Puzzle for Fiends by Patrick Quentin Read Free Book Online Page B

to do with it?”
    “Asking me if the accident improved your looks, Mr. Friend.” She was grinning. The grin showed pink gums veined with red. “Why, I never even saw you. Not before they brought you back from the hospital.”
    “You’re new?”
    “Sure, I’m new. They hired me right the day after the old—after Mr. Friend died. They fired all the servants then. Except Jan. Mr. Friend fired him the very last day. Then they took him on again.”
    I stared. “But my father died a month ago. My accident was only two weeks ago. You had a couple of weeks to see me in.”
    “Not you, Mr. Friend.” A suggestive titter had crept into her giggle. “You wasn’t around, sir—not ever, after your father died.”
    “Where was I then?”
    She hesitated. Then she blurted:
    “You, Mr. Friend! The old cook told me just before she left. They said you’d gone off on a visit. But you never even showed up for the funeral. The old cook, she said... Well, she said as it was more likely you’d gone off on one of your...”
    She broke off. I felt for a moment that she was going to put her hand over her mouth—a gesture which had surely gone out with the invention of the vacuum cleaner.
    “One of my—what?” I said.
    She squirmed. “Oh, sir, I really shouldn’t have...”
    “One of my—what?”
    “Your toots.” She grinned again and, as if this admission had forged a bond of intimacy between us, she moved a trifle nearer. “You’re quite a one for the...” She bent her elbow significantly.
    “So I understand,” I said. “So I was off on a blind drunk for two weeks before I had the accident. Why did I pick the day my father died to leave?”
    She giggled again. “That old cook. With her imagination, she ought to write stories. The things she hinted at!”
    “What things?”
    Netti looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Oh, nothing.” The discomfort had become genuine anxiety. “Don’t ever tell them I said anything about you being away and everything. Promise. I didn’t ought to have...”
    “Forget it, Netti.”
    I didn’t press the point further. I knew she wasn’t going to tell me any more anyway.
    She was staring at me uncertainly, as if she was plucking up her courage. Then, with a glance over her shoulder at the door, she whispered: “I suppose you wouldn’t have just a little snort? Carrying that heavy tray from the kitchen and…”
    “Sorry,” I said. “They put me on the wagon.”
    “That’s too bad. “She leaned towards me and breathed: “There’s times when I get the liquor closet if it’s a sherry dessert or something. Sometimes I sneak maybe a pint of gin. Next time, I’ll slip you some up—okay?”
    “Okay.”
    I got the gums again. “I like a drop myself once in a while. I know how it is, Mr. Friend.”
    She patted at the cap and left the room with a lot of hiprolling.
    I’d made a buddy. And was I glad. You never know when you need a buddy.
    But somehow the chicken breast in wine sauce didn’t seem so inviting now. They’d fired all the servants after my father died. Why? And they’d kept it from me that I’d been off on a blind drunk for two weeks before the accident. Why?
    “I.” I was beginning to think quite naturally in terms of “I” whenever Gordy’s past was discussed. Did that mean that my identity as Gordy Friend was coming back? Or was it just a new habit forming?
    I wished I knew more about amnesia. I wished I could be more sure that the stubborn conviction of something wrong was just a normal symptom.
    Netti had never seen me. That meant none of the servants had ever seen me. For all they knew, I could be King Tiglath-Pileser the Third.
    The dog. The iris. The propellers. Seeing someone off on a plane. San Diego. The Navy.
    Why had they fired all the servants after my father’s death? And what were the things at which the former cook with the literary imagination had hinted?

Chapter 6
    I had finished my dinner. My mother had turned on