I went back to the office, where I found Sam looking sternly at Linn Pighee.
“What’s up?” I asked them.
“She won’t eat breakfast,” Sam said.
“I’m not hungry.” Linn’s voice was very weak.
“You’ve got to keep your strength up,” I said. “And we’ve got a big afternoon today.”
“I don’t really feel very well,” Linn said.
“She doesn’t want to go, Daddy,” Sam said.
“She doesn’t?” I asked sharply. “You don’t?”
“I never said that,” Linn said.
“But you don’t want to, do you?” Sam asked.
“None of us want to,” I said.
“I’ll go,” Linn said, “if you think it’s best.”
“If we want to find out what’s happening about your husband, I think we have to.”
“Do you really think John is somewhere else?” Linn asked.
“I don’t know what to think. But after today we’ll know a lot better.”
“You shouldn’t get her hopes up, Daddy,” Sam said.
“And you shouldn’t go around telling everybody what they want and what they think,” I snapped.
“Well, she’s not well! She shouldn’t go out. And you complained when I tried to push her around.”
“Don’t argue,” Linn said plaintively. “I’ll be all right. I just didn’t sleep so well last night. I’ll take a nap now so I’ll be ready this afternoon.”
“Won’t you have something to eat?” I asked.
“I’ll try later,” she said.
Sam and I watched her go to the bedroom.
“I don’t understand you, Daddy,” Sam said as soon as Linn had closed the bedroom door.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She doesn’t want to go out. Anybody can see that.”
“But she wants to know about her husband. People often have wants which conflict with each other. It’s up to her to choose.”
“I understand that,” Sam said sharply. “I’m not stupid. But what I don’t understand is you pushing so hard for her to go. You are the one who’s pushing her into decisions.”
I started to defend myself. But stopped. She had a point. I shrugged.
“Why does she have to go today? Why not tomorrow?”
Not that she’d be more likely to want to go out tomorrow, either. But I said, “I feel it’s the right time.”
Sam still didn’t understand.
“I feel it, Sam. I feel there’s a momentum and a correctness to the timing. I don’t want to lose it”
“The feeling?”
“And the concentration. I hate to let something I’ve worked on go. I’ve built up an understanding of what I don’t understand. Another day and I might confuse myself. I don’t like to toss away the pieces easily.”
She was quiet for a while.
It gave me a moment to reassure myself that if Linn really didn’t want to go out, I wasn’t threatening to tie her up and roll her down the stairs. If her problem was mostly mental, concentrating on clearing a small obstacle might help build confidence for clearing larger ones.
Sam said, “You and Mummy must have had a lot of trouble when you lived together.”
“What?”
“You must have had some feeling for her once. You wouldn’t have wanted to throw all that away easily.”
“I didn’t,” I said, after a moment’s catching up with the long gone. “And it wasn’t exactly me that threw it away.”
“Mummy says it was.”
“You talk about me?”
“Of course!” She burst with it. “You’re my father. She’s my mother. Of course I want to know about you. I’ve got curiosity, too, you know.”
And I finally understood why an active kid could cut a few weeks out of a summer to hang around Indianapolis with an old man she’d hardly ever met. It was because it was her old man, and, thrust into other people’s lives, she had little enough that was hers, all hers.
“We . . . your mother and I . . . we sort of met each other when we were both thinking about being things that we weren’t, that we aren’t.”
“She thinks you’re stupid to waste your time being a detective.”
For all the years, it hurt.
“And I think she’s stupid contenting herself with being a rich man’s wife. She did all that while she was still just her rich father’s daughter. She had a lot going for her, underneath all the silk.”
“It still hurts?”
I didn’t want to admit to her what I’d already admitted to myself.
“Once stung,” I said. Trying to be ambiguous. I didn’t fool her a bit.
“I thought it might,” she said. Then, for no logical reason, “You wrote me super letters when I was young.”
“That’s ‘cause we were pen playmates. You’ve outgrown me now.”
“Daddy, why are you a private detective?”
“It just seemed like a good idea at the time. And now—well, I know a lot more than I did about how to do it, and it seems a shame to throw all that good knowledge away. And I like those odd times, every year or two, when someone tells me something interesting.”
“But why without really trying at it? Why without working hard at it?”
“There’s no reward for working hard except more money and less time to enjoy it.”
“But . . .”
“And I don’t like to waste my concern, my feeling, on things that aren’t really interesting. I’d rather save them for situations like this one, so I can pull out my best, even if it isn’t good enough.”
It seemed to satisfy her. Even if it didn’t satisfy me.
At least she didn’t ask another question. I said, “So I don’t want to make Linn go out this afternoon. But if she will, then I’ll encourage her.”
Quietly, Sam accepted the return to work. “Isn’t there something else you could do?”
“Any suggestions?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know all that much about it, do I?”
I spent the rest of the morning going through my notes on the case with her.
When it was ten minutes past the time I thought Linn should be up, I said, “Is Linn awake?”
“No,” Sam said. “If she is, she hasn’t made any noise.”
“I’ll go look.”
I went to the bedroom and opened the door very quietly. Linn Pighee was still and facing the wall so I couldn’t see her face.
“I said, “Linn?”
She didn’t move.
I said her name again.
She turned over. Her eyes were still closed, but she clawed at the space next to her. She made sounds, breathing at first and then some crying. She slurred the word “John,” said it again. Turned back to the wall and became still again.
I left her, wondering how much stress she could take. And decided to make some coffee before waking her up for real.
But as I was pouring it into three cups, the bedroom door opened and Linn walked out smiling. “I’m getting used to your mother’s smock, Mr. Albert,” she said. “Do you think she’d let me buy it from her?”
“I doubt it. But she’d give it to you. Want some coffee?”
“Lovely,” she said, and took it. “When do we leave?”
“A little less than an hour.”
“You know,” she said, “I don’t have anything suitable to wear.”
She decided to dress from Sam’s wardrobe, rather than mine, and when we descended the stairs at 3:40 they looked more like sisters than I would have thought possible. Out for a walk with Pop. Linn remained cheerful. Only at the outside door did she shudder and ask, “How far is the car?”
“It’s a panel truck and it’s around the corner.”
“Couldn’t you go bring it up to the curb, Daddy?”
I did.
Sam sat in the back on the cushions I keep there. “I don’t often have two passengers at the same time,” I said.
“You should go out and get my car,” Linn said. “I’d be very happy for you to use it. It ought to be used.”
We were quiet for a while as I made progress toward the hospital. Then Linn said, “I’ll bet Dougie is worried about me. He’s very responsible that way, you know.”
“Who’s Dougie?” Sam asked.
“He’s a boy who used to bring me medicine, when I was in Beech Grove.”
“That was nice of him,” Sam said.
“I’m sure Mrs. Thomas is aware by now that you’re not at home,” I said. “If he asks, she’ll tell him that.”
“I suppose so,” Linn said.
I saw Sam’s face wrinkling in the rear-view mirror. She said, “He’ll probably stop by in a few days, and you’ll be able to tell him yourself.”
Linn didn’t say anything.
Neither did I.
“You’re bound to be feeling better by then,” Sam said.
“I’m not going back to that house,” Linn said. “Not now I’m out. Not ever.”