Ross MacDonald - The Ferguson Affair

“How do you know it’s his? It could be yours.”

“No.” He shook his head despondently. “I know where I stand, I won’t try to blink the facts. I had no right to expect so much out of life. I tell you, it’s a judgment on me. I’ve had it coming to me, all these years.”

“Judgment for what?”

“My moral rottenness. Years ago I got a young girl pregnant, then I turned my back on her. When Holly turned her back on me, I was only getting my just deserts.”

“That’s not rational thinking.”

“Is it not? My father used to say that the book of life is like a giant ledger. He was right. Your good actions and your bad actions, your good luck and your bad luck, balance out. Everything comes back to you. The whole thing works like clockwork.”

He made a downward guillotining gesture with the edge of his hand. “I threw that little girl in Boston out of my life, gave her a thousand dollars to shut her up. And when I did that, I condemned myself. Condemned myself to the hell of money, do you understand me? In my life everything comes back to money. But Good Christ, I’m not made of money. I care for other things. I care for my wife, no matter what she’s done to me.”

“What do you think she’s done to you?”

“She’s defrauded and betrayed me. But I can forgive her, honestly. I owe it not only to her. I owe it to that little girl in Boston. You don’t know me, Gunnarson. You don’t know the depths of evil in me. But I have depths of forgiveness in me, too.”

He had been taking a moral beating, and wasn’t handling it well. I said: “We’ll talk it over tomorrow. Before you make any final decisions, you’ll want all the facts about your wife and her activities.”

He closed his fists on his knees and cried hoarsely: “I don’t care what she’s done!”

“Surely that will depend on the extent of her crimes.”

“No. Don’t say that.”

“You still want her back, don’t you?”

“If I can have her. Do you think there’s a chance?” His hands turned over and opened and clutched air.

“I guess there’s always a chance.”

“You don’t see any hope in the situation,” Ferguson stated. “But I do. I know myself, I know my wife. Holly’s a lost child who has done some foolish things. I can forgive her, and I feel sure we can make a go of it.”

His eyes shone with a false euphoric brightness. It made me uneasy.

“There’s not much use in talking about that now. I’m on my way out of town. I’m hoping to find out something more definite about her background and her connection with Gaines. Will you hold off everything until tomorrow? Including too much thinking.”

“Where are you going?”

“A town in the valley, Mountain Grove. Did Holly ever speak of the place?”

“I don’t believe so. Did she use to live there?”

“Possibly. I’ll report to you in the morning. Will you be all right tonight?”

“Of course,” he said. “I haven’t given up hope, not by a long shot. I’m full of hope.”

Or of despair so sharp, I thought, that he couldn’t feel its edge biting into him.

THE MOUNTAINS WHICH GAVE the town its name lay on the horizon to the west and south like giants without eyes. Against their large darkness and the larger darkness of the sky, the lights on the main street flung a meretricious challenge.

It was like a hundred other hinterland main streets, with its chain stores and clothing stores closed for the night, restaurants and bars and movie houses still open. Perhaps there were more people on the sidewalks, more cars in the road, then you’d see in the ordinary town after ten at night. Most of the pedestrians were men, and many of them wore the hats and high-heeled boots of ranch hands. The young men at the wheels of the cars drove like an army in rout.

I stopped at a gas station, bought two dollars worth of gas out of my last ten-dollar bill, and asked the proprietor to let me consult his telephone directory. He was an old man with a turkey-red face and eyes like chips of mica. He watched me through the window of his office to make sure that I didn’t steal the directory off its chain.

It said that Mrs. Adelaide Haines lived at 225 Canal Street, which was the address that Mrs. Weinstein had set down. The red-faced man told me where it was. I drove across town at the legal speed limit, fighting down my excitement.

Canal Street was lined with trees and houses a generation old. Number 225 was a wooden bungalow with a light on the porch, filtered green through a passion vine which grew thick to the eaves. A card in the front window became legible as I mounted the front steps: VOICE AND PIANO TAUGHT.

I pressed the bell push beside it, but no audible bell rang. I knocked on the screen door. The holes in the screen had been ineffectually mended with what looked like hairpins. An aging woman, for whom the idea of hairpins had prepared me, opened the inside door.

She was tall and fine-boned and thin to the point of emaciation. Her face and neck were roughened by years of valley sun, and the fingers at her throat were conscious of it. In spite of this, she had some style, and a kind of desperate, willful youthfulness. Her thick black hair was coiled on her head like sleeping dangerous memories.

“Mrs. Haines?”

“Yes. I am Mrs. Haines.” The cords in her throat worked like pulleys to produce the syllables. “Who are you, sir?”

I gave her my card. “I’m William Gunnarson, a lawyer from Buenavista. You have a son named Harry, I believe.”

“Henry,” she corrected me. “I called him Harry when he was a child. His grownup name is Henry.”

“I see.”

Threading her genteel accents was a wild and off-key note. I looked at her face more closely. She was smiling, but not as mothers smile when they speak of their sons. Her lips seemed queerly placed against the bone structure. They were open and stretched to one side, in an off-center leer.

“Henry isn’t at home, as you probably know.” She looked past me at the dark street. “He hasn’t lived at home for years. But you know that. He’s living in Buenavista.”

“May I come in, Mrs. Haines? You may be interested in what I have to say. I know I’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m all alone here. But of course you realize that. We won’t have a chaperone.”

A nervous giggle escaped the hand which she pressed to her mouth a second too late. Lipstick came off on her fingers. They were vibrating like a tuning fork as she unlocked the screen door.

Her perfume flooded over me as I entered. She was wearing so much perfume that it hinted at panic.

She ushered me into a fair-sized front room which was obviously her studio. An upright grand piano as old as the house stood against one inner wall. A Siamese cat jumped straight up into the air from a mohair armchair which was in process of being disemboweled. The cat hung in the air for a long instant, glaring at me with its hazel eyes, then reached for the arm of the chair with stretching legs. It landed on the piano stool with all four feet together like a mountain goat, struck one angry chord on the keyboard, and rebounded to the piano top. There it slunk and slalomed among metronomes and music racks, and crouched behind a old-fashioned photograph of a girl in a cloche hat.

On second glance, it was a very fine photograph. The arrogant good looks of the girl jumped to the eye like a mask of pride and pain.

“That was taken in San Francisco,” Mrs. Haines said conversationally, “by San Francisco’s leading photographer. I was very beautiful, wasn’t I? I gave recitals in Sacramento and Oakland. The Oakland Tribune said I had great promise. Then, unfortunately, I lost my voice. One misfortune followed another. My second husband fell from a window just as he was about to make a killing on the stock market. My third husband deserted me. Yes, deserted me. He left me to support our infant son as best I could with what remained of my music.”