“That you tell me more. You told me yesterday that the patient you visited wasn’t Clarissa, but you didn’t tell me much of anything else. What happened to this phantom friend, as you call her?” Peter asked curiously. “Begin at the beginning and tell me exactly how you met her.”
“We met her—in a restaurant. We went back there yesterday but didn’t find out anything.” Judy sighed. It was good to be telling Peter about it. She had so much to tell him that she thought she might as well dish it out in small doses. The big surprise would come when she handed him the post office box number of the thief he had been trailing. But that could wait. She told him about church first, and how the minister had said, “Love ye therefore the stranger.”
“It was easy to like Clarissa,” she continued in answer to his first request. “You asked how we met her. Well, the four of us were having lunch when there was a commotion at the cashier’s desk, and this stranger—we found out later that her name was Clarissa Valentine. Well, anyway, she claimed that she had given the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. He opened the cash drawer to prove that her bill wasn’t in it, but she insisted and we believed her. Was that wrong, Peter?”
“Not at all,” he replied. “I might have believed the girl myself and suspected the cashier of palming the bill.”
“Then I’m glad we believed her. Not that it makes what happened afterwards any easier to explain,” Judy added. “Pauline thought she had tricked us, but that was after she disappeared with the money we lent her. I don’t know how she could have vanished the way she did if it wasn’t a trick. Besides, the things she said—”
“What things?” asked Peter, more interested in the story than Judy had expected him to be. “If you can remember exactly what she said it may help us find out what happened to her.”
“Oh dear, no! I’m afraid not. So much happened! This is going to sound unbelievable to you,” cried Judy, “but she said things that made it seem almost as if she—she didn’t exist. Things like telling us she looked in a mirror once and saw no reflection. And then—you won’t believe this at all, but when we toured Radio City and looked at ourselves on television, all the rest of us showed, but Clarissa was nothing but a big white light closing in until it disappeared just the way she did—without a trace. We called her a phantom friend for a joke at first, but after that it seemed so real it wasn’t funny any more. Peter, what do you think happened?”
“Well, for one thing, a tube probably blew out on the TV set. That would cause the picture to close in and disappear. I’ve seen it happen myself, and it is weird—”
“It certainly was that,” Judy agreed. “I suppose a tube could have blown out. We didn’t wait to see what was wrong with the set, because Clarissa fainted. She wasn’t faking, either. She was really frightened. We went back and saw ourselves after the set was fixed, but she wouldn’t go near it. She said her hair was dull and drab and then we all started saying it—as if we were hypnotized or something. Was that a trick? Was Clarissa playing some sort of confidence game?”
“Someone was. I’ll have to look into this myself,” declared Peter. “It may tie in with what we found out. There are all kinds of thieves, you know. That cashier is probably a petty thief and should be reported. A thief like Clarence Lawson plays his confidence game for bigger winnings. But the most insidious kind, I think, are thieves of the mind. Do you follow me, Angel?”