Simon Said

by Sarah Shaber

  Mrs. Blythe was pleasant enough to Simon when he called her on the telephone. He wasn't sure that she really understood the purpose of his visit, but she did invite him to come by that afternoon.

  Rose Street was so short, it almost qualified as an alley. Narrow and winding, it hadn't been asphalted in years, and the original cobblestones showed in patches. If any place in Cameron Park was haunted, this was it. At first glance, the house looked like it belonged in a fairy tale; it sat on a huge wooded lot. Its roofline, front door, and window arches were rounded. The house was a wreck, though. The porch was piled with junk—old lumber, Victorian fretwork that must have fallen off over the years, window screens, and the rotten remains of some wicker porch furniture. The roof was decorated with fallen leaves and branches. An old paneled station wagon with broken windows and four flat tires was parked next to a Quonset hut. Once a garage, it had now fallen in.

  The yard was a new-growth forest. Saplings and volunteers sprouted all over the place. Grass would have been impossible under the layer of leaves that hadn't been raked in years. Kudzu had begun its inexorable work, growing over a side yard and covering a patio on its way to tear down the house. Simon could see the lumps on the patio where the wrought-iron furniture had been carpeted with the stuff. If the kudzu got any kind of a grip on the foundation, it would take blowtorches to stop it.

  Mrs. Blythe had stacked piles of wood across the walkways to the house and painted them white to discourage trick-or-treaters many Halloweens ago. The barricades couldn't stop anyone serious about getting to the house, but they made it look fortified and forbidding.

  Simon picked his way around the piles of wood and climbed up the crumbling stone steps. He rang the bell but didn't hear it sounding inside. So he knocked twice, loudly. Lillie Blythe answered the door almost immediately. She wore a neat blue dress with a wide skirt and white Peter Pan collar and cuffs. The dress was faded and threadbare, although clean and ironed to perfection. She wore stockings, black pumps, and a pearl choker. Her blond hair showed an inch of gray at the roots and was styled like Doris Day's forty years ago. She could have stepped out of a Frigidaire advertisement in the pages of Life magazine in the s, except maybe for the cigarette that dangled out of her mouth and the dowager's hump that caused her to lean forward slightly. Her skin was remarkably clear and unlined. She had obviously spent most of her life indoors.

  Simon was so busy taking in her appearance that he didn't say anything. "Yes?" Mrs. Blythe said. "Can I help you?"

  Simon introduced himself. To his surprise, she remembered who he was.

  "Please come in," she said, opening the door wide and gesturing into the dark interior. Simon entered with the same apprehension Pip must have felt when he was summoned by Miss Haversham. But instead of cobwebs, dirt, and decaying wedding cake, Simon saw boxes piled everywhere.

  Mrs. Blythe's living room was stacked at least five feet high with boxes sealed with packing tape. From the labels, Simon could see that the boxes had originally held everything from Jack Daniel's to lamp shades. There was no clue what was packed in them. The living room was so crowded that it could be negotiated by only two narrow paths, one that disappeared down a central hallway and one that went into a dining room. From where he stood, he could see that the dining room table and floors were stacked with boxes, too. What he could see of the wallpaper and furniture had been aged to a uniform gray-brown, with an occasional splotch where a pattern had once been. The house was very clean. There were no cobwebs and decayed wedding cake here.

  "Come into the kitchen," Mrs. Blythe said. "I'm afraid that there isn't room to sit in here. When one gets old, one does tend to collect things." Yes indeed, thought Simon. He followed her down the path that led into the central hall, which was lit by a chandelier with just one functioning lightbulb. There were boxes here, too, stacked along the wall and lining the sides of the staircase to the second floor.

  He definitely did not want to walk into her kitchen. But he did, and he saw the clues to what Mrs. Blythe stored in her boxes stacked on the kitchen table. Crocheted blankets, shawls, and pillows were piled on a big old kitchen table in a breakfast nook with a bay window. Mrs. Blythe must spend all of her time crocheting at this table, he thought. An old wing chair stood at its head, and near to hand were a lamp and baskets of yarn and other supplies. Simon reckoned if all the boxes in the house were full, she had been crocheting almost constantly for many, many years.

  The kitchen was clean, too. There was no grime on the old stove or refrigerator, and the counters looked clean enough to eat on. The stove was a gas one. Simon didn't much like the idea of an open flame in that house.

  Vines almost obscured the view from the large window near the kitchen table. One tendril had worked its way inside through the window frame, crept along the floor, and twisted around the leg of the wing chair. Simon could imagine that someday the vine would cover the chair and Mrs. Blythe, too. The image disturbed him deeply, and he had to fight the urge to leave and disregard whatever Mrs. Blythe might know about Anne Bloodworth.

  She led him over to the table, where she sat down in the wing chair. The ivy twined perilously close to one foot. Simon took a straight chair next to her. "Please excuse this mess," she said. "I'm afraid crocheting is my passion. This piece," she said, holding up a lovely, intricately patterned shawl, "is for my sister Sallie's girl. She's having a baby soon. She gets so cold when she's expecting."

  It was at least eighty degrees outside, and Sallie's girl was probably a grandmother by now.

  "It's very nice," Simon said. "Thank you. Time does crawl by now that my boys have gone to college. And my husband travels so much in his work. I just have to do something to keep busy. All this," she said, gesturing around the table, "is for the church bazaar next month. My things always sell so well there."

  Simon wondered if it would be possible to get her on the subject of Anne Bloodworth, and whether it would be productive if he did.

  She picked up her hook, threaded yarn deftly over her fingers, and began to add a row to the shawl. Her hands moved easily and confidently.

  "I know you're here to talk about Anne," she said. "I'm not surprised that she died violently. When you socialize outside your class, that's what happens."

  Simon could not believe his luck. "Are you talking about her beau, Mrs. Blythe?" "Of course. This is what this is all about, isn't it? She was in love with someone who was completely inappropriate for her. She couldn't even tell her friends who he was. Called him Mr. X—what nonsense. It's no wonder her father tried to hurry up her marriage to Adam. He was probably afraid she would make a fool of herself and never recover socially."

  "Do you think she was trying to run away when she disappeared?" "I suppose so. She was so influenced by those college people, and by all those suffragettes in the clubs she belonged to, she thought she could do anything. She gave no thought of her responsibility to her father. She was his only child and heir, and she had obligations. Adam Bloodworth was the perfect match for her. They would have had money and social position. But she didn't care about that."

  "Do you know who Mr. X was?" "I would be the last person she would tell. But I do know she met him at college. She couldn't help but drop a few clues about him. All the other girls in our crowd thought it was thrilling to have a secret lover. His letters were so romantic, they said. I would say, 'What's the point if he can't afford to give her a ring?' "

  "Couldn't he?" "If he could afford to marry her, why didn't they get engaged like regular people? Because he didn't have any money or expectations, that's why. So they had to sneak around behind everyone's back. I used to tell her she watched too many Greta Garbo movies."

  "What do you remember about her disappearance?" "She had given the help the night off so they could go to some movie they wanted to see. It wasn't their regular night off, either. Anne didn't have any idea how to handle servants. She treated that maid of hers as if she were white. Anyway, the servants came back late, after Mr. Bloodwort
h and Anne were in bed, or so they thought. No one knew she was missing until the next morning. Then the neighborhood was in a complete uproar. I remember sitting by the front window of our sitting room, watching everyone look for her. I've never seen so many men and dogs in my life. Even the boys from State College and the volunteer fire department from Fuquay-Varina showed up to help search. It took two years for our camellias to recover from the trampling they got. Then, of course, everyone seemed to think she had left town. But she didn't get far after all, did she?"

  "No, she didn't. Where was her cousin during all this?"

  "Adam was supposedly fishing all night up at Whitaker Mill, and he showed up at the house hours after all the fuss started. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now." "You don't? Why not?"

  "He was absolutely fastidious. He took germs very seriously. Anne told me that he washed his hands with carbolic every day. I cannot envision him baiting a hook." "So you think he could have killed Anne?"

  "I didn't say that. I think he didn't have a good alibi, so he made one up, quickly." "Did other people accept it, or did most people think as you did?"

  "Those coloreds in Little Rock, they're out of line, don't you think?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "You let colored people go to school with white people and pretty soon they'll want to marry one another," she said. "It seems to me that if they use the same books, they're getting the same education. Separate but equal—that makes sense to me."

  Now Simon understood why she dressed like June Cleaver. This woman was still living in the fifties. "Imagine President Eisenhower sending in federal troops like that, to a sovereign state," Mrs. Blythe said. "The states have the right to run their own affairs. It says so in the Constitution. That's what we fought the Civil War over."

  Somehow, Simon didn't think it would help to mention the fact that the South had lost the Civil War. Simon tried to get Mrs. Blythe back on the track of Anne Bloodworth's disappearance in 1926, but he only managed to get the subject changed to Sputnik and the Russian menace.

  Mrs. Blythe escorted Simon out of her decaying house, past the boxes of crochet destined for the church bazaar. Should she ever decide to deliver them, she would have to hire Mayflower to do it.

  Chapter Twenty

  "I THINK YOU CAN TRUST WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT EVENTS IN THE distant past," Marcus said. "The present would be another story."

  "She's not living in the present," Simon said. "She's somewhere in Eisenhower's second term. She kept talking about Sputnik and the Little Rock school crisis." The two men were sitting in the faculty lounge of the history department, where Simon had gone to drink a Coke and unwind after his interview with Mrs. Blythe. There he had found Marcus grading blue books at the long table in the middle of the room.

  "What would make her like that?" Simon asked. "Alzheimer's disease?" "Without having talked to the woman," Marcus said, "I think there must be some other syndrome at work, rather than the common senile dementias of old age. I would guess that something psychologically traumatic happened to her, which caused her mind either to return to the 1950s or kept her from leaving them."

  "So if she lives in a time before the event," Simon said, "she doesn't have to deal with it."

  "That's right. Her mind protects itself. It's a coping mechanism. Not what most psychologists would consider a very healthy one, though."

  "Whatever happened to her must have been terrible." "Terrible for her. Not necessarily for someone else. She sounds like a person who is very rigid in her attitudes. Rigid people always have more trouble adapting to change than flexible ones."

  "How do you think I'm doing?"

  "Excellently. Your psychology is so normal that I could use you as a control when I'm training my rats."

  "Be serious."

  "I am serious. It's normal to be unhappy if something miserable happens to you. What's not normal is to get stuck permanently in 1957."

  "Could anything be done for her?" "I would never suggest it if she was my patient. Maybe thirty years ago, psychotherapy or medication would have served some purpose. Now it would just be cruel. If you were able to bring her out of the past, think how disoriented she would be. Leave her alone."

  "But you do think her memory of 1926 is trustworthy?"

  "As much as anyone's would be."

  Simon bummed a yellow legal pad from Marcus and sat with him at the table, reconstructing his interviews with Mrs. Holland and Mrs. Blythe. Usually Simon took a tape recorder to interviews. He preferred to concentrate on reaching a rapport with his subjects rather than on taking notes. But Simon hadn't wanted to make these elderly ladies uncomfortable by arming himself with a tape recorder. Fortunately, he had an excellent memory, and he was able to reconstruct the conversations almost verbatim.

  Simon taught a semester course in oral history every other year. He never got tired of watching his students' reactions when they participated in one of his favorite exercises. He would ask them to read several popular accounts of the Pearl Harbor crisis, then to interview eyewitnesses who lived in the community. One old gentleman, who was a retired civilian employee of the Navy Department, could be counted on to make such pungent and shocking observations about Franklin Roosevelt that his young interviewers were left stammering. Then Simon would ask them to write a paper about the differences between the printed sources and the oral testimony they had collected. This little experiment always separated the historians from the dilettantes. If they were historians, the students became addicted to diaries, letters, and old people, like chocoholics who had to have Ghirardelli every day. If they were dilettantes, they changed their major.

  So it wasn't a surprise to Simon to find, after just two conversations with real people, that the newspaper accounts skimmed the surface of the story of Anne Bloodworth's disappearance. Now he wanted desperately to find Bessie. If she really had been Anne's maid, her knowledge could be crucial. There was still no answer to his newspaper ad, and Simon wished he'd offered a lot more than a hundred dollars for information about her.

  When Simon finished his notes, he looked up at the clock and realized it was almost time for his class. Marcus had slipped away long ago, leaving him a brief note propped facing him on his empty Coke can. "No neurosis," it read, "is possible with a normal sex life (Freud)." Simon carefully folded the note in half and put it in his jacket pocket. Then he wrote a reply. "Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit (Seneca)."* Grinning, Simon stuck the note in Marcus's mailbox on his way to class. Let him work on that one for a while.

  *'"There has not been any great talent without an element of madness."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  SIMON, JULIA MCGLOUGHLAN, AND OTIS GATES MET AT THE neighborhood bar for a conference on the Bloodworth murder case. Simon had made copies of his interviews for Otis and Julia. They read the pages carefully while sipping on their beers, and Simon drank his and stared at the old black-and-white pictures of various North Carolina State football teams that covered the walls.

  The bar had been built in a blessed time before ferns, piped in classical music, and pastel prints. A jukebox blasted out rock 'n' roll from the golden sixties and seventies. The knotty pine walls were stained the color of mahogany from years of cigarette smoke. The old-fashioned pinball machines rang, crashed, and lit up. Pool was played night and day in a side room, at five dollars a rack, no one under eighteen allowed. Burgers, buffalo wings, steak, spaghetti, fries, and iceberg lettuce salads were the only items on the menu. There was nothing at all trendy about the place. It was packed all the time.

  Sergeant Gates took up an entire side of the booth and still oozed a little over the edges of his bench, while Simon and Julia sat together on the other side of the booth. Simon was glad to see Julia was drinking beer. He wouldn't have been devastated if she'd ordered white wine, though. No one was perfect.

  Gates looked over his reading glasses at Simon. "This is interesting," Gates said. "It tells us a lot about Anne Bloodworth. She was inte
lligent, independent, and had no intention of marrying her cousin. She was in love with someone else. Just about everyone in her circle thought she had run off with him when she disappeared."

  "That may be why the hue and cry over her disappearance died down so quickly" said Julia. "No one was very worried about her." "Exactly" Simon said. "In fact, there was probably a lot of effort spent on covering up. Bloodworth wouldn't have wanted anything about a lover in the newspaper. There was that one reference about rumors that she had run off with a lover, but Adam Bloodworth denied it."

  "So her father makes a big show about looking for her by hiring Pinkertons and putting ads in newspapers all over the world, but he doesn't really care about her being found—because of the scandal," Julia said.

  "He's protecting her from embarrassment," Simon said, "not to mention his own and his cousin's." "You can bet, though, that if all these girls knew about Mr. X, lots of other people in the community did, too," Julia said. "Especially after she vanished. One of those girls was bound to have told her parents. After that, there would have been no stopping the rumor."

  "Rumor is different from scandal," Simon said. "One is speculation and the other is often true." "Only after they didn't hear from Anne in a few years did her friends begin to worry about her safety. And her father was already dead," Julia said. "He would have been the obvious person to reopen an investigation. But since he couldn't, we're the first people to do anything about it in seventy years."

  "Hold on, you two," Otis said. "You're letting your imaginations run off with you. The only new fact that surfaces in these interviews is confirmation of the secret beau. Everything else is just guesswork. We come back to the same problem. The girl might have intended to run away. The suitcase certainly adds some weight to that conclusion. But she didn't. She was shot in the head and buried on her own property. We still have no idea who did it."