Little Less Than Kind

by Charlotte Armstrong

  The young doctor said to Justin, “Where’d you fly from?”

  “San Fran.” Justin had not passed out.

  “Jet?”

  “Right. Listen, I don’t know,” said Justin, sweating, “about this, too much longer.”

  The young doctor took his folded handkerchief from his pocket and put it between Justin’s teeth. He said, “Those jets will sure scare the hell out of you, taking off.”

  David marveled. And his mind, going double, remembered the knife. It was behind him. All right. No matter. Sit still. Not much longer.

  Now. A siren sounded and the doorbell pinged, simultaneously. Aaron opened the door for Dr. Jones, The one siren snarled and died as another was screaming upward on the scale. The noise was terrible. David held hard to the wood. He could sense, through his back, ripples of arousing.

  Something impelled him to say, companionably and almost with enthusiasm, “Watch this, Ladd. Watch how they work.” And his back was broad and strong enough, not to wince or startle.

  Men came in, without any babbling. They were slow and meticulously gentle, but so decisive that they seemed to be working fast. Inch by inch, a folded blanket was slipped between Abby and Justin. Six men, holding the blanket’s edges, synchronizing their movements to a steady and exactly even effort, very very slowly and very very surely lifted Abby’s arched body still in its very arch, away. Slowly and evenly, they carried her out of the house. Two men bent to Justin, who was letting himself moan a little. They did things to that crooked leg. They put him on a stretcher. They took him away.

  It was Aaron who went back to the terrace and summoned Rafe Lorimer to go with his son.

  As Rafe’s wild crop of hair went by, underneath, Rafe was saying with rich emotion, “What is happening to me and my children? Is there a curse on the house of Lorimer?” Aaron put him out, at the front door.

  All the while, David sat on the eighth stair with a weight against his back. The sagging weight of the boy’s body where he lay, warm and heavy, upon David’s muscle and bone, breathing like a child when it’s asleep.

  Sirens wailed, going away.

  Aaron said in a normal voice, “By the way, this is Joe McDonald. David, you’ll want to leave now?”

  “Yes, I must.” David stirred. The boy moved. David slid sideways, as the weight lifted from him, and turned to look. The boy’s lips moved soundlessly.

  Joe McDonald said, “Ladd Cunningham is your name. How about you coining with me? I’ve got a little old Austin Healey outside.”

  The dark eyes looked his way but the boy said nothing.

  It was David who said, “Where would you take him? I don’t want to leave him here alone.”

  “Alone,” the boy echoed.

  “Well, I had in mind a hospital, kind of,” Joe said. “Where he can relax and we can figure things out a little bit.”

  “Are you a doctor?” the boy said. Life seemed to go on in him, like a light bulb.

  “That’s what I am.”

  The boy looked down, to his left side.

  David saw the knife on the tenth stair. He leaned back, with one elbow on the tenth stair, not touching the knife.

  The boy’s long lashes lifted. The dark eyes were somber. “Is it because I am sick?” He was asking David.

  “It would be good to know,” said David.

  Joe said, “This is an okay place. You wouldn’t be alone. We can make some tests, and all that.”

  The boy looked into the young face below. He turned again and the dark eyes searched David’s face. “Shall I go with him, Dad?”

  David groped for phrases and discarded all of them. “Yes,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  By five o’clock, they had put a set of tires on the Cadillac and managed to turn it. Then, tilted on two wheels, all its lines spoiled, the big car went away behind the tow truck, looking like a monstrous baby carriage.

  David turned and saw Aaron Silver pulling to the curb. He stepped quickly. “How is the boy?”

  “Safe,” said Aaron, smiling. “Shall we put it that way? Abby?”

  “She’s safe.” David did not smile. “Will you come in?”

  They went into Hob Cunningham’s house. “As you see,” said David, “I am in sole possession. Drink?”

  “Fine. It occurs to me that it might be useful if I knew what happened here this morning.”

  David took him into the living room and, when they had sat themselves down with drinks, David told it as briefly as he could.

  “You seem depressed,” said Aaron.

  “Oh, I am. I am. Consider the damages. Broken bones, lives, hearts … not to mention that the little girl is still missing. All on account of one miserable mixed-up boy.”

  “Is Abby depressed?”

  David drank deep. “Abby is in the damnedest cast I ever saw. She’ll mend, they say, and there’ll be no paralysis. She doesn’t blame him. She startled him, and he didn’t mean it. It was essentially an accident.”

  (Abby, who fought all ugly happenings but, when she had lost, behaved very well. Darling Abby, whom he loved. To whom he would, therefore, give all that he was. But no less.)

  “You think he meant it?” Aaron was asking.

  “I may give up thinking.”

  “Nobody is guilty, Dave.”

  “If I weren’t too depressed to wiggle my mind,” said David, “I’d give you a knockdown drag-out argument on that.”

  Aaron smiled but said nothing.

  In a moment, David said, “All right. In a nutshell. If nobody is guilty, then nobody is any good either.”

  “I should have said, Everybody is guilty?”

  “Not all of the people, all of the time,” said David. A chance. A choice. A risk, even. That’s all I’m asking. He shook himself. “What is the prognosis on the boy?”

  “We are not witch-doctors. Tests to make, much to do, before we can even begin to sense the dimensions of his trouble. How can I say? He’s at a bad age. Yet, we may have caught him early enough.”

  David fiddled with his glass. “Justin Lorimer is done out of a semester.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I’m partial to him. I think I’ll offer Cunningham Company to Justin. He is a relative, of sorts. And I could train him up.”

  “Yes, he might shape up,” said Aaron neutrally. “He is a little like Hob, wouldn’t you say?”

  “May be,” said David. “May be. Hob had a blind spot.”

  “Justin has his.”

  “I agree.”

  “Still, who hasn’t?”

  David brooded. “What would it do to a boy, Aaron, if he is told that it’s fine thing to live his own life and that he may and ought to, but if be chooses to do or say what his mother would rather he did not, she will suffer, unbearably?”

  “Some boys,” said Aaron, who had listened intently, “might get mixed up.”

  “This boy!” burst David. “Do you know what I think? He must have believed, when he was small, that she literally could not bear it. That she would die.”

  “Possible.”

  “What a spot to be in.” David sighed. “There was sex in it, too, I suppose.”

  “We’ll help him look for what is there,” said Aaron placidly.

  “Did he love his mother and hate his father?” asked David, with curiosity.

  “Probably.”

  “Then why does he want to revenge his father’s death?”

  “Because he loves his father and hates his mother. Probably,” said Aaron, with a twinkle. “And, probably, he himself is both. Or doesn’t know which.”

  “If that’s not witch-doctor talk! You pulling my leg?”

  “We don’t know,” said Aaron. “The boy has to peel the layers and the contradictions from himself, by himself.”

  “I’d like a plain fact or two,” said David grimly, “if I’m not asking too much. For instance, why did he think I’d killed Hob?”

  “He had to put a floating fury somewhere, maybe.”<
br />
  “But he was going to tell me why.”

  “Yet, he didn’t?”

  “No, no. Abby came …” David sighed, once more. “Abby acts on a principle, you know. Sometimes she wins.”

  “Don’t we all, sometimes?”

  “Not if we can’t fail,” said David severely. “I’ll ask you a question, Doctor. And there had better be a plain answer. How does the layman deal with a bomb in his house?”

  Aaron understood at once. “I’ve seen bombs to which yours was a firecracker,” he chided. “You didn’t do too badly, old friend.”

  “Old friend,” said David, “I go by results. Which are extremely poor. You fellows better come up with some fairly simple rule or rules for the layman to apply. None of these layers and contradictions.”

  “Alas,” said Aaron, “we deal with the individual.”

  “No universal rule?”

  “Love?” said Aaron, tilting his head as if he listened to the word.

  “On demand, eh? Just turn the faucet and there she flows.”

  “Didn’t she?”

  “What?”

  “In your case?”

  “Not me. I could have flayed him.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t coddle him,” said David shortly. “And I’ll tell you somebody else I’d like to paddle and that’s young Miss Lorimer. For her discourtesy.”

  “You want a fact?” said Aaron. “All right. I told you on the phone, at about six P.M. on Monday, to try to get the boy into therapy. At twelve fifteen P.M. on Wednesday, he went with Joe. Now, what do you want? That’s fast work, old friend.”

  “I didn’t do it single-handed,” David said morosely. “There were contributions.”

  “Justin and the whip, you mean?”

  “Love, too. Abby tried that.”

  “Yes. His love for her. That love she tried.”

  David looked at his old friend sourly.

  “Gloom’s the ticket, I see,” said Aaron, leaning back. “But somebody loved him.”

  David opened his mouth, but there came a tapping on the window. “What …?” He got up and opened the long glass. Felicia Lorimer stepped in and said breathlessly, “Justin was hurt? Where is he? Where’s my father?”

  David stood still, but Aaron jumped “Come in. Come in, Are you all right, Miss Felicia?”

  “Of course. What’s happened?”

  “Why your brother will be fine,” Aaron began.

  But David looked down at the girl and, with a lift of his hand, he shut Aaron up. “This is what happened, Felicia,” he said quietly. “You ran away. Your father was frantic. He called your brother. Your brother flew home. When he got there, the police had taken your father to the morgue. Justin came here to beat up Ladd. Abby tried to stop it. She was pushed downstairs and it broke her back and Justin’s leg. They are both in the hospital. Ladd’s in another hospital, for tests and therapy. I don’t know where your father is. He was with Justin. The girl in the morgue, obviously, was somebody else. I suppose, for half an hour at least, your father thought she might be you.”

  Felicia clung to the back of a chair and listened to him, motionless, all the way through. Only her face seemed to become tighter and whiter.

  Aaron said, “Sit down, Felicia, please. Don’t blame yourself for all of that.”

  But she did not move. She kept her eyes on David.

  He said, “Why couldn’t the police find you on Tuesday? Were you hiding?”

  Her back straightened, “Yes. I rented a room and said I was Felicia Cunningham.” She put up her chin. “No, Dr. Silver,” she said clearly, “I don’t blame myself for all of that. But I’m sorry for it. Is … poor Abby going to be all right?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Aaron started to say more but David said shrewdly, “Your father ought to have known you had some money.”

  “He did know.” (David nodded.) “I said a couple of days. It is a couple of days. Why did the police take my father to the morgue?”

  “Because you were missing and very unhappy and talking ‘silly’. Cleona told us.”

  “I had to get over that,” she said. “That’s why I went. And my father wanted me away, you know. He didn’t know how to arrange it.”

  “Sit down,” said David, smiling at her.

  Felicia sat down. (Aaron sat down and was still.)

  “I thought it was best,” she said, “to get myself straightened out first.”

  “It’s a good idea,” David said gravely.

  “So I had to think. I had to pray. I sat in some empty churches. I believe in God.” She said this last sadly, as if no one would take it seriously.

  “Why so do I,” said David, as if this were not uncommon, but it was always pleasant to meet a fellow enthusiast. He sat down. “Was it the lying story, in itself?” He was respectful, but not pulling any punches, “Or because Ladd told it?”

  She shook her head. Her face had lost flesh. She wasn’t pretty. But there was something … “Not because it was Ladd. It was the … idea. I mean, what you call the lying story. A lie can make you good and mad,” she said. “Oh, the truth can, too. But of course, sooner or later, you’ll have to take the truth. But it’s—” She stopped and looked at Dr. Silver and back to David. “Am I talking too much?”

  “No, no,” said David. “That’s only because you’ve been alone. Go on.”

  She regarded him silently a moment. Then she said bravely, “After a while I figured it out. It’s something that could be just a little bit true—that shocks you.”

  David nodded. “Shakes you up,” he said.

  Felicia held his eyes, in wonder. Then she said earnestly, “I love my dad, but I manage him. I hate to, but I have to. Otherwise, he blunders around in my life. He doesn’t mean any harm.”

  David nodded. “I can imagine.”

  She sighed. Her eyes fell. “Well, I think I can manage, that’s all.”

  “The story isn’t the problem now. Ladd is—discredited. It’ll be on his head.”

  “I know,” she said. “And it’s just for this winter, really. I’ll be out of high school. I can get a job. And—he gets to working.” She looked down at her hands.

  “Your father knows what the problem really is,” said David in a moment. (Aaron stirred, but said nothing.) David went on, “He said to me that you can’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

  “Did he?” said Felicia, looking as if she’d been enlightened. “I’m sorry for him, then.” She began to bite her lips. “I shouldn’t manage him. I’ll try …”

  “Would you like to go to school in Europe?” David said. ‘I’m sorry—for you.”

  Felicia shook her head slightly, not to say No, but to say, Wait, discuss that later. “Not for me,” she said. “I’ll be all right.” Then, with a look of sudden mischief, she said, “Humpty-dumpty was an egg. Suppose it had already hatched?”

  “Then she could fly,” said David quickly.

  And Felicia smiled and her eyes danced.

  The doorbell broke the spell. It rang again. Cleona must be out of hearing. David rose, reluctantly, to answer it.

  “Mr. Crown. I’m sorry I kinda ran out this morning,” said Gary Fenwick, looking very unhappy.

  “I’m sorry too,” said David.

  “Ladd’s in a mental hospital, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there was one thing, though …”

  “What was that?”

  “If anything happened to him, I was supposed to tell. So I …”

  “Come in.”

  “Hi Gary,” said Dr. Silver.

  “Hey, Felicia!” cried the big boy, with honest delight.

  “Hello, Gary,” she said courteously. She was twice as old as he.

  “What was it you had to tell?” asked David.

  “The trouble is,” said Gary, squirming, “what I’m supposed to know, I don’t guess I do know. But see … he was pretty sure … well, he was sure that you’d killed hi
s dad.”

  “Yes, I know that he was. Do you know why?”

  David could tell by the tail of his eye that this was news to Felicia, but she took it, said nothing, made no gasp.

  “Well, there was something in it, in a book, that made him so sure. A message from his father, he said it was.”

  “What message?”

  “He wouldn’t show me. He said he was the only one who could read it.” Gary shifted his big feet some more. “I know where the book is,” he offered, “up in his room.”

  “Then will you get it?”

  “Sure thing.” Gary made off. They heard his heavy feet on the stairs.

  Felicia had laced her fingers and bent her head.

  “Rafe!” said David suddenly. “And Justin, too. I’ll call.” He went swiftly into the library, by way of the door from this room, to call the hospital. He didn’t know where Rafe was, but Justin must be told in any case, and Justin might know. Abby must know. And Ladd Cunningham. He needed to know that Felicia was safe.

  Felicia lifted her head and looked after David Crown.

  Dr. Silver sat still, watching her face.

  As David came back, so did Gary, bounding into the room like a retrieving puppy, bearing a leather-bound desk-diary. “It was in here some place.”

  “Thank you, Gary.” David took it. He did not open it. “They are very glad, Felicia. Your father is coming. You are to stay here.”

  “I’ll be glad to stay here,” she said gravely. “Thank you.”

  “Will Ladd get better, Dr. Silver?” Gary asked.

  “We hope so, Gary.”

  “He was my best friend,” said Gary solemnly. Nobody spoke. “Well, I guess I better get going.”

  No one detained him.

  When he had gone, David opened the book. Hob’s notes, appointments, reminders. He flipped the pages. “These are pretty cryptic. Do you suppose Ladd thought it was a code?”

  David had gone past the end of the daily notes into the blank pages—past where life had stopped, he thought—and there, at the end, was a section for names and addresses, cut to alphabet tabs. There, on the first of these, he saw Hob’s handwriting, but unnaturally large, written in emotion.

  “Here it is,” said David sadly. His throat was tightening. He gave the book to Aaron.

  Aaron read it to himself He began to mutter, frowning. The he read it aloud, evenly, unpunctuated.