Free Blunt Darts by Jeremiah Healy

and I served with her on several town committees just after their marriage. Diane continued to be active in town matters far into her pregnancy with Stephen. But for a while before he was born, she began acting... well, strange. She appeared at committee meetings with alcohol on her breath. She walked past people she knew on the street as though she never saw them. She began wearing sunglasses even into the evening, and despite two servants at the big house, she sometimes slipped into Carver’s, the small grocery store in Meade Center, to buy odd items. Then one September night something happened. I’ve never talked with anybody who knew just what. But Diane was hospitalized, and Stephen was born a few hours later, two months premature.”
    “Miss Pitts, can you tell me who would know what happened that night?”
    She frowned. “Yes, for all the good it would do. Her obstetrician couldn’t be reached in time, and Dr. Ketchum, who was the family’s doctor, rushed down and delivered her of Stephen. He wouldn’t talk about it, and he died a few months later. Both servants, a woman and her husband, were let go within a week, I suspected because they were supposed to be keeping an eye on her and somehow failed. They headed south somewhere. No one else that I know of was involved.”
    “How did she get to the doctor’s office?”
    “Her husband.”
    “But surely, if she was hospitalized, there’d be records of what her trouble was.”
    “Oh, she was hospitalized, all right, but in a private place, if you get me.”
    “A sanatorium?” I decided to use the “old parlance.”
    “Yes, out in the Berkshires.”
    Coincidence? “Does the name Willow Wood ring any bells?”
    “What?”
    “The name Willow Wood. Was that the sanatorium Diane Kinnington was in?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. I think it was me same one Stephen stayed in.”
    “What do you know about the night Diane died?”
    She sighed. “Even less, I’m afraid. Just the newspaper stories, and I didn’t keep them. After Stephen was born, Diane seemed to... well, rally back in spirit. Then, a few years later, she began to decline again. By the time Stephen reached my class, she had declined frighteningly. If her earlier conduct was strange, her later behavior was wicked. Drunkenness, rowdiness, and... well...”
    “Miss Pitts, I know this must be difficult—”
    “Oh, you know nothing, young man, nothing!” she snapped. “You know I’m relatively old and therefore you ‘know’ that I’m patriotic and narrow-minded and a prude. Well, we may have felt strongly about some things when I was young, like love of country and order and respect. But maybe we felt differently about other things than you think we did. And maybe while we didn’t go around talking about things, we nevertheless knew how to enjoy ourselves. But what we didn’t do was what she did with every male that she could.”
    “Message received and understood, Miss Pitts,” I said. She calmed down a bit, and Valerie gave me an approving smile. “What about Stephen thereafter?” She sighed again. “He’d been so obviously affected by his mother’s behavior. He had become erratic in school, and then his mother showed up roaring drunk for a student-teacher conference, with a... a man waiting for her in the car. Well, things must have been twice as bad at home. The day after Diane’s accident, the judge whisked Stephen away to the sanatorium. The school records don’t show it, but I’m sure that poor boy suffered a complete nervous breakdown. He returned to school the next year. He had lost a year, but he seemed to be doing so well until now.”
    “Do you remember anything else that might help us?” I asked.
    “I’m afraid not. Although...”
    “Yes?” prompted Valerie.
    “Well,” she looked from Valerie to me, “there was a reporter named Thomas Doucette on the Banner at the time Diane died. The rumor was that he’d been assigned to the story and, well,