Talmage Powell

The Thing in B-3: A Tale of the Supernatural

The Boneyard

No other student at Crownover University had a part-time job quite like Bill Latham’s. He worked at the city morgue five evenings a week, Monday through Friday.

His duties in this place of the dead were light — except for those occasions when he manned an ambulance on emergency call.

Early in the evening of October fifth (the date would stamp itself in his memory) Bill was threading the ambulance through the city streets with the cool of a NASCAR point leader.

The attitude of his rangy six-foot body settled in the driver’s seat suggested total concentration, but not strain. He was grateful that the rush-hour congestion was over.

The lights of street, buildings, and cars flicked past like winking fireflies. The moan of the siren added a painful quality to the crisp autumn darkness. It was a sound Bill could have done without.

The instrument panel cast a dim glow. Bill’s husky face — cleft chin, rugged cheekbones, high forehead — right now reflected none of its usual quiet good humor. Under even brows, his brown eyes glittered with alertness as he picked and judged details of the street rushing at the windshield. The dawdling gray sedan straddling a white line... the pedestrian stepping from a traffic island as if hypnotized by the spinning red light of the ambulance... the pickup truck nosing into the intersection... and that silly driver in the red sports car who had U-turned a block back to chase the ambulance.

That dimwit, Bill thought grimly, should have to ride the ambulance for just one evening. He should have to help pull the mangled, screaming results out of a high-speed pileup. One evening of trips to the hospital emergency room, and he would drive his sports car like a mature adult.

Bill eased over to give the gray sedan room. His toe touched the power brake to let the suicidal pedestrian leap to the curbing. The pickup, Bill saw with relief, was holding at the intersection. And — beautiful sight — a police cruiser was nosing around the small truck.

As the ambulance roared past the side street, Bill glimpsed the cruiser pouncing on the sports car’s tail. At least, Bill thought, the psycho with four-on-the-floor wouldn’t break his neck this time out.

Almost a mile ahead, sprinkled with lights, City Hospital was a blocky, six-storied silhouette against the night sky. Bill envisioned the cool hustle of preparation in Emergency; he’d already radioed in the nature of the run.

He flicked a glance in the parabolic rearview mirror. From the way Dr. Barney Childers, the young intern, was working with the oxygen equipment, Bill had the warming guess that the emergency was still alive.

The patient, a stooped, gray man of about sixty, had collapsed on a downtown street as he came from a restaurant. The usual crowd, a mixture of the shocked, the morbid, the curious, had gathered by the time Bill and Barney had arrived. They had struggled through with a stretcher, assisted by a policeman, who had had his hands full keeping the crowd back.

Barney had dropped to one knee and examined the gray, prostrate form quickly. “Heart attack... if we can stave off cardiogenic shock he’s got a good chance...”

Even while it was happening, the details had seemed to run together. The loading of the man on the wheeled stretcher, the sight of Barney’s hands busy with the oxygen, the pressure of the driver’s seat against Bill’s back, the merry-go-round blur of lights and shadows as Bill had turned the ambulance in the street.

The shadows around the hospital began to take distinctive forms, tree-shaded lawn in the foreground with the vast parking area to the sides and beyond the half-block-wide building.

Bill aimed the headlights at a driveway where a glowing red sign spelled out Emergency Entrance.

The building loomed like the sheer wall of a canyon. Bill turned on the concrete apron, backed up to the ramp, and the ambulance came to rest with a catlike sigh.

Bill flipped a door handle in the same instant he locked the hand brake. He was out almost before the ambulance had settled on its shocks.

Barney was already sliding the stretcher out when Bill reached the rear. As they rolled the elderly man through the wide swinging doors, Bill noted that the face seemed a little less gray.

A team of interns and nurses met them inside the wide, rubber-tiled corridor. Bill was perfectly willing to let them take over. He stepped aside, edging off tension with a deep sigh, and watched the stretcher being whisked toward the white-enameled door of Emergency B.

The soft click of footsteps hurrying along the cavernous corridor caused Bill to turn his head.

A familiar figure was swiftly descending on Emergency B.

“Dad!” Bill said. “What are you doing here?”

Dr. William Latham, Sr., broke stride. He was a robust, hearty individual who always looked a bit rumpled and shaggy, even after a trip to the clothier and barber. He was a craggy, iron gray, rather handsome promise of what Bill might one day become.

“Is a hospital a strange place to find a doctor?” he asked good-naturedly.

“You know what I mean. Down here in the emergency area.”

“I’ve got a patient down here.” Dr. Latham glanced toward the burdened stretcher as it disappeared into B. “The man has been my patient for more than a year now.”

A faint frown grew between Bill’s eyes as he watched his dad turn to follow the stretcher.

“Hey, Dad...”

Dr. Latham’s pause was accompanied by a glint of irritation in the glance he threw over his shoulder.

“What is it now, Bill?”

“We had no way of knowing the man was your patient. We didn’t radio a call for you. Out of all the thousands of people in the city... how’d you know one of your heart patients was coming in, desperately needing you?”

The question held Dr. Latham for a second. “Blamed if I can give you a test-tube answer for that one, Bill. All I know is that I was seeing some of my other patients here in the hospital when I seemed to sense that this heart case was in trouble. I simply knew that I should get to Emergency on the double.”

Bill grinned. “Maybe you’ve ESP, Dad.”

“It was just a hunch,” Dr. Latham decided. “Now, why don’t you grab a coffee break? You look as if you need it. And I passed Betty Atherton on the way down. You might find her in the commissary.”

The commissary was drowsing through the mid-evening lull. A white-jacketed busboy was lifting stainless steel compartments from the steam table and clanging them onto a dolly. In the kitchen they would be scalded and replenished with food for the duty changes at 11:00 P.M. At a formica-topped table three surgical nurses in rumpled green gowns and caps were taking a breather, sipping coffee, and indulging in harmless gossip. Bill returned their friendly greeting as he carried his coffee past.

His destination was a corner table where an attractive girl in the white blouse and pink-bibbed apron uniform of a hospital volunteer sat alone. Her softly oval face lighted when she saw Bill. Her rather wide-lipped mouth parted, her even teeth flashing a smile. She had large dark eyes and feathery hair that was so black it reflected purple highlights.

Bill curled his length in the chrome and leatherette chair across the table. “Hello, beautiful.” He reached for Betty Atherton’s slender hand and gave it a squeeze.

“Easy, fellow — or do you hold hands with all the younger members of the hospital auxiliary?”

“All the pretty girls with the initials B. A.” Bill dumped three lumps of sugar in his coffee and stirred it. “How goes it?”

“Okay. I read the bedtime stories this evening in one of the children’s wards.” Her expressive eyes clouded. “Those little tykes, always so brave and cheerful.”

“The children’s ward can be especially depressing,” Bill remarked.

“And lonely... for them. No wonder they hang on to every word in a story.”

Bill sipped his coffee. “How about a pizza when I clock out of the boneyard at eleven?”

“Don’t you have an early class?”

“A math quiz,” Bill said. “But I can breeze it.”

“That isn’t what you were saying last week.”

Bill tried for a sneaky grin; it was merely lopsided. “I’m cracking books on company time. Things have been quiet — and dead bodies in the morgue aren’t always interrupting a guy like brothers in a dorm.”

“Bill, honestly!” Betty shook her head in mild exasperation. “The way you refer to that place.”

“The occupants don’t mind.” He toyed with the handle of his coffee mug. “Seriously, I wouldn’t want to flunky in the city morgue and hustle an ambulance for the rest of my life. But right now it’s a made-to-order setup. I work an evening duty tour five days a week to keep me financially solvent. Most of the time I just have to be there, and I can study between chores. The emergency signal for an ambulance breaks up the monotony. And my days are free to soak up higher learning at good old Crownover University. Yep, some of the eggheads at school with their creepy jokes about my job would love to have such a deal.”

“It remains,” Betty said with a slight shudder, “the city morgue.”

“So how about that pizza?”

“I’ve an early class myself... but... well, okay.”

“Now that we’ve hammered out an agenda,” Bill said with a grin, “I really ought to be getting along. I want to stick my head in Emergency B. We brought a heart attack in...” His grin faded. “Funny thing...” His voice trailed off. A slow change came to his eyes, the beginnings of a frown to his forehead. His thoughts seemed to slip away.

Betty looked at him closely. “What is it, Bill?”

His eyes came up slowly. He took a long breath and ran his fingers through his short-cut, slightly tousled light brown hair. He was having difficulty trying to frame a thought. “Dad threw me a curve a few minutes ago. It bugs me a little.” He studied her a moment. “Betty, do you believe in clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, that sort of thing?”

She felt he was driving at some point he wanted to make. “I don’t believe in spirit mediums who dish out hokum in hopes of cheating grief-stricken widows out of money,” she said. “But I know that much of my own mind is a mystery even to me. Too many hardheaded scientists are researching the field of parapsychology for me to laugh off the existence of psychic forces. Just what they are and how they work, nobody can yet say. But, after all, electricity was around a long time before mankind pinned it down.”

A moment of silence came, which took on an aspect of heaviness.

Betty leaned forward. “What’s this all about, Bill?”

“Wish I knew myself. The heart emergency... he’s one of Dad’s patients.”

“Then he’s in good hands.”

“Sure — and the hands were right there when we brought in the stricken old man.”

“What’s so unusual about a doctor receiving a patient?”

“Nothing,” Bill said, “if the doctor has been called. But in this instance, Betty, my father had absolutely no normal channel of communication. And yet, he knew. Without being told, he knew that a certain patient needed him at a certain time in Emergency. He called it a hunch and let it go at that.”

“Well, why not? People do have hunches, you know. Your father understood the patient’s habits as well as his condition. Maybe he guessed the man was buying trouble.”

“And would land in Emergency at a specified moment?” Bill shook his head. “I don’t like words such as ‘hunch’ and ‘luck’ and ‘coincidence.’ They don’t really mean anything. They just pass over things we can’t explain.”

He seemed to realize the growing seriousness of his mood and broke it with a laugh. “So the Norseman a few hundred years ago explained thunder by saying it was the god Thor throwing his mighty hammer. The Seri Indian explains dreams with the claim that it’s his soul wandering free while his body sleeps. Why not explain Dad by saying he had a momentary case of ESP and let it go at that?”

“Why not, indeed?” Betty nodded, not sharing Bill’s laugh.

“Hey! Now look who’s getting grim about the whole thing!” He nuzzled a knuckle playfully under her chin. “We keep it a family secret, but actually the Lathams had an ancestress who jumped on her broom and took off every time the moon was full.”

His bantering was infectious. Betty smiled. “She must have gorged on pizza every night at bedtime.”

“How’d you guess?” Bill pushed his chair back. “See you at eleven.”

In the vaultlike corridor, Bill met a middle-aged nurse coming out of Emergency B.

“How is the old gentleman making out, Miss Abbott?”

“Doing nicely, Bill. I think we can chalk up one for our side. Your father knew the case history so well... lucky coincidence he was on hand.”

Luck. Coincidence. Two of those words used in a single breath. Bill watched the starched rustle of Miss Abbott moving toward the elevator.

If he hadn’t witnessed the minor miracle of his father’s timely appearance, he’d hardly have believed it.

Was there really something to this ESP-telepathy bit? A pair of half-forgotten memories flashed into his mind. The first time he’d called at Betty’s home, the living room had seemed strangely familiar for only a bare fraction of a second. Surely, he’d been in this room before, shaking Mr. Atherton’s hand, knowing the first word Mr. Atherton was going to say. The second memory was of a road, an ordinary two-lane county road downstate. It branched from the interstate to the lake resort where Bill had worked two summer vacations ago. The very first time he’d driven the road Bill had known somehow that a certain kind of billboard was around the next curve.

Later, studying parapsychology, the fledgling science of psychic forces, he’d learned that this phenomenon of familiarity is called déjà vu, or, more accurately, paramnesia.

With a final glance at Emergency B, Bill turned and went outside.

He was a white-coated shadow crossing the narrow tract of lawn to the low-roofed extension that housed the city morgue. It hadn’t the aspect of a repository for the dead at all. With night lights burning behind antique and glass brick, the morgue, outwardly, resembled a quiet, conservative motor-lodge addition to a large hotel.

The previous morgue, a lulu of dreariness, had occupied the basement of a century-old municipal building. When urban renewal had revitalized the downtown area, the city fathers had decided to locate the new morgue at the already-existing complex of hospital, health facilities, and clinics.

One of the clinics was sponsored by Crownovers medical school, and now and then Bill bumped into premed upperclassmen around the hospital.

The opportunity for razzing a likable and popular fellow student was rarely passed up. And Bill usually had a comeback.

Now Bill keyed open the front door and stepped into the nighttime desertion. He was in a cheerful, carpeted anteroom with rattan furnishings and a pair of pleasant seascapes on the wall.

Beyond and to his right, separated by a waist-high partition of pecan wood paneling, was the office of the secretary-receptionist. Behind it, in frosted glass privacy, was the office of Dr. Josiah Hornaday, the pathologist in charge.

To Bill’s left, beyond a wooden door marked “employees only,” were the laboratory and autopsy and dissection rooms.

Bill strolled the hallway that led toward the rear. It terminated at a door set in steel tracks. He slid aside the panel, and before him lay a single huge, whitely sterile room that harbored a chill all its own. In the jargon of those who worked here the room was known, not irreverently, as the boneyard.

The room heightened Bill’s awareness of the silence. With an instinct of then own, his lips puckered to whistle a pop time softly as he stepped inside.

The overhead lights cast a bone-white glow that penetrated every cranny. Even so, the room suggested shadows.

The furnishings were sparse, a large surgical table near the center, sterilizers and instrument cabinets beside the stainless steel basins against the west wall. In the rear corner was a wide, overhead, sliding door that could be lifted when the meat wagon drew up outside.

On the east wall were banked the refrigerated drawers where the dead were tucked in a huge, bizarre filing cabinet like finished correspondence.

Bill crossed to the utility closet where he took out a mop bucket and a gallon jug of green, antiseptic cleaner.

With one ear tuned for the ambulance emergency bell, he mixed a solution of scalding water and cleaner, turned from the sink, chugged the mop a couple of times, and pressed his toe to tighten the wringer rollers attached to the bucket’s top.

He pulled the steaming mop between the rollers and slapped it against the vinyl floor. He attacked the chore with an easy, tireless, lean grace, swabbing the floor with long strokes.

He was halfway through the job before he paused to rest, leaning on the mop handle. His eyes drifted over the bank of refrigerated drawers. Most were empty at the moment.

The heavy silence and air of desertion began to crowd against him. He felt a chill, as if the coldness of the refrigerated compartments was oozing out.

The whistle faded from his dry lips. His frown began with slowly creeping furrows.

If he wanted time to crack a book, better finish his job, he told himself sharply. The thought was a vagrant wisp, unimportant and meaningless against this strange, growing urgency in his mind.

He stood with his fingers opening and closing on the mop handle. The muscles of his calves, along his spine, across his shoulders, rippled as if in response to an unseen touch.

He jerked his head and looked about the room, suddenly needing the reassurance of its reality.

What in blazes was going on? He was no afraid-of-the-dark little boy.

The quietness was absolute, as deep as the silence of dark space between the stars. Even his breathing couldn’t be heard.

His gaze came to rest on the bank of cadaver drawers. A whisper of pain needled against his brain when he looked in any other direction. The sensation eased entirely as his attention focused on a drawer in the middle row, third from the end. The number was B-3.

His left foot broke its paralysis. Then his right. The forgotten mop rested askew in the bucket.

Bill bent slowly from the waist. The drawer was apparently occupied. A plastic tag was attached to the handle with a twist of thin, bright wire.

But the tag was blank. Someone on an earlier tour of duty had evidently failed to fill in the ID.

It didn’t seem right. Even the dead should have a name.

With the strange sensation that he was standing apart and watching himself, Bill saw his hand stretch out and touch the handle.

The drawer slid out with the barest slither of sound on its rollers.

The sight hit Bill’s mind like a bolt of nuclear energy. A girl lay on the cold slab. A slender young form clothed in a yellow linen dress. Tiny rhinestone pins clasping the shoulder straps to the square-necked bodice. A splash of softly waving hair that caught the light blackly. And a face — surely once lovely — that had been battered to unrecognizable pulp in some kind of horrible accident...

Bill slammed the drawer shut, wishing he hadn’t yielded to the impulse to follow up the blank ID tag.

Then he thought: Impulse?

It had really been more like an overpowering compulsion.

The Missing Detail

Victoria Latham opened the door of her brother’s room and thrust her head inside.

“Bill, will you pu-leese get up? Your breakfast was getting cold the second time I called you.”

Bill slept on his stomach, in a sprawl that dripped his right arm over the edge of his bed. His habit was to retire in pajama bottoms, without the top. His bare, husky shoulders showed above his rumpled sheet. Six feet away, a foot stuck out.

Vicky’s request brought a response of somnolent grumblings. Waiting for something more meaningful, Vicky glanced about the room, at the table piled with textbooks and papers, the chest with but one shirt spilling from a half-open drawer, the bureau cluttered with his brush, comb, hairdressing, and a few odds and ends.

It was a sunny, cheerful room. It reflected the casual disarray, without messiness, that might be expected of a college student who studied and worked harder than he really should.

Vicky’s gaze returned with fond patience to his sleep-drugged form.

“Hey, champ! You have an early class. Math quiz. Remember?”

“Okay, okay,” Bill mumbled. “I’m awake.”

“And no sneaking another ten winks,” Vicky said. “If I spend much more time rousting you, I’ll be late to work myself. Come on, now. Show me you’re half conscious.”

Bill stirred, rolling by degrees onto his back. He struggled to a propped position on his elbows and looked at her with his right eye, his left remaining closed.

“I can’t decide which half is conscious.” He grinned.

She started to smile in return, but suddenly she faltered. Concerned, she stepped into the room and approached him. Dressed for work in a chic two-piece suit, she looked like a smart young career woman, which she was. Her evenly featured face had the attractiveness of quiet strength. Her dark eyes flashed intelligence. Her hair had a smooth, ebony sheen.

“Say, Bill, have you got a flu bug?” Her eyes picked details in his grayish, tired face. His eyes were puffy, and his lips looked dry. “Maybe Dad should have a doctor’s-eye view of you.”

“If I look beat, it’s only because I am.” His voice had a forced lightness. “Betty warned me not to add anchovies to that pepperoni and cheese pizza last night.”

“I heard you come in,” Vicky said. “You’re sure that’s it — you just didn’t sleep well?”

“Rode nightmares. Three times around the track. Now why don’t you scram and let a kid brother brush his teeth.”

She drifted toward the door as Bill sat up. He stretched, yawned, and scratched his chest.

She paused to look back at him. Reassured by his explanation of his wan appearance, her thoughts had leaped ahead to her own day, her job. A glint of excitement came to her eyes.

“Bill...”

“Yeah, Sis?”

“I had a phone call yesterday from New York. Mr. Zangler himself.”

Bill’s eyes snapped wide. “The big cheese, no less!”

“No less,” she said, eager to share good fortune with her brother. “Head of the advertising department of Fortesque Fifth Avenue.”

“Which only happens to be about the biggest store in New York.” Bill sighed. He tilted his head, imitating the imperious, and spoke down his nose to an imaginary audience: “Why, yes, gentlemen of the State Advertising Association, Miss Victoria Latham does happen to be my sister. Naturally I’ll convey your request for her to appear as main speaker when your convention is held...”

“Oh, Bill!” Vicky giggled. “The way you carry on!”

“I know Dad is happy for you. You’ve really applied yourself at the department store here. You’re smart. You’ve learned the business. You work well with people, because you honestly like them. And you’ve a cool, executive sense of judgment to top it off. You can’t help but succeed.”

“Wow! If I ever need a press agent...”

Bill looked at her with his eyes now wide awake, mirroring the family affection that ran so deeply in the Lathams. “When are you buying a plane ticket, Sis?”

“I’m not gone yet. Mr. Zangler said my ideas and copy samples were interesting, but he didn’t offer me a job wrapped in pink ribbon.”

“If he took the trouble to call,” Bill said, “it means you’re coming down to the wire.”

“He did mention the possibility of asking me to come to New York for a personal interview with him and Mr. Fortesque.”

“Then you’re as good as in,” Bill decided.

“We’ll see.”

“Just you have a cot in the kitchen in that New York apartment. Younger brother will duck a hotel bill and really do the city when vacation rolls around.”

“Younger brother will flunk a math quiz if he doesn’t get a move on.”

Bill watched the door close behind her and listened to the happy sound of her feet hurrying along the hallway.

He, Vicky, and Dad were more tightly knit than most families, he thought. Mom had died when he and Vicky were ten years younger. Dad was a sort of old-fashioned doctor who exploded the myth that all doctors get rich. Dad still practiced in the older building downtown where he had started. The waiting room was a little moth-eaten, always crowded with patients who were as short on money as they were long on germs. Dad had never learned not to roll out of bed when somebody needed him at three in the morning. He had a few well-to-do patients who sensed in him a good doctor, perhaps even a great one. But his shadow was more familiar in the tenements and slums.

I wonder what dreams and hopes he had when he was my age, Bill thought as he got out of bed and began laying out clothing.

The thing was, Dad, in trying to build a practice, had inherited the poor, those willing to trust a pink-faced young guy fresh out of residency. And the poor had been his hang-up. Dad must have surely promised himself year after year that he was going to make a change. His reputation within the profession had grown. There wasn’t a better diagnostician in the entire state.

True, Dad had a terrible bedside manner. He was brusque and short of patience with a case of self-pity. Even so, he might have had a practice in Fairfield Estates and Cowan Grove, the swankiest sections of the city.

Trouble was, a man simply couldn’t be in two places at the same time. And Dad had never been able to ignore the sick and wasted faces turned to him for help.

Trouble? Bill corrected himself. The trouble with Dad?

The trouble was that Dad couldn’t divide and redivide himself, like a monocellular being, until there was enough of him to go around in the world.

A shower and fresh clothing acted as an early-morning tonic. Bill went downstairs, moving with almost his usual vigor, leanly muscular in tan slacks, knit shirt, plaid jacket, and oxfords.

The house about him was comfortably spacious, an older brick home in a neighborhood that had maintained its quiet respectability for a generation. The homes were all two-storied, facing green lawns and sidewalks shaded by long rows of maple trees.

Bill stepped from the bottom of the stairway into the entry foyer. The deserted living room lay to his right. It contained comfortable couches, overstuffed chairs, bookcases, and a fieldstone fireplace. A fresh flower arrangement graced the drum table before the draperied triple windows that overlooked the lawn. Beyond the living room was the long, narrow, many-windowed sun parlor that had long since been converted into a den.

Mrs. Hofstetter came from the kitchen just as Bill turned into the dining room. With an exuberance he didn’t entirely feel, Bill said, “Good morning. How’s my best girl friend today?”

“Running short of patience with you, sleepyhead.” The housekeeper, in appearance, might have been legal secretary to a crotchety, conservative old lawyer. She had a spare, bony figure. Her dry face was a severe arrangement of sharp features. Her graying hair was tightly bunned at her nape. Behind pince-nez glasses her eyes were flinty, gray gimlets.

Bill remembered the boyish fear he’d had of this woman when she’d first come to work for them, years ago, not long after his mother had died.

She’d sensed his feelings immediately. “Young man,” she’d said sternly, “despite my somewhat drab appearance I am not the wicked witch from the land of Oz. You meet me halfway, and you’ll find out.”

She’d spoken truly. Before long, with her kindness, her consideration, her affectionate but no nonsense discipline, she’d assumed a role similar to that of an industrious, genteel, maiden aunt.

Bill moved to the buffet where he clattered the covered silver service but barely touched a plate with bacon and scrambled eggs.

Pouring coffee for him and herself, Mrs. Hofstetter watched him sit down and spread a napkin across his knees.

She seated herself at the end of the table and looked at his plate with a raised brow. “That bird-bite is a helping for Bill Latham?”

“Just not hungry this morning,” Bill said.

“Maybe you’re coming down with the grippe.”

Almost the same words Sis had used, except Mrs. Hofstetter couched the diagnosis in more old-fashioned terms. Bill was mildly irritated. “I haven’t caught cold, and I didn’t have those dreams because of a little nine-inch pizza.”

“Dreams?” She looked at him over the rim of her cup.

“Lulus.” Bill pecked at the small mound of softly scrambled egg. He seemed about to speak, but then he shook his head.

Mrs. Hofstetter lowered her cup to its saucer. “Come on, Bill. I know when something’s bothering you. If you need to talk about it, I’m a sturdy listening post.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, last night I saw a horrible sight in the morgue.”

“Sometimes I wonder how you take that place, Bill, the wreckage they bring in.”

“This one... a girl... I didn’t have to receive her. She was already there, in one of the refrigerated drawers. I don’t know what drove me to open it. The tag, maybe. The tag was blank. No name, not even a Jane Doe. I don’t know how such a mistake could have happened.”

He dropped his fork and all pretense of eating. He raised his napkin. Instead of touching his lips, he wiped a sudden film of hot sweat from his forehead.

“I opened the drawer,” he said, “as if I had no choice. My muscles seemed to move on their own. This girl... she was inside. Young. Dark hair. And her face...”

His jaw muscles rippled. His Adam’s apple labored as he swallowed.

“Yes, Bill?” Mrs. Hofstetter prompted.

“She had no face,” Bill said gustily. “It had been battered to something — non-human.”

With quick motion, her hand reached to cover his. “Oh, Bill! How dreadful. No wonder you didn’t rest well.”

He was remote for a moment, staring past the sweeping, filmy, tie-back dining room curtains. Then his head turned slowly. “I’m not squeamish, like a student in anatomy who’s just starting to dissect his first arm or leg. I’ve picked up the feel of the medical profession from the time I was a kid. One reason I took my evening job is because I plan to be around the sick and suffering for the rest of my life.”

He paused for a breath. “No... if it was nothing more than the sight of the girl’s face, I could take it. But it’s... it’s...” His voice trailed helplessly.

“It’s what, Bill?”

He stared at her, trying to find words to pin down a fragmentary shadow.

“I don’t know... something is wrong. A detail doesn’t fit.” His eyes dropped away, and he was silent a moment. Then he worked up a lopsided grin.

“Maybe it’s the old subconscious mind at work,” he said. “I’ve noticed something out of kilter, but I can’t put my finger on it and it’s bugging me — even when I’m asleep.”

“It will probably pop into your mind when you least expect it.”

“Sure. I’ll bet it will turn out to be a trifle. We’ll have a laugh about old Bill and his sixth sense.”

Studying him, Mrs. Hofstetter pursed her thin lips. “Why don’t you take the day off?” she suggested. “Your nose has been against the grind for such a long time. Loaf. Do just as you please. You need a day.”

“Take the day...” Bill crumpled his napkin and flung it beside his plate. “Holy moley, the math quiz!”

The morning hours slipped away, his busy schedule crowding everything else from Bill’s mind.

He met Betty for lunch in the huge, noisy university cafeteria. Carrying food-laden trays, they picked their way to a vacant spot at a long table.

“How went the formulae?” Betty asked. She looked at him directly, her eyes lingering. “The quiz must have been a real skull duster. You look pooped.”

It wasn’t the quiz that had wrung the energy out of him. But why bother her with this edge-of-the-mind drain that he couldn’t himself identify? He grinned. “I think I squeaked through even if I’m not a budding Einstein.”

They devoted themselves to eating, Betty sampling a tuna salad while Bill attacked a stuffed pepper.

She said something he didn’t quite catch in the clatter and chatter about them. His look was a question.

“I said,” she repeated, “Daddy wants you to have dinner with us Saturday. He promised to parole us in time for the Gamma Epsilon dance.”

“Dinner... sure. Sounds okay.”

She didn’t miss his slight hesitancy. Studying him, she seemed to forget her food. Her eyes held a soft warmth. “Thanks, Bill.”

He glanced up. “For what?”

“Just being a nice person, I guess. I know you and Daddy don’t always agree.”

That was true. He and Mr. Atherton got along only for Betty’s sake. They were careful to keep their discussions on friendly, neutral ground.

Their differences were basic. Life had cut and then molded them in different patterns.

Mr. Atherton was a hardheaded realist, a materialist who believed in what he could see, touch, measure. Issues were to him cut-and-dried, with yes or no answers. He was impatient with shades of gray.

He’d started out gully poor, his determination and ambition unswerving. He’d built up the largest construction company in this part of the state, and he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — understand men who refused or failed to do likewise. Not surprisingly, he measured others with the yardstick of money.

Bill had tried to be fair with Mr. Atherton. Betty’s father had many admirable traits — energy, integrity, honesty. He could fork a bulldozer on a work site, or slip a slide rule with the acumen of his best engineer.

Bill knew that Mr. Atherton would have preferred for Betty a young man who put a greater value on money and power and who was out to get what he wanted. Mr. Atherton could have understood such a young man.

But these Lathams... they were enigmatic, from Mr. Atherton’s point of view. Mr. Atherton honestly couldn’t understand the old doctor in the old office downtown. Bill knew that his own father was something of a failure in Mr. Atherton’s eyes. And Mr. Atherton harbored the suspicion, Bill sensed, that the son would end up just like the father.

Bill tried his best to keep his opinion of Mr. Atherton’s values to himself.

Betty’s father, Bill admitted, was also keeping his cool, in the knowledge that college romances often lasted no more than a semester or two. For the time being, Mr. Atherton was sidestepping the issue, careful not to provoke a crisis which might in the end never develop.

Bill accepted the truce, and there the relationship hung.

“Don’t worry about me and your father, beautiful.” Bill’s face worked itself into a wolfish leer. “It’s an old tribal rivalry. Old chief with cool daughter stirs his dandruff when young warrior comes to cave thumping chest.”

Betty laughed. “Eat your pudding.”

Bill’s afternoon today included a research stint and a lab period. Usually he breezed through such activities. He enjoyed ferreting out facts and putting them together like pieces in a puzzle.

But in the quiet of the library, surrounded by millions of thoughts written down by thousands of men, his mind wandered. He sat at a long oak table, clipboard, pencil, and open book before him. He read over several paragraphs of Pierre Duhem’s philosophical observations on physical law for the third time. The words were little more than hieroglyphics. They refused to convey their sense to his mind.

He gave up for the moment and sank back in the wooden chair. His fingers toyed with a pencil.

His attention wandered about the large reference room with its long aisles between massed bookshelves, its high, beamed ceiling flooding fluorescent light, its tall, Gothic-arched windows.

The activity at the tables about him proceeded with its usual quiet rustle. Students flipped pages, scratched notes, exchanged murmurs, pored catalog numbers from the card files, moved to seek volumes from the shelves.

Suddenly an unusual impression crept over Bill. It was a reversal of that unaccountable feeling of familiarity he’d experienced that first time in the Atherton living room and on the road to the lake resort. This time he had a distinct feeling of strangeness in his surroundings.

He looked about, picking out details that should have put the room back into its commonplace familiarity.

The pencil flitted between his nervous fingers. He wondered if any of the others felt it, this disturbance in some dark recess of the mind, this barely detectable, way-out feeling that his brain was trying to frame a thought not its own.

A thought from some outside source? Like a TV set picking up an invisible wave from a satellite hanging weightless in space?

This was the first unhurried moment he’d had all day long. In this quiet surrounding his brain was receptive...

A jarring awareness of the trend of his thoughts struck him. His lips pulled tight. Cool it, he chided himself. It’s because of those weird dreams last night when someone invisible was trying to tell you something and you were struggling in dark pits, trying to understand... That’s all there is to it. Just the memory of some bad dreams.

He concentrated on Duhem’s complicated passages with fresh determination, and M Duhem began making some sense at last.

Because of his schedule, Bill had to eat dinner earlier than his father and Vicky, except on weekends. He preferred Mrs. Hofstetter’s food, but he didn’t like to put her to extra trouble. So he usually arrived at the hospital complex in time to eat in the commissary.

Today his six-year-old fastback rolled onto the hospital grounds at the hour of twilight. On the way to his space in the employees’ parking lot, he swung past the emergency entrance. Three ambulances crouched on the cement apron, ready for service.

Bill took some comfort in the sight of the idle vehicles. Frankly and unashamedly, he didn’t get any kicks from the ambulance runs. Sometimes he passed his feelings off with a crack about the runs giving him some relief from the boneyard. But the hospital personnel understood; they all faced similarly unpleasant duties. They didn’t need to be told how Bill really felt, or any nurse, intern, or doctor, for that matter. Each time he had to turn on a siren, it meant a human being was in trouble.

With three on the line, it was possible that his ambulance duty would be light this evening.

He parked his car, got out, and strolled toward the side entrance with three heavy textbooks under his arm.

He had a pleasant dinner in the company of two nurses and an intern, taking a bit of good-natured kidding about doing his homework in the morgue.

He punched the time clock outside the employees’ locker room ten minutes early, and moved off through the labyrinth of vaultlike corridors, exchanging nods and hellos with passing doctors and nurses.

He was outside briefly as he crossed to the morgue wing. Entering, he noted that the small red light over the wooden door to his left was on. It meant that an autopsy was in progress, and that no one was to be admitted. Bill wondered if Dr. Josiah Hornaday was working late, or if some other doctor headed the team that was in there cutting, probing, dissecting, determining the cause of death of a human creature.

Bill crossed the anteroom and pushed through the swinging wicket of the railed-off secretarial office. He parked his books on the corner of the desk. He stood a moment, indulging a yawn. The loss of sleep last night was catching up, he realized.

During his first week of employment, Bill had conducted his own time study. Then he had arranged his janitorial duties in a routine that stretched the minutes. Empty the ashtrays, then the wastebaskets. Dust the furniture. Water potted plants and arrange magazines on the table in the anteroom. Then vacuum, check supplies, and, lastly, swab down the boneyard.

But tonight the gears didn’t want to mesh. He wandered across the anteroom, looking at the red signal. His eyes strayed to the sliding door at the end of the hallway. Was there a connection between the autopsy and the nameless girl?

The question assumed a reasonless sense of urgency in his mind. A reluctant frown etched his face as his feet carried him along the hallway. He opened the sliding door, stepped through, and closed it behind him.

Visibly, the boneyard was the same sterile, functional place. Bone-white light. Stainless steel equipment. And yet it had changed subtly. It seemed strangely warm. Rather, it had lost its suggestion of coldness. For Bill, it had lost that alien feeling. The room seemed to welcome him, to have waited for him.

He was at the refrigerated drawer almost without knowing that he had moved. He heard the soft sound of his own breathing, the only breakage of the deep, antiseptic silence.

The plastic tag was still blank. Was it possible they’d taken her to autopsy without filling in the ID?

Bill saw his hand touch the metal handle. He heard the drawer slither open. The girl was still inside. Bill’s reaction was not so immediate or reflexive as it had been last night. He didn’t slam the drawer closed. Instead, he looked at the figure with coolly clinical eyes.

And then, just as Mrs. Hofstetter had predicted, the detail that had bugged him popped into the forefront of his mind. It was right in front of his eyes, as it had been last night.

The yellow dress. If standard, legal procedure had been followed, the girl should be swathed in one of the white, muslin-like shrouds, not the dress.

Bill was rigid with dismay and shock. It didn’t seem possible. And yet everything indicated that someone had somehow slipped an unknown body into the morgue.

A Shocking Realization

Dr. Josiah Hornaday came into the anteroom still wearing green cap and gown. He was a tall, thin, slightly stooped man with a long, lantern jaw and a long, thin nose. His thinning gray hair partially exposed a long, narrow skull that caught the light.

So many sharp features might have added up to a knifelike total. But Dr. Hornaday’s large, brooding eyes softened everything else about him, giving him a sort of Lincolnesque aspect.

He sighed with relief that the job in the autopsy room was over. With quirked brows, he gave his head a short shake as if asking himself how a man ever chose pathology in the first place.

He noticed that the lights had been turned on in his private office. He heard the sounds of movements and assumed Bill Latham was the source.

As he thought about Bill, a fight flickered in Dr. Hornaday’s eyes. He had known Bill from birth and had occasional glimpses over the years of William Latham’s boy growing up.

It was Dr. Hornaday who had offered Bill the job here. Actually, the arrangement had solved a minor labor problem. Like everything else around a large hospital, the maintenance force was chronically shorthanded. Bill’s efficient tours of duty helped pull the ends together. Dr. Hornaday wondered sometimes how they had managed without him.

Fine young man, Dr. Hornaday thought as he shuffled with his long, loose stride across the anteroom. Not a flash in the pan, but a steady young man whose mind held what it absorbed. He might even make a better doctor than his father, though he’d have to go some to do that.

Then the train of thought broke as Dr. Hornaday reached his office door. A frown burrowed across his high, ridged forehead. Across the office, Bill Latham had opened a filing cabinet and was digging through it with the blunt energy of an air hammer.

Dr. Hornaday cleared his throat in a courteous warning.

Bill’s head snapped around. At the sight of the man framed in the doorway, Bill’s breath was a gusty burst.

“Am I glad to see you, Doctor!”

Hornaday craned his neck to look at the file. “What’s going on here?”

“I’m looking for something in the records.”

“So I would assume — and not very neatly, either.” Bill’s eyes followed Hornaday’s gaze at the mussed-up file. “To tell you the truth, sir, I didn’t mean to make a mess. But I was getting a little desperate.”

Hornaday had ambled over. He reached and thumbed the protruding file folders idly. “Now, what’s this all about, Bill?”

“There’s a... a girl in one of the compartments.”

“There are several cadavers in the compartments,” Dr. Hornaday said.

“But this one is — different.”

Dr. Hornaday’s brooding eyes turned toward Bill’s face. “Different? In what way?”

“For one thing, the tag on her drawer is blank.”

“Impossible.”

“My own first impression, sir. But it’s true. She’s also clothed in a dress — not a shroud.”

Dr. Hornaday’s tensile fingers restored the folders to some order. He slid the file cabinet closed. “Bill, if I didn’t know you better...”

“That makes two of us,” Bill said. “But why don’t you see for yourself? Not a thing about her in the records, but, believe me, she’s back there.”

“At least your suggestion makes some sense. I guess my dinner can wait a little longer.”

Bill’s quick stride led the way. He paused only to fling open the sliding door. Then his footsteps knocked soft echoes from the vinyl flooring as he rushed to the bank of refrigerated compartments. He bent slightly, grasped the handle, and slid the drawer open.

With a shallow breath, he stood looking down at the pitiful wreckage of her face.

He felt Dr. Hornaday’s presence beside him. He assumed the doctor’s moment of silence was due to shock rivaling his own. But when he turned his head, he saw that Hornaday was looking at him, having taken but a brief glance at the drawer.

The doctor’s long face seemed to gather in its sharpest lines. His eyes were darkening thunderclouds.

“Bill,” Hornaday said, too quietly, “if you were a freshman pledging a fraternity, I might excuse a hell-week assignment. But for this, I see absolutely no mitigating circumstance!”

The force of Dr. Hornaday’s delivery was numbing to Bill.

“Let me point out, Doctor, that I didn’t put the body where it is or foul up the records.”

“Of all the brazen, idiotic...” Then something shifted in Hornaday’s eyes. He took a backward step. He looked from Bill’s face to the open drawer, then back again.

“I preach self-control and try to practice it,” he said on a heavy breath. “I’m reminding myself of your past record and a lifetime of friendship. But you’ve got about five seconds to explain this silly joke!”

“Doctor, if you’ll only examine what’s in the drawer...”

“You know the compartment is quite empty!”

Bill felt a flash of heat, then a murky coldness. It was his turn to stare. The soft eyes and doleful, angular face before him were serious.

Bill ripped his eyes from Hornaday’s features and strained the edge of his vision toward the interior of the compartment.

She was still there, of course, in all her pathetic loneliness.

Why would Hornaday deny the obvious fact of her existence?

As a joke? No. Never. Not Hornaday.

Because Hornaday was a part of the conspiracy to sneak her in? No. Never. Not Hornaday.

Hornaday — and Bill went sick with the discovery — must have gone a little crazy. That would explain it. Hornaday had faced so many on the autopsy table that his mind simply refused to see another one right now.

As if some unseen force were nudging his thinking, Bill decided to change his tactic. He needed time, for whatever it was that he was supposed to do. It wouldn’t help to have Hornaday at odds.

A crafty smile, not quite normal to him, wreathed Bill’s lips. “Okay, Doctor. You win. You were right the first time. I was pulling your leg. You’ll have to admit I really had you out of sight for a minute.”

Under the weight of Hornaday’s heavy frown, Bill turned and slid the drawer closed.

Hornaday cleared his throat. “And what was the reason for this act?”

Careful now... Hornaday is a lean, poised cat...

The warning was a vibration, a sensory experience rather than an actual thought. With it, a sly cover-up slipped full-blown into Bill’s mind. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Doctor. But the reason was a good one. I was acting in the interest of science.”

“Really?” The word was frigid. “In what way?”

Bill turned from the now-closed drawer. “We’ve been doing some experiments in parapsychology and I just had to test your reaction to my power of suggestion.” A faint, small part of his mind marveled at the ease with which the he fell from his lips — almost as if a stranger had borrowed his vocal cords.

Hornaday’s eyes narrowed. “Young Dr. Patrick Connell’s class is where these experiments have been taking place?”

“We’ve been investigating...”

“Yes, yes I can imagine!” Hornaday’s mouth tightened. “Him and his ideas about nailing down psychic forces! They’re not exactly viruses to be isolated and identified, you know.”

“Yes, sir, but...”

“But what?”

“For a long time,” Bill ventured, “the only thing we knew about viruses was that they are filterable. We couldn’t trap them, couldn’t see them in the best microscopes of that day. ‘Virus’ was a word for something we couldn’t be sure even existed.”

Hornaday’s face endured an angry twitch. “I’d expect you to defend Pat Connell. He’s also your faculty adviser, isn’t he?”

Bill nodded. “But the little experiment was my own idea. Professor Connell didn’t suggest it.”

“Perhaps his methods did.” Hornaday’s flat, bony chest rose and fell with a long breath. “I’m far from satisfied, Bill. I’m going to think some more about this business here tonight.”

With that, Hornaday turned, his slew-footed stride carrying him across the barren, sterile room. Bill flinched slightly as the sliding door banged shut behind Hornaday.

The usual deathly silence returned, muffling Bill with a sense of aloneness.

Bill stood near the coldly impersonal surgical table, not moving for several minutes. Now and then, the silence was broken from the distance, clues to what Hornaday was doing. A whisper in the water piping told of Hornaday’s freshening up in the small locker room wedged beside the autopsy room. The faintest clang of a locker door drifted back. The opening and closing of the front door was unheard, but Hornaday by this time must have left the building.

Bill had so far avoided the final possible explanation for Hornaday’s actions. But he couldn’t put it off any longer, as much as the mere thought chilled him. Was it his mind — not Hornaday’s — acting up? Was there really a faceless, nameless girl in the compartment?

Unaware of the gesture, he put a steadying hand on the edge of the surgical table as he turned his head slowly. His eyes brooded on the bank of refrigerated drawers, one in particular. He seemed to need time to gather himself.

When he moved, it was with a snapping of muscles. He crossed the distance and opened the compartment with a quick, hard tug on the handle.

A warmth touched his muscles. Not a detail had shifted. His mind grasped at the fact. Dreams shifted like smoke on a windy day. If he’d flipped, surely some small detail would have altered from one time to the next.

The burring of a bell jarred through to him. He swung about, his eyes losing their glaze as his mind connected. Bell, emergency, ambulance...

The emergency was one of those that might have been much worse. Two cars had collided at Monterey and U.S. 49. The smashed-up cars partially blocked the intersection while a squad car policeman directed traffic around them. Glass, water, and oil littered the street. But passengers and drivers had escaped serious injury. A young woman, bruised and bleeding from a superficial scalp cut, was more hysterical than hurt. Dr. Barney Childers had her fairly quiet by the time they trundled her into Emergency.

Bill came out, got in the ambulance long enough to back it into its parking slot, and then walked across the lawn toward the morgue.

Someone was standing outside the doorway. Bill stopped short at the sight of his father.

“Hi, Bill.”

“Dad! Anything wrong at home?”

“No, not at all. Mrs. Hofstetter should be turning on the dishwasher about this time, and I imagine Victoria is bruising her portable, practicing copy-writing for Fortesque Fifth Avenue.”

He gripped Bill’s shoulder briefly as Bill turned to open the door. “I just wanted to see you, that’s all.”

Bill stepped aside for his father to enter, then followed.

Dr. Latham’s robust, hearty presence pervaded the pleasant anteroom. He surveyed the surroundings. “I still think the architect did a great job when this little wing was tacked on. Additions can turn out to be eyesores, but not this one.”

“You didn’t take the trouble to come over and extol the beauties of the boneyard,” Bill said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I bumped into Josh Hornaday a little while ago, Bill.”

Crossing the office. Bill had raised the top section of a chrome smokestand to lift out and empty the ash receptacle. At his fathers words, the silvery metal top clattered back in place.

“I see.” Bill straightened slowly and looked at his father. “I guess that figures.”

“Bill—” Dr. Latham’s eyes smoldered with concern. “Hornaday was pretty much upset. What happened over here?”

Bill’s quick irritation with Hornaday edged the tone of his voice. “What was Dr. Hornaday’s tale?” he countered.

“Tale?” Dr. Latham drew a breath. “The insinuation you put on the word hardly becomes you. You know Josh Hornaday better than that. Anything he mentioned was for your good, not a gossip’s pleasure.”

Bill knew this was true-if Hornaday was his normal self.

“Just what did Dr. Hornaday say?”

“That you were—” the older man endured a difficult moment — “acting strangely.”

Bill recoiled slightly. “You’re a doctor. What do you think? How do I look to you?”

Bill hadn’t intended his words to be quite so belligerent. The relationship between him and his father had always been man-to-man, lay-it-on-the-line. For a second he had the feeling that a shadow was slipping between them.

“You do look a little tired, Bill.”

“Well, I’m not. I feel great.”

His father waited a patient moment for the air to settle. “Bill, whatever is troubling you...”

“Please, Dad,” Bill said on a full sigh, “don’t let Hornaday’s imagination run away with you.”

The old, stout shoulders moved in a vague gesture. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

“Sure, Dad. Hornaday — he’s okay. But he can make mistakes like any of the rest of us.”

“I’m sure he would admit that.” Dr. William Latham hesitated, knuckling day’s-end stubble on his jawline. “How about letting me have a look at the compartment that raised the fuss?”

“You want to...” Bill measured the words.

“Just mark it up to the curiosity of an old sawbones.” His father was trying to pass it off lightly. “Okay?”

A short laugh burst from Bill. “Be my guest!”

Leading the way along the corridor, Bill felt his spirits rise. The emergency run and his father’s unexpected appearance had kept him from immediately facing a serious and depressing problem.

The problem of Hornaday. The quirk that kept Hornaday from seeing the girl could only mean that Hornaday himself had received her. Then Hornaday’s mind had refused the experience.

And the problem of the identity of the girl — and the unpleasant revelation of Hornaday’s condition.

It was all going to be a little heartbreaking, and Bill’s dad might help in a way he hadn’t dreamed of.

Bill slid the door on its tracks and courteously waited for his father to pass. They moved through the chill, white silence of the boneyard, his father a few steps in the lead.

“Help yourself.” The near emptiness of the huge, high-ceilinged room caught Bill’s words with the suggestion of an echo. “Third drawer from the farther end, middle row. B-three.”

Inured to unpleasant sights by his years of medical practice, Bill’s father opened the compartment without hesitation.

Standing to one side and slightly behind, Bill watched his father glance at the open compartment. One look was all he seemed to need. But before he turned, Dr. Latham obeyed an antiseptic instinct developed over a lifetime. He idly picked up a contaminate fuzzy of muslin lint that had collected in a little ball on the slab.

His hand and arm reached right through the girl’s body... out again...

He straightened, rolled the lint fuzzy between his fingers, and glanced about for a receptacle in which to throw it away.

Bill choked back a scream. He was dizzy, as if he’d fainted for a second without falling off his feet. His body tremored between hot and cold.

A thought surfaced: Spare Dad, if you can... don’t hit him with it, not yet...

Bill turned, using all his strength of will to keep his movements normal. He managed to reach the utility closet on feet and legs that felt nothing. He opened the small door and groped for the mop and bucket. It was an act of hiding, of stealing a moment to collect himself and compose his face into a mask.

“Satisfied, Dad? Now, why don’t you forget Hornaday and leave me to my chores?” Bill plopped the mop into the bucket and closed the closet with his other hand, keeping his back toward his father.

“It’s not Hornaday I’m worried about,” his father said. “Hornaday isn’t my flesh and blood.”

“Then why worry about anything?” Bill had to turn at last.

His father was standing at the end of the surgical table, one hand resting on its edge. His eyes gave Bill the desperate feeling that his father could see through the flimsy mask.

“Bill...” His father struggled to frame a question wholly hateful to him. “Tell me... straight out... on the line... do you see anything in that compartment?”

Bill forced himself to look across the room. His father hadn’t yet closed the drawer. She lay there, as real as death.

Somehow Bill dredged up a faint resemblance of his old grin. “I think,” he said, “I’m safe in saying that no material substance is in that compartment.”

“Hornaday seemed to think that at first you were...”

“Hornaday shouldn’t be such a thin-skinned, hungry-looking old wolf.” Bill carried the mop and bucket the few steps to the stainless steel basin. He turned on the hot water tap. “Why don’t you just forget it, Dad? You’ve plenty on your mind without running up and down Hornaday’s molehills.”

Without turning his head, Bill cut his eyes and watched his father move to the compartment and close it.

The weight of his father’s eyes returned once more across the distance of the room. “Then it was nothing more than a gag, a silly experiment suggested by something that rubbed off in one of Dr. Pat Connell’s classes?”

“Didn’t Hornaday say that?” Bill countered.

Dr. Latham’s grin was an older, and at the moment less strained, version of his son’s. “Okay — and say, Bill...”

“Yes, Dad?”

“How about judging the annoyance gently? One of these days you’ll have a musclehead of your own, and you’ll know how it feels when you think something is haywire.”

“Sure, Dad.”

He watched the hallway receive his father, and the door slide closed. He pulled in a breath and held it, giving his father time to leave the building.

The water ran, forgotten. Little white ghosts of steam wisped up from the long, deep sink.

Bill crept to the compartment and touched the handle. His hand refused the command of his brain. He was helpless for a long, empty minute. Then his trembling muscles reacted, and he eased the drawer open.

He stood beside the girl in a crouch, simply looking at her, breathing in and out.

The dismal thought was reflected in his face: Why don’t you be a nice chick and just go away?

Weighing the Evidence

In a sense, Dr. Patrick Connell was a multiple personality. As is often the case with the man who puts on no false fronts, Connell varied according to the eye of the beholder. The image of the man depended on his observer’s viewpoint and prejudices.

In physical appearance he might have been mistaken for a graduate student. He was lean, fit, clean-shaven. His evenly featured face was friendly, alert, with quick, snapping gray eyes, the whole capped by a nondescript carpet of lank brown hair.

To the crusty traditionalist, Dr. Connell seemed like a dangerous young liberal. To the far-left radical, he was a monstrous moderate.

Young women employees of Crownover — secretaries, infirmary nurses, and such — regarded him as the most eligible bachelor on campus.

Students who made it in his psychology classes and parapsychology workshops were convinced that Connell was Pavlov and Dr. J. B. Rhine rolled into one.

He was a tough, tenacious, aggressive opponent on a tennis court and last year had placed a tight second in the faculty handball tournament that Dean of Men Cruikshank had organized.

He lived quietly in a sunny apartment just off campus. The building was about five years old, designed for the middle-class tenant, featuring a sidewalk canopy and small, balcony-like terraces that thrust like shelves from the sides of the six stories.

Furnished with an eye to comfort rather than display, his apartment consisted of a living room with sliding glass doors yielding on the terrace, a dining alcove, kitchen, and two bedrooms.

Connell had put the master bedroom to use as a study. It had accumulated the not unpleasant impression of bookish disarray. A pair of large leather chairs, studded at the edges with brass upholstery nails, invited the visitor to sit and talk long and learnedly. At various times these chairs had felt the weight of top men in the field as well as that of students. Connell’s working seat was a swivel chair behind a massive old mahogany desk, which contained both a typewriter and a tape recorder. The furnishings appeared to have been purchased secondhand at an auction, which happened to be true.

The walls were a cluttered repository of shelves and cases stuffed with books and papers. The most prized of these was Connell’s scrapbook collections of newspaper reports from all over the world. The stories had one thing in common: Each dealt with an event in the psychic realm for which material science had no ready explanation. They ran the gamut, from the shenanigans of poltergeists in “haunted” houses to the account of a boy in India who could “see,” although doctors agreed that a rare disease had left him without eyesight.

Connell enjoyed letter writing, and he corresponded with colleagues and laymen in several countries. Hardly a week passed without his mail turning up another clipping or two for his scrapbooks. Most of the stories he dismissed as the results of somebody’s overactive imagination, a publicity stunt conceived by a faker, or a clever trick. But there was that very small percentage — the woman in London waking in the dead of night, overpowered with the certainty that her sister’s car had just plunged off the road in distant Idaho... the discovery, two days later, of a touring English woman’s car in a Rocky Mountain chasm — the rescue of a boy from the surf off Point Marie, Florida by a man who explained that “something just told me that I should hurry right down to that stretch of deserted beach.”

Always those challenging little thorns. They might be compared, Connell liked to point out, to the scattered bugs in Newton’s theories that persisted until Einstein glimpsed a time and space that weren’t absolute.

This evening Pat Connell’s thought was not of psychic forces. His electric portable typewriter had suddenly developed the habit of wildly spacing each time a key was touched. Connell had the thing upended on his desk, the bottom cover removed. He was trying to solve the mysteries of its innards with a small screwdriver, tweezers, and the poking beam of a flashlight.

He was just beginning to get the hang of the interworking parts when the phone rang.

His face shadowed with irritation. Then he swung the swivel chair in a quarter turn and picked up the phone.

“Patrick Connell’s residence.”

“Dr. Connell, this is Bill Latham.”

Connell’s annoyance vanished. “Well, hello, Bill. How are you?”

“Not so hot.”

Pat sat a little straighter. “What’s the trouble?”

The line hummed with Bill’s hesitation. “It’s a little hard to explain. If you’re not too busy...” The hanging phrase was more an entreaty than a suggestion.

Disturbed by Bill’s tone, Connell dismissed the typewriter with an impersonal glance. “Nothing that can’t wait for a while.”

“Then I’d like to see you as soon as possible.”

“Sure. By all means, come on by.”

“I’d rather you came over,” Bill said. “I’m on duty, and this thing... it’s here.”

“The boneyard?”

“Yes,” Bill said.

Connell itched with curiosity, but he checked his questions. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

“Thanks, Pat.” The voice in the earpiece cracked with relief.

“For what? I haven’t done anything yet.” Connell was shoving out of his chair as he cradled the phone.

In the desertion of the secretary’s office, Bill heard the connection break. He lowered the phone slowly, looking at it. Vaguely, he regretted the call. But after the last look in B-3, he’d had to talk to somebody.

He’d thought of Dad first, but he balked at the idea of tearing him with the truth. Dad’s shoulders always carried more than their own share, anyway.

Hornaday? Nope. Bill couldn’t be sure of his superior’s reaction, of what Hornaday might do. Ringing in Hornaday might make it even tougher for Dad.

The choice, for the moment, had narrowed to Pat Connell. Bill was reasonably sure that Pat would look at him both as a friend and also as a detached scientist.

Bill picked up the dustcloth he’d dropped on the secretary’s desk when he’d nerved himself into making the call. He moved about the office, swiping the surface of the furniture. The task busied his hands and helped tick away the seconds.

Every few minutes he went to the front door and took a look for Connell. Peering through the heavy glass pane the fourth time, he saw the hurrying shadow outside.

Bill flung open the door when Pat was still half a dozen paces away.

“Hi.” Bill’s greeting wasn’t quite a babble of relief.

Connell’s eyes flicked a quick examination as he stepped inside. Bill was grayish pale, owl-eyed.

“What’s the trouble?” Pat asked quietly.

Bill closed the door and slumped back against it for a second. His head jerked in a short shake. “Now that you’re here, I hardly know where to start.”

“Try the beginning,” Connell suggested.

Bill looked along the hallway to the sliding door shielding the boneyard. “Last night... one of the cadaver compartments was tagged.”

“Oh,” Pat murmured. “It was someone you knew.”

A brittle imitation of a laugh gusted from Bill’s lips. “I wish I did. I just wish that’s all there was to it.”

Connell stood by quietly, waiting for Bill to get his thoughts out in his own way.

“The tag — it was blank,” Bill said. “My first thought was that somebody had goofed. Normally, I would have checked the record. Finding none, I’d have called Dr. Hornaday and told him that a mistake had been made”

“Normally?” Pat picked out an isolated word. “Are you implying you didn’t act normally?”

Bill’s face worked with a touch of despair. “I guess I am. At least, from the time I first looked at the tag I haven’t felt normal.”

“Just what did you do?”

“I opened the compartment. I had the urge to open it, the feeling that something would be terribly wrong if I didn’t.”

Connell watched Bill shuffle to a rattan chair and sink to its edge. Bill sat cracking his knuckles, staring at the carpet, looking up at last.

“Terribly wrong,” he husked. “Wildest bit... like somebody without a voice is trying to tell me something.”

Connell drifted across the silent reception room toward Bill. Pat recognized the onset of a prize case of heebie-jeebies when he saw it. He didn’t belabor Bill with the usual platitudes to take it easy, get hold of yourself, it’s all in your imagination. Instead, he merely touched Bill’s shoulder with calm strength. “How about keeping it chronological? The events as they happened? You opened the drawer. What did you see?”

“A girl.”

“Young? Old?”

“Young — I think” Bill worked up a dry-throated swallow. “She was slender. Her hair looked young. Dark. Glossy. Not gray.”

“Didn’t her face clue you?”

The shoulder beneath Connell’s hand twitched. “Did you have to ask?” Bill said. “It was all messed up, like she’d been in a terrible accident.”

“Rough.” With casual motion, Connell idled to a nearby chair and rested on its arms. Clearly he knew that the sight of the girl in itself hadn’t plunged Bill into his present state. Patiently Connell waited.

“Rough,” Bill mumbled in echo. “Good word to describe my night and day today. Then finally it hit me. The girl is wearing a dress, yellow linen, with two little rhinestones at the neck. But a corpse in one of the compartments is always shrouded, like in a white sheet. So I decided that she’d been slipped in.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Then I—” Bill ran his fingers through his hair. He looked distantly embarrassed. “I even had a wild idea about Dr. Hornaday. He couldn’t see the girl. He opened the drawer, but she simply wasn’t there to him. I wondered if he’d flipped, from working so many autopsies, if his mind had suddenly refused to admit another.”

“Sounds possible,” Connell said mildly.

Bill turned his head and looked directly at Pat. The suppressed black fire seemed to burst in the depths of Bill’s eyes.

“My father — he didn’t see her, either,” Bill said miserably. “He came over later, after Hornaday told him I wasn’t acting... quite right.”

“That would seem to answer the question about Hornaday,” Pat admitted. “How’d you lay it off with the two of them?”

“Passed it off as a goofy experiment,” Bill said. “But I don’t think either of them bought the explanation. Maybe a down payment.”

Connell slapped his thighs and straightened up. “Let’s have a look.”

“It’s drawer B-three.”

“Let us have a look. You can’t look, parked there on your spinal column.”

Bill’s fingers curled and uncurled on the slender bamboo arms of the chair. Then with a final pressure he pushed himself upright. He led the way through the corridor and into the cold glare of the boneyard, with the heaviness of a man walking his last mile.

Within arm’s length of B-3, Bill dragged to a stop. Connell was a patient, immovable shadow beside him.

“Bill,” Connell said, after the lapse of a long minute, “I know how you feel about opening that drawer again. My impulse is to do it for you. And I will, if you want me to.”

Bill rubbed his fingers across his forehead. “No, I understand. It won’t get any easier from here on out, if I start showing yellow at the start.”

“Nothing ever does,” Connell said.

Bill touched the handle. The drawer glided open. He forced himself to look at the image of the girl. “Well, Pat?”

“I don’t see a thing,” Connell said.

Bill, without looking away from the drawer, laid his hand on Connell’s shoulder. The gesture seemed unconcerned. Actually, Bill was borrowing strength for his sagging knees.

“Of course.” Bill’s whisper was a part of the effort to breathe. “The drawer is empty.”

“I didn’t say that,” Pat said. “The air in the compartment is made up of billions upon billions of atoms, each as complex in structure and motion as the solar system itself. I don’t see them, either.”

Bill drew his hand from Connell’s shoulder. “This is no time for classroom speculations.”

“Got any better tools?”

“You know what I mean!”

“I know exactly,” Connell said. “You want a cut-and-dried answer. You want to duck the fact that we human beings are as ignorant as we are. You want a nice, neat theory pieced together out of the, bits and pieces of stuff we call knowledge. But” — Connell shrugged — “even if I had the answer it might sound as ridiculous as the idea of a round earth once did to the man conditioned from birth to a flat world.”

Connell looked at the compartment with the naked wish in his eyes that something was there. “I can’t be dishonest with you, not you, of all my students and friends. You want an answer in black and white terms — and I can’t give it to you.”

“Something is in the drawer,” Bill said, “or I’m... nuts.”

“Why must that be true?”

“There isn’t any other answer,” Bill cried.

“Not according to our present knowledge,” Connell agreed. “But what is our present knowledge? The knowledge of a thousand years ago was the present knowledge of that day — and a lot of those fellows were certain they’d found the answers.”

Bill turned away. He gripped the edge of the surgical table, his shoulders drawn with his storming thoughts.

“Hornaday would see a clear answer. He’d say I’ve blown my stack.” Bill wrestled the words out. “Even Dad...”

“Hornaday, yes,” Connell said. “He’s of that turn of mind. But your father — well, I’m not so sure his mind is so stifled with knowledge. He’s smart enough to glimpse how much we don’t know.”

Bill stared at the wall. “And you, Pat?”

“What’s the evidence?” Pat’s voice was almost droning in its steadiness and calm. “You see the girl. You, and no one else. Since she isn’t there in material form, the handiest explanation is that you’re mentally haywire. But that simply doesn’t include all of the evidence.”

“Is there any more?” Bill asked bitterly.

“You bet there is!” Connell gave the compartment a slight push. It closed easily on its oiled rollers. “Unable to explain it, some of our learned colleagues would dismiss the knotty point as unimportant. But the fact remains, there’s a big flaw in the case against you.”

“I’d sure like to hear it.”

“It’s right in front of our noses,” Connell said. “At first glance, the evidence indicates that you’ve suffered a hallucination. But if we consider all the evidence, a big question rises.”

Connell moved a couple of steps nearer Bill. “As we understand it, a hallucination is a symptom of a severe mental illness. An illness of that degree always gives advance warning. The patient’s behavior pattern changes and declines over a period of time. Do you follow me, Bill?”

“Every word you say.” Bill’s tone took on a fervent quality.

“Okay. Boil it down to your individual case. You’ve been surrounded by medically trained people all your life. Could you have reached the point of hallucinating without someone around you detecting the earlier signs, the danger signals? Frankly, I think it would be impossible.”

A glint of hope filled Bill’s features. “Pat...”

Connell held up a hand. “Now wait a minute. I’m not dumb enough to give you an all-wise answer. I’m just trying to admit all the evidence, not duck it because it throws us face to face with the unknown. Not ignore it because it raises questions beyond the range of our present-day scientific experience. I’m laying it on the line, that’s all. No one saw any danger signals because there weren’t any. Even now, your fears and questions about your sanity have a healthy, normal ring.”

Bill slowly released his grip on the edge of the table. “How do you explain the image in B-three?”

“How did primitive man explain lightning?” Connell said, rather shortly. “But did his inability to explain make the lightning non-existent?”

Bill knew the rhetorical question didn’t require an answer. He watched every flicker of expression on Connell’s face, the deepening of the eyes, the tightening of lip muscles.

“The admission of all the evidence,” Pat said, “tangles us in two possibilities. First, your case should prove unique in the history of mental illnesses — or we have here—” he seemed hesitant to take the step over an invisible, unknown edge — “a classic, authentic experience in the area of parapsychology.”

His words hung. The chill in the morgue seemed to drop several degrees.

Bill’s gaze eased toward the closed, impassive front of B-3. “Like ESP? Extrasensory perception?”

“Like a psychic force at work,” Pat agreed. “And, frankly, I wish she would have picked on someone else. Say, in Denmark, or Argentina.”

“I’d go along with that,” Bill said wryly. “But I guess even Galileo was bugged when he peeped through his telescope and saw the wild rings around the planet Saturn.”

Connell slapped him lightly on the shoulder, clearly pleased at the way Bill was wearing, enduring, and hanging onto a stabilizing sense of humor.

“My theory may be way off base, Bill.”

“I know. But we’ll grab hold until we can think of something better.”

Together they crossed the boneyard. Bill opened the sliding door and let Pat precede him into the hallway.

Then he closed the door and fell in step beside Pat.

“I wonder who she is... was,” Bill said.

Connell nodded, coming to a stop when they reached the reception room. “As a psychic experience, she certainly raises questions. Where she came from.”

“Why she picked on me,” Bill said.

“How long the phenomenon will last,” Pat added.

“How she managed it.”

“And why.”

They stopped speaking in the same instant and stood looking at each other.

“I get the feeling,” Bill said, “that she was a kind of nice girl. Tenderhearted. Generous.” His hand crept up to his temple in a vague motion. “Somehow, I get the idea she suffered and doesn’t like to see people suffer.”

“The experience is a warning?”

“Yes,” Bill nodded. “Come to think of it, I guess it is. Something is about to happen, but it can be prevented. B-three is trying to make the future a little different for somebody.”

Pat ran his fingers through his lank brown hair. “Ambulance...” he mused. “Accident... battered face... could there be a connection?”

“Wish I knew,” Bill said heavily. “I sure wish I knew. Gives me the feeling of being on a long limb. If I’m supposed to prevent something, I wish I knew who, how, what, when, where.”

“Maybe you’ll find out.”

Bill turned to look in the direction of the bone-yard. “I don’t think so, Pat. I get the feeling she’s done all she can. Somehow — if I’m to understand — I’ve got to meet her halfway. And I don’t think I have very much time left to do it in.”

Sudden Awakenings

Dr. Latham came into the dining room with his face a ruddy glow and his iron gray hair curling damply at the ends from his morning shower.

Victoria was already at the table, gulping orange juice and toast. “Hi, Dad. You look just great this morning.”

Moving to the buffet, Dr. Latham smiled. Everything, the whole world, looked great to Vicky these days. And looking at her bright face, the early sunlight catching in her dark hair, Dr. Latham himself felt pretty good.

He poured a cup of Mrs. Hofstetter’s robust coffee and turned to sit down at the end of the table. The morning paper lay folded beside his plate. He picked it up, snapped it open, but he didn’t look at it right away.

“Any further word from Fortesque Fifth Avenue yesterday?”

“Nope — but any day now. I do declare, you’re as anxious about the job as I am.”

“Just shoving the young bird out of the nest.” Dr. Latham laughed. Affectionately he watched Vicky dash the last of the juice into her mouth. “Young lady, a doctor should have the healthiest family in town. So take time to taste or you’ll ruin your digestion.”

“These days I could digest nails.” Victoria tossed her napkin beside her plate and jumped up. She paused beside her father to give him a quick hug and peck on the cheek. “Just you take time to eat. You’re not an entire medical squad, you know.”

Her parting gesture was a flip on his earlobe. “Got to run. Big doings. I don’t want any loose ends at the store when Fortesque Fifth Avenue whistles.” Dr. Latham watched her dash to the cloak closet in the foyer and peel out a light coat for the autumn morning. She flung it capelike about her shoulders and blew a kiss back as the front door closed behind her.

Her departure left Dr. Latham with a sudden awareness of the quiet in the house about him.

He picked up his coffee and sipped slowly. Vicky and Bill — children no longer. The day was just after the morrow when his crack about the nest would be a fact.

He looked at the back of his hand. It was still firm and steady. Was it possible he’d used up so many years?

His gaze drifted to the stretch of lawn visible through the sun-glowing windows. How long before the grass would be bruised by the racing feet of grandchildren? A skinned knee to doctor... a sleepy head nestled against his chest as he told a story of witches and gingerbread houses...

The moment was suddenly empty, as it hadn’t been for a long time. A wisp of the future crossed his mind, he and a child talking. Is that Grandmama’s picture on your bureau, Grandfather?... Yes, child... She’s pretty, Grandfather... She is indeed, child... Did she get sick?... Yes, child, she went away from us...

And I, he thought, was so helpless — little better than a witch doctor — against the adversary of cancer, when it struck my own wife.

“Good morning, Doctor.” Mrs. Hofstetter’s greeting snapped his mood. He glanced up. The spare-boned housekeeper, entering from the kitchen, was carrying a serving of grapefruit sections.

“I found some of those pinks you like so much at the supermarket yesterday.”

“You spoil us all, Mrs. Hofstetter,” he said with a smile.

She set the dish before him, then swished to the buffet to pour her second coffee of the morning. She joined him, sitting in one of the chairs at the side of the table.

While the grapefruit disappeared, they discussed household problems. The old hot-water heater was balky again. Dr. Latham questioned whether it was worth the cost of another repair. The power company wanted to trim back the oak at the corner of the yard to protect the wires. Dr. Latham nodded permission.

He glanced at the wristwatch which Bill and Vicky had given him last Christmas. “By the way,” he mentioned, “is Bill turning into a chronic ten o’clock scholar?”

“He beat everybody out of bed this morning, Doctor. He’s already up and out.”

“That’s too bad.” Dr. Latham liked for the family to breakfast together, their schedules nowadays scattering them so much during the day. Usually they did, although there were exceptions. Yesterday, for example, an emergency call had sent him to the slum section known as Goosetown before any of the household was stirring.

“He didn’t look so upset this morning,” Mrs. Hofstetter remarked. “I was worried about that boy yesterday.”

Dr. Latham’s coffee cup halted, half raised to his mouth. “Strange,” he murmured. He put down the cup slowly. “I had an anxious moment about Bill myself yesterday. Dr. Hornaday took the trouble to mention that Bill looked weatherish.”

“Well, he was worried about the math quiz, for one thing. It isn’t his best subject, you know.”

“Talking with Bill,” Dr. Latham followed his own line of thought, “it appeared that Hornaday was miffed by a prank. Hornaday does get cranky sometimes, when he’s overworked and his dinner long delayed. Still, I couldn’t get over the feeling that Bill wasn’t his usual bushy-tailed self.”

“You know youngsters,” Mrs. Hofstetter said. “Draggy with a bug one minute and bouncing back the next.”

“I doubt that it was a bug. But, in a sense, you may be right. He was down for a minute when I showed up. Skittish, jumpy. Then after I talked with him, I couldn’t isolate but one reason. Hornaday’s reaction to a prank had jolted him. Bill hadn’t expected such a backfire as a report to his father.”

“Bill’s no shrinking violet, and not yet the settled adult,” Mrs. Hofstetter said. “I’m not surprised he’s still got a boyish prank or two kicking around in him.”

“This one was supposed to be more than just a joke. Some sort of far-out psychological test of Hornaday’s reaction to an impossible development.”

Mrs. Hofstetter pushed her chair back a few inches. “Ready for your eggs, Doctor?”

He shook his head. “None this morning.” He watched his fingers turning the cup back and forth in its saucer. There was a hint of tension in the unconscious gesture. He pulled his hand away. “The more I think about it, the less real the experience seems. It doesn’t jibe with the Bill I know.”

“Just what did he do, Doctor?”

“He told Hornaday that the unidentified and unrecorded body of a girl was in the morgue.”

In the act of rising, Mrs. Hofstetter’s muscles held. She eased back into her chair. Her gimlet eyes snapped. “Isn’t there?”

“Of course not. That was the gimmick.”

Mrs. Hofstetter’s colorless lips pursed. “That’s odd. Yesterday morning Bill told me about the girl.”

A tightness seeped through Dr. Latham’s muscles. The indefinable shadow of worry which had gnawed at him struggled to stronger life. What in the world was going on? Why this sudden twist in Bill’s behavior?

His mind went over details of the experience in the morgue. I think I’m safe in saying that no material substance is in that drawer. Those had been Bill’s exact words. The phrases now seemed in Dr. Latham’s mind to smack of a too-careful, sideways statement of truth.

Dr. Latham’s fingers twitched in a nervous drumming on the tabletop. He thought of the strong bond between himself and his son. He knew that his son would give his right arm for him. Despite this, Bill was holding back something. The meaning of the action was obvious. Bill was trying to shield him. And this implied that it was from something of a serious nature.

His eyes met Mrs. Hofstetter’s. He sensed that the same sinister questions were needling her.

“What can possibly be the meaning of it?” he wondered aloud.

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Doctor. It just isn’t like Bill at all.”

The chair became an uncomfortable pressure against Dr. Latham’s back. He stood up in sudden decision, strode into the kitchen, lifted down the wall phone, and dialed his office number.

Miss Pegran, his nurse-receptionist, responded with the usual: “Dr. Latham’s office.”

“This is the doctor,” he said. “What have we on the docket this morning?”

“Mrs. Bayliss first.”

“Routine prenatal,” he said.

“Then Mr. Chizik...”

“For a cortisone injection. You needn’t detail the list, Miss Pegran. Just tell me if we have anything that looks critical.”

“It’s the lightest schedule in days, Doctor.”

Thank goodness for small favors, he thought. The parade through his office was rarely so healthy.

“Then you and Dr. Smithfield can hold the fort for a while.” Young Smithfield had joined him a year ago, fresh from internship. Smithfield had wanted the sort of experience he would gain in Dr. Latham’s practice, and Dr. Latham had been glad to get him. The load had been too much for one man for a long time.

“I’m sure we can, Doctor. When will you be in? Some of the older patients won’t have anyone but you, you know, even for a case of heartburn.”

“I’ll try to make it by noon. And of course I’ll keep in touch.”

“Very well, Doctor.”

Miss Pegran’s tone told him that her curiosity was rising like a malarial thermometer. She couldn’t remember when Dr. Latham had taken the morning off. To her, the prospect was comparable to the idea of the President boarding up the White House.

Dr. Latham hung up, forestalling questions.

By eleven o’clock the bug of worry was growing in his mind. Bill hadn’t reported for either of his two morning classes. And his space in the student parking lot yawned emptily.

Dr. Latham turned indecisively, a man without direction. He looked about the shade-dappled grounds, at the ivied buildings cloistered peacefully about the sprawling campus. His rugged face was tinged with the wish to see Bill hurrying along a walk, around a lawn, with his easy, long-legged stride.

A hundred yards away, beyond a hedge-boxed stretch of grass, the Gothic quiet of the Humanities Building was broken by a stream of emerging students. A light clicked in Dr. Latham’s eyes.

He hurried from the parking lot and across the lawn. He bucked the tide of students fresh from bouts with English literature and Grecian tragedies. Now and then a friend of Bill’s would speak a greeting. Dr. Latham’s replies were courteous but absent-minded.

Betty Atherton was among the last of the students to come out. He picked her out of a cluster of three young women chatting their way through the towering portal.

She saw him standing beside the wide, stone steps when she was halfway down. She spoke a parting to the others and angled toward him.

Watching her close the distance between them, Dr. Latham agreed with his son’s taste. Betty was lovely. Yet her attractiveness included more than looks. In her face one sensed intelligence, humor, compassion. Depth of character, Dr. Latham would have summed up in a moment when his mind was less strained.

She stepped down beside him, comforting an omnibus textbook in the crook of her right arm.

“Well, hi, Dr. Latham.” Her tone reflected her puzzlement at his appearance in this time and place.

“Good morning, Betty. How was Chaucerian England today?”

“I’ve a feeling,” she said, “you just didn’t happen to be here. Were you looking for me?”

“I happened to be nearby and always welcome the pleasure of seeing you,” he evaded. If he could fish in blind waters, he wanted to keep from upsetting her more than necessary. “How about an old bear for company as you walk to your next class?”

Her response was to stand firmly on the spot. The gush of students had subsided to nothing. They stood in an isolated privacy beside the walk, in a splash of shadow cast by a willow tree.

“Dr. Latham, has something happened to Bill?” Her tone was steady, but he sensed the controlled alarm behind it. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hide much from this girl. Perhaps he shouldn’t even try. For all her femininity, she was no precious petal. Honesty might hurt her less than the feeling that she was being protected because she was too weak to face the truth.

“I don’t know,” he answered bluntly. “Do you?”

“No,” she said. “But I’ve been uneasy since night before last.”

“Why?”

Her shoulders made a slight movement of struggle. “I wish I knew. Something I felt. When you really like someone, you can usually tell when something’s wrong.”

“I don’t disparage a woman’s intuition,” Dr. Latham assured her.

A vagrant breeze, a hint of winter in the Indian summer morning, brushed a wisp of her glossy, black-purple hair across her forehead. “We had a coffee break together, Bill and I.”

Dr. Latham nodded. “I remember. I met him as he brought in an emergency and told him he’d probably find you in the hospital commissary.”

“Then, later, when he clocked out, a late snack — and he wasn’t the same.”

“In what way?”

Her smooth brow crinkled. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know. But inside — he was changed. It must have happened while he was in the morgue, during the time between the coffee break and the pizza. Something happened... touching him.”

A non-existent girl in a cadaver compartment. Dr. Latham kept his shudder from twitching to the surface.

“When did you see Bill last?”

“Yesterday at lunch,” Betty said. “He looked beat, I might add. I blamed it on a math quiz.”

“Are you meeting him today?”

“No,” Betty said. “He phoned me early this morning. Said he had to attend to something.”

“Did he say what?”

Betty’s head moved in the negative. “But he sounded okay. I didn’t pry.”

Dr. Latham’s face felt warm, despite the chill in the breeze.

“Whatever it was,” he said, “it wasn’t here at Crownover. Bill apparently hasn’t been on campus all day.”

She clutched the textbook a little tighter. Her knuckles showed white. “I don’t like any of this, Dr. Latham. I admire and respect Bill for wanting to protect me... us. But this is one time I wish he’d shared a problem.”

“We may be jumping at shadows. Could be the problem doesn’t rate a sharing.”

Her wide-lipped mouth twitched with irritation. Then she tilted the soft oval of her face and her eyes gentled. “Well,” she sighed, “Bill inherited the trait, I guess. But don’t kid-glove me, Doctor. I understand. I know when you’re putting me on.”

“All right.” He nodded. “No communication gap. Maybe the shadow is big enough to slice up and go around.”

“Then what’s the next move? Check the police and hospital for accident reports?”

“Not yet,” he said. “If anything like that had happened, my office or home would have been notified. Both know where I am.”

Absently, he lifted a hand and kneaded the coil of tension in the back of his neck. “Bill’s phone call canceling lunch today means that he didn’t intend to come to classes. His absence from the campus is deliberate, not by accident.”

“But why?” Betty cried.

“That is a rather good question,” Dr. Latham conceded. “Since Bill didn’t broadcast advance publicity, there is one person to whom he might have spoken.”

“Dr. Connell!” Betty said, before Dr. Latham could get the name out.

“It’s a chance. Bill refused the idea of dumping his troubles on us. Let’s hope the heroics didn’t extend to Pat Connell.”

Connell’s office in the faculty building was a rather cramped cubicle with a severe decor. The walls were paneled with a dark brown wood veneer. Two windows were at the end of the room, but they were narrow, faced north, and admitted little sunlight. The desk was boxlike in its sharp lines. Against the wall between desk and doorway, a pair of Windsor chairs, uninviting in their stiffness, were separated by a low table that bore a large ceramic ashtray and a lamp with a shade of tan parchment.

The office reflected very little of Connell himself. He’d restrained the normal urge to enliven the surroundings with gimcracks of himself. No pictures of his choosing on the walls and no rack holding some of his tennis trophies.

The office, Dr. Latham’s practiced medical eyes noted, was as impersonal as a confessional booth.

Connell leaned across the desk to shake Dr. Latham’s hand. He included a smile of greeting for Betty.

“Welcome to faculty row, Doctor. How are you, Miss Atherton?”

At Connell’s gesture Betty sat down in one of the chairs beside the table. Dr. Latham chose a chair nearer the corner of the desk. Connell sank down into a secretarial type chair that received him with a faint metallic squeak.

“Obviously your son is the reason for seeing his faculty adviser, Doctor,” Connell said. “What can I do for you?”

Dr. Latham’s questions were suddenly too personal to come easily. An awkwardness touched him. He cleared his throat. “I’m not here with one of the usual beefs.”

“I shouldn’t think so.” Pat nodded. “Bill’s record is excellent. He’s steady, dependable, and works at the top of his I.Q., which, as you know, is well above average.”

Dr. Latham wasn’t a man who lapped up praise of his son. He thanked God often for the quality of his children, but his love was big enough to see and accept Bill’s — and Vicky’s — faults.

Still and all, under normal circumstances Dr. Connell’s opinion would have been heartwarming. But right now Connell’s words made Bill’s behavior seem even more puzzling.

“Thank you,” Dr. Latham murmured. “But have you any idea why the usual pattern should suddenly shatter?”

Pat’s elbows were resting on the desk, his hands folded before him. His fingers tightened slightly against each other. “Bill hasn’t as yet told you about his experience in the morgue?”

“I know a little bit about it, the little that I found out for myself,” Dr. Latham said.

Betty reminded them of her presence with a tight, small stirring. “Then I wasn’t wrong in my guess. Something did happen.” Her shoulders strained forward. “Tell me, Dr. Latham. I’ve a right to know.”

His face dragged toward her, and she glimpsed the controlled fear deep in his eyes. His voice was steady, but she didn’t miss the painful twisting of his lips as they put words together: “Bill thinks the body of a dead girl is in one of the drawers at the morgue — an empty drawer.”

The color dashed from Betty’s face. A gasp ripped from her. “Oh, no!”

“That isn’t entirely correct.” Connell took issue in a courteous but firm voice. “Bill’s mind accepted the evidence. He knows that no material body is in the compartment.”

Dr. Latham frowned. “But he saw...”

“He received an impression,” Connell amended.

“Is there a difference?”

“In this case — yes, I think so.”

Dr. Latham’s jaw muscles rippled. “One of your fancy theories, Dr. Connell?”

Pat wasn’t offended. Right now Dr. Latham’s coolly scientific outlook was clouded by the fires of apprehension.

Anyway, Pat was used to skepticism. Parapsychology was in its infancy, and every branch of science suffered the same birth pangs. The thought helped, whenever Connell was discouraged.

Discouragement was the least of his worries at the present moment. It was one thing to discuss theory in the security of the classroom, and a horse of an entirely different feather to gamble high stakes on it in the field.

None of the turbulence of misgivings showed on Pat’s face. “Will a commonly accepted theory explain all the facts of the case, Doctor?”

Dr. Latham’s hands were clamped together in his lap, knuckles cracking under the pressure. Faced with Connell’s experience in the specialized fields of psychology, psychiatry, and, finally, parapsychology, Dr. Latham endured a moment of feeling as helpless as a layman.

His lips were numb. He heard himself speak as though the voice belonged to someone else. “You’re asking me to believe in my son’s sanity.”

“At least for a little while. Until the score is in. Just don’t brush aside parts of the evidence that we don’t understand, that’s all I’m asking.”

“But why did he receive this impression, this psychic contact from the unknown?”

“I don’t know,” Connell said. “I don’t know why X rays work, either. But I’ve a smattering of knowledge of how they work, and so I’m able to take pictures with X rays. The top scientists of yesteryear would have pooh-poohed the whole idea.”

A glisten of sweat squeezed from Dr. Latham’s face. “X rays are deadly in inexperienced hands, Dr. Connell.”

Pat felt a pulse beating unpleasantly through his chest. He knew exactly what Dr. Latham was thinking. He didn’t blame the older man for not wanting to put it into words. The unknown force — if it existed — could be far deadlier than X rays.

And we are so inexperienced, Connell thought. Like primitive men finding a door open and blindly wandering into a nuclear power plant.

A sudden small cry burst from Betty. Her eyes flashed from one to the other of the two men. “Will we help Bill by sitting here and talking theories?”

Dr. Latham took the long breath of a man reinforcing control over his anxieties. He glanced at Pat. “She’s more practical than both of us, Doctor.”

“And perhaps twice as sensible,” Pat admitted.

The Oaks

The day had begun for Bill on a drowsy note. Sleep stole gently away from him. Sprawled in his bed on his stomach, he lingered in a half-awake, dreamy state. He didn’t open his eyes right away. The darkness was a friendly presence to him, peaceful and languorous.

Yesterday seemed a long way off. He had glimpsed the image in the compartment — and what else had happened?

Nothing.

Here he was, quite safe in bed.

He yawned and opened his eyes. The room, with the blinds drawn, was steeped in gray. About him, the house was heavy with silence. The hour was early, and no one else was up yet.

He rolled onto his back, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared vaguely through the gloom in the direction of the ceiling.

He felt much different than he had yesterday morning. The presence that had nudged him with nightmares the previous night hadn’t bothered him at all during the night just ending.

The contrast struck him as odd. Was the experience over? Or were his refreshments of mind and body necessary for a rigamarole that was only just beginning?

“Now, that’s a thought for you,” he muttered at the dimness of the ceiling.

He raised, punched up his pillow, and flopped on his side. Resolutely he closed his eyes and evened out his breathing. Plenty of time to catch another little nap before breakfast.

But his mind refused to drift off. His eyes wanted to snap open. In an effort to lull himself back to sleep, he tried the old method of thinking of a single subject. Usually when he was a few paragraphs along, the sentences began to skip, the words to slip off, and, next thing, he was waking up again, and it was time to get up.

Parapsychology, he thought. Young science... has several branches... ESP, extrasensory perception, knowing something you couldn’t have learned with any of the five physical senses... telepathy, catching a thought in somebody else’s mind... clairvoyance, getting a glimpse of the future... psychokinesis, or PK, which means the influence of mind over matter...

PK research... number of reports show definite relationship between “green-thumbed” people and plant germination and growth...

His chest rose and fell with an aggravated sigh. No use. He was wide-awake. The pleasant ability to slip off to sleep again seemed to have left him completely. The bed had an unfamiliar hardness.

He sat up, tangled in his sheet, and swung his bare feet to the floor.

Half an hour later he was at the kitchen table buttering toast when Mrs. Hofstetter entered. She was bright-eyed.

Her brows lifted. “Well, day of miracles! Look who’s up without a bomb going off.”

He caught her motherly appraisal as she passed. He grinned and said, “Slept like a guru with a sweet flower conscience.”

“Looks as if it helped a little, too.” She glanced at the overdone eggs on his plate. “Is that a synthetic rubber experiment? How about if I cook you some more?”

His grin became a laugh. “After these, I’ll really appreciate yours tomorrow morning.”

“All right,” she said, opening the refrigerator. “It’s your stomach. If everyone had one like it, the alkalizer people would go out of business, I suppose.”

He finished eating while the kitchen wanned with the mouth-watering aromas of Mrs. Hofstetter’s sizzling bacon and perking coffee.

He pushed back his chair and got up. “Off to the wars.”

“Have a good day.”

Through the tier-curtained window over the sink, Mrs. Hofstetter saw him cross the driveway and get in his car.

The murmur of water in piping told her that another Latham was out of bed and in the shower. Probably Victoria. That girl doesn’t want to waste a single marvelous minute these days. If Fortesque Fifth Avenue doesn’t come through for her, Mrs. Hofstetter thought, I’ve a notion to personally march in and tell them what fatheads they are.

The habitual snorting complaints of Bill’s car drifted to her as he coaxed the cold engine to life. Soon the shadow of the car dipped across the window as he prodded it along the driveway.

He came to a full stop at the street. With a few seconds’ warming, the motor relented and smoothed out. He turned and drove the familiar blocks over to the arterial street that led downtown.

Traffic was already a rush and roar. He waited, in the shadow of a stop sign, for a break in the stream of cars. He slipped in with a smooth turn of the steering wheel, pressuring the accelerator until he had adjusted his speed.

Half a mile along, a bank of traffic signals high over the street turned red at an intersection. He braked to a stop.

It was then that the thought came from nowhere, a swift flash, almost a pain in his mind: Why B-three? Why not one — or any — of the other cadaver drawers? Why had B-three been pinpointed?

The light changed, and for once his alertness missed a detail in traffic. He sat woodenly, staring through the windshield.

A short beep from the car behind snapped through to him. He jumped slightly, looked at the green light, and drove ahead.

Fed by side streets, the thoroughfare widened to six lanes. He would have to jockey to the outside lane to take the turn and cloverleaf underpass for the route to Crownover. Instead, he stayed in the thru lane, hardly noticing the turnoff when it flicked past.

Minutes later, he was driving onto the grounds of the hospital complex. He parked in his space on the employees’ lot, got out, and hurried around the main building to the morgue wing.

Mrs. Wennington, who constituted the office force, hadn’t yet arrived. The building, not surprisingly, was steeped in the tomblike silence of death.

Bill went directly into the main office beyond the reception room. He crossed to the filing cabinets and slid out the long, slender cross-index file. He flipped the cards for the name of the last occupant of B-3, then closed the file and pulled a larger drawer open. Thumbing through the folders, he quickly found the one for which he was looking. He yanked it out and dropped it open on Dr. Hornaday’s desk.

The typed form was an icily impersonal summation of a human life:

Name: Elizabeth Ursa Braxley.

Age: 21.

Address: The Oaks, Harlandale.

Cause of death: Leukemia.

Circumstances: No suspicious circumstances. Deceased expired while hospitalized for treatment. Body temporarily removed to morgue for transfer to private mortician. Body released to Bascome Funeral Home.

Findings of inquest and/or autopsy: No inquest.

Surviving next of kin: Mother, Mrs. Jonathan Fitfield (Carlotta) Braxley, The Oaks, Harlandale.

Bill closed the folder, turned to the cabinet, and replaced it.

The shortness of her life and the way she had died touched his compassion. But the written proof that a young woman was the last occupant of B-3 didn’t surprise him in the least.

He was halfway across the outer office when he broke stride and crossed to the desk. He picked up the phone and dialed Betty’s number.

The cool voice of a servant announced the Atherton residence.

Bill identified himself and asked to speak to Betty. Her voice came to him after a moment.

He returned her cheerful “hi” and said, “Don’t let it bug you if I miss lunch today.”

From her hesitancy, he sensed her curiosity. But she didn’t pry, as some girls might have. “Maybe I’ll try the football players’ table. I don’t like to scoff alone.”

“You’re a problem child. But I’ll make it if I can, after I attend to a detail.”

Harlandale was a section of small estates just west of the city. The green meadows, shaded vales, and rolling and wooded hills were divided and hemmed by quaint split-rail and whitewashed wooden fences. Long, private driveways snaked to secluded homes. Here and there a blooded colt cavorted around in the pastures.

The area was approached by a two-lane macadam county road that turned off the state highway.

A large trucker’s restaurant and filling station occupied a corner of the intersection. Bill pulled in and braked at one of the bays of gas pumps.

A wiry old man in neat coveralls came across the cement apron. “Howdy there, young fellow.”

“Good morning.” Bill got out of the car. “How about dosing it with a dollar’s worth of the regular?” Bill watched the old man remove the gas cap and slip the hose nozzle in the vent.

“Know a place called The Oaks?”

The attendant cut his eyes from the clicking pump meter to glance at Bill. “Who doesn’t? That’s the Braxley place. Mile up the road.”

“You know Mrs. Braxley?”

“Sonny, I reckon nobody really knows her — ’cept that big galoot of a caretaker, George Kahler.” The old man rounded off Bill’s purchase with a final small squirt. “But we know of her, poor woman.”

Bill wondered what the attendant meant.

“Friend of Elizabeth’s?” the old man asked as he reached for Bill’s dollar.

“Yes,” Bill said. The word came so readily and naturally that it didn’t seem a distortion of the truth.

“Figured you was. About the right age. Guess the poor girl never had many friends, sick so much of the time.”

Bill slipped under the steering wheel and clicked the door shut.

The attendant stepped back from the car. “Good luck on your visit, young man. Lotsa luck.”

The statement brought Bill’s finger to pause on the ignition key. He watched the old man bandy-legging toward the office. Then he shrugged, started the engine, and slipped the car in gear.

The humpbacked county road was deserted, and the fields lay silent, showing their first touch of brown in the Indian summer haze.

Bill passed a white-graveled road flanked by stone pillars. Farther along, a private driveway was arched with iron filigree. He almost missed The Oaks turnoff, the weathered wooden sign blending so well with the background of trees and unkempt brush.

He braked, backed, and hunched a second look at the sign through the windshield. Supported by a tall, rusty iron post and crossbar that tipped tiredly, the rotting wooden panel creaked its supporting chains in the soft breeze. Bill could hardly make out the faded lettering that once in proud simplicity had announced The Oaks.

He looked at the driveway beside the sign with a slight turn of his head. Disuse and inattention had reduced it to no more than ruts on either side of a crown. The remnants of once-white gravel showed a yellowish band across a field where wild thickets and brambles strained to overrun the narrow road.

The land rose in a hillock dark with the shadows of trees. Far up on the gently rounded crest, Bill could glimpse a large house.

He turned in and jounced across the unkempt meadow. When the road rose to part the trees, he had a clearer view of the house. It overlooked a long lawn that retained but a ghost of its green charm. Bare spots and clumps of crabgrass mottled the original finery of the grass like splotches of mildew on a moth-eaten green velvet gown. Tufts of wild grass sprouted between the flagstones of the walkways, the stone steps, and a front terrace. Two-story and fortress-like in its dimensions, the house was of weathered brick, the windows reflecting the blankness of sightless eyes.

The place had the air of abandonment, except for the big brute of an old Mercedes that was parked in the otherwise empty three-car garage attached to the porte cochere at the north end of the house.

The trees obscured the house as the driveway made a final climbing turn. Then suddenly Bill jerked his foot from the accelerator and slammed on the brake. A huge man and German shepherd dog had leaped in view around the bend as if the driveway had spewed them up.

The man was holding the dog with a chain leash and choker collar. They stepped forward in unison.

The man was dressed for the American countryside, in corduroy slacks and woolen plaid shirt. But his personage inspired the thought of a gigantic Mongolian warrior. Carved from the barrel-like body, a stumpy neck supported a face composed of hard, flat features, yellowish skin, and dark slanting eyes under hairless brows. The bullet skull was bald and glistening, with an earless look.

The dog was no more inviting, full grown to mastiff proportions, straining forward with ears laid back.

“Easy, Blitzen.” The man checked the dog.

Bill rolled down the car window. “Mr. George Kahler?”

The man nodded and said coldly, “This is private property. You’re trespassing.”

“My name is Bill Latham. I drove out from the city to see Mrs. Braxley.”

“She’s not receiving visitors.”

In the edge of his vision, Bill glimpsed the drawing of a window curtain inside the house.

Kahler took a step forward. “If you’re a reporter, we had a gutful when her husband died — and for a long time. There’ll be no more raking over the bones for Sunday feature pieces.”

“I’m not a reporter, Mr. Kahler, but a student at Crownover University. One of my subjects is parapsychology, and I...”

“Get out!” Kahler bit the order viciously. The mere mention of psychic research stoked the cold fire in his eyes.

Bill eased the transmission lever into reverse. “I think Mrs. Braxley has seen me from the house. At least tell her a friend of Elizabeth’s came.”

“Elizabeth had no friends!”

“She does now. You tell Mrs. Braxley that.”

“Out!” Kahler slackened the leash as a threat. “Or you want me to feed you to Blitzen?”

Bill’s face reddened in angry reaction. He bit back a retort that would have matched Kahler’s discourtesy, stared the man down for a second, and let the car slide backward. He inched off the driveway between two trees and turned the car around in a tight maneuver.

Kahler stood where he was until he saw the car turn onto the highway. Absently, he slipped the choker collar from Blitzen’s neck and walked to the house with a heavy stride.

The door opened as he mounted the front steps. Carlotta Braxley stood framed, a pale glow against the shadows of the foyer behind her. Her slender, wasted form was draped in a pale pink dress, calf length, a quarter of the century behind the style. Her thin, delicately boned face was a hovering mask of garish makeup. Her suffering had been unique, and she tried to hide its ravages, at least from her mirror, with layers of white powder, globs of mascara, and smears of bright red lipstick. The results were ghastly and pitiful, for one who remembered her as George Kahler did.

She lifted a thin, waxen hand to touch the misty hair still worn in the pageboy style of yesteryear. Once her hair had been honey gold, a burst of sunlight in any room she entered. Now it was a thinning sheen of silver.

“Who was the caller, George?” Her voice was pleasant and musical. In spite of everything — the dress, the bone-white face, the urge to turn away from too-grim reality in her blue eyes — she still retained a hint of the old charm. Once it had captivated everyone. Now everyone was gone.

“Just a young fellow.” George brushed past into the foyer. The house was furnished as Carlotta’s father had left it. Overstuffed couches and chair in the living room off the foyer. A baby grand piano draped with a shawl. Even a large cabinet radio that had sparkled with Fred Allen’s jokes and Ben Bernie’s music in a bygone era.

“What was his name, George?” she insisted, following close on his heels.

He was moving along the hallway toward the kitchen. He, like Carlotta, had known the house from childhood. His father had superintended the farm and the orchards in the days when the house had teemed with guests and sparkled with parties.

Carlotta had been like a little sister, unspoiled by her father’s money and prestige. She would worshipfully follow George about his chores in those days. He was the first she always invited to her birthday parties. When her father had given her a pony, nothing would do but that George had one, too.

Then one day she was grown up, and George had beamed from a front row as she married Jonathan Fitfield Braxley. Guests, some from a thousand miles away, had packed First Church, happy with future prospects for the rare young couple. She was the loveliest bride of the season, and the handsome Jonathan Braxley had already earned his doctorate in the then-young field of atomic physics.

Future prospect, indeed. A future turning on its apparent favorite. A future filled with heartbreak and despair, the marks of which today lay so heavily upon her.

George didn’t like to think about it, but hardly a day passed that he didn’t. First her parents had passed away, bringing her back to The Oaks for a short time. She had closed the house and asked George to stay on in the caretaker’s cottage. Before she’d recovered from this loss, the terrible thing had happened to Dr. Braxley. When the pain of the radiation poisoning was over for him, she had returned to The Oaks for good. She and her baby, Elizabeth. More years of drawn-out suffering, but the child had lived longer than anyone had really expected. And in her way she had been happy... her strange, shy way, as if she really wasn’t a creature of this earth but a misty shadow passing through.

George pushed the swinging door to the kitchen, struggling out of his thoughts. “His name? Bill Latham, he said,” he replied finally to her question.

George turned toward the pantry to inventory grocery needs he would fill on his weekly shopping trip into the city.

Mrs. Braxley wandered to the small window recessed between rows of shoulder-high cabinets. “He looked like a nice young fellow, George.”

“Yes, Mrs. Braxley,” George said idly, eyeing the shelves of canned goods. The pantry, like everything else about The Oaks, was as familiar to him as the back of his hand. Once, when she’d closed the house, he’d tried city living for a while. But he had missed the fields, the open spaces, the quiet of the nights. He had disliked the hurry, the straitjacket of a time clock.

He had been glad to have The Oaks to go back to. And in time he had reconciled himself to the thought of spending his life here. It would all be his one day; she had no one else to leave it to. Meanwhile, she needed a father, a brother. He couldn’t have walked out on his responsibility under any circumstance. Without help and protection, the remaining thin threads that bound her together would all come undone.

“You sent him away so quickly, George.”

He glanced across the kitchen. She was standing with her back to him. “I always do, the way you asked. Just like I don’t cut the fields with a plow and drag harrow because that’s the way you want it.”

“Yet they grow, George, if only weeds. Nothing stands still.”

His eyes sharpened. He took a couple of steps from the pantry. She hadn’t expressed a thought like that for a long time.

“That’s right, Mrs. Braxley.”

She looked at him over her shoulder. “What business was the young man in?”

George hesitated. “He wasn’t selling anything.”

“Then what on earth brought him here?”

“It really isn’t important.”

“But I want to know! No one but you and I have driven up and down that driveway for a long time. Now there’s no need for me... since the hospital visits have ended.”

George didn’t want her thinking about the hospital. He said quickly, “Well, he was a student.”

“At Crownover?”

“Well, yes.”

He saw her face shadow. He’d expected and dreaded it, with a mention of Crownover. He wished he’d put her off with some kind of explanation. That the young man was inquiring directions. But George had difficulty with words. He always thought of clever things to say when it was too late.

“Yes,” she said pensively. “Crownover... I was a cheerleader. It seems only yesterday.”

George watched her move, wraithlike, to the old-fashioned kitchen table and sit down.

“The freezers pretty low. Think we should fill it this week?”

The question didn’t distract her thoughts. George saw the skittish movements of her eyes, the beginnings of a twitch in the hollow of her slender neck.

“George, I simply must know what would bring a young Crownover student all this way.”

“Please, Mrs. Braxley...”

“You talked with him. You do know. You must tell me.”

“Well, he... he just wanted to say hello to me. Can’t a friend...”

“When did you meet him, George?”

“Look, now,” he said with a sort of gentle roughness, “you cut this out. Strangers are rare, I know. But you’re letting the sight of one...”

“You don’t know him, George. That’s the truth of it! He didn’t come to see you — but me. It’s been so long since anyone came to see me... except a lawyer with papers to sign or a doctor patting my shoulder and telling me to be brave.” Her head began to shake. The movement was loose, without control. “George, you really shouldn’t have sent away the only visitor I’ve had in ages.”

“Your orders have stood for a long time,” he reminded her.

“I know.” She was almost on the verge of tears. “You’re not to blame. You’re nothing but good, George. But the young man must have wanted to know something about Dr. Braxley’s pioneering work in atomics. Perhaps he is preparing a paper and thought it would be a good idea to get some firsthand...”

“No, that isn’t it at all.” George sighed grimly. “I wish you hadn’t seen the guy. He didn’t say a thing about Dr. Braxley. Instead, he...” George caught the words that were about to spill from his lips.

“He what, George?”

He had the feeling that her eyes could knife right through his, to the hidden thought behind.

“Nothing,” he said.

“George,” she said, too calmly. A mist of sweat was gathering in the translucent hollows beneath her eyes. “George, I can tell when you’re ducking. Who did the young man mention?”

“Nobody!” George’s voice was angry with his own heavy awkwardness. “I mean, you... he mentioned you...”

“And what else, George?” She was reading him now with every nerve, straining forward, studying him like a trainer divining a doltish horse.

“Now, you listen to me.” His near shout was that of a roughly protective big brother. “I’m telling you for the last time. You’re climbing a molehill!”

Her eyes glinted with a cunning that wasn’t altogether sane. Without actually moving, she seemed to slip into a crouch there in the chair.

“You’ve eliminated yourself and all the Braxleys except one, George.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Elizabeth. Did he meet her while she was in the hospital that last time?”

George dropped his eyes, almost in the manner of an upbraided child. “He didn’t say.”

“Does he know the truth about her?”

“Of course he doesn’t!” George took a blue bandanna from his hip pocket and swabbed the creases of his short neck. “Now I am going to get you a pill,” he said sternly. “And you are going to take it and relax and forget all this.”

“No, George,” she said slyly. “That isn’t what we’re going to do at all. You are going to look up this young man and bring him back here.”

George looked at her dumbly. A sharp fright knifed through him. He’d never seen her quite this way before, with that rapt smile, that look of eagerness in her eyes.

“You know his name, George, and where he goes to school. You can find him, easily.”

Kahler was meshed in the grip of her stare. “He’s probably sore at me.”

“Nonsense. He looked like a nice boy who wouldn’t carry a grudge.”

“I guess you could tell all about him — with one look from the house.” George’s mumble was one of surrender, of knowing that objections would be ineffectual.

“In any case,” she closed the discussion, “he must come back, George. And you will bring him — one way or another.”

An Unbridgeable Gulf

When he turned into the student parking lot, Bill was still peeved about the experience with Kahler. But a sense of mystery overshadowed Bill’s rankled personal feelings, which he could handle with a mature cool.

He slid into his space in one of the long parallel rows of parked cars. But with the car at rest, he made no immediate move to get out. He reviewed the morning, picking at the details. His hands remained curled on the steering wheel. The engine idled without purpose.

He was nagged with a sense of incompletion. Staring through the windshield, he thought of the unknown woman who had watched from the silent seclusion of a window.

What was the real scene out there at The Oaks? Did any of it actually have anything to do with the Presence (the name for it came naturally) in B-3?

The questions stirred a dim struggle in a dark corner of his mind, a groping toward a shadow flitting just out of reach.

The campus surrounded him like a not-quite-real painting, trees blushing with the first touch of autumn, far-flung buildings serene and strangely silent.

The painful valley of a frown pressed between Bill’s eyes. His shoulders twitched. He didn’t feel entirely alone in the car...

Then the sensation seeped away as quickly as it had come. It didn’t seem to have happened at all. The campus focused in prosaic normality.

Bill pushed away his tinge of fright with a sheepish grin. His hand stabbed motions, clicking off the ignition, snapping the door handle.

He got out and started walking toward the weathered stone building a hundred yards distant. Pat Connell often detoured by his office on the way to lunch.

He reached the shallow stone steps as his father stepped from the front door. Both stopped in surprise. Then each moved, Bill going up, his father down.

They met midway, and Bill saw the gray tone of his father’s husky face, the flare of relief in his eyes.

“Young man, will you please tell me why you spend good money on tuition and cut classes?”

The greeting was both gentle and rough. It reminded Bill of a long-ago experience, when, as a very small boy, he had sneaked off with some older boys to explore a woods. He’d got separated and lost, wandering in circles until descending darkness had frightened and chilled him. Briar-scratched and exhausted, he’d stumbled on and on, fighting the rustlings and strange night shadows of the woods. Then his father’s stalwart figure had loomed, arms outstretched. “Boy, I ought to whale the socks off you!” But the big, capable hands had quickly swept the small figure up and anxiously explored for damage.

Bill glanced beyond his father, toward the double-door entry.

“No,” his father said, “don’t surmise that Pat Connell tattled. He should have. I think he stretched his prerogatives. But it was Mrs. Hofstetter who put me onto you.”

“Dad, the last thing I wanted was to upset you and Vicky.”

They moved aside, clearing the steps for the occasional student or faculty member who came and went.

“I know.” Dr. Latham nodded. “And if you didn’t want to stand on your own feet, I’d be disappointed.”

“It must have been quite a morning for you,” Bill said.

“Quite a morning,” his father agreed. “It could have been avoided — with a word from you. Or did you think I’d haul you off to the nearest padded cell?”

“I wasn’t too sure.” Bill matched his father’s bluntness. In really important discussions, they could lay it on the line without stretching the bond between them.

“If you’d thought twice, you would have known better,” Dr. Latham said. “I’m not a crusty-brained savant burying my own ignorance behind a know-it-all front.”

“I know that, Dad.”

Bill met his father’s gaze. Dr. Latham’s eyes probed. With quickened feeling, Bill sensed the full measure of his father’s concern, bewilderment, and helplessness in the face of the unknown. He must have felt the same way, Bill thought, when Mom was so sick and there was nothing he could do.

Bill gripped the sturdy old shoulder in a gesture filled with warmth. “Dad, how about trusting me — and Pat Connell — for just a little while?”

Dr. Latham’s chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh. “I’d have but one other choice, wouldn’t I? Connell told me his theory. I either buy it” — his words faltered for the first time — “or assume that my son’s mental machinery went haywire without any of the usual warning signals.”

“I wish none of it had happened,” Bill said. “It’s rougher than your hunch about your heart patient.”

Dr. Latham studied the trees, lawns, the first streams of students from far-flung buildings toward an early lunch. The locale seemed to drive into him the strangeness of the conversation.

“I don’t know that I buy Connell’s theory,” he said finally. “All this talk of a psychic experience... parapsychology is too young a science.”

“They all were, once,” Bill said. “They all had their scoffers, their witch burners.”

“I’m hanging on to the thought.” The old doctor’s lips clamped grimly. “I’m remembering that Pat Connell is quite a man and scientist — unless he’s let his psychic researches carry him over the deep end.” A friend of Bill’s came out of the faculty building. But he caught the gravity between Bill and his father and passed down the steps with only a nodded greeting.

“But my suspicions of Connell” — Dr. Latham gusted a mirthless laugh — “are less painful than thoughts of the alternative.” The iron gray head glinted in a shake. “Maybe I’m thinking of myself, but I seem to be very much in a bind. I can’t fully accept Connell’s ideas — and I can’t deny them flatly, either.”

“Then give them a chance, Dad, to work or fail.”

Dr. Latham’s stout hand was a white-knuckled pressure kneading the iron rail. “That’s what it comes down to. But if I delay and anything happens to you...” His jaw muscles clamped off the words.

Bill offered the only comfort he could think of. “Remember that Pat Connell is a trained psychiatrist, and more.”

“Infallible, I hope,” Dr. Latham said wryly.

“And as far as Vicky is concerned...”

“I know,” Dr. Latham broke in. “And I agree. The moment may arrive when we have to jar her out of her dreams of Fortesque Fifth Avenue. But until then... well, borrowed trouble usually carries a high rate of interest.”

Dr. Latham peeled his fingers from the rail and took a step down. He paused and looked up. Bill felt the full power of his father’s eyes. “I’m risking something very near and dear to me, Bill. I hope it’s the lesser of alternative risks. But I won’t give you and Connell much leeway or time to play with this thing.”

“I wouldn’t want you to feel any differently,” Bill said.

He watched as his father turned and went down. Dr. Latham’s movements to the walkway were heavy and uncertain.

Bill wished he could rush and overtake his father. He longed to laugh and say, “You buying lunch?”

But B-3 had happened. B-3 couldn’t be wished away.

B-3 was between them, and no hand could reach across the gulf.

Unexpected Visitor

Patrick Connell was closing his office when Bill entered the corridor.

In the act of turning, Pat saw him. Pat poised in awkward balance, face twisted toward Bill, right hand clamped on the door handle.

He jerked to life and shoved the door open as Bill neared. His hand flashed as if he would literally propel Bill inside.

“Where have you been all morning?”

Pat’s ire jarred Bill to a stop. “Hey, I didn’t mean to rattle everybody.”

Pat motioned him in, almost trampling his heels.

“You didn’t,” Pat said. “But the disappearing act had me privately throwing questions all over my fine theories. I had to sit here and talk as if I knew it all — while I wondered if I were a phony.”

“I’m really sorry about that, Pat. But I wasn’t out chasing hallucinations or voices in my head.”

“Okay.” Pat banged the door shut. “But how about a little closer cooperation in the future? We’re not playing a hand of bridge, you know, or shaking a known substance in a test tube.”

Pat went around his desk and flopped in his chair. “You can imagine the turn it gave me, when your father and Betty...”

Bill started. “Betty was here, too?”

“She left a few minutes before your father.”

“Was she...”

“She was,” Pat said. “Worried as all get-out.”

Bill glanced toward the door. “I’d better let her know I’m okay.”

“Yes, you had better.” Pat stabbed a finger at the Windsor chair near the corner of his desk. “But first — you’re making with some words.”

Bill sat down slowly. “I started for school this morning, but I ended up in Harlandale.”

Pat blinked. “Harlandale! Why Harlandale, of all places? How did that happen?”

“I was driving along to school,” Bill said, “when the idea hit me to find out who was last in B-three. I stopped by the morgue and checked the record.”

Pat strained an inch taller in his chair. “Was the last B-three a young woman? Like the image, the impression that you receive?”

“Young woman... young woman image...” Bill paled slightly. “It sure fits.”

“Beyond the mathematical laws of probability,” Pat said.

“It seemed so natural I didn’t think about it.” Bill stifled the shiver that quaked through him. Frightful thoughts lashed him. What’s happened to me? Am I some kind of psychic freak?

In every nation psychic researchers were exploring the frontiers of the human mind. Many would have welcomed a personal experience. Even Pat, Bill suspected, would have jumped at the role of guinea pig, the unique chance to probe and analyze. But not me, Bill thought. I would give anything if B-three had picked on somebody else.

Pat was looking at him closely. “You all right?”

“Hardly,” Bill admitted. “B-three isn’t a harmless trick done with mirrors, you know.”

Pat’s eyes reflected a struggle with himself. “Bill, if all this is too difficult for you...”

“Don’t garble the signals now, quarterback.” Bill tried to grin. “I want to get rid of this... this thing. If B-three can make her point, I got a hunch she’ll go away.”

“Well, she didn’t pick on a coward.”

“You just don’t know where the yellow went.” This time Bill managed the grin.

“Let’s get back to the morning,” Pat suggested.

Bill pressed his elbows on the arms of the chair. “B-three’s surviving next of kin is her mother, who lives in Harlandale. But I didn’t have a chance to get out of the car. A Genghis Khan character manned the outpost — with a German shepherd, Blitzen, who looked like he wanted my right leg for breakfast. This guerrilla — George Kahler was his name — said I was trespassing and told me to drop out. I didn’t have much of a rebuttal. But I’m sure Mrs. Braxley saw me from the house.”

“Braxley?” Pat’s voice snapped. “Did you say Braxley?”

“Sure,” Bill said. “The last occupant of B-three was named Elizabeth Braxley. The morgue record indicated that her father, Dr. Jonathan Fitfield Braxley, is deceased. The mother, Mrs. Carlotta Braxley, is secluded out there in an old place called The Oaks. Looks like she’s handing the whole kaboodle over to the worms.”

Pat had the look of a man who had stood too close to an explosion. His face was rigid. The Braxley name had swept his thoughts from the present moment.

“Did you know them?” Bill asked.

Pat’s eyes focused. After a moment he shook his head. “But I don’t have to refer back to scientific journals to know about them. The facts are the kind that stick in your memory.”

Pat noticed the way he was gripping the desk’s edge. He quietly folded his hands and rested them on the blotter pad. “Jonathan Braxley was a casualty in the scientific wars. Like Madame Curie, killed in the end by the very radium she’d discovered.”

Pat watched his fingers curling against each other. “A generation ago Braxley had everything. Youth. Genius. Beautiful young wife. Growing recognition. Unlimited future. He was one of the youngest men in the Manhattan Project during World War Two. As a nuclear physicist he helped develop the first controlled chain reaction in history.”

Pat seemed to listen a moment to the friendly, ordinary sounds filtering in the office — the distant ringing of a phone, a burst of laughter from students passing beyond the window.

“Then... a laboratory accident,” Pat said. “Braxley suffered a walloping dose of high-energy particles. It didn’t get him right away. He lived on for a short time. And then it got him.”

“Rough,” Bill murmured with feeling.

“And it gets rougher. It’s beyond me how a sensitive woman like Carlotta Braxley survived it all. Little wonder she’s shut herself up behind a bodyguard.”

Bill held back his questions, watching Pat mull the story.

“Elizabeth Braxley was born shortly after her father’s death,” Pat said. “I recall at least two papers about her that appeared in the parapsychology journal. They suggest the broad picture. It isn’t hard to guess the details.”

Pat’s head made a vague, pitying movement. “No one can say for sure that she inherited the changes atomic radiation made in her father. Greenleaf does suggest that hereditary factors were altered. He conducted a series of psychic experiments with her at the small, expensive private school where she was then enrolled. The results were astounding. I don’t think Greenleaf quite dared to believe them himself. You can detect doubts between his lines, if you want to dig out his treatise.”

A reflection of bitterness quirked Pat’s mouth. “Greenleaf never had a chance to doublecheck and assemble all the proofs. Elizabeth Braxley, who had been sort of mistily fragile from childhood, was taken ill, and had to leave school.”

“She had leukemia,” Bill said. “It was on the morgue record.”

“The end?” Pat pushed back his chair and stood. “Or an ESP linkup that will end when we get the message?”

Bill glowered in mock reproach, partly to cover the chill threading through him. “I do love the way you put it, teach.”

“I know,” Pat said gravely, “but we haven’t a blueprint to lead us to the switch and tell us how to turn off the juice.”

“On that note,” Bill said with a jocularity he didn’t feel, “Elizabeth Braxley can wait — while I time in the flesh and blood female in my life.”

As Bill crossed to the door, Pat spoke his name.

Bill stopped and looked over his shoulder. Pat was moving around to stand in front of the desk.

“How about a flight plan prior to any more solo takeoffs?” Pat requested. “I know you can take care of yourself — but it’s bad for my blood pressure.”

“Sure, Pat, and I’m sorry I wasn’t a little more thoughtful.”

Bill was certain he’d catch Betty in the cafeteria. Instead, he saw her when he was half a block away. She was a trim figure on the concourse slipping past a small group of strolling students.

With her quick, tense pace she had covered a couple of hundred yards before Bill caught up with her.

“Hi,” he said, a bit short of breath as he fell in step beside her. “Training for a broken-field run?”

His quip fell flat as she jarred to a stop and spun to look at him. The sight of him crumpled the softly oval lines of her face.

She said, “Bill,” on a slightly strangled note.

He caught her hand. “Hey, what gives?”

She glanced away. “I couldn’t eat. The thought of it choked me.”

“Then we won’t eat.”

She muffled a soft sob. “Bill, why do you have to be so nice?”

“With you, it’s easy. I don’t have to be. I’m just...”

“Oh, you know what I mean! It would be a lot easier for me if you were a casual friend, a now and then date.”

He drew her aside. A wooden bench encircled the bole of a huge old water oak nearby. He touched her shoulders with firm gentleness, forcing her to sit down.

“Please, Bill.” She was fighting tears. “I’ve got a bomb of a headache. I was on my way to the parking lot. I’m going home for the afternoon.”

He sat sideways on the edge of the bench so that he was almost facing her. “I guess I should have told you, before everybody found out secondhand from Dr. Connell.” His shoulders rolled in an ironic shrug. “Just goes to show — I thought I was being the big man, protecting everyone.”

Her moist eyes crept up to his face. “Bill, it really isn’t true — those things Dr. Connell told your father and me?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

She bit her lip and looked at him miserably. Then her gaze dropped away. “I wish no one had told me. I could have gone on being around you in blissful ignorance,” she whispered. “Looking at you and seeing the nice, normal person I wanted to see. The person I enjoyed so much.”

“Now, wait a minute.” Bill’s tone was peppered with irritation. “I’m the same person I was this time yesterday.”

“Yes, I know. I know now.”

He studied the strained white line of her chin and cheek. “Let’s not let our concern for each other peel our nerves and start us fighting,” he said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it at all.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed.

She lifted her hand and touched her temple. “But I can’t stop thinking about it!”

“Then why try?”

Her eyes flashed up. “You mean I should just accept the idea that you’re the sort of person who... who sees dead bodies that don’t exist, in strange places?”

His back muscles flinched.

She suddenly seemed to catch the way her words had sounded to him. “Oh, Bill, I didn’t mean it to sound that way! It’s just that I’m so puzzled, and frightened, and mixed-up.”

“I don’t blame you for that.” He hesitated. The question was almost too important to risk asking. “Are you suddenly frightened of me?”

She didn’t answer right away. Her eyes pored over his features. With her palm she touched the back of his hand where it lay on his knee. She tested her response to the feeling of contact.

“No,” she said. “I’m scared... down deep inside. For you. Not of you.”

“Fine,” Bill said. “Let’s take it from there.”

“Would you, Bill?” The first hint of hope touched her voice. “Really take it from there?”

Looking in her eyes, catching the subtle inflections of her tone, he began to realize what she was driving at. “You think I’ve been going about it all wrong, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. I wanted to scream, sitting there in Dr. Connell’s office, listening to him talk about psychic forces and evidence suggesting that you weren’t suffering an ordinary hallucination.”

She paused to see how he was taking it. His tight control on his composure let his face give her no clue. But inside, he was tom with the thought that she was trying to deal with him gently now, trying to reach into a wounded mind. She didn’t buy Connell’s theories. She thought he was sick, period, and right now Bill wondered whether she might very well be right.

“Bill, parapsychology is such a young science.” She was choosing her words with careful tact. “It might be like the old practice of alchemy.”

He didn’t point out that alchemy had evolved into the very real science of chemistry. Man today could build molecules and even make artificial elements because the alchemist had searched the darkness of ignorance for a way to turn lead into gold. Their gropings had accumulated the foundation stones of knowledge on which the first chemists had built.

But he knew that Betty would find no comfort in dark gropings right now. She wanted an answer to come out of what she believed was hard, proven, safe knowledge.

He hated the sound of the words, but he had to say them: “You think I ought to go to a head-shrinker?”

“Mental sickness is no disgrace, Bill. They do wonders nowadays.”

He studied the ground at his feet. A colony of ants was laboring a bread crumb around the obstacle of a dried oak leaf.

B-three, he thought, the cost of your company may be more than I can pay.

He felt the feather-light touch of her hand on his shoulder. “Bill?” she said softly.

He lifted his head slowly. “What if I put the psychiatrist off a little longer?”

“But why? The quicker you...”

“Why?” he echoed. It was hard to look at her suffering and tell her why. “Betty...” he pleaded, taking her hand in both of his, in almost a fatherly gesture, “what if a psychiatrist doesn’t have the answer to this one?”

“You could try...”

“And cut the slender thread?”

“You’re not a laboratory animal for Connell to observe!”

“Forget Pat Connell. This is something I have to do for myself.”

Her shoulders folded slightly. “The way men had to plant a flag on the South Pole, climb Mount Everest, and risk their lives in weightless space just because it’s there?”

“Yes, I guess so — because she’s there.” He saw the small, fresh flare in her eyes and added quickly, “More accurately, the impression is there. My conscious mind accepts the evidence of other observers. I haven’t gone that far. Consciously I’m well aware that there is no material body in that morgue compartment.”

She closed her eyes. “Bill, this can’t be real...” He ignored the glances they were drawing from passing students.

“Betty, I’d do almost anything to make it easier for you.”

“I know,” she said with a little gulping sound. She opened her eyes, looked about her, and stood up. “Well, I guess we’ve said it, haven’t we?”

“Not quite.” He rose beside her. “What are you doing for lunch tomorrow?”

A glint of tears spilled over. “Meeting an impossible character named William Latham, Jr.” She mustered a look that was both bright and woebegone.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Bill said.

On the way he considered telling her about Elizabeth Braxley, but then he decided not to. They hadn’t solved or settled anything between them, merely put it off. It was best to let things rest as they were for the moment.

He opened the door on the driver’s side of her small MG. She slid under the steering wheel and started the car, avoiding his eyes.

“See you tomorrow, Betty.”

He stepped back against the car parked parallel to hers and watched her back up and turn. The MG’s engine burred saucily as she drove the lane formed by the rows of cars. At the entrance-exit she had to brake suddenly and ease around an old Mercedes limousine that was nosing in.

Bill broke stride so suddenly his toes stubbed the asphalt. He stood rigid in the driving lane, watching the car approach. Despite its age and weight, the Mercedes moved with silken power.

Bill moved over, and the car whispered to a stop. In the driver’s seat George Kahler smiled at Bill through the side window, which was snicking down from a touch on an electric button.

“Hello there, Mr. Latham,” Kahler said pleasantly. “This is sure luck. I was looking for you and all prepared to go to the registrar’s office and find out where you might be this time of day.”

“What do you want?”

“First, I guess an apology is in order. I must have impressed you as a roughneck this morning.”

“I’ve met friendlier people,” Bill admitted.

“It’s just that Mrs. Braxley don’t usually want anybody calling. So, out of habit, I head off what you might call ‘unauthorized personnel.’ And I make it short and to the point. Saves wear and tear on the nervous system.”

Kahler leaned his head out. “This morning I thought I did real great.” He grinned hugely at himself. “But I about got tarred and feathered. Seems Mrs. Braxley likes your looks.”

A breath quickened in Bill’s throat.

“She said to me, ‘George, you go right down and look that fine young man up and you tell him you’re sorry you acted like a roustabout, and then you offer the hospitality of The Oaks to him.’” Kahler delivered his diplomacy in a single rush of words.

“She wants to see me?” Bill asked.

“She sure does.”

“When?”

“Right now.”

Bill glanced at a classroom building several hundred yards away.

“Be a pal, Mr. Latham,” Kahler wheedled. “It’ll mean a lot to her, talking with someone about Elizabeth. And to me, too. I can’t go back and tell the poor old lady you wouldn’t come. Anyhow, you must have missed some classes this morning. A little more classroom time spent at The Oaks won’t hurt.”

“I’ll get my car,” Bill decided suddenly.

“No need. Come around and hop in. I’ll bring you back.”

As Bill walked around the front of the Mercedes, Kahler let out a long, grateful sigh and slipped his hand from beneath his black jacket. His fingers felt stiff. His palm had grown sweaty from gripping his concealed revolver.

Something to Wear

Betty carefully insinuated the MG into the rushing roar of expressway traffic. The tumult squeezed yet another degree of intensity into her raging headache. The cars about her hurtled like monsters straining their leashes. Home, where she could collect and sort her thoughts in quiet security, seemed an impossible distance away.

She drove with determination, consciously focusing on the demands of expressway conduct. She marked off the familiar exit signs, hanging on to the thought that as each swept by she was a little nearer her own.

The drive was a brutal contrast to all her other trips in the MG. The car was a present from her father on her last birthday. Until today, she had enjoyed every mile the sturdy little car had taken her. It was a personal possession, as a spirited filly might have been to a young woman in bygone days. She usually drove with the top down, a kerchief snugging her blue-black hair, even in chilly weather. Often on weekends, she was a common sight around home in dungarees and sweatshirt, slicking up the MG with hose, wax, and chamois.

Ahead loomed the tall stanchion supporting a white-on-green sign: EASTERN PARKWAY, NEXT RIGHT.

The MG blinkered and eased into the exit lane. Betty braked and dropped down the tight cloverleaf of the ramp.

A few minutes later she turned off Eastern onto Fairfield Boulevard. The scenery abruptly changed. Out here in the Estates, traffic was a whisper. A few shiny cars and an occasional delivery van from the better downtown stores glided the winding, gracefully curving avenues. The boulevard was walled in green; carefully planted pines and rhododendron shielded homes, swimming pools, parklike acreage.

Betty turned left on Foxlane and reached the break in the screening shrubbery that marked the Atherton driveway.

As the MG nosed in, the familiar view spread before Betty. A long lawn. Manicured box hedges and rock gardens. The curl of the driveway through a lane of firs as perfectly shaped as Christmas trees.

Rising in the midst of the setting, the house was a two-story, spotlessly white colonial. Chimneys of antique brick rose at either end. A veranda, reposing behind tall columns and graced with a scattering of wrought-iron furnishings, would have delighted the heart of a Kentucky colonel.

Betty parked on the concrete apron before the three-car garage, turned off the ignition, and sat for an exhausted moment.

The soothing serenity didn’t lift her spirits very much. She appreciated everything her father had done, but at times she wished they were all back in the middle-class home she’d known as a small child. No other house could quite match its friendliness and warmth.

The good old days. Her mouth quirked in wry amusement at the thought.

Mr. Youngblood had seen her arrival and was coming around the garage, a pruning shears dangling in his hand.

He was a lean, fit, slightly grizzled man of about fifty. He could plumb a pipe, repair a furnace, and coax a rose to grow. He, a butler, a cook-house-keeper, and a housemaid comprised the staff. The others were always distant and impersonal, as if she were a machine or another piece of furniture. But Mr. Youngblood had always had a moment for Betty and her problems. In some ways, she felt almost as close to him as to her father.

He was frowning as his shadow fell across the car. His keen gray eyes added up her tired look, her paleness, the wan hollows beneath her eyes.

“You’re all done in!” he said anxiously.

“Just a headache,” she dismissed her own feelings.

She got out as Mr. Youngblood opened the door.

“Is Mother here?”

“No, ma’am. She left about an hour ago. She’s attending the convention of clubwomen in the state capital.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Betty said. She remembered that her father had mentioned the convention, rather stiffly, to her mother last evening.

Walking toward the foot of the veranda, she supposed that her mother would be gone over the weekend. Nothing much had been said about the trip. Her mother was forever on the go with her time-filling activities — clubs, charities, bridge parties at the country club.

It seemed such a long time since Daddy and Mother had really discussed anything more important than a dinner-guest list. Betty almost wished that sometime they would have an old-fashioned, slightly uncivilized argument.

She felt the weight of Mr. Youngblood’s concerned gaze. As she crossed the veranda, he was still standing there beside the driveway, tapping his shears in his hand and worrying about her.

Her arrival had caught the rest of the household unawares. She moved through the spacious entry hall and wearily mounted the subdued elegance of the gently curving stairway.

The carpeting in the upper hallway dissolved the sounds of her moving presence as she made her way to her room.

Her mother had chosen the French provincial furnishings a few years ago — ivory chests, dressing table, canopy bed. But Betty had added touches of her own. A shelf of treasured books. A small aquarium of tropical fish. High school and college pennants on the walls.

She’d made the curtains over the twin bay windows and daubed the still lifes and landscapes that hung on the walls. They weren’t very good paintings, she knew, but she’d been warmed by Mr. Youngblood’s praise as the two of them had made frames in his workshop.

She gulped an aspirin in the bathroom, then reentered the bedroom and crossed to the bed. She stripped off the satin spread, folded it, and laid it on a boudoir chair. She wriggled her shoes off, sitting on the edge of the bed, and lay back, easing her head to the pillow.

She tried to keep her mind off Bill and the awful thing that had happened to him. She had plenty of thinking to do about Bill. But right now, just get rid of the horrible headache.

Her eyes closed. Her muscles began to relax. The hammering pain between her temples dulled.

She was soon limp. Now that it had a chance to catch up to her, the fatigue overwhelmed her. It was the last thing she expected, and she didn’t know the quiet, secret second that it happened; but in a short time she fell sound asleep.

She woke groggily. Her senses struggled from the slump of deep exhaustion. She stirred and opened her eyes. Early twilight cast a gray tone through the room. As consciousness gained strength, she felt better. The headache had drained away.

“Betty?” a man’s voice inquired softly.

She turned her head. Her father stood at the foot of the bed. His form was a bit fuzzy because of the gloom. But even so, Rolph Atherton’s presence filled the room. He was six feet tall, but the width of his shoulders and chest gave him a stocky look. He didn’t seem to merely stand on a spot; he was planted, rooted of his own free will and for as long as he cared to remain. The cut of him, Betty thought at times, might have been molded from the concrete and steel with which he worked.

“Yes, Daddy, I’m awake,” she said.

The shadows emphasized the crags of his face, the lean cheeks sloping down from blunt bones, the cleft chin, the forehead with the slight jutting of bone over the eyes. His hair seemed to pick up most of the light. Surprisingly, it was a soft silver, as fine as a woman’s, laying back from his forehead in a carefully barbered sheen.

He moved around to the side of the bed. In motion, his body denied its weight. No particular muscle usage set him apart. He didn’t barge; he didn’t charge, he simply walked. And yet a close observer could easily have imagined Rolph Atherton crossing a veld in big-game country. The same observer might have surmised that in the end Rolph Atherton would track down his lion and bring back his trophy.

He sat down sideways on the edge of the bed and leaned forward to touch the lamp on the bedside table.

His face leaped boldly from the twilight as the lamp softly flared. Betty saw the thawing of anxiety in his eyes as he looked at her carefully.

“Little flu bug got my girl?”

“No, Daddy, just a headache.”

“Saw Youngblood as I drove in. He told me you checked in early.”

Casually he patted her forehead. She knew he was really checking for the heat of a temperature. During his rare mother-hen moments with her, he was never as clever as he thought. But she was touched rather than amused. Deep down, she suspected, he really did value her well-being more than his own life.

She sat up and brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead. The bed rustled with the loss of his weight as he stood up and edged back to give her room. He stood and watched her swing her feet to the floor. Her toes explored in search of her shoes.

She smiled up at the residual shadow of worry still in his face. “The nap was a terrific tonic. I’m fine now.”

“Headache all gone?”

“Like I never had one.”

His eyes remained faintly suspicious. “You’re the stickler for the nearly perfect attendance record,” he pointed out. “And you do look a bit puny. Maybe Dr. Rathstein should look you over.”

“Pete’s sake, Dad!”

He watched her rise and cross to her dressing table.

“Well, okay,” he relented. “But I don’t like the idea of a headache bad enough to blast you out of school and knock you out for the afternoon.”

“Maybe something I ate,” she said, sitting down and picking up a hairbrush.

“You?” he growled. “You’ve a stomach like... like young Latham’s. Have you had these headaches often?”

Her eyes met his briefly in the dressing table mirror. “No, of course not. Today was the first time.”

She tried to concentrate on brushing her hair, but he was still studying her mirrored image.

He was a hard man to fool. Many people had tried — business rivals, politicians, top echelon employees in his company on rare occasions. Very few had succeeded. And right now, Betty knew, he suspected she was holding something back.

He came up close behind her, making a grin for her in the mirror. “Three guesses?” he suggested. “You flunked a test?” He shook his head. “No, you’ve done that before without it resulting in migraine. Let’s see, for number two, your best friend has been making eyes at Bill Latham, and he’s...”

“Daddy, please!” The words were almost a gasp.

His hand stole to her shoulder. She could sense the reserve of his strength, like the power of a dynamo that would never run down, but his touch was gentle.

“Sure, Bets. I guess I stumbled warm, at that. It does have to do with Bill Latham.” He gave her shoulder a warm little squeeze. “And I keep forgetting. You’re not a kid. You’re a young woman. College girl, anyhow. You’ve a right to some privacy.”

“Yes, I do have!” She yanked the brush in a vigorous stroke through her hair.

His hand drew back. “Say, now! I really did touch a sensitive nerve.”

The tension that had clamped through her in Patrick Connell’s office began an insidious, creeping return.

She dropped her brush on the dressing table and turned to face him. Now that he’d traced the cause of her headache to Bill Latham, he wasn’t any longer worried about her physical health. He was not only relieved, she decided, he was hoping the headache was a sign that she and Bill were breaking up.

“Daddy, I think yours is the sensitive nerve — any time Bill Latham is mentioned.”

“Have I said anything against the boy?”

“Not in so many words. You’re too clever for that.”

He drew up a Louis XVI chair upholstered with brocade and straddled it, facing her over its back. “Have I said you couldn’t see him? In fact, I believe he has a dinner invitation this very next Saturday evening.”

A vein throbbed in Betty’s temple. She moved to face away from him again. Then, seeing herself in the mirror, she wished it didn’t reflect her countenance so clearly. She had the feeling there was no escaping, no hiding.

She saw her lips move and heard the words, “Saturday... it seems so far off. So much could happen.” She broke off, her eyes stinging, the mirrored image swirling.

“Betty?” her father asked with some alarm.

She fought for a breath and tried to guide the brush through her hair. “I’m all right. It’s nothing.”

“You’re not all right!” His hands were clamped tight on the chair, inches below his thrust-out chin. His eyes flared with the light that usually cowed a board of directors. He was about to voice a demand. But an instinct seemed to warn him.

He got up, came to her, bent beside her, and put his arm about her. “Bets, it’s a good strong shoulder.”

She needed it, and she used it, her hands grasping him, her face burrowing tightly against the collar of his jacket.

He cushioned her sobs, letting her have the time she needed.

She raised her tearful face. “Daddy, Bill is sick!”

“Sick?”

“Sick, sick, sick!” The words were almost a scream. “In here!” Her fingertip punched against her temple.

He rose with stiff movements. “When did you find this out? How?”

“Today. Dr. Patrick Connell told Bill’s father and me.”

“Connell...” Atherton’s strong fingers curled at his sides. “That radical and his wild ideas!”

Without realizing it, she was wringing the brush between her hands. “Bill thinks he detects a... a presence in one of the empty drawers in the morgue.”

Atherton’s head moved in a quick, pitying shake. “Poor old Doc Latham. Where have they taken Bill?”

“No place, Daddy. Not yet.”

His brows elevated. “You mean they’re just letting him run loose?”

“Dr. Connell has a theory...”

“He would have!” Her father broke in.

“A theory that Bill,” Betty continued, “is receiving a psychic impression and isn’t really crazy at all.”

“Hogwash! Connell should be locked up, also, on the level below young Latham, and the key thrown away.”

She noticed the way she was handling the brush. She dropped it on the dressing table with a clatter.

Her father thrust his hands in his trousers pockets and strode a few steps back and forth. “Little wonder you had such a headache.”

She was silent for so long that he stopped his pacing. He hesitated, then took a step toward her.

“No, Daddy,” she said in a gusty voice, as if replying to a question. “The cause of the headache, I think, was a little more complex than you believe. You see... growing up, all my ideas were borrowed, mainly from you, because you were so much stronger than Mother. Things were either black or white. Everything could be cut and measured. If you couldn’t see it, smell it, taste it, or feel it, then it wasn’t worth the wasting of a thought.”

“Bets...”

“No.” Her head made a single, quick movement. “Please let me finish.”

His shadow washed to the side of the dressing table. “All right, I’ve never said you couldn’t speak your mind. But I think that this house, everything we have, is pretty good proof of the soundness of my ideas.”

“I’m not arguing with your success, Daddy. It’s just that... well, I don’t cut and measure things quite the way I used to.”

His face took on the faintest of reddish tints. Then he bit back his snarl. “Bets, don’t tell me that Connell has poisoned you, too.”

“No, but...”

“But what?” he demanded.

“Well, even now my borrowed impulse is to mark Bill on the sick list and not look beyond that.”

“What’s beyond?” he said. “Looks as plain as the nose on my face.”

“And that’s the trouble, Daddy. The appearance of things not always expressing the truth of their reality. Your nose looks just like a nose, but when you use it, does it give you exactly the same smells that my nose gives me?”

“Betty, I’ll hear no more of this!” He turned, taut with the need to vent his energies and emotions. He seemed about to kick a hassock out of his way. “Maybe I’d better have some plain talk with the Crownover trustees about Connell!”

“I was trying to tell you what I feel inside, Daddy, and how it all added up to one mind-blowing headache.”

He walked all the way to the window bays and looked out at the deepening twilight.

When he turned, Betty knew he had made a decision. He had assessed everything with what was to him computer-like dispassion.

“I don’t actually dislike young Latham,” he said quietly. “I’ve simply never agreed with his aims in life. I’ve wanted something better and more substantial for you.”

“I know, but...”

He flicked his hand up. “Give me the same freedom of saying what I want to say that I gave you.”

She nodded, huddled slightly on the dressing table seat, her hands clutched together in her lap.

“Right now,” Rolph Atherton said, “I’m more than a little sorry for the boy. I want it broken up between you two — but not like this. I wouldn’t want it to end on a more unpleasant note.”

“Unpleasant? What do you mean?”

“If he’s off his rocker, who knows what he’ll do? Perhaps come out here and make trouble. So we’re going to the lake cottage for a few days. Just you and me. You can read, and rest, and take the speedboat for a good, chilly spin. You can think over Bill Latham with a lot clearer mind out there.”

“But I’m not thinking so much about myself. If Bill should need me...”

“Good grief, Bets,” he said in kindly contempt, “you don’t think you could put a broken mind together again in a few days, do you? Anyway, if you’re really thinking about Bill, you’ll not want your own fears and tears around him right now.” She looked at him closely, wondering if he were playing on her feelings for Bill with a virtuoso touch.

“You could be the worst tiling for him right now, Bets. Give him — and the doctors — a chance for a few days. You’ll strengthen yourself and come back able to do him some real good.”

Her shoulders rose with a long sigh. “You cut it like chipping ice.”

“But I’m right. You’ll see.” He walked to her and picked up her hand. “Now, you freshen yourself up and pack a bag, young lady, while I tell the cook we won’t be here for dinner. We’ll eat in that lodge restaurant up toward the lake. The one with the funny-sounding Indian name.”

She watched him leave the room. She wanted to be here every second, knowing all that was happening to Bill. She glimpsed herself in that role, a fluttering nuisance worrying everyone with her questions, troubling them with her fears, helping no one. Her father was offering her the harder way, it seemed.

She got up and crossed to the closet. She slid back the panel, exposing the rack of dresses, not really caring what she would wear.

She reached in and lifted a dress from its hanger. It was yellow linen. It had two small rhinestones where the shoulder straps met the squarish collar.

She had bought the dress a few days ago at a little off-campus shop catering to coeds. So far she hadn’t worn it.

A Revealing Portrait

Driving toward Harlandale, George Kahler worked at being friendly. He asked about Bill’s courses at Crownover and insisted on picking up a bag of hamburgers at a carry-out place on the edge of the city.

Kahler got back in the Mercedes, grinning as he handed over the food. “That’ll push a wrinkle out, anyhow.”

“Thanks.”

Kahler whisked the car back onto the highway. It moved with the fluid power of harnessed black leopards.

Kahler drove with his left hand, taking a big chomp at the hamburger he held in his right.

“Your girl in the MG?” Kahler asked.

“I guess you could say that.”

“Real nice-looking chick.”

“Yes, she is.”

Kahler glanced at him. Bill’s tone hadn’t invited pursuance of the subject. And right now, Bill rated royal courtesy, at least until Kahler had finished the job of fetching him to The Oaks.

Bill watched trees and telephone poles whip past. By now, he judged, Betty would have covered the distance of the expressway, Eastern Parkway, Fairfield Boulevard, Foxlane. She would be entering that luxurious house. Her father wouldn’t be home for a few hours yet. Bill hoped her mother would be. But that was always questionable. Mrs. Atherton was always running hither and yon, making motions to fill a life that had grown empty.

She could try filling it a little more with Betty, Bill thought grimly.

Kahler watched Bill without appearing to. The young fellow was sure thinking some long thoughts, he observed.

Kahler slowed the car, turned the steering wheel, and eased across the rutty drop onto The Oaks driveway.

Bill’s moodiness drained off a little. He braced against the armrest as the car rolled and pitched along the ruts up through the trees.

They passed the point of their earlier confrontation. Then Kahler was stopping the car in front of the house.

The silent, weathered face of the house held George for a moment.

“Just be kind to her, Mr. Latham. The years haven’t been. It never hurts to be kind.”

Bill’s hand stiffened for an instant on the door handle. His face twisted leftward in a short arc. George was looking away, toward the house. Bill studied the almost earless head that might have been carved from yellowish marble. George’s words had rung unpleasantly like a warning, a threat.

“I didn’t come along to be unkind,” Bill said.

George looked around with a bull-like movement of head and shoulders. “Yes, that’s right. You’re a nice young fellow.”

“And kindness is a two-way street,” Bill said.

George caught the counter-warning. It seemed to amuse him. “You’re mighty right, Mr. Latham,” he agreed amiably.

They got out of the car. As Bill walked around to fall in beside George, he looked toward the house, expecting it to show signs of life. But nothing happened. Even the big dog Blitzen was conspicuous by his absence.

George opened the front door and bowed Bill inside.

Bill had the sensation of a backward movement in time. The air had a mustiness that couldn’t have accumulated overnight.

He followed Kahler into a living room where the draperies had hung limp for a generation. The style of the couches and chairs was older than his earliest memories. On a coffee table a youngish Harry Truman doggedly electioneered from the cover of a yellowing magazine. Bill had never seen a radio like the ornate cabinet model in the end of the room.

“I’ll announce you, Mr. Latham,” Kahler said, as if he spent half his time ushering in callers.

The woman who poised for an entrance a few minutes later caused Bill to stand rooted in mild shock. She was a slender, wasted figure in a blue silk dress that reached within a dozen inches of her ankles. Her thin face was a gargoyle mask molded from white chalk, with slashes of crimson and blue marking mouth and eyes. Her hair was a sparse fall of silver that curled inward above her shoulders.

“So nice of you to come, Mr. Latham.” With hand outstretched and a smile pulling the garish lips, she stepped forward with a lingering trace of charm and grace. The hint of what she must have once been only pointed up, pitiably, what she was today.

Bill took the offered hand. The bones were thin and birdlike. Her touch was as dry as an old, long-stored newspaper.

“I’m Carlotta Braxley,” she said. “Do sit down. Be comfortable. We don’t stand on too much formality here at The Oaks. You may smoke if you care to.”

“Never picked up the habit,” Bill said.

“Then you’re a very wise young man. Neither did Elizabeth.” She turned and moved to one of the couches facing each other before the dead fireplace. “George will serve some tea shortly, and we’ll have a good talk.”

She sat down with a genteel breaking of the knees, her back straight. She patted the cushion beside her, and the movement provoked a hint of dust.

Bill was nearer the opposite couch. It was a good excuse for him to sit farther from her, with the old-fashioned oaken coffee table between them.

With a ferret intensity, she watched him sink onto the couch.

“Do you like Crownover, Mr. Latham?”

“Very much.”

“Do you live in a dorm or fraternity house?”

“I live at home,” he said. “My father is a local doctor.”

“I see. Do you wish to become a doctor, also?”

“I’d like to get into the research end of medicine. But it takes a long time and a lot of work.”

“And I’m sure you’ll succeed.” Her quick little nods admitted no argument.

George came in carrying a magnificent but slightly tarnished silver tea service. He set the tray on the oaken table.

“Thank you, George,” Mrs. Braxley said. “That will be all for now, but stay on call.”

Rising from the tray, George flicked a final warning glance at Bill. Be very kind to her, George’s eyes said.

Bill felt his hackles rise. It came to him that this echo of a woman and this ruin-ridden estate made up Kahler’s world. These were the responsibilities that gave George a reason for existing.

Bill sneaked a longing glance at the door. He was beginning to regret having come. But the strange urge to know more about Elizabeth Braxley still gnawed at him.

Mrs. Braxley was asking him how he liked his tea.

“A lump of sugar will be fine, please.”

She poured, tonged sugar, and offered the fragile, steaming cup across the table. She tilted the heavy teapot to pour her own, saying, “Did you meet Elizabeth when she was last in the hospital?”

“No, Mrs. Braxley, I didn’t know Eliza...”

“Surely you didn’t meet her when she was away at school? I’m sure she mentioned all her friends, and I don’t remember your name.” She looked at him over the thin rim of her cup. “Just how did you meet Elizabeth, Mr. Latham?”

“Well, I started to say,” he began again, clearing his throat, “I didn’t know Elizabeth at all.”

She had no facial expression, at least none visible through the layers of powder. “I’m afraid you’re confusing me. You came here earlier with inquiries about Elizabeth. Now you say you didn’t know her.”

Bill shifted awkwardly. Now that the moment was here, he wondered how foolish his words would sound — and what old wounds they might reopen in Carlotta Braxley.

“I’m waiting, young man!” For the first time her voice hinted at the emotional undertows constantly seething inside of her.

“It isn’t something that happens every day,” Bill said.

“No one has experienced the strange and the shocking more than I.” She pressed back, seeming to shrink into the couch. “I doubt that you could say anything that would surprise or upset me.”

Bill set down his drink, the cup emitting a slight rattle against the saucer.

“I have a part-time job, Mrs. Braxley, and I...”

“I’m sure it’s very nice. But I suggest you start getting to the point.”

“The job is the point — at least, in a way.” Bill rubbed the knuckles of his left hand with the palm of his right. “I work evenings at the city morgue.”

“A horrible place!”

“Yes... well... night before last...” Had it been that recent? He drew a helpless breath. “Mrs. Braxley, I think this has all been a mistake, starting with my coming here in the first place.”

She inched forward, and something in her movements sent a chill through him. “But you did come, Mr. Latham. You had a reason. And you’ve aroused my curiosity dreadfully.”

Bill found himself pressing the back of the couch, stretching the distance between himself and that hovering face. He knew he had come too far to turn back. She was going to have an explanation, or erupt like an ice-capped volcano.

“Okay, Mrs. Braxley, I’ll tell it to you straight. If you think the trouble is with me, you won’t have to call George to throw me out. I’ll leave quietly.”

“Then let’s by all means return to the morgue. I believe we were there, and the time was night before last.”

His glance slid away. He sat as if studying the film of gray ash in the long-unused fireplace. “I won’t bore you with details, but I discovered a girl in one of the refrigerated drawers. Only she wasn’t there, not really.” He hesitated. “Other people couldn’t see her. Just me.”

He slipped a look to see how she was taking it. He couldn’t tell. Her face was that of an expressionless clown out of a nightmare circus.

“Since the drawer was actually empty,” he said, “I looked up the name of the last person who’d been in it.”

“And the name was Elizabeth’s,” she said.

“Yes.”

“No, no, that’s only the beginning of it!” A wild, happy laugh burst through her words.

In a fury of movement she was up and around the table. Then she dropped sideways beside Bill and clutched his hands.

“You dear boy!” Tears of delirium spilled down the plaster-of-paris cheeks. “You dear, marvelous boy!”

Bill struggled away in quick panic, but she wouldn’t let go. She pressed his right hand against the hollow of her cheek.

“You bring me such happy news!”

“Happy?” Bill gulped. He’d expected nothing like this display.

She jumped up. Holding his hands, she dragged him to his feet.

He held back, and her eyes snapped a bolt of anger. Bill had never seen anything like it. Once it was charged up, the white mask could express joy, sorrow, wild rage, all in the same instant.

“Now, don’t be afraid, young man! We’re simply going up to Elizabeth’s room. Isn’t that why you came, to know and understand her better?”

Bill allowed himself to be led out of the living room and up a creaking stairway. In the upper hall, Carlotta Braxley stopped at a closed door. A hush came over her. She opened the door with soft, gentle movements.

“This room knew her private thoughts, Mr. Latham. These are the things she touched.” Mrs. Braxley held his hand and drew him inside. She moved inch by inch, as if she were on hallowed ground.

Special as the room might be to Carlotta Braxley, Bill saw it as comfortably ordinary. It was furnished in maple and chintz. And, in one respect, it didn’t seem a part of the house. Carlotta Braxley had tried to stop the passage of time when her husband died. But in here, at least, there were reminders of the immediate past — a portable TV in the farther corner, a book about John F. Kennedy on a nearby table, and a small stereo with a tape still in place.

“Everything is exactly as she left it, Mr. Latham,” Mrs. Braxley said in hushed tones.

Bill thought of a girl growing up in this house and staying in tune with the present only in this room. He shivered slightly.

Mrs. Braxley slipped about the room, touching objects here and there as if it were a daily ritual. She shifted comb, brush, cologne and perfume bottles on the dressing table, probably back to the exact locations of yesterday. She smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle from the flowered bedspread.

Bill stood as if glued. She looked at him from the foot of the bed.

“It was terribly difficult,” she said, “first realizing and then accepting Elizabeth’s differences. She was like no other person, Mr. Latham. She was different from the day of her birth. Yes...”

Her mind drifted. She looked vaguely about the room, then refocused on Bill.

“I’m sure your education has progressed to a knowledge of genes, chromosomes, those hereditary factors in our parents that cause us to be born the way we are.”

“Yes.” Bill nodded. “I know something about the subject.”

“Then you know that life progresses in a chain. Every now and then a link bursts out that’s different. We call this link a mutation. Elizabeth was a mutant... yes...”

She wandered to the windows overlooking the front lawn. A fold in the curtains caught her eye. She smoothed it with a gentle brushing of her palm, then carefully fingered it in again.

“It was, of course, due to the terrible accident Johnny suffered,” she said.

Johnny, Bill thought, Elizabeth’s father. To the rest of the world, he’d been a remote, incomprehensible, big-brain atomic scientist. But to this woman, Dr. Jonathan Fitfield Braxley had been Johnny, lovable sweetheart, husband.

She looked down at the front lawn, and perhaps she was seeing a stream of cars arriving for a party, hearing the laughter and exuberant greetings, the sights and sounds of a generation ago.

Bill took a step toward her. “Mrs. Braxley...”

She flashed about, her lips twisting in a snarl. “You haven’t let me finish, young man! Don’t you know it’s discourteous to interrupt?”

“I’m sorry,” Bill said.

“Well! At least you’ve been taught sufficient manners to apologize.” A shaft of afternoon sunlight caught bluishly in her silver hair. “Shall we continue?”

“Please do,” Bill said. Anything to placate her, to keep the fires of madness banked. He wondered how many years George Kahler had spent doing the same thing.

“Johnny was... atomically radiated,” she said, “before we had any children. Elizabeth was the first, the last. Born after her father was dead from radiation poisoning.”

Bill might have expected talk of this sort to upset her. Instead, it seemed to do Carlotta good to get the thoughts out of her head.

Her voice gained strength as it droned on. “The accident was foolish and unnecessary, but things like that did happen in the hurry and pressure of those wartime days. An assistant dropped a shielded container of high-energy material. He recovered. Johnny — who acted to reclose the casing — didn’t. Yes...”

She’d drifted toward the bed. She grasped one of the foot posters at shoulder height and leaned slightly against it.

“The results of atomic radiation were passed on to Elizabeth,” she said. “She was a fragile child from the beginning, but such a lovely little girl. The sickness that eventually claimed her wasn’t apparent at first. Leukemia, the doctors called it, for want of a better word. But I know... Indeed, I know...”

She rested her forehead against the bed post. “We human beings are more than mere flesh and blood. Don’t you agree, Mr. Latham? Yes, you do, or you wouldn’t be here.” Her words crowded on, giving him little chance to speak.

“Our psychic nature is more important than our physical,” she said. “And that was the important difference in Elizabeth. She was a new kind of human being. Her psychic outreach grew as her body weakened. Even when she was small and her powers first noticeable, I rarely had to call aloud to her. She would come into the room where I was. ‘Mama,’ she would say, ‘did you want me for something?’ And I would reply, ‘Why, yes, dear, but how did you know?’ ‘I just felt it, Mama,’ she would answer. Further than that, she never had any explanation. And sometimes she had no psychic powers at all.”

Mrs. Braxley’s palm left a damp impression as it slid from the poster.

“This is what she looked like, Mr. Latham. That is, her physical shell.”

Bill turned by degrees, his gaze following her across the room.

She stopped and looked up at an oil portrait hanging on the inner wall. Bill took a few steps for a straighter, broader view.

In lifelike flesh tones, the painting of Elizabeth Braxley suggested that she’d just said something gently humorous to the artist. The soft mouth was quirked as if her little joke was really beyond human understanding. Her blue eyes were patient and kind. Her sheen of golden hair, falling to her shoulders, relieved the etching of suffering in her delicate jaw and chin lines.

“Isn’t she lovely, Mr. Latham?”

“Yes,” Bill said honestly, “she was beautiful.”

The shoulders in front of him stiffened. “Was? Did I hear correctly, young man?”

She spun about. For a second he thought that her hands were about to tear like talons at his face. “How dare you speak of Elizabeth in the past tense!”

“Please, Mrs. Braxley. Don’t upset yourself.”

“It is you who are upsetting! I’m surprised Elizabeth chose you!” She parked her knuckles against her sides and looked him up and down. A breath hissed from her. “But since she did, I suppose I must accept her choice.” Her hand darted and was suddenly plucking his sleeve. “So come along, young man, and I’ll show you to your quarters.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Braxley?”

Her glance was impatient. “Your quarters. Your room. We’ll try to make you comfortable while you’re living with us.”

He gulped, dry-throated. “Mrs. Braxley, I really have to get going now. There’s school and my job.”

“Nonsense! None of that is important now. Nothing matters — except that Elizabeth found you and sent you. It naturally follows that you will stay here until you have raised her.”

Bill balked immovably in the hallway outside Elizabeth’s room. “Raised her, Mrs. Braxley?”

“Certainly. It’s perfectly clear, dear boy. You are her medium. Through you, Elizabeth will speak. You’re the connection through which she will return.”

A dreamy glow melted Carlotta Braxley’s eyes. “We’ll have endless seances. Each evening after dinner we shall turn down the lights and wait for Elizabeth to come and speak through you.”

Bill cleared his throat. “Mrs. Braxley, please let me explain something.” Unobtrusively he eased into motion, moving along the hall, her eyes rapt on his face as she stayed beside him.

“You see,” he said, “I’m not a spirit-medium. I’m just a college student who never had anything like this happen to him before. I’ve a feeling when this is over I’ll never experience anything like it again. A once-in-a-lifetime thing, you understand?”

“I don’t like the sound of this, Mr. Latham.” Her tone was brittle.

“Don’t you want me to be honest with you?”

“You had best be!”

Ahead loomed the shadow of the stairwell, the escape route.

“There are a lot of phony mediums who’d love to come here and give you a spook show for your money, Mrs. Braxley. Some of them are very clever. They could make you think you were talking to Elizabeth through them. But I can’t produce what your heart craves so much. I couldn’t fake it. I’d feel like a nut, sitting in the dark and calling out to Elizabeth’s spirit.”

“You lack dedication, Mr. Latham,” she warned thinly. “The way you feel isn’t the important issue.”

“No, you’re right about that, I guess. But don’t you see, I’d only disappoint and hurt you.”

She slipped between him and the stairway. In the corridor’s gloom, her face hovered as if disembodied. Facing him in a slight crouch, she seized his elbows. “What is it you want, Mr. Latham? Your room redecorated? It shall be done. Special foods? You shall have them. Money? I have lots of it.”

He moved his hands, gently breaking her grip, almost a finger at a time.

“I want,” he said, “you to have peace of mind. I think the woman who mothered Elizabeth was a fine lady. I want her to be happy. I want her to know that I would have done as she asked, if it had been possible.”

Holding her hands, he had quietly shifted their positions as he talked. Now he could feel the emptiness of the first stair under his left sole.

“Please try to understand, Mrs. Braxley. Good luck, and good-bye.”

He went down quickly, hitting every third stair tread, touching the banister with outthrust hand to keep his balance. Her wild screaming of his name threatened to shatter the plaster and bury him in moldering ruin.

He raced through the foyer and yanked open the front door. A crimson, glaring sun met his eyes.

An upstairs window showered tinkling glass as Mrs. Braxley smashed it with the first thing she could lay hands on.

“George! Blitzen!” she was screaming from up there. “He’s running away! You must stop him. You must, you must, you must!”

Bill ran toward the Mercedes. He tried to remember: Had George left the keys in the ignition?

He jerked open the door on the driver’s side, and the ignition lock leered at him, empty.

Hearing a deep-throated growl, he twisted a frantic glance over his shoulder. The huge dog had slipped up behind him. Blitzen was crouched, bunched to spring. Bill glimpsed the reddish eyes, and the gleaming fangs, and his reflexes almost failed him. He threw himself aside as the dog catapulted. The hurtling shadow blurred his sight. Losing his footing, Bill rolled away. He heard the heavy thud of the powerful animal against the open car door.

He was up and running before Blitzen could regroup himself. Then he heard Blitzen’s snarl, closing in.

Bill ducked behind an oak tree. The ground beneath spreading branches was littered with dried leaves, chips of bark, dead twigs and branches that had fallen victim to high winds.

Bill grabbed up a decayed limb that was almost as thick as his arm and half again as long.

With the rough bark of the tree trunk biting his back, Bill jabbed the limb as Blitzen closed in.

The dog veered, slowed, and began circling with muscles bunched and eager.

From Bill’s throat came a sound to equal Blitzen’s growl. Bill punched and feinted, warding off the dog.

He glimpsed Kahler’s massive, running form coming from the farther corner of the house.

“Call the brute off, Kahler!”

Kahler stopped, his feet showering dead leaves. He slapped his thigh. “Heel, Blitzen!” The dog didn’t obey immediately. He inched sideways, eyes glazed with excitement of the hunt, ears laid back, tongue lolling.

Kahler took two strides, closed on the dog, and grabbed him by the scruff. “Easy, boy, easy now.”

Blitzen struggled a moment longer in his master’s grip, frantic to leap upon Bill. Kahler backed the dog, holding the bunched neck fur and talking softly to him.

Blitzen gradually calmed, but his muscles continued to quiver, his eyes not leaving Bill.

Kahler straightened, his hand slipping a pistol from the waistband of his trousers.

Bill looked at the man for a nerveless moment. The dead tree limb slipped unnoticed from his hand.

He slowly looked from the gun up into Kahler’s face.

“She wants you back in there, fellow,” George said as he leveled the pistol at Bill.

Bill tried to calm the pounding in his chest. He shook his head slowly. “You’re making a mistake, Kahler. You’ll end up in jail for a long, long time.”

Kahler showed the first sign of hesitancy.

“She’s sick, Kahler,” Bill pressed on. “You know it as well as I. You probably hurt for the tragedy of her even more than I. But making me a prisoner in that house won’t help her.”

Kahler’s face turned briefly toward the house. It was silent now, as silent as a lost ship in ocean depths.

“Maybe she’s collapsed or hurt herself,” Bill said. “You’ve spent a lot of your life taking care of her, Kahler. Don’t ruin it. Don’t let her down now.”

Bill stood with his hands pressed beside him, clawing into the tree trunk. He watched the play of slow wits through Kahler’s face.

“People are no good for her,” Kahler said savagely. “People make her remember too many things.”

Kahler again looked at the house. He was brutish and dull, but as the man’s tortured eyes swung back, Bill glimpsed the human depths that even the dullest of men may possess. There are few clods on this earth, Bill thought, except in the eyes of the beholder.

Kahler took a step backward, the first in his hurried return to his appointed task. “Like I told you the first time, fellow — get out!”

The Search

Patrick Connell sat tilted back in his office chair, hands laced across his stomach, feet on his desk. He brooded at the stack of papers on the desk before him. They were individual student appraisals of a report dealing with ESP experiments at the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man at Durham, North Carolina. He had read the report to his parapsychology classes.

He told himself for the dozenth time to get busy on the papers. Otherwise, he knew he’d have to take the stuff home and spend half the night on them.

Usually he enjoyed the sort of chore that now faced him. He was always buoyed by the keen insights and sense of judgment in the great majority of the young minds in his charge.

But this afternoon he couldn’t seem to focus his powers of concentration. He would read a paragraph or two and drop the paper back on the stack.

He knew what ailed him. Bill Latham.

If it turned out that he’d said or done anything harmful for Bill...

He shook aside the thought and reached with grim resolution toward the stack of papers.

His movement was arrested by a knock on the door.

He lifted his feet off the desk, straightened in his chair, and called, “Come in.”

The door opened several inches. Bill Latham’s head thrust in. “Am I interrupting?”

“Not a bit,” Connell said. “As a matter of fact, I was sitting here thinking about you.”

Bill entered and closed the door. He came forward and chose the nearer Windsor chair. Watching him, Pat grew a shallow crease in his brow.

“Bill, you’re looking a little off your vitamins. Frankly, I don’t like it.”

“It’s my personality.” Bill’s lopsided grin was a tired effort. “I draw punishment like the big breakers pull out the surfboards.” He dropped heavily in the chair.

“You and Betty? That the trouble? Of course, if the talk was personal, you have permission to tell a professor to shut his mouth and mind his own business.”

“Betty and I had some rap,” Bill said. “Nothing too personal to talk about. She cut out at lunchtime and took a headache home.”

“She comes from a hard-dollar background, a little different than your own, Bill. You can’t expect her to see eye to eye with you at the drop of a lash. Not on a subject like psychic phenomena.”

“I know.” Bill nodded. “But Betty isn’t the subject that brought me, this trip.”

“What then?”

“I went back to Harlandale and The Oaks. This time by invitation, driven out in a Mercedes limousine. I had to hitch a ride back, though. A truck driver gave me a lift into town, and I just now paid off a taxicab driver outside the building. My car’s still in the parking lot.”

Pat propped his elbows on the desk and leaned heavily. “And this time you saw Mrs. Braxley.”

“Yes,” Bill said, his tone dropping. “Yes, I did.” He mused on the space beyond Pat’s shoulders, then shook his head. He brushed the heel of his palm across his temple. “Pat, I don’t think I’ve ever been sorrier for anyone, thinking what a woman she must have once been!”

“What did she say to you?”

Bill’s brows gathered in a rueful pinch. “For one thing, she practically wanted to adopt me — so we could spend our days in spook-haven having happy little spirit seances that would call forth Elizabeth. For another...”

Pat let Bill break off for only an instant. “Yes?” Connell prompted, his feelers of scientific curiosity opened up like a Venus flytrap.

“She — Mrs. Braxley — has this theory,” Bill said. “She’s convinced that Dr. Jonathan Braxley’s overdose of radiation changed hereditary factors and caused Elizabeth to be born different from any other person on this planet. A sort of side step in the chain of evolution, I guess you could say.”

Sharp points of light glittered in Pat’s eyes. “I know you pretty well, Bill — and you’re still not down to the nub of it.”

“Well, I saw a portrait of Elizabeth Braxley. Drawn from life. And that... that thing in B-three is not the image of Elizabeth Braxley.”

“Why not? How can you be sure? You said the face appeared to be battered beyond recognition.”

Bill pulled in a breath. “B-three... The impression in B-three has dark hair, very dark. But Elizabeth Braxley was a blonde, a blonde like sunlight through a window stained with a tinge of gold.”

Pat had picked up a pencil and busied his hands with it. Now he stared at the ragged ends of two pieces of pencil, one in either hand. He tossed them on the desk.

“Dead end,” Pat said bleakly. “Blank wall. Short circuit. And the dimmest of candles goes out.”

“Except for one thing,” Bill amended. “I thought about it all the way in from The Oaks.”

Pat snapped his fingers in his impatience. “Well, give! Clue me in!”

“The dress,” Bill said, “that yellow dress the image in B-three is wearing.”

The skin flashed tight across Connell’s cheekbones. His eyes reflected his effort to computerize his thoughts.

“Of course!” Pat breathed. “Your experience at The Oaks firms up the scene. We know definitely now that B-three is not a glimpse at Elizabeth Braxley’s past. So it’s got to be a warning of somebody else’s future.”

“Dark-haired girl, wearing a yellow dress, slated for the morgue,” Bill said. “I had a feeling from the start that B-three was a danger signal. But I couldn’t be really sure until I’d seen that portrait of Elizabeth Braxley.”

Pat rocked forward. “But the future isn’t cut-and-dried. The future is the accumulation of moment-to-moment actions. You pull off the highway for a Coke — and never know you’ve avoided a collision by just that many seconds.”

“Or the seconds used up in the delay,” Bill pointed out, “puts you exactly in the path of the other car.”

“Granted. Normally you never know. But B-three is a little tear in the curtain. B-three is pointless — unless a nudge in the present can alter the future of a girl in a yellow dress.”

Bill suddenly choked on a breath. “What if she isn’t wearing the dress? Nothing will happen if...”

Pat slammed his chair back. “That’s it, Bill! The dress is the one thing that stands out like... like a yellow dress! We don’t know who the girl is. So we’ve got to find that dress!”

“How?” The practical side of Bill’s mind grabbed hold of the problem. “We can’t ask every girl in town if she owns a B-three dress!”

Pat planted his palms on the desk, leaning his weight forward on his extended arms. “You didn’t describe it that first time as a bargain basement number.”

“No.” Bill shook his head. “It looked like a job from one of the better stores. But I know women’s clothing like I know the dark side of the moon.”

“We’ve no choice but to trust your opinion,” Pat declared. He straightened and stood a moment knuckling his jaw. “We’ve got a couple things going for us. The number of upper-crust stores and shops narrows the job. Those shops usually stock only a few of the same model. They don’t load a rack with duplicates of expensive dresses. And, finally, shops of that type keep a pretty good record of their customers.”

He continued speaking as he came around the desk. “We’ll divide up the stores and start digging, unless you can think of a better way.”

“No,” Bill said, “I can’t. But the afternoon is gone, and the places we’re after don’t keep discount-store hours.”

“So they all close before we get results,” Pat muttered with determination. “So we start out again tomorrow morning.”

Bill fell in step beside Pat. Pat closed his office door, and they started down the corridor at a fast pace.

“If B-three is just a trick of my eyes,” Bill remarked, “we’re going to look like a pair of fools.”

They came out of the building into the crimson shades of a setting autumn sun. “If B-three isn’t a trick of your eyes,” Pat countered, “we’ll feel like a pair of happy fools — if we succeed.”

Pat’s car was in the small area set aside for faculty members, adjacent to the building. As Pat drove toward the student parking lot and Bill’s car, he and Bill listed the stores and shops each would take.

“Luck,” Pat said as Bill got out and moved toward his own car.

Luck? The word returned to haunt Bill when the downtown stores began locking their doors and turning on their window display lights.

Whoever invented the lousy word?

He hadn’t eaten, but he wasn’t hungry. He could catch a delayed dinner at the hospital commissary. Right now, his stomach was too knotted with the hope that Pat had turned up positive results.

Pat timed a call that almost coincided with Bill’s entry into the morgue.

Bill crossed the reception room and picked up the phone in one quick movement.

“Pat, Bill.”

“Any luck?”

“All bad.”

“Ditto,” Bill said.

“We’ll try tomorrow.”

“Sure,” Bill said.

He dropped the phone in its cradle in discouragement. What if the girl who’d bought the dress had left town? What if the salesgirl who’d sold it was out sick, had been fired, couldn’t remember?

The sudden summons of the ambulance signal snapped the chain of what-ifs, at least for the moment.

An hour later Bill and young Dr. Childers were rolling a birdlike, protesting elderly lady from the ambulance at the emergency entrance.

“Young man,” she said vigorously from the stretcher, “I tell you I’m quite all right!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Barney said, sliding her through the swinging doors without a break in movement. “As soon as we X-ray the right shoulder and left ankle.”

Bill returned to the ambulance and jockeyed it back into its slot. When he got out this time, he saw his father drifting across the emergency ramp.

“Hi, Dad.” Bill grinned. “Not just passing, were you?”

“No,” his father said frankly. “Just keeping an eye peeled in a fond direction.” He nodded toward the emergency entrance. “What was all that?”

“Little old lady was returning a stepladder to her basement and took a tumble down the stairs.” Bill knew his father was using conversation as an excuse for an observant once-over.

“She had been using the ladder,” Bill continued, “to get her kitty out of a small tree. The cat’s okay — but the basement floor was solid concrete. Her shoulder is smashed, though she isn’t feeling much of it right now.”

They were walking toward the morgue, his father nodding now and then as if he had nothing more on his mind than Bill’s account of the ambulance run.

“By the way,” the doctor said, “Victoria got that call today from Fortesque Fifth Avenue.”

They paused at the front door of the morgue. “That’s really great!” Bill said. “That store will be her bag.”

“They’ll be interviewing her the middle of next week. But she isn’t waiting around.” Dr. Latham smiled. “Said she was going to see a sight or two and soak up a little of the feel of the big city before she marched on the store. I imagine she’ll be like the well-known headless chick tomorrow with last-minute shopping and packing.”

Bill looked at his father gravely. “Dad, nothing must spoil this for Vicky.”

“We agreed on that, didn’t we?” Dr. Latham remarked. “Victoria mentioned your peaked looks during dinner, not more than an hour ago. I didn’t contradict her conclusion that you’re suffering nothing more serious than a twenty-four-hour bug.”

Bill nodded. “Come on in, Dad, and I’ll loan you a mop.”

“Thanks, but I’ve a hospital check on a couple of patients.”

Bill watched his father turn and move away, a heavily striding shadow.

“Hey, Dad.”

His father stopped. Bill saw the pale oval of the doctor’s face turn toward him in the gloom.

“Yes, Bill?”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Looking in on me, before the other patients.”

“Sure, Bill. But you weren’t my only reason.”

“No?”

“Me.” Dr. Latham stabbed a thumb at himself. “Need to ease my own mind. When I’m swimming in ignorance, I like to stay in hollering distance of the shore, if I can.”

Bill watched the corner of the morgue wing swallow his father from sight. Then Bill opened the door and began an evening of routine that stretched to a dreary length.

When it was time to clock out, he crossed the boneyard, curled his fingers about the handle of B-3, and broke the silence with the metallic, whisper-soft sound of the compartment’s opening.

He wasn’t surprised to find her still there. He studied the dress for a few moments before he closed the drawer.

That night he slept better than he had expected to, and when he came to breakfast the next morning, it struck him that the only outwardly visible abnormality in the Latham household was Vicky’s hardly containable excitement. She chattered about New York, the big store there, how much she had to do today.

Bill followed her to the front door as she was leaving. He pressed ten dollars in her hand.

“It isn’t much, but you see a Broadway show on me.”

“Oh, Bill, you sweet character!”

He thought for a second she was going to cry. They hugged each other and he said roughly, “You take good care of yourself, now.”

“Like I am Bill Latham’s sister!”

“What time are you leaving?”

She paused in the front doorway. “Haven’t got my reservation yet. I may end up a standby at the airport.”

“Well, we’ll be talking on the phone when you get there, anyway.”

“Sure. I’ll probably end up working to pay my toll calls.”

When he left the house, his unfinished task crowded everything else from Bill’s mind.

By ten o’clock he had talked with saleswomen at three stores. He kept his routine brief and simple, stating that he wanted to see a dress for someone who perhaps would like linen fabric in, say, yellow. He let the salespeople draw their own conclusions. One saleswoman surmised that he was a terribly young husband shopping for his wife. Another hinted that a gift certificate was always a good patch on a lover’s quarrel; then the young lady could drop in and choose for herself.

Bill talked with a beautifully groomed, middle-aged department head at the third store. When he had described the dress he had in mind, she said kindly, “We don’t have the number. But I can tell you where to find it.”

The plush carpeting seemed to drop out from under Bill.

“All spies aren’t the James Bond variety,” the woman was saying with a smile. “We shop our competition continually, and I saw the very dress you describe in Ann-Helen’s.”

“Where is that?”

“It’s a lovely little shop on Grantland, not far from the university campus. All the college women who can afford it adore the place, though I’m sure you men have never heard of it.”

Bill took a groping step toward the elevator.

“Young man, are you quite all right?”

Bill glanced back at the frowning woman. “I am now — and thanks a million.”

A Yellow Dress

Ann-Helen’s was as quaintly casual as a village barn. Old-fashioned carnage lamps shed a soft glow. Coat and clothes cabinets were eaved with cedar shingles. A lacquered wagon wheel had been mounted on a short peeled log to do service as a display rack for belts. The chairs were converted barrels, beautifully varnished, bound in brass, and upholstered in leather.

The small, select shop expressed the air that it existed for the sheer pleasure of its owner. It was obviously a one-woman operation.

A bell tinkled softly when Bill entered, and a woman came forward to meet him. She was slender in a simple, unadorned black dress. About thirty-five, Bill guessed, with a gamine face, reddish hair, and a sprinkling of freckles across a snub nose. She wore little makeup. Her smile was airy, and Bill could have imagined her at a horse show as easily as here in this shop.

“May I help you?”

Bill introduced himself and described the dress. “Why, yes,” Ann-Helen said. She crossed to a cabinet. “Do you mean this one?”

She lifted out the dress and draped it across her other forearm.

The dress seemed to rush at Bill. The two small rhinestones at the collar were blinding points of fire.

“Yes,” he croaked the word out. “That’s the dress. Did you have many of them?”

Ann-Helen accepted his question with a friendly, amused laugh. “No, just the two.”

“You sold the other?”

“Yes. Now, if you know the young lady’s size...”

“Do you remember who bought the other dress?”

“Certainly. One of my regulars. A young college woman, Betty Atherton. She...”

Bill was backing to the door, fumbling behind him for the knob. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

The proprietress watched him turn and dash out. Then she held the dress before her, shrugged, and slipped it back into the cabinet.

From the middle of the sidewalk, Bill threw glances along the street. Ann-Helen’s was in keeping with the tone of the block. Book and artists’ supply store. Interior decorator. Beauty salon. A dealer in antique vases and clocks.

And down on the corner, a drugstore. Bill broke into a run.

A bank of phone booths lined a wall inside the front door. Bill ducked into the nearest, slammed the folding door, and fumbled change from his pocket.

He dialed the Atherton residence. The cool voice of the butler responded.

“This is Bill Latham.”

“Yes, Mr. Latham?”

“Miss Atherton wasn’t feeling well yesterday afternoon. Did she leave for school at the usual time this morning?”

“No, Mr. Latham. She and her father left for the lake cottage an hour or so before dinner time yesterday.”

The booth was suddenly a sweatbox. Bill tugged his collar with his finger. “Have you heard from them since their departure?”

“Why, no, Mr. Latham. Is anything wrong?”

Bill sleeved his forehead. “Did you see Miss Atherton leave?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Did you...” Bill forced the words, distinctly, carefully separating each. “Did you notice what she was wearing when she left?”

“I’m sure she looked very nice, Mr. Latham. She always does.”

A vein thumped on the side of Bill’s neck. He fought back the urge to yell. “Was she wearing a yellow dress?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

With a strangled moan, Bill crashed the phone onto its hook. He clung to it, dropping his face against his forearm. His mind refused to yield the phone number of the lake cottage. Then at last he remembered.

He straightened on the small round seat and steadied his breathing. He and Pat were to meet at eleven and add up their progress. But he could phone a message for Pat to sit tight. Meanwhile, assuming she’d reached the lake all right, Betty might even now be putting on that yellow dress to go for a drive.

Bill’s quivering fingers dropped the coin he tried to put in the slot. He bent and picked up the money. The phone box swallowed it with a faint ting.

He dialed and waited, his scalp shrinking a little each time the phone rang. Where was Betty? Mr. Atherton? At least the caretaker and his wife who lived in the servants’ quarters?

Then Betty answered. Bill couldn’t reply at once. The words formed but wouldn’t come out.

“Hello?” Betty repeated. “The Atherton cottage. Who’s calling?”

“Betty...”

“Yes? Who is this?”

“It’s me, Bill.”

“Hi, Bill. We don’t seem to have a very good connection.”

“Got a frog in my throat, I guess.” He cleared his throat. “How’s the headache?”

“It went away okay. Bill, I’m glad you called. I haven’t felt right about coming up here. Seems like I ran out on you.”

“Not a bit,” he said. “You forget that kind of stuff. Just do me a favor?”

“Sure, if I can.”

“Tell me what you’re wearing.”

“What?”

“Slacks? Dress?” He managed a laugh. “Burlap bag?”

She worried for a silent moment. “Bill, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Are you sure you feel...”

“Please. Just trust me.”

“Well, okay. Right now I’m in jeans and an old sweatshirt.”

“Good. One more favor. I’m driving up there.”

“Right now, Bill?”

“As soon as I can crank the cayuse. And don’t change clothes. Do you understand? Not under any circumstances.”

He faintly heard the catch of her breath on a note of fright. “Bill, the way you’re talking...”

“I know,” he said. “But please do as I say. Just mark it off to my romantical impulses. I’ve got to see you. Just as you are. In dungarees and baggy cotton.”

The Atherton country place was a forty-minute drive northward. Bill had spent a couple of very pleasant Sunday afternoons up there at the close of the summer. He would lunch on hamburgers after church and drive up for lazy hours of swimming, fishing, boating with Betty, or just soaking up the sun on the strip of white beach Mr. Atherton had constructed with bulldozers and a mountain-load of sand.

Today, as the road climbed gradually toward the ragged skyline of low mountains, the scenery might have been a pleasant experience. The sky was clear, the sun bright, the air bracing. But the brilliant autumn changes of colors in the foliage were today like psychedelic hues, rising, falling, shifting, and closing on the car. Long miles separated him from Betty.

He swept through the village, a cluster of stores, filling station, souvenir stands, restaurant and roadhouse. Several of the places were already closed and boarded up against the teeth of approaching winter.

The road skirted the lake, which lay as still and hushed today as a miles-long millpond. Then Bill was climbing again. The view widened to breathtaking scope, a vista of lake, coves, shadowed valleys, all sheltered by peaceful mountains.

As the road hugged a fold in the mountain, Bill glimpsed the house, up ahead and to his left.

Cottage, he thought, wasn’t quite the word for it. The large and luxurious Swiss-style chalet might have been lifted bodily from the Alps. From the terraced lawns, a man could look upon the dizzying panorama of nature and feel dwarfed. The interior was a soothing sanctuary of hand-rubbed paneling, bearskin rugs, shaggy furniture with cushions of down, and vast fieldstone fireplaces where logs glowed and roman-candled tiny, crackling sparks during chilly evenings.

Bill’s old fastback labored up the driveway in a lower gear. He saw Betty come to the railed front gallery in response to the sound of the car. The hard knot in his stomach gave a little. She was in jeans and the tentlike comfort of an old green sweatshirt. The yellow dress was still on its hanger. But he still hadn’t won, not a total victory. He was grimly certain that she’d never be safe as long as the dress existed.

She came down the steps to meet him with her quick, lively movements.

Her smile was bright. But from the way her eyes searched him, he knew she was worried about the way he had sounded on the phone.

“Hi.” She linked her fingers with his as she fell in step beside him. With her other hand she stretched the tail of the sweatshirt in sloppy disarray. “Just as you ordered, sir.” She laughed. They were moving up the steps side by side. “But I didn’t know you thought the outfit so becoming.”

“You’ve never looked better,” he assured her.

They entered the cathedral-like silence of a living room with a beamed ceiling vaulted two stories overhead.

“Now, what’s this all about, Bill?”

“A dress.”

“Dress? I don’t understand.”

He wondered with a sudden misgiving if she could possibly understand it, even after he’d explained it.

He drew her to a large couch near the raised fireplace. She obeyed the pressure of his fingers and sat down. She was edgy. Her back was stiff, and her eyes reflected her concern for him.

He hadn’t seen her father’s car outside, but he wanted to be sure he could talk to her without any interruption.

“Did your father drive into town?”

She nodded. “One of those things came up at his office, like they always do. He got a phone call early this morning.” She tilted her head, looking up at him. “But you didn’t come here to talk to my father.”

He eased down sidewise on the couch. “Betty, sometimes we have to do things on faith, the way a blind man crosses a street.”

The confusion in her eyes glinted a little brighter. “Bill, I just don’t understand any of this. Are you sure that you... feel all right?”

“My own feelings don’t matter right now.” He scratched above his ear and tried to grin. “This is all coming even harder than I expected. I know how you feel about that business I went through in the morgue.”

For the first time, he sensed, she was actually beginning to fear him. She’d drawn back ever so slightly.

He made himself look at the suffering in her eyes, the struggle between the emotions she felt for him and the questions her mind was raising against him.

“Betty, for your own sake, during the next few minutes admit that the image in compartment B-three might have happened. I’m not asking you to believe it. Just don’t think of it as a tale told by a raving maniac.”

Sudden tears brimmed in her eyes. “Bill, I can’t stand to hear you carry on like this!”

Sharper than a knife, a wish cut through him, that he could put an arm around her and tell her the whole thing was a sad and sorry prank. But he had to get that dress. Whatever the cost to their feelings, he had to make sure she never put on the yellow dress.

“Betty, about the dress...”

“Bill, please!”

“You bought a dress at Ann-Helen’s,” he said doggedly. “It’s yellow. Linen. It has a squarish neck and two rhinestones where the straps join.”

“Bill, I don’t see...”

He wanted to shake her with rough, affectionate hands. “Aren’t you curious? Don’t you wonder how I know about the dress?”

“You’ve seen it, of course.”

“Where? When? Have you ever worn it?”

“No, but—” She broke off. She couldn’t dismiss his description of a dress he’d never seen. A subtle change came to the way she was looking at him. “Bill, just how did you know about the dress?”

“The young, dark-haired image with the battered face in B-three is wearing it,” he said.

He saw the flash of shock through her face.

“Betty,” he plunged on, “a strange mutant of a girl was the last to pass through B-three. She suffered a good part of her life, and maybe it gave her a kindness and compassion deeper than most of us ever attain.”

“You think you’ve received a warning through some sort of ESP force,” Betty said, a hollow note in her voice, “and nothing will convince you...”

“I don’t think I’m something special, Betty, ESP or clairvoyant,” Bill said. “I’ve never had any uncommon psychic powers — and I’ve a feeling that when this is over nothing else like it will ever happen to me again. But right now, in this one moment out of my lifetime, I know one thing. I know I can’t take the chance, Betty, and blindly rule out the possibility of what might happen to you if you wear that yellow dress.”

“You... you want me to destroy it?”

“Yes,” he said.

Her hand made a small movement toward him, then dropped in her lap. She pushed slowly to her feet. “All right, Bill. If it will make you feel better. Your feelings mean more to me than a shop full of dresses.”

He knew she was humoring him, trying to doctor a mental disturbance with the balm of pacification. The thought hurt, but he let it pass.

“Now,” he said. “I want the dress out of the way before your father or anyone else has a chance to talk you out of it.”

“If that’s what it takes to satisfy you.” Her words stifled. She turned away quickly, as if to deny herself a chance to think of what she was doing, and ran from the room.

She was back in a few moments, the dress crumpled in her hands. Without looking at Bill, she crossed to the fireplace. She threw the dress on the glowing embers. It began to smolder. She made one small movement with her hand as if she would snatch the dress out. Then it burst into flame. In an instant, it was a mass of hungry tongues of fire.

Standing close behind Betty, Bill watched the fire subside. The final little flame curled up, and the dress was a glowing ash.

“Thanks,” Bill murmured.

She didn’t turn, but stood looking at the ash that was turning from white-hot to gray. “I hope it helped you, Bill, that’s all.”

And I hope it helped you, he thought. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to realize it was all over. But what had he expected? A pronouncement from invisible trumpets?

“Well,” he said, “I guess I should get back to town.”

She turned then and said quietly, “I’ll walk with you to your car.”

They said little on the way out. He opened the car door but didn’t get in immediately.

“You’ve something else on your mind,” she said. “I think I know what it is.”

He looked from the car keys in his hands to her face.

“You’re wondering how much things have changed between us,” she said.

“Yes.” He nodded. “I was thinking about that.”

“Well, I don’t feel quite the same about you, Bill.” A slow smile softened her face. The mountain breeze brushed the purple-black hair at her temples. A deep calm had come to her eyes. “Maybe I’ve grown up a little. Yesterday, last week, I guess the relationship was the kind of thing our parents used to call puppy love. But today I know that when you really like a person, it means sharing. The lumps, as well as the fun.”

His feeling for her was a quiet warmth inside Bill. His mouth formed a crooked grin as he asked, “Lunch tomorrow, beautiful?”

“Lunch,” she said. “And you be on time!”

“Yes, ma’am.” Bill laughed as he got in the car.

He followed the circular driveway while she stood beside the house and watched. He thrust out his hand and waved a cheerful good-bye as a twist in the road slipped the house out of sight.

The drive back to the city was a breeze. The autumn colors had lost their psychedelic overtones. The mountains were beautiful. He drove with the car radio turned low, whistling accompaniment to the music.

Inside the city limits, he spotted an outdoor phone booth beside a filling station.

He turned in and drew to a stop when he was clear of the gas pumps. Still whistling, he walked to the phone booth and slid inside.

In five more minutes he was talking to Patrick Connell.

“Where in thunderation have you been?” Pat demanded. “I got a message that you wouldn’t meet me at eleven. I assumed you had located the seller of the dress. But that was hours ago.”

“It’s okay, Pat. Everything is fine.”

“Then you did run the dress down?”

“Sure. A little shop right near school sold it — to Betty Atherton.”

“What!”

“She was at their lake place. I had to drive up there. She’d never worn the dress, Pat — and she won’t. It lasted all of a minute in that nice, hungry fireplace.”

Pat was enfolded with a flabbergasted silence. He broke it with a shaky laugh. “You want to know something, Bill? Right up until this minute, I don’t think I really believed in B-three myself. But all this... the dress actually existing, purchased by someone close to you...”

“And safely destroyed,” Bill finished. He laughed suddenly. “Hey, I should get an A in parapsychology this semester!”

“You’ve done some unusual homework,” Pat admitted. “Are you coming by my office?”

“I guess not.” Bill looked out at the slanted rays of the sinking sun. “I’ve killed most of the day. I think I’ll clock in early and have a happy look at an empty morgue compartment.”

“You deserve it, at that.”

Bill hung up and came from the booth with a friendly smile for the station attendant and anybody else who crossed his path.

When Bill breezed into the morgue after a long skirmish with crosstown traffic, Mrs. Wennington was draping the cover over her typewriter. In her placid, comfortably plump personage she combined the multiple roles of receptionist, filing clerk, typist, and taker of Dr. Hornaday’s dictation. She looked over the rim of her glasses at Bill, then toward the wall clock.

“Hmmm. At first I wondered if I had actually worked that long after four-thirty.”

“Nope.” Bill grinned. “I’m just popping in bright and early so the taxpayers who foot the bill for my salary will get their money’s worth.”

Mrs. Wennington crossed to the closet and lifted out her coat. “An honest politician, no less.”

“Sure,” Bill said, taking her coat and holding it for her. “There are a few of us around.”

She buttoned her coat, tossed a scarf about her feathery salt-and-pepper hair, and tweaked his nose in parting.

The moment the front door closed behind her, Bill hurried along the hallway, slid open the door, and stepped down into the huge silence of the boneyard.

He walked directly to B-3, rubbed his palms in anticipation, and yanked the compartment open.

That’s when his knees buckled, and all the light seemed to dim.

She was still there.

Last-Minute Purchase

Victoria Latham rode a crowded elevator down to the lower-level parking area of the store where she’d spent a large part of her life since graduation from college.

She was the last of several people to spill out when the elevator doors slid open. She experienced a pensive moment as she walked to her car. She looked at the details about her — the cement walls, the steel beams, the pipes and cables that clung to the ceiling overhead like huge spaghetti.

Behind her were moments she’d always treasure, culminating in the send-off her fellow employees had just now given her. No party. No break in the routine, really. But they’d all managed to drop by as she was cleaning out her desk and wish her the best. She’d laughed and told them she was going for an interview, remember; she might be back, begging at the personnel director’s door. They’d said it would never happen that way; they were giving her up for good.

And she knew that was true. She would make the grade at Fortesque. She had no false, egotistical notions about herself. She knew she was young and had a lot to learn. But she knew also that she was capable and ready for the step.

She tossed the package of odds and ends she’d taken from her desk into the car. Reaching in her coat pocket for her car keys, she touched the ten-dollar bill that her brother had pushed into her hands just a few short hours ago.

She slid under the wheel. She was going to miss them all — the gang here at the store, Mrs. Hofstetter, Dad — very much. But most of all she was going to miss Bill. She was nagged with concern for him. He certainly hadn’t looked well for the last two or three days. Was he upset because this was the first time, since Mom, the family wouldn’t be together?

I’ll spend his tenner on phone calls, Vicky decided.

Then she had to concentrate on driving. Her car moved up the exit ramp, leaving behind the continual hum of the powerful exhaust fans that kept the lower level free of exhaust fumes.

The sun, beginning its westering journey, smote her eyes as she joined the movement of traffic on the one-way street behind the store.

Lunchtime, she thought. And I could maybe manage a chicken-salad-on-white down in the butterfly cage.

But there was a stop she wanted to make first, and she was there in twenty minutes, luckily finding a metered parking space almost in front of Ann-Helen’s smart little shop.

Vicky went in and browsed until Ann-Helen had finished with another customer, a young woman with creamy skin and red-gold hair.

Ann-Helen’s smile brightened the already cheerful shop as she came to the dress cabinet where Vicky was lingering.

The two were by no means strangers. They lunched together sometimes at a restaurant favored by buyers and department heads.

“Well, Vicky, did Fortesque come through?”

“Like Santa Claus — only they have to put me over the griddle first.”

“You’ll fry quite well,” Ann-Helen said with a laugh, “or they wouldn’t fly you all the way to New York. When are you leaving?”

“This afternoon, if the reservation agent can double-cross somebody for me.”

“And you’ve decided to take off in glory, in an Ann-Helen dress. Smart girl. It’ll bolster your morale to leave like that.”

“So let me treat myself to a good-bye splurge.” Vicky smiled.

The proprietress reached up and lifted out a soft gray wool.

“It’s beautiful,” Vicky said. “But how about something with more color? Real sunny — say, that yellow one.”

“Size ten. A neat, slim pattern. Should fit you perfectly.” Ann-Helen withdrew the yellow dress and handed it to Vicky.

Holding the dress against herself, Vicky said, “I think I’ll try it on.”

“Help yourself to a dressing room,” Ann-Helen said.

Vicky reappeared in a few minutes wearing the yellow dress.

Ann-Helen nodded appreciatively. “You know me, dear. I wouldn’t try to move a dress with flattery. But that one was made for you. It does wonders for you. Maybe it’s the other way around. It’s just been hanging here, waiting for you to do wonders for it.”

Smiling, Vicky moved into the alcove of mirrors. She turned this way and that, looking at herself.

Ann-Helen was right. The two little rhinestones at the collar straps matched her twinkling mood today. The shade of yellow highlighted her coloring, bringing out the dark sheen of her hair and suggesting mysterious shadows about her eyes.

“I had two of those,” Ann-Helen said.

“Who bought the other?”

“Betty Atherton, a student at Crownover. Her father is Atherton Construction.”

“Oh, yes, I knew.” Vicky nodded. “As a matter of fact, my brother Bill dates her.”

“Well, he’s got a good eye for women,” Ann-Helen gossiped comfortably. Then a slight frown crinkled her face. “Speaking of males... sort of funny thing happened in here this very morning. A young fellow came in and described that very dress. Then immediately dashed out of here.” She shrugged. “I guess the all-girl bailiwick was too much for him.”

“He should have put his money on the line, or brought his wife or girl friend with him. She won’t get this one. I’m buying — if you’ll break the price to me gently.”

“Smart girl. You won’t have to worry about running into yourself on the street, with Betty Atherton here and you in New York.”

Vicky enjoyed a final appraisal of herself in the crystal mirrors. “You know, I think I’ll wear it.”

“I’ll de-tag while you’ve got it on. I’ll bet the flight captain will be asking you up front to help him fly the plane!”

They joined in friendly laughter. Ann-Helen boxed the dress Vicky had worn while Vicky wrote out a check.

Ann-Helen walked with her to the front door.

“All the luck in the world, Vicky. I wish I had an operation big enough here to employ a smart young advertising woman like you.”

“Your taste in buying is all the advertising you need.” Vicky crossed the sidewalk with a good-bye wave and got in her car.

She struggled homeward through traffic, stopping on the way to munch a sandwich in a luncheonette.

She parked in the driveway. With her hands still resting on the steering wheel, she looked at the house, the lawn, the trees. Everything looked so sharp and vivid today. She remembered Bill wobbling his first bike across the lawn, and the capable movements of her father’s sensitive hands when he’d sewn a tear in a Raggedy Ann doll a long time ago.

Her throat was thick with nostalgia. Golly, she was homesick already! But everybody went through it — if they came from a home like this one.

“Vickeee!”

Vicky’s face snapped around. Mrs. Hofstetter was standing framed in the open front door.

Vicky rolled down the car window. “What is it, Mrs. Hofstetter?”

“Thought I heard you drive up. Better quit mooning. A gentleman called from the airport. He wants you to call him back, soon as you get in. I think you have a reservation.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Hofstetter.” Vicky squirmed around to pick up her packages, struggled from the car with her arms loaded, and closed the door with her heel.

Mrs. Hofstetter stepped down to relieve her of part of her load. They walked into the house.

“Just drop those things on the table,” Mrs. Hofstetter said. “I’ll put them in your room. I wrote the reservation agent’s name on the phone pad.”

Vicky had made her call by the time Mrs. Hofstetter came downstairs.

“You were right, Mrs. Hofstetter. They had a cancellation.” Vicky glanced at the pad sheet on which she jotted the information. “I’m on flight seventy-one. It’s the big New Orleans to New York jet and only touches down here long enough to let passengers on and off.”

“What time do we get rid of you?” Mrs. Hofstetter kidded. Her eyes were suddenly moist.

“Five fifty-eight this afternoon,” Vicky said. “Then we’d better get cracking, as the British say.” Mrs. Hofstetter stopped short as Vicky peeled off her light coat.

“That is a lovely dress, Vicky.”

“I got it at Ann-Helen’s,” Vicky said. “I was just wondering if I should have spent so much money.”

“You deserve it, Vicky. You’re the hardest-working, steadiest girl I know. And if you ever tire of writing ad copy, you could model dresses like that one.” Mrs. Hofstetter’s snappish nod was final approval. “But if we keep standing around here, that plane will leave without you. Better call your father first. He’ll want to take you to the airport. And how about shoes? Did you decide which pairs you’ll take?”

The afternoon fled, filled with last-minute details. A blouse to press. A run detected in a stocking about to be packed. A change in the small assortment of costume jewelry that would go along.

Before she realized the time had come, Vicky heard her father’s footsteps coming up the stairs.

“Ready, Dad,” she called from her bedroom. She bent at her dressing table mirror to give her lips a last touch.

She saw his reflection from behind her. He was looking at her with a depth of love that gently warmed her.

Then he was crossing to pick up the twin pieces of luggage waiting beside her bed.

He picked up the bags and glanced around the room, hesitant for a moment. She guessed what he was thinking, that this room was going to feel mighty empty for a while.

But he did everything just right. He smiled as if this were an everyday occurrence.

“As they put it in my generation, you’re a knockout. That sure is a pretty dress you have on.”

“Flatterer!”

They went from the house trailing banter and happy laughter.

Delayed Takeoff

I HATE YOU, B-three... Elizabeth Braxley... whoever you are... whatever you are...

Bill sat alone in the morgue reception room, behind the secretary’s desk.

Folded on the desk, his arms were a hard, bone-and-sinew pillow for his face. But the discomfort of a wrist knuckle against a cheekbone was nothing. He felt too exhausted to move. His mind chased a tortured circle.

The answer was always the same. No answer — except that... that thing back there in B-three.

He’d tried his best to dog it through, to keep his balance. A grin on his face. Stiff upper lip.

But he’d stood it as long as he could. He was tired, down in dark corners where no one had any right to be tired. Everything in him wanted to cop out, and he’d reached the point where he didn’t care.

He raised his head with the effort of a weight lifter going for a record. Squinted at the lengthening shadows in the room. Listened to the silence.

He fumbled at the phone and picked it up. Dully he dialed Patrick Connell’s apartment.

When he heard the click of the phone being picked up at the other end, he said thickly, “You and your lousy theories.”

“Bill?”

“So what if it is? Bill Latham, plain-out flip case, seeing things. And listening to you! I got a thing against you, Dr. Patrick Connell, high mucky-muck of the ESP set!”

“Hey, now. Ease off. What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” Bill said. “And that’s the trouble. She’s still back there. B-three. Wearing the same yellow dress. Just like Betty’s and the one in the store.” He suddenly caught the shallowest of breaths. His shoulders began to pull upright.

Pat was saying something, but his words were just a rattle in the receiver. Bill turned and stared in the direction of the boneyard.

Two dresses. Betty had bought one. But how about the second? Ann-Helen didn’t keep it in the shop just to look at.

“Sorry, Pat.” Bill broke the connection, then laid the phone on the desk so that Pat couldn’t instantly call him back and tie up the line.

Bill yanked open the desk drawer and scrambled through it, then tried the one below. He hauled out the yellow pages phone book, ripped through it to find the proper classification, and stabbed the phone number of Ann-Helen’s with a forefinger.

He dialed. Closed the classified. Dropped the book back in the drawer.

Then he waited. Three, four, five times her phone rang. He was beating the heel of his palm against the desk.

Don’t be closed up and living in some cool little apartment with an unlisted home phone.

She answered in a rather breathless voice, as if she’d run to the phone. “Ann-Helens.”

He wilted out a breath. “This is the fellow who was in your shop earlier, asking about the yellow dress. The one with the squarish collar and...”

“Yes, I know. But you waited a little too long. I sold it this afternoon. Why don’t you bring your girl friend and let me show her around?”

“Sure,” he said, forcing a heartiness, “sounds great. Mind telling me who the lucky girl was? The one who bought the yellow dress?”

“Not at all. My customers are my best advertisement. She was one of our most promising young career women, Victoria Latham. She bought the dress to wear on a trip to New York.”

The room turned a sickening somersault around Bill. He grabbed and clutched the edge of the desk to feel something, anything, solid in contact with him.

“Thanks,” he managed. “Thanks very much.”

Then he was again seeing the wavering, in-and-out-of-focus of the dial, the blurred outlines of his finger trying to dial.

Mrs. Hofstetter’s voice, even from the distance, was a soothing compress on an aching bone. “The William Latham residence.”

“This is Bill. Let me ask Vicky if she’s got her schedule yet.”

“Why, she’s already on her way, Bill. There was a cancellation and the reservation agent called. Your father came home and picked up Vicky almost an hour ago.”

“No, Mrs. Hofstetter! Please. It can’t be!”

“Bill, whatever is...”

“What’s the flight? What time does it leave?”

“Flight seventy-one, Bill. It takes off at five fifty-eight. Will you please tell me...”

“Later,” he said. He dropped the phone and jumped to his feet, knocking over the chair. He threw a glance at the wall clock, and it seemed to paralyze him. He flinched with each brittle movement of the jerking second hand.

The airport was in the county, beyond the farther side of the city. With the traffic and the distance and his tired old car, there just wasn’t time... not enough minutes... the plane would be lifting off with his sister on it, wearing that yellow dress, before he was two-thirds of the way there.

But he’d fought B-3 this far. It had knocked him to the bottom, the dismally hopeless bottom, but he wouldn’t quit now.

Again he grabbed the phone. This time he punched the button that connected him with the hospital switchboard.

“Dr. Barney Childers,” he said. “This is an emergency.”

A few seconds later he was talking with his ambulance co-worker. “Barney, don’t ask questions. I’ll give you the answers later, when there’s time.”

“Fire,” Barney said. “What’s up?”

“I’m marking off for a short time — and taking an ambulance with me.”

“A brief mark-off is okay, but about the...”

“Barney.” Bill blinked against the sweat scalding the corners of his eyes. “If those jobs were put together to save lives, I’ve got to be rolling one.”

“Then roll it.”

Bill rolled it, with the siren wailing a path through traffic from the moment the big ambulance slewed into the street.

He was swinging off the highway outside of town at last, homing on the lights of the airport, not daring to look at the electric clock in the ambulance dashboard.

He rocked to a stop in a loading zone directly in front of the administration building. He threw himself out of the ambulance and dashed inside.

The terminal was modestly active at this time of day, a few people buying tickets or weighing luggage at the ticket booths.

Bill spotted his father standing with his hands in his pockets. The doctor was at the tall windows that gave a sweeping view of the runways, proudly waiting for a loaded jet to take off.

Bill mumbled a series of “pardon me, please” as he bucked a thin tide of passengers streaming through the double doors from a completed flight.

He was outside, under a long canopy, shouting at a man in neat, gray uniform, “Flight seventy-one?”

“Over there, but I think you’re too late, sir. The flight’s about ready for takeoff.”

Bill burst into a wild run, his eyes straining. The ground crew was moving out to start the engines. A stewardess lingered a final moment in the cabin door, saying something to a man who was standing below, prepared to dolly the steps away.

Bill hurtled onto the bottom step just as the ground crewman started to roll the portable stairs.

“Hey, fellow!”

Bill ignored the shout. He charged upward, his eyes on the closing door.

“Please, stewardess! Hold it! Don’t seal the plane!”

With a final lunge he grabbed the edge of the door and hurled it open, throwing the stewardess off balance. She stumbled backward, staring at him as Bill leaped into the cabin.

Bill’s eyes swept the rows of seats. Recovering, the stewardess tried to wedge herself in front of him.

“Sir, the aircraft is scheduled to take off...”

Bill shook aside her restraining hand. His gaze locked on Vicky. She was sitting beside an elderly woman halfway along the aisle.

Bill’s appearance provoked a rustling among the passengers. The sight of him snapped Vicky stiff in her seat.

The stewardess backed a step as Bill shoved forward.

“I’ll have to ask you to debark immediately, sir.”

Clearly the words made no impression. The stewardess yielded, faced with his chiseled determination. She slipped around him and hurried toward the pilot’s cabin.

Bill dropped into a half-crouch beside Vicky.

Her face was white with amazement. And just a hint of amusement. “Bill, this is hardly the way to see me off!”

“I’m not seeing you off. I’m taking you off, Vicky!”

Confusion, and then a glint of irritation, swept the lighter reflection from her eyes. “Bill, this isn’t very funny.”

“Come on now, Vicky,” he said forcefully. “We’re holding up their schedule.”

People were leaning, stirring, craning their necks to look at the scene.

“Bill, please!” Vicky murmured tightly. “Don’t you see all the commotion you’re causing? Everyone is staring at us!”

“I don’t care,” Bill said. “This airplane isn’t leaving the ground until you get off.”

He took hold of her arm. She jerked away.

“Bill, what’s come over you? I don’t see how you could do this to me!” Sudden tears of embarrassment and irritation glinted in her eyes.

A shadow fell across Bill. The flight captain, a lean, well-set-up man of about forty, touched Bill quietly on the shoulder. Behind the pilot, the stewardess hovered.

“What’s the trouble, fellow?”

Bill turned a look up into the cool, aquiline face. “This girl is my sister, sir. And she’s not flying with you tonight.”

The captain glanced at the chronometer on his wrist. “You have already delayed this flight a full two minutes, young man. Please debark.”

“Not without my sister,” Bill said doggedly.

The captain glanced at Vicky. “Is this man your brother, miss?”

She nodded, biting her lip.

“Do you wish him removed from the aircraft?”

Vicky’s answer was a choked, distraught sob. She looked down at her hands as if everything were blurring in her vision. Her trembling fingers fumbled with the seat belt. She managed to snap it open almost by accident.

She slipped to her feet, her knuckles pressing against her mouth as she gave Bill a look raw with hurt. Then she slipped past the captain and stewardess and fled the staring eyes.

Bill was unable to catch up with her before she was yanking open the glass doors of the administration building.

“Sis, you’ve got to believe...”

“I just hope you’re satisfied, Mr. William Latham, the second!”

He almost emitted a crazy little laugh. She sounded so much like she had on occasion years ago, when they’d had a childish brother-sister spat.

Waiting to watch the takeoff, Dr. Latham had seen a part of what had gone on. He met Bill and Vicky just inside the large waiting room.

“Oh, Dad!” Vicky wailed against his shoulder briefly. “Bill made such a scene. Please take me home!”

She pulled from her father and hurried toward the outside doorway, wiping her eyes with her fingertips.

Dr. Latham held back for a moment, his face stamped with bewildered concern. “Bill, what’s this all about?”

“It was something I simply had to do, Dad.” Bill’s jaw muscles bunched. “That dress Vicky is wearing... it’s a duplicate of what the image with the battered face in B-three has on.”

Dr. Latham stared.

“Don’t worry about me,” Bill said. “I’m fine now, honest. Better get Vicky home. And stroke her feathers, Dad. It’ll take some explaining, but you’re good at those things. She’s got lots of time before the interview date. She’ll storm Fortesque Fifth Avenue after a flight tomorrow.”

“Bill, I’m very unsure of all this. But what’s done is done. I’ll have to accept it.”

“Just one more thing needs doing,” Bill said. “After Vicky gets out of that dress, be real sneaky and arrange an accident for it. A tear. A stain. Anything to give you the chance to destroy it.” Bill grinned and chunked his father on the shoulder. “Better get moving. She’ll be waiting in your car.”

“And you, Bill?”

“I’ll be at the morgue. Drop by. I guess Pat Connell will also. And drive extra carefully on the way home, Dad. She hasn’t changed dresses yet, you know.”

From outside filtered the distant sound of jet engines. Flight seventy-one, delayed, was taking off.

Bill glanced across at the bank of clocks showing the different time zones. He guessed that the captain was right now fuming in anger. Seventy-one was five minutes and thirty seconds late in takeoff.

Three hours later, the stark, white light of the morgue revealed Bill, Dr. Latham, and Patrick Connell standing beside the opened refrigerated drawer, B-3.

“Well?” Connell demanded.

Bill shrugged. “It’s empty. Whoever... whatever... from wherever... it’s gone. The experience is finished.”

Bill touched the drawer and pushed. It slid inward and closed with a snap of finality.

The three turned and started across the glistening floor on which Bill still had to render the evening mopping.

“I still don’t figure it,” Bill said. “Maybe it was all for nothing, with no more sense of direction than a stroke of lightning. I called the airport a little while ago, just before you two showed up. Flight seventy-one landed safely. Sixty-eight passengers in addition to the crew, and nobody with a hair out of place.”

They had reached the door. Pat slid it open but stood blocking it. “How long did you delay the flight?”

“Almost six minutes,” Bill said. “But what’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything, perhaps. Who knows what might have happened if seventy-one hadn’t been jarred out of its time stream? If its future hadn’t been changed by just that many minutes and seconds? Who can say what would have happened during takeoff, or in flight, or in the congested New York traffic pattern? Maybe,” Pat finished, drawing a shallow breath, “in addition to Vicky, sixty-eight other people and a jetliners crew are alive right now because of B-three and you.”

Maybe, Bill thought, just maybe Pat is right.

Content

Talmage Powell
The Thing in B-3: A Tale of the Supernatural

The Boneyard

The Missing Detail

A Shocking Realization

Weighing the Evidence

Sudden Awakenings

The Oaks

An Unbridgeable Gulf

Unexpected Visitor

Something to Wear

A Revealing Portrait

The Search

A Yellow Dress

Last-Minute Purchase

Delayed Takeoff