Footprints by Kay Cleaver Strahan

I

Dr. Joseph Elm said: "Look, Miss MacDonald, I'm not asking you to say whether or not you'll take the case. All I'm asking you to do is to read these letters."

"Letters," Lynn MacDonald explained, "that pertain to a murder committed twenty-eight years ago. Many of them, you have told me, written by a twelve-year-old child. Yes, I admit the fact that the child was Lucy Quilter does make some difference-but not enough. The remainder written by a boy who since has confessed to the murder. At the very best, I could form a theory or two. Any possibility of proving those theories has been removed by time. I am sorry, Dr. Elm, but -- "

"Will you read these letters, just read them, I mean, for five hundred dollars?"

"My time -- "

"Yes. I know about time. Everybody's time. Will you read them for a thousand dollars?"

"I am not a highway robber, Dr. Elm."

"No? Well, bless my soul to glory if I know what you are. You're a darn good crime analyst, or so I hear. But if you're not a better analyst than you are a woman, you've nothing to show. Look. As a woman, you're a mess. You haven't any kindness, or patience, or sympathy-not even pity. You haven't any courage-afraid to take a chance. You haven't much of anything but lack of time."

He settled back patiently in his chair. If he had guessed rightly about that red hair and those clear gray eyes, something was going to happen in half a minute now.

Lynn MacDonald stood, tall, behind her desk.

"Perhaps you are right," she said. "Certainly you are right about my lack of time. I have no time to sit here and listen to insults from importunate strangers."

Dr. Elm added to his patience an air of solid permanence.

"Funny thing," he offered, "about women. Tell them the truth and ninety-nine out of a hundred will think you are insulting them. I kind of figured, maybe you'd be the hundredth. But I see now where I made my mistake. I should have tried to wheedle instead of -- "

"Bullying," supplied Miss MacDonald.

"All right. Look. I've found out one thing you've got-that's a temper. Glad to see it. Makes you a person. You're Scotch-Irish, I judge. Best debtors in the world. Never had a Scotch-Irish bill yet that wasn't paid. Look. You won't read those letters for love or money. Will you read them to pay a debt?

"Hold on. Let me tell you. I'm a professional man, same as you're a professional woman. I've got a consulting room, too. It isn't near as stylish as this one of yours. One thing, I've had it forty-odd years, and it's kind of worn down some, and rubbed off. Another thing, I don't much favour elegant consulting rooms. Patients likely to get impressed. 'Tisn't a good thing to impress your patients. Many a stomachache has turned into appendicitis just from the patient being ashamed to own up to an ordinary stomach ache in the midst of walnut furniture and Persian rugs. Look. Here's what I'm getting to.

"I've been sitting up there, afternoons, for the past forty years. I've had time and patience, all that while, to listen to women-two thirds of them nervous, hysterical things, poor souls-telling me about their backaches, and their numb spells, and their throbbing heads. Until the last ten years or so about all I could do was to listen, and then pat them on the shoulders, and tell them they were fine, brave girls, and give them some healthy advice, and send them home. About all I can do yet, for that matter. Say psychiatrist to most women and they'll up and act like you did just now when I was trying to tell you something. No. I sit and cluck, like an old hen eating, and listen. I suppose the time I've wasted listening to and pitying your sister-women would aggregate about twenty years. Money doesn't pay for it-if I got paid with money, which I generally don't, because I can't cure them. Thanks might pay, but I've never got thanked-much. (‘Old Dr. Elm simply could not find what my trouble was. So I went to young Dr. Sawbones, and he cut it right out. I wouldn't have lived three months without the operation. ') But I've kept along. I'll go back, when I leave here, and sit up there and listen, and cluck, till I die. But I've always kind of thought, maybe, sometime I'd get paid back. I've never asked a favour of a woman in my life, Miss MacDonald. Never even asked a girl to marry me. Well, I'm asking a favour now. You can read these letters in less than the time you could read a novel. How about it? A couple of evenings, as pay for twenty years? And if you tell me there's no reason why you should pay for all the time I've given to your sister-women, I'll tell you that, come to it, there generally isn't a reason for most of the fine, grand things folks have done. Florence Nightingale, Father Damien, or -- "

Lynn MacDonald, sitting behind her desk, resting her chin on her bridging fingers, smiled. "Or," she questioned, "Dr. Joseph Elm?"

"I get you. It's below the belt, all the same."

"But, no, you didn't ‘get' me. I meant, any real reason for him to come here and offer me what he has just offered me. Oh, yes. I know what it is. In spite of your opinion of me, I have some of it myself-in payment for a service, not for himself, but for friends of his?"