Маргарет Миллар - Vanish in an Instant

“And did you?”

“No.”

“Why not? If it’s money, I have...”

“It’s not money. They can hold her for forty-eight hours without charge. It looks as if that’s what they’re going to do.”

“But how can they hold an innocent girl?”

Meecham picked up the question carefully as if it was loaded. “The fact is, she hasn’t claimed to be innocent.”

“What — what does she claim?”

“Nothing. She won’t deny anything, won’t admit anything, won’t, period. She’s...” He groped for a word and out of the number that occurred to him he chose the least offensive: “She’s a little difficult.”

“She’s frightened, the poor child. When she’s frightened she’s always difficult.”

“I can see that.” The line-up had dwindled down to just the three of them. Meecham looked questioningly at Alice, then turned back to Mrs. Hamilton. “You came alone?”

“No. No, I’m sorry, I forgot to introduce you. Alice, this is Mr. Meecham. Miss Dwyer.”

Meecham nodded. “How do you do?”

“Alice is a friend of mine,” Mrs. Hamilton explained.

“I’m a hired companion, really,” Alice said.

“Really? If you’ll give me the luggage checks, I’ll get your things and take them out to my car.”

Mrs. Hamilton handed him the checks. “It was kind of you to go to all this trouble.”

“No trouble at all.” The words were polite but without conviction.

He carried the four suitcases out to the car and piled them in the luggage compartment. The car was new but splattered with mud and there was a dent in the left rear fender.

The two women sat in the back and Meecham alone in the front. No one spoke for the first few miles. Traffic on the highway was heavy and the pavement slippery with slush.

Alice looked out at the countryside visible in the glare of headlights. It was bleak and flat, covered with patches of gray snow. A wave of homesickness swept over her, and mingled with it was a feeling much stronger and more violent than homesickness. She hated this place, and she hated the lawyer because he belonged to it. He was as crude and stark as the landscape and as ungracious as the weather.

Mrs. Hamilton seemed to share her feeling. She reached over suddenly and patted Alice’s hand. Then she straightened up and addressed Meecham in her clear, deliberate voice: “Just what are your qualifications for this work, Mr. Meecham?”

“I took my law degree here at the University and played office boy to the firm of Post and Cranston until they found me indispensable and put my name on a door. Is that what you want to know?”

“I want to know what experience you’ve had with criminal cases.”

“I’ve never handled a murder case, if that’s what you mean,” he said frankly. “They’re not common around town. You know Arbana?”

“I’ve been there. Once.”

“Then you know it’s a university town and it hasn’t a crime rate like Detroit’s. The biggest policing problem is the traffic after football games. Naturally there’s a certain percentage of auto thefts, robberies, morals offenses and things like that. But there hasn’t been a murder for two years, until now.”

“And they’ve arrested my daughter.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t, I just can’t believe it. All they had to do is take one look at Virginia to realize that she’s a — a nice girl, well brought up.”

“Nice girls have been in trouble before.”

There was a brief silence. “You sound as if you think she’s guilty.”

“I’ve formed no opinion.”

“You have. I can tell.” Mrs. Hamilton leaned forward, one hand on the back of Meecham’s seat. “Excuse me if I sound rude,” she said softly, “but I’m not sure you’re qualified to handle this business.”

“I’m not sure either, but I’m going to try.”

“Naturally you’ll try. If murders are as rare in this town as you claim, it would be quite a feather in your cap to conduct a defense, wouldn’t it?”

“It could be.”

“I don’t believe I’d like to see you wearing that feather, at my daughter’s expense.”

“What do you suggest that I do, Mrs. Hamilton?”

“Retire gracefully.”

“I’m not graceful,” Meecham said.

“I see. Well, I’ll talk it over with Paul tonight.”

They were approaching the town. There was a red neon glow in the sky and service stations and hamburger stands appeared at shorter intervals along the highway.

Mrs. Hamilton spoke again. “It’s not that I have anything against you personally, Mr. Meecham.”

“No.”

“It’s just that my daughter is the most important thing in my life. I can’t take any chances.”

Meecham thought of a dozen retorts, but he didn’t make any of them. He felt genuinely sorry for the woman, or for anyone to whom Virginia Barkeley was the most important thing in life.

One wing of the house was dark, but in the other wing lights streamed from every window like golden ribbons.

The place was larger than Meecham had expected, and its flat roof and enormous windows looked incongruous in a winter setting. It was a Southern California house, of redwood and fieldstone. Meecham wondered whether Virginia had planned it that way herself, deliberately, because it reminded her of home, or unconsciously, as a symbol of her own refusal to conform to a new environment.

The driveway entrance to the house was through a patio that separated the two wings. Here, too, the lights were on, revealing hanging baskets of dead plants and flowerpots heaped with snow, and a barbecue pit fringed with tiny icicles.

Mrs. Hamilton’s eyes were squinted up as if she was going to cry at the sight of Virginia’s patio, built for sun and summer and now desolate in the winter night. Silently she got out of the car and moved toward the house.

Meecham pushed back his hat in a gesture of relief. “Quite a character, eh?”

“I like her. She’s very pleasant to me.”

“Oh?” He stood aside while Alice stepped out of the car. “You’re a little young to be a hired companion. How long have you worked for her?”

“About a month.”

“Why?”

“Why? Well...” She flushed again. “Well, that’s a silly question. I have to earn a living.”

“I meant, it’s a funny kind of job for a young girl.”

“I used to be a schoolteacher. Only I wasn’t meeting...” any eligible men were the words that occurred to her, but she said instead, “I was getting into a rut, so I decided to change jobs for a year or so.”

He gave her a queer look and went around to the back of the car to unlock the luggage compartment. Mrs. Hamilton had gone into the house, leaving the front door open.

Meecham put the four suitcases on the shoveled drive and relocked the compartment. “I suppose you know what you’re getting into.”

“I... of course. Naturally .”

“Naturally.” He looked slightly amused. “I gather you haven’t met Virginia.”

“No. I’ve heard a lot about her, though, from her brother, Willett, and from Mrs. Hamilton. She seems to be — well, rather an unhappy person.”

“You have to be pretty unhappy,” Meecham said, “to stab a guy half a dozen times in the neck. Or didn’t you know about that?”

“I knew it.” She meant to sound very positive, like Mrs. Hamilton, but her voice was squeezed into a tight little whisper. “Of course I knew it.”

“Naturally.”

“You’re quite objectionable.”

“I am when people object to me,” Meecham said. “I’ve forgotten your name, by the way, what is it?”

Instead of answering she picked up two of the suitcases and went ahead into the house.