know from the hotel people that Ellison got in before twelve, that there was a telephone call for him, but that the party disconnected and a few minutes later a seedy-looking bird came in and left a sealed note for him at the desk. Soon as he got this note, he took off. It was probably word that the snatch was set and told him to meet somebody somewhere.”
The old man looked at Dab. “That’s it, Mr. Dab. I’ve let you have it.”
Dab was silent for a long while. “Tell me,” he said at last, “if I can find another meaning in these cards on the floor, will you give my version serious consideration?”
“Sure we will, Mr. Dab,” replied Romano. For once he wasn’t flippant. “We’ll get photos of these cards to you first thing in the morning, and we’ll listen to anything you have to say.”
“You needn’t bother sending me home in a police car,” said Dab. “I want to walk a piece. I can get a cab on Broad-way.”
Allan Walters accompanied Dab to the front porch. He was a large young man with wide shoulders, but somehow he appeared to have shrunk, to have wasted in a matter of hours. His taut face accentuated the size of his eyes which seemed to burn feverishly. The cheekbones were pronounced, the flesh glove-tight over them. His face is like a death’s head, Dab thought. He’s like a skeleton wearing a coat with absurdly padded shoulders. He’s dazed. I’m dazed, too. We’re both in a state of shock. Panic, even.
Walters laid a hand on Dab’s arm. He said, “Can you solve that puzzle another way, Mr. Dab? Can you, sir? She’s my girl. She’d have been my wife in just a few more weeks. I’ve loved her since we were kids. You’ve got to solve it, Mr. Dab. It’s up to you. If we find the murderer, we find the kidnapper and that means we find Pat. I’m a cop. I know about these things. When there’s a snatch, you have to catch them right away. Kidnappers wait twenty-four hours, forty-eight hours, maybe a little longer. But if you don’t find the victims quick, you find them dead. It’s Pat they’ve got, Mr. Dab. Can you find her? Can you solve that puzzle Phil Linton left for you?”
The dandyish gentleman with the waxed mustache looked suddenly very old and very tired.
“I don’t know, boy,” he answered. “It’s the toughest job I’ve ever tackled. I’ve not only got to do it the hard way. I’ve got to prove the easy, obvious answer is the wrong one. But maybe, if I have time . . .”
The big clock across the river flashed
TIC
TOC
It was four o’clock in the morning.
5
SHE AWAKENED to mote-swirling gloom and to silence that was almost complete.
A murky shaft of light, trembling with dust particles, stabbed down from a small, grimy skylight in the high ceiling. The place was cold, yet insufferably close and musty. There was a smell of old wood and dry rot that reminded her of the attic in her own home. Suddenly the silence shivered with the slightest of sounds. It was a fluttery, frightening little noise, the soft sound that the padded feet of rats make in woodwork.
Her head ached intolerably. A faint and cloying smell seemed to linger in her nostrils and her throat was very dry. She was nauseated. Her neck ached as if the muscles had been twisted. As the faint light swirled in front of her eyes like a smoky curtain, her head cleared a little. She became more acutely conscious of pain, discomfort, but now she could remember, and the disembodied, floating sensation was passing. I am Patricia Linton, she told herself. A while ago—or was it an age ago?—a young man named Allan asked me to marry him. We were in an old farmhouse and there was a checkered tablecloth and a candle was stuck in a wicker-covered bottle and the tallow had dripped down over the bottle’s neck in fat chunks and made fascinating basket-weave designs. Our dinners were very expensive because I peeked at the check and with the cocktails and the wine it came to nearly eighteen dollars and that didn’t even include the tip. You see, I can remember even small details very clearly. Then we were driving in the car. We were on a very dark and a very rough road and suddenly the car began to spit and cough and inexplicably we were out of gas. So I waited there inside the car where it was warm while Allan went back up the road to the darkened station to get a pail of gasoline to start the car. I thought how still and how dark the country was and how even the daughter of a cop and the granddaughter of a cop who knew something about judo might be just a little frightened.
Then there was a slight noise, as if the back door of the sedan were opening but before I could turn around, there was a strong arm around my neck, forcing back my head, and there was a piece of cloth pressed over my face, and the cloth had that hospital smell to it, that smell I could remember from the time when I was very little and Daddy was dying in a place that was all white and sanitary. And then I didn’t know anything at all. But once, it seems, I remember a sense of movement as if I were riding in a car again. I stirred and tried to open my eyes and see something, and I did see something, something small and faintly familiar, before the cloth was on my face again, stifling me. The thing I saw, or thought I saw, was swinging to and fro, and it was white and fluffy. I had seen a thing like that many times before, but there must be a lot of them in the world. Or maybe I didn’t really see it at all. Maybe I just dreamed I saw it. Anyway, it simply couldn’t be his. I’ve known him nearly all my life and I’m sure he loved me even though I was going to marry another man. And he’s good and kind, I know he is, even if he was cruel sometimes when he was a little boy. He used to make me scream and cry when he tore the wings off butterflies or that time he shot a sparrow with his B-B gun and it didn’t die for a long time but just floundered around on the ground while he stood watching it, running his tongue over his chapped lips. No, I mustn’t remember things like that. I must remember how good and kind he really is, and how well he’s done in the face of a great handicap, and how he loves me even though I’m going to marry another man.
Pat tried to rise. For a moment she felt giddy and sat on the edge of the bed, clutching the side of the bed with her hands, shaking her head. In the dim light she could see that besides the cot there were other articles of heavy, old-fashioned furniture in the room, all of them draped with ghostly sheets. Then she realized with a start that this room was almost perfectly round in shape.
Besides the skylight there was a window, but it was boarded over. There was a chink in the boards, however, and a twisted taper of wan light thrust through it. There was a heavy door. Pat rose on unsteady legs, paused as dizziness assailed her, put her hand to her forehead. Then, when she was sure she would not fall, she crossed to the door and tried the knob. It was securely locked, of course.
“The room I’m in is round,” she told herself, “like a room in a tower.”
She went to the window and pressed her eye against the pane so she could see through the chink in the boards. It was a gray and misty day. Below her flowed a sluggish river. Across the river she could see an enormous clock. The lights of the clock were not lit now, for the great hands pointed to a few minutes before eight in the morning.
But she knew the clock. It was the Tic-Tok clock.
Patricia Linton began to laugh hysterically.
I’m in the tower, she thought. I’m in the tower of the Mad Hatter’s castle. I’m just across the street from home.
I’m the princess in the tower.
She remembered how Mr. Dab used to make up stories about the princess in the tower when she and Abner had sat on the front porch with him those summer evenings when she was a child.
