Ross MACDONALD - Sleeping Beauty

“I don’t think you and I are going to have an explosion. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m sure you’re highly explosive, just as Laurel is.”

“Really? You think I’m like Laurel?” She sounded both complimented and dismayed. “They do say an aunt and a niece have about thirty percent of the same genes – almost as close a relation as mother and daughter. And I feel that way about her.” She leaned toward me. “What happened to Laurel?”

“I don’t know. I think she was ready for almost anything, and very close to the edge of emotional breakdown. I’m not offering this as a theory, just an idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the kidnapping was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Perhaps somebody recognized her and saw she was vulnerable and picked her up on the street. It may have been someone she knew. She may even have gone along willingly.”

“You’re not suggesting that she’s a party to the extortion attempt?”

“No, but it’s not impossible.” I was thinking of what Joyce Hampshire had told me about the Las Vegas incident when Laurel was fifteen. I decided not to mention it to Elizabeth.

She said, “But she’d have no reason. Laurel doesn’t care about money. And if she did, she could always get it from my parents.”

“Not her own?”

“Jack and Marian don’t have much money in the here and now. The company pays him a good salary, of course, but they live right up to it, and beyond. I don’t mean that they couldn’t or wouldn’t raise money for Laurel if they had to.”

“Money isn’t always the main thing in these extortion attempts. The extortioner may think it is. But what he’s really after is some kind of emotional satisfaction. Some kind of revenge on life. Would Laurel do something like that to her parents?”

“I don’t know. They’ve certainly had a lot of trouble with her. And she with them,” Elizabeth added carefully. “Jack and Marian have had a troubled marriage. But all three of them really care about each other. I suppose it’s what they call a love-hate relationship. Odi et amo. Excrucior.”

“What does that mean?”

“ ‘I hate you and I love you. And it hurts.’ That’s my own translation from Catullus. They printed it in the annual at River Valley School.”

“The same school Laurel went to.”

“Yes. You know quite a lot about her.”

“Not nearly enough. I didn’t have much of a chance to question her husband. He was at work.”

“He wouldn’t be able to tell you much, anyway,” she said with faint contempt.

“Why do you say that?”

“He doesn’t really know Laurel. How could he, with his background? I’ve spent some time with them, and if ever I saw an unreal marriage–”

“Tom seems to be in love with her.”

“Whatever that means,” she said. “As far as Tom is concerned, she’s a creature of romantic fantasy. He treats her as if she were a fairy princess. Laurel really deserved something better than that.”

Her voice was surprisingly bitter. I wondered if she was talking about her own marriage as well as Laurel’s.

“How did – how does Laurel feel about him?” And how do you feel about your husband, Mrs. Somerville?

“I think she loved him, in a way, and she was grateful to him. It isn’t easy for Laurel to be intimate with anyone, certainly not with a man. But she really should have had something more than Tom Russo. She’s a remarkable young woman. If she had met her match in life, this dreadful thing wouldn’t have happened.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. Her hair fluffed out, and caught the light of a car coming up behind us. “After what you said about her possible complicity, I don’t think I ought to speculate about it.”

“I was speculating.”

“You certainly were.”

“But I thought the question ought to be raised. I’m not suggesting that Laurel originated the idea. At worst, she simply went along with it.”

“Why would she?”

“She wanted out, and she was so desperate that any out would do. Assume she did go with someone, and that someone made the extortion call to her parents, with or without her knowledge – it doesn’t follow that Laurel is out of danger. In fact, it works the other way around.”

“You mean if she knows who she’s with, he’s just as likely to kill her?”

“That’s what I mean. He or they.”

“But you’re simply imagining all this,” she said with synthetic scorn.

“What else can I do? I said I wasn’t offering you a theory, just some possibilities. You seem to take them seriously. So do I. Remember, I spent some time with Laurel just before she took off. She was wide open to possibility, ready for anything to happen. And if she ran into someone else in the same condition–”

“The nuclear components would come together?”

Her voice was sober. We climbed the ramp onto the midnight freeway. I was keenly aware that I’d brought Laurel this way a few hours before.

“Speaking of nuclear bombs,” Elizabeth said, in the tone of someone hoping to change the subject, “this isn’t the first time tonight that they’ve come up. My husband was talking about bombing earlier this evening, before I persuaded him to go to bed. I know men aren’t supposed to have hysterics, but he was pretty close to it. Of course, he’s been through a lot more than I have, particularly in the last couple of days. I have to make allowances for that, and for the fact that he’s older.”

She seemed to be having a quiet debate with herself on the subject of her husband’s manhood.

“What did he have to tell you about bombing?”

“Nothing worth hearing, really. If anyone but Ben had said it, I would have laughed in his face. He had the wild idea that perhaps our oil well started leaking because some enemy had planted a small nuclear device in the sea floor. Of course, he was very tired, and he can’t drink–”

“Some enemy of the United States?”

“He didn’t go quite that far. Some personal enemy, or enemy of the company. Or someone trying to make the oil industry look bad.”

“It isn’t possible, is it?”

“No.” Her voice was definite. “I think my husband may be getting a bit paranoid. It’s understandable. He’s a sensitive man, and I know he feels terribly guilty. He told me once himself that he was too emotional to be a naval combat officer. He said he realized it when he saw the official photographs of the fire-bombing of Tokyo. He was appalled by them.”

“Did he have something to do with the Tokyo bombings?”

“No. I didn’t mean that. But this oil thing isn’t his first disaster. It’s the second one that he – that he was made to feel responsible for. His ship the Canaan Sound was disabled by fire at Okinawa, and some of his men were lost.”

“Was it his fault?”

“He was the Captain. He naturally assumed responsibility. But Ben has never talked about it. Neither has Jack. I don’t think either of them knows how the fire started.”

“Was your brother Jack aboard the Canaan Sound?”

“Yes. Jack was a young officer just out of Communications School. Ben arranged to take him aboard, so Jack would be under his wing. It wasn’t a very protective wing, I’m afraid. Jack wasn’t on the carrier for more than a week or two when it was ordered to Okinawa, and then burned. That was the end of Jack’s sea duty, and the end of my husband’s naval career.”

“You mean they fired him out of the Navy?”

“Not exactly. They gave him shore duty at Great Lakes. Ben hated it. So did I. But it was much harder on him than it was on me. When I married him, he was terribly ambitious. He used to talk about someday becoming CINPAC. The job at Great Lakes led nowhere, and wasn’t intended to. As soon as the war was over, Ben resigned from the Navy. Fortunately he was married to me, and my father took him into the company.”