“It’s me, Vic. Can I come up?”

She met me at the door to her apartment wrapped in a bright red dressing gown, looking like a little Mandarin with her dark eyes blinking away sleep.

“I’m sorry, Lotty—sorry to wake you. I had to go out this evening. When I got home I thought there might be a reception committee waiting for me.”

“If you want me to come with you to blaze away at a few muggers, the answer is emphatically no,” she said sardonically. “But I am glad to see you had a little more care for your skin than to go after them by yourself.”

I couldn’t respond to her breezy mood. “I want to call the police. And I don’t want to go back over to Racine until they’ve had a chance to check the place out.”

“Very good indeed,” Lotty said, amazed. “I begin even to think you might live to be forty.”

“Thanks a bunch,” I muttered at her, going to the phone. I didn’t like turning tail, handing my problems over to someone else to solve. But refusing to get help just because Lotty was being sarcastic seemed stupid.

Bobby Mallory was home. Like Lotty, he was inclined to taunt me a little over going to him for help, but once he’d absorbed the facts his professional persona took over. He asked me a few crisp questions, then assured me he’d have a squad car there without lights before he left his house. Before hanging up, though, he couldn’t keep from rubbing my nose in it.

“You just stay put now, Vicki. I can’t believe you’re letting the police handle police business, but remember—the last thing we want is for you to come bounding up and get in between us and a couple of hoods.”

“Right,” I said sourly. “I’ll look at the morning papers to see how things turn out.”

The line went dead in my ear. I spent the next hour or so moving restlessly around Lotty’s sitting room. She tried at first to talk me into going to sleep in her spare bed, preparing hot milk with brandy for me, but she finally left me to myself.

“I need my sleep even if you don’t, Victoria. I’m not going to lecture you on rest after your physical ordeal—if by now you don’t know you should, no words of mine will have any effect. Just remember—your body is an aging organism. It will repair itself more and more slowly as time goes by, and the less help you give it, the less you will be able to rely on it.”

I knew by the tone as much as the words that Lotty was truly angry, but I was too fragmented still to make any kind of response. She loves me; she was afraid I would put myself at such risk I would die and abandon her. I understood that; I just couldn’t fix it tonight.

It was only when she’d shut her door with an angry snap that I remembered the Chigwell notebooks. Not the time to knock at her bedroom and ask for help in deciphering his medical shorthand. I drank some of the milk and lay down on the daybed with my boots off, but I couldn’t relax. All I could think was that I had run scared from my problems, had turned to the police, and now I was waiting like some good old-fashioned damsel in distress for rescue.