Winter of Discontent

by Jeanne M. Dams

“Well, I’m going over there. We’re not getting anywhere, and I can’t stand it, not knowing.”

  “I’ll drive you, then. I confess I’d like to see for myself.”

  I wasn’t at all sure they’d let us in, but once more Alan’s influence was a help. With strict instructions not to touch the patient, not to talk, and especially not to disturb any of the tubes and wires, we were allowed five minutes in the ICU.

  I wanted desperately to touch Walter’s hand, make sure he was still warm. I would never forget the dreadful coldness of Bill’s cheek. Walter looked exactly like a crash dummy, plastic and inhuman. He lay unmoving. I couldn’t even detect a rise and fall of his chest, but the monitors displayed rhythmic lines that meant, I presumed, that his pulse and respiration and so on were normal.

  Yes, and what about his brain?

  We asked the nurse when we had tiptoed out of the room. “We won’t know for a bit. Perhaps another twenty-four hours, perhaps longer. He’s—you’re not family, are you, Mr. Nesbitt?”

  “No, just friends. Actually my wife and I found him.”

  “Yes, I know. Do you know anything about his family?”

  Alan looked at me. I shook my head. “I’m afraid I know very little about him, other than that he works at the museum and is reading history at the university. You might check with the registrar, or wherever student records are kept.”

  “Yes, we’ve done that, and we talked to the woman where he rooms, but we can’t seem to reach his parents. I thought you might know if they’re away on holiday, or something.”

  “Is it—I know you’re not supposed to talk about patients’ conditions, but is it a case of notifying his family because he might—that is, is he really—” My voice was unsteady. I stopped.

  The nurse looked at me with sympathy. “I wish I could tell you he’ll do splendidly, but honestly there’s no telling yet. He’s stable, which is a good sign, but he was very badly hurt.”

  I cleared my throat. “Yes. I see. There was another woman here to see him a little while ago, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes. I told her she could look in again in an hour. I think she went downstairs for some tea.”

  “Thank you. You’ve been kind. May we come back too, in a little while?”

  “You won’t see a change, but yes, you can come and at least look in. I do understand how you feel, but we’re doing all we can for him, you know.”

  “We know.” Alan nodded his thanks and tucked my hand over his arm. We went to find Jane.

  She was in the hospital canteen, drinking tea from a cardboard cup. She had been, anyway. A lot of the tea was left in the cup and after one look at it I could see why. Jane doesn’t take milk in her tea, and the fluid in the cup resembled something one might use to pave roads.

  We sat down at her table. “Don’t get the tea,” she said gruffly.

  “I hadn’t planned on it. Jane, we just saw Walter.”

  “Looks like nothing on earth, doesn’t he?”

  “Well … I must admit he doesn’t look wonderful. They say he’s doing all right, but …”

  “‘Stabl.’ Could mean anything.”

  “Did they ask you about his parents?”

  “Yes. Don’t know anything. Never talked about his family. Don’t think they live around here.”

  “Where does he live, do you know?”

  “Boards with someone, up near the university. Cheap place. Not got a penny to bless himself with, that lad.”

  “Then I don’t suppose his landlady would know any more about his parents.”

  “Not likely. A shrew, from what I hear.”

  “Well, maybe he has friends at the university who would know something. It’s not that big, the university. Surely somebody …”

  I trailed off miserably. There was Walter, lying unconscious in a hospital bed. His family didn’t know, and he had, apparently, nothing better to go home to than a cheerless room with a shrewish landlady.

  “Might do some checking myself,” said Jane. “Family needs to know.”

  I sighed. “I wish there was something I could do.”

  Jane nodded. “Told you helpless is the worst feeling.”

  I brooded and wished I could have a decent cup of tea. Was there no way I could help?

  Well, there might be, come to think of it. “Alan,” I said slowly, “a while ago we talked about somebody needing to go through Bill’s storage and workroom at the museum. It’s a rat’s nest of papers and all sorts of junk, but there might be something interesting, something useful in there. Do you suppose Jane and I—?”

  Alan shook his head regretfully. “The whole museum’s a crime scene for now, Dorothy. Sealed off. You’re right, the storage room needs to be searched, but it’ll have to be done by evidence technicians. And it may be several days before they get around to it. Derek’s shorthanded, as usual, so they might in a pinch allow me to help, but I’m afraid I haven’t a prayer of getting you two in there. In any case, we have to face the fact—I’m sorry, Jane—that as Bill’s fiancée, you’re an interested party. No one thinks you had any hand in anything that’s happened, but …” He spread his hands.

  I sighed. “Well, as long as someone does it. I suppose maybe they can do some organizing while they’re at it. Walter won’t want to face that mess when he gets back to work.” I didn’t admit the possibility that Walter might never get back to work. It hung in the air of the room, as real and heavy as the hospital smell.

  We invited Jane over for lunch, but she said she had to feed her dogs. It was just an excuse. She wanted to be alone. My heart ached for her, but Jane is not an easy person to comfort, and she’s seldom in any doubt about what she wants.

  So Alan and I, saying we’d check with her later, went back, alone, to our house with the Christmas tree in the parlor and the Christmas cards on the mantel and two friendly cats dozing on the hearth rug. It ought to have been a comforting scene, but to me it all seemed infinitely dreary.

  We lunched on canned soup and cheese sandwiches. It didn’t matter. We were eating to live. One flavor of sawdust tastes much the same as another.

  “We never got round to talking about the letter,” Alan commented when we had finished and were drinking tea.

  “Letter? Oh. The letter.” I added milk and sugar to my tea.

  “Snap out of it, Dorothy!”

  I gave such a start I spilled my tea. Alan had never before shouted at me.

  “You’re feeling sorry for yourself, and blaming yourself, and working yourself into a fine tizz, and I won’t have it. You’re not God. You’re not even Superwoman. You’re a perfectly healthy, sensible, intelligent woman, and I love you, and I’m not going to let you sit there and make yourself miserable.”

  I made an effort. “I’m sorry, Alan. I know I’m getting gloomy over this. It’s just that—well, I’ve been wondering if I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. My brain seems to be turning to mush. I can’t seem to pick up on the obvious. Do you suppose I’m getting—” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.

  “Alzheimer’s? No, I don’t suppose any such thing. You’re under stress, that’s all. In any case, you didn’t miss anything that everyone else didn’t also overlook. You thought of the tunnel before I did, or Derek. It was too late. Very well. It might have been too late five minutes after Bill went down there. We don’t know how he died. But wallowing in guilt isn’t going to help anyone, least of all you. Furthermore, don’t you realize I’ll love you every bit as much if one day you do turn into a drooling idiot?”

  “Oh, Alan!” He took me into his arms, and I cried and cried and, finally, got it out of my system.

  “All right,” I said, dabbing my eyes and blowing my nose, “the letter. You never did tell me what it said, exactly.”

  Alan looked me over, decided Id do, and returned to business. “Well, it wasn’t complete, as I think I mentioned. It was the first page only, beginning ‘Dear Waffles’ and ending with an incomplete sentence. It was a rather point
less letter, really, telling ‘Waffles’ all about someone, apparently a friend of both writer and addressee, who was planning a trip to America, to Indiana, in fact.”

  “When did you say this letter was written?”

  “I didn’t. It had no date. It looked old, but I’m no expert on these matters.”

  “Hmm. Do you suppose I could see it?”

  “No reason why you couldn’t see a copy, I’d think. The original will be in an evidence bag by this time, of course.”

  “And they will have fingerprinted it, I’m sure. There are ways of lifting very old prints from paper, aren’t there?”

  “There are, but they won’t have done that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because (a) it’s expensive, and (b) the letter is only what we call tangential evidence. Bill didn’t die violently, Dorothy. He wasn’t murdered. We won’t know for sure how he did die until they complete the autopsy, but the betting is on either heart attack or stroke, something cardiovascular. The police are keeping the letter only because Walter was attacked. That’s a crime. And Bill was in the tunnel. That’s an odd thing. When odd things happen in the vicinity of a crime, we tend to think they’re connected.”

  “You’re talking like a policeman.”

  “I am a policeman. Or I was.”

  “Well, stop being one for a minute. As an ordinary human being with a good brain, tell me what you think the connection might be between that letter and Bill’s death and Walter’s attack.”

  “I think,” Alan said slowly, “that Bill died because he was under stress. I think he took that letter down to the tunnel for a reason, but the effort was too much for his system, and he collapsed shortly after he got there.”

  “Why shortly after he got there? Why couldn’t he have been there for a while before he died?”

  “For one thing, he wasn’t very dirty. His clothes and hair were almost free of cobwebs and dirt. You must have noticed that the tunnel was full of both. If he’d spent much time there, he’d have been covered. Cobwebs are sticky and hard to brush off.”

  I shuddered. “You’re telling me!”

  “And the other reason I think he’d only been in there a few minutes was that he still had the paper in his hand.”

  I frowned. “I don’t get that one.”

  “My dear, what would he have been doing down there except trying to hide that letter? But he hadn’t done it, so …” Alan spread his hands.

  “Hide it. Yes. That makes sense. Except that it doesn’t. Why would he have wanted to hide a boring letter about someone’s travel plans?”

  “I have the feeling that when we know that, we’ll know a great deal more about his death and whatever’s going on at that museum.”

  TEN

  AFTER WE’D CALLED THE HOSPITAL YET ONCE MORE AND HEARD that there was no change, I went next door to see how Jane was doing. Really, I suppose, I was restless and wanted to do something, anything. Getting no answer to my knock at the back door, I poked my head in. The dogs, for once, only whined instead of setting up a cacophony of barking.

  Jane was asleep in the kitchen rocking chair. She looked, suddenly, very old, and somehow defenseless. I felt like a peeping Tom. She would hate my seeing her without her usual stoic armor. I backed away as quietly as I could, hoping the dogs would stay still, and went back to Alan.

  “Sleep is the best thing in the world for her,” he said when I told him.

  “Yes, but I’m antsy. I feel like Don Quixote. I’m itching to run off in all directions at once, tilting at whatever windmills present themselves.”

  “Well, then, suppose I go get a copy of the letter, and we can worry over that for a while.” So he went over to the police station and came home with not one copy, but two.

  We sat down in front of the fire with them. “I can’t believe Derek is letting me look at this,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Only tangential evidence, as I said before, love. And don’t forget you have a few special privileges.”

  “Wife of VIP. Right.” I grinned at him and stuck out my tongue.

  “Ah, a prophet is not without honor save in his own home. All right, let’s see what this can tell us.”

  “Read it out loud, Alan. I’m still not too good at English handwriting, and this is old and dirty, besides.”

  He cleared his throat. “No return address. No date. Here is the text:

  Dear Waffles, Good to get your last letter. Sounds as though things are fairly quiet there, ha-ha. I heard from an old friend of yours the other day, Sam Smith. He’s going on a little trip soon. Do I recall that you used to know some people in the States? He’s going to try to get to Indiana, though travel is difficult these days. Plans to visit some pleasant little towns called Donaldson, Tiosa, Spring Grove, Laketon, and Rolling Prairie. I’ve not beard of any of them, have you? Then it’s on to Mount Auburn—he says be may visit there twice—before he sees Orestes and then rests from his travel in Dabney or Manson. Sounds frightfully dull to me, but if you have friends that way, you might warn them that Sam’s toddling through. They might want to be ready”

  Alan stopped reading.

  “Be ready for what?”

  “I don’t know. The letter ends there.”

  “‘Be ready to entertain him,’ I suppose. Well. That surely isn’t very interesting, is it?”

  “Dull as ditch water. Which makes one wonder all the more why Bill thought it worth hiding.”

  “And worth copying onto a map of Indiana. I wish that atlas weren’t lost.”

  “I think I brought back the Indiana map we bought when we went to the States for that visit. I’m afraid I haven’t the least idea where it might be, however.”

  “I suppose we could order one from W H. Smith or somebody. Or I could get my friend Doc Foley to buy one and send it to me.” I went back to the letter. “‘ … though travel is difficult these days.’ What do you suppose that means?”

  “I thought it might refer to the austerity program after the war.” He didn’t need to say which war. To people of our generation, there is only one war. “Do you know about the currency restrictions and so on?”

  “Just from old Agatha Christie novels. You were allowed to take only a few pounds out of the country, right?”

  “So few that most people couldn’t travel abroad at all, unless they had bank accounts in another country, or wealthy friends.”

  “Why, in that case, would an Englishman want to go to all that trouble to visit a bunch of boring places in Indiana? Besides, it doesn’t sound as though he was planning to go and stay with anybody, so how could he possibly have managed the money angle?”

  Alan shrugged. “There was a thriving black market, of course.”

  “In Europe, probably. But in the wilds of Indiana?” I shook my head. “Anyway, I had another thought. What if the letter means during the war? The paper and ink look old and faded enough to date back sixty years or so.”

  “But your objections would apply tenfold, a hundredfold. Travel to America in those years wasn’t merely difficult, it was nearly impossible, and wildly dangerous. The U-boats were attacking commercial shipping as well as warships, you know.”

  “I was pretty young at the time, but I do read occasionally,” I said pointedly. “Maybe we’re wrong about the time frame. Maybe it was later, in the late fifties or early sixties, and travel was difficult only because money was tight. Look, I’ve just had an idea. We’ve agreed that the letter must be important, somehow, or Bill must have thought it was. Do you suppose Derek and his crew would turn loose of it long enough to have an expert date it?”

  Alan ran a hand down the back of his neck. “Dorothy, do try to remember what we’re dealing with here. Officially, I mean,” he added hastily as I opened my mouth to protest. “We have one man dead of apparently natural causes and one attacked, and a couple of items of no value apparently stolen from a museum. When Walter recovers—”

  “If he recovers—”

  “All right,
if he recovers, he may be able to tell us who his attacker was, and—”

  “Alan, I’m sorry to keep interrupting, but you know perfectly well that’s not likely. He may have some brain damage, and even if he doesn’t, he’s almost certain to have amnesia about the events immediately before the blow. Even I know that much about head trauma. And he may not have seen his attacker at all. He was hit on the back of the head, don’t forget.”

  “All right, given all that, what I was about to say was that we have a serious but not major crime here. So long as there’s the possibility that Walter may be able to help solve it, the department isn’t likely to spend the money to chase this particular wild goose.” He tapped the letter. “You and I may think there’s funny business going on and this letter’s at the heart of it, but the police operate on evidence, not hunches.”

  I am not easily squelched. I sat and thought about that for a while. “All right. Suppose I came up with a way to have it looked at that wouldn’t cost the department anything. Would they allow that?”

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, deeply suspicious. “You’re not planning to send the thing to America to some friend of yours, are you? They’d never allow—”

  “Of course not. I’m thinking of a friend of mine who works at the British Museum. Charles Lambert, you’ll remember him, he’s been to dinner a time or two. You’ve probably forgotten that he’s an expert on old documents. Really old, I mean, Old Testament and like that. But I’ll bet he’d know somebody who’s an expert on twentieth-century stuff, and I’ll bet he and I between us could get that expert here to look at this. For free.” “Are you, my love, saying that you plan to use your feminine wiles on not one but two men, right under my nose?”

  “Well,” I said, batting my eyelashes for all they were worth, “the alleged expert might be a woman, in which case you’d have to use your masculine wiles, wouldn’t you?”

  It took a while to hunt Charles down. A transplanted American like me, he came over to work in the museum for a year and never went home. He hides in the warren of basement rooms in the venerable building, and he doesn’t like to be disturbed by the telephone. I had to let my voice quaver quite a little bit to get the museum operator to keep trying, but eventually Charles’s irritable voice came over the line.