dead man shot?”

“I don’t know, and it—”

“Say he was. We don’t have the equipment for a ballistics check. We can’t run a simple paraffin test on suspects’ hands. I don’t think a one of us could get a clean fingerprint from a mirror.”

“We ask the state to handle the science for us, Eric. That’s what the state’s for. But we don’t have to go running to Captain Garrett the minute the complaint comes in. You always downgrade yourself, Eric. You always—”

“Don’t start analyzing me, Joyce, you’ll just depress yourself. I’ll call you from the theater.”

“All right, Eric,” she said, with exaggerated resignation.

He hung up, got his officer’s cap, and left the office. Downstairs there was a giant mirror on the side wall, the architect’s futile attempt to make a tiny marble lobby look like a great big marble court. Sondgard saw himself in it, a thin man in a pale blue uniform complete with knee-high black boots. “Cossack,” he whispered at the reflection, and felt a little better. Stupid uniform.

Mike had the prowl car, of course. Mike always had the prowl car. Joyce would find him out at the practice range, shooting guns. Sondgard went around to the parking lot at the side of the building and got into his little black Volvo. He drove out to Broad Avenue and turned left, toward the lake.

Captain Eric Sondgard, forty-one years old, a man of titles. In June and July and August he bore the title Captain, and ran Cartier Isle’s four-man police force. From September till May he bore the title Professor — Associate Professor really — and taught the Humanities in a Connecticut college.

“There’s a dichotomy in you, Captain Professor,” he told himself. “Half of you is a humanist and half of you is a Cossack. You’re all mixed up, Professor Captain.”

He was talking to himself. Out loud. As soon as he realized it, he gave a snort of disgust and turned on the car radio. There was no local radio station, and the distant stations picked up a heavy load of static on their beamed way up through the mountains, but at least there was noise in the car now, and a part of the noise was discernibly a human voice. He wasn’t totally alone now, and he wouldn’t be talking to himself out loud.

He hadn’t always felt this way. But six years of marriage had ended, seven years ago, in an emotional and sloppy divorce, full of bitterness and recrimination, and one of the side effects of that breakdown had been this dislike for solitude, this watchful fear that he would turn into a mumbling recluse, divorced from the world as well as his wife.

This job, summer Cossack, was in its way another side effect of the divorce. He and Janice had always spent their summers together in the cottage on Stenner Lake, but Janice had received the cottage as part of the settlement. The first summer without her, he had spent his time in his apartment in the city, and being alone at the wrong time of the year in the apartment where he had lived so long with Janice had nearly driven him crazy. The second summer he had taken a camp counselor’s job, not because he needed the money but simply to have something to do and the reassurance of other people around him, and he had detested the job. That fall, through a student, he had heard of the vacancy in the Cartier Isle police force. The student’s family owned one of the estates on Black Lake, and through them Sondgard had obtained the job. And surprised himself by liking it. This was his fifth summer at Cartier Isle; he would probably spend every summer here for the rest of his life.

Cartier Isle was a strange town, really; at least in that part of the year when he saw it. In the off-season months it was a tiny quiet community of seventeen hundred, and Mike Tompkins served as its entire police force. But during the summer it was a resort town, with a population swollen to over five thousand, and with the police force increased to four — Sondgard himself, and Dave Rand, the Floridian who ran a boat for fishing parties off the Florida coast the rest of the year and operated the police launch on Black Lake during the summer, and a student of Sondgard’s, a different one each year, hired by him at the end of the school term. This year it was Larry Temple.

The policing of Cartier Isle in the summertime was complicated by two factors: first, the artificial boundaries of the town; and second, the type of people who were its summer residents.

The summer residents were, to begin with, wealthy. Cartier Isle was no middle-class vacation spot. There were no cottages for rent anywhere around Black Lake, no tourist cabins, no boat-rental agencies. Black Lake had become fashionable as a summer resort in the early twenties, when the first of the big lake-front estates were built, and it had never lost either its popularity or its wealthy atmosphere. The lake was ringed by the estates, big country homes surrounded by parks and tamed woods, fronting on private beaches, enclosed by high fencing, protected by uniformed guards driving black Mercurys or Buicks.

And the whole thing was within Sondgard’s jurisdiction. As a result of political maneuvering in the twenties, the entire frontage all around the lake was included within the official Cartier Isle town boundaries. The early estate owners had urged the move, so the town could then zone the area to keep the rabble out, and the town fathers had approved the idea because they could then tax the estates. Because the town kept its tax bite modest, and because the estate owners usually refrained from interfering with local affairs, the arrangement worked out to the satisfaction of both sides.

But it still made life more complicated for Captain Eric Sondgard. This killing, now, out at the summer theater. If the town had a sensible perimeter, the killing would have taken place seven miles outside town, and would have been either a county or state affair. State most likely, since the county organization was a petrified political fossil, with a sheriff who lived thirty miles away down the mountain in Monetta, and who hadn’t left the town of Monetta in thirty years.

Even without this killing, there were complications enough. Circle South and Circle North, being the two halves of the road around the lake, had to be patrolled by the town police. The one or two drownings in the lake every summer were a town affair, though state dredging equipment was used to search for the bodies. Every bus into town was met either by Mike Tompkins or by Sondgard himself, and cheaper-looking cars with out-of-state license plates were watched carefully, and the town’s one motel was under constant surveillance, because all that money out around the lake inevitably drew thieves. Suspicious-looking types who could prove no legitimate reason for being in town were sent packing, with a warning not to come back.

And there was occasional trouble from the estates themselves. Four summers ago, a jumpy private guard with an itchy trigger finger had fired three shots into a car moving on one of the private roads, thinking it contained burglars. Later, he swore he’d called at the driver of the car to stop, and had fired only when the driver had ignored him. But the car had contained a pair of college kids, employed for the summer at Black Lake Lounge out by the summer theater, off looking for a secluded place to neck, and not realizing this was a private road. When a uniformed man had shouted at them, the boy had panicked and had kept going, trying to drive away from there. One of the bullets fired at the car struck the boy in the head, killing him instantly.

So there were complicated times in the job, and messy times. But all in all Sondgard was satisfied. The work was a pleasant contrast to the sedentary indoor life he spent the rest of the year, and it kept him busy, kept him from brooding about himself. If it weren’t for the nagging of Joyce Raven-field...

But that was another subject entirely. Shying away from it, Sondgard forced himself to concentrate on what the radio was saying. The radio said, “Extra margin because...” and while Captain Sondgard drove, Professor Sondgard winced.

The flame-red of the summer theater shone through the trees long before he’d come around the last curve and turned off on the gravel parking lot. Just ahead, across the road on the lake side, was the Black Lake Lounge, the only commercial property anywhere along the lake frontage. There was an extensive gambling setup on the second floor of the Lounge, and everyone knew it, but Sondgard also knew he wasn’t supposed to do anything about it. His conscience wasn’t particularly troubled, nor was his integrity very outraged; no paupers were cleaned of their last pfennigs upstairs in the Black Lake Lounge. It was a rich man’s game up there, and no credit was given any player, so it was essentially harmless. The only police business that ever came out of the Lounge was the occasional drunken driver.

Sondgard parked the Volvo in front of the theater, seeing the shiny blue-and-white prowl car already there. So Mike Tompkins already had arrived.

Sondgard went into the theater first, and saw Mary Ann McKendrick behind the ticket window. She looked frightened, and her eyes were puffy, as though she’d been crying. She said, “Next door, Mr. Sondgard. In the house.”

“Thanks.”

He went next door, and found Mike Tompkins in the rehearsal room, standing by the door. A dozen or more people, men and women, were sitting in a stunned silence on the folding chairs. None of them met his eyes as he came in, nor were any of them looking at one another. They gazed at the floor, or at the ceiling, or over toward the window, and they all had the tightness of shock on their faces.

Sondgard recognized a few of them. Bob Haldemann, producer of the theater. Loueen Campbell and Richard Lane and Alden March, who’d acted here in other years, and Ralph Schoen the director, and Arnie Kapow the set designer. The others were all strangers to him.

Bob Haldemann finally got to his feet, saying, “Hello, Eric. I’m glad you’re here.”

“In a minute, Bob. Mike?” He motioned to Mike Tompkins to come outside with him.

Mike Tompkins, bearing the rank of sergeant in the Cartier Isle police force, was a huge man, six foot, five inches tall, weighing nearly two hundred and sixty pounds, and none of it fat. A local boy, born and bred in Cartier Isle, he’d left his home town twice, the first time to accept a football scholarship at a Midwestern university — he’d flunked out the second semester of his sophomore year — and the second time to join the Marines. He’d spent twenty years in the Marines, which he enjoyed more than either college or football, and retired at thirty-nine, coming back home to live with his Japanese wife, May. Now forty-four, he looked barely thirty, and was an exercise-and-health-food nut. He was also mainly responsible for the police force’s high ammunition bill each year, since he spent a part of nearly every day out on the practice range. He’d taken over the police force job three years ago, when the earlier sergeant — Crawford, his name was — retired, and since then he’d revamped the force completely. He and May designed the new uniform, a modified version of Marine dress uniform in a lighter shade of blue, and he also talked Mayor Ravenfield into trading in the force’s seven-year-old Chevy station wagon for a brand-new blue-and-white Ford V8 with a red dome light. He enjoyed the uniform and the car and the chance at unlimited use of the practice range, but he usually ignored the job itself as much as possible. His relief at Sondgard’s presence now was obvious and unashamed.

He and Sondgard stepped out to the hallway, and Sondgard shut the door before saying, “You get the story?”

“I did. It’s a mess, Captain, a real mess.” Mike was the only one in the world who knew Sondgard and called him Captain.

“There really was a murder, then.”

“There sure was. She’s upstairs.”

“A woman?”

“Girl. One of the actresses here. Looks like one of those sex maniac jobs.”

Sondgard looked toward the stairs. Would it be considered necessary for him to go up and view the body? He hoped not. What good could he do? He said, “You better call in to Joyce. Tell her to notify Doc Walsh.”

“I did already.”

“All right. Good.” He looked at the staircase again. Wasn’t there something else he should do? He said, “Who discovered it?”

“Fella named Mel Daniels. Actor.”

“All right. I guess I want to talk to him first.”

“You want me to call Captain Garrett.”

Yes, he did, very much. Let Captain Garrett go up those stairs. But some embarrassment connected with Joyce Raven-field made him say, “Not yet. Let’s get our facts straight first.”

“Okay, Captain.”

Sondgard went back into the rehearsal room. “Bob,” he said, “is there any place I can use for my interrogations?”

Haldemann got to his feet, looking eager to help. “Well, I guess the kitchen,” he said. “I guess that’d be the best. Unless you want to go over to the theater. You could use my office over there.”

“No, the kitchen’s fine. That’s okay, Bob, I know where it is.” He looked around the room. “Mel Daniels?”

An ashen-faced boy got shakily to his feet. Early twenties, wearing wrinkled slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt. It was Professor Sondgard who catalogued him: class comic, a facile learner, fifty-per-cent effort in his studies, occasionally in trouble with the Dean’s office for being involved in panty raids or illegal bonfires on the main square in town or the painting of white bucks on the statue of the school founder. It was Captain Sondgard who said to him, “Would you come with me, please?”

He led the way back out to the hall, and said to Mike Tompkins, “When Doc Walsh comes, have him go right on upstairs. Keep the rest of them in there, and I’ll talk to them one at a time.”

“Right. You want the recorder?”

“Oh, yes. Good idea.”

Sondgard and Mel Daniels went down the hallway to the kitchen, and sat down across from one another at the kitchen table. Sondgard brought out his cigarettes and offered one to the boy, who took it gratefully. Sondgard said, “Pretty much of a shock, eh?”

“No encores, please.” The boy smiled shakily, and accepted a light.

Mike Tompkins came in with the Wollensack tape recorder from the prowl car, another of his innovations since joining the force. Mike loved gadgets, loved machinery, loved to be surrounded by things with motors and gears and levers and things that went whirr. He plugged the recorder in, put a fresh five-inch tape on, set the speed for three and three-quarter ips, positioned the microphone on its little stand midway between the two at the table, and said, “All set, Captain.”

“Thanks, Mike.”

Mike went back out to stand guard in the hallway, and Sondgard switched the machine on. Feeling slightly foolish, he intoned, “Preliminary questioning in the killing of— Oh, damn.” He switched the machine off again. “What was her name?”

“Cissie. Uh, Cissie. I forget her last name.”

“Hold on.”

Sondgard went to the doorway and called to Mike, “What was her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ask somebody.”

Mike opened the rehearsal-room door and asked somebody, then passed the name on to Sondgard: “Cissie Walker.”

“Cissie’s a nickname.”

“Just a second.” He asked again, and said, “Cynthia. Cynthia Walker.”

Sondgard went back to the kitchen table, put the tape back at the beginning, and started again: “Preliminary questioning in the killing of Cynthia Walker. Four fifty-seven p.m., June 6th. First witness, Melvin— Is that right? Melvin?”

“Yes.”

“Melvin Daniels.”

“Actually, that’s just my stage name. Mel Daniels. Do you want my legal name?”

Sondgard looked at him. The tape was going around, and somewhere upstairs a girl lay murdered, and Sondgard sat in this kitchen ensnarled in farce. They were doing a comedy routine, all of them, playing one long senseless gag on names. This was no place for Eric Sondgard. He should have called Garrett right away, no matter what Joyce might say or think.

But he was in it now; he had to keep going. He said. “The stage name is good enough.” Anything to end the comedy. “You were the one who found her, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Mr. Haldemann told me to go upstairs and pick out a room. All the rooms were occupied on the second floor, so I went up to the third floor. I was trying the doors, looking for one that wasn’t locked, because all the rooms that were already taken are kept locked. So her — door wasn’t locked. I went in and saw her, and then I got sick, and then I ran downstairs and shouted for help. Mr. Schoen, he’s the director, he went upstairs to check, because I wouldn’t go back up there again, and then he called the police.”

“And when was the last time you saw Miss Walker alive?”

“When I got here, this afternoon.”

“You just arrived this afternoon?”

“I’m a day late. There was a party for me and—”

“All right. What time was this, when you saw Miss Walker alive?”

“Around quarter to four, I guess. I came in on the bus at three o’clock, and Mary Ann McKendrick came down to town and picked me up at about three-thirty, maybe twenty-five minutes past three, and we drove out here, and that’s when I met her.”

“Miss Walker.”

“That’s right.”

“Then that was the only time you ever saw her alive?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how did she act? Did she seem frightened of anything, or worried about anything?”

“No, sir. She... well, she flirted with me a little.”

“All right.” Sondgard took time out to a light a cigarette of his own, and to think of what his next question should be. Probably it would be best to get a complete timetable from everybody.

Was the killer one of those people in the rehearsal room?

Oh, this was ridiculous. Sondgard had never met a killer in his life. He couldn’t imagine what a killer would look like, or sound like. How could he seriously suspect anyone? No one looked like a killer to him.

It didn’t have to be any of the people in the theater company. Someone could have come in from outside.

Still, a timetable would be a good idea. He’d have something to turn over to Captain Garrett when the time came. So he said, “All right, now, I’d like to get a complete rundown on your movements this afternoon, from the time you saw Miss Walker alive at three forty-five till you found her dead at — what time, about?”

“Four-thirty.”

“All right, forty-five minutes. Oh, by the way, where was Miss Walker when you first saw her?”

“Over in the theater. In the box office.”

“That was at three forty-five. Now, what did you do next?”

Daniels gave a complete rundown of the next forty-five minutes. Since Haldemann had been showing him around the theater, introducing him to the rest of the people in the company, Daniels could also give partial information on the whereabouts of nearly everyone else in the group at one time or another in those forty-five minutes. Sondgard heard him out, and though it was all going down on the tape he jotted some of it in his notebook just the same. He thought it might be helpful when he talked to the others if he had Daniels’ timetable where he could refer to it instantly.

When Daniels was finished, Sondgard’s notes read:

Sondgard thanked Daniels for his co-operation and told him, “Tell the sergeant I want to see Bob Haldemann next. And wait in the rehearsal room, please.” Because Captain Garrett might want to question everybody all over again. Sondgard couldn’t guess how many important questions he hadn’t thought to ask.

Haldemann came in and confirmed Daniels’ timetable, as he had been with the boy from three-forty on. He and Daniels had parted on the first-floor hall of this house just before Daniels found the body. Haldemann had already gone back to the office, and Will Henley, one of the actors, had come over to get him after Ralph Schoen had checked and found Cissie Walker really murdered.

As to the dead girl: “She was a very cheerful girl, Eric. Something of a flirt, I guess, but she didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Could someone have misunderstood, thought she did mean something by it?”

“I don’t see how. It was all too innocent and playful. She was only nineteen, just being playful. I don’t think anyone could have thought she was serious about it all. She was just — I don’t know exactly how to explain it, Eric. She was just a healthy, happy girl, having a lot of fun with the brand-new discovery she was a woman. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were a virgin. In fact, I’d be surprised if she weren’t.”

He could add nothing more. The dead girl, like the rest of the company, had only been here since yesterday. So far as he knew, no one else in the company had known Cissie Walker before meeting her here. So far as he knew, no one had become a special friend or a special enemy of the girl in the twenty-four hours the company had been together.

Sondgard asked him, “Is everybody in the company in that room out there?”

“All except Mary Ann; she’s at the box office. And Tom Burns. You remember him, our stage manager. I imagine he’s over at the Lounge. I haven’t seen him since this morning.”

Sondgard remembered Tom Burns. So far as anyone knew, Burns hadn’t drawn a sober breath in ten years. He was precise and competent and reliable as a stage manager, but whenever he was neither working nor sleeping he was drinking.

Sondgard said, “Okay. I’ll look for Tom later. Here” — he passed his notebook and pen across the table — “make me a list of this year’s company.”

Haldemann did. Including himself, there were fifteen names on the list. Sondgard looked at the list and shook his head. He’d be hours questioning all these people. He sighed and said, “All right, I’ll talk to Arnie next.”

But the questioning didn’t take as long as he’d expected. Arnie Kapow had spent the entire afternoon in the scene dock in the theater, and Perry Kent had spent the entire afternoon on the stage, setting up the lights. Neither of them knew anything about the killing. Nor could either of them be involved; they were alibied. In later questioning, Sondgard established that the theater’s front door had been under the eyes of Mary Ann McKendrick constantly between three-forty and four-thirty, and the rear door had been right next to where two of the young actresses, Linda Murchieson and Karen Leacock, had been washing flats. They had seen no one during that hour except Mel Daniels and Bob Haldemann.

After Arnie and Perry, Sondgard talked to Ralph Schoen, who was even fatter this year than last year. Schoen had spent the entire afternoon in the rehearsal room on the first floor. The doors to the hall had been closed, so anyone could have come into the house without being seen. Schoen could vouch for Loueen Campbell and Richard Lane, who had been doing most of the rehearsing and neither of whom had left the room at any time. He thought all of the others had stepped out at one time or another during the afternoon, but he couldn’t be sure of specific times.

Loueen Campbell and Dick Lane, questioned after Schoen, merely agreed with what Shoen said, and could add nothing.

Alden March was the only other actor who’d been here before this summer. Sondgard knew him, as he knew the others, because he’d developed the habit a few years ago of stopping by this house late at night, after a performance, to have a cup of coffee in the kitchen here with Bob and Ralph and the actors. For the last few years, Sondgard’s summer nights had been spiced by good-humored rehashings of the old argument about the actor’s artistic status: Is an actor an artist, or is he simply the interpreter of the artistry of the playwright, as a musician is an interpreter of the artistry of the composer? But aren’t some musicians artists in their own right? Aren’t the most accomplished actors artists in their own right? And what about directors? And so on, and so on.

Alden March came into the kitchen now and looked around, smiling sadly. “Not the usual joyous occasion, Eric,” he said. “But I’m glad to see you nonetheless.”

That Alden was homosexual was no secret. But he kept his opinions to himself, and never strove to press his convictions on males who were not of his persuasion, so there was never any trouble over him. He even managed to spend his summers sharing a room with Tom Burns — who combined perpetual drunkenness with a well-developed lust that verged on satyriasis, totally female-directed — with no problems.

He was not obviously effeminate, with the pseudo-girlish posturing associated with the homosexual. He was, in fact, very masculine in both looks and manner, which had caused more than one woman to offer him her all in a missionary attempt to show him the error of his ways. The missionaries, so far, had all failed.

He had nothing to add to what Sondgard had already learned. He had spent the afternoon in the rehearsal room. He’d stepped out of the room for about five minutes somewhere between two-thirty and three o’clock, and he vaguely remembered others making similar brief trips, but he couldn’t be precise about times. He’d been concentrating totally on the rehearsal.

After Alden, Sondgard took a break, to go through what he’d been told and see if there was anything of importance he’d overlooked. He had so far questioned eight people. Of them, six had alibis; Arnie Kapow and Perry Kent in the theater, Ralph Schoen and Loueen Campbell and Dick Lane in the rehearsal room, Bob Haldemann with Mel Daniels. Daniels really should be considered a non-suspect, too, but Sondgard hesitated to eliminate him. It was remotely possible that Daniels had killed her himself, and then had made a big show of discovering the body. Had there been time enough? Haldemann had left him, he’d gone upstairs, he’d come running back downstairs all in about five minutes. Could he have committed a murder in those five minutes? Unlikely. So he was a possibility, but far from a probability.

And the same was true of Alden March. Alden might actually have left the rehearsal room an hour later than he’d claimed. He had no rock-solid alibi. But Alden was even more unlikely than Daniels, if this was actually a sex killing.

So out of the eight, Sondgard had six impossibles and two improbables. And there was still the strong possibility that it was none of these people at all, but a stranger from outside.

Well, he would try to be dispassionate about this. He would assume, for the moment, that the killer was one of these fifteen people on the list Bob had made for him. Six were eliminated, two were almost eliminated. That left seven, four men and three women. If it was a sex killing, the list was cut to four. Three actors and one stage manager. Ken Forrest, Will Henley, Rod McGee, and Tom Burns.

Sondgard stalled. He sent next for Linda Murchieson and Karen Leacock, who simply verified the earlier statements, and neither of whom had seen any strangers slinking around anywhere. Now only Mary Ann McKendrick was left, and the four men.

Mary Ann McKendrick.

For the last hour and a half, alone in the theater.

“Don’t you have any sense?” He said it aloud, irritating himself further.

But what kind of stupidity was it, when one girl had been murdered, to let another girl stay all alone in an empty theater? If he’d heard of anyone else doing it, he would have said the man in charge was an imbecile.

The man in charge. The whole problem was that he was the man in charge, but he didn’t feel like the man in charge. He was just making motions like a police captain, salving his pride for an hour or two before calling Captain Garrett in. Captain Garrett was actually the man in charge; it was just that Captain Garrett didn’t know it yet.

Sondgard hurried to the doorway, and called, “Mike! Get over to the theater, and tell Mary Ann to come back here. You know she’s over there alone?”

“Son of a bitch!” Mike stormed away, his boots booming heavy across the porch and down the stoop.

Sondgard remained in the doorway, waiting, half fearful that Mike would come back alone, to tell him his blundering had ended in another death. But when the front door opened again, Mike came in with Mary Ann, and Sondgard smiled with relief. “Down here, Mary Ann,” he called. “You too, Mike.”

They both came down the hallway toward him. Sondgard said, “Just sit down at the table there, Mary Ann. Mike, go on over to the Lounge, see if Tom Burns is there. If he is, send him back here, tell him to come straight in to see me. And you stick around, find out has he been there steadily all afternoon. Get his movements particularly between three-thirty and four-thirty.”

“Right.”

Sondgard went back to the table, sat down, and started the recorder again. The first five-inch reel was full by now, and they were halfway through side one of the second reel. Joyce Ravenfield could type up an extract of the important parts tonight. She needn’t copy the whole thing, at least not right away.

Sondgard had very few questions to ask the girl. She simply substantiated Mel Daniels’ story, confirmed the fact that neither Perry Kent nor Arnie Kapow had left the theater by the front door, and verified Bob Haldemann’s statement that he had come right back to the theater at four-thirty, after leaving Daniels at the house.

She did have one additional piece of information: “When I brought Mel Daniels up from town, Cissie was in the box office. She asked me to take over for her for a while. She had tight loafers on, and they were bothering her; she wanted to go change into sneakers.”

“This was at three-forty.”

“I guess so. Right around there. Just when I got here with Mel Daniels.”

“So she left the theater at three-forty, to go over to the house. Did she meet anybody outside, or say anything about planning to meet anybody?”

“She didn’t say anything, no. Just that she wanted to change her shoes. And I didn’t see anybody out in front of the theater at all.”

“Didn’t you get a little worried when she didn’t come back for so long?”

She fidgeted, and looked embarrassed. “We shouldn’t speak unkindly of the dead,” she said, somewhat prim. “But Cissie didn’t seem very... reliable. It honestly didn’t surprise me that she left me there for nearly an hour.”

“All right. Thanks, Mary Ann. I’d like you to wait awhile, if you can. You can phone your mother if you want. Just wait in the rehearsal room with the others.”

“Somebody has to be in the box office, to answer the phone.”

“Have Bob do it. Or he can send one of the men I’ve already talked to. Not one of the girls.”

“Oh. Yes, I see. All right.”

As she was leaving the kitchen, Tom Burns came in. In his late thirties, he was about five foot nine and somewhat gone to seed, with a pronounced paunch and sagging shoulders. His face had an unhealthy red complexion, and his hair was a dry and sandy brown, thinning on top.

He was, of course, drunk. No more drunk than usual, and no less. Drunkenness in Tom showed only in the slow care of his walk and movements and speech, and a slight fuzziness in his eyes as though he couldn’t focus as well as most people. He came in now, saying, “Summertime! It is now officially summertime, our official has arrived. It’s good to see you, Eric.”

“The official is here on official business, Tom. Didn’t Mike tell you?”

“Michael Tompkins never tells me anything. One time, if memory serves, Michael Tompkins said to me, and I quote, quote, I wish I had you in my outfit, Burns, for just one week, I’d make a man of you, unquote. Prior to that threat, and also post to that threat, Michael Tompkins has never said anything to me at all. May I sit down?”

“I wish you would.”

Burns sat down at the table, as carefully as though sitting on eggs. “He did, howsomever, tell me just now to come over here and look for you in the kitchen. I did, and I found you.”

“Were you over at the Lounge all afternoon, Tom?”

“What’s that, a tape recorder?”

“Yes. Were you?”

Burns frowned, his mobile face going into contortions to achieve the expression. He said, “Serious, Eric? Is this really something serious?”

“A girl was murdered here this afternoon, Tom.”

“Murdered? For God’s sake, Eric! One of our girls? Who?”

“Her name was Cissie Walker.”

“Walker. Cissie Walker.” Burns twisted his face around some more, this time to show concentration. His face worked like faces in silent comedies, exaggerating all expressions into parodies of themselves. He had a small but bushy mustache, the same dry sandy brown as his hair, which added to the effect.

“Cissie Walker,” he repeated. “Now, which one is that? We’ve only been together since yesterday, you know, there’s three new ones. Wait a minute. The buxom blonde?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her.”

“Cissie... Sure, that’s which one. Fantastic, Eric, absolutely fantastic. A Rubens nude. Stacked, overflowing, an abundance of riches. A rump like a mare, Eric. Pearl-white boobies like great big pillows.”

“I said she was killed, Tom.”

“Oh!” His eyes widened, and his hands went to his mouth, as though to block it before he could say anything more. “I didn’t even think. Oh my God, Eric, what a way to talk! Eric, on my honor, I wasn’t even thinking, I was just shooting off my mouth, you know the way I am.”

“All right, Tom.”

“Murdered, for God’s sake. Who can accept a thing like that, right off the bat? You talk about a girl — I just saw her this morning at breakfast. She was really killed, Eric?”

“She really was.”

“Christ, what a shame. I mean that, Eric, you know I do. A young girl like that, what a shame. What a waste. Gahhh, there I go again!”

Burns really did seem more shaken and disoriented than Sondgard had ever seen him before, but Sondgard could understand why. Whatever it was about the world that troubled Burns, he had years ago chosen drink as the antidote. He kept himself anesthetized with liquor, so he would never have to take anything seriously. But this, the murder of a young girl, was so strong and violent a fact that even Tom Burns couldn’t drown it or blur its outlines. It was impinging on him with all its reality, and it had been too many years since Burns had had anything to do with uncushioned reality.

As much to help Burns get back on an even keel as to go on with the interview, Sondgard repeated his original question again: “Were you at the Lounge all afternoon, Tom?”

“Well, sure. You know me. I’ve been hanging around over there since breakfast time. Watched the sailboats for a while. Got acquainted again with Henry, the bartender over there.”

“And you don’t have any ideas about this murder? No one who acted sore at the girl, or acted, uh...”

“Hot for her? Eric, anybody who saw that girl would be hot for her. I didn’t see anybody drooling down his chin, if that’s what you mean.”

“I guess that’s what I mean.”

“It was somebody here? Is that what it is, Eric?”

“I don’t know yet. It could be.”

“What a shame, Eric. What a crying shame.”

Sondgard switched the recorder off again. He had nothing more to ask Tom Burns. He said, “Will you wait with the others in the rehearsal room for a while? And send in...” He checked the list Bob Haldemann had made. “Send in Ken Forrest.”

“Right. A real shame, Eric. You should have met her.”

Ken Forrest came in promptly. He looked to be in his middle twenties, about six feet tall, with crew-cut black hair and a solemn expression. Sondgard motioned at the chair across the table, and Forrest silently sat down. Sondgard switched on the tape recorder and intoned, “Preliminary questioning of Ken Forrest. Is that Kenneth?”

“Yes, sir.” His voice was soft, almost inaudible. He watched Sondgard intently, his eyes never shifting for a second.

“Speak a little louder, please.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Yes, my name is Kenneth.”

“And your permanent address?”

“Three Ninety-two West Fifteenth Street, New York City. Apartment Three-B.”

“This is your first year at this theater, is it not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Could you give me a brief history of yourself up till this year? You understand, I don’t know you yet. Most of the people here I do know, and the rest of you I want to know.”

“Yes, sir. You think it was one of us.”

“I think that’s possible, yes.”

“A brief history, you say, sir. I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and lived there till I was nineteen. Then I enlisted in the Army and spent three years there, mostly in Japan. After my discharge I went to New York. Three years ago, that was. I’ve worked at a number of jobs, mostly clerical work, and I’ve attended drama classes. I’ve had small parts in two off-Broadway productions, and I was in the national touring company of Love Among the Falling Stars. Last summer I was with the Keelsville Players in Maine. I got my Equity card there, and that’s how I happened to be eligible for the touring company.”

“Why didn’t you go back to the theater in Maine this summer?”

“They went bankrupt last year, sir.”

“I see. Have you ever been in any trouble with the police of any kind? I mean, besides parking tickets, things like that.”

Forrest’s lips stretched in a small tight smile. “Not even parking tickets, sir. I’ve never been in trouble of any kind.”

“All right. Now, this afternoon. You were in the rehearsal room, is that right?”

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“Did you leave the room at any time?”

“Yes, sir. Around three o’clock, I think, I went upstairs to the bathroom.”

“How long were you gone?”

“Five or ten minutes.”

“This was around three o’clock.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, I can’t pinpoint it exactly.”

“That’s all right. Did you notice, did anyone else leave the room at any time?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Most of us did, in fact. But if you want to know who left at what time, I’m afraid I couldn’t be of much help. I was watching Mr. Schoen, most of the time. The director is vitally important in any sort of theatrical undertaking. He and he alone determines whether it will be a good production with well-behaved actors and a feeling of high morale within the group, or a bad production with ill-behaved actors and a feeling of low morale with warring cliques. So I was watching Mr. Schoen, to see what sort of summer I could expect.”

“Oh? And what did you decide?”

“I really don’t think it will be a particularly good summer, sir.”

That was all he had to offer. Sondgard asked him a few more questions, but with no result. He had seen no strangers hanging around the area, he had seen no one take a particular interest in Cissie Walker, he had not noticed any apprehension in Cissie Walker’s manner the last time he saw her alive, this morning at breakfast.

Will Henley was next. He was a stocky man who looked to be about thirty, five foot, ten inches tall, with a heavy face that could become Shakespeare’s Falstaff or Hammett’s Casper Gutman with equal aptitude. He was wearing brown slacks and tan polo shirt, the shirt stretched tight across heavy chest and heavier stomach. He sat down, and Sondgard announced the normal preliminary statement, then asked, “Your permanent address?”

“One Ninety-two West Seventy-second Street, New York.”

“This is your first season here?”

“If there is a season here, yes.” There was a note of heavy irritation in Henley’s voice; at the moment he was being more Gutman than Falstaff.

“What do you mean by that?”

“This— All right if I smoke?”

“Go ahead.”

Sondgard waited while Henley took his time lighting a cigarette. He wondered if this was Henley’s normal manner, or was he trying to be offensive because Sondgard was a cop, or was he just regretting his choice of summer job.

When Henley finally got the cigarette going and still didn’t say anything, Sondgard repeated his question: “What do you mean, if there’s a season?”

“We’re supposed to open in a week and a half. If you don’t solve this killing by then, will you let us open?”

“Why not?”

Henley shrugged. “All right,” he said, as though tabling that subject for the moment. “What if there’s more killings?”

“Do you think there will be?”

Henley nodded his head toward the front of the house. “They think so.”

“Why?”

“A maniac doesn’t just kill once. You think it’s one of us, don’t you?”

“Not necessarily.”

“They think it is.”

“Do you?”

Henley shrugged again, tabling another topic. “Besides,” he said, “they’re already talking about getting away from here.”

“The other actors?”

“The whole crowd. Nobody wants to be next.”

Sondgard found himself getting irritated. There was in Henley’s manner some sort of implication that Sondgard couldn’t be relied upon to do much in this case, that the people here were pretty much on their own. Sondgard was constantly reminding himself of his lack of competence and experience in something like this, but he didn’t like the same sort of reminder coming from someone else.

He failed to hide his own irritation as he said, “We’ll do our best to see that nobody is next. To begin with, I’d like to get back to the interview.”

As usual, Henley’s answer was a shrug. His whole manner seemed to be that he didn’t expect to be disappointed by Sondgard since he wasn’t looking for much from Sondgard anyway.

Sondgard said, “First, I want you to give me a brief autobiography. Jobs you’ve had, places you’ve lived.”

“Of course.” And even in that brief phrase, there was something vaguely insulting. Henley reached out and flicked ashes from his cigarette, then leaned back in the chair and gazed at the ceiling as he recited: “I was born in Boston, and grew up here and there around the world. My father’s an Army officer. He wanted me to go to West Point, but one childhood on Army bases is enough. On my eighteenth birthday, I enlisted, and that took care of that. My father will never forgive me for having been an enlisted man. When I got out, on my twenty-first birthday, I went to LA. I got my discharge in Texas, and it didn’t matter where I went, so I went to LA. I hung around there for a year, and met a few actors, and got interested in acting. But the big goal out there is to get your own Western series, and that’s just the Army all over again. So I went to New York. I’ve been in four plays, all off-Broadway and three small television parts, one of them in a soap opera, and I was in a crowd scene in a movie, and I had a small part in a commercial. I was one member of a football team, running around throwing this box of cereal to each other. Summer before last, I was at Tent Theater in Pillicoke, Pennsylvania. Last summer, I was with the Dark Horse Players in Estes Park, Colorado. That’s near Denver. And this summer I’m here.”

“You never spend more than one summer at the same theater?”

“Why should I? A different vacation every summer.”

“I see. And what do you do for a living, in New York, when you’re not acting?”

“I collect unemployment insurance.”

“Do you attend drama classes?”

“No. That stuff’s a farce. Makework for losers.”

Again it was Professor Sondgard rather than Captain Sondgard who analyzed and typed this boy. He was another common type on college campuses: arrogant and opinionated, but with the quick mind and facile ability to back up his boasting with performance. This type usually had only the resilience and adaptability of youth to rely on, and once youth was gone they were bereft and bitter.

With less irritation, now that he had placed Henley, Sondgard asked him, “How old are you now?”

“Twenty-seven.”

So he had a few years left before the decline. He was welcome to them. Sondgard glanced at his notes and asked, “Have you ever had any trouble with the police? Aside from parking tickets and things like that.”

“Drunk and disorderly one time in LA,” said Henley carelessly. “A bunch of us had a party down at the beach. It got a little out of hand.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“All right. Now, about this afternoon. You were at the rehearsal.”

“If you could call it that.”

Sondgard raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t care for it?”

“Paid amateurs,” said Henley.

“Today was the first day of rehearsals, wasn’t it?”

“You don’t need to smell a rotten egg for an hour to know it’s bad.”

“Well, never mind about that. You were at the rehearsal. Did you leave the room at any time?”

“Of course. It was a waste of time for most of us to be there anyway. Campbell and Lane were doing all the rehearsing.”

“What time did you leave?”

“Around two-thirty.”

“And how long were you gone?”

“Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. I went upstairs and had a cigarette.”

“So you got back to the room around quarter to three.”

“Roughly.”

“Roughly, yes. Do you remember any of the others leaving the rehearsal at any time during the afternoon?”

“Sure. They all did, sooner or later. It wasn’t what you’d call an inspired afternoon.”

“Did anyone leave after your smoke break?”

Henley shrugged. “I don’t know, I suppose so. I wasn’t paying much attention.”

“But you weren’t concentrating on the rehearsal either. What were you thinking about?”

“New York. I should have stayed there this summer.” His sudden smile was surprisingly open and pleasant. “I knew it even before that girl got herself killed.”

“Got herself killed?”

“You never saw her in action, huh?”

“No.”

“She kept throwing it around. So somebody made the catch.”

“Did she throw it toward you?”

Will Henley’s smile this time was mocking. “I wear pants,” he said. “That means she did. But it doesn’t mean I killed her. I don’t have to kill them.”

“All right,” said Sondgard, wondering what Joyce would think of that when she came to it in the transcribing. “I guess that’s all. Send Rod McGee in, will you?”

“Sure.” Henley got to his feet, and Sondgard could see why he’d been cast as a football player in that commercial. Although he wasn’t particularly tall — around five eight — there was a massive quality to him. At first he seemed fat, but it wasn’t fat. Will Henley was solid, and probably very strong.

Henley left the room, and a minute later Rod McGee came in. The contrast between the two was complete. McGee was thin as a rail, with a wiry look to him, and he seemed to radiate nervous energy, as though he would make a spark if you touched him. And as Will Henley looked somewhat older than his twenty-seven years, Rod McGee surely looked younger than he really was. He had a bony and unlovely face, with strikingly bright brown eyes, and the eager open expression of a teen-ager. He looked to be no more than nineteen or twenty.

He came over and bounced down onto the chair. “Is that a Wollensack?” His quick fingers tapped the tape recorder.

“Yes.”

“An old one, or one of the new ones?”

“I don’t know how old it is.”

“It was a better machine before, when the German company owned it. Now it’s a subsidiary of Revere. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t. What is Rod short for? Robert?”

“No, my name is Fredric, and then it went to Fred, and then it went to Rod.”

“All right. Excuse me a second.” He started the machine and said, “Preliminary questioning of Fredric McGee, known as Rod McGee. How old are you, Rod?”

“Twenty-six.”

“And your permanent address?”

“You want my folks’, or where I live in New York?”

“Do you have a permanent address in New York?”

“Yeah, 37A Carmine Street.”

“Have you been employed at this theater before this summer?”

“No, never. I just got here yesterday. First time I’ve ever been in this part of the country at all. I like it.”

“Good. Now, please, give me a brief autobiography. Where you’ve lived, what jobs you’ve held, your theatrical background.”

“Oh, well, let me see. You want addresses?”

“No, just the city, and during what period you lived there.”

“Well, let me see. Albany, New York, to begin with. I mean, I was born there. And grew up there. I had part-time jobs when I was a kid... do you want those?”

“No, not particularly.”

“Well, then, when I got out of high school, I went to— Oh. You want the name of the high school?”

“It isn’t your childhood I’m mainly interested in.”

“Oh. Well... College?”

“You went to college?”

“Yes, sir, sure. Monequois College, Monequois, New York. Drama and American Lit, combined major. Then I was drafted — right after I got out of college, I mean. I was drafted, and I went to Texas for basic training and then to New Jersey, and then to Rhode Island. Then when I got out, I went to New York to take drama classes. I had this introduction from my drama teacher at Monequois to Jule Kemp. The teacher, you know. And I studied with him ever since.”

“Have you had professional acting jobs?”

“Well, Jule doesn’t like the students to do that, you know, but I did get a couple jobs. I was in a show on weekends, for children, on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. I was the Foolish Knight; I get lost, and eat the poisoned apple, and all sorts of things. And I got a couple of daytime television jobs; I was on a soap opera for three weeks once — I was this Army buddy of this character, he brings me home from camp and there’s all this trouble — and I was in a skit on a quiz show. I dressed up in an Arab costume, and I meet Death, and he talks to me, and the answer was Appointment in Samarra.”

“Are you in Actor’s Equity?”

“Oh, sure. I apprenticed two summers ago at Southern Tier Playhouse in Binghamton, New York.”

“Why didn’t you go back there this summer?”

“Oh. Well, it doesn’t have a repertory company like this, you know, it’s all package shows. The year I was there we had Tallulah Bankhead and Arthur Treacher and Victor Jory and—”

“All right, fine. What about last summer?”

“Oh, I stayed in New York last summer. I had this very good job with a suntan-lotion company. Bronzo, it’s called. I went around to five-and-tens and department stores and everything, and I put on displays for this suntan lotion. It was pretty good lotion, too.”

“Have you had other jobs in New York, besides acting jobs?”

“Oh, sure. I worked for a moving company — you know, furniture movers. Scappali Brothers. And I work for the city every time there’s a snowfall, you know, I shovel snow. And I had a job for a while at this settlement house on East Fifth Street, I taught drama to this bunch of kids, we put on Our Town. It was pretty good.”

“Good,” said Sondgard, smiling. The contrast between Rod McGee and Will Henley went deeper than physical appearance. Here was the eager boy, the willing worker, the one who in college wound up on every club’s Entertainment Committee, who never got a single mark higher than B or lower than C, who loaned his money indiscriminately, and who at a get-together in a professor’s home would leap to help the professor’s wife with the refreshments. Not out of calculation, but simply because that’s the way he was.

Sondgard asked the next question for the record only, expecting a negative answer. “Have you ever been in trouble with the police? Parking tickets and such excepted.”

“Oh, no. Not till now. I mean — I guess I’m not really what you’d call in trouble now either, am I? But I mean I’ve never even talked to a policeman before, except maybe ask directions or something.”

“All right, fine. Now, this afternoon. You spent the entire time at the rehearsal, is that right?”

“Oh, sure. Listen, do you think we’ll be able to go on? I mean, I know that sounds awfully heartless, with Cissie just dead and all, you know, but we’ve all been talking in there and we were kind of wondering, you know...”

“I imagine the play will go on.” Sondgard smiled. “The show must go on, remember?”

“Sure, I know. But a couple of us were thinking maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t know, I guess it doesn’t make any difference.”

“Just a minute.” Sondgard was finding Rod McGee the most difficult of them all to interview. The boy kept going off on tangents, and it took a bulldozer to bring him back. “About this afternoon,” Sondgard insisted. “You say you spent all your time at the rehearsal?”

“Oh, sure. We started at—”

“Yes, I know what time you started.” But as soon as he said it, Sondgard was sorry, afraid he’d sounded harsh. Rod McGee was certainly friendly and co-operative, and it wasn’t his fault if he was too eager to be orderly. More softly, Sondgard said, “But I was wondering if you spent every minute in that room there. You didn’t leave at all to—”

“Oh, to go to the bathroom!” It burst out of him, and he was sparkling again. “Oh, sure! I’m sorry, honest, I didn’t know what you meant. Oh, sure. I went to the bathroom twice.”

“What times?”

“A little after two, I guess, and maybe around three-thirty, quarter to four.”

“Did you see anyone else in the house either time?”

“No, I didn’t. You think it was a prowler, huh?”

“It might have been.”

“Some of the others say you think it’s one of us. That would be a real mess, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would. Now, did you happen to notice—”

But he never got to finish the sentence. Mike Tompkins stuck his head in the door at that moment and said, “Captain, can I see you for a second?”

“What? Oh, yes. Be right with you.” He turned off the tape recorder and told Rod McGee, “I guess that’s all. Thank you for co-operating. Would you go back with the others now? Tell them I’ll be with them in a minute.”

“Will do.” McGee got to his feet. He motioned at the tape recorder. “That looks like one of the new ones,” he said.

Mike was waiting impatiently in the doorway, a strained expression on his face. Sondgard got up from the table and went over to him, saying, “What is it, Mike?”

“Something I want to show you.”

Sondgard went with him, the two of them following Rod McGee down the hall. McGee went into the rehearsal room. Standing at the foot of the stairs, looking unusually pale, was Tom Burns.

Mike said, “Tom here found it. None of the others know about it yet.”

“What is it?”

“You ought to see it for yourself. Come on along, Tom.”

“Anything to be of service,” said Burns, but he sounded reluctant.

The three men went upstairs, and Mike led the way to the bathroom. “Here it is, Captain.”

Sondgard looked where Mike was pointing. On the mirror over the sink, in a huge and childish scrawl, were the words, I’M SORRY. The letters were shaky and ill-formed, sprawling over the entire surface of the mirror, the “Y” of SORRY crammed against the edge of the mirror by the size of the letters preceding it. The writer had pressed the soap so hard against the mirror that chunks of it stuck here and there, protuberances on the letters, and more small pieces had dropped to the sink. The bar of soap itself, all mashed together, lay in the soap dish on the sink.

Sondgard looked at the letters, and felt a sudden rush of pity. A poor bewildered mind had scrawled out those words, and Sondgard had no doubt they were sincere. This creature, whoever he was, driven by whatever sickness infested his brain, had raped and killed. And then, in shock and terror and remorse, he had come here to gaze upon his own face in this mirror, and to scratch out on its surface his plea for forgiveness.

A madman. Not simply a low and cunning intelligence, or a brutish mind, but a sensitive mind twisted by madness. Just as Sondgard had placed and typed the people he had questioned, trying to understand them, now he automatically built up in his mind a portrait of this poor lost wretch, who here for the second time had left his spoor. If the carnage upstairs was the result of a Mr. Hyde, this writing on the mirror was surely the outcry of a Dr. Jekyll. It was Jekyll that Sondgard pitied, forced to share the same husk with Hyde.

Was that husk here in this house? Sondgard riffled the mental daguerreotype he had made of his suspects, and tried to match one up against the daguerreotype of this sick and twisted human being. But he couldn’t find the pair that matched, and a paraphrase of a line from television ran idiotically through his head: Will the real madman please stand?

So, not yet. He would have to talk to them more, he would have to get to know them better

Mike’s usually loud voice was unexpectedly hushed. He said, “You want me to call Captain Garrett now, Captain?”

Captain Garrett?

No, not this time. Captain Garrett was a hunter. This poor wretch couldn’t be hunted; he would have to be understood. Would Captain Garrett, on seeing this pitiful message, have understood its implications as Sondgard did?

“Maybe there’s prints on that soap,” said Mike, more to himself than Sondgard.

Of course. That’s what Garrett would see. A clue to the man’s hands, not a clue to his soul.

It was one of the people waiting in the room downstairs. Sondgard knew that now as surely as if the guilty man had come and whispered it in his ear. After the crime, coming down the stairs, he had stopped here to remove the evidences of what he had done. And why? To make himself presentable when he returned to the group below. And he had scrawled this message to whom? To his co-workers, pleading with them for understanding. A stranger from outside would not have left this message here. Either the message would have been found in the murdered girl’s room itself, or it would have come through the mail — shaky block letters clipped from a newspaper.

The killer was here, in this house. Sondgard had talked to him. Sondgard would find him.

“Captain? You want me to call Captain Garrett?”

“No,” said Sondgard. “Not yet. We’ll handle it ourselves for a while.”

Externally, the asylum wore the modern look. Situated atop a clear and grassy knoll, it presented to the visitor a pleasing façade, the bright brick administration building fronted by white pillars and with an approach of white limestone-painted rocks bounding the asphalt road through well-landscaped and well-manicured lawn.

Behind the administration building were three other buildings, all the same two stories in height, and connected by covered walkways amid more landscaping. One of these buildings was the infirmary, where the physical sicknesses of the mentally ill were cared for. One housed the non-violent patients, those well enough to be allowed freely to walk the grounds; the doors of this building were never locked, and the rocking chairs on the veranda were full throughout these soft spring days. Only the third building, farthest back, most hidden from the sight of the casual visitor, bore the physical appearance of the stock asylum. Somehow, the brick of this building seemed dingier and darker. The windows were smaller, and all were heavily barred. The door was stout, and always locked. Spotlights at the corners of the roof gleamed down at night, washing over the walls and the near grounds.

Standing in his office in the administration building, Dr. Edward Peterby gazed out his window at the maximum-security building. It was from that building that the madman had escaped, killing two male nurses on the way.

“He has a high degree of intelligence,” said Dr. Peterby, still looking out the window. Behind him, the police officers and the newsmen shifted position, cleared their throats, made small noises. Dr. Peterby nodded at the maximum-security building. “No one has ever escaped from there before. We would have said it was impossible. But he did it. With a combination of great intelligence and a capability for direct incisive action, he managed to get away.”

Dr. Peterby turned away from the window at last, and faced the roomful of men. “Before his sickness,” he said, “his IQ was rated at 168. That puts him in genius class. Economic pressures had forced him into a job that would have frustrated an IQ of 120. That was one of the reasons he eventually wound up here.”

Dr. Peterby paused. He felt this was important, though he knew it wasn’t the part these men had come to hear. But he wanted them to understand. “This man,” he said, “is more to be pitied than hated. I can say that although he has murdered at least five times that we know of, twice before being sent here, and three times on the way out. If we are to include the young man murdered by the hitchhiker.”

One of the police officers cleared his throat and said, “We include him, Doctor. The timing is right, the method is right, the descriptions from the other drivers are right.”

“Well, then.” Dr. Peterby sat down at his desk, spread his hands flat on the warm wood. This crowding of his office had unnerved him somewhat; extra chairs had been brought in, and the room was full of his visitors. He was used to the warmth and spaciousness of this office, and now it was cool and crowded, the coolness emanating from the cold faces of the police officers and newsmen. He was used to dimness and silence in this room, and now the overhead light was on — which it never was when he was in it; he only used the desk lamp, even at night — and there were constant small noises from the waiting group of men.

Dr. Peterby made a tent, joining the fingertips of both hands together, analyzed it as symbolic of a desire to crawl away into a small dim place away from all these faces, and broke the tent apart. “Well, then,” he said again. “You all have photos of Robert Ellington; you know what he looks like. You know, to a certain extent, what he has done. Now, as I understand it, you want to know what he is, what sort of man he is, what we can expect him to do.”

He paused. They waited. He said, “Robert Ellington is, as I said, a highly intelligent man. He is also an extremely cunning man, an admission which I make with some regret. He was not a cunning man when he came here. We strove to cure him when he first came here, and in so doing we were striving to force him to understand himself, and to understand the enormity of what he had done. To understand that he had been wrong, and that he had been wrong in a terrible and inhuman way. He resisted us, as of course he must. If he is to retain his own regard, his own self-respect, he cannot believe that his actions were anything less than proper and necessary and inevitable. When he came to us, he was a violent man, but an open man, revealing himself completely, revealing himself far more than he knew. But in our attempt to hold up a mirror before his gaze, to reflect back to him the insights he had given us about himself, we only succeeded in teaching him how to avoid giving us any more revelations. We underestimated him — more than once, as you can see; he got away — but we underestimated him, and we only made matters worse.”

Looking down, Dr. Peterby saw that unconsciously he had made the tent again. He broke it at once, with a sudden feeling of irritation, and pressed his palms down on the desk top. Watching his hands, he said, “It isn’t easy to admit an error like that. It was a grievous error. Methods which had worked with varying success on other men were no good on Robert Ellington. We had not taken into account the strength and adaptability of his mind.”

He raised his head to look at his visitors once more. “That is a vitally important point,” he said. “The adaptability of his mind. The defenses he is capable of erecting are utterly fantastic. He learned here to be a man of a thousand psychic faces. Until he grew violent again and had to be put in the solitary ward, he displayed an amazing ability at mimicry. I could play for you tape recordings of our sessions together during that time, and they would astonish you. He was never the same man twice. He would choose one of the other inmates, and very nearly become that person. His speech, his responses, his attitudes, all would reflect almost a parody of the original, with his own personality showing through only as a muted left hand, as it were, in a minor key. Do you see what he was doing? Ours was a doctor-patient relationship which he could not evade, but which he could not accept because it would inevitably lead to disclosures about himself which he did not want to know. So he altered the doctor-patient relationship by becoming one of my other patients. Whatever I said to him, it was that other patient who answered, and whatever revealing information I might unearth about the other patient, could certainly not harm him.”

Dr. Peterby’s hands fluttered, his face was animated. He had very nearly forgotten this disruption of his office. “Do you see the fantastic implications of what he did? Great intelligence, great cunning, a high order of talent, all bent on this one goal. The potential of this man is very nearly unbelievable. Well, you can see that for yourself. He managed to break out of our maximum-security building. Alone, penniless, his name and face and general whereabouts known to all of you, he nevertheless managed to evade you. If we could yet find the key to this man, break him from the bondage of his illness, unlock his potential, what a value he could be to society!”

“We have to find the man himself first,” said one of the police officers. “And right now he isn’t being a value to society, he’s being a menace to society.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. He must be found, before he does even greater damage to himself. You must know, it is entirely possible that he will kill again. What these three killings have already done to him I can’t begin to guess. The longer he remains free, the more difficult his eventual cure will become. All the time he is out there, he is piling up more and more data he must forever hide from himself; he is making the wall between himself and self-knowledge thicker and thicker and higher and higher.”

“He is also killing people.”

“Good God, I’m well aware of that! Do you think I’m ignoring that? The two men here, I knew them both, knew them for years. I would have said they were friends of mine, as much as there are friendships between the staff and the employees at ward level. One of them — Davis — I know his wife, I’ve met their children. Of course it’s a dreadful thing, I know that as well as anyone. But it’s dreadful in the way a flood is dreadful, in the way an airplane crash is dreadful. You don’t hate the water, or hate the airplane, and if you do you’re just being foolish and wasting your emotions. I realize this is a different situation here, Robert Ellington can hardly be considered an act of God, but—”

“More an act of Satan,” said one of the newsmen.

“Very well,” said Dr. Peterby, nodding. “Very well, if you want to phrase it that way. Robert Ellington is possessed by a devil, if you will, and we here are the priests trying to exorcise that devil. The devil, in this case, is a mental illness. Once Robert Ellington is cured, if we ever do manage to cure him, he will be as shocked and repulsed at these crimes as you or I, and he will have just as strong a feeling as you or I that he was not the one who committed those crimes. I know I didn’t murder those people. You know you didn’t murder them. If and when he is ever healthy, he will know just as surely that he didn’t murder them, and he will be right. It is the disease within him that is killing, not him. The law recognizes that fact. When caught, he will not be punished; he will be returned here. If cured, he will be released, and he will still not be punished. He will be a free man.”

Dr. Peterby wasn’t sure be was getting through to these people. But he knew he had to, if they were to know Robert Ellington well enough to catch him, and well enough not to damage him mentally even more than he was already damaged. He tried again.

“Let us say,” he said, “as an example, that one of us in this room is a carrier of bubonic plague. Let us say he does not know it, that he himself shows no symptoms of bubonic plague. Soon, those of us in contact with this man will begin to sicken and to die. Our deaths will be horrible, and this carrier will have been the direct cause of those deaths. We may fear him, as being deadly. We may pity him, as being himself doomed eventually by the death he carries with him. But if we hate him, if we blame him, we do him a terrible injustice. He is sick, he carries within him a sickness, but he doesn’t know it. And precisely the same is true of Robert Ellington. He is sick. He carries within himself a mental sickness, which is deadly to those with whom he comes in contact. But he doesn’t know it. No matter how much we are revolted by the results of his sickness, we cannot in all justice hate him or blame him.”

“I don’t hate him,” said one of the police officers. “I just want to catch him.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. We all do. Very well. Very well, you want to know what he is most probably doing at this moment.”

“Strangling somebody,” said a newsman flippantly.

“That is a regrettable possibility,” Dr. Peterby told him. “But I think we all know that already, and don’t require to be reminded of it.”

The newsman looked properly sheepish. Those near him shifted uncomfortably.

“You have established,” said Dr. Peterby, “that Ellington escaped with the suitcase belonging to the young man he killed on the highway. He therefore is now in possession of clothing more suitable to the outside world than that in which he left here. He may even have stolen money from the same young man. With clothing and money, I would imagine that Ellington would next attempt simply to disappear in the crowd. I would guess that he would make his way as quickly as possible to a large city, such as New York. I would also guess that he would use the same protective device in the outside world which served him so well here. That is, I would imagine that he would attempt to become someone else. That he would pick someone he met in a train, perhaps, or a restaurant, study the person’s mannerisms and movements and speech patterns and habits of thought, and then mimic that person from then on. He would be attempting to disguise himself as a free man, and I would guess that he would do so by becoming one of the free men he meets. Now, his mimicry never lasted long here; he would be a different patient at almost every session. Sometimes, when one of his roles particularly pleased him — he had the most fun, I think, with patients of lower mentality — he would keep the part for two or three sessions. But normally he would change from session to session, and I would guess he will do much the same thing in the outside world. That each day, perhaps, he will pick out some different person to be. Because of that, and because he will feel himself to be a hunted man, I would imagine that he wouldn’t stay in any one place for long. I would guess he will live in hotels, changing to a new hotel every day. I would guess he will make no attempt to get a job, afraid of the normal questions asked by any employer, and so, in order to have money for food and shelter, I regret to say that my guess would be he will resort to robbery. He has no background of house-breaking or safe-cracking or anything along those lines, so I would imagine he will be limited to robbery of individuals. What, I believe, is termed mugging.”

“So,” said one of the police officers bitterly, “we can look for him killing people in Central Park.”

“I’m very much afraid you will find him doing something very like that.”

A newsman said, “What about the sex angle, Doctor? He’s been cooped away here for quite a while. Is he liable to go after women?”

“He has absolutely no history of sexual crime of any sort. Whether or not he will attempt a sexual encounter at this time, I couldn’t say. It is possible he will hire a prostitute. It is possible that his fear of exposure will keep him from consciously desiring such intimate relationship with anyone.”

The same newsman asked, “Is it also possible he may try to get his sex by force, the same way you think he’ll get his money? And the same way he got out of here, too.”

“I would not want to see you paint Robert Ellington in your newspaper as a sex maniac,” Dr. Peterby told him. “As I have said, he has absolutely no prior history of sex crime or sexual pathology or sex-based violence. His is a sick mind, a deranged mind. Therefore, no certain predictions can be made about what he will do. It is possible he will attempt rape. It is also possible he will attempt to kill himself. I think both possibilities very unlikely. Remember that while his mind is sick, it is also a highly intelligent mind and a very clever mind. I have no doubt he could carry off a masquerade of normalcy for a limited period of time, with no question in those around him that he is other than what he seems. He is far from inarticulate. He can be, in fact, extremely wordy and facile and chatty, if these happen to be the characteristics of the person he is mimicking. However, and this does relate to the sexual question raised a moment ago, he can be articulate only on non-stress subjects. He cannot express a strong opinion of his own, or a strong emotion of his own, through the play-acting of being someone else. Nor can he successfully simulate strong emotion or strong opinion on the part of the person he is imitating. Once strong emotion is brought into play, he is reduced to a mute condition, necessitated by the need to hide his true self from himself.”

A police officer said, “Doctor, this business about his being in a big city like New York, and stealing to make a living — how good do you think the odds are?”

“What is the chance that I’m wrong?” Dr. Peterby smiled. “A very good chance,” he said. “You must remember that we are dealing with a sick mind, and we can never be absolutely sure what that mind will do. It is entirely possible that at this very moment Robert Ellington is on a farm somewhere, the newly hired handyman, doing the chores and minding his own business and causing trouble to no one. I think this unlikely, because he has no rural background, and because despite his derangement he is clever. I am basing my guesses on the belief that he will consider his situation, decide that anonymity is his best chance to avoid recapture, and further decide that anonymity is much more readily found in a large city than in either a small town or a farm area, where strangers are much more noticeable. I am basing my guess that he will rob rather than work on the same assumption that he will consider his primary goal to be anonymity and so will take no chances on a regular job.”

He spread his hands. “There’s really nothing more I can add.”

They thanked him, and promised to keep him informed, and the newsmen asked a few more questions in search of the sensationalism which paid their salaries, and slowly the office emptied.

Once they were gone, Dr. Peterby switched off the ceiling light. Thick draperies flanked his windows, dimming the sunlight that brightened the world outside. Now in the afternoon the sun was around on the other side of the building, leaving this side in shade. Dr. Peterby switched on the desk lamp, creating a small circle of warm glowing light around the desk. He sat in the middle of this warm circle, picked up his telephone, and phoned someone to come take all those chairs away.

Mel’s room was seven by eleven, with an eight-foot ceiling; six hundred and sixteen cubic feet. The bottom was varnished, the sides were painted pale green, the top was painted off-white. This box contained a bed with white-painted metal head and foot, a small and chunky dresser enameled black, a small walnut-toned table with a green blotter on it to indicate it was a writing desk, two wooden chairs without arms, a scarred black bedside table with uneven legs, and a black metal wastebasket graced on one side by an enormous rose decal. A small green rectangular rug lay on the floor to the left of the bed. There was a mirror on the closet door, doubling everything.

Without the mirror, there were three light sources: a ceiling fixture shaped vaguely like a flying saucer, a gooseneck lamp on the writing table, a pink-shaded porcelain-bodied lamp on the bedside table. All three were lit. The six-hundred-sixteen-cubic-foot box was bathed in light.

It was 9:15 P.M. Mel lay on the bed, supine, gazing at the ceiling.

The policeman, Sondgard, had finished with the individual interviews a little before seven. Then he’d come in and talked to them all together. He’d thanked them for their co-operation, and then he asked them if they would co-operate with him further. There were only two things he wanted from them: First, if anyone remembered anything that might be of any help at all, he or she should get in touch with Captain Sondgard at once. And second, none of them were to leave Cartier Isle until further notice.

After that, there had been a silent awkward dinner, with all of them only picking and poking at the food. For a while they could hear Captain Sondgard in the hall, talking with the doctor who had examined Cissie Walker, and then an ambulance had come to take Cissie away, and for a while the house was full of the rumbling of men going up and down the stairs.

Mel spent ten or fifteen minutes at the table, but ate practically nothing, and finally gave up and went upstairs. The door to Cissie’s room was open, and though he tried to avert his eyes he couldn’t help looking in there. She was gone now, of course. The other policeman, the one called Mike, had a little kit laid out on the bed and was dusting all likely places in search of fingerprints. Also, Mel’s suitcase was still there, just inside the door, where he had dropped it and forgotten it.

He went to the doorway. “Excuse me,” he said.

The policeman looked around at him, stolid and impassive.

“That’s my suitcase.”

“It is? What’s it doing here?”

“I dropped it when I — found her.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. You’re Daniels. Go ahead, take it.”

“Thank you.”

He had taken the suitcase, and then at last he had found the empty room, this room in which he now lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Across the hall, the policeman named Mike was or was not still looking for fingerprints; Mel had his own door closed, and didn’t know if the policeman had left yet or not. Elsewhere in the house, presumably, the other members of the company were sitting around and waiting, as he was waiting.

They wouldn’t be working any more tonight, of that he was sure. Would they work together at all again here this summer? They would all be staying here, at least for a while, but only because they couldn’t leave.

If there was no season here, that would mean no Equity membership this fall. It was far too late to get a spot at some other theater. This whole thing could throw him back a full year.

And then, while he was thinking this, suddenly on the white ceiling, like a color slide all at once projected there, he saw again Cissie Walker’s bedroom this afternoon, and Cissie herself dead on the bed. He shut his eyes, and the color slide was projected on the inside of his eyelids instead.

The knocking at the door startled him so that he leaped up from the bed. “Who is it?” He shouted it much louder than necessary.

“Bob,” said the muffled voice. “Bob Haldemann.”

“Oh. Come in.” Mel started across the room to open the door, but it opened before he got there, and Haldemann came in. Mel said, “You shook me up a little bit. Knocking on the door there.”

“I’m sorry. I know, we’re all nervous here now.”

“Sit down.” Mel went back to sit on the edge of the bed. “I wish I had a radio in here,” he said. “A television set would be nice, too, but I’d settle for a radio.”

“Some of the boys have gone over to the Lounge,” Haldemann told him. “You could go on over there, if you like.”

“I think I will. You going over?”

“No, I can’t. There’s still work to do. What I wanted to see you about, I imagine we’ll be getting reporters tomorrow morning. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk to them, Mel. I’m asking everyone the same thing; if a reporter approaches you, refer him to me. I imagine they’ll be flocking around you in particular, since you found the bo — uh, well, found the body, I guess that’s the only way — but all I mean is, I wish you’d just refer them to me.”

“Sure.”

“At first glance,” Haldemann said, “I suppose this — this thing here, I suppose it looks like it would be, well, publicity for us. As though it would bring us a lot of additional business, from the curious, you know, the people who always flock to a thing like this. But— You see, the way I look at it, it wouldn’t be good publicity at all. This whole affair is sensational enough as it is, and if it looked as though we were trying to capitalize on it, well, we’d attract the curious, of course, the kind of people who come once and then never show up again. But I think we’d drive away the people we need to support us for an entire season, and for next season, and so on. I mean, it’s going to be very difficult not to look as though we’re trying to capitalize on it. An affair like this, you know, it’s bound to be given sensational treatment in the newspapers anyway. But I want to, I want to limit it as much as I possibly can, and so that’s why I don’t want anyone to talk to reporters, but just to refer them to me. Because you might have the best intentions in the world, but you never know how what you say is going to look in print, or how they can take things out of context. So if you’ll just do that for me, I’d appreciate it.”

“Then, we will have a season here?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I mean, I hope so, certainly. There’s an investment, not only mine but everybody else’s, too, and of course there’s been a continuity to this theater, eleven consecutive seasons and we’ve never so much as missed a performance, but at this point I’m just not sure if it will be possible. We all have to stay anyway, at least for the time being, and I’ll want to talk to Eric Sondgard and see what he thinks, and so on, and try to let everyone know one way or the other just as soon as possible.”

Haldemann got to his feet. “I’ll see you later, Mel,” he said. “And of course you know how much I regret all this.”

“Well, sure.” Mel was surprised again at Haldemann’s eternally apologetic manner. Haldemann was always apologizing for something that wasn’t his fault and over which he had no control. Like Ralph Schoen. Or the murder. The man just didn’t jibe with Mel’s preconception of a summer-theater producer.

Haldemann went out, still murmuring apologies, and Mel was left alone again in his cube. He was fully dressed, but he’d taken his shoes off when he’d come up here after dinner, and now he put them back on again. Anything would be better than solitary confinement in this box, with its unexpected and unwelcome slide projections on the ceiling.

There was an old-fashioned key in the door, on the inside. Mel took it, switched off the light, and locked the door behind him. He noticed that the door to Cissie Walker’s room was now closed. All the doors on this floor were closed, in fact, leaving the squarish hallway looking like another box. A magician’s box, lined with doors. Or something from one of those labyrinthine Chinese houses in Sax Rohmer.

He went downstairs and outside. The night was clear and cool; the sky velvet-black and sprayed with stars. A thin sliver of moon hung high over the lake.

The house he had just left loomed dark and bulky behind him. A light was on behind one second-story window, and the downstairs hall light shone through the glass in the front door, but other than that the front of the house was dark. The theater next door, the night having robbed it of its bright red veneer, was now only a barn again, hulking and silent and dark.

Across the road and down a ways to the left was the only bright spot in the night. A sprawling two-story stucco building was awash in light. Varicolored light shone from all its windows. A large and nearly empty parking lot at its side was lit by floodlights. A bright red neon sign in front of the building gleamed out:

Mel turned in that direction, walking along with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders unconsciously hunched to protect the back of his neck from the darkness. He was relieved when he came within the aura of light surrounding the Lounge. Taking his hands from his pockets, he strode across the blacktop and up onto the veranda

The façade of the Lounge was Southern plantation, complete with pillars and veranda and white front door. But inside the disguise was dropped completely; the interior was the stock bar decor to be found anywhere in the United States. A horseshoe-shaped bar dominated the center of the room, with booths at the side walls. The normal beer and whiskey displays, with all their flashing lights and moving parts, were crowded together on the back bar amid the cash registers and the rows of bottles. Most of the light came from these back-bar displays, aided only slightly by the colored fluorescent tubes hidden away in the trough that girdled the room high up on the wall. Lithographs of fox-hunting scenes predictably dotted the walls, and the imitation gas lamps jutting from the wall over each booth said Schlitz around their bases.

In the rear wall, to either side of the horseshoe bar, were wide arched entranceways leading to the dining room. In there were all the usual square tables with their white tablecloths and their place settings for four. And off to the right, flanked by maroon draperies, was the broad carpeted stairway to the second floor.

The bar was nearly deserted. Only one bartender was working, and there were no waitresses out here; it was still too early in the season. Two men sat together at the bar, chatting in a desultory manner while they ate cashews and drank beer. A man and a woman — he florid and wealthy-looking, she machined and expensive-looking — sat across from one another at a booth to the left. And finally, four people from the theater company sat at a booth on the right. They were Tom Burns, the stage manager, whom Mel hadn’t met until just before dinner, and three of the actors, Ken Forrest and Will Henley and Rod McGee, the three who were, like himself, all new here this year.

Mel walked over to their table and said, “Could you use a fifth, or are you all sticking to beer?”

Tom Burns looked up and smiled broadly. “Well, well, the tattletale! Get yourself a chair. Join us for the post-mortem.”

“Be right with you.”

Mel went over to the bar and got himself a beer. Then, because the booth would only fit four comfortably, he commandeered a chair, and brought it over.

Rod McGee, the thin eager cheerful one, was saying, “What do you think of that cop anyway? What’s his name, Sondgard? What do you think of him?”

“An extremely able man,” Tom Burns started to say, but Will Henley, big and dour, overrode him, saying, “I don’t think much of him. He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow, if you ask me.”

“I’ve known Eric a number of years,” Tom Burns told him, “and I believe he may surprise you.”

“He’s a teacher,” said Ken Forrest. His voice was low, almost diffident.

Mel said, “A teacher? What kind of teacher?”

“English,” said Tom Burns. “I don’t recall the college at the moment. Isn’t it someone’s turn to go for refreshments?”

“Yours,” said Henley.

But Rod McGee was already on his feet, saying, “No, it’s mine. Five beers. You ready, Mel?”

“I will be.”

McGee hurried away, and Mel turned to Ken Forrest. “You mean he isn’t a full-time policeman?”

“No, he’s a teacher.”

“He works here summertimes,” Burns explained.

“Fine,” said Henley sarcastically. “A part-time cop. He’s an amateur, for God’s sake. You really expect him to catch a clever killer?”

Ken Forrest echoed, “Clever?” His voice was still low, his manner that of a shy man unsure of his acceptance in any group conversation.

Henley slapped him down at once, saying, “Of course, clever! A lot more clever than our English teacher.”

Forrest retired deeper in his corner, and studied his empty beer glass. It was Mel who picked up the ball for him: “He doesn’t seem so clever to me. He acted like an animal. That doesn’t seem clever.”

“Why not? Cunning as a fox, you’ve heard that before.” Henley’s whole tone was belligerent; he leaned far over the table, frowning as he talked. “Here we’ve got a house full of people, maybe, I don’t know, how many of us? Ten? And this guy comes in and kills somebody right under our noses and goes right back out again and doesn’t leave us a hint of who he is or where he came from. You don’t call that clever?”

Mel said, “You think it was somebody from outside, then.”

“I don’t know, what difference does it make? One of us, maybe? In that case, he’s even more clever. He managed to leave us, go commit his murder, and come back, without any of us suspecting what he’d done. Face it, this guy isn’t stupid. Now, I don’t say this Captain Whatsisname is stupid either, all I say is this killer knows his business and Captain Whatsisname doesn’t know his business. He may be the greatest English teacher in the world, but as a cop he makes a good English teacher. That’s all I say.”

Rod McGee came back with the fresh beer then, and the subject shifted. For a while, they talked about the likelihood of there being a season here this summer. Bob Haldemann had told them all the same thing, that he hoped there would be but he couldn’t be sure yet.

They were rather widely split in their opinions. Tom Burns thought there would be a season, but he guessed the opening would be postponed, maybe a week. Will Henley thought, loudly, that there wouldn’t be a season, that once this thing was settled most of them would want nothing more but to get away from this part of the country as quick as possible, so there wouldn’t be the personnel to put on any plays. Ken Forrest stated with characteristic quiet that he thought the show would go on, but offered no amplification. Rod McGee said he for one was willing to stay if Haldemann decided to go ahead, but he wasn’t so sure Haldemann would want to; Haldemann seemed like a pretty sensitive guy, and he might decide it wasn’t in good taste to go ahead and put on plays.

Mel had no strong opinion one way or the other yet, so he said nothing. He was, in fact, thinking of something else entirely. For the first time, the idea had become real to him that the killer was very possibly one of the people in the company, maybe even one of the people at this table. He looked at them with this new realization, studying their faces, trying to decide if one of those faces was a mask hiding a murderer.

Tom Burns? The man was obviously a heavy drinker, you could tell from looking at him. He had a careless attitude toward life in general. Could the killing of Cissie Walker have been prompted by alcohol? Had Tom Burns, drunk, tried to force himself on her, been rebuffed, and had he in a drunken rage killed her?

Or Will Henley. He was the biggest and strongest of any of them there; he could most easily have beaten and strangled the girl without giving her a chance to run away or scream for help. And he’d been praising the killer’s cleverness; was that simply arrogance? Was he himself the “clever” killer, mocking them?

Or Ken Forrest. Silent, withdrawn, oddly unemphatic. Couldn’t the killer be one of those people who bottles up his emotions, who holds everything in with no safety valve, and who suddenly blows up all at once?

Or Rod McGee. Eager, friendly, agreeable. Another protective cover for a darker person underneath?

The subject of the summer season exhausted, they went on to anecdotes, telling each other half-truths about their past experiences in theater and the Army and school, and Mel left his morbid reflections alone for a while. He told an exaggerated version of an encounter he’d had with a WAF while touring with an Army Special Services show, and as the talk went on he began to lose the dullness of shock that had been with him since he’d walked into the dead girl’s room this afternoon. His normal ebullience returned, and when he managed in the middle of an out-and-out falsehood about a girl guitar player from Queens to let everybody know he was Jewish, he knew wryly he was his old self again.

Gradually, the group was getting more and more animated. They’d all been needing a change of pace, something to break the spell that murder had cast over them, and this was it. From reminiscence they got to the joke-telling period, and not a single clean joke was heard. They were all laughing so hard, and interrupting each other so often, that even the dirty jokes weren’t heard any too clearly. In the general hilarity — touched just slightly as it was with hysteria — Will Henley thawed and became absolutely amiable, Ken Forrest came way out of his shell and demonstrated a piercing laugh that endangered every wineglass in the place, and Rod McGee settled in with the group and stopped looking as though any second he would dash off and shine a lot of shoes. As for Tom Burns, his eyes got brighter and brighter, his nose got redder and redder, and his speech got shlurrier and shlurrier.

They finally left the Lounge at one-fifteen, only because the bartender insisted. Tom Burns tried to exit with a quote from Shakespeare, but whether he succeeded or not he alone knew; by now his speech was almost entirely unintelligible.

Will Henley started the singing, as they moved out across the night away from the Lounge. “On top of Old Smoky,” he shouted, and they all joined in. Mel took upon himself the job of caller, roaring out the lines before they were sung by everyone else, and wishing he could remember that old Stan Freberg parody so he could shout out some of Freberg’s lines.

They angled across the road, weaving and singing, all linked together with their arms around each other’s shoulders and waists. Lights flicked on in the house bulking ahead of them, and heads appeared in windows, but they ignored it all. They needed release, the one killer and the four unwilling sharers of his drama; what did they care about disapproving heads in lit windows? They were lit themselves, and to hell with everything.

It was Rod McGee who shushed them all when they reached the porch. From loud caterwauling they shifted immediately to comic silence, tiptoeing into the house, giggling, shushing one another, tripping on the stairs. Alden March met them at the second-floor landing, pique on his face and hands on his hips. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” he told them, in a loud whisper. “At a time like this!”

They hooted him down, and staggered on by. Mel and Rod and Will had to climb the additional flight to the third floor, where they whispered incoherent good nights to one another. Mel unlocked his door with not too much difficulty, switched on the light, and entered his room. He closed the door, peeled off his clothing, scattered it around the room, switched off the light, and crawled into bed.

Three minutes later, with embarrassed haste, he got up again to relock the door.

The madman lay frightened and exultant in the darkness, squeezing his hands together and smiling from ear to ear. His room was much like Mel Daniels’, and like it now was in darkness. The door was closed, but unlocked, for of them all the madman had the least to fear tonight, and a sliver of light outlined the door all the way around.

Of them all he had the least to fear, but he too was afraid, and afraid of the same thing as all the rest. He was afraid of the madman, of himself. Exultant, but also afraid.

Exultant, because tonight he had brought it off. The acid test, the acid test. Sitting with them all, joining in their conversation, without suspicion. But also afraid, because in his success he had lost himself, and now more than ever before that was dangerous.

It had happened to him other times, when he was fooling Doctor Chax by making believe he was one of the other inmates. Sometimes it had happened that in the making-believe he had lost touch with himself, the true self and the assumed self had become confused together, and for a while he had not been in control. At such times, a tiny portion of himself — he visualized it as crouching low against the floor in a dark corner — only that tiny portion of himself was still aware, could still differentiate between fantasy and reality, while the rest of him was all taken over by the other being. Times when all but that tiny portion of himself actually believed he was that other being. It hadn’t happened often, and it never lasted long, so he had never been overly concerned about it.

But tonight he was concerned. In the asylum it had not been dangerous, but here it was dangerous indeed. Here he had to be in control, at all times. When it had happened tonight, at the table in Black Lake Lounge, the sliver of self that had retained awareness was terrified, afraid that the other being would make a slip, would say the wrong thing and spoil every thing.

But it had worked out, with no danger and no trouble, and so the fear was muted by exultance. They had accepted him. They had made no objection to his joining their group, being a part of their conversation and their laughter and their singing.

And he was pleased with himself. When the story-telling time had come, and the joke-telling time, he had done as well as anyone. What matter that it had been automatic, the work of the other being, out of his own control? The point was that he had not only been accepted, he had managed to take advantage of the acceptance and actively to become one of them.

And this afternoon, with the teacher/policeman, that too had been good. Could there possibly be any doubt at all in the teacher/policeman’s mind that he was precisely what he claimed to be? (Some of the things he’d said had been direct quotes from the dead actor, the one whose place he was taking, just as some of the stories he had told tonight had come from the same source. But the other being — and this was strange — the other being was not entirely patterned on the dead actor. It was, for the first time, an amalgam, a combination of people from his past, with the dead actor only one facet. Maybe that was why the being had taken over tonight so readily; it was a more complex creation than any he had done before.)