Two days later Elaine came into my room at the clinic with the morning newspaper.
“Good morning,” she said. “How did we sleep last night?”
“Better,” I yawned. “Still have that middle-of-the-night period. Wake up reaching for a gun that isn’t there. Then lie awake as if I never have slept and never will again.”
She took away the breakfast tray with the food I hadn’t eaten and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap.
“You promised you’d finish telling me about it when you could,” she said.
I sighed, put aside Steve Canyon and the other denizens of the comic strip page, and began the long story of hate and vengeance. I told her of the old fire and its lone survivor, the little orphan named Carla Kennedy who grew into a lovely woman carrying the terrible scars of the fire on her back and the even more terrible scars of hatred in her festering mind. I told it all, how she had used the dull-wilted giant, Taggart, as a messenger of death, how she had ruthlessly removed all obstacles to her crazy plan: the ineffectual drunk, Owen Barr; the crippled newsdealer who had been like a father to her; me, when I began to dig too close to the truth. Except that she had failed to get me, three times.
Elaine’s face tightened when I told about Taggart’s last, nearly successful try at me. Her fists clenched as I described the gunfight and my long, tortured trip to the outside, too late to do the job Macy had called me back to do.
I began to tell of Macy’s last, long struggle to the gatehouse and the death switch, but Elaine shut her eyes and put her hand on my lips. “That’s enough,” she said. “It’s... terrible. I don’t... ever want to hear you mention it again, Pete. Never. It’s just a miracle you’re alive. I want to forget all that ever happened.”
I took her hand, kissed it. She looked at the door, then leaned back on the pillows with me. I put an arm around her shoulders. “As soon as I’m well enough to get away from here, we’ll be married. Then we’ll take a long trip. Havana or Nassau, maybe. It was nice of the cops to turn over that envelope they found in Macy’s pocket to me, just because he had put my name on it. Five thousand dollars. We’ll spend some of it because I think I earned it. The rest belongs to Aimee.”
I felt Elaine stiffen slightly, but her eyes remained closed.
“How is she?” I said.
Elaine smiled bleakly. “She eats. She sleeps, a little. But she won’t respond to me, or to anybody. She... just sits, and stares with those dark terrible eyes. Dr. Richman says she’ll probably snap out of it.”
“We’ll do what we can,” I said.
“Yes, Pete,” she said obediently.
“You didn’t like it when I had her brought here, did you?” I said after a short pause.
“Pete, we don’t need to talk about it now.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s clear it up.”
She twisted a little, indecisively. “Pete — she doesn’t belong with us, really. She... she’ll never fit in. We know nothing about her, except that she’s probably not legitimate. We know about the filth and squalor she came from. She was wild once. She could go back to being wild. She might grow up to be nothing but grief. A... busty, sullen little tramp, easy pickings for every boy in town. She’s — trouble for us, Pete. Trouble we don’t need to take on ourselves. We’ll have children of our own to think about.”
I tried to tell her the way I felt, but I knew I couldn’t explain. Not now. It was something she would have to learn, and maybe she was right, and I was wrong. But I had to do it this way and because Elaine believed in me she would go along with it. Reluctantly. But she’d try.
“Maybe she’ll turn out to be nothing but trouble for us,” I said frankly. “But I think she deserves some sort of chance. Macy gave me more than a chance once. I — I don’t quite know what to say.”
She got up then. A smile warmed her eyes. She bent over and kissed my forehead. “It’s all right, Pete. Really. We’ll do the best we can. And it’ll work out for us. Just... be patient with me, darling. Understand me. I guess I was born a snob, that’s all.”
I held her for just a moment. “With you as a model, Aimee will turn out just about perfect.” Her lips touched my face again; then she walked out quickly, snuffling and having some kind of trouble with her eyes. She slipped through the door, and it clicked softly behind her. I smiled once, then turned on my side, so the sun was warm on my face. I waited for her to come back.
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