Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane Read Online Free PDF Page B

slang expression.”
    “Oh. Well, that’s what I thought. Yes, I—well—of course. How could anyone have a crab? ”
    “They can’t,” Mawr said soberly, fighting down a giggle.
    “Then why do they say I have them?”
    Mawr grew vaguely uncomfortable. “The expression wasn’t meant literally. It is slang for a tiny bug.”
    “Bug?”
    “Bug.”
    “Is it something like the ‘clap’?”
    Miss Mawr nearly fell off her chair. “Something.”
    “Should have said so in the first place.”
    “Well, I—”
    “Damn bloody nonsense,” the Founder grumbled testily as she pulled open a drawer and reached for something in it—then recollected something—possibly Mawr’s presence—and quickly slid it shut again. She blinked across at her dean. “What was that you said?”
    “Not a thing, Madame Founder. But what shall we do about the—?”
    “Nothing. Nothing at all, my dear. It’s all been taken care of.”
    “Oh?”
    “Taken care of,” the Founder repeated sagely. Her hand had pulled open the drawer again and suddenly she seemed rather anxious to be rid of Miss Mawr. “The trouble,” she rattled brusquely, “was that foolish Colonel Ryan. I’m convinced that he was the trouble. He was naughty to those men; very naughty, very cruel; ran that place like a snake pit. Did you ever see that movie?”
    “No, I—”
    “Ran it like a snake pit, hiss-hiss-hiss! Don’t concern yourself, my dear. No. Not at all. Sufficient unto the day.”
    Mawr waited for her to continue before she realized that the Founder had concluded her remarks. “How”—she probed with delicacy—“has it all been taken care of?”
    “What?”
    “The incidents. The inmates next door.”
    “Oh. That. A new commanding officer. Arrived there today.”
    “Oh, I see.”
    “Yes. You see?”
    “Did he call?” asked Mawr.
    “What?”
    “The new commander. Is that how you got the news?”
    The startled, fleeting shadow of something like panic flitted vaguely, for an instant, across the Founder’s face. “Yes!” she said quickly. “Yes, the dear heart called. Said that everything would be—fine!”
    “Good show,” drawled Miss Mawr. Then excused herself and left. For a moment she paused outside the door, her head bowed in thought. Muffled and indistinct, she heard the opening of a drawer, the clinking of glass; and smiled in bemusement. The Founder was just like her father, she thought: her gentle, beery father who used to drink on the sly to repel the Boston chill. But then, what could one do with a banker who read John Donne aloud? Except love him, she thought; love him; that’s all.
    A chattering of girls tinkled lightly down the corridor and vanished around a corner. Mawr moved to a window, looked out across the campus to the wall; and then above it to a turret of the gruesome Slovik mansion.
    She blinked; then blinked again. The inmates had posted a new banner: “Mary Poppins has Syphilis.”

Chapter 5
    Captain Norman Fell gently tipped the grinning skull atop the skeleton in his office so that the vodka bottle inset in its base could pour its contents through its gaping oral cavity into a coffee cup in his hand. “Don’t blame me! ” he admonished the skull. “I told them not to operate! Remember? Eh?” The skull did not remember, splashed vodka onto his fingers. Fell gently licked them. He bore the skull no malice. Yet there was in him something dangerous.
    Fell’s clinic reeked of defiance. Against one of its walls rode a white-sheeted medical examination table on over-sized wagon wheels, and set against the head of it stood a high and smugly venerable Dickensian accountant’s stool. On the walls, in heavy crayon, bold red arrows pointed to jars containing “Aspirin!” “Band-Aids!” “Dental-Floss!” and “Lemon Drops!” Another pointed out a “Suggestion Box”; and above them all a master inscription, crayoned in green, proclaimed: “Self Service.” Gaudy and squat and pouting heavily in a