Kate wanted me to do it, of course, and we both knew her reasons, but she also knew she had to have some different reason if she were going to persuade me, and she was ready. “Bill and I could go out to Hal’s on the Island,” she said. “You know Bill’s been hoping he could get away to the ocean for a while during summer vacation, and I would like it, too. We don’t mind staying here, we understand that you don’t want to leave the wall, but if you took the job you’d be going up to that place to live for a while and that would give Bill and me a chance for a real summer vacation.”
Sometimes I wish I had the courage to leave entirely. Kate would be a thousand times better off without me, and God knows so would Bill. What does a fifteen-year-old boy need with a father who just broods in the house all the time? It would lighten both their lives if I were simply to pull up stakes and go away, and there are times when I wish I could do it, but I just can’t. I’m afraid to go, and that’s the truth. If I didn’t have Kate, and Bill, and the house, and my wall, if I didn’t have these threads of my cocoon to enclose me, I doubt I would long allow me to go on living.
So Kate had chosen the perfect argument. I would be out of their lives for a month, at least.
Doctor Cameron was staying at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. I called him that evening and accepted the job, and we met in his hotel room the next day to begin the groundwork for my impersonation. We decided on a background for me that paralleled my own life without revealing me to be an ex-cop, and Doctor Cameron dictated a letter of application which I wrote and sent off to The Midway. Because the clerical staff there was composed entirely of residents—a cook, Doctor Cameron and one other psychiatrist were the only employees—I had to put in an actual letter of application. The return address was Revo Hill, not only because no one now at The Midway had ever been there, but also because an old friend of Doctor Cameron’s was on the staff there and would intercept the reply.
Doctor Cameron also gave me dossiers on the twenty-one people now living at The Midway, plus verbal descriptions of the cook, a local widow named Mrs. Garson, and the other psychiatrist, a younger man named Lorimer Fredericks.
On Saturday, Doctor Cameron returned to Kendrick, and on Monday Kate and Bill went happily off to Long Island while I boarded the train with my suitcase and came up to The Midway, where I promptly became the fifth victim of the man—or woman—I was supposed to catch.
After my induced accident and my nocturnal breakfast with Dewey and subsequent stroll around the first floor, I slept another five hours, waking up just before noon to find that someone had removed my shoes and socks and covered me with a blanket while I slept. And when I got out of bed—being much stronger this time—I found on the bureau a miniature bottle of Ballantine Scotch and a note in printed capital letters, ballpoint pen on ordinary white notepaper, saying:
I’M SORRY IT WAS YOU
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Copyright © 1967 by Tucker Coe
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Murder Among Children Page 19
