The Thing in B-3

by Talmage Powell

  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 squarenecked 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.

  2

  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 diy. “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 pinkfaced 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.”