The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories

In a definite tone I said, “Then I’m going to move in here with Martha and Tod while you’re gone.”

Lyle shrugged. “It’s all right with me, if you don’t mind the daybed in the den.”

“Reporters can sleep anywhere,” I told him.

Little Tod said, “You stay for a visit, Unkie Tod?”

“Yeah,” I said. “For a whole week.”

Martha said, “Actually, if it won’t inconvenience you, I would feel better with you here. Not that he’d be very likely to pick on me. So far he’s only picked pretty women.”

Cocking an eyebrow at her, my brother-in-law said loyally, “That includes you, honey.”

She gave him a fond smile, but she knew that if he meant it, she was pretty only in his eyes. The best adjective to describe my sister was plain. She certainly wasn’t ugly, but no one except a man blinded by love could possibly have considered her pretty. She was thin, with match-legs, and had the unfortunate Conner nose. It was thin and pointed and too long, making her rather resemble a bird.

In short, she looked like me, except I was eight inches taller. At the paper I’m known as Nose Conner. The editor who nicknamed me claims he thought up the sobriquet because of my skill at nosing out stories, but I suspect most of my colleagues associate it with my appearance.

Martha was one of the sweetest, most understanding women around, though, and there was no doubt about Lyle being nuts over her, so maybe he did think she was pretty.

Although they did their best not to show it, I’m sure most of our friends were astonished when Martha returned to St. Louis with such a handsome husband in tow. Lyle Barton was tall and muscular, with blond, curling hair and the features of some mythical Greek hero. He also had a certain charm about him that made both women and men instantly like him, despite his occasional moodiness and his tendency to be oversensitive to people’s remarks.

As fond as I was of my baby sister, I have to confess I was surprised too, until I learned some of the details of their romance.

Martha had been serving as a psychiatric nurse at the Fort Ord Army Hospital when Private Lyle Barton was shipped back from Vietnam with combat fatigue. He had also been wounded slightly, but had fully recovered from his physical wound before he arrived at Ord.

It seems that many emotionally disturbed patients tend to reach out desperately for love and understanding. According to Martha, patients in psychoanalysis usually develop parent complexes about their analysts when both are of the same sex. If they are of different sexes, it is almost routine for patients to go through periods during treatment when they fall in love with their analysts.

Also, according to Martha, in military hospitals the case loads of psychiatrists are generally so large that they have to concentrate most of their time on the more severely disturbed patients, usually seeing those with less serious problems only briefly on their periodic visits through the wards. The result is that these patients never establish the rapport with their doctors that almost always develops during analysis, but the need is still there, so the less disturbed patients tend to fall in love with their nurses.

While Lyle was pretty disoriented when he first arrived at the hospital, he was deemed by his assigned psychiatrist to require merely rest and tranquilizers instead of psychiatric treatment. Martha was his day nurse.

She told me in confidence that she was quite aware of the psychological reasons that made Lyle think he was in love with her. As a matter of fact, she had gone through similar experiences with a number of previous patients who eventually recovered from their infatuations at the same time they recovered their mental health, but she had an odd and disturbing premonition that Lyle’s feeling for her wasn’t going to change when his condition improved.

She couldn’t explain why, but she candidly confessed that it might have been merely wishful thinking, because she had fallen hopelessly in love with him too. She waited to see how he felt when he recovered before committing herself to anything, though.

When he was discharged from the hospital, and simultaneously received an honorable discharge from service, he was still insisting he loved her. At the time, Lyle was twenty-six, the same age as Martha, which she figured was too mature an age for it to be puppy love. Nevertheless, she was still afraid it might be only an unusually prolonged attachment of the usual sort common in nurse-patient relationships, and she insisted that he take more time.

Lyle had no parents, but the uncle and aunt who had raised him were still alive and lived in Wisconsin. He had some terminal leave coming, so Martha suggested he visit his uncle and aunt for thirty days, and told him if he still felt the same at the end of his visit, she would marry him.

He arrived back at Fort Ord on the twenty-ninth day, and they were married a week later.

Lyle had only a high-school education, and under the G.I. educational program he could have gone to college with all expenses paid, plus $200 a month for living expenses, but he preferred to go to work. He took a civilian job at the post exchange.