Эд Макбейн - Snow White and Rose Red

“You were telling me that at first you kept putting off Mr. Whittaker...”

“Oh my, did I!” she said, and laughed. “I drove the poor man frantic, I’m sure. You’d have thought he was offering me a life of bondage in an Arabian seraglio, rather than marriage. But, as I say, I was only nineteen, and he was pressing thirty, and the discrepancy in our ages was more than I could effectively cope with at the time. He persisted, though — oh, he was quite a persistent man, my Horace.”

I glanced out at the cruiser offshore and saw the unmistakable glint of sunlight on the lenses of uncoated binoculars. Someone was studying the house. Someone was looking at Mrs. Whittaker and me. It was not unusual for Calusa Bay boaters to ogle whatever houses on the shore might catch their fancy. Rarely, however, were they brazen enough to do their house- and people-watching through binoculars. I listened only vaguely now to Mrs. Whittaker as she told me of the many years Horace Whittaker had courted her, and of her continuing reluctance to marry an older man, and of how finally she’d succumbed to what she’d recognized as a vital life force, an energy lacking in most men half his age. I kept my eyes on that blinking flash of sunlight coming from the cruiser.

And I thought, oh Jesus, I thought...

Patricia had signaled to them.

Patricia wanted them to know I was here.

I was expected, and now she wanted to let them know I’d arrived.

She had fiddled with the French doors to signal them. The way one would signal with a mirror.

And now whoever was out on the boat was watching us.

Dr. Schlockmeister was undoubtedly on that boat. And perhaps the Prime Minister of Justification, Mark Ritter. Both out there, watching. Trying to eavesdrop visually on Mrs. Whittaker and me. Maybe they had someone who could read lips out there on that cruiser. Read what we were saying. They knew I wanted to get Sarah out of Knott’s Retreat, where they were keeping her for whatever reasons I could not yet discern. Someone who could read lips was trying to hear what we were saying, the binoculars trained on us. Mrs. Whittaker had told me she wanted Sarah out of that place, but that was a lie, and now they were checking on us to make certain she was playing her part, the role they had assigned to her, the Loving Mother wanting her Poor Pitiful Daughter to regain her senses so that she could be returned to the home where she’d been nurtured for so many years. Lies, all lies. The Harlot Witch’s henchmen spying on the White Knight. Snow White locked away. The binoculars trained on us still, sunlight glinting. The steady drone of Mrs. Whittaker’s voice — married him when she was twenty-three and he was thirty-three, well, almost thirty-four. Didn’t give birth to Sarah till she was thirty-eight years old, supposed to be a dangerous age for childbearing, but, oh, what a lovely baby she was, and what a sweet child, never would have expected anything like this to have happened, never in a million years, oh my poor dear daughter — while the binoculars stayed trained on us and the boat stood motionless on the water.

“Sightseers,” she said suddenly, breaking her narrative. “They aren’t often this bold, but, oh how sick to death I am of them! We’re quite protected here, you know, except on the bay side. And, of course, the boaters always come in as close as they can to get a look at what is, after all, a Calusa landmark. It’s so irritating, you have no idea. I sometimes choose to swim naked in the pool — that’s my privilege, isn’t it? Naturally, I’m careful to do it when the servants are away. But, oh , those damned boaters! Forgive my language, they irritate me so.”

The binoculars suddenly winked off, as though Mrs. Whittaker’s words had magically stopped the flash of sunlight on glass.

Had she, too, signaled to them in some way? Exactly as Patricia had? Had she somehow warned them that I was aware of their surveillance and—

And all at once I realized how utterly convinced I was of Sarah’s own beliefs, and how deeply I’d been drawn into — but was it?

Her delusion.

Oh Jesus, could delusions be shared ?

The cruiser was suddenly moving.

“Good riddance,” Mrs. Whittaker said. “They’re such a nuisance. I’m sometimes tempted to call the Coast Guard.”

I watched the boat. I turned back to her.

“Mrs. Whittaker,” I said, “I know you must be reluctant to discuss Sarah’s illness, but really — that’s why I’m here. Anything you can tell me...”

“It’s just that she seems so much better now,” Mrs. Whittaker said. “Doesn’t she? Well, of course, you wouldn’t know. You didn’t see her then .”

“Back in September, do you mean?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Whittaker said. “When she tried to kill herself.”

“Can you tell me a bit more about that?”

“Well, it’s such a painful memory...”

“I know, but...”

“So very painful,” she said, and turned away to look out over the water again. The boat was moving rapidly southward. In a moment it would be nothing but a speck in the distance. Almost as if it had never been there.

“Where were you when it happened?” I said. “What part of the house?”

“I wasn’t in the house at all,” Mrs. Whittaker said. “I was at the museum — the Ca D’Ped — I’m on the board of directors there, we were making plans for an exhibition of Calusa sculptors, long overdue, I might add, we have so many talented people here. I got back to the house along about — oh, it must have been four in the afternoon, perhaps a bit later.”

“Was anyone here at the house?” I asked. “Besides Sarah?”

“No, the twenty-seventh was a Thursday. All the help had the day off.”

“By ‘all the help’...”

“The maid, cook, and gardener. That’s all the help we had,” she said, turning to me. “Does that surprise you, Mr. Hope? No upstairs maid, no downstairs maid, no chauffeur, no personal maid to rinse out my underthings and help me dress? I’m afraid we never were that ostentatious. Three in help is the most we ever had.”

“And all three were gone that day?”

“Yes.”

“Then Sarah was alone.”

“Yes. I saw her car in the driveway as I pulled in, and I called to her as soon as I entered the house. There was no answer. I called again. The house was very still. I suspected at once that something was wrong... Do you know the feeling you sometimes get when you enter a house and know that everything isn’t as it should be? I had that very feeling then, that something was terribly wrong. I suppose I called her name again, and again got no answer, and then... I started up the stairs to the second floor of the house. The door to Sarah’s room was closed. I knocked on it. It’s always been a rule in this house never to invade anyone’s private space. Sarah was taught as a child that one knocks before entering. And Horace and I observed the same rule. There was no answer from inside her bedroom. I knocked again, I called her name again, and then I became really alarmed and — I broke my own rule, Mr. Hope, I opened the door to her room without being invited to enter.”

She brought her hand to her lips and squeezed her eyes shut tightly, as if closing them against the memory of what had awaited her in that room on that day last September. I waited. I thought she might begin crying. She seemed to be gathering the courage to go on with the story. When at last she opened her eyes, she focused them on the bay, looking out over the water, and began speaking as if I were no longer there, her voice very low.

“She... was standing naked in the bathroom. The dress she’d been wearing was on the floor, the bathroom floor, in a heap on the floor with her undergarments and sandals. A yellow dress, I remember. She was holding a razor blade in her right hand. There was blood on her left wrist — three narrow lines of blood, what Dr. Helsinger later identified as hesitation cuts. I’d come home just in the nick of time, you see. Five minutes later, perhaps only a minute later, she might have mustered the full courage to really open her wrist. Her hesitation — and my arrival — saved her.”