at the top of the stairs. Just a
suggestion of a movement. Jeffers hardly noticed it.
The
smell of gas was in the house.
Jeffers
ran upstairs, crashing into Leiber’s bedroom. Leiber lay motionless on the bed, and the room billowed
with gas, which hissed from a released jet at the base of the wall near the
door. Jeffers twisted it off, then forced up all the windows and ran back to Leiber’s body.
The
body was cold. It had been dead quite a few hours.
Coughing
violently, the doctor hurried from the room, eyes watering. Leiber hadn’t turned on the gas himself. He couldn’t have. Those sedatives had knocked him out, he wouldn’t
have wakened until noon. It wasn’t suicide. Or was there the faintest
possibility?
Jeffers
stood in the hall for five minutes. Then he walked to the door of the nursery.
It was shut. He opened it. He walked inside and to the crib.
The
crib was empty.
He
stood swaying by the crib for half a minute, then he
said something to nobody in particular.
“The
nursery door blew shut. You couldn’t get back into your crib where it was safe.
You didn’t plan on the door blowing shut. A little thing like a slammed door
can ruin the best of plans. I’ll find you somewhere in the house, hiding,
pretending to be something you are not.” The doctor looked dazed. He put his
hand to his head and smiled palely. “Now I’m talking like Alice and David talked. But, I can’t take any
chances. I’m not sure of anything, but I can’t take any chances.”
He
walked downstairs, opened his medical bag on the chair, took something out of
it and held it in his hands.
Something
rustled down the hall. Something very small and very quiet. Jeffers turned rapidly.
I
had to operate to bring you into this world, he thought. Now I guess I can
operate to take you out of it. . . .
He
took half-a-dozen slow, sure steps forward into the hall. He raised his hand
into the sunlight.
“See, baby! Something bright—something
pretty!”
A scalpel.
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I t was a little caricature of a town square.
In it were the following fresh ingredients: a candy-box of a bandstand where
men stood on Thursday and Sunday nights exploding music; fine, green- patinated bronze-copper benches all scrolled and
flourished; fine blue and pink tiled walks—blue as women’s newly lacquered
eyes, pink as women’s hidden wonders; and fine French-clipped trees in the
shapes of exact hatboxes. The whole, from your hotel window, had the fresh
ingratiation and unbelievable fantasy one might expect of a French villa in the
nineties. But no, this was Mexico ! and this a plaza in a small colonial
Mexican town, with a fine State Opera House (in which movies were shown for two
pesos admission: Rasputin and the
Empress, The Big House, Madame Curie, Love Affair, Mama Loves Papa).
Joseph
came out on the sun-heated balcony in the morning and knelt by the grille,
pointing his little box Brownie. Behind him, in the bath, the water was running
and Marie’s voice came out:
“What’re
you doing?”
He
muttered “—a picture.” She asked again. He clicked the shutter, stood up, wound
the spool inside, squinting, and said, “Took a picture of the town square. God,
didn’t those men shout last night? I didn’t sleep until two-thirty. We would
have to arrive when the local Rotary’s having its whingding .”
“What’re
our plans for today?” she asked.
“We’re
going to see the mummies,” he said.
“Oh,”
she said.