"I won't," he promised. "Good morning, Pat—how are you?"
Little Patricia Quain came slowly from the nursery and clung to Nora's soapy hand. Her blue eyes were redder than Nora's, and ringed with grime. Her pink, square-jawed face seemed stubbornly set against any more tears.
"I'm all right, thank you, Mr. Will." Her low voice struggled not to break. "The tragedy is poor little Jiminy Cricket. He was killed last night."
Barbee felt a frigid breath blow out of the darkness of his mind. He turned and coughed in an effort to cover his terrified start.
"That's mighty bad." His voice rasped huskily. "How did it happen?"
Pat's wet blue eyes blinked.
"Two big dogs came in the night," she told him soberly. "One was white and one was gray. They wanted to take Daddy's box out of the study. Little Jiminy ran out to stop them, and the big gray dog bit his back and killed him."
Mute and shaken, Barbee turned to Nora.
"That's what Pat says." Her own tired voice seemed bewildered. "Anyhow, her little dog is dead. We found it lying on the sand pile this morning—right where she told me to look, when she woke up crying."
Her plump shoulder shrugged vainly at the inexplicable.
"I really think a car struck the little dog," she insisted resolutely. "Some of those college boys drive so recklessly at night. Probably he crawled back to the sand pile before he died, and Pat must have heard him whining."
Pat set her pink, grimy jaw.
"Please, Mother—no!" she protested stubbornly. "That big gray dog did it with his long, ugly teeth. I did too see him, and the pretty white dog with him, like I do in dreams. Didn't I, Mother? Didn't Daddy believe me?"
"Maybe he did, darling." Nora turned her round, troubled face to Barbee. "It's true Sam turned white as a sheet when Pat told about her dream. He wouldn't go with us to look for Jiminy—just ran to see about his box in the study."
Her tired eyes were suddenly concerned.
"You look pale, Will—do you feel all right?"
"I had a funny dream myself." He tried to laugh. "Something I ate, maybe. I'm going to run on over to the Foundation now and talk to Sam." He put his hand around the child's small back. "That's too bad about Jiminy."
The child shrank from his hand, and hid her stained face in Nora's apron.
"I don't think Sam will tell you anything," Nora was saying. "If he does, Will—won't you let me know?" She walked outside the door with him, and dropped her voice below Pat's earshot. "Please, Will-I'm so afraid, and I don't know anything to do about it."
CHAPTER TEN
A Friend of April Bell
Autumn-fire still burned in the trees on the campus and the adjoining grounds of the Humane Research Foundation, and all the lawns were red and gold with fallen leaves. Barbee recalled the scents that had been so vivid in his dream and sniffed the cool air. All he could smell was a faint pungence of leaves burning in some back yard.
He met six freshmen marching down University Avenue, escorted by six sophomores with paddles and burdened with the cage that held the Clarendon tiger— this was homecoming week, he recalled, and the daily march of the tiger was part of the traditional preliminary ceremonies before the football game with State College.
That mascot was the life-size model of a saber-tooth, complete with tawny stripes and ferocious snarl, which had been merely an exhibit in the university museum until it was first abducted years ago by raiders from State College. The sight of it brought back wistful memories to Barbee.
For the Muleteers had been the four heroes who crossed the mountains west of Clarendon in Rex's ancient, stripped-down Cadillac on the eve of another homecoming game, disguised themselves successfully with the red war paint of the State College Indians, and snatched the stolen tiger out of the very midst of a State war dance.
But that was many years ago, before old Mondrick turned against him. Wistfully, for a moment, he wondered why—but the problems of the present were large enough without brooding over old slights. He parked around the corner, and strode firmly up the walk to the tall new Foundation building.
That lingering, nameless malodor of the night had fled, and the sounds of nighttime carpentry had ceased. The austere hush of the dim corridors seemed almost ominous. Instead of the girl he expected to see at the information desk, he found a thick-set man who looked many years too mature for his university sweater.
"Sorry, mister." The man scowled. "Library and museum not open today."
"That's all right," Barbee said pleasantly. "I only want to see Mr. Quain."
"Mr. Quain's busy."
"Then I'd like to speak to Mr. Spivak or Mr. Chittum."
"Busy." The man scowled harder. "No visitors today."
Barbee was reviewing his gate-crashing technique when he saw the two men idling in the automatic elevator. They also seemed too old to be wearing sweaters splashed with the yellow-and-black of the Clarendon tiger, and they looked back at him too sharply. He saw the bulges at their hips and remembered that Sam Quain had been hiring guards for the Foundation.
He scrawled on a card: "Sam, it will save us both trouble if you will talk to me now" and pushed the card and a dollar bill across the information desk. He smiled at the cold-eyed watchman.
"Please send that to Mr. Quain."
Silently, the bleak-faced man pushed back the dollar and carried the card to the elevator. He limped like a tired policeman, and Barbee found the bulge his gun made. Sam Quain evidently intended to protect that box.
Barbee waited ten uncomfortable minutes under the guard's cold stare before Sam Quain stepped abruptly out of the elevator. Barbee was appalled to see the stark intensity of his contained desperation—no wonder Nora had been upset. He was coatless; his shirt sleeves were rolled up and his big hands had a vague chemical odor, as if he had been interrupted in some laboratory task. His unshaven face was gray and harsh with strain. "This way, Will."
His haggard eyes recognized Barbee without friendship, and he led the way brusquely across the corridor to a long room which briefly puzzled Barbee. The walls were hung with huge maps of all the continents and others which bewildered him until he recognized them as restorations of the different coastlines and vanished land masses of the geologic past. A battery of card-punching and card-sorting machines occupied the end of the room, with long rows of gray steel filing cabinets beyond.
Barbee wondered for a moment what sort of data old Mondrick and his associates had assembled and analyzed here. The rivers and mountains of those lost continents older than legendary Atlantis and Lemuria were shown in convincing detail; colored boundaries across them puzzled him again. The work of the room had been either completed or suspended, because the sleek machines were silent today, the dim-lit aisles deserted.
Sam Quain shut the door behind them and turned beside a desk to face Barbee. There were chairs, but he didn't ask Barbee to sit. He knotted one gaunt fist in an unconscious gesture of restrained emotion.
"Better lay off, Will!" His quiet voice was vibrant with a controlled vehemence. "For your own sake."
"Tell me why," Barbee challenged.
A spasm as if of anguish twisted Quain's stiff face. His dark, tortured eyes looked up for a moment at those maps of the far past. He coughed, and his voice seemed to choke.
"Please, Will—don't ask me that!"
Barbee sat down on the corner of the desk.
"We're friends, Sam—or we used to be. That's why I came out here. You can tell me some things I've got to know—for very urgent reasons."
Quain's face set.
"I can't tell you anything."
"Listen, Sam!" A quivering urgency turned Barbee's voice imperative. "What was old Mondrick trying to say when he died? What did you find in the Ala-shan—and what have you got in that wooden box?" He studied Quain's bleak, gray face. "And who is the Child of Night?"
He paused, but Quain stood woodenly silent.
"You might as well answer, Sam," he rasped bitterly. "I'm i
n the newspaper game, remember. I know how to deal with unwilling sources. I'm going to find out what you're hiding—whether you like it or not."
Quain's blue eyes narrowed and his Adam's apple jerked to an uneasy gulp.
"You don't know what you're meddling into." His abrupt, low voice was harsh with pain. "Won't you just leave us alone with this—while there's something left of our old friendship? Can't you forget you're a snooping newshawk?"
"This isn't for the Star," Barbee protested huskily. "The paper isn't interested. But things are happening that I can't understand. I've got to solve some riddles, Sam, before they drive me nuts!"
His voice shuddered.
"I know you're afraid of something, Sam. Why else did you take all those useless precautions to guard old Mondrick at the airport? And why have you turned this building into a fortress?" He swallowed. "What's the danger, Sam?"
Stubbornly, Sam Quain shook his head.
"Better forget it, Will," he said. "The answers wouldn't make you any happier."
Barbee rose trembling from the edge of the desk.
"I know a little already," he said hoarsely. "Enough to drive me nearly out of my mind. I feel that you are putting up a terrific fight against—something. I'm involved in it—I don't know how. But I want to be on your side, Sam."
Sam Quain sat down heavily in the chair behind the desk. He fumbled nervously with a paperweight—it was that little Roman lamp of Mondrick's, Barbee saw, the one whose blackglazed design showed Romulus and Remus, twin sons of dark Mars and a human vestal, sucking at the dugs of a wolf bitch.
"Anything you know may be very unfortunate, Will —for both of us." He pushed the terra-cotta lamp away from him abruptly, and sat a long time motionless beyond the desk, searching Barbee with hollowed, pain-shadowed eyes.
"I think you're imaging things," he said softly at last. "Nora was telling me you've been working too hard, and drinking too much. She was worried about you, Will, and I'm afraid she's right. I think you need a rest."
He put his hand on the desk telephone.
"I think you ought to get out of town for a few days, Will—before you drive yourself into a complete breakdown. I'll arrange it for you—so nothing will cost you a cent—if you'll promise to catch the afternoon plane today for Albuquerque."
Barbee stood frowning and silent.
"You see," he explained, "the Foundation has a little party working in New Mexico—excavating a cave dwelling for remains that may tell us why Homo sapiens was extinct in the western hemisphere when the Amerinds arrived. But you needn't bother with their work."
A hopeful smile warmed his harsh face.
"Won't you take a week off, Will?" he urged. "I'll call Troy and fix it with the paper—you might even do a feature story on the trip. Get plenty of sunshine and a little exercise—and forget about Dr. Mondrick."
He started to lift the phone.
"Will you go—today—if we arrange the reservations?"
Barbee shook his head.
"I don't bribe, Sam." He saw Quain's angry flush. "I still don't know what you're trying to cover up, but you can't ship me out of town that way. No, I'm going to stick around and see the fun."
Quain stood up stiffly.
"Dr. Mondrick decided not to trust you, Will—a long time ago." His voice was flat and cold. "He never told us why. Maybe you're all right. Maybe you aren't. We simply can't afford to take chances."
His stubborn face was bleak and dangerous.
"I'm sorry you choose to be so unreasonable, Will. I wasn't trying to bribe you—but I have to warn you now. Lay off, Will. If you don't stop this presumptuous investigation of affairs that don't concern you—we'll have to stop you. I'm sorry, Will. But that's the way it is." He shook his raw-boned, sun-bronzed head regretfully. "Think it over, Will. Now I've got to go."
He strode to open the door.
"Wait, Sam!" Barbee protested sharply. "If you can only give me one sane reason—"
But Sam Quain shut the door of that enigmatic room behind them and turned abruptly away. Barbee attempted to follow, but the elevator doors shut in his face. Uneasily conscious of the cold-eyed guard at the reception desk, he retreated from that stern tower that had become a citadel of the inexplicable.
Beside his shabby car at the curb, he turned to look up at those high windows behind, where he had seen the blue glare of welding torches in that nightmare, as Quain's men prepared a strongroom for the box. He couldn't help shivering, or sniffing again for that peculiar fetor. His nostrils caught nothing now. Yet the perfect fit between dream and reality frightened him— and his very sanity, he felt, was locked inside that guarded wooden box.
A sudden, illogical panic swept him into the car. He raced the motor and clashed the gears and lurched around the turns getting back to the highway. Foolish, he told himself. But Sam Quain, with that curious mixture of desperate intensity and solemn regret and sheer terror, had somehow shaken him.
He drove around the campus until that irrational spasm of dread had passed, and then started back to town. He glanced hopefully at his watch, but it wasn't time to call April Bell. He was still supposed to be working for the Star, he recalled, and the Walraven file was waiting in his desk in the city room. His troubled brain, however, revolted at the unpleasant chore of renovating Walraven for the voters, and suddenly he knew that he had to see Rowena Mondrick.
Why did she wear those quaint old silver heirlooms —in reality and in his dream? What, precisely, had she and Dr. Mondrick been digging for in Nigeria—and what had been the exact circumstances of that black leopard's attack? What did she know of Mondrick's later work? Did she know of any enemies who might have conspired to murder him at the airport? Did she know the name of the Child of Night?
If she could answer even one of those restless questions that stalked the darkness of his thoughts, her answer might be the touchstone he needed to distinguish between fact and whisky-bred illusion.
Passing the office, he drove on to the foot of Center Street and north on the new river road. Glennhaven occupied a hundred well-kept acres on the hills above the river, four miles out of Clarendon. Trees still gaudy with autumn screened the hospital buildings and the occupational therapy shops away from the highway.
Barbee parked on the gravel lot behind the long main building, an impressive three-story prison of yellow brick. He walked around the building into the cool, dim-lit hush of a wide reception room. Austere and opulent as the foyer of a bank, it seemed a temple to the new god Freud. The slim girl sitting at a switchboard behind a massive mahogany desk was its virginal priestess. He gave her his card.
"I've come to see Mrs. Rowena Mondrick," he said.
Her fragile loveliness reminded him of a portrait of some princess of old Egypt that he had seen in the university museum. Her eyes and hair were very black; her skin was pale ivory, her brow very low, her skull oddly long. She leafed swiftly through a black-bound book, and gave him a dreamy smile.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I haven't your name." Her voice was a sleepy caress. "All visits to our patients must be arranged in advance, you see, through the doctor in charge of the case. If you wish to leave your request—"
"I want to see Mrs. Mondrick, now."
"I'm very sorry, sir." Her slow smile was hauntingly exotic. "I'm afraid that would be impossible to arrange, today. If you wish to return—"
"Who is her doctor?"
"One moment, sir." Her slender ivory fingers riffled gracefully through the black book. "Mrs. Rowena Mondrick was admitted at eight this morning, and she's under—" The girl's limpid voice quivered melodiously, intoning the name of a minor deity. "She's under Dr. Glenn."
"Then let me see him."
"Sorry, sir," she purred. "But Dr. Glenn never sees anyone without an appointment."
Barbee caught his breath, and stifled an angry impulse to stalk past the girl and see what happened. She was watching him with dark misty eyes, and he knew she could call enough husky attendants to preserve the te
mple's solemn sanctity.
He gulped uneasily, trying to swallow the dry apprehension in his throat. Glennhaven, he knew, was rated as one of the country's finest psychiatric hospitals. There was no good reason, he told himself, for his old dim terror of all mental institutions.
"Mrs. Mondrick is a friend of mine," he told the girl. "I only want to find out how she is."
"Any discussion of our patients is against the rules," that fragile priestess cooed. "With Dr. Glenn himself in charge of the case, however, you may be certain that Mrs. Mondrick is receiving the best care possible. If you wish to ask permission for a visit—"
"No," he muttered. "Thanks."
He fled from the girl's exotic smile and that well-ordered, ruthless hush. The blind woman was not a sacrificial victim imprisoned in this efficiently conducted twentieth-century temple, he tried to tell himself. Actually, Glenn was a distinguished psychiatrist; his treatment would surely be kind and skillful.
Barbee was glad to get outside again, however. He filled his lungs thankfully with the cold autumn air, and hurried back to his car. One more effort had failed, but there was still April Bell. Eagerness hurried his breathing when he thought of that vivid redhead. It was almost time to call her hotel. He was going to return the jade wolf and find out, somehow, whether April Bell had dreamed—
Sight of Miss Ulford broke his thought. A gray little wisp of a woman, the nurse was sitting on a bench at the bus stop on the corner. He pulled to the curb and offered to drive her home.
"Thank you so much, Mr. Barbee." Smiling gratefully with yellow false teeth, she got in the car beside him. "I just missed the bus," she said plaintively, "and I don't know when the next one is. I suppose I could have asked the girl to call a taxi—but I hardly know what I'm doing, I'm so upset about poor Rowena."
"How is she?" Barbee whispered huskily.
"Acutely disturbed—that's what Dr. Glenn wrote on her chart." Worry rasped in the nurse's dry nasal voice. "She's still hysterical—she didn't want me to leave, but Glenn said I must—and they're giving her sedatives to calm her."
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