Free The Quick Red Fox by John D. MacDonald Page A

causeway thatleads over to Hope Island. It is not a luxurious retreat. Stan Burley is the Schweitzer of the gin bottle. The buildings are surplus barracks he barged in long ago. He and all of his small staff are reformed drunks. If he has room, he takes you, at whatever you can afford to pay. He has some theories. They work for him. If you took a seven-foot chimp and shaved every hair off and painted him pink, you’d have a recognizable version of Stan Burley. His graduates who stay dry send contributions regularly.
    Before I could turn the motor off, Burley was striding toward us from his little screened office. It was warm and bright, eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning. The Florida bays were blue.
    “Ho, McGee,” he said, hand outstretched toward me, looking with a keen expectation at Dana, doubtless thinking her a new guest.
    I introduced them and said quickly, “We’ve come down to talk to one of your people, Stan. If possible. Nancy Abbott.”
    The welcoming light went out of his face. He gnawed his lip. “Miss Holtzer, you go wait in my office a minute, and Jenny will give you a nice glass of iced tea.” She nodded and walked away. Burley led me over to a wooden bench in the shade.
    “What’s it about, Trav?”
    “She was involved in something a year and a half ago. I want to ask her some questions about it. Is she all right?”
    He shrugged. “She’s dry, if that means very much. Has been since October. I shouldn’t tell you a damned thing about that one. But you worked so hard with me that time with Marianne. God help us, we fought hard, but we lost that one, boy. I’ll have to tell you, it’s on my conscience having her here, this Nancy. It isn’t the place for her, but no place is, not any more. Did her father send you?”
    “No.”
    “A retired policewoman delivered the child here in October. Sick drunk and down to ninety pounds. The D.T.’s and the spasms. Pitiful. I got a thousand then, and I get a thousand a month from a San Francisco bank. I write the bank a condition report once a month. After we began to bring her out of it, she puzzled me. I had a doctor friend look her over. Drunk is only part of it. But the thousand a month takes care of a lot of other ones. I’m an evil old man, Trav.”
    “What’s wrong with her?”
    “Physically she’s as healthy as an ox. She’s only twenty-four. She had nine years of drinking, the last five of them heavy, not long enough to damage her. Mentally, you name it, she’s got it.”
    “She’s mad?”
    “Boy, she isn’t sane. What they did, they got too eager with her long ago. Some people who thought shock treatments were the answer to all. A cure for anxiety and depressive symptoms. As far as I can figure, she had over twenty complete series. That and the alcoholic spasms, there’s degenerative damage. She doesn’t track too well. She can’t handle abstract concepts. She’s trapped in a manic-depressive cycle. You hit her at her best. She’s on her way up now, but not up too high yet. This is her happy time. She could manage in public pretty well if too much wasn’t demanded of her. Pretty soon she’ll get real wild. Violence, compulsive nymphomania, such a craving for drink she’d kill to get it. Then I put her under restraint. Then she falls all the way down to the bottom. She won’t speak for days. Then she starts to slowly build again.”
    “How is her memory?”
    “Sometimes good and sometimes gone.”
    I looked at that tired simian face and remembered the way he had talked of Marianne. Of love and destruction.
    “What did it to her, Stan?”
    “Her? The father did it. The adored, talented, mighty father. It was an ugly marriage. The poor child was too much like her mother, so the father couldn’t help despising her. He rejected her. So because she couldn’t understand why—just like Marianne—she grew up with a conviction of her own worthlessness. Ah, that’s where the compulsions start, McGee. A person can
not
endure