Росс Макдональд: The Wycherly Woman

Whenever he mentioned her name, it came out soggy with emotion. I tried to dehydrate it a little:

“You’re melodramatizing a little bit, I think. When girls disappear, it’s generally for some good reason of their own. Every year thousands of young women leave their families, or their schools, or whatever they happen to be doing–”

“Without telling anyone of their plans?”

“That’s right. You’ve been out of the country, anyway. You wouldn’t know if she had tried to contact you.”

“I could always be reached in an emergency.”

“But maybe it wasn’t an emergency, to your daughter.”

“Let’s hope that’s the case.” He sat down heavily, as if his bout of emotion had exhausted him. “But what good reason could she possibly have for going away? A girl with her opportunities?”

“Opportunity is where you find it.” I looked around the mortuary room, and out the window to the little city and the wide empty valley. “Was Phoebe happy at home?”

He said defensively: “She spent very little time here in recent years. We always went to Tahoe for the summer, and of course she’s been going to school the rest of the year.”

“How was she doing at school?”

“Adequately, so far as I know. She had a little academic trouble last year, but that was resolved.”

“Tell me about it.”

“She had to leave Stanford. She didn’t flunk out, exactly, but it was suggested to us that she’d be more comfortable in a less competitive atmosphere. Which is why she transferred last fall to Boulder Beach. I wasn’t too happy about the transfer, since Stanford’s my alma mater.”

“How did your daughter feel about it?”

“Phoebe seemed to be keen on the change. I gathered that she’d found herself a boy friend at the new place.”

“What’s the boy friend’s name?”

“She called him Bobby, I think. Feminine psychology is not my forte, but she seemed to have quite a crush on this boy.”

“A fellow-student?”

“Yes. I know nothing about him, but I wasn’t displeased at the idea. She’d never taken much to boys in the past.”

Girls fall hard, I thought, when they fall for the first time at twenty-one. “Is she attractive?”

“I’d say so. Of course I’m a fond father.”

He produced an alligator wallet and flipped it open. Phoebe looked up at me through transparent plastic. She was attractive, but not in any ordinary fashion. Careless light-brown hair swirled around her head. She had great blue lamps of eyes. Her mouth was wide and straight, passionate in a kind of ingrown way. She looked like one of those sensitive girls who could grow up into beauty or into hard-faced spinsterhood. If she grew up at all.

“May I have this picture?”

“No,” her father said flatly. “It’s the best I have of her. I can let you have some others if you like.”

“I’ll probably need them.”

“I might as well look them up now, while we think of it.”

He left the room abruptly. I heard him going up the stairs two at a time, then banging around on the second floor. Something crashed and shook the ceiling.

Wycherly bothered me. He was a gentleman of the old school, as such things went in the sixties, but there was a violence in him that kept breaking out. He pounded down the stairs and flung the door open so that it rebounded against the wall. His face was an uneven crimson:

“Damn the woman, she’s taken all my pictures. She hasn’t left me a single one of Phoebe.”

“Who?”

“My wife. My ex-wife.”

“She must be quite fond of the girl after all.”

“Don’t you believe it. Catherine was never what you’d call a devoted mother. She took the pictures because she knew I valued them.”

“When did she take them?”

“I presume when she went to Reno. That was last April. I haven’t seen her but once since then. She shook the dust of Meadow Farms from her feet–”

“Is she still in Reno?”

“No. She simply went there for her precious divorce. I believe she’s living somewhere in the Bay area, I have no idea where.”

“You must have some idea. Aren’t you supporting her?”

“That’s handled by the lawyers.”

“Okay, give me the name of a lawyer who knows her address.”

“I will not.” He breathed at me like a bull, or at least a good fat steer. “I don’t want you making any attempt to contact Mrs. Wycherly. She’d simply confuse the issue, give you a completely false impression of Phoebe. Of both of us, for that matter. Catherine has a vile tongue.” His elastic lips bulged over a mouthful of words. To judge by his expression, they tasted bitter. “She said the most dreadful things.”

“When was this?”

“She came aboard the ship the day I sailed – forced her way into my cabin and attacked me. I had to have her removed.”

“Attacked you?”

“Verbally, she attacked me. And most unfairly. She accused me of leaving her penniless. Actually I was most generous with her – a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement, and ample alimony.”

“You say the divorce was in April?”

“It became final at the end of May.”

“Has Phoebe been seeing her mother since the divorce?”

“Absolutely not. Phoebe considered that Catherine had done us both a great wrong.”

“The divorce was Catherine’s idea, then?”

“Entirely. She hated me. She hated Meadow Farms. She had no regard for her own daughter, even. I know for a fact that after Catherine left here the two of them never met, except for that ugly moment in my cabin.”

“Phoebe was on the ship at the same time as her mother?”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“Why ‘unfortunately’?”

“Phoebe was naturally shocked and horrified by the things my wife said. She did her best to calm her down, of course. She was really very good to her, I thought. Better than she deserved,” he added prissily.

“Did they leave the ship together?”

“Certainly not. I didn’t see them leave – frankly I was feeling under the weather after Catherine’s attack, and I didn’t venture out of the cabin again. But it’s unthinkable that Phoebe should have gone off with her mother. Quite unthinkable.”

“Did Phoebe have funds of her own? Could she have taken a plane or a train?”

“She could have, yes. As a matter of fact, I gave her quite a large amount that very day.” He went on in a self-justifying tone: “Her expenses at school had been running higher than she’d expected. She’d had to buy a car, and that put quite a dent in her allowance. I gave her an extra thousand to tide her over.”

“In cash, or by check?”

“Cash. I happened to be carrying a good deal of cash.”

“Where was she planning to go when she left the ship?”

“Back to the hotel. I had a suite at the St. Francis. I left it paid up a night in advance for her.”

“Was she driving her own car?”

“No. Her car was in the Union Square garage. She wanted to drive me to the dock herself, but I was afraid of getting caught in a traffic jam. I insisted we take a taxi.”

“Did she take the same taxi back to the hotel?”

“I presume so. She asked the driver to wait. Whether he did or not I can’t say.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He was a darkish fellow. That’s all I can remember. A small darkish fellow.”

“Negro?”

“No. More Mediterranean in type.”

“What kind of a taxi was it?”

Wycherly uncrossed and recrossed his thick tweeded thighs. “I’m afraid I don’t remember. I’m not a noticer.”

“Can you describe Phoebe’s car, or give me the license number?”

“I never actually saw her car. It’s some sort of a small imported model, I believe. She bought it secondhand in Boulder Beach.”