John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“Bobby will build special chemical tanks right into the work boat and rig up some automatic pumps with flowmeters so that one man can handle the flow of the stuff down to the job.”

“That’s nice.”

“After another good piece of salvage, we’re going to install the same kind of a setup, but smaller, on a truck, and put a good winch on it. It will make it easy to pick automobiles out of the canals.”

“That’s nice.”

“Am I boring you or something, McGee?”

“If I was all hot to get tangled up in a nice profitable little business with three nice people, I’d probably be chuckling and dancing and singing. Lots of luck, Meyer.”

He stared at me, shrugged, and went below to start taking the cameras and reels apart to see if the rinsing in fresh water had made them salvageable. He was in one of his mother hen periods, but this time he was taking care of Guthrie and Palacio instead of McGee. They were in good hands. But Meyer was going to be a bore until the little business was safely launched.

I had no plans. I felt mildly restless. I decided I would help the trio get their work boat set up and then maybe I would round up a batch of amiable folk and cruise on up the waterway, maybe as far as Jax. In another month or so I would have to start looking for a client so whipped-down he would snap at my kind of salvage, at my fifty-percent fee. Meanwhile, some fun and games, a little action, some laughs.

There was a note in my post office box about something I had to sign for, so I didn’t get Helena’s letter until Monday, a little before noon.

First there was a crisp white envelope with the return address in raised black letters: FOLMER, HARDAHEE, AND KRANZ, ATTORNEYS AT LAW. There was a cashier’s check for $25,000 paper-clipped to the letter signed by one D. Wintin Hardahee in tiny little purple script. The letter was dated Sept 28th, and the check was dated Sept 27th.

My dear Mr. McGee:

Pursuant to the wishes of Mrs. Helena Trescott...

[The Trescott put me off the track for a moment, and then I remembered the wedding I had missed, when she had married a Theodore Trescott.]

I am herewith enclosing a cashier’s check in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000.00) along with a letter which Mrs. Trescott asked me to mail with the certified check.

She has explained to me that this sum is in payment of an obligation of several years’ standing, and because it does not seem probable that she will survive her present critical illness, she wished to save you the trouble of presenting a claim against her estate.

If you have any questions about this matter, you can reach me at the address and telephone number given above.

Yours very truly,

The law firm was in Fort Courtney, Florida. Her letter was thick, sealed in a separate envelope, and addressed to me. I walked back to the Flush and put it, unopened, on the desk in the lounge. I took one of the big glasses and laid an impressive belt of Plymouth atop the cubes, and then roamed about, sipping at it, continually catching a glimpse of the letter out of the corner of my eye. The eerie coincidence of not having thought of her for maybe almost a year, then having such vivid memories just one week after the letter had been mailed, gave me a hollow feeling in the middle.

But it had to be read and the gin wasn’t going to make it any easier.

Travis, my darling ,

I won’t bore you with clinical details — but oh I am so sick of being sick it is almost a relief to be able to see in their eyes that they do not expect me to make it... sick unto death of being sick — a bad joke I guess. Remember the day at Darby Island when we had a contest to see who could invent the worst joke? And finally declared it a draw? I’m not very brave. I’m scared witless. Dying is so damned absolute — and today I hurt like hell because I made them cut way down on the junk they are giving me so I could have a clear head to write to you... Forgive lousy handwriting, dear. Scared, yes, and also quite vain, so vain I would not look forward to walking out of this place — tottering out, a gray little old lady, all bones and parchment .

Up until a year ago, dear, I looked very much as I looked that marvelous summer we had together, and might look almost as well this year too, except for a little problem known familiarly as Big C. A year ago they thought they took it all out, but then they used cobalt, and then they went in again, and everything was supposed to be fine, but it popped up in two more places, and Thursday they are going to do another radical, which they are now building me up for, and I think Dr. Bill Dyckes is actually, though maybe he wouldn’t even admit it to himself, letting me leave this way instead of the long lousy way that I can expect if they don’t operate .

I said I wasn’t going to bore you! I’m tempted to tear this up and start again, but I think that one letter is about all I can manage. About the check Mr. Hardahee arranged for, and which you will get with this letter, please don’t get stuffy about it. Actually, practically by accident, I became medium rich — an old friend of Mick’s took over the investment thing shortly after Mick died. He is very clever and in the business of managing money for people. For the last five and a half years he has been buying funny little stocks for my account, things I never heard of before, and some of them are never heard of again, but a lot of them go up and up and up, and he smiles and smiles and smiles. But lately, of course, he has been changing everything around so that it will all be neat for the estate taxes. Don’t have strange ideas about you getting money that should go to my girls, because they will be getting enough. Anyway, the money is sort of a fee...

It’s about my big daughter, Travis. Maureen. She’s practically twenty-six. She’s been married to Tom Pike for three and a half years now. They have no children. She’s had two miscarriages. Maurie is a stunning-looking young woman. When she had her second miscarriage, a year ago, she was quite sick. I would have been able to take care of her, but at about that time I was in the hospital for my first operation — Gad, talk about soap operas!.. Bridget had come down to help out, and Biddy is still here, because things are a Godawful mess. You see, I always thought that Maurie was the solid-as-a-rock one, and Biddy — she’s twenty-three now — would be the one who’d manage to mess herself up because she is sort of dreamy and unreal and not in touch. But Biddy has had to hang around not only on account of me but because Maurie has tried three times to kill herself. It seems even more unreal to me when I see my hand write the words on this paper — kill herself — such a stupid and frightening waste. Tom Pike is a darling. He could not be nicer. He and Biddy are trying as hard as they can to bring Maurie out of it, but she just doesn’t seem right to me. As if she can’t really be reached. Tom has tried all kinds of professional care and advice, and they have been trying to make me believe that her troubles are over now. But I can’t believe it. And I certainly can’t get up out of this damned bed and take charge. Let us just say I am not likely to ever get up out of this damned bed .

Remember on our cruise when you told me how you live, what you do? Maybe I am stretching the definition, but in this situation my elder is trying to steal her own life. Do you ever operate on a preventative basis? I want you to try to keep her from stealing her life away. I don’t have any idea how you would go about it, or whether anything you could do would be of any use at all. Certainly fifty percent of Maurie’s life would be worth far more than twenty-five thousand .