Ross MACDONALD - Sleeping Beauty

“I don’t really know. I never thought about it. Maybe Martie will know.”

Gloria opened a door into the back passageway and called her mother, who came out walking in a mist of alcohol. Her long day’s drinking had already begun. But the eyes with which she searched her daughter’s face were as sharp as a fortune-teller’s.

“Is he taking you in?” She turned to me. “Do you have to take her in?”

“I don’t think so. But it would be a good idea if Gloria went to the police on her own and gave them a full account. Do you have any friends in the Sheriff’s department?”

The two women exchanged glances. “There’s Deputy Stillson,” the older one said. “He always liked you.”

“Will you go and talk to Deputy Stillson, Gloria?” I said.

She clenched her fists and shook them, sending a tremor through her entire body. “I don’t know what to say to him.”

“Just tell the truth – what you told me – and ask him to pass the word to Captain Dolan in Pacific Point. Dolan is in the Sheriff’s office there.”

Tears sprang into her eyes, as if her head had been subjected to sudden pressure. “I don’t want to tell on Harold.”

“You have to, Gloria. And you better do it before I bring him in.”

“You’re going to bring him in?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“I think so.”

“Where?” She stepped toward me eagerly.

“I can’t tell you.” I turned away from her and spoke to her mother: “Gloria’s just been saying that your nephew Tom used to play with Laurel Lennox when they were children. Do you know anything about that, Mrs. Mungan?”

“I have a vague memory of it. Why?”

“Do you know how the connection came about?”

“I can’t say I do.” She spoke brusquely to Gloria, “If you’re going to go and talk to a deputy sheriff, you better wash your face and change your clothes.”

Gloria gave her mother a defiant look, but turned submissively and left the room.

“I didn’t want her to hear this,” Mrs. Mungan said. “I don’t recall if I told you last night about my sister and Captain Benjamin Somerville.”

“No, I don’t think you did. What about Somerville, Mrs. Mungan?”

“He was the one that Allie fell for when she was in Bremerton. She thought for a while he was going to help her get a divorce and marry her. But then he turned around and married a girl half his age – a girl with high connections in the oil business. That girl was Elizabeth Lennox, Laurel’s aunt.”

She gave me a look of satisfaction, like a mathematician who had solved an equation. Then her face darkened, as if the product of the equation had saddened or frightened her.

“It all comes back to me now,” she said. “Allie was hard up for money after she left her husband in Bremerton and came back here with Tom. Mungan and I helped her out as much as we could. But she was having a hard time holding on to the house and living from day to day. So I suggested she should go to Somerville and get something from him. After all, he was the one who broke up her marriage. And, being in real estate, we knew that he’d just paid fifty thou for a big new house in Bel-Air. That was a lot of money in those days, back in the spring of 1945.

“Allie told me she went to his house, but he wasn’t there. He was at sea. His new little wife was at home, though, and Allie got some money from her, enough to carry her for a few weeks. Then she ran out again.

“Mungan and I couldn’t help her. In those late war years, we were just about losing our real-estate business, which we eventually did. So she went back to Somerville’s place again. This time his new wife wasn’t there, but her brother was – the same man we saw with Captain Somerville on TV Tuesday night. The brother and his wife hired her to do some babysitting for them, which Allie did right up to the day she died. That was how Tom and their little girl got together.”

She stood in silence, swaying a little, listening to the flat echoes of her story. But her eyes remained uncomprehending. She wasn’t a mathematician after all: more like an idiot savant who remembered all the details of her own and her sister’s life but couldn’t detect any over-all meaning in them.

I took the freeway south to Pacific Point, then switched to the old highway. Where it veered close to the ocean, I could see oil lying thin and rainbowed on the water, thick and black on the beaches.

Sandhill Lake was once again deserted. I could see no official cars and no Sheriff’s men around the hunting club. But I remembered something I had forgotten. There was an armed guard and a barrier at the entrance to El Rancho; and I couldn’t ask Harold’s mother to pass me in.

I asked the guard to call William Lennox’s house. A servant brought Connie Hapgood to the phone:

“Mr. Archer? I’ve been thinking about getting in touch with you. William appears to be missing.”

“For how long?”

“At least an hour. His bed was empty when I went to wake him with his Postum. All of the cars are here, which means that someone took him, doesn’t it?” Her voice rose high and cracked on the question.

“What do you mean took him?”

“I don’t know exactly what I mean. But I’m frightened, and I don’t frighten easily. Somehow this place seems terribly empty and dead.”

“He could have left under his own power. He almost did yesterday.”

“That worries me, too,” she said. “We have a very large acreage here. Some of it is rough country. His heart isn’t in very good shape, and he tends to overdo, and if he wandered off by himself–” She left the sentence unfinished.

“I’ll get there as soon as I can. That won’t be immediately, though.”

“Where are you going first?” Her voice was sharp with a kind of jealousy.

“I’m on the track of Laurel.”

I hung up before she could question me further. The guard lifted the barrier and waved me through.

I parked on Lorenzo Drive below Mrs. Sherry’s hedge and walked up her driveway. It wasn’t very steep, but it felt that way to the muscles of my legs and to my will. Harold had a gun and was probably in good enough shape to fire it.

I studied the windows for any gleam of metal or movement. But the only movements around the house were those of a pair of hummingbirds making aerobatic love.

I walked around to the back, as I had done the day before, and inspected the contents of the open garage. Very little seemed to have changed. The aging gray Mercedes was there, but this time the lid of the trunk was up and when I looked inside I found dried blood on the floor.

The back door of the house creaked. Mrs. Sherry appeared, moving rather stealthily toward the garage. She started when she saw me. But she had enough presence of mind to come up close to me before she spoke, and then to speak in a whisper.

“What are you doing here?”

“I want to talk to Harold.”

“Harold isn’t here. I told you that yesterday.”

“Then why are we whispering?”

She touched her mouth with her hand as if it had given her away. But she couldn’t bring herself to raise her voice.

“I’ve always had a very low voice,” she whispered.

She moved past me in an elaborately casual way and shut the lid of the trunk as noiselessly as possible. Her movements were tense and awkward, and interrupted by glances in my direction. Her eyes had grown deeper and brighter in the course of the night.

“Where is he, Mrs. Sherry?”

“I don’t know. We went into that subject yesterday, I believe. I gave you all the information I had – all there was.” She spread her hands to show me how clean they were, and how empty.