Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

“Where is your daughter?”

He crossed the room and opened a door. “Sandy!”

I followed him into a lighted bedroom. It was a strange room, as strange as Lupe’s. Wild color exploded on the walls and ceiling. A round bed stood like an altar in the middle. Sandy’s clothes were scattered across the bed.

Sebastian opened the sliding glass door. We ran down to the water. The girl was out past the surf line, swimming for her life, or for her death.

Sebastian waded in in his clothes, then turned to me helplessly. “I can’t swim very well.”

A wave knocked him down. I had to drag him out of the sucking water.

“Go and call the sheriff.”

“No!”

I slapped him. “Call the sheriff, Keith. You have to.”

He floundered up the beach. I tore off my shoes and most of my clothes, and went in after the girl. She was young, and hard to catch. By the time I reached her, we were a long way out and I was tiring.

She didn’t know I was there until I touched her. Her eyes were wide and dark as a seal’s. “Go away. I want to die.”

“I’m not going to let you.”

“You would if you knew all about me.”

“I almost do, Sandy. Come on in with me. I’m too tired to drag you.”

The eye of a searchlight winked open on the beach. It roved the sea and found us. Sandy swam away from me. Her body was white and faintly phosphorescent, shimmering like moonlight in the water.

I stayed close to her. She was the only one left. A man in a black rubber wet-suit came out on a paddleboard and took her in unresisting through the surf.

Sebastian and Captain Aubrey were waiting for us with blankets. I rescued my clothes from under the feet of the onlookers and followed Sebastian and his daughter toward the beach cottage. Captain Aubrey walked with me.

“Suicide attempt?” he said.

“She’s been talking about it for months. I hope this gets it out of her system.”

“Don’t count on it. Her family better take security precautions.”

“I’ve been telling them that.”

“You say it’s been on her mind for months. That means it antedates the current mess.”

“Correct.”

We had reached the cottage. I was shivering in my blanket, but Aubrey detained me outside. “What made her suicidal in the first place?”

“I want to talk to you about that, Captain. First I need a hot shower and a chance to get Sebastian squared away. Where will you be in the next hour?”

“I’ll wait for you in the substation.”

I opened the glass door and stepped up into the colored bedroom. Sebastian was on the far side of the room. He stood like a sentry beside an open door through which I could hear a shower running. His clothes were dripping. He had wet sand in his hair, and in his eyes a look of maniacal dutifulness.

“What do you plan to do for the next five or ten years, Keith? Stand suicide watch?”

He gave me a puzzled look. “I don’t quite follow.”

“We almost lost her just now. You can’t go on taking chances with her life. And you can’t stand around and watch her twenty-four hours a day.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Take her back to the Psychiatric Center tonight. Forget about South America. You wouldn’t like it.”

“But I made a promise.”

“To Sandy? She’d rather die than go on this way. Literally.”

“She isn’t the only one involved,” he said miserably. “I don’t have any choice about South America. It’s part of the whole ball of wax.”

“You’d better explain that.”

“I can’t. I promised not to talk about it.”

“Who did you make these promises to? Stephen Hackett?”

“No. It wasn’t Mr. Hackett.”

I moved around the bed toward him. “I can’t do anything more for you, if you won’t open up. I think you’re being taken for a ride, you and your daughter both.”

He answered me doggedly: “I know what I’m doing. I don’t want or need your help.”

“You may not want it, but you certainly need it. Are you going to take Sandy back to the Center?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll have to make you.”

“You can’t. I’m a free citizen.”

“You won’t be for long. Captain Aubrey is waiting to talk to me now. When he finds out that you’ve been buying and selling evidence in a murder case–”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the tapes you bought from Mrs. Fleischer.”

It was a guess, but an educated one, that the tapes were part of the ball of wax he’d referred to. His face confirmed my guess.

“Who did you buy them for, Keith?”

He didn’t answer.

“Who’s paying you to take your daughter out of the country?”

He still refused to answer. Sandy appeared in the doorway behind him. She had on a clean yellow terrycloth robe and was rosy from her shower. Clearly the night swim had been good for her. I found this hard to forgive.

She said to her father: “Is somebody paying you to leave? You didn’t tell me that. You said your company was giving you some separation money.”

“That’s what it is, dear, separation money.” He stood between us, looking from one to the other.

“How much money?”

“That’s none of your business, dear, I mean, let me handle the business. You don’t have to trouble your mind–”

“Gee thanks. Is Mr. Hackett giving you this money?”

“You might say so. It’s his company.”

“And you get the money if you take me to South America? Is that right? Otherwise you don’t?”

“I don’t like this cross-questioning,” Sebastian said. “After all I am your father.”

“Sure you are, Dad.” Her voice was sardonic, darkened by the authority of experienced pain. “But I don’t want to go to South America.”

“You said you did.”

“I don’t any more.” Brusquely she turned her attention to me. “Get me out of here, will you? I’ve had it with this scene. This is where I freaked out last summer, right here in this very room. This is the bed where Lupe and Steve took turns at me. In the vulva and the anus.” She touched those parts of herself like a child showing where she’d been hurt.

The words and gestures were addressed to me but meant for her father. Sebastian was appalled. He sat on the bed, then stood up quickly and brushed away the sand he had deposited.

“You can’t mean Mr. Hackett.”

“Yes I can. I blew my mind and I hardly knew what was happening. But I know old Steve Hackett when I see him.”

Like lenses in a sophisticated camera, Sebastian’s eyes were changing. He wanted not to believe her, to find a credibility gap in her story. But the truth was there, and we both knew it.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Sandy?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“I mean last summer, when it happened.”

She regarded him with scorn. “How do you know it happened last summer? I haven’t mentioned that tonight.”

He looked around rather wildly, and rushed into speech: “Your mother said something, I don’t mean she spelled it out. But there was something in your diary, wasn’t there?”

“I spelled it out,” she said. “I knew Bernice read my diary. But neither of you ever said a word to me. Never ever a word.”

“I took your mother’s lead in that, Sandy. After all I’m only a man and you’re a girl.”

“I know I’m a girl. I found it out the hard way.”

She was angry and troubled, but she sounded more like a woman than a girl. She wasn’t afraid. It occurred to me that she had suffered a sea-change into a woman, and that her storm would pass.

I went into the bathroom for a hot shower. The stall was warm and fragrant from Sandy’s use of it.

Then, while Sebastian took a shower, I talked to his daughter across the poker table.