Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

The entrance to this second road was barred by a heavy wire gate, which was padlocked. Ferguson had a key to the padlock on the ring of keys which the Trumbulls’ agent had given him. But when Ferguson got out of his car to use it, he discovered that the padlock had been changed. A heavy new brass lock glinted in the light of his torch.

He could have climbed over the gate, but that would have meant a five-mile walk uphill. Being in a hurry, he broke the new padlock with a tire iron and drove through the gate, leaving it open. He drove up the winding road without headlights: that acned blonde, the moon, was of some use after all. When it made a deep black shadow under a roadside oak, he parked his car, and covered the last few hundred yards on foot.

From the road, the house was completely dark and silent. Something about its architecture reminded Ferguson of a medieval castle, the dark tower to which (he said obscurely) Childe Roland came. The row of eucalyptus trees along the driveway stood like bearded seneschals swaying mystically in the silver air.

One of his feet slipped on the driveway and he swayed not so mystically, almost falling on his rump. He switched on his flashlight to see what had caused him to slip. An irregular dark pool as big as his hand glistened on the concrete. He touched it and smelled his finger: oil drippings where a car had stood, not very long ago.

He doused his light and walked on to the house, keeping in the shadows of the trees. Their sharp medicinal odor reminded him of hospitals; that, or the moisture in the air, started a wound aching where he had taken shrapnel in the back. It started up an old excitement, too, which Ferguson hadn’t felt since the year they cleared the Low Countries.

Leaning against the trunk of the last tree in the row, he listened to the house for a while, and watched it. It was built of stone, and the castellated twin towers at the end of each wing somehow added to its deserted air. Drifts of leaves, fallen branches and twisted strips of eucalyptus bark littered the overgrown lawn.

Yet it had the wrong sound for an empty house; or rather, not sound enough. The house and its surroundings seemed to be holding their breath. No wild life stirred or murmured, nearer than the occasional frogs croaking down in the creek-bed. The house stood in a vacuum of sound, ringed by the silence which human beings impose on nature. It was almost, he said, as if the natural world had heard the repeated cry that he had heard, and been struck dumb by it.

As he was thinking this, Ferguson heard another crying, quiet and broken, somewhere inside the house; then the sound of a door being closed. He ran across the cluttered lawn and hammered the front door with its lion’s-head knocker.

Silence answered him, the absolute silence he had learned to distrust. He knocked again, with all his force. As he did so, Ferguson told me, he had an odd objective vision of himself. He saw himself from above and behind as the moon might have seen him if she had eyes: a dark little figure casting a frantic shadow on a moonlit door. Like the traveller in de la Mare’s poem, which he had read in the Fifth Form at Upper Canada College.

“Where?” I said.

“Upper Canada College. The school I attended in Toronto when I was a youngster. I was a wild–”

I cut him short: “Could we skip the biographical details, and the literary touches? Another time they’d be interesting. Right now I need the facts, Colonel.”

He gave me a dark angry look, then dropped his eyes to the coffee mug in his hands. All the time he spoke, he’d been staring down and into it, twisting and turning it, like a crystal ball that told him the past but kept the future hidden.

“These are facts about me,” he said. “Since you’re good enough to listen to me, I want you to understand how I came to do what I did. I was a wild boy at school, lonely and romantic, a dreamer and a chance-taker. In that moment of revelation at the door, I realized that I hadn’t changed. At the age of forty-five, I was still trying to act like a knight-errant, rescuing the damsel from the blessed tower.

“And I said to myself that I had been too much alone. I had made a mistake in coming to California. A trick of light, an animal cry or two, a wrong number on the telephone, had peopled my mind with figures of melodrama. My midnight enterprise was quixotic, absurd. I turned from the door, ready to forget the whole thing.

“Then a voice I recognized spoke through the door.

“ ‘Is that you, Larry?’ it said.

“ ‘No,’ I said. My excitement made me rash. I told him that I was Colonel Ferguson, and that he’d better open up, whoever in hell he was, or I’d kick the bloody door down on top of him. He answered in an unctuous tone that that was hardly necessary, and opened up. He was a big fellow dressed in white, like a baker or a chef. He turned out to be a doctor, or so he claimed – a Dr. Sloan. According to his story, he’d leased the house from the Trumbulls’ agent and was planning to use it as a nursing home. As a matter of fact he had a patient with him, a disturbed patient. She was particularly disturbed on account of the full moon. He hoped the noise she’d been making hadn’t alarmed me.”

“Did you see this patient?”

“Not then. The doctor stepped outside and closed the door behind him. But I could hear her on the other side of it. She was cursing him, in the most unfeminine language, and calling to me for help. I wanted to help her, of course, then and there. But the situation didn’t seem reasonable. The doctor persuaded me that the woman was off her rocker. His story was certainly plausible. There seemed no alternative but to accept it, and apologize, and went my way back to the studio.”

“He talked like a doctor, did he?”

“I’d say so, yes. He used a number of technical terms that weren’t familiar to me.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was a big chap, as I said, thickly built, perhaps my age or older. He had quite an impressive face, dark eyes and a high forehead.” The last word, for some reason, made Ferguson wince and sigh. “But there’s no need to describe him. You can see him for yourself.”

“Where?”

“In the studio. He’s the man I killed. I shot him with George’s rifle.”

“Is anybody with him?”

“Yes. I left the woman, Molly.”

“We’d better get up there. You can tell me the rest on the way.”

We left his rented car on the shoulder of the highway and drove up the coast in mine. Apart from a few trucks, there was no traffic. He explained how he had got on a first-name basis, in no time at all, with Hollywood’s most incendiary blonde. Call it an explanation, anyway.

He’d gone back to bed, but not to sleep, and lay there trying to make some sense of the night’s events. It turned out they weren’t over. He heard a scrambling and plunging in the undergrowth below the studio, and went outside with his flashlight. “It was the woman,” he said. “She’d got away from the house somehow and crossed the canyon on foot. She’d had to wade the creek, and her slacks were soaked to the waist. Her shirt, even her face and hair, were streaked with mud where she’d fallen. In spite of this, and the rather wild look in her eye, she was extraordinarily good-looking.

“I put my arm around her and helped her up the bank. My heart beat foolishly high. Frankly, I’m susceptible to women. Perhaps she sensed this. She turned to me as I shut the door of the studio and laid her poor soiled head on my shoulder.

“ ‘You won’t let him take me back?’ she said. ‘You’ll look after me, won’t you?’

“Under the circumstances, I couldn’t very well refuse. No matter who or what she was, she was a woman in distress.”