CREEPING LIKE SNAIL Faces kept floating about the steamy room. All the weight had bobbed out of Jessie’s head. It felt taut and airy, like a balloon. In the nightmare she knew with curious certainty that her alarm would go off any minute. She would wake up in a solid world, jump out of bed, listen for the baby’s gurgling, shuffle into the nursery with a bright good morning … “Sit down, Jessie.” “What?” It was miraculously Richard Queen. He was urging her back into the rocker, putting a glass to her dehydrated lips. He had called her Jessie, so it was still the nightmare. Or perhaps the nightmare was turning into a harmless dream. “Drink it.” The flow of cold water down her throat awakened her. She saw the room now as it was. The nursery was full of men peering, measuring, talking, weighing, as impersonal as salesmen—state troopers and Taugus policemen and an unshaven man without a tie whom she distantly recalled as having arrived carrying a briefcase. “Are you feeling better now, Miss Sherwood?”
What do You think about Inspector Queen’s Own Case?
