Snow White and Rose Red (Matthew Hope) Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE MATTHEW HOPE SERIES

  “A master. He is a superior stylist, a spinner of artfully designed and sometimes macabre plots.” —Newsweek

  “He is, by far, the best at what he does. Case closed.” —People

  “McBain has a great approach, great attitude, terrific style, strong plots, excellent dialogue, sense of place, and sense of reality.” —Elmore Leonard

  “It’s hard to think of anyone better at what he does. In fact, It’s impossible.” —Robert B. Parker

  “The Matthew Hope novels do for the world of Florida sleaze what the 87th Precinct books do for big-city vice. The reader is hooked and given not a moment’s letup.” —New York Times Book Review

  Jack & The Beanstalk

  “A cracking good read…a solid, suspenseful, swiftly-paced story.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  The House That Jack Built

  “Deft plotting, crisp dialogue, and intriguing characters rack up solid entertainment.” —San Diego Union

  “When McBain sets his tale to wagging, he commands close attention.” —Los Angeles Times

  Three Blind Mice

  “Matthew Hope, the suave Florida lawyer, is back in the latest of McBain’s series of cynically titled nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale themed novels… McBain is an undisputed master of the genre—slick, wry, and satisfying.” —Booklist

  There Was a Little Girl

  “McBain does it again! A brilliant piece of writing…and you won’t put it down.” —Larry King, USA Today

  Cinderella

  “The first page of a McBain novel is like the first potato chip: It whets the appetite for more.” —Newsday

  Snow White & Rose Red

  “Guaranteed to raise the hackles you didn’t know you had.” —Kansas City Star

  ALSO BY ED McBAIN…

  THE 87TH PRECINCT NOVELS

  Cop Hater (1956), The Mugger (1956), The Pusher (1956), The Con Man (1957), Killer’s Choice (1957), Killer’s Payoff (1958), Lady Killer (1958), Killer’s Wedge (1959), ’Til Death (1959), King’s Ransom (1959), Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (1960), The Heckler (1960), See Them Die (1960), Lady, Lady, I Did It (1961), The Empty Hours (1962), Like Love (1962), Ten Plus One (1963), Ax (1964), He Who Hesitates (1964), Doll (1965), Eighty Million Eyes (1966), Fuzz (1968), Shotgun (1969), Jigsaw (1970), Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here! (1971), Sadie When She Died (1972), Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man (1972), Hail to the Chief (1973), Bread (1974), Blood Relatives (1975), So Long As You Both Shall Live (1976), Long Time No See (1977), Calypso (1979), Ghosts (1980), Heat (1981), Ice (1983), Lightning (1984), Eight Black Horses (1985), Poison (1987), Tricks (1987), Lullaby (1989), Vespers (1990), Widows (1991), Kiss (1992), Mischief (1993), And All Through the House (1994), Romance (1995), Nocturne (1997), The Big Bad City (1999), The Last Dance (2000), Money, Money, Money (2001), Fat Ollie’s Book (2002), The Frumious Bandersnatch (2004), Hark! (2004), Fiddlers (2005)

  THE MATTHEW HOPE NOVELS

  Goldilocks (1977), Rumpelstiltskin (1981), Beauty and the Beast (1982), Jack and the Beanstalk (1984), Snow White and Rose Red (1985), Cinderella (1986), Puss in Boots (1987), The House That Jack Built (1988), Three Blind Mice (1990), Mary, Mary (1992), There Was a Little Girl (1994), Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear (1996), The Last Best Hope (1998)

  OTHER NOVELS

  The April Robin Murders (with Craig Rice, 1958), The Sentries (1965), Where There’s Smoke (1975), Doors (1975), Guns (1976), Another Part of the City (1986), Downtown (1991), Driving Lessons (2000), Learning to Kill (2005), Transgressions (2005)

  AND BY EVAN HUNTER…

  The Evil Sleep! (1952), Don’t Crowd Me (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1954), Second Ending (1956), Strangers When We Meet (1958), A Matter of Conviction (1959), Mothers and Daughters (1961), Buddwing (1964), The Paper Dragon (1966), A Horse’s Head (1967), Last Summer (1968), Sons (1969), Nobody Knew They Were There (1971), Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972), Come Winter (1973), Streets of Gold (1974), The Chisholms: A Novel of the Journey West (1976), Walk Proud (1979), Love, Dad (1981), Far from the Sea (1983), Lizzie (1984), Criminal Conversation (1994), Privileged Conversation (1996), Candyland (2001)

  PLAYS

  The Easter Man (1964), The Conjuror (1969)

  SCREENPLAYS

  Strangers When We Meet (1960), The Birds (1963), Fuzz (1972), Walk Proud (1979)

  TELEPLAYS

  The Chisholms (1979), The Legend of Walks Far Woman (1980), Dream West (1986)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Find the Feathered Serpent (1952), The Remarkable Harry (1959), The Wonderful Button (1961), Me and Mr. Stenner (1976)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Jungle Kids (1956), The Last Spin & Other Stories (1960), Happy New Year, Herbie (1963), The Easter Man (a Play) and Six Stories (1972), The McBain Brief (1982), McBain’s Ladies: The Women of the 87th (1988), McBain’s Ladies, Too (1989), The Best American Mystery Stories (2000), Running from Legs (2000), Barking at Butterflies (2000)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©1981 HUI Corporation

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612181981

  ISBN: 1612181988

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  About the Author

  1

  * * *

  VISITING HOURS at Knott’s Retreat were from three to five every Saturday afternoon. That’s what Sarah Whittaker had told me on the telephone. Sarah Whittaker knew when visiting hours were; she’d been a patient at Knott’s Retreat for the past six months now.

  In the state of Florida, the mental health statutes are definitive as concerns a patient’s rights, even in a private hospital. Section 394.459 forcefully states that each patient in a mental facility has the right to communicate freely and privately with persons outside the facility, and goes on to say that “each patient shall be allowed to receive, send, and mail sealed, unopened correspondence, and no patient’s incoming or outgoing correspondence shall be opened, delayed, held, or censored by the facility.” Moreover, the statutes make it clear that the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services is obliged “to establish reasonable rules governing visitors, visiting hours, and the use of telephones by patients in the least restrictive possible manner.”

  Thanks to the statutes, Sarah Whittaker had first been allowed to write to me and to receive my answering letter, and next had been allowed to talk to me on the telephone.

  Sarah Whittaker was nuttier than a fruitcake.

  Or so I’d been told by an attorney named Mark Ritter, who’d handled the involuntary commitment on behalf of Sarah’s mother.

  Sarah’s letter had been crisp and lucid, stating her case in clear, straightforward English.

  Sarah on the telephone had sounded as sane as anyone I knew in the city of Calusa, Florida.

  Sarah in person—

  I think I fell in l
ove with her the moment I met her.

  Perhaps as a carryover from the days of England’s Bedlam, there are still people in the world who find mental facilities a source of amusement. That may account for why Knott’s Retreat was familiarly known to the citizens of Calusa as “Nut’s Retreat.” Situated rather closer to Sarasota than that city would have preferred, the facility was nonetheless within the boundaries of Calusa County, a good half-hour drive north on US 41 and then west on Xavier Road. At first glance, the facility much resembled the neighboring cattle ranches that bordered it on three sides. Split-rail fences defined the property, which seemed to consist solely of acres of improved pastureland on either side of a somewhat rutted dirt road—until one came to the end of the dirt road. It was here that the wall began.

  Even so, the wall did not look too terribly forbidding. It was neither high nor stout, and the two plaques—each announcing that this was indeed Knott’s Retreat—affixed to either side of the entrance gates were fashioned of burnished brass, which gave the impression, when combined with the ornate wrought iron of the gates, that one was approaching a stately castle somewhere in England or France. The gates were wide open, further encouraging the idea that no sane person was being kept here against his or her will.

  Sarah Whittaker claimed that she was a sane person being kept here against her will, despite the fact that she had been declared mentally incompetent at a hearing last October.

  The terrain in Calusa, except where developers have bulldozed the earth in an attempt to simulate rolling hills, is almost uniformly flat. Beyond the entrance gates, the dirt road became a paved one, flanked on either side by neatly landscaped lawns. Patients, I assumed, and visitors—it was difficult to tell them apart—roamed freely over these lawns, chatting, occasionally laughing in the bright April sunshine. Here and there a whitecoated attendant was in evidence, looking more like a servant than anyone expected to keep peace and order. It all appeared very civilized. I expected someone—perhaps a woman wearing a long summer dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat—to emerge from one of the stone buildings at any moment, announcing in an impeccably crisp English voice that tea would presently be served on the terrace. I drove my Karmann Ghia to a well-defined parking area, and then walked up a gravel path to the centermost of the stone buildings, following the directions Sarah had given me on the telephone.

  It was cool inside the building.

  A woman in starched white sat behind a desk just inside the entrance door. She looked up as I came in.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “May I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Miss Sarah Whittaker,” I said.

  “Yes, sir. And your name, please?”

  “Matthew Hope.”

  “Are you a relative of the patient, sir?”

  “No, I’m an attorney.”

  “Is Miss Whittaker expecting you?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Just a moment, please, sir,” she said, and lifted a telephone receiver.

  She dialed three numbers.

  She waited.

  “Freddie,” she said into the telephone, “this is Karen at the reception desk. I have a visitor for Sarah Whittaker. His name…”

  She looked up.

  “Matthew Hope,” I said. “I called yesterday to say I’d be here. I spoke to a Dr. Carmichael.”

  “Matthew Hope,” she said into the phone. “He spoke to Dr. Carmichael.”

  She listened a moment and then said, “No, he’s an attorney.”

  She listened some more.

  “Fine, then,” she said. “Will you have someone bring her up?” She put the receiver back on the cradle, smiled, and said, “If you’ll have a seat, sir, Miss Whittaker will be up in a moment.”

  I wondered where “down” was.

  I took a seat on a bench facing the reception desk. The entrance area was perhaps twelve feet square, the desk set into a nook just inside the door. The walls were of stone. There were oil paintings on the walls. The feeling of a baronial manor persisted. The receptionist picked up a copy of Ms. magazine.

  “Do you know Miss Whittaker?” I asked her.

  “Sir?” she said, looking across at me.

  “Sarah Whittaker. Do you know her personally?”

  “Well, yes, sir,” she said, “I’m familiar with most of the patients here, yes, sir.”

  “How many patients are there?” I asked.

  “We have beds for three hundred,” she said. “We’re running a bit under capacity at the moment.”

  “How many would that be?”

  “Two ninety-five, something like that. We’ve got ten buildings in all. Miss Whittaker is in North Three.”

  “When you said, ‘bring her up,’ what did you mean?”

  “Sir?”

  “Up from where?”

  “Up from—oh. That’s just an expression we use. This is Administration and Reception. Anyone coming from the wards to here we say is coming up. I don’t know why, there aren’t any hills here or anything.” She shrugged. “It’s just an expression.”

  “Are there any patients in this building?”

  “No, sir. This is just Administration and Reception. The offices are in this building. The administration offices.”

  “The wards are in the other nine buildings, then, is that it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “About thirty, thirty-five patients in each building, is that it?”

  “Approximately, sir, yes.”

  “Is there any significance to the way the buildings are—”

  Sarah Whittaker walked into the room.

  An attendant in white was with her.

  I don’t know why I expected her to be wearing a uniform, one of those gray, striped things that look like mattress ticking. That was what was in my mind, even though I’d already seen patients—I’d assumed they were patients—on the lawn outside, wearing clothing they might have worn to any cocktail party in Calusa. Fantasies die hard; in a mental hospital or in a prison, the patients or the inmates are supposed to wear uniforms. Or were the patients here at Knott’s Retreat only dressed up for visiting day?

  She was wearing a linen suit.

  Jacket and skirt the color of wheat.

  Saffron silk blouse open at the throat.

  Beige French-heeled pumps.

  She had eyes as deeply green as an Amazonian jungle.

  Her blonde hair was clipped short—I wondered if they’d cut it here at the hospital—framing in abbreviation a pale, exquisitely shaped face.

  She wore no lipstick on her generous mouth.

  She was tall, five-eight or -nine, I guessed, a slender, delicately boned woman—narrow hips, ankles, and wrists; small, perfectly formed breasts—who conveyed in her stance an overwhelming sense of fragility…or was it vulnerability?

  She extended her hand to me and said, in a voice that was as hushed as evenfall, “Mr. Hope?”

  “Miss Whittaker?” I said, and took her hand.

  “You’re really here,” she said. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come.”

  “Would you like to take your visitor outside, Sarah?” the receptionist said.

  The attendant who’d led Sarah into the room exchanged a glance with her.

  “I’m sure it’ll be all right,” the receptionist said.

  The attendant looked at her more sharply.

  “I’m sure,” she said again.

  We went out into the sunshine.

  “Welcome to Nut’s Retreat,” Sarah said, and grinned.

  The attendant had followed us out of the building. I could hear his footfalls on the gravel path as he continued to walk slowly behind us. I did not turn to look at him.

  “That’s what It’s called, you know,” Sarah said. “Even the patients call it that. Oh, I’m so happy You’re here! You have no idea how worried I was. That you wouldn’t come.”

  “I told you I would.”

  “Ah yes, but people often humor lunatics, don’t they?” she said, and gr
inned again. “Shall we walk down by the lake? It’s man-made, but it looks real enough to those of us who indulge impossible fantasies.” She rolled her green eyes, mocking her own words.

  “Yes, certainly,” I said.

  We walked in the sunshine. The day was balmy and warm. You can say what you wish about Florida’s West Coast, but in the month of April, when the temperatures hover in the midseventies and the sun spills a wash of golden beneficent light, there is no place better on earth. Sarah’s attendant followed along behind us, his footfalls a steady crunch on the gravel path, a reminder that this was not, after all, paradise.

  “That’s Jake,” Sarah said without looking over her shoulder. “My watchdog. he’s afraid I’ll slit my wrists or something. That’s why they put me in North Five when I first got here. Because Mother told them I’d tried to slit my wrists. Which was nonsense, of course.”

  She held out both her wrists for me to examine.

  “See any slash marks?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Of course not.”

  She pulled back her arms, folded them across her chest.

  “North Five is the worst of the wards,” she said. “That’s where the real loonies are kept. No garden-variety neurotics there, oh no. You’ve got your keeners and your pickers in North Five, not to mention your fair share of Napoleons and Joans of Arc. The keeners are the ones who walk from wall to wall to wall, hugging themselves and chanting in an indecipherable singsong. Ululation, It’s called, which is a rather poetic word for such a sad symptom, wouldn’t you say? The pickers sit in the corner and—well, pick at their clothes. Or their scabs. Or their imaginary bugs. They’re really rather frightening because They’re so preoccupied with their impossible task. You get the feeling that should you interrupt them, they might hurl themselves at you in rage.” She sighed heavily. “It was a picnic, North Five.”