A Mother’s Heart

Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, December 1981.


Dr. Terrence Gramling awoke that fine spring morning thinking about one of his patients, Camilla Jordan. She claimed his conscious mind as he briskly went through the automatics of his morning ritual — icy shower, aerobic exercises timed to the final second, choice of monogrammed underwear, bench-made shoes and gray vested suit by the best tailor in the city. As he emerged from the master bedroom of his expensive, severely-modern bachelor apartment, he looked every inch the successful and brilliant young psychiatrist. With his clipped Vandyke, whose lustrous brown matched the color of his hair, he did indeed resemble the Master, a Freud in mid-thirties.

He sat down to a breakfast prepared by his housekeeper-cook — two minute eggs, Danish bacon, whole-wheat toast and a cup of steaming Swiss mocha. As he ate, he beheld the new day through floor to ceiling glass that opened onto the balcony-terrace of his condominium. Golden warmth of sun. Clear azure sky. Birds singing, mating, wheeling in exuberant flight. Saps all rising to burst brilliant green through the landscaping of the courtyard. Spring... time of renewal... the moment for Camilla...

She had never been very far from his mind during the long past months that he had been her messiah. Now on this lovely spring morning his mind held a calculated inspiration for her. Perhaps his subconscious in its primeval wisdom had turned the final key while he’d slept...


Dr. Gramling was chief of staff at Haven Hill, a private sanitarium for the wealthy. He had chosen psychiatry because the infinite jungle of the human mind offered a challenge worthy of his talents. Even in medical school, comparing himself to his fellow students, he had assumed that he would quickly make a name for himself. And so he had. In a science so filled with mystery and uncertainty, Gramling was never visibly unsure of himself. He preferred to ignore his failures, of which even genius must suffer a few, but he was never reticent or shy about bringing his successes into the light of public and projected. Even hoary old colleagues, savants among the chosen, spoke Gramling’s name nowadays with a nod of respect.

Haven Hill claimed fifteen gently rolling acres behind stone walls softened and subdued by clinging ivy. As Gramling’s white jag nosed past the wrought-iron gate, his fiefdom spread before him, carpet-like green lawns, walkways bordered by clipped box hedges, the shadows of majestic live oaks, the white purity of multi-storied colonial style buildings with verandas tucked behind the tall columns. Here and there ambulatory patients were strolling in the company of nurses in the soft blue uniforms that Gramling, having done a study on the emotional effects of color, favored for his personnel. But it was the dark skeins beneath this surface patina of peace that absorbed Terrence Gramling. At Haven Hill in the space of a few weeks he would deal with a broader range of cases than many of his colleagues would experience in half a lifetime. Hill patients varied in age from six to octogenarian; and such a circus of fetishes, fixations, obsessions, compulsions, regressions, and you-name-it. Never was an orchard more fruitful, Gramling thought; and the pun was a verity, fully intended.


As soon as he was in his spacious, walnut-paneled private office, he rang for Iva Twugg. She was a short, dumpy woman of middle age whose blue eyes, an echo of the color of her uniform, had seen it all.

“Good morning, Twugg.”

The head nurse nodded a respectful, impersonal, neutral response, as Gramling would have it.

He stood behind the precise order of his huge desk. “I want to see Camilla Jordan, Nurse. Right away.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And phone Camilla’s parents. I want them to come over for a talk. We may have something encouraging to discuss, the parents and I.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And tell my private secretary, as you go out, to bring in Camilla’s file while you’re fetching our patient.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Twugg ushered Camilla into the office fifteen minutes later. The head nurse lingered at the patient’s side, easing away; and Gramling’s Vandyke twitched below his brightest smile as Camilla stood alone in the middle of quiet office.

“Good morning, Camilla. You’re looking wonderful. Isn’t it a lovely day?”

She looked at him steadily, in silence. In her early twenties, she was a slender creature of dark, exotic beauty. Her straight black hair was brushed to glistening highlights, framing the shadowed angles of her face. Neatly manicured, in an expensive, simple white dress, she seemed to have stepped from a society page. But there were two almost obscure details., the faint bulge of her dress over her abdomen, and the inverted cone of blackness in her eyes... eyes that nailed on Gramling with the intensity of a frozen bunny rabbit’s.

At Gramling’s slight nod, Twugg continued her retreat, softly closing the office door as she melted away. Camilla’s eyes jerked to the closed door, and Gramling knew she was feeling her isolation in this room with a male. He heard the hiss of her indrawn breath; it seemed he could feel her pulse rate thud through the room.

Once, the nearness of a male would have triggered her to violence, to a mad, screaming, tooth-and-claw struggle to escape. But Dr. Terrence Gramling had, at least, eased her from that precipice. This morning she pulled from the invisible knife-edge through a racking effort of her own, turning slowly to face him finally. She tilted away from his friendly smile, but at last accepted his gentle gesture and nod and eased onto the chair near his desk.

He moved quietly to a table in the further corner, picked up a silver carafe and poured steaming coffee into two bone-china cups. “Let’s see,” he smiled casually over his shoulder, “it’s two sugars and a spot of cream, isn’t it?”

She pressed back in the chair, clutching the leather-upholstered arms.

He crossed over to her, both hands burdened with cups and saucers. “There now. Nothing like a second morning cup, is there?”

He stood for a long moment with a cup and saucer extended. Gradually her slender hand moved to accept it. He strolled from her, going behind his desk, sitting in his high-backed chair, sipping his coffee and murmuring a sound of pleasure. Watching him, she slowly brought her own cup to her lips.

He rocked back casually. “Did you finish the ‘Times of Helena’? I didn’t. Personally, it seemed a dull, superficial book.” He tilted his cup against his mouth, lowered it, continued in the quiet, conversational tone, “Just because they’re best sellers doesn’t mean they’re good books. Do you think?”

She looked at him, saying nothing.

“By the way, from the fine healthy look of you,” he said, “the pregnancy is coming along marvelously.”

Her cup rattled on its saucer. Her other hand moved to lay its curled fingers against her slightly swollen stomach. She had carried her pregnancy for two years now. It was her reality. The sun might spill ice; the stars disappear from an unreal sky. But the pregnancy... it was the singular actuality behind the cone-points of blackness in her eyes.

“He’s very quiet,” she said, fingertips kneading. “The baby stretched and squirmed in there half the night. But now he must be sleeping.”


She had carried the non-existent baby from the morning after the nearly-fatal battering and rape. College girl, out late, hurrying across a dark lawn to her sorority house. A girl suddenly not alone. A man looming beside her, as if a part of a tree had detached itself. A blow on her head leaving her lips parted on a scream that never came. A drifting in the darkness. Then stars, twinkling distantly above a wooded hill in the hands of a sex-crazed sadist...

A farm worker had spotted her at early dawn staggering along a country road. Drunk, he’d thought. Then his thoughts had turned to fire and ice as she’d stumbled blindly closer. He’d gasped and stood rooted for a moment by the sight of the battered and desecrated image. Then he’d got her to the hospital. The first hospital. She’d been one of the few virgins in her sorority house.

She’d now carried the pregnancy through the two years of padded cells, shock treatment, chemotherapy, psychoanalysis. So powerful was her obsession that her menstrual periods altered and her abdomen had that visible bulge.

Of all the doctors, only Gramling had helped her to a measurable degree. And to him, the case was a chaffing frustration, a challenge to his science, his ingenuity.

“Camilla,” his voice reached gently, “it has been a long and difficult pregnancy, and I know what it will mean to you to have it end.”

“Oh, God...” Her body cramped forward. Her cup and saucer fell to the carpet and spun to rest, “...if only I could have this baby!”

“Look at me, and believe.” He was the prophet down from the clouds. “You must believe. You are nearing the end of your pregnancy.”


Mr. and Mrs. Jordan, Horace and Harriet, were a smallish, bland, gray, gently polite and very wealthy couple who gave some credence to the belief that people long married tend to look alike as they pass the years and grow old together.

With inherited money from both their families, they might have spent their lives faced only by the problems of where to spend the winters or summers and whom to have in as weekend house guests. All that had changed two years ago. They’d taken their daughter to the finest psychiatrist in New York, to a famous clinic in Switzerland, to Mendoza in Mexico City who, they’d heard, had worked a miracle in several cases similar to Camilla’s. At last, three months ago, they’d appeared at Haven Hill with an open checkbook seeking a reservation.

This lovely spring morning they drove quickly from their rented house in response to the call by Gramling’s secretary. Gramling crossed the thick carpet as they were shown into his office. He shook Horace’s tensile hand and gave Harriet a warm, friendly squeeze about her slender shoulders. Their eyes were hard on his face, daring a small light of hope.

As he strolled them toward his desk, he said, “I do have a proposal.”

He sensed their heightened strain. Before questions starting pouring from their lips, he requested crisply, “Let me outline what I have in mind, first. Then you may ask whatever you like.”

They sank stiffly on the edges of the massive leather chairs he’d arranged in front of his desk. Gramling walked around and remained standing behind the desk.

“We have brought Camilla a long way,” he preambled.

“Yes, Doctor,” Horace choked, “from the days of strait jackets and wet-sheet packs.”

“But we’ve not yet surmounted the key obstacle,” Gramling said.

“The baby...” The eyes of Camilla’s mother filled. “When I see her feeling her stomach, talking about the non-existent child in her womb...”

“And yet,” Mr. Jordan choked, “so very normal at times... until she feels the stirring of the baby that isn’t there... if the baby were... exorcised... Camilla would return to us... maybe not entirely the Camilla we once knew, but we would have our daughter back.”

“But so many things have been tried,” Harriet said. “Drugs, shock, even hypnotism. Is anything left?”

“Perhaps,” Gramling said. “A long shot. The therapy lay full blown in my mind when I awoke this morning. It has been working through my mind for days.” He hesitated for a short beat. “We shall take the baby.”

He felt their reaction. The office was silent for a moment while they stared at him. Then Harriet’s lips moved. “A baby that isn’t real? You mean...”

“I think you know precisely what I mean,” Gramling said. “Nothing more can be done for Camilla until the pregnancy obsession is removed. Once she is convinced that she isn’t carrying a baby, we might break through. Destroy the obsession. Set her on the path to final recovery.”

“If it could only be,” Harriet wept.

“Destroy a delusion with a counter delusion, Doctor?” Horace said.

“It’s not uncommon in my field of medicine,” Gramling said.

“How will you go about it?”

“First, give Camilla something to make her tractable. Then go through all the motions, to the final detail, even leaving her with a mild uterine soreness. And, when the long obstetrical procedure is over, break the news to Camilla carefully that she has miscarried. Her pregnancy is over, done with, and she is free of it forever. She is as free, clear, unsullied as she was the night before the assault upon her. That is the thought which we shall implant, reinforce, develop — leaving no room for thought of pregnancy.”

Horace strained forward. “What are chances of it working?”

“What are chances of it not working?” Gramling countered. “But I shall of course need your permission.”


That evening, dining on surf and turf, Gramling reviewed the hours after he’d shown Horace and Harriet Jordan out of his office. He’d called in Conover and Hemmings, two of his most able nurses, and briefed them carefully. Then the ritual... the ceremonial staged to open a human mind, extract a thought and implant another...

He’d taken Camilla through the routine of examination. Returned her to her room. Appeared a little later at her bedside with the news that a follow-up was necessary. Soothed her with scopoline. Prepped her. Wheeled her into surgery. Gowns, masks, rubber gloves, all the trappings. Anesthetized her mildly. Removed her to the recovery room exactly as if she’d gone through an operation. From there, back to her room. And finally, while Camilla was in that nether state, that twilight zone known since the first use of scopolamine, Gramling had sat by her bed, taken her hand, and whispered that she’d developed complications. They’d had to take the baby. Her pregnancy was finished. The baby was gone, forever.

She’d lain passively, looking at him.

He’d moved his face a little closer. “Do you hear me, Camilla?”

“Yes,” she’d whispered.

“Do you understand? You are free. It is over. You are bound no longer. You can stretch, laugh, lift your face and throw your arms to the sun. Once more you are Camilla, and only Camilla.”

She’d closed her eyes slowly, and Gramling had risen, nodding at the nurse assigned to Camilla’s bedside. “We’ve turned a corner,” he’d said softly. “Now... during the days ahead... the careful, skillful follow-up...”

Now, as he poured a quick after-dinner Benedictine, he was already planning the follow-up, the guidance he would give to Camilla.

He glanced at his watch. He set down the small brandy snifter with quickening movement. He was picking up Marcy Lewis, his favorite among his women friends, in an hour. Marcy was a department store executive, and enjoyed an occasional evening of Wagner as much as he did.


At last, Camilla opened her eyes and said, “Please... may I have something cold? A Coke? And something to nibble on?”

Miss Archer, the young blonde nurse on duty until midnight, laid aside her Gothic novel. She smiled serenely. “Coke? Of course, Miss Jordan. But something to eat?” She glanced at the heavy numerals of the watch on her wrist. “It’s almost eleven o’clock. The kitchen’s long-since closed, the last of the help home and fast asleep. But perhaps...” She rose quietly. “...I could raid the ’fridge. Nothing substantial, mind you, not so soon after surgery. What would you like? Bit of fruit? Perhaps a little cup of custard?”

“No, please. Don’t make me feel like a bother. Just a Coke and package of those little crackers from the vending machine in the rec room.”

Miss Archer nodded, moved to the door, paused and looked at the bed. The patient’s eyes had already closed once more. Miss Archer shrugged. She could always go for a Coke herself, if Jordan didn’t re-awaken.

In her veil of darkness, Camilla heard the click of the door latch. Her eyelids snapped. Light scorched her. She eeled out of bed, steadied herself through a gasping moment, and reached toward the closet where her lavender silk robe hung.

A moment later she cracked the door and looked out into the corridor. It was a long, dimly-lighted cavern, empty, silent. Belted robe swishing, she was out quickly, a wraith slipping into a stairwell, disappearing.


Gramling’s phone was burring an insistent demand when he keyed open his apartment door. He rushed through the soft glow of the night light, past the shadowy impressions of Danish modern furnishings, and snatched up the phone in the middle of its next snarl.

“Doctor,” the stone-like voice was that of night nursing supervisor Stephens, “Camilla Jordan has disappeared.”

The pleasant afterglow of his evening with Marcy Lewis was consumed in a quick fire. His teeth clicked; his knuckles whitened. “How did it happen? Who was on duty in her room?”

“Archer, Doctor, the young RN who just came to us from Central Hospital.”

“Who can pack and return to Central’s payroll as of this moment,” Gramling rasped. “Was she catching a catnap?”

“Hardly, Doctor. She stepped into the rec room to get the patient a soft drink.”

Gramling’s thin nostrils flared out a breath. “And when she stepped back in, she found the covers thrown back, the bed empty. Well, so much for that. It’s done now, isn’t it? I’ll be there immediately. She must not leave the grounds — and not a hint of a patient-escape leaking out, especially to the local press.”

“Of course, Doctor. We started searching on the instant. She will never get over the walls.”


Shivering, Camilla stepped from the meat cooler into the dim vastness of the institutional kitchen. Before her in the faint light filtering from the night outside were obscure details, the long table where food was prepared, the butcher’s block with its rack of knives, the gas-fired ranges, the rows of pots and skillets dangling from the long rafter overhead.

Haven Hill had been home for two long years, and she knew every door and passageway. Once out of her room, she’d hurried down a service stairs. At a doorway in the ground-level corridor, she’d known a search had already started. She’d heard footsteps crackling quickly on tile, voices, subdued but strained, calling out her absence from her room. She’d crossed quickly into the kitchen. They would search every hallway, each linen and storage closet, she’d known. Even the kitchen. When she’d heard the quick approach of footsteps, she’d ducked into the cooler between hanging loins of beef, the side of a pig, the quarter of a veal. As from a muffled distance, she’d heard the brief murmur of voices when two of them had clicked a light on and off in the emptiness of the kitchen.

Now they were gone, and she drifted to the tall windows. She saw the light of electric torches flickering, moving about the dark landscape. In the distance jouncing headlights marked a pickup truck. That would be Pickens, the maintenance supervisor, cruising carefully, hoping to catch sight of her as she tried for the ivy-grown outer wall.

She drew back from the shadowy window, nodding slowly; Very well. Quite well let them search the trees and shrubs and pan along the wall, searching in all the wrong places...


Castleneau, the night man in gray security guard’s uniform, swung open the wrought-iron gate and the white jag shot through. Gramling slammed the car to an immediate halt and looked up through the open side window as Castleneau bent and peered in.

“Well?” Gramling demanded through gritted teeth.

“Not yet, Doctor. But we’ll find her. She is still inside the grounds.”

“Are you absolutely certain?”

“As sure as I can be of anything. She simply didn’t have that much time. I had Pickens, his crew, orderlies and aides spreading about the perimeter in everything available on wheels within thirty seconds after the night nursing supervisor notified me. Camilla Jordan will have to grow wings to get out of here.”

“Very well.” Gramling was only slightly mollified. “But every second counts. She is a patient, Castleneau. Don’t forget that for a moment. No telling what she will do. It’s worth your hide if she hurts herself.”

“If we had a few more people...”

“You will have people in sufficient number to take Haven Hill apart,” Gramling said, gunning the engine. “I’ll have day crews, from grass cutters to RN’s reporting in immediately. Nobody gets any sleep until Camilla Jordan is safely back in her room.”

Gramling threw the clutch, and the jag shot toward the white shadows of colonial buildings at the further end of the driveway.


Camilla stood in the soft darkness of the munificent, walnut-paneled office, looking at the deeper shadows of chairs in leather, the imposing desk with its high-backed chair like a throne upon the heights. This was Terrence Gramling’s sanctum, his lair, the place where his mind wormed in its patterns.

She turned her head, hearing the sound of his voice speaking to someone out in the corridor. She eased backward, until her shoulder blades were pressed against the wall close beside the door.

She heard the sound of the doorknob turning in his hand.

And she was quite prepared. Her face was a glint of sweat-slick whiteness. The cones of black erupted in her eyes. Her right hand was lifted, poised, her fingers burning with strength as they gripped the cleaver from the butcher’s block.

The door opened. And in walked the unspeakable monster who had destroyed her child...

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