“I caint see anything either,” Mrs. Boyer said gingerly, trying not to give offense.
“Do I care a hoot in hell if you can see it or not? It itches and I want to pick at it but you don’t pick at a boil. So all I need from you is something to put on it so I don’t pick at it and get it infected.”
“Give her something,” Mrs. Boyer muttered to Mr. Boyer.
Mr. Boyer hardly needed prompting. He mixed up a quantity of cold cream, cod liver oil, diaper-rash cream, and calamine, and filled a squat glass jar with it, typed out a label instructing Apply As Warranted, and handed it over to Mamadee. “I’m not supposed to give you this without a doctor’s prescription, so I could get in real trouble. It’s two seventy-five; I’ll just put it on your bill.”
By noon, all of Tallassee knew that Roberta Carroll Dakin had fled Ramparts. By four o’clock that afternoon, all of Tallassee knew of Deirdre Carroll’s peculiar behavior downtown and in Boyer’s Drugstore. Dr. Evarts therefore was not surprised when Mamadee called him up and told him to get over to her house right then.
“I have five people in my waiting room and all five of them have appointments,” he told her.
Dr. Evarts intended to judge by her response to this refusal just how dire she felt her case to be.
“If I have to come over there,” Mamadee replied, “those people in your waiting room won’t be alive long enough to get cured. Do you hear me?”
Dr. Evarts had heard about Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin’s departure with her odd little girl but without her son, and about Deirdre Carroll and the umbrellas. Dr. Evarts perceived gossip as an integral part of the life of the town, amusing and informing him, but on which he need not necessarily act. However, once he had arrived at Ramparts, Dr. Evarts realized that the tales he had heard had not been exaggerated. He found the front door open and when he called out for Tansy, there was no answer. The door was open, Dr. Evarts noted, and a sick woman lay within.
He found every door open, and opened umbrellas in every room.
Open umbrellas were propped in chairs, open umbrellas depended from the chandeliers, an open umbrella was planted in the deep pocket of a fox-fur coat in an open closet. An open umbrella filled the horn of the gramophone in Captain Senior’s library. A small, open, frilled child’s parasol—the kind of thing a six-year-old future beauty queen would brace on her shoulder at an Easter parade—was hooked over the ceiling molding on the staircase landing.
Upstairs, opened umbrellas like enormous black bats squatted on beds, snagged on curtain rods, or kept the rain out of commodes. Dr. Evarts paused to peek into Roberta Ann’s bedroom. It appeared Roberta Ann had rummaged her own room like a thief. He peered around; the photograph of Roberta Ann showing off her legs in her shorts was gone. That bothered him more than he would have expected. He had always enjoyed looking at that photograph. Joe Cane Dakin, while he lived, had enjoyed the favors of a very beautiful woman. On the other hand, Joe Cane Dakin’s fate was unenviable, to say the least.
Distracted already, he hardly glanced into the next open bedroom door and so passed it before what he saw registered. He took three steps backward and looked again.
The boy, Ford, sat on the edge of the bed. He wore a suit and tie. His hair was damp from a recent combing. A suitcase shared the counterpane with him. He looked bored. Dr. Evarts could not help reflecting what a handsome boy he was, blessed if blessing it was, with his mother’s beauty and grace, and with her and Deirdre’s willfulness, almost certainly no blessing.
“Took your time.” Ford came to his feet. “The old witch has gone batty.”
“Thank you for your diagnosis,” Dr. Evarts said.
“You’re welcome.” Ford came to the door. He nodded down the hall toward Deirdre’s room. “Well?”
Deirdre’s bedroom door was closed. The keyhole was jammed with the ferrule of an umbrella—a small red and yellow affair with a long stem, meant to be raised over the seat of a tractor.
“Deirdre!” Dr. Evarts called at the door.
He tried to pull the umbrella out of the lock, but the point broke off.
He knocked. “It’s Dr. Evarts! Are you in there, Deirdre?”
Ford leaned against the wall a yard away, his face impassive.
Though Dr. Evarts heard nothing, he had no doubt that Deirdre Carroll was on the other side of the door. He twisted the doorknob, pressed his shoulder against the panels, tried to twist the broken point out of the keyhole, all in vain. He looked round, stalked down the hall, and snagged the open umbrella that had been hooked over the stem of a gas sconce. It was large and unadorned, with an ebony handle, cold steel ribs, and black silk as thin as crepe. He positioned the steel ferrule against the floor, forcefully pressed his foot against the ribs of the umbrella, warping and then snapping them, straining and then ripping the dyed canvas, until nothing was left but the handle, the stem, a tiny halo of broken ribs, and the ferrule—all that he needed.
Squeezing the ferrule into the keyhole alongside the other, broken spike, Dr. Evarts twisted and pushed and pulled, lifted and jerked down and jerked out and shoved in, until he heard the sound of the entire mechanism of the lock breaking. The knob turned freely in his hand.
The ferrule that had been embedded in the keyhole fell out. It was red, as if it had been heated, and it smoked, singeing the hall carpet.
Ford applauded for a few slow sardonic claps.
Dr. Evarts glanced back at Ford. If Deirdre Carroll were indeed on the other side of the door, someone else must have jammed the umbrella in the keyhole, someone who meant to lock Deirdre in that bedroom.
“Where’s Tansy?”
Ford shrugged. “Run off.”
As Dr. Evarts had been quite sure, Deirdre Carroll was in the room. Even before he saw her, he heard her breath—soft, labored, stertorous. She lay motionless on her bed, her head turned slightly toward him in the doorway. When the doctor entered the room, Deirdre Carroll didn’t speak. Very possibly she couldn’t, owing to the boil beneath her chin.
It was nearly round, larger than a softball, and in color a dull black like the soot coating the walls of a fireplace where only the cheapest grade of coal ever burned. Whatever its origin, whatever purulence festered inside it, the black boil was larger and more obscenely bloated than the worst cancerous growth that Dr. Evarts had ever seen. Deirdre Carroll’s head tilted back. The glistening black boil was so engorged, it pressed on her lungs below and pressed her jaw shut. It was little wonder she breathed only with difficulty, it was no wonder at all she had not responded to his calls.
Deirdre’s eyes rolled in her head as she strained to see him. Avoiding eye contact, Dr. Evarts approached the bed. The surface of the boil was sooty black but it was definitely skin—the charred black skin of burn victims who had to sleep sitting up because it was less painful than lying down. Yet the boil glistened in places—shone with a lick of purple. Realizing his mouth had twisted in disgust, he tried a smile. The attempt failed.
“You should have called me sooner,” he said, reaching a finger to touch the black boil. She winced away. He was unable to avoid the panic in her eyes: Please don’t touch it! The same panic most people had of the needle, of the knife, of the cold steel forceps.
“It’s all right, Deirdre, you’re just going to feel a little pressure,” he said, lightly pressing his index finger against the boil’s black burned skin.
It exploded.
Thirty-three
EVEN as I sweated through that nightmare, I realized that I had dreamt and forgotten it several times. But this time, I woke with the conviction that Mamadee was indeed dead.