Snow White and Rose Red

12

At a little before five that afternoon, I drove a brand-new Cadillac Sedan DeVille up the road to Knott’s Retreat, presented myself at Administration and Reception, and informed the young lady behind the desk that I was here to pick up Sarah Whittaker for transfer to the Arlberg Receiving Facility at Southern Medical Hospital.

Sarah was brought up some ten minutes later.

She was wearing the yellow dress Pearson had described to me earlier, a summery cotton frock scooped low at the neck and billowing out from the waist into a wide skirt. She wore a string of pearls at her throat, no other jewelry, no makeup. She was barelegged, and the sandals she wore — ankle-strapped and with slender stiletto heels — added a good three inches to her height. She was grinning from ear to ear, even though she was in the presence of Christine Seifert, the attendant she called Brunhilde.

Brunhilde came as something of a surprise.

I had never met her, and my preconceived notion of her was premised on Sarah’s description: “Christine Seifert, five feet eight inches tall, two hundred and twenty pounds, tattoo on her left forearm, ‘Mom’ in a heart. I made up the tattoo, but the rest is real.”

There was no possible way that the person who stood alongside Sarah, shyly introducing herself to me, could fit this description. Christine Seifert was wearing a pale blue tailored summer suit and navy blue French-heeled shoes. She was carrying a leather shoulder bag that matched the shoes. She was perhaps five feet seven inches tall, a slender young woman with brown hair, brown eyes, and an engaging smile.

Sarah must have noticed the startled look on my face.

“Never trust a lunatic,” she whispered, smiling, as I led her and Christine — I could never again think of her as Brunhilde — to where I’d parked the Cadillac. “Oh my, aren’t we elegant today,” she said. “How do you want to do this, Miss Seifert? Shall I sit up front with Mr. Hope, where you can keep an eye on me?”

“Perhaps we should both sit together in the back,” Christine said softly.

I opened the back door for them. Christine allowed Sarah to enter the car first, and then she got in and made herself comfortable beside her. I closed the door and came around to the driver’s side. I started the car.

I drove up the paved road to the wall with its wrought-iron gate. I drove through the gate and onto the dirt road and stopped at the split-rail fence defining the property. I checked for traffic east and west on Xavier Road, and then made a left turn toward US 41 and Calusa.

“Ahhh, fresh air again,” Sarah said.

Her face was framed in the rearview mirror. She was smiling.

“What time are they expecting us, Mr. Hope?” Christine asked.

“Six,” I said.

“We should make that easily,” she said.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Miss Seifert thinks this is all a waste of time,” Sarah said. “Isn’t that true, Chris?”

“Not at all,” Christine said.

“Aw, come on, you can be honest with us. You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

Christine said nothing.

“Her silence indicates assent,” Sarah said.

“Not necessarily,” Christine said.

“What does Joanna think?” Sarah asked suddenly.

“Joanna?” Christine said.

“I’m talking to Mr. Hope, dear,” Sarah said. Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “Have you discussed this with Joanna?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Then she’s had no opportunity to form an opinion, has she? As to my sanity.”

“None whatever,” I said, and smiled.

“Biggest day in my life,” Sarah said, smiling at Christine, “and he doesn’t even tell his daughter about it. Joanna lives with her mother. The way I used to live with my mother. Isn’t that right, Matthew?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where do they live, anyway, Matthew?” she asked.

“Out on Stone Crab Key,” I said.

“Will we be passing the house?”

“No, no.”

“Pity, I wanted to see it. I feel I know her already. Your daughter. You did promise I’d meet her one day, Matthew. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said, and smiled.

“Joanna has blonde hair,” Sarah said. “Like mine.”

I looked into the mirror.

Christine was suddenly alert.

“Daddy’s bimbo was blonde, too, you know,” Sarah said, and a sudden chill went up my spine.

“Or so they tell me,” Sarah said, and smiled. “She was supposed to be blonde, isn’t that right, Chris? My daddy’s bimbo? Isn’t she supposed to be blonde in my alleged delusion?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Christine said.

“Oh, sure you do,” Sarah said. “My delusion? They didn’t tell you about my delusion?”

“Well...” Christine said, and shrugged.

“Well, sure,” Sarah said.

The car seemed suddenly too cold. I fiddled with the unfamiliar air-conditioning controls.

“I’m so excited, I can hardly sit still,” Sarah said. “Do you realize what today means to me? To be out of the Tomb of the Innocent? Oh, forgive me, Chris,” she said at once. “I didn’t mean to cast aspersions on your place of employment. Have I offended you?”

“Not at all,” Christine said.

“You know, don’t you, that I won’t be coming back to Knott’s? I said all my good-byes this morning. Anna the Porn Queen was terribly upset. She told me I’m throwing away a brilliant career.”

“She means Anna Lewis,” Christine said to me.

“The Porn Queen,” Sarah said, nodding.

Quite calmly, Christine said, “She’s no such thing, Sarah. You know she isn’t.”

“Oh, I know it,” Sarah said, “but does Anna know it?”

“Anna knows it,” Christine said in that same calm voice.

“Right, right, I invented her delusion, too,” Sarah said.

Christine said nothing.

“There’s the bird sanctuary,” Sarah said, indicating a wooden sign hanging on posts over the entrance road. “Have you ever been there, Matthew?”

“Once,” I said. “With Joanna. When she was younger.”

“Nice in there,” Sarah said. “Do you enjoy wildlife, Chris?”

“Yes,” Christine said.

“Chris leads a very wild life,” Sarah said. “Don’t you, Chris?”

Christine said nothing.

“Taking care of all the nuts at Knott’s.”

Christine still said nothing.

“God, am I glad to be out of there,” Sarah said. “How much longer will it be, Matthew?”

“Twenty minutes or so.”

“Because if we pass a gas station, I’d like to use the ladies’. I’m about to bust here, if you’ll pardon the expression. Would that be all right, Chris?”

“You should have gone to the toilet before we left,” Christine said.

“I did,” Sarah said. “Don’t you love the way loonies are scolded by their keepers?” she asked me in the mirror. “Oh, will I be happy when this is all over. You have no idea how demeaning it is to have to ask permission to pee.”

“You’ve never had to ask permission to urinate,” Christine said.

“Urinate, yes, excuse me. May I please urinate if we pass a gas station?”

“Yes, of course,” Christine said.

“We’re coming to Taylor Road,” Sarah said, leaning forward. “If I remember correctly, there’s a Mobil station on the corner there.”

I looked at the dashboard clock.

It was twenty minutes to six.

“I don’t want to be late,” I said.

“Won’t take a minute,” Sarah said. “There it is. Do you see it?”

I pulled into the gas station and found a parking space near the air pump.

“I’ll get the key,” Christine said, and got out of the car, closing the door behind her again.

“Naturally, she’ll be in mute attendance,” Sarah said, and pulled a face.

Christine was in the office now, talking to one of the men there. He handed her a key attached to a wooden block. She came back to the car, opened the back door again, and said, “Sarah? We’d better hurry.”

“Are you going to time me, Chris?” Sarah said, getting out of the car. “Did you bring your stopwatch?”

“We don’t want to keep the doctors waiting,” Christine said.

“Even doctors have to pee,” Sarah said. “Excuse me, urinate.”

I watched them as they walked toward the side of the building where the restrooms were. They turned the corner of the building and disappeared from sight. I looked at the dashboard clock again. A digital clock: 5:44. I turned off the engine, and belatedly realized the windows were on an electric switch. I turned the ignition key again, pressed the button that lowered the window on the driver’s side, and then turned the key yet another time.

The digital clock read 5:45.

The corner of Xavier and Taylor was perhaps seven miles from US 41, but it could have been fifty miles from nowhere. Cattle country was far behind us to the west now, but this was still open land, the road on either side of the gas station flanked by palmettos and thickets of pine and oak. The Sawgrass River Bird Sanctuary — where Bloom’s Jane Doe had been discovered — was now some two or three miles back, but the terrain here was much the same as could be found inside the park, flat and wild and tangled, Florida in its natural state, Florida before the developers and the bulldozers came in.

I looked at the dashboard clock again.

5:47.

I checked the time against my own watch.

Won’t take a minute, Sarah had said.

The seven on the digital clock changed to an eight.

A truck carrying chickens in crates pulled into the gas station and up to one of the pumps. A burly white man in a soiled T-shirt and blue jeans got out, spit tobacco juice onto the concrete, and then signaled to the office.

“Want to fill her up?” he called.

The dashboard clock read 5:49.

They had been in there for five minutes now.

The chickens in their crates cackled and squawked. The chime on the gas pump ticked off gallons and seconds.

5:50.

The chicken farmer got back into the cab of his truck. He started the engine and drove off. The corner of Xavier and Taylor was still again.

The digital clock read 5:51.

I got out of the car.

I went around the side of the building to where a pile of used tires was stacked between the men’s room and the ladies’ room. I knocked on the ladies’ room door.

“Sarah?” I called.

There was no answer.

“Sarah?”

I tried the doorknob. It turned. I pushed open the door.

Christine Seifert was lying on the floor near the sink.

There was blood on the floor.

The blood was pouring from a wound the size of a dime in Christine’s left temple.

The door to the toilet enclosure was partly open. I shoved it open all the way. The enclosure was empty.

Sarah was gone.

And with her all hope.

Detective Morris Bloom got to the gas station ten minutes after I’d called him. The ambulance was there by then, and an intern was in the ladies’ room, crouched over Christine Seifert and trying to stanch the flow of blood from her temple. Bloom took one look at the wound and said, “Either a ball-peen hammer or a high-heeled shoe.”

“Would you mind giving me some room in here, sir?” the intern said.

Bloom showed him his shield. “Calusa PD,” he said.

“You can stuff that up your ass,” the intern said. “I’ve got a badly injured woman here.”

“Had one just like it in Hicksville, Long Island,” Bloom said. “Woman in a bar took off this high-heeled shoe she was wearing, whacked her husband on the side of his head, almost killed him. How is she?” he asked the intern.

“Breathing,” the intern said, annoyed. He had fastened a butterfly suture to the wound, and was putting a bandage over it now. “Bring that stretcher in here,” he called to the ambulance attendant outside. “Stand back, please, will you please?” he said to Bloom.

They carried Christine out on the stretcher and loaded her into the ambulance. The garage attendants and a man in bib overalls, his hands on his hips, watched from the open garage door bays. The ambulance went off with its siren screaming. And then the corner of Xavier and Taylor was still again.

“What happened?” Bloom asked me.

I started to tell him what had happened, what I thought had happened. My eyes were blinking. He put his hand on my arm.

“Calm down,” he said.

I nodded. I took a deep breath. I told him about the case I’d been working on — he remembered the case, didn’t he? The time I came in asking about the night of September twenty-seventh? Asking to talk to the patrolman who had gone to the Whittaker house...

“Whittaker, yeah,” he said.

I told him I’d been trying to effect Sarah Whittaker’s release from Knott’s Retreat. I started to tell him—

“Sarah Whittaker, huh?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Any relation to Horace Whittaker?”

“His daughter,” I said.

“Yeah,” Bloom said, and sighed heavily.

There were contradictions and convolutions.

In Bloom’s office some forty minutes later, we tried to untangle it.

If Horace Whittaker was the man who’d set up Tracy Kilbourne in that luxurious apartment on Whisper Key, then Sarah was not crazy; her father had indeed been involved with another woman.

Bloom said there was no concrete proof that the apartment owned by Arch Realty had been used by Horace Whittaker as a love nest.

But Horace Whittaker had been president of the corporation at the time.

And Horace Whittaker was the only one of the officers who made his residence in Calusa, Florida.

It was a possibility.

A strong possibility.

I remembered that Sarah had described her father as “a faithful, generous, decent, hardworking man. Faithful, yes. To my mother and to me. No cuties on the side, Matthew.”

I remembered that Mrs. Whittaker had said, “Horace was a faithful, decent, loving man. I trusted him completely.”

But Bloom remembered what Sylvia Kazenski, alias Tiffany Carter, had said about Tracy: “The younger guys went for her, naturally — she was their dream girl next door, you know, all peaches and cream, that honey-blonde hair and those blue eyes flashing like lightning, sweet as a virgin and built like God you could die just seeing her move her pinkie. But she got an even bigger play from the older guys, the geezers who it took all night for them to get a hard-on. She played to these guys like she’d been waiting all night for them to walk through the door...”

Had Horace Whittaker walked through the door of Up Front one night, and had Tracy strutted her stuff on that stage for him, made him feel like a million bucks when she went to his table?

Had he taken her away from there in July, set her up in the apartment on Whisper Key, given her the use of the company telephone and car, visited her whenever opportunity allowed?

Tracy Kilbourne wanted to be a movie star.

Was she Horace Whittaker’s personal star?

If so, there was another woman in Whittaker’s life, and Sarah was not crazy.

“The girl is nuttier than a Hershey bar with almonds.”

Mark Ritter talking.

“In this ‘elaborate’ delusional system I am alleged to have evolved, Daddy was having an affair with one or perhaps many women, it varies from day to day — we lunatics are not often consistent, you know — which naturally infuriated his only daughter because it deprived her of the love and affection to which she was entitled as her birthright.”

Sarah speaking.

But if Horace Whittaker was keeping Tracy Kilbourne, then it was not a delusion.

In which case...

“Either I believed, still believe, my father was having an affair — or I don’t believe it, and didn’t then. If I’m sane, I didn’t go running off after a person who existed only in my mind.”

Sarah again.

But Tracy Kilbourne did exist, and not only in Sarah’s mind.

Then why protest?

Why the hell protest, pretend, that a delusional system was invented for her when all along the primary aspect of that alleged system was firmly rooted in the truth?

The truth, Bloom reminded me, only if Horace Whittaker and Tracy Kilbourne were indeed romantically linked.

Contradictions and convolutions.

“She said she’d been out searching for her father’s phantom lover...”

Pearson’s words.

But Tracy Kilbourne was no phantom.

“Voices had commanded her to find ‘Daddy’s bimbo,’ as she called her, confront her, get back the money that was rightfully hers — Sarah’s, that is — stolen from her by her mother and her father’s mysterious girlfriend.”

Well, damn it, was there a girlfriend or wasn’t there? Did a delusional system exist, or didn’t it? Everyone involved with Sarah’s hospitalization had done his or her best to convince me that Horace Whittaker’s lover was a figment of Sarah’s imagination. Sarah herself had told me flatly that she did not believe her father was involved with another woman. But Tracy Kilbourne was a reality, and the apartment owned by Archer Realty was another reality, and Tracy had been living in that apartment and using the company car, and Horace Whittaker was the only officer of the corporation who lived in Calusa. So where did the reality end and the delusion begin?

If indeed there had been a relationship between Whittaker and Tracy, had Sarah in fact gone out looking for Daddy’s bimbo, and had she confronted her?

“Sarah looked at me, her eyes wide, the razor blade trembling in her hand, and I... I said, I said very gently, ‘Sarah, are you all right?’ and she said, ‘I went looking for her.’ ”

Mrs. Whittaker reporting on her daughter’s condition when she’d found her in the bathroom on September 27 last year.

“So much blood.”

Sarah’s words, again as reported by Mrs. Whittaker.

But there had not been much blood from the superficial cuts she’d allegedly inflicted on her own wrist. So what was she referring to? The blood that surely gushed from Tracy’s throat when she was shot? The blood that flowed when her tongue was cut out?

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Was it possible?

Had Sarah gone searching for Tracy Kilbourne, and found her, and confronted her...

And killed her?

“She got into her car,” Mrs. Whittaker had told me. “I believe she got into her car. Yes. And went searching for another woman. And found this other woman, found her father’s lover. Found herself, Mr. Hope. Recognized herself as the phantom lover she had created. And could not bear the horror of it. And tried to kill herself.”

Or had the horror been the reality of murder?

The open Jane Doe/Tracy Kilbourne file was on Bloom’s desk.

Someone had killed her, that was for sure. Whether that someone had been Sarah Whittaker was quite another matter. And yet she had hit Christine Seifert hard enough to put her in the intensive-care unit.

“You do her a great disservice by supporting the delusion that she is sane,” Pearson had told me. “You are helping her to destroy herself.”

I sat looking bleakly at the file.

Bloom was watching me.

“Matthew,” he said, “why don’t you go home? There’s nothing you can do here till we find her.”

I nodded.

“Matthew?”

“Yes, Morrie.”

“Go home, okay? I’ll let you know.”