Gene Wolfe - Pandora by Holly Hollander

“I know where it is.”

“Only Les’s folks don’t really go for having me around all that much, and living in the same house, Les and I don’t hit it off like we used to. So I thought of you. I get an allowance—I could pay fifty a month, and I know you could use it. Besides, there’s some questions I have to ask you.”

Muddy came in then with my stereo and said, “How about the room in back?”

Blue shook his head. “The big turret. It’s traditional.”

So that’s how I got to be a princess, captive in her tower. Don’t ask me what Blue thinks he is; he’s no giant, for sure. A dragon, maybe, or a warlock. If that’s what he is, then I’m a warlock’s secretary. I do his typing for him (he’s only a two-finger typist, and he doesn’t have a machine of his own anyhow), and when I answer the phone I say, “Aladdin Blue’s office.”

Only I’m getting a little ahead of the story. That evening we had a vegetarian dinner, the whole thing picked right out of Tick’s garden, and I got my questions in. Muddy wanted to know about some letter Blue’d gotten, and Blue said that judging from the tone of it there wouldn’t be any money in the job unless he could find some on the side. That gave me my opening. I said, “Do you remember that morning in our living room? You said the letter in the paper had been written by a woman. How did you know?”

“You have a fine memory.” Blue looked thoughtful for a minute. There was some pretty good summer squash on his plate—I happen to like squash—and he picked up a piece with his fork and then set it down. “For one thing, there was a great deal of underlining. Most people agree that women have a penchant for that type of emphasis, although you could probably find quite a few men who underline more than the average woman. What seemed to me more telling was the use, in a brief letter, of the words bravely and cheerfully. Those are female words; men scarcely ever employ them. I think that says something good about women or something bad about men, though I’m not certain what. It was only an indication, of course, not evidence.”

“You said that was the second indication you had that my … Elaine …” I drank a little coffee to get my voice straightened out.

“Holly, are you sure you want to talk about this?”

“I have to. So tell me. What was the first one?”

“The rose you found in the bouquet in your hospital room, of course.”

“You said I had a memory. I’d nearly forgotten about that, and anyway I don’t see what it means.”

“It meant that the police were wrong in thinking your uncle had been shot when he arrived at the hospital. You said it was a florist’s rose, remember? And that he must have persuaded the florist to insert it in your mother’s bouquet. That seemed very improbable to me. What appeared much more plausible was that he had bought a single rose, which would have cost only a couple of dollars, and brought it to the hospital himself; or that he had gone into some other room—one in which the patients were asleep—and taken the rose from an arrangement there. Once he’d done that, the natural place to put it would be the vase that already held your mother’s bouquet. But either explanation implied that he had been not only in the hospital but in your room; and your mother, we knew, had been in that room with you for a good part of the night.”

“So she’d seen him. Wasn’t his name on the register? And why did she kill him, anyway?”

“No, he wasn’t on the register. But then he would not have dared to register. To be admitted, he would have had to explain his relationship to you, and hospitals, especially, are alerted when a mental patient escapes. However, I doubt that a man who had succeeded in escaping from a mental institution would find it difficult to slip past a sleepy receptionist. Perhaps he was in your room when your mother arrived, though it is more likely that he came somewhat later. In any event, they left together and he died in the parking lot.”

“She was carrying my father’s gun around, then.”

Blue nodded.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Possibly simply because she was frightened. If her love letters to Larry had not been found, she would have had to see to it that Larry’s to her were, in order to provide a motive for your father. She may have been afraid of what Molly might do when they were made public. Or perhaps she had planned all along to kill someone with your father’s gun. Perhaps she planned to kill him and make it appear a suicide, though I doubt that.”

“I guess I still don’t understand what she was after.” I took another swallow of coffee and made a face.

“Freedom.”

“Yeah, and money. For her I guess there wasn’t any freedom without money. But what was she doing? Why Uncle Herbert?”

“Again—remember the day I talked to you in the hospital. You said you were rich, but later you called that a lie and said you merely came from a rich family. Even your second statement wasn’t quite true, as wealth is measured in Barton Hills. Your father was the president of a medium-sized corporation. He was paid an excellent salary, but that salary was all he had. The real wealth belonged to your uncle; it was merely administered by your father.”

“Sure, I knew that.”

“If your father had died, your mother would have been left with his insurance and his house—ten times more money than most human beings ever see, but not enough to permit her to live as she wished to live.”

“She could’ve killed Uncle Herbert, then killed my father.”

“Possibly she could have, though murdering your uncle would have been difficult as long as he remained in Garden Meadow; but she was intelligent enough, I think, to see that if she were to kill them both she lacked the brilliance to escape conviction. Those murders would have directed a much less astute policeman than Lieutenant Sandoz to her. What actually happened was that your father received a letter which seemed to indicate that your uncle had not long to live. That event, I would guess, suggested a much more subtle plan.

“She had already purchased Pandora’s Box and loaded it with two iron buggy weights—they were used to hitch the horse when there was no post or rail—so that Bill wouldn’t think it empty. Servants talk, you know, and at that time she was very probably planning to put some interesting antique in the box, just as I suggested later.”

“Those were the weights that Sandoz found under the sofa in the study?”

“Yes. She should have disposed of them before then, but at the time neither Sandoz nor I had any idea why they were there. Perhaps I should mention that it was Bill, whom they were meant to deceive, who directed me to the shop where she had bought the box. I telephoned him from the kitchen while you were sitting in my office.”

“But when the letter came, she figured out how to use the box.”

Blue nodded again. “She would kill in such a way that your father would be blamed. While he was in prison, your uncle would, she thought, die of natural causes. Your father would inherit—nothing in the law bars a prisoner from claiming an inheritance, provided it does not come to him by his crime. She, his wife, would control that money for so long as he remained imprisoned, probably for the remainder of his life.”

“Only when he figured out that he was going to die, Uncle Herbert went over the fence.”

Muddy said, “So would I, if I knew I was about to croak—I mean if I was locked up someplace. Al, how about a couple more of these thin-sliced tomatoes?”

I held out my plate. “I’d like some more, Muddy.”

“Swell. Everything’s organically grown and good as hell for you.”

“You think she just decided to hurry things up?”