The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
As soon as he was in his spacious, walnut-paneled private office, he rang for Iva Twugg. She was a short, dumpy woman of middle age whose blue eyes, an echo of the color of her uniform, had seen it all.
“Good morning, Twugg.”
The head nurse nodded a respectful, impersonal, neutral response, as Gramling would have it.
He stood behind the precise order of his huge desk. “I want to see Camilla Jordan, Nurse. Right away.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“And phone Camilla’s parents. I want them to come over for a talk. We may have something encouraging to discuss, the parents and I.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“And tell my private secretary, as you go out, to bring in Camilla’s file while you’re fetching our patient.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Twugg ushered Camilla into the office fifteen minutes later. The head nurse lingered at the patient’s side, easing away; and Gramling’s Vandyke twitched below his brightest smile as Camilla stood alone in the middle of quiet office.
“Good morning, Camilla. You’re looking wonderful. Isn’t it a lovely day?”
She looked at him steadily, in silence. In her early twenties, she was a slender creature of dark, exotic beauty. Her straight black hair was brushed to glistening highlights, framing the shadowed angles of her face. Neatly manicured, in an expensive, simple white dress, she seemed to have stepped from a society page. But there were two almost obscure details., the faint bulge of her dress over her abdomen, and the inverted cone of blackness in her eyes... eyes that nailed on Gramling with the intensity of a frozen bunny rabbit’s.
At Gramling’s slight nod, Twugg continued her retreat, softly closing the office door as she melted away. Camilla’s eyes jerked to the closed door, and Gramling knew she was feeling her isolation in this room with a male. He heard the hiss of her indrawn breath; it seemed he could feel her pulse rate thud through the room.
Once, the nearness of a male would have triggered her to violence, to a mad, screaming, tooth-and-claw struggle to escape. But Dr. Terrence Gramling had, at least, eased her from that precipice. This morning she pulled from the invisible knife-edge through a racking effort of her own, turning slowly to face him finally. She tilted away from his friendly smile, but at last accepted his gentle gesture and nod and eased onto the chair near his desk.
He moved quietly to a table in the further corner, picked up a silver carafe and poured steaming coffee into two bone-china cups. “Let’s see,” he smiled casually over his shoulder, “it’s two sugars and a spot of cream, isn’t it?”
She pressed back in the chair, clutching the leather-upholstered arms.
He crossed over to her, both hands burdened with cups and saucers. “There now. Nothing like a second morning cup, is there?”
He stood for a long moment with a cup and saucer extended. Gradually her slender hand moved to accept it. He strolled from her, going behind his desk, sitting in his high-backed chair, sipping his coffee and murmuring a sound of pleasure. Watching him, she slowly brought her own cup to her lips.
He rocked back casually. “Did you finish the ‘Times of Helena’? I didn’t. Personally, it seemed a dull, superficial book.” He tilted his cup against his mouth, lowered it, continued in the quiet, conversational tone, “Just because they’re best sellers doesn’t mean they’re good books. Do you think?”
She looked at him, saying nothing.
“By the way, from the fine healthy look of you,” he said, “the pregnancy is coming along marvelously.”
Her cup rattled on its saucer. Her other hand moved to lay its curled fingers against her slightly swollen stomach. She had carried her pregnancy for two years now. It was her reality. The sun might spill ice; the stars disappear from an unreal sky. But the pregnancy... it was the singular actuality behind the cone-points of blackness in her eyes.
“He’s very quiet,” she said, fingertips kneading. “The baby stretched and squirmed in there half the night. But now he must be sleeping.”
She had carried the non-existent baby from the morning after the nearly-fatal battering and rape. College girl, out late, hurrying across a dark lawn to her sorority house. A girl suddenly not alone. A man looming beside her, as if a part of a tree had detached itself. A blow on her head leaving her lips parted on a scream that never came. A drifting in the darkness. Then stars, twinkling distantly above a wooded hill in the hands of a sex-crazed sadist...
A farm worker had spotted her at early dawn staggering along a country road. Drunk, he’d thought. Then his thoughts had turned to fire and ice as she’d stumbled blindly closer. He’d gasped and stood rooted for a moment by the sight of the battered and desecrated image. Then he’d got her to the hospital. The first hospital. She’d been one of the few virgins in her sorority house.
She’d now carried the pregnancy through the two years of padded cells, shock treatment, chemotherapy, psychoanalysis. So powerful was her obsession that her menstrual periods altered and her abdomen had that visible bulge.
Of all the doctors, only Gramling had helped her to a measurable degree. And to him, the case was a chaffing frustration, a challenge to his science, his ingenuity.
“Camilla,” his voice reached gently, “it has been a long and difficult pregnancy, and I know what it will mean to you to have it end.”
“Oh, God...” Her body cramped forward. Her cup and saucer fell to the carpet and spun to rest, “...if only I could have this baby!”
“Look at me, and believe.” He was the prophet down from the clouds. “You must believe. You are nearing the end of your pregnancy.”
Mr. and Mrs. Jordan, Horace and Harriet, were a smallish, bland, gray, gently polite and very wealthy couple who gave some credence to the belief that people long married tend to look alike as they pass the years and grow old together.
With inherited money from both their families, they might have spent their lives faced only by the problems of where to spend the winters or summers and whom to have in as weekend house guests. All that had changed two years ago. They’d taken their daughter to the finest psychiatrist in New York, to a famous clinic in Switzerland, to Mendoza in Mexico City who, they’d heard, had worked a miracle in several cases similar to Camilla’s. At last, three months ago, they’d appeared at Haven Hill with an open checkbook seeking a reservation.
This lovely spring morning they drove quickly from their rented house in response to the call by Gramling’s secretary. Gramling crossed the thick carpet as they were shown into his office. He shook Horace’s tensile hand and gave Harriet a warm, friendly squeeze about her slender shoulders. Their eyes were hard on his face, daring a small light of hope.
As he strolled them toward his desk, he said, “I do have a proposal.”
He sensed their heightened strain. Before questions starting pouring from their lips, he requested crisply, “Let me outline what I have in mind, first. Then you may ask whatever you like.”
They sank stiffly on the edges of the massive leather chairs he’d arranged in front of his desk. Gramling walked around and remained standing behind the desk.
“We have brought Camilla a long way,” he preambled.
“Yes, Doctor,” Horace choked, “from the days of strait jackets and wet-sheet packs.”