The Murder of Miranda

by Margaret Millar

  “We never get to walk the dog anymore since she came,” Cordelia said. “It’s not fair.”

  “We could walk the cat.”

  “No, we can’t. We tried that once and Snowball just sat down and wouldn’t budge. We had to drag him around the block and someone reported us to the Humane Society and they sent a man out to investigate.”

  Juliet’s memory was soft and warm as a pillow. She re­membered the Humane Society incident as a nice young man stopping his truck to make complimentary remarks about the cat; and the Singapore incident, which Cordelia frequently referred to in a sinister manner, Juliet couldn’t remember at all. She took her sister’s word that it had happened (whatever it was) because Cordelia had more sophistication and experience than she did, being two years older. By virtue of this age gap, and the phenomenal num­ber of things that must have occurred during it, Cordelia had become an authority who dispensed information and advice like a vending machine.

  “In fact,” Cordelia said, “we’re not allowed to do practi­cally anything since she came. We may have to get rid of her. It shouldn’t be too hard if we plan ahead.”

  “I’m sick of always talking about her. I want to talk about us for a change. You and me.”

  “What about us.”

  “Do you think we’ll ever get a second chance?”

  “To do what?”

  “Be born. Will we ever be born again?”

  “I hope to Christ not,” Cordelia said. “Once was bad enough.”

  “But it might be different if we had a second chance. We might be good for something. We might even be pretty. And something else. This time I might be born first, two years ahead of you.”

  Juliet knew immediately that she’d gone too far. She turned and ran down the hall to her room, locking the door behind her and barricading it with a bureau in case Corde­lia decided to pick the lock with one of her credit cards.

  She took a shower and before putting on her pajamas she counted her fleabites. Twenty-eight. A record. She scratched them all until they bled. If she bled to death, right then and there, she would speed up her chances of being born again, brilliant, beautiful and two years ahead of Cordelia.

  At ten thirty the Admiral began closing up the house for the night, checking each room for security purposes, mak­ing sure that windows were locked and no intruders lurked in closets or behind doors. The job took a long time partly because he enjoyed it and partly because there were so many rooms, some of them never or hardly ever used.

  The drawing room, off the foyer, was opened only for formal entertaining. Its elegant little gold chairs looked too fragile to hold a sitter and its Aubusson rugs too exquisite to be stepped on. The walls were hung with gilt-framed family portraits which had, like most of the furniture, been included in the purchase price of the house. For reasons of her own, Iris allowed visitors to think the pictures were of her ancestors, but in fact the amply proportioned ladies and the men with their muttonchop whiskers were as un­known as the artists who painted them. The thrifty Dutch­men who were Iris’s real ancestors would have considered such portraits a sinful extravagance.

  Next to the living room was the conservatory, which contained an old rosewood grand piano with a broken pedal and ivory keys yellow as saffron. Now and then the Admiral would sit down at the piano and try to pick out melodies he’d learned in his youth: “Shenandoah,” “The Blue Bells of Scotland,” “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.” But no matter how softly he played, how tightly the doors and windows were closed, Iris always heard and thumped with her cane or sent the housekeeper or the girls to tell him to stop. He opened the lid of the piano, played the first few bars of Brahms’ “Lul­laby” and replaced the lid almost before any of the notes had a chance to climb the stairs. Then he went on with his job of checking the house.

  The solarium, facing south, had an inside wall faucet and a tile floor that slanted down to a screened hole in the middle in order to allow the draining of plants after they were watered. There was only one plant left in the place, a weeping fig which had grown too large to move. The Ad­miral watered it every night, knowing that at some time, perhaps quite soon, the fig would break out of its clay prison. He usually stayed in this room longer than in any of the others, as though he wanted to be a witness to the plant’s exact moment of escape, to hear the noise (big or small? he had no idea) and see a crack in the clay (perhaps a series of cracks, a shattering, an explosion, a room full of shards).

  Across the hall the game room had walnut-paneled walls and a billiard table with a rip in it. Year after year the Admiral postponed having the rip repaired. It unnerved the very good players, thus giving the poorer ones like him­self a psychological advantage. Beside the library there was a sewing room where no one sewed. Perhaps when the house had been built it was the custom for the women to do petit point or embroidery while the men played bil­liards. Now the space was a catchall for steamer trunks and suitcases, the housekeeper’s reducing machine, a pair of carved teakwood chests Iris had carted halfway around the world, a vacuum cleaner that didn’t work, the ski equip­ment the girls had used at their school in Geneva. Though the equipment was well worn, the boots scuffed, the webs of the poles bent out of shape, he was amazed that the girls had ever skied. Juliet seemed too timid to try, Cordelia too reckless to survive. No matter how hard he attempted to picture them skiing in a nice average way down a nice average slope, he could only imagine Cordelia plunging headlong from Mt. Blanc like an avalanche and Juliet hav­ing to be dragged up the smallest knoll and pushed down screaming. Perhaps there never were any nice average slopes in the girls’ lives.

  The library was in another wing of the house. It had brown leather chairs that smelled of saddle soap. The floor-to-ceiling shelves of books were behind glass and the man­tel of the fireplace was decorated with ceramic songbirds. It was a comfortable room, but the Admiral rarely sat there to read or to watch the fire. The bookshelves were locked and he could never remember where he’d put the key; and because of a defective damper the fireplace smoked badly and all the birds had turned grey as if from old age.

  The adjoining room was where Iris spent most of her time. Here, too, there was a fireplace, but its logs were arti­ficial and its flames gas. Iris wasn’t strong enough to han­dle real logs in a real grate. Sometimes she couldn’t even light the gas without help from Miranda or the house­keeper. The Admiral turned off the gas and the lamp by Iris’s reading chair and the other lamp that lit the table where half a dozen miniature chess sets were laid out, each with a game in progress. These were the games Iris was playing by mail with people in other parts of the world. To the Admiral it seemed a little like war to have unseen op­ponents in foreign countries planning strategic moves against you. But no blood was shed, nothing was lost but prestige.

  The kitchen and the rooms beyond it he left alone. They were the working and living quarters of Mrs. Norgate, the housekeeper, and he depended on her as he would have depended on a chief petty officer to keep her part of the ship tight and tidy.

  He returned to the front of the house at the same time as Miranda was coming in the door with the little poodle. She’d put a coat over the formal dress she’d worn at din­ner, but it offered little protection from the spring fog. She looked cold and damp and her voice was hoarse.

  “Alouette wanted to come home. He acts afraid of the dark lately.”

  “He might have trouble with his vision,” the Admiral said. “I understand poodles often do as they get older. Per­haps I should take him to the vet.”

  “What happens to their vision?”

  “Cataracts, I believe.”

  “Like people.”

  “Yes. Like people.”

  She let the dog off the leash and it bounded up the stairs. “He seems all right now. Maybe he simply wanted to get back to his mistress.”

  “Miranda—”

 
“I’d better go upstairs and open the door for him so that Mrs. Young won’t be disturbed.”

  “Miranda, I’m sorry about the dinner tonight.”

  “You’re sorry?” she repeated. “That’s funny, I was just going to tell you that I was sorry. It was my responsibility. I should have made better plans.”

  “No, no. Your plans were fine. Those ‘questions for a summer night,’ I thought that was an excellent idea.”

  “Mrs. Young didn’t.”

  “Mrs. Young’s illness makes her hard to please. You mustn’t take her opinions too seriously. She doesn’t mean to disparage your abilities.”

  “She means to and she’s right. I’m not qualified for a position like this, I’m not qualified for anything. It’s useless for me to keep on pretending.”

  “Sit down, Miranda. I’ll get you a drink to warm you up.”

  There was a bench along one wall that looked as if it had once been a pew in a small church. She sat down, shiver­ing, pulling the coat around her. It was several sizes too large. The poodle had been in such a hurry to go out that she’d grabbed the coat out of the hall closet without know­ing or caring whom it belonged to.

  “A drink won’t change how I feel,” she said.

  “It might. Let me—”

  “Those questions for a summer night, what a joke. Hun­dreds of summer nights have passed, and fall and winter and spring, and I couldn’t answer one of those questions positively. I haven’t earned or learned or helped or felt glad to be alive.”

  “You’ve made me feel glad to be alive.”

  “You mustn’t say nice things like that. You’ll make me cry.”

  “Please don’t. I insist you don’t, Miranda.”

  Her face was hidden in the collar of the coat, her voice barely audible. “All right.”

  “You won’t cry.”

  “No.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Thank you.” He cleared his throat as if it were his voice, not hers, being muffled in the folds of the coat. “Ac­tually you’re the best thing that’s happened to this house­hold for a long time and we’re all grateful to you. I hope you’re not planning to leave.”

  “I’m not accomplishing anything here.”

  “But you are. There’s a definite improvement in the girls’ behavior. They’re less self-centered, more responsive to other people. At dinner, for instance, they talked directly to their Uncle Charles instead of around him to each other. Did you notice that?”

  “Everyone noticed,” she said. “Especially Uncle Charles.”

  “It was a step up from ignoring him, as they’re in the habit of doing. But I’m not only thinking of the girls when I ask you to stay with us. I’m being quite selfish. In fact—well, you must be aware of how happy I am in your pres­ence, Miranda.”

  “No.” She’d hardly been aware of him at all except as a figure in the background, like one of Iris’s ivory and wooden chess pieces. Now suddenly he was stepping off the board alive, making sounds, having feelings, being happy and unhappy. It frightened her. She wanted him to step back on the chessboard where he belonged.

  The girls, reconciled by this time, were hiding behind the railing at the top of the stairs.

  “He said he was happy with her presents,” Juliet whis­pered. “I’ve never seen her give him any presents. I wonder what kind they are.”

  “Use your imagination, stupid.”

  “You mean hanky-panky? Surely they wouldn’t commit hanky-panky with Mrs. Young right in the house.”

  “They wouldn’t have to. Pops has tons of room in the back seat of the Rolls.”

  “Do you think we should tell Mrs. Young?”

  “My God, no,” Cordelia said. “She’d probably blame us. Let her find out for herself.”

  Miranda stayed for two months.

  During this time the weather remained cold and Van Eyck blamed it on the environmentalist members of the municipal government, accusing them of trying to limit the city’s growth by controlling the weather. He wasn’t sure how this was being done, but he wrote letters to alert the daily newspaper, the Chamber of Commerce and, in case more inspired revelations and clout were necessary, the bishop of the Episcopalian diocese.

  At the beginning of June, Frederic Quinn was released from the high-priced detention facility Sophrosune School, and before being transported to the high-priced detention facility Camp Sierra Williwaw, he had a whole month of freedom. He intended to make the most of it.

  He collected a dozen starfish from the wharf pilings and put them in the ovens at the club to dry out. The ensuing stench permeated the ballroom, drifted through the corri­dors into the cabanas, hung over the pool and terrace. The entire staff was pressed into service to track down the source, but no one thought of opening the ovens until it was time to start cooking for the Saturday night banquet.

  Mr. Henderson immediately blamed Frederic, who had made the common criminal mistake of hanging around to see how things turned out.

  “By God, this time you’ve gone too far, you bastard.”

  “I didn’t do it, I didn’t, I didn’t!”

  He swore his innocence on the small Bible which he carried around in his pocket for this very purpose. It was one of the more useful things he had learned at Sophrosune School.

  Some of his exploits were more or less in the interests of science. He jumped off the thirty-three-foot diving plat­form holding a beach umbrella to see if it could be used as a parachute. It couldn’t. After that, the cast on his left wrist curtailed his activities to a certain extent but he was still able to let the air out of Mr. Henderson’s tires and to put red dye into the Jacuzzi when little Miss Reach was dozing. She woke up, assumed she was bleeding and began to scream to the full capacity of her ninety-year-old lungs. When a stem to stern, inch by inch examination by a num­ber of bystanders proved that she wasn’t bleeding, she was rather disappointed. Her whole life had been passing be­fore her eyes and she was just coming to an interesting part.

  That same week Charity Nelson reached retirement age. She didn’t tell her boss, Smedler, or anyone else at the office, since she had no intention of retiring. Instead she celebrated by herself with two bottles of Cold Duck. Half­way through the second bottle she became quite sentimen­tal and decided to phone her first husband, who lived somewhere in New Jersey. By the time she’d tracked him down to Hackensack and learned his phone number she couldn’t remember why she was calling him.

  “Hello, George. How are you?”

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning, that’s how I am.”

  “Your clock must be wrong. Mine says twelve.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Oh, George, how could you forget our anniversary?”

  “I’m not having an anniversary. You sound stinko.”

  “George, I am stinko.”

  “Who the hell is this, anyway?”

  “This is me,” Charity said. “Me.”

  She hung up. Men were beasts.

  In mid-June, Grady Keaton returned to work at the Pen­guin Club. The girls brought the news home as their contri­bution to the dinner entertainment that night, but the Admiral was dining out and Iris was confined to her room, so they had only Miranda to contribute it to.

  “That lifeguard is back again,” Cordelia said. “The one who locked Frederic Quinn in the first aid room. Remem­ber, Miranda?”

  “No.” Miranda raised an empty fork to her mouth, chewed air, swallowed. “No.”

  “You were there.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I do,” Juliet said. “All hell broke loose. And afterwards Frederic threw up all over your dress and everybody could see what he’d been eating, ugh.”

  “This isn’t a very appetizing subject for the dinner table, Juliet.”

/>   “It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Or me,” Cordelia agreed. “I don’t see why it’s all right to talk about food while you’re eating it but not when you throw it up.”

  “Stop it, girls, this very minute . . . Now let’s start over on a more civilized level. Tell me what you did today that was interesting.”

  “We already told you about seeing the lifeguard who’s back working at the club. We forget his name.”

  “Grady,” Miranda said. “I think that was his name—Grady.”

  She went down to the club the next afternoon while the girls were at a movie. She stood outside looking in at the pool through the glass door. Grady was leaning against the steel frame of the lifeguard tower, his arms crossed on his chest, an orange-colored visor shading his face. He seemed smaller than she remembered, as though someone had lo­cated a vital plug and let some of the air out of him. He had shaved off his mustache—some girl probably asked him to or asked him not to. She wondered how many girls there’d been in the eight months and three days since Paso­loma.

  She wanted to leave, to go back to the Admiral’s house and hide in her room, but she couldn’t force her limbs to move. She stood there for such a long time that one of the porters came out of the club and asked her if she needed help. He was a young Mexican who spoke the Spanglish of the barrio.

  She said, “No, I’m fine. I was just about to leave.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you. Muchas gracias.”

  “Por nada.”

  He reminded her of the boy in the dining room of the clinic, Pedro. Grady had promised him a ride in the Porsche, but Grady wasn’t very successful at keeping promises. The instant they rolled off his tongue they rolled out of his head and heart. “I never said anything about marriage or commitment or forever . . . Jeez, I’m not a for­ever-type guy, Miranda.”

  Poor Grady, he didn’t recognize what was good for him, he would have to be forced into doing the right thing.