“All right, all right,” Stern said. “I guess there’s no need to get too gruesome about this. You’re—”
“What?”
“You’re quite strong for your age, aren’t you, Gerard?”
“I guess so. Strong enough, anyway.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I still don’t see that logic you were talking about.” I began to hammer on the couch with my fist, hard, once for each word: “Why—did—I—have—to—go—and—do—that?”
“Cut that out,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I ought to get hurt,” I said.
“Ah?” said Stern.
I got up and went to the desk and got some water. “What am I going to do?”
“Tell me what you did after you killed her, right up until the time you came here.”
“Not much,” I said. “It was only last night. I went back to my room, sort of numb. I put all my clothes on except my shoes. I carried them. I went out. Walked a long time, trying to think, went to the post oflice when it opened. Miss Kew used to let me go for the mail sometimes. Found this check waiting for me for the contest. Cashed it at the bank, opened an account, took eleven hundred bucks. Got the idea of getting some help from a psychiatrist, spent most of the day looking for one, came here. That’s all.”
“Didn’t you have any trouble cashing the check?”
“I never have any trouble making people do what I want them to do.”
He gave a surprised grunt.
“I know what you’re thinking—I couldn’t make Miss Kew do what I wanted.”
“That’s part of it,” he admitted.
“If I had of done that,” I told him, “she wouldn’t of been Miss Kew any more. Now the banker—all I made him do was be a banker.”
I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with that pipe all the time. It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes.
“You killed her,” he said—and I knew he was changing the subject—“and destroyed something that was valuable to you. It must have been less valuable to you than the chance to rebuild this thing you used to have with the other kids. And you’re not sure of the value of that.” He looked up. “Does that describe your main trouble?”
“Just about.”
“You know the single thing that makes people kill?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Survival. To save the self or something which identifies with the self. And in this case that doesn’t apply, because your setup with Miss Kew had far more survival value for you, singly and as a group, than the other.”
“So maybe I just didn’t have a good enough reason to kill her.”
“You had, because you did it. We just haven’t located it yet. I mean we have the reason, but we don’t know why it was important enough. The answer is somewhere in you.”
“Where?”
He got up and walked some. “We have a pretty consecutive life-story here. There’s fantasy mixed with the fact, of course, and there are areas in which we have no detailed information, but we have a beginning and a middle and an end. Now, I can’t say for sure, but the answer may be in that bridge you refused to cross a while back. Remember?”
I remembered, all right. I said, “Why that? Why can’t we try something else?”
He quietly pointed out, “Because you just said it. Why are you shying away from it?”
“Don’t go making big ones out of little ones,” I said. Sometimes the guy annoyed me. “That bothers me. I don’t know why, but it does.”
“Something’s lying hidden in there, and you’re bothering it so it’s fighting back. Anything that fights to stay concealed is very possibly the thing we’re after. Your trouble is concealed, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” I said, and I felt that sickness and faintness again, and again I pushed it away. Suddenly I wasn’t going to be stopped any more. “Let’s go get it.” I lay down.
He let me watch the ceiling and listen to silence for a while, and then he said, “You’re in the library. You’ve just met Miss Kew. She’s talking to you; you’re telling her about the children.”
I lay very still. Nothing happened. Yes, it did; I got tense inside, all over, from the bones out, more and more. When it got as bad as it could, still nothing happened.
I heard him get up and cross the room to the desk. He fumbled there for a while; things clicked and hummed. Suddenly I heard my own voice:
“Well, there’s Janie, she’s eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.”
And the sound of my own scream—
And nothingness.
Sputtering up out of the darkness, I came flailing out with my fists. Strong hands caught my wrists. They didn’t check my arms; they just grabbed and rode. I opened my eyes. I was soaking wet. The thermos lay on its side on the rug. Stern was crouched beside me, holding my wrists. I quit straggling.
“What happened?”
He let me go and stood back watchfully. “Lord,” he said, “what a charge!”
