Something in her face and mood — and in the darkness in which she’d chosen to wait for him — told Holt the current problem was more serious than he had at first supposed.
“Hello, Evelyn,” he said. “Margaret said you wanted to talk to me about Brad.”
“Yes.” She stopped a few feet from him, her expression troubled and uncertain. “He doesn’t know I came,” she said. “He didn’t want any fuss.”
“He wouldn’t. Sit down, sit down. I’m losing my manners. Would you care for a drink?”
“No, thank you.” But she did sit down, in the green wing chair, and folded her hands in her lap.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I will. I’ve had two hours of weekend traffic, and I need to unwind.”
“Of course,” she said.
The bar was to the left. Turning to it, he said, “I don’t mean to interrupt you. If you drove all this way, and particularly without Brad’s approval, it must be important.” He put ice in a short glass and reached for the bourbon.
“I’m not sure whether it is or not.” When he wasn’t looking at her, her voice sounded too frail, almost the voice of an invalid. “He fainted yesterday.”
Holt was already pouring the bourbon. He half-filled the glass, recorked the bottle, and turned to look at her. “Fainted? Brad?”
“In California. You knew we were going out for Uncle Harrison.”
“The supermarket opening,” Holt said, remembering Howard’s description of it. Howard had been opposed to the expedition, to the point of asking Holt to forbid Brad to go on medical grounds. There had been no medical grounds, though, and Brad would have ignored him in any case, and he really didn’t take the affront to Brad’s dignity as seriously as Howard, so he’d refused.
“Afterwards,” Evelyn was saying, “we were sitting around talking with Uncle Harrison — Brad was arguing with him, really, about some things that might not be right about the town — and all of a sudden he just fell out of the chair. Fainted, right out of the chair.”
Holt put his drink down again untasted. “What was the temperature out there? Very hot?”
“Not really. It was sunny, but not bad. About seventy-five. And this was afterwards, when we were indoors.”
“How long was he unconscious?”
“Less than five minutes. It seemed terribly long, but it was only two or three minutes.”
“Then he woke right up?”
“Not really.” She frowned, trying to get the description right. “He woke up, all right. I mean, the faint was over and he could stand and everything, but he was still a little fuzzy.”
“What do you mean, fuzzy?”
“Well, he seemed confused about everything. Not amnesia or forgetting about things, just a little confused. As though he was distracted. And he was stuttering a lot.”
“Has the stuttering continued?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “He’s perfectly all right today. It was only for about ten minutes after he woke up that he was confused and stuttering. After that he was fine.”
“Any other symptoms after the faint? Anything besides the confusion and the stuttering?”
She gave him a quick glance, and said, “You think it’s something serious.”
“I think it could be a lot of different things,” he said, “some serious and some not so serious. I’ll have to know a lot more before I can narrow it down.”
“There wasn’t anything else,” she said. “Not connected with the faint, anyway.”
“Not connected with the faint? I don’t understand.”
“Well, I told you he fell out of the chair, and he apparently hurt his leg when he fell. But it wasn’t bad, it’s fine today.”
“What did he do, cut himself? Bruise himself?”
“Well, I didn’t see it, exactly. He just had a little limp afterwards. But it was gone by the time we got off the plane in Hagerstown.”
“When was that, last night?”
“Yes. We flew right back, last night. It was after midnight before we were home.”
“Did Brad seem unusually tired?”
Evelyn offered a small smile. “We were all unusually tired. We’d crossed the continent twice in one day.”
Holt returned her smile. “Pedaling all the way,” he said. “And you say Brad is all right today?”
“He was when I left.”
“You asked him to talk to me about the faint?”
“Yes. He said it was nonsense, it was the result of the plane trip and the bad speeches, at his age he had to expect an occasional unauthorized absence. That’s what he called it, an occasional unauthorized absence.”
“Did he mean it had happened before?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded surprised, as though it hadn’t occurred to her to put that interpretation on his words. “I don’t think so,” she said doubtfully. “That isn’t what he seemed to be saying.”
“You haven’t seen any of these symptoms before, in him? Not just the faint, but any of the others. The stuttering, the confusion, the limp.”
“The limp? But that happened when he fell off the chair.”
“Even so,” Holt said. “Has he limped before?”
“Not that I remember. None of it before, the limp or anything else.”
Holt nodded. “All right. He doesn’t know you’ve come here, is that it?”
“That’s exactly it.” The brief lovely smile flashed again, and she said, “He’s going to be quite upset.”
“Are you driving back there now?”
“Oh, no. The idea was, I’m going to New York for two days. Shopping and visiting and so on.”
“You’re driving back Sunday.”
“Yes. Why, do you want me to drive you out there?”
“No, not at all.” Holt smiled and said, “Not if you want to maintain security. If we can avoid letting Brad know you’ve come to see me, so much the better.”
“Agreed,” she said.
“I have a free day tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll drive out and see what the situation is.”
“Thanks, Joe. It’s probably nothing to worry about, but I’ll feel better after you say so.”
“Stop by here on your way back Sunday, and I’ll say so then.”
“Fine.”
Holt hesitated, then said, “Did Margaret invite you to dinner? If not, allow me.”
“She did,” Evelyn said, smiling, “but I really do have a dinner engagement in New York.”
Holt tried to stop himself, but couldn’t help saying, “A nice young man, I hope.”
Evelyn laughed and said, “That depends on your attitude toward George.”
“Your brother George?”
“The same.”
This time he did stop himself, refraining from saying, What’s a nice-looking girl like you having dinner with her brother for? Advice only when requested, he reminded himself, and then limited to the medical. He said, “My best to George. And to Marie, of course.”
They both had the same attitude toward Marie. Evelyn’s smile was ironic as she said, “Of course.”
iv
It was three hundred twenty-two miles, door to door. Holt had clocked it one time. From the house it was just a quick jog through Willow Grove to the Turnpike, then due west for nearly three hundred miles across the bottom of the state to the Willow Hill exit, south on state road 75 to Metal, then back east on county road 992 to Eustace.
Saturday dawned bright and clear and cold, perfect driving weather. If he left in the morning and returned in the afternoon, he would have the sun at his back in both directions, which was perfect.
He had told Margaret about it at dinner last night, of course, and had asked her if she felt like making the trip with him, but she had something to do with the League of Women Voters today, so he traveled alone. Fortunately he liked to drive — when not in Friday afternoon traffic — and didn’t mind driving alone. It gave him time to think, to muse on this and that, to evolve ideas like that cemetery notion that had fallen flat on its face yesterday. He would spend much of today’s driving time dissecting that failure from various points of view; the generation gap, romantic vs. realist, religious-based political conservatism vs. humanistic-based political liberalism, on and on. It was his form of solitaire, and didn’t even require a deck of cards.