Росс Макдональд: The Wycherly Woman

“I wanted to.” His mouth did the mousetrap trick.

“But your mother wouldn’t let you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I did.”

“Who’s been telling lies about us? Who have you been talking to?”

“Your mother, and one or two of the tenants.”

“You have no right to come bothering my mother. She only did what she thought was right. She believed that Phoebe had gone off on a trip with her father. We both did,” he added as an afterthought. “We kept expecting to hear from her. It isn’t our fault she didn’t write. You’d think she’d send a postcard at least, to tell us what to do with her things.”

“Why do you think she didn’t?”

“I don’t know, honestly. I don’t know anything about it.”

He was painfully defensive. Perhaps he was simply too scared to co-operate. I realized that I hadn’t been handling him with any tact, and I changed my line of questioning:

“I’m interested in the things she left behind. Can you tell me where they are?”

“Yes. They’re in the storage room. I’ll show you.”

He seemed glad to have a chance to move. He led me around a big gas furnace, ducking under its vents, and unlocked a door in the corner of the basement. Dust-laden sunlight slanted from a high window in the concrete wall. Bobby switched on a hanging bulb. Half-a-dozen suitcases and hatboxes were piled beside a large steamer trunk. The trunk was plastered with hotel labels, American and foreign.

Bobby Doncaster had the key to the trunk on his key ring. He unlocked and opened it. The contents smelled faintly of lavender and of girl. They included masses of dresses and skirts, sweaters, and blouses, an expensive beaver coat. Bobby watched me finger the coat with something like jealousy in his eyes.

“Are the suitcases hers?”

“Yes.”

“What’s in them?”

“All kinds of things. Clothes and shoes and hats and books and jewelry and doodads. Cosmetics.”

“How do you know what’s in them?”

“I packed them myself. I kept expecting to hear from Phoebe, so that I could send her her things.”

“Why didn’t you send them home?”

“I guess I didn’t want to. It seemed so – well, so final. Besides, she told me her father had closed – was closing their house. I thought her stuff would be safer here. I kept it under lock and key.”

“She left a lot of stuff behind,” I said. “What did she take with her?”

“Just a weekend bag, I think.”

“And you believed she went off on a two-months’ cruise with nothing more than a weekend bag?”

“I didn’t know what to believe. If you believe I know where she is, you’re wrong. You couldn’t be wronger.” He added in a gentler tone: “I only hope you find her.”

“You may be able to help me find her.”

This startled him: he was easily startled. “How?”

“By telling me what you know about her. First I’d better have a look at the suitcases.”

I went through their contents in a hurry and found nothing that seemed significant. No letters, no photographs, no diary, no address book. It occurred to me that Bobby might have combed them out.

“Is everything here?”

“I think so. I packed everything I could find of hers. Dolly Lang helped me. She’s – she was Phoebe’s roommate.”

“You didn’t put anything aside, as a keepsake perhaps?”

“No.” He seemed embarrassed. “I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

“Do you have a picture of her?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t. We never exchanged pictures.”

“You mentioned some books of hers. Where are they?”

He pulled a heavy cardboard carton from behind the trunk. The books inside were mostly textbooks and reference books: a French grammar and a Larousse dictionary which was dog-eared with use, an anthology of English Romantic poets, a complete Shakespeare, some novels including Dostoevsky in translation, a number of quality paperbacks on psychology and existentialist philosophy. The name inscribed on the flyleaf, ‘Phoebe Wycherly,’ was in a small, distinctive hand – the kind that is supposed to indicate intelligence and sensitivity.

“What kind of a girl is she, Bobby?”

“Phoebe’s a wonderful person.” As if I’d questioned this.

“Describe her, will you.”

“I can try. She’s fairly tall for a girl, about five foot seven and a half, but slender. She wears size twelve clothes. She has a very good figure, and nice hair, cut medium short.”

“What color?”

“Light brown, almost blonde. Some people wouldn’t call her pretty, but I would. Actually, she was beautiful when she felt good – I mean when she was happy. She has those deep dark eyes. Blue eyes. And a wonderful smile.”

“I take it she wasn’t always happy.”

“No. She had her problems.”

“Did she talk about them to you?”

“Not really. I knew she had them. Her family had broken up, as you probably know. But she didn’t like to talk about that.”

“Did she ever mention some letters that came last spring?”

“Letters?”

“Attacking her mother.”

He shook his head. “She never said anything about them to me. In fact she never spoke about her mother at all. It was one of those closed subjects.”

“Did she have many closed subjects?”

“Quite a few. She didn’t like to go into the past, or talk about herself. She had a rocky childhood. Her parents were always quarreling over her, and it left its mark on Phoebe.”

“In what way?”

“Well, she didn’t know if she wanted to have any children, for one thing. She didn’t know if she’d make a fit mother.”

“You talked about having children?”

“Of course. We were going to get married.”

“When?”

He hesitated, and glanced up at the hanging bulb. The light held his eyes. “This year, after we graduated. I was going on to graduate school. It would have worked out, too.” He pulled his eyes down from the hypnotic bulb. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

“It’s strange your mother didn’t mention this. Does she know about your marriage plans?”

“She ought to. We argued about it enough. She thought I was too young to think about getting married. And she didn’t understand Phoebe, or like her.”

“Why?”

A wry, sideways smile made his mouth ugly. “Mother probably would have felt that way about any girl that I was interested in. Anyway, she’s always hated people with money.”

“But you don’t.”

“It makes no difference to me, one way or the other. I can make my own way, I’m an all-A student. At least I was until this semester, and I still have a couple of weeks to pull it out.”

“What happened this semester?”

“You know what happened.” He looked down at Phoebe’s abandoned belongings, green eyes half-shut, lower lip thrust out. He shook his head tautly. “Let’s get out of here.”

“This is as good a place to talk as any.”

“I don’t want to talk any more. I’m getting pretty sick of your insinuations. You keep hinting that I’m lying.”

“I think you’re holding back on me, Bobby – suppressing some of the facts. I want them all.”

“We can’t stand here all day.”

“Sit down then.”

He didn’t move. “What else do you want to know?”

I picked a fairly neutral subject. “How was she doing in school?”

“Pretty well. She knocked off mostly B’s at the midterms. She was majoring in French, and she has a knack for languages. She told me she was doing a lot better than last year at Stanford – didn’t have so many emotional problems.”

The wry and ugly smile took hold of his mouth again. He straightened it out, but it left the impression that he was mocking himself.