The Damned by John D. MacDonald Page A

The nurse said something to the doctor. He bent over the bed. He came out to Linda, still smiling. “Sorry,” he said. “Señora is dead.”
    The smile made it an obscene joke. Linda brushed past him and stood over the bed. The nurse eyed her gravely. Linda looked down at the damp gray face of the dead woman. There was no doubt.
    The doctor appeared at her elbow with a glass. “Dreenk, please,” he said, smiling.
    She drained the glass mechanically. It was water with something added that gave it a faintly bitter flavor. The doctor took the empty glass.
    He said, “Body go to Estados Unidos, yes?”
    “Yes.”
    “Bad heat. Is better ice. Is a man here in San Fernando can fix and take body to Matamoros, yes?”
    “My husband will decide.”
    “Yes.”
    And she heard his familiar steps on the stone stairs. She turned and met him as he came across the office. He tried to brush by her, saying, “Where is she?”
    Linda caught his wrists. “Please, darling. She… died, just a minute ago.”
    He looked at her vacantly. “Eh? What?” He snatched his hands away from her and went to his mother. He flung himself against the edge of the bed, kneeling on the floor, his face against the sheet beside her, one arm flung across her. He cried, vocalizing each sob as children will. His spasms shook her, so that in a horrid moment it seemed to Linda that the dead woman was suppressing laughter that shook her body. The doctor stood smiling. John’s sobs began to sound like laughter. She felt the emptiness and dizziness as the room darkened. It was the nurse who saw it. She came quickly to Linda, took her arm, led her into the outer office to a chair, made her sit down, pushed her head forward gently until Linda sat with her head between her knees. Darkness moved back and away from her, and the singing sound left her ears. She straightened up and listened to John weep and knew he was done, finished. He would make no decisions.
    She stood up tentatively, and then went to him. “John!”
    “Leave… me alone!”
    “The doctor says there’s a man here who can take the body to Matamoros. You have your papers and hers, and you can get her across the border and arrange for the body to be shipped to Rochester. Can you do that? Are you listening?”
    “I… I’ll go with her.”
    “How about our car? I better go back and get it. Where will I meet you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Tell the Brownsville police where you register. I’ll check with them. Will you do that?”
    He didn’t turn. “Yes,” he said, his voice muffled, mouth against the sheet.
    “You gave that girl the car keys?”
    “Yes.”
    “Give me some money.”
    He took his wallet out of his pants, handed it blindly back to her. She took it, opened it, took out several twenty-peso notes and fifty dollars in United States currency. She put the wallet on the edge of the bed beside his hand. She looked at his hand, then bent over and looked at it more closely, wondering why on earth he should be holding so tightly to a cheap yellow mechanical pencil. She hadn’t seen it before, in his pocket.
    “Any Brownsville undertaker will ship the body to Rochester.”
    “Please stop talking to me.”
    “Maybe in Matamoros you’ll have to phone an undertaker to come across the river to get the body.”
    “I’m not a child. I can do what has to be done.”
    “Maybe you should come back with me and let the doctor’s friend handle it.”
    “She’s dead now. You don’t have to be jealous of her any more.”
    Linda turned and walked out. She went down the stone steps and out onto the narrow sidewalk. It was perceptibly cooler, and the buildings on the west side of the square cast shadows that touched the bases of the buildings on the opposite side. The black sedan had gone. From a corner cantina came the thin strains of a guitar, a nasal tenor singing “María Bonita.” A pup trotted sideways down the middle of the street. A ragged child appeared from nowhere, saying,