“State and city police are sending out a five-state alarm here tonight for Mrs. Jeremy Playfair, wife of the Governor, who has been missing from the residence at Leafy Way since . . . Since when?”
“It was about ten when the Governor discovered she was missing, but no one has seen her since three when the luncheon party broke up.”
“We’d better say ‘since shortly after two o’clock.’ The longer she’s been missing, the more likely people are to pay attention to this. What happened to the mike? Thanks.” Carlos backed up the tape, erased the last words, and re-dictated. “. . . since shortly after two o’clock this afternoon. Her car, a white convertible . . . Do you remember the make and year?”
“Buick, 1975.”
“A Buick, 1975, is also missing. She was last seen at a luncheon party today at Leafy Way attended by . . . Who was there?”
Tash spoke directly into the microphone. “The Governor himself, members of his staff, and the Lieutenant Governor and Mrs. Jackman.”
Carlos took back the microphone. “All those who saw her at luncheon agree that she appeared to be in normal health and spirits at that time, but—”
“Stop! I’d say ‘usual’ instead of ‘normal,’ because normal always suggests its opposite, abnormal, is lurking in the wings.”
“Good point. In her usual health and spirits at that time. Hospital emergency wards are being checked throughout city and state, but so far there is no indication that Mrs. Playfair has met with an accident. There remains the possibility that she may be the victim of an unreported accident, or that she is suffering from loss of memory. Anyone with any knowledge of her whereabouts should telephone the Governor’s house at Leafy Way or State Police Headquarters immediately at one of the following numbers. We’ll get the numbers from the switchboard. Any criticism?”
“You want the truth?”
“Yes.”
“The whole thing sounds fake. People will never understand why we are sending out a five-state alarm at ten when she’s only been missing since two. We need something to make it more real. Since we can’t tell the whole truth, her previous disappearances and the canary business, we need something else to make it sound like an emergency. What about her engagements this afternoon? Did she break any?”
“Hilary will know.” Carlos reached for the telephone. He was smiling when he put it down. “She had a private engagement. An old school friend coming to tea at five.”
“And she broke it?”
“No, much better. She failed to keep it without breaking it. That’s the sort of detail that makes a disappearance seem involuntary, which is the very effect we want to create.”
Carlos dialed the switchboard again. “Nick, I need all the telephone numbers for Leafy Way and the state police barracks, and a page to take a tape to the secretariat for Xeroxing.”
When the page came back with Xeroxes of the transcript made from the tape recording, Carlos said, “If you’ll proofread these, I’ll go and tell Jerry about that letter of Vivian’s that was stolen. I think he ought to know.”
“Will you be back in time to meet the newspapermen?”
“I’ll be back in two minutes.”
The door crashed behind him as he plunged out of the room.
So he can hurry if he wants to. Tash filled in the telephone numbers on the Xeroxes by hand in order to save time. She had just finished when Carlos burst back into the room.
“Too late! They’re here. I didn’t even get as far as Jerry. Some day, when this is all over, I shall go back to my mother’s house in Sotavento and spend the rest of my life in the sun translating the love poetry of pre-Islamic Arabs into Spanish. I am not Saxon. I do not like hurrying.”
The chief usher appeared in the door way to announce the newspaper men.
Carlos dropped his cigarette stub in an ashtray, threw back his shoulders, and took up his stance in front of the fireplace. Now he was another person. Gone was the anxious, harassed public relations man, fussing over a tricky press release that had to repress more than it released. Now he was the embodiment of sangre azul, which always sounds so much more romantic than blue blood.
The tawny marble of the chimney piece threw his dark good looks into high relief. The sense of failure he had expressed a only a moment ago might never have existed. He seemed serenely assured that he could command the respect of a press corps that made a cult of irreverence. And if anybody can, he will, thought Tash.
The reporters fanned out until they formed a semicircle around him.
“Good evening,” he said. “Most of you know Miss Perkins. She has a written statement for you.”
Tash went through the crowd, handing out Xeroxed sheets. When she reached the other side of the room, she was amazed to see Bill Brewer.
“Once a reporter always a reporter?”
“I get tired of sitting at a desk all day every day,” he answered. “Besides, I wanted to see you. Like it here?”
“Never a dull moment.”
“But you don’t smile when you say that.”
“I don’t feel like smiling tonight. This disappearance is frightening.”
“Any idea what’s behind it?”
“None whatever.”
“How about dinner with me when this is over?”
“Thanks, but I’m needed here tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I’d like that. Bill, who are all these men? I don’t recognize half of them.”
“Some of the Washington press corps came down for this.”
“Why?”
“You ask why, and you a newspaper woman? Playfair is news. Just in the last few days there have been four big stories about him on the front page of every paper. He’s abolished the death penalty. He’s trying to end a strike that could to lead to riots in the barrio or war in the Caribbean. He’s announced his candidacy for a second term as governor, and now his wife has disappeared. If he survives all this, he’ll be President in a few years, and we all know it. That fellow trying to catch Miranda’s eye now is the top Washington man for The New York Times.”
“Yes?” said Carlos.
“Is there any truth in the rumor that Mrs. Playfair has disappeared before and returned without explanation?”
“No truth whatsoever.”
The simple honesty in Carlos’ voice and expression would have convinced Tash that he was telling the truth if she had not happened to know that he was lying.
Apparently, he did convince the Times man, but a woman reporter was more suspicious.
“Is Mrs. Playfair subject to attacks of amnesia?”
“No.”
“Could she be visiting a friend unofficially?”
“That’s a nasty one,” whispered Bill. “Might as well ask right out if she has a lover.”
“No.” Carlos still managed to keep his voice detached and remote.
“Is she subject to dizzy spells or allergies?”
Bill translated sotto voce: “Does she get drunk?”
“No.”
Now it was the turn of a little man in the back of the room. “Christian Science Monitor,” muttered Bill.
To those in front where Tash was standing, the little man was invisible, just a disembodied voice floating over the heads of taller men.
“What happened to the canary?”
Carlos almost cracked, then made a supreme effort: “I beg your pardon, I don’t understand you.”
“The last time I was in this room there was a canary in a big wicker cage. It belonged to Mrs. Playfair and it was called Blondel. Where is it now?”
“Mrs. Playfair has had the bird moved to her sitting room upstairs. And now, if there are no further questions, the Governor has a word to say to you.”
“I’ll see if he’s ready,” said Tash.
The hall was empty. She found Jeremy and Hilary in the communications room. He rose.
“Time for me?”
“Yes. Any news?”
“Nothing.”
He had himself under control, but there were lines in his face that Tash had never seen there before.
The bright lights of the Florida Room did not spare him as he stood beside Carlos and smiled at one or two of the reporters whom he knew well.
“I decided to hold this press conference instead of merely announcing Mrs. Playfair’s disappearance, because I wanted to ask you personally for your help. You have many sources of information, and perhaps some that are not available to me or the police. I shall welcome with gratitude anything you can do or suggest to help me find my wife.”
He fielded one or two questions with the ease of long practice. There was nothing even resembling cross-examination. The sympathy of the crowd had been with him from the moment he entered the room.
He does have mana, thought Tash. His mere physical presence is winning them over now as all Carlos’ urbanity and address could not do.
As the last reporter filed out, Hilary came in.
“The police want to talk to all of us again,” she said. “What are we going to tell them?”
“The truth,” said Carlos. “The whole truth.”
Jeremy looked up sharply. “Without holding anything back?”
“Holding things back now will just make it harder if we have to tell everything in the end, as we undoubtedly shall.”
“But what about Vivian? Do you think telling the police everything is best for her?”
“Don’t you?”
“While you’re making up your minds, I’m going to ring for sandwiches and drinks and coffee,” said Hilary.
The others protested that they were neither hungry nor thirsty, yet, when the picnic supper arrived, they all began to sip and nibble.
Suddenly, Jeremy broke away from Carlos.
“All right. You’ve convinced me. The police shall be told everything now, warts and all. Find Wilkes and ask him to step over here.”
Carlos left the room, shutting the door quietly this time.
“Would you like Tash and me to leave?” asked Hilary.
“No.” Jeremy smiled. “I have no secrets from Tash or you.”
There was a tap on one of the French windows. Tash parted the curtains and saw Carlos on the other side of the glass. She opened the window.
“Jerry!” Carlos’ voice was low and urgent. “There’s a car coming up the old right of way through the orchard. You don’t want a guard to stop her, do you?”
“Her?”
“It’s a white convertible, and—”
Already Jeremy was outside the window, Carlos at his heels. Tash and Hilary followed, hurrying around the East Wing to the orchard.
“The old right of way!” cried Hilary. “It’s an unpaved lane, so neglected and overgrown for years I didn’t even think a car could get through, but I should have remembered it.”
“So should I,” said Tash. “Sam Bates told me about it the first time I came here.”
“There’s always a disused place that everybody forgets,” said Hilary. “That’s how the Dauphin was smuggled out of the Temple, to vanish forever during the French Revolution.”
The forgotten lane was deep in shadow under the trees. The car coming toward them so slowly was visible in the moonlight only because it was white.
There was a curve in the lane. The car did not follow the curve. It left the lane and kept on coming toward the house over the grass slowly as if it were rolling in neutral down a slight incline under its own momentum. As it came nearer they could see that the one occupant was in the driver’s seat, but the hands slid off steering wheel while the car was still moving.
Jeremy ran across the grass. The others followed. Evening dew soaked their ankles.
Jeremy got to the car first. It was still moving slowly. He ran beside it, reaching for the hand brake. The car lurched to a stop.
It was she, slumped in one corner of the driver’s seat, eyes closed, head on her own shoulder, fair hair drifting across her face. There was a bruise on her forehead, bleeding a little.
Jeremy opened the car door. Without a word, he lifted her out of the car, cradled her in his arms, and carried her over the grass to the house.
“Look,” said Carlos.
On one side, the whole length of the car was scored with a deep gash from front headlight to rear fender. It looked like a sheet of paper that had been slashed savagely with a bowie knife.
“What could have done that?” cried Tash.
“Some projection that struck the car when it was moving at high speed, sharp enough to plow through its skin of thin modern steel,” said Carlos.
“I’ve seen other scars like that before,” said Hilary. “They happen most often if you try to pass a truck at high speed when you’re shaving it too close. Another millimeter and that would have killed her. I wonder if she was conscious when it happened.”
“Probably not fully conscious, but the other driver may have been. Let’s hope it was too dark for him to read her license plate.”
8
TASH WOKE AT dawn next morning. While she dressed, she listened to news on the radio.
“Vivian Playfair, the Governor’s wife, who was reported missing yesterday, returned to Leafy Way late last night. Carlos de Miranda, the Governor’s A.D.C., told newsmen that it was all a misunderstanding, and Mrs. Playfair is deeply distressed by the anxiety she may have caused for a few hours. The Orioles . . .”
It was still early when Tash left her car in the executive office parking lot. The day was windless, the landscape still as a painting. Birds called to each other in the trees above her head, and sun filtered through the leaves. It would be hot in an hour, but now the delicious freshness of dawn lingered in the mild air.
It came to her then that beauty and peace are largely aspects of vegetable life and inanimate nature. The moment the animal appears, even in his humblest forms, ugliness and war take over. What was an animal but appetite? A mouth, a maw, and a clutch of eggs and sperm feeding on one another?
Such thoughts do not come to people who are happy, especially on a beautiful spring morning. Why was she unhappy?
She met Hilary in the corridor of the office wing.
“I was looking for you. Vivian wants to see you. She’s upstairs.”
They passed through the door to the rest of the house and went up the wide stairway. Hilary led the way down the central corridor and knocked on a door.
“Come in!”
The door was opened by a young woman in a black dress with a black silk apron. One look at her face told Tash that this was Juana. “Monstrously scarred,” Jo Beth had said. It was worse than that. The whole face was puckered on one side by a cruel scar that ran from hairline to chin.
No wonder she had emigrated to America. To live with a face like that in Barlovento, where sex was still a woman’s only value must have left far more monstrous scars on the mind, however invisible. Tash was almost afraid to think of the banked fires that must burn secretly night and day under her unnaturally self-effacing manner.
Opaque curtains were drawn across every window in the bedroom. Only one lamp was burning. Its shaded light fused all the pale colors of the room into a gray monotone.
Vivian was sitting up in a wide bed, propped against a pile of pillows, smoking a cigarette. Even her fair hair and lacy bed jacket looked gray in that treacherous light. Once more her eyes were dull and her face lax and old-looking as they had been the first time Tash saw her. There was a patch of surgical tape on one temple.
She made an effort to smile, but it wavered and collapsed. “I’ve caused so much trouble,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad to see you back. There’s really nothing to be sorry for.”
“Oh, but there is. I should have left word that I was going out. I just didn’t remember to do so. That’s my trouble. I don’t remember things. You are not going to believe this. Nobody else does, but it’s the truth. I simply do not remember anything that happened yesterday afternoon or evening. I remember going upstai
rs to rest after luncheon, and the next thing I remember is Jerry carrying me over the lawn to the house last night. Everything in between is blank. This morning they told me about the damage to the car, but I have no idea how it happened.”
There are two classic responses for the reluctant witness: I don’t know and I don’t remember. Vivian had chosen the second. No one was likely to suffer such a sudden and extensive loss of memory as she claimed without a blow on the head or a great emotional shock or a great deal of alcohol.
There had been no bruise on her temple at luncheon. That wound had surely been acquired at the same time as the gash on the body of the car. Both must have occurred after she left the house, yet she had just claimed she could not remember leaving the house. She had had only one martini before luncheon. So far as Tash could recall, nothing had happened at luncheon likely to induce emotional shock in her.
This was what Washington called a cover-up. It left Tash wondering more than ever what could lie underneath.
“I asked to see you because I wanted to explain about that letter,” said Vivian. “You don’t have to worry about its being stolen. It wasn’t important. Just a letter to one of those mail order houses that advertise gadgets. This was a miniature watering pot, a silly hand-painted thing that would add a little gaiety to dull jobs like watering indoor plants. I should have told you that before.”
This time she achieved a ghost of her old smile.
Tash tried to summon an answering smile. “Don’t worry, please. It doesn’t matter.”
Vivian looked about for an ashtray and found one under a fold of the frilly counterpane. She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another.
“Wouldn’t it be safer to keep the ashtray on the bedside table?” suggested Tash.
“I suppose so, but that’s so far to reach in a bed as wide as this. I haven’t the energy . . .”
Downstairs in Tash’s office, Hilary lit a cigarette of her own. “Well?”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Nobody believes it.”
“What did happen?”
“I have no way of knowing.”
“What do you think?”
“I can’t think at this point. I can only guess. Could it be an alcoholic blackout?”
Helen McCloy Page 7