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

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.”

“But we’ve not yet surmounted the key obstacle,” Gramling said.

“The baby...” The eyes of Camilla’s mother filled. “When I see her feeling her stomach, talking about the non-existent child in her womb...”

“And yet,” Mr. Jordan choked, “so very normal at times... until she feels the stirring of the baby that isn’t there... if the baby were... exorcised... Camilla would return to us... maybe not entirely the Camilla we once knew, but we would have our daughter back.”

“But so many things have been tried,” Harriet said. “Drugs, shock, even hypnotism. Is anything left?”

“Perhaps,” Gramling said. “A long shot. The therapy lay full blown in my mind when I awoke this morning. It has been working through my mind for days.” He hesitated for a short beat. “We shall take the baby.”

He felt their reaction. The office was silent for a moment while they stared at him. Then Harriet’s lips moved. “A baby that isn’t real? You mean...”

“I think you know precisely what I mean,” Gramling said. “Nothing more can be done for Camilla until the pregnancy obsession is removed. Once she is convinced that she isn’t carrying a baby, we might break through. Destroy the obsession. Set her on the path to final recovery.”

“If it could only be,” Harriet wept.

“Destroy a delusion with a counter delusion, Doctor?” Horace said.

“It’s not uncommon in my field of medicine,” Gramling said.

“How will you go about it?”

“First, give Camilla something to make her tractable. Then go through all the motions, to the final detail, even leaving her with a mild uterine soreness. And, when the long obstetrical procedure is over, break the news to Camilla carefully that she has miscarried. Her pregnancy is over, done with, and she is free of it forever. She is as free, clear, unsullied as she was the night before the assault upon her. That is the thought which we shall implant, reinforce, develop — leaving no room for thought of pregnancy.”

Horace strained forward. “What are chances of it working?”

“What are chances of it not working?” Gramling countered. “But I shall of course need your permission.”

That evening, dining on surf and turf, Gramling reviewed the hours after he’d shown Horace and Harriet Jordan out of his office. He’d called in Conover and Hemmings, two of his most able nurses, and briefed them carefully. Then the ritual... the ceremonial staged to open a human mind, extract a thought and implant another...

He’d taken Camilla through the routine of examination. Returned her to her room. Appeared a little later at her bedside with the news that a follow-up was necessary. Soothed her with scopoline. Prepped her. Wheeled her into surgery. Gowns, masks, rubber gloves, all the trappings. Anesthetized her mildly. Removed her to the recovery room exactly as if she’d gone through an operation. From there, back to her room. And finally, while Camilla was in that nether state, that twilight zone known since the first use of scopolamine, Gramling had sat by her bed, taken her hand, and whispered that she’d developed complications. They’d had to take the baby. Her pregnancy was finished. The baby was gone, forever.

She’d lain passively, looking at him.

He’d moved his face a little closer. “Do you hear me, Camilla?”

“Yes,” she’d whispered.

“Do you understand? You are free. It is over. You are bound no longer. You can stretch, laugh, lift your face and throw your arms to the sun. Once more you are Camilla, and only Camilla.”