Murder Among Children (22 page)

My arm. I tried to lift it, and it seemed to be held down with heavy weights. I lifted my head instead, and looked along the length of my arm, and saw a fresh white plaster cast covering it from just below the elbow to the middle of my fingers. And my head—which ached, a dull foggy ache that made me fuzzy-minded—was wrapped in bandages.

So he’d gotten me. On arrival, a greeting from my prey. And I had come here warned against him.

Was he warned against me? Did he know who I was and what I was doing at The Midway? Or was it purely accident that the accident had been arranged for me? That seemed more likely, and in any case I preferred to believe it.

But how badly was I hurt? With my free hand I pressed and poked at my head beneath the bandage. Two areas near the right front responded with sharp pain, but my fingers didn’t find anything that seemed really serious. I probably had cuts and bruises up there, that’s all.

My arm? Broken, no question of that. And any other injuries?

I found it surprisingly easy to sit up, but the instant I did so a blinding headache swept over me, as though a bucket of liquid pain had been dumped on my head. I sat there with head bowed for half a minute or so, till the pain subsided again, and then took inventory of myself.

I had a bad burn on my right knee. Also a tender spot in my rib cage on the right side. Those two, plus the head and the arm, seemed to be the extent of my injuries.

I was amazed that I didn’t feel weaker, but then I saw the small puncture mark on the inside of my left elbow. A doctor had been to see me, of course, the cast on my right arm demonstrated that, and he must have given me something to make me sleep. I’d done a lot of my healing already, while unconscious.

What time was it? The floor lamp was lit and there was darkness outside my windows now, meaning it had to be after nine o’clock at night, and it had been barely noon when I’d taken the spill. My watch had been taken off, along with the rest of my clothing, so I could only make guesses.

I was starving. The question about time had made me suddenly stop and realize how hungry I was, and it was my stomach rather than my sense of duty or question about time that drove me to get out of bed.

All movements affected my head, but by moving very slowly and carefully I managed to keep the pain to a low background irritation. I slid my legs over the side—I was dressed in nothing but pajama bottoms—and with a great deal of care stood up.

Ah. I wasn’t quite as strong as I’d thought while in the safety of the bed. Standing was another matter. I leaned against the wall beside the bed for a minute, till a certain dizziness passed, and then stepped in slow small movements across the large room to the bureau on the opposite wall, on top of which I could see my watch.

Twenty minutes to five. In the morning? I held the watch to my ear, and it was ticking. I’d been unconscious nearly seventeen hours. No wonder I was so hungry.

I dressed with a great deal of difficulty. Not only did my head wince at every careless movement, I had a lot of trouble getting any useful assistance from the fingers of my right hand. They jutted from the cast, but didn’t want to work well. Zipping my trousers was bad enough, but tying my shoelaces was very nearly impossible, and when I finally had loose sloppy knots done on both, the headache was with me full-strength. I sat in the chair at the writing desk a few minutes, till I felt a little better, and then got up to finish dressing.

A shirt was impossible, so what I finally did was put on the tops to the pajama bottoms I’d awakened in, leaving the right sleeve dangling empty and buttoning the buttons awkwardly with my left hand.

I had brought a small pencil flashlight, and this I tucked into my hip pocket before leaving the room. It was quarter past five when at last I opened the hall door, it having taken me over half an hour to get dressed.

The corridor lights were on. I shut the room door behind me and stood listening to the silence a moment. The echo was muted late at night, but it still existed, vibrating far away out of sight, as though some tiny bird were caged in the attic.

I found the staircase this time with no false turns. It was empty, silent, enclosed, with lit ceiling globes at top and bottom. I took out my pencil flash, awkwardly sat down on the top step, switched on the flashlight, and carefully examined the baseboard on both sides. I could see nothing at all on the left, but on the right I could just barely make out the small hole where a nail or tack of some kind had recently been.

So my guess was probably right. He had stretched some sort of wire or string across the top of the stairs, just at ankle height. I distinctly remembered the feeling that something had caught my ankle.

He’d been taking quite a chance this time. He’d set the trap in broad daylight—it hadn’t been there when Jerry Kanter and I had come upstairs—and then he’d had to wait nearby until someone was caught, so he could quickly go and remove the evidence, the wire and tacks.

This was his fifth booby trap, and he hadn’t yet repeated himself. The first had been a table that had collapsed in the dining room, bruising the legs of the two people sitting there and burning them both with hot coffee. The second was when a resident opened a seldom-used storage closet and a six-foot-long metal piece of bed frame which had been leaning against the door on the inside fell out and hit him in the face, cutting his mouth and chipping two of his teeth. The third was the collapse of a small terrace outside a woman resident’s room while she was standing on it to watch a touch football game on the lawn below, the result being that she was now in the local hospital with a broken neck and three broken ribs, among other injuries. And the fourth was a ladder rung that had given way while a resident was doing some work on the gutters, so that he fell and broke his leg.

It was the ladder accident that had tipped his hand, since another resident, in putting the ladder away, had seen that it was partly sawn through, and had taken the evidence to Doctor Cameron. They’d checked the terrace and found that that had been tampered with also. There was no way to prove the bed frame had been left dangerously against the door on purpose, and the collapsed table had long since been thrown out, but the evidence of the third and fourth accidents was enough to force Doctor Cameron to take action. The action he had chosen to take was me. I had agreed with great reluctance to come up here and pretend to be another resident while trying to find out who was causing these injuries, and I had promptly become victim number five.

My only consolation was that so far no one had been victimized twice, though even that was small consolation since most of the booby traps had operated strictly by chance. Anyone at all might have opened that closet door or started down these stairs. Half a dozen residents would have been likely to use that ladder. The injurer didn’t seem to care in particular who was hurt, just so someone was.

A small sound made me look up. I was still sitting hunched on the top step, the pencil flashlight beamed at the tiny hole in the baseboard, my useless right arm imprisoned inside my pajama top, and the small sound made my hackles rise. Was I about to be pushed? Could I survive two falls like that in the same day?

I saw black tennis shoes, black denim work pants. My right arm wanted to reach out and grasp the wall, the floor, anything at all for protection and support. In order to look up, to see any more of this person, I would have to tilt my head back over the yawning staircase, and I was very reluctant to do so.

A mild voice said, “Did you lose something?”

My feet were braced against the second and third steps. I looked up, and up above the baggy-kneed black work pants, the faded flannel shirt, the open black cardigan sweater, blinked a round, curious, rabbit-mild face. He wore wire-framed spectacles, behind which his eyes were pale and watery. His hands, small and pale and soft, hung at his sides.

I said, “Yes. I lost”—I cast about for something I might have lost, something small—“my ring,” I said at last, and held up my bare left hand, the flashlight still held in it. “I dropped it when I fell,” I said.

“Wouldn’t it be at the bottom?” He wasn’t suspicious, merely curious. The perfect spectator, friendly and interested and not involved.

“I suppose it would be,” I said. I struggled to my feet—he didn’t offer to help me—and went up the two steps to the landing, where I felt safer. I had no idea which of the residents this man might be—after multi-murderer Jerry Kanter had turned out to be a spry little aging teen-ager, I was going to make no more guesses based on dossiers—but whoever he was and however mild his appearance, he was potentially the planter of the booby traps, and I was more than a little nervous in his presence.

I also felt I had to explain myself. I didn’t want the residents to begin to suspect there might be something false about me. At the moment, only Doctor Cameron and the resident who’d discovered the sawn-through rung and I knew that the recent rash of accidents were not accidental. I said, “I woke up and I was very hungry. Then I thought I’d look for my—my ring.”

“I should think it would have been found by someone else by now,” he said. “Doctor Cameron will have it.”

“No one would take it for himself?”

“Steal it?” He was shocked at the idea. “Not
here,
not in The Midway! This is not like the outside world, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “But there’s never any petty thievery, none at all?”

“How could there be? You’d have to tell about it in group therapy, and then they’d make you give it back.” He said this as though it was obvious, and I had merely forgotten it. “Besides,” he added, “stealing is merely an indication of insecurity, and who would ever feel insecure in The Midway?”

I would, for one, but I didn’t say so. But now, seeing the solemn assurance in this little man’s eyes, I finally understood Doctor Cameron’s passion for secrecy. The Midway was a haven for people recently out of mental institutions who for one reason or another felt unable to go directly into the mainstream of society, which meant these people were delicate and fragile creatures who very much needed the feeling of security The Midway afforded them. If they were to learn that behind every door, within every piece of furniture, somewhere in every room there was a potential injurious booby trap, what would it do to their newly-gained mental stability? Particularly once they were told the perpetrator was necessarily one of them, and that all of them were equally under a cloud of suspicion.

So I didn’t disagree with the little man. Instead, I said, “You’re up pretty early yourself, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I sleep very little,” he said. “I was just going down to the kitchen for a snack. May I join you?”

“I wish you would,” I said. “I have no idea where the kitchen is.”

“Oh, I know this house backwards and forwards,” he said. “Come along, I’ll show you.”

I let him go first, and he stepped carelessly down the stairs, blithe in his belief of The Midway’s security. At the bottom I was prepared to stage a little search for my nonexistent ring, but he opened the door without pausing and went on through.

As we walked along the constantly shifting corridors of the first floor, I said, “By the way, my name is Mitchell Tobin. I just got here today, you know.”

“I know,” he said. “You came by taxi. I saw you drive up. Tobin, you say?”

“Yes. I’d like you to call me Mitch, if you would.”

“People call me Dewey,” he said. “It’s a sort of nickname.”

“Hello, Dewey,” I said.

He smiled blankly at me, and walked on.

The kitchen was large and old-fashioned, but with fairly new appliances. Doctor Cameron, while describing The Midway to me, had told me something of the place’s finances. The people here paid nothing, support coming primarily from a foundation grant, plus a small subsidy under a Federal Health, Education and Welfare program. The foundation owned this house, and leased it to Doctor Cameron—whose brainchild The Midway was—for a dollar a year. These modern appliances would no doubt have been put in by the foundation when it had bought the building for Doctor Cameron seven years ago.

Dewey expressed a wish to cook for both of us, and asked me what meal I had in mind to eat. It was really too early for breakfast, and yet the hour was even more inappropriate for lunch or dinner. I asked him what he planned to eat and when he said scrambled eggs I said that sounded fine for me also. It did, but there was also the advantage that my food would not be prepared separately from his. There was no reason to suspect Dewey in particular—except that he was prowling around the house at five in the morning—and the accidents had not so far included anything along the lines of food poisoning, but there was something about being in this house, knowing what I knew, surrounded by former mental patients, that was making me cautious almost to the point of paranoia.

While Dewey bustled around the kitchen, obviously enjoying himself, I watched him and tried to figure out which one he could be. None of the residents was named Dewey, nor did any of them have names that would quickly alter into such a nickname. There were three men in particular I thought he might be, having eliminated everyone else simply on the basis of sex or age, but I couldn’t seem to narrow it any more than that. And it would surely have seemed a little odd if I pressed the point about his name. I’d find out in time, in any case.

The scrambled eggs were delicious, and so was the coffee. I had to eat left-handed, which I found awkward, and there was no choice but to let Dewey butter my toast, which he diffidently volunteered to do. He was very pleased to have someone to chat with, that was plain, but was hypersensitive to the possibility that he might be forcing his attentions. When talking about The Midway he could be voluble and animated, but other than that he was extremely shy and reticent.

I kept the conversation alive mostly by asking him questions about The Midway, the answers to which I already knew from Doctor Cameron. It was clear that Dewey loved the place, but when I asked him how long he’d been here his answer was vague. I knew the house rules were that no one could stay here more than six months—partly because of the demand for space, but even more in order to avoid having any of the residents become too attached to The Midway and become unable ever to leave—and I wondered how close Dewey was to that cutoff date. I doubted departure would be easy for him when the time came.