He said nothing. He did not speak a word all the way back into the city, but drove along softly so that she could relax. She lay as though sleeping, always a white face bruised with purple around the eyes. Once the freshening pain in her mind brought a faint moan from her lips. Kildare, at that, put a steadying arm about her and she let her head lean against his shoulder. He drove on like that for a time, slowly, and when she sat up, he removed his arm without a word. So nothing was said between them all the way back to the city.
When they came into her father’s house she looked up at him with that faint, sick smile, saying good night. Kildare held her hand for a moment.
He said: “Something’s hit you pretty hard. I don’t know what and I’m not asking you any questions. But if there’s anything you want to do about it, will you let me try to help, Nancy?”
She read his face from left to right and back again, a great and calm affection in her eyes.
“There’s nobody else in the world that I’d turn to,” she said.
He digested that speech and the connotations of it on his way upstairs; it meant that she would turn to him before she would to her father or to big Charles Herron.
It was a quarter to ten when he tapped on the door of Messenger. Messenger himself pulled the door open quickly and passed a hand over the troubled corrugations of his face as he saw Kildare.
“It’s been a long night,” said Messenger. “Come in!”
Kildare went in, looking rather vaguely about him. “There’s something to drink over there on the table,” said Messenger.
Kildare sniffed the pungency of good Scotch and poured out a stiff drink. It went down like water. He took another, lighted a cigarette, and sat down with it. All he could think about was the taste of the smoke and fire as the Scotch worked into him more deeply. A warm, friendly mist was forming across his brain.
“You’re dead tired. You’re dead,” said Messenger.
“I’m all right,” said Kildare.
“Can you tell me about Nancy?”
“Pretty soon. I know a little more. I want to ask you a few questions. A short time ago she sold her horse, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“A fine mare she was very fond of—a good jumper and all that?”
“That’s true.”
“What reason did she give?”
“It troubled me at the time very much,” said Messenger. “I think she said that horses were all right, but that horsy people were a great bore. But it didn’t ring true. That chestnut had been a great thing in her life.”
“You can’t tell what suddenly made Nancy change her mind about riding?”
“No.”
“Has Nancy complained of bad health or pains?”
“Headaches. Otherwise, she’s always been a tough, healthy specimen.”
“Along with the riding, she gave up every other form of exercise except dancing?”
“Exactly.”
“Because she was not physically fit?”
“I’ve never heard her say so.”
“Mr. Messenger, will you tell me a little about Nancy’s mother?”
Messenger said, after a moment, gently, as though he were granting his forgiveness to an intruder: “Nancy’s mother has been dead for ten years, Doctor Kildare.”
“That made Nancy about ten years old at the time. What were her relations with her mother?”
“Deeply, deeply affectionate,” said Messenger.
“No,” said Kildare.
Messenger lifted his eyebrows and waited. Kildare explained:
“I don’t think so. Affectionate, perhaps; but there must have been something else.”
“Will you explain what you have in your mind?” asked Messenger.
“I have a thousand things in my mind,” said Kildare. “I have to select something out of the thousand and try to concentrate on it. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
“You’re upset,” said Messenger.
“I’m badly upset,” said Kildare.
He finished his drink and went over to the whisky bottle. There would be no hospital this day. He took that melancholy consolation to heart and then poured the third drink. He was beginning to taste the stuff now.
“Do you think that matters have come to a crisis?” asked Messenger. “Is that what you mean?”
“I think they have decidedly,” said Kildare.
“If matters have come to a crisis,” persisted Messenger, “it means that Nancy is on the verge of some very important action.”
“Some very important action. Yes.”
“Something that might remind us of the Chanler case?”
Kildare thought back to that dreary room in the boarding house and the body of Barbara Chanler with the sheet drawn up over the face. A shudder began in the small of his back. He took a quick drink.
Instead of answering the question, he said: “I don’t want to discuss possibilities that may frighten you. I want to get information from you. Will you tell me a little about Nancy’s mother?”
Messenger said: “She was a very gentle person: brave, calm, and beautiful. I thought she was a perfect woman. I still think so.”
Kildare shook his head.
Messenger said coldly: “I assure you.”
“Between a character like that and Nancy nothing could have happened. It must be that you’re not telling me everything. Was there any circumstance connected with the death of your wife?”
Messenger frowned at the floor.
“I’m a doctor,” said Kildare crisply. He thought of the pain that was in his own life and that would have to stay in it. He had to have the truth, even if it meant cutting with the knife. “I have to have the truth, and the full truth,” he said.
The telephone rang. Messenger reached for it.
“I can’t come just now,” he said into the instrument. “Perhaps, in that case…Very well, I’ll be right down.”
He put the telephone back in its cradle and stood up. “Don’t let anything stop us,” said Kildare. “Let me have a chance to find out the facts.”
“It’s impossible for me to tell them to you briefly,” said Messenger, “and I have a call from my office that I can’t avoid answering.”
Kildare followed him to the door of the room, saying rapidly: “Is it possible that whatever you can tell me would have had any effect on Nancy?”
“I think it might,” said Messenger. “Possibly it might. But ten years have gone by without a sign…”
“What’s been buried even for thirty years sometimes works all the mischief,” said Kildare. “When can you come back, or where can I see you?”
“I ought to be through in two or three hours. I’ll come straight back here.”
“You can’t make it faster than that?”
“I’ll try to make it as brief as possible. Kildare—is Nancy very badly upset?”
“She’s as badly upset as a human being can be,” said Kildare. “Will you please stop asking me questions?”
The answer struck Messenger so hard that he went out of the room without another word. Kildare followed out into the hall. As he stood there, he heard the descending feet of Messenger stumble twice on the stairs. The front door closed and the echo of its closing lived for a moment beside him in the upper room. After that, he threw off his clothes, walked through a shower, shaved, and dressed again. Then he dropped face down on the bed and fell into an instant sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A NOISE picked at his brain like a woodpecker at a sensitive plant. After a while he was able to sit up and discover that the sound was a rapping at his door. He got to it and pulled it open on Nancy Messenger. She was dressed again for the street.
“I’ve had a call,” she said, “and I have to go out. I wonder if you’ll come, Johnny. Are you too dead?” He stared at her.