Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

Later, she watched the clock hands edge to nine, nine-thirty, a quarter to ten... At ten-thirty she went to bed. Bev had not come by; no one had come by. If they had called, she didn’t know it because she had not listened to the calls. She realized she had not checked her mailbox since Monday, had not read a newspaper all week. Neither had she called Jordan, she remembered, still wakeful and twitchy after midnight. There had been nothing to say to him.

Thursday was a repeat of Wednesday; she and Winona Kelly pulled files until noon. She was invited to lunch in Conference Room D again, but today Janice Ayers was there, too.

Haliday was at the end of the table, Janice at his elbow, with papers spread out between them and on down the table.

“Help yourself,” Haliday said, waving toward the tray at the other end of the table. She took a sandwich and sat down at that end.

“Okay, this one,” Haliday said, pointing to a paper.

“Psychodrama and Other Games,” Janice said. “Easy. He taught personality types out of Jung, had them role-play characters, and go into the fallacies of the method, and the strengths.” She straightened up. Apparently they had been at this for some time. “That’s how he taught. By involving them in every possible way. Demonstrations, role playing, participation.” She pointed to the same paper. “Like this one, Psychohistory and Myth. He had them choose an historical subject from a list he provided and then research that person thoroughly and psychoanalyze him or her. Afterward, he extracted quotes from their papers, ran the list down the side, and had them try to link the quoted words to the proper name. Most of them failed entirely, which was his point. What people do and what they say are often at variance.”

“Good teacher. That’s your point?” Haliday said.

“Good! My God, I’m good, everyone who stays here is good. Philip was the most brilliant teacher I ever knew.” She leaned back in her chair. “Do I get to eat?”

Haliday laughed. “Sorry. I forgot. Let’s, before Blair finishes it all off.”

They got up and took sandwiches from the tray; Haliday poured milk. Janice got coffee from the automatic machine on the other table. Eating, Haliday returned to the list. He put his finger on an item, glanced at Janice, who was taking a bite, waited, and then said, “What about this one, Shamanism and Modern Cult Figures?”

She finished chewing and took a swallow of coffee. “What it says. He was convinced that with the proper buildup, normal healthy people would believe whatever the cult leader wanted them to believe.” At the other end of the table Ellen stopped eating. “He had an experiment he was anxious to try and couldn’t, for obvious reasons. He believed he could convince a group of pretty random people that a totally inert substance was a powerful hallucinogenic, and that they would then hallucinate exactly as if they had ingested LSD.”

“You believe that?” Haliday asked.

Ellen got up to pour coffee that she didn’t want, and stood at the window with her back to them. It was raining again. She was remembering Patty’s answer to her question, what had they done with the mushrooms. We ate them and went to sleep. He had been playing a game with them, she thought, and listened to what Janice was saying.

“I didn’t, but now I’m not so sure. Some people have power naturally, we call it charisma. Philip had it. I’m sure every good shaman had it.”

“Why couldn’t he try it?”

“It’s a very dangerous game to put anyone under your spell, Lieutenant. It’s dangerous to teach anyone how to hallucinate, to start a process you may not be able to control.”

There was a long pause; Ellen didn’t turn from the window to look at them. He had been playing a game that he had known could be dangerous...

“What about the book he was writing? Did he show you the manuscript? You know what it was about?”

“I never saw it,” she said, “but he talked about it from time to time. Part was about his work with his students. He was very innovative, and honest about his failures and his successes. He said I was in it, and did I mind? He wanted a reaction. I laughed and said if he used my name, I’d get a hefty cut of the Seymour millions.”

“He was using his love affairs as material?”

“Everything he did was material one way or another. What you have to understand, Lieutenant, is that the whole world was a petri dish for Philip, and he found everything in it interesting.”

“While he stayed on the outside,” Haliday said. “Did you love him, Dr. Ayers?”

She laughed. “No. I might have come to love him, but I woke up. Have you ever watched a snake feed?”

Ellen felt her whole body tense with the words. Why was she talking about that particular experiment, talking about snakes?

“It unhinges its jaw and swallows its prey whole,” Janice was saying. “You can watch the lump that was a living creature as it moves down the body, slowly diminishing. I was fascinated by Philip, but after you’ve seen the snake feed a time or two, the fascination also diminishes. I preferred to stay on the outside, and after a time I didn’t care to remain a Philip watcher; we became friends in a way, I suppose.” There was a rustle of motion. “Now I’m going back to my own world. It’s been fun.”

Ellen heard her movements, then her steps, the door opening, closing.

“You can come back now, Blair,” Haliday said. “You haven’t finished your sandwich.”

She made sure her hands were steady before she left the window and returned to the table.

“How’s it coming in the catacombs?”

“We’ll finish this evening, I think. Then there will be the current files in the records office downstairs. They won’t take long.”

“Good. What do you think, Blair? Did Ayers love him?”

Ellen set her cup down hard. “She said not, Haliday. What else can I tell you?”

He chuckled. “She can’t recall the name of a single woman he had an affair with. Curious, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I didn’t think you would,” he said mildly. “Eat your lunch.” But before she could take another bite, he pushed a paper toward her. “Have a look at that. Tell me, as a reasonable person, if you saw an apartment with all that stuff in it, would you assume the occupant intended to come back?”

Philip’s apartment, she realized. This was a list of what had been found. She had thought it was just a few odds and ends at the time, but this was a long list. Suits, outdoors clothes, other clothes, books, the typewriter, a stereo and records, television, photographs... She read it over again and shook her head. “I’d think he was coming back,” she said. “I never realized it was this much.”

“I’m getting that from everyone except Ayers. Seems word went out that he left a few things and took off.”

“But his family should have raised objections,” Ellen said.

“Sheriff Craxton says there was a lot of infighting going on at the time. They seemed to accept that he took off to annoy them. They deny anything of the sort now.”

She pushed her unfinished sandwich away and drank the rest of her coffee. It was bitter and cold. “Why do you keep telling me things like that? You’re implying that the sheriff knew, or should have known, it wasn’t a case of a man driving away. Why are you doing this?”

“You think the sheriff would deliberately hide something like this?”

“No. I think he’d bend a lot in little ways. No students get arrested for drunken driving, or searched for possession of substances, things like that. This serious? No.”

“That’s why I tell you stuff, Blair. I’m sort of using you as a sounding board, find out what people around here are thinking. You do just fine.”