The Drowner by John D. MacDonald Page A

a little kid who has to go, and translates discomfort into random energy. As a new floor covering was being put down in Nile’s office, they met in one of his treatment rooms, and during the first few minutes Stanial found himself making continual reappraisals of the little man. At first he thought him a clown striving for laughs. Then he wondered if perhaps Rufus Nile was a totally humorless man. His final appraisal was that this was a complex and, quite possibly, a shy man who had manufactured a public image to hide behind. The humor was there, but it was of a cold variety directed more subtly than any clown motions could be.
    Particularly disconcerting was Nile’s habit of asking a question, then abruptly tilting his head, shoving it forward, assuming a totally vacuous expression and following the question up with an insistent, “Hah?”
    “Did she seem troubled the last few weeks, Doctor?”
    “Troubled? How are you orienting this, Stanial? You want me to say depressed? Hah? No, my boy. You’re reaching too far, too far. I was fond of Lucille. Fond or not, I keep a close watch on my personnel. Doctors’ offices have a massive turnover, and you like to guess when you’re going to lose the next one. Never lost one this way though.”
    “Did you think you were going to lose her?”
    “A woman like that? Hah? Eventually. She was marking time. Had the blessed sense to walk out on that Hanson pup. And agree to a one-year cooling-off period. So I knew I’d lose her at the end of a year.”
    “Was she disturbed at the failure of her marriage?”
    “What do you think? Hah? A woman like that? Marriage wasn’t a casual thing. Certainly disturbed. Upset. Sense of failure. It troubled her. That’s the word we started with. And she got involved with Sam Kimber. That troubled her too. I’m no moralist, Stanial. We all get into conflict with our own standards for ourselves, if we’re worth a damn. She was. The Sam Kimber thing surprised a lot of people, mostly the ones that take him at face value. Known Sam a long time. More complex than he lets on. God knows how it got started between them. Unlikely, sort of. And they kept it discreet. But a place this size, they weren’t about to keep it a secret. After Kitty Kimber died, Sam never took up with anybody. There were plenty of them who made the attempt. Sam did his prowling other places. And not often, I’d say. Anyway, I guess Lucille didn’t have an image of herself as a woman who’d get into that kind of a situation. A quiet woman, pretty and sort of cool and careful looking. But a good healthy female creature in the best part of her life. Pretty much alone and vulnerable and far from home. She was starting to turn a little brittle and precise. And Sam turned her back into a woman. My guess, it startled her considerable to find out she could get into a relationship as physical as that. I’d guess Sam brought her alive more than marriage ever did. All this isn’t any of my business, and it isn’t any of yours or any of the North Atlantic Mutual Life’s, but when you start hinting around about suicide it seems to me it’s time I tell you the reasons why the idea doesn’t fit. If she was feeling guilt, which I don’t doubt, it was less than the contentment. She’d come to work some mornings in a dream, slow and soft and misty, and dark circles around her eyes and a little Mona Lisa smile on her, and as a practicing physician I can say that maybe one woman in ten has the combination of glands and good luck and plain sensual capacity to get herself into that kind of condition. And it doesn’t exactly lead to a suicidal mood, Stanial, because it’s a celebration of the sweetness of life, and just as far from death as you can get.”
    “But how about the last few weeks?”
    “Now you want to take the usual suicide motives one by one? Hah? My people get a physical whenever there’s any halfway excuse for it, and last month I had the excuse with Lucille because