The weekly’s new prosperity made it possible to hire a new reporter-photographer. He came into the office with an eight-by-ten blow-up of the dozer operator with a ten-foot length of pine sapling protruding from his belly. The editor found the picture to be interesting and well done, but a little gory for a family audience. The reporter sent the picture off to a national sensational tabloid, along with a story. The story ran in the national tabloid and, in a one paragraph squib on the inside pages, in the Ocean City Weekly. The freak nature of the accident appealed to the rewrite man on the City Desk at the Port City daily, and it was in the morning Port City News that Dr. Irving King read about the accident. The dateline, Pine Tree Island, reminded him that he had not, as yet, satisfied his curiosity about what it was that reminded him of something regarding his recent patient, Gwen Ferrier. The account of the death triggered other long-hidden memories.
It was a slow day in the office. The doctor went to the files and started rummaging around in the years from 1935 on. Ruthie, out for coffee, surprised him and reprimanded him for messing up her files.
“If you’d do what I asked you to,” he said grumpily, “I wouldn’t have to mess around in your precious files.”
“If you’d tell me what it is you want,” she retorted, equally grumpily, “I’d get it.”
“Something to do with plants,” he said.
“That tells me a lot,” Ruthie said. “Flowers?”
“Plants in general. Trees, grass, weeds, all of it.”
“I don’t recall ever having a plant as a patient,” the assistant said.
“The patient was human, and, I think, female.”
“You’re a gold mine of information,” Ruthie said. “All right, I have nothing better to do.” She said it with evident suffering, the overworked female. “So I’ll spend my morning looking through the files for a female patient who had a love affair with plants.”
“Do that,” King said, going into his office to meditate on the perversity of all women.
He had an appointment with a young man who feared that he had homosexual tendencies. They were well into it, this being the latest in a long series going back some four months. By this time King was positive that the lad not only had tendencies, but was a flaming closet queen, and King was tempted to tell him to forget fighting it and just enjoy it. One way, he was thinking, as the young man talked endlessly about his mother’s fondness for his younger sister. King covered a yawn and murmured, “Yes, go on, please.”
Then he began to wonder why he did it. Why did he keep the office open? He didn’t need the money, and he’d long since given up hope of getting a really interesting patient. Most of it was so damned repetitive. He would have loved to get his teeth into someone like the Boston Strangler. Now there was a psycho.
“Ruthie,” he said, when the potential queen had minced out, “why don’t we take down the shingle?”
“Coming to this office every day is the only thing that keeps you alive,” she said bluntly. “You wouldn’t last a month in retirement.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It seems so futile sometimes.”
“Feeling sorry for ourself today, is that it?”
“I don’t need the money,” King said. “Not that I’m so damned rich, it’s just that I won’t live long enough to spend what I have.”
“I don’t share your fortunate estate,” Ruthie said. “And I don’t think I could walk down the street and get another job.” She was holding a yellowed folder in her hand.
“There’s enough for both of us,” King said.
“Halvers?” She smiled.
“Why not?” He was remembering her at forty, a long-legged, mature woman with a Rubens body, soft and full of delights. “Are you so old and set in your ways that you couldn’t adjust to living with me?”
There was a softening in the old, wrinkled face. “I’ve been putting up with you for thirty-five years, Irving King.”
“Yes.”
“You’re just tired. Forget your laxative?”
“Ah, the practical mind of the woman,” he said, folding his hands in front of him. “You think, to put it bluntly, that I’m just full of shit.”
“That may be,” she said, still smiling. He was looking at her with his face formed in a musing expression. “Let’s see how you feel about it tomorrow?”
“I was just thinking,” he said. “You mentioned once that you wanted to go to Greece. Did you ever make it?” “On a two weeks’ vacation?” She snorted.
“We could go,” he said. “Would you like that?”
She sat on the edge of his desk and touched his shoulder. “Irving King, you’re an old war horse. This office has been your life for too long. And I’m the same way. Sometimes I think how nice it would be, when the alarm goes off, to just throw it out the window and turn over and go back to sleep. But on Saturday and Sunday, when I could sleep late, I’m wide awake at seven, as usual. By Sunday evening, I’m going stir-crazy. The apartment is too small. There’s no smell of cigars and there’s nothing to do. By Monday morning I feel as if I’m starting a new life when I get on the bus and head downtown. Now just what would we do in retirement? Play checkers?”
“Go to Greece?”
“And have to hire strong Greek boys to carry us up the steps of the Parthenon?” She patted him on the shoulder. “Get to work, old man. It’s all we have.”
“There’s a new condominium going up on the river,” King said. “I’ve got a dollar invested in it. There’s a unit on the first floor—” He cleared his throat and reached for a cigar. “I’d guarantee the smell of good Havana.”
“All right,” she said simply.
“Fine,” he said.
“I think this is what you want,” she said, standing, all business again. “A Mrs. Evelyn Rogers.”
How in the hell could he have forgotten that one? He reached for the folder eagerly, not even noticing that Ruthie had smiled at him and shaken her head fondly before leaving. His mind was worse than he thought, to forget that one. His own Boston Strangler, his own Winnie Ruth Judd. Only it had never been proven.
If he ever did a book, she’d be in it. She just might be the prime attraction. He opened the folder. Cute address: Cutesy, more the word. Mrs. Evelyn Rogers, The Jolly Rogers, Pine Tree Island.
She had been brought to him by her husband, a man considerably older than she, on July 10, 1937. He had caught her fornicating with a local retarded teenager. His investigation had showed only rampant nymphomania, and, later, took on more interesting aspects.
As he read, his memory came back, clear, vivid. She was not a beautiful woman, but she was youthful, twenty-nine and in her prime. She talked openly about her affairs, and their variety had, he remembered with a wry smile, had the effect of good pornography on his libido. Only his professional detachment had kept him from doing something foolish. That and a truly shocked sorrow at the waste of a life. She had children, two boys and a girl, ranging in age from ten to three years. The oldest, a girl, knew what was happening, although she was often told to play in her bedroom with the younger children and not come out on pain of severe punishment. But she was a totally sexual being, and she spoke of her activities not with shame, but with a sort of detachment, as if some other woman had been involved, not she.