The Diamond Bikini by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

he’d had the polio.
    “You live around here?” he asked Pop.
    Pop nodded. “Back up the road a piece. Me and my brother own a big cotton plantation. You figure on visitin’ back in that direction? Kinfolks, I mean?”
    The man’s eyes got narrow, like he was thinking. “Not exactly,” he says. “To tell you the truth, I was looking for a spot to camp for a few months. Some place where it was quiet and kinda off the beaten track, and a man wouldn’t be bothered too much by the tourists.”
    I could see Pop beginning to think too. “Kind of a out-of-the-way place, you mean? Where you could sort of get away from the highway noise, an’ just lay around, and maybe fish, without nobody to bother you?”
    “That’s it,” the man says. “You know of a spot like that around here?”
    “Well, I don’t know,” Pop says. “My brother Sagamore and me might be able to rent you a little campground. We got a lake there, and lots of trees, but the place is kind of hard to get to and nobody ever goes in there.”
    The man’s face lit up. “That sound fine,” he says.
    “No traffic at all,” Pop says. “It’s on a dead-end road. You alone?”
    Well, not exactly,” the man says. I noticed that all the time he was talking he kept looking around every few seconds to watch that bend of the road. “I’ve got my niece with me.”
    “Niece?” Pop asked.
    The man nodded. “Let’s get out of this hot sun.” He moved out of the road and we all went over and squatted down in the shade of the pine trees on the other side of the trailer. He faced so he could watch towards the highway.
    He took another drag on his cigarette and tossed it away, and nodded towards the trailer. “Maybe I better introduce myself,” he says. “I’m Dr Severance. I’m a specialist in nervous disorders and anemia. My niece, Miss Harrington, is in there. It’s on her account I’m looking for a secluded place to camp. She’s an invalid, and under my care. She needs a long rest, in quiet surroundings.”
    “I see,” Pop says.
    “You understand,” the man went on, “I’m telling you this in the strictest confidence. Miss Harrington is from a very old and very wealthy New Orleans family. She’s a delicate and very sensitive girl who’s in bad health and has to have absolute rest and quiet for a long time. Her fiancé was killed in an automobile crash this spring, and she suffered a nervous breakdown which finally turned into this rare type of anemia. She’s been given up by specialists all over the United States and Europe, so in desperation I finally turned my New York practice over to my assistants and took on the case myself. In all medical history there’ve been only three cases of it, and it’s supposed to be incurable, but it just happened I’d once read an obscure article by Von Hofbrau, the Austrian anemia specialist—”
    The man stopped and shook his head. “But there’s no use bothering you with all this medical stuff. The point is that Miss Harrington has to have perfect seclusion, and lots of fresh leafy vegetables and eggs, and outdoor air, and she can’t be disturbed by her family and reporters all the time. So if you think your farm will fit the bill—”
    “Oh, sure,” Pop says. “A farm is just what you want. We got slathers of fresh vegetables and eggs, and absolute quiet. Now as to the price—”
    Dr Severance waved a hand. “Anything. Anything within reason.”
    Pop looked at his clothes and then at the car and the trailer. “Say fif—I mean sixty dollars a month?”
    “Quite all right,” Dr Severance says. He Patted his pocket. “Wait’ll I get another pack of cigarettes out of the car.”
    He got up and walked around in front of the trailer.
    Pop shook his head kind of sad and looked at me. “That’s the hell of it,” he says. “You get out of touch for even a week and you begin to lose the knack and can’t tell within fifty dollars what a client’ll go for.”
    Dr Severance came back