The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [40]
In fact, Dr. Penrood’s agitation rather pleased me. Had he been just a little more officious, I might have thought he had nothing to hide except for a possible sexual peccadillo with his most attractive employee. Because Ms. Tangent has more than looks. She has the confidence of her sensuality: She is the kind of woman who can lead a man on, turn him down while sympathizing with him, and make him her slave. And I suspect now that the man in the three-way engagement with his back to the camera is indeed Dr. Penrood.
Moreover, given the incongruity, as I see it, of these three individuals involved in that kind of congress, I can’t help but speculate that some sort of powerful aphrodisiac was involved. Professor Tromstromer’s words come back to me: Researchers are not above experimenting on themselves. This may be the break we’re looking for. I’ll have to push Worried on getting us that enhanced version of the surveillance tape.
Perhaps I should be excited. Perhaps I should call Lieutenant Tracy and tell him there’s been a “development.” But frankly, all of this pales to insignificance when I think on my dear wonderful Elsbeth, who grows more wan and weak with each passing day. The unrelieved impulse is to get her help, to take her to hospital. But there is no help. And she doesn’t want to go to hospital. She wants to die here, in our home, surrounded by friends.
At least she doesn’t object to my having help brought in for her. I’ve never been very good with bedpans and that sort of thing. We have a couple of unobtrusive ladies from a hospice outreach program. Estelle is the thinner one and Mildred is the plump one. They’ve been coming only a week and they already dote on Elsbeth, who spoils them.
Elsbeth did have a very good meeting yesterday with Father O’Gould. Though she is anything but Catholic, she told me afterward that what he said to her made her feel doubly that her life had not been in vain; that there was a purpose. “He made me feel that I and every living creature is part of a larger, ultimately beautiful scheme in which we all have a role to play. He made me believe that everything we do has meaning.”
I nodded, having heard the good priest expatiate on the moral implications of evolution, how it fits in and accounts for everyone and everything in the universe, even those who think they have gotten only scraps from life’s feast.
She was telling me about it this evening as we sat in the more formal living room, each of us with a glass of wine. Elsbeth was holding my hand, reading my eyes, comforting me, saying, “I used to look at old family pictures, not just mine, but those of other people, and I would have to fight a sense of desolation. They are all dead, I would tell myself, and how sad, how futile it all seemed. But I was forgetting that they and countless others had lived, had loved, had gotten joy and satisfaction out of life. And so have I, even married to poor Winslow and pining every day for you, dear Norman.”
Then I tried to comfort her, holding her hand in both of mine, bringing it to my lips, blinking back tears at the sight of hers.
But I must confess that beneath my pity and pain and concern for Elsbeth, I feel a strange, familiar anger. Elsbeth is leaving me again, as she left me so many years ago for Winslow Lowe. Now she is leaving me for God, and how can I be jealous of God, who, truth be told, I feel has gone on sabbatical. It doesn’t matter. My Elsbeth is going away again, going somewhere beyond my reach.
At the same time, these petty resentments leave me with nothing but shame. And worse. My dreams are full of Elsbeth and Diantha, each merging into the other as they recede smiling beyond my reach. Then I find, upon awakening, that I am being left stranded by creeping death and by this bumptious, oblivious creature