Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

Eddie stared hard through the windshield. Laughing? Aunt Crabby? It didn’t seem possible. He was dreadfully certain her new vitality would last another fifty years...

He stopped the car at the shallow front steps, which were flanked by a pair of stone lions. He jumped out and opened the rear door. His face a carefully-composed and long-practiced mask, he offered a tender hand to help Aunt Crabby from the car.

Her gaze lingered on his face. Her eyes were almost like those of a stranger, deeper, gentler, quieter than the eyes he remembered. “Thank you, dear,” she gave his hand a quick, motherly squeeze.

Dr. Picard bumbled out beside her. He permitted her to take the short walk up by herself, slowly and carefully, one step at a time while the servants strained with each of her movements.

She paused on the veranda to accept their welcome. Cook, gardener, maid, butler, the spare-boned registered nurse who had been assigned by Dr. Picard to live in for awhile.

“Welcome home, mum...

“It’s so good to have you back!...”

When all the murmured greetings were over, the servants sneaked bewildered glances at each other. The eyes of Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper had actually filled with tears of tenderness and gratitude!

Aunt Crabby led the way into the spacious foyer with its vaulted ceiling, gold-framed mirror, antique hat-rack and umbrella stand. Eddie was the last to enter, on dragging feet.

The servants scattered to their tasks. Dr. Picard gave Aunt Crabby a few moments to look about brightly and exclaim how good it was to be home. Then he ordered her into the chair-lift that had been installed at the graceful, curving stairway.

“Up we go, my dear,” he said. “You’ve had plenty of excitement for the first day. Don’t rush things. You’ve years and years to enjoy your home now.”

He was a big, slovenly looking man whose appearance belied his genius as a heart surgeon. It took the setting of an operating room the touch of a scalpel in his hand to transform him.

Aunt Crabby, Dr. Picard, and the skeletal nurse (Miss Mayberry was her name) disappeared in the upper reaches toward Aunt Crabby’s bedroom. Eddie slouched into the living room and flopped in a huge wingchair upholstered in dark green silk. The chair seemed to shrink his slender frame. Behind heavy black glasses, his face was sparrow-like, with a thin cap of brown hair plastered on a long, narrow skull.

He stared blindly. His scanty, wiry muscles twitched now and then, visible echoes of his churning thoughts.

Right up until today he’d fought the idea that Aunt Crabby would leave the hospital alive. Sure, heart transplants were no longer news. But it just hadn’t seemed possible to Eddie that Dr. Picard could tear the heart from the still-warm body of the Dutcher youth, jam it into Aunt Crabby’s bosom, and have the whole thing work out. Her tissues would reject the alien flesh; her kidneys would collapse; her lungs would fill with fluids and she’d drown in pneumonic juices. But her tissues, kidneys, and lungs had performed with the ease of a computer.

“She’s a lousy, sneaky cheat!” Eddie whispered, his voice quivering with savagery even as it cracked on a note of intense self-pity.

That was the sum and substance of it. For two long, insufferable years he’d played the role of dutiful nephew. Whipping boy. Slave, no less.

He’d leaped to obey her whims. He’d soothed away her fears of death when nightmares had brought her screaming to wakefulness at three in the morning. He’d borne her vituperations as she’d grown to hate those whose days weren’t numbered.

The seemingly certain and foreseeable goal had sustained Eddie. He’d stuck it out, even if the effort to stay in the compliant nephew character had cost him an ulcer. Each day she’d used up had brought him twenty-four hours closer to the moment when he could buy his dear, departed aunt the biggest funeral wreath in town.

He’d played the game honestly. Like the time when he was a kid with the Monopoly game in the neighborhood, skipping squares on the board.

When the sole surviving relative passes “Go” he collects two million dollars. Wasn’t that the rule?

But they had conspired, that horrible old man with the doctors degrees and Aunt Crabby. And they had reached into the “Chance” pile and sneaked out for Eddie a card that read: Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two million dollars...

A burning-knife sensation gathered force behind Eddie’s navel and shot through viscera to his spine. He gritted his teeth, labored out of the chair, and struggled upstairs to his room. He was in the bathroom, chasing a slug of Amphojel with a shot of Alka Seltzer, when timid knuckles rapped on his bedroom door.

“What is it?” he snarled through the open bathroom doorway.

The maid’s voice drifted from the hallway: “Mr. Crabtree, Mrs. Harper wants to talk to you.”

Eddie slammed the glass into its porcelain holder and glared at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Sucker... you’ll probably pop off with a bleeding ulcer long before she ever again thinks of dying...

Aunt Crabby was reposing on a white chaise lounge near the tall, gossamer-curtained windows when Eddie entered her room. She dropped the book she was reading, smiled at him. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Edward. I excused Miss Mayberry. I wanted us to have a chat, just the two of us.”

From long habit, Eddie’s face was a bland, myopic mask. Only a tremor in the jaw muscle suggested a gritting of teeth.

She studied him as he shuffled forward, his bony shoulders slightly stooped. A glow of compassion softened her brown eyes. “You poor boy, the lines in that dear little pale face are my doing, aren’t they?”

She held up a slender hand as Eddie started to speak.

“No, dear. You don’t have to fib to me.” She drew a breath. “Don’t forget, I’ve had weeks in which to think, about myself, other people, life, the really important things. Did you know there’s no place quite like a hospital to do some heavy thinking?”

She reached out to pat the arm of the nearby boudoir chair. The gesture was quick and lively. One thing for sure, the restoration of life — in the midst of certain death — seemed to have peeled the years from her. It was hard to look at the almost youthful glow of her face and imagine the drawn, vulturous visage that had entered the hospital.

“Please sit down, Eddie. Bear with me for a moment. What I have to say isn’t easy.”

“Aunt Violetta...”

“No, Eddie. Don’t try to gloss it over. I know what a real shrew I’ve been.” A smile trembled in the dainty oval face. “Vixen. Harridan. Old witch. I made life perfectly dreadful for all those around me. I repaid kindness with ire, compassion with wrath. But I was lost, Eddie. Nothing was real to me except suffering and the darkness of death. I know now that I was lashing out...”

She drew a breath. “Yes, just lashing out.”

Staring at her, Eddie eased to the edge of the boudoir chair.

“But Dr. Picard... the new heart...” Her solemn eyes sought his face. “What I’m trying to say is that the old heart, Eddie, and all the vile rancor that stemmed from it are gone. I can’t go back and undo the meanness of the old witch that I became. So we must let her rest in peace, mustn’t we?

Eddie glanced away, hating the vitality of her. “Why not?”

“I knew I could count on your kindness and understanding!” She sat up, a fire of excitement building in her eyes. “I want to start writing on the new page of life with a little act of repayment, Eddie. My new heart has given me faith and hope. Now it behooves me to express charity.”

Eddie held his breath. Was she actually going to do something decent for him?