Evil Friendship

by Packer, Vin

  “Will we ever forget, ever ever forget,

  the myriad, burning crushes

  a certain ‘sweat socks’ suffered through?”

  Someone sitting beside her in the auditorium had laughed and poked her in the ribs with her elbow and whispered, “That’s yours, Nicky. Some sadists wrote that, didn’t they!”

  When she received the post at Chillam, she had been proud and filled with resolutions about that sort of thing. And she hadn’t faltered, not for seven long years. Then Rush came along — young, cocksure, knowing, knowing everything and saying so, with her sideways looks and raised eyebrow, and following her about after sessions, leaning across her desk and saying things like, “I’ve got a crush on you and you know it. It’s why you avoid me, isn’t it?”

  Until it happened — too suddenly, before she could realize that an eventuality like the one she was facing now was probable. Poor, silly, ingenuous, insecure, dear old Rush had kept the note, kept it for years, while they had simply felt the warm knowledge between them that they had brought a halt to something impossible and, in view of the way both of them loved Chillam, disrespectful. She had kept the note.

  “Well,” Martha Kent said, “we can’t stand here all day in the swimming pool, can we?”

  “Will you return it to me then?” Miss Nicky asked.

  Late that afternoon, Martha Kent and Mary Drew Edlin met again down on the beach, under the boardwalk. They walked along, picking up pebbles and discarding them while they chatted, Martha flushed with success, Mary Drew slightly sullen.

  “But it doesn’t matter, Druid,” Martha said. It was only a first try.”

  “Yours too.”

  “Men are more difficult, I think. They don’t scare so easily.”

  “Was she really terribly scared?”

  “Petrified. Now I wish I hadn’t been so silly as to return that mushy letter to her. I could have gotten another twenty!”

  “Moly, do you think I could steal something in a store, and then sell it?”

  Martha laughed. “That would be fun! We could go together!”

  “Anyway,” Mary Drew frowned, “I pinched three shillings from Father’s jacket this morning. He never counts his change. There it was.”

  “Oh, we’ll make out all right. And I know Mother will let you live with us once you get there. She must! She’s always favored you, rather.”

  “What about Roddy?”

  “He’ll have to agree. After all, there you’ll be. Besides, after what we saw those two up to, they’re getting off easily, I’d say.”

  Mary Drew threw a pebble into the waves. “Over there, of course, we’ll make barrels with our novels. Live like queens.”

  “I’m going to demand that I choose who plays my characters in the movies. I’m going to have that written into my contract,” Martha said. “Oh, look,” bending over, “this is a lovely stone, isn’t it? It’s heavy, but look how smooth.”

  She ran her palm across its surface, then her fingertips, smiling. “Isn’t it lovely, Druid?”

  But Mary Drew was still brooding. She said, “There’s just one thing we forget. That’s Mother.”

  “Oh, well, we’ll simply leave a note explaining everything. What can she do? She knows my mother would take excellent care of you.”

  “I don’t know that she knows that,” said Mary Drew. “She’s awfully critical of your mother, particularly since she’s found out about the divorce. I think she might very well come after me.”

  “Do touch this stone, Druid.”

  Mary Drew put her hand across its surface. “Nice…. But I do worry about Mother. She’s a terrible obstacle.”

  “Druid, it’s egg-shaped, do you see! Perfectly egg-shaped. Oh, I think it’s the Druid’s egg!”

  “Something ought to be done about Mother, Moly.”

  “I guess so,” Martha said, “but let’s worry about raising the funds first. And Druid, let’s keep the Druid’s egg, shall we? What can we do with it?”

  “Let’s use it to murder Mother,” Mary Drew said.

  The two girls looked at one another — Martha, holding the stone in her hands, the sea splashing in the background, the bobbing blue and red lights of the boardwalk above them.

  “Would it be large enough to kill her?” Martha asked.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Moly and I really are crazy! How dreadfully divine to be us! We have agreed to polish off mother! Last night in the Palace of Torture, Raynor described a bloody murder with the Druid’s egg, but we prefer the razor. L. L. and Rob seem slightly silly to us lately.

  — from the diary of Mary Drew Edlin

  JUNE 8, 1956

  Detective Randolph watched the girl in the yellow robe as she twisted the belt of the robe, her eyes lowered now from his.

  He repeated his questions: “Do you remember the night near Trumpet Head, Mary Drew?”

  “How do you know about it?” she said. “Father tell you?”

  “No, Mary Drew. I read about it.”

  “I see,” she said, “in my diary. Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” Detective Randolph answered. He shifted his weight in the beaded chair, in the living room of the Kent house, and waited a moment, watching the girl’s face, waiting to see some break of emotion. But there was none. The features remained blank, unrevealing.

  Then he said flatly, “You are suspected of having murdered your mother. You need not say anything. Anything you do say will be taken down in writing, and may be used as evidence.”

  Still there was no expression on Mary Drew Edlin’s face. She did not meet his glance, but kept her eyes lowered to the robe’s belt, which she was twisting in her fingers.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked. “This morning when I got up,” the girl began in a dull tone, “the phone rang …”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Tomorrow we’ll polish off mother! Both of us are tingling with excitement!

  — from the diary of Mary Drew Edlin

  JUNE 8, 1956

  “Furthermore,” Henry Edlin was saying as he wiped egg from the side of his mouth with a corner of his napkin, “we won’t have to buy expensive costumes. After all, Mrs. Miniver wore much the same thing you wear every day, and I’d only need — ”

  “Do you want to get the phone?” his wife interrupted.

  Mr. Edlin started to push himself away from the breakfast table, but heard his daughter’s feet above him in the hallway as she rushed for the extension. He shrugged. “It’s always for her anyway.”

  “We have time enough to think about it,” his wife answered.

  “My dear, the ball is next Wednesday! This coming Wednesday!”

  “Very well, very well. We’ll talk about it at lunch.”

  “We’ll win. I know we’ll win,” he said.

  “I’m going for the outing this afternoon,” Mrs. Edlin said. “I do hope everything goes along as well as it has been.”

  “They still write to each other. I saw one in yesterday’s mail from her.” He gulped his coffee and pulled his napkin from his shirt collar, tossing it on top his plate. “Fitzgill the tailor is coming in this afternoon for a fitting on his caps. I could ask him to estimate the price for a Yankee Doodle suit. Wouldn’t have to be terribly elaborate, at all.”

  “I don’t see how people’d know I was Mrs. Miniver. There’s no costume for me or anything. Am I to wear a sign?”

  He sighed and shoved his chair away from the table. “You look like her. That’s how they’d know! The competition isn’t being judged on the costumes — it’s the imagination that counts. After all, in 1942 those two American movies were the — ”

  “All right! Heavens, Henry, I know all that!”

  “Well then, so long as the tailor is going to be in the chair this afternoon, why shouldn’t I go ahead and inquire about his fitting my costume?”

  “But don’t commit yourself, Henry,” she said.

  “What is the matter, Louisa?”

&n
bsp; “After all, Tony is ringing up tonight. I thought we could ask his advice.”

  Henry Edlin said, “I see.” “Well, don’t pout!”

  “Tony isn’t even going to be present at the Masque Ball!”

  “Still, he’s awfully amusing with things of that sort.”

  “I dare say,” said Henry Edlin.

  He walked into the hallway and took his newspaper from the tray, folded it and placed it under his arm. His wife followed him. She was wearing a melon-shaded crinkle-fabric wrapper, her hair still in the thin net that set the wave each night, her bare feet in mules. She said, “It doesn’t bother me that they write every day. Not any more.”

  “It never should have!”

  “You brought it up,” she said.

  “Merely to point out things aren’t any different than they ever were! Mary Drew still has a terrible case of hero-worship toward Martha. There’s no denying that. But it wasn’t as involved as your Dr. Mannerheim said. What nonsense!”

  Louisa Edlin stood before the mirror in the hallway, removing the net from her hair, and fluffing the reddish strands with her fingers. “Just because Dr. Mannerheim is a woman — ”

  “No, not just because she’s a woman!” he said. “Because as I’ve contended right along, Louisa, these psychiatrists spend a few years longer at school on their behinds and come out telling everyone they’re crazy! What if I told everyone their teeth were rotten!”

  “Here, darling,” handing him three letters, “mail these on your way.”

  “Right.” He leaned to kiss her forehead. “Have a good morning!”

  “And Henry, do remember the calamine at the druggist’s?”

  He waved as he went out the door, and Mrs. Edlin wandered back toward the kitchen aimlessly, humming a little of “The Morning Dew Waltz” to herself. Then she saw Mary Drew by the staircase.

  “Whatever are you doing, darling?”

  The girl looked startled. “Nothing.”

  “Was that Martha who just called?”

  “Yes. She’ll come for lunch.”

  “Fine. Would you like an egg, dear?”

  “I don’t mind,” the girl said.

  While her mother fried the egg in the worn black pan on the stove, Mary Drew sat at the small, square, enamel-top table.

  “Martha must be excited about her trip,” her mother said.

  “Awfully.”

  “Does she take to Mr. Sawyer, dear!” “Fairly well.”

  “Those things are always too bad.”

  “She’s glad to be going to America. She’s going to sell her novel there. They pay terribly high.”

  “What’s her novel about, dear?”

  “She was writing about these two characters, Lord Love-Lost, and Lady Heart-Robbed. They were rather symbolic, allegorical, really. But she isn’t bothering with them any more. We both decided they were mushy types. Now we’re both writing about the same characters. Raynor and Gretchen.”

  Her mother said, “How nice.”

  “The plot is dreadfully complicated. Murder and all sorts of things involved.”

  “Dreadful!” her mother said. “Should I break the yoke, dear?”

  “Yes. Over and hard.”

  “I don’t see how your father can bear the yoke streaming across his plate in the morning,” Mrs. Edlin sighed, “but he absolutely relishes it. Tony’s the same way.”

  “Did you find Tony’s bank yet?”

  “No! Isn’t it odd! When he calls up this evening, I’m going to ask him if he didn’t mistakenly pack it, though I can’t imagine him packing it. He’s always left it right there on his bureau.”

  “Was there much in it?”

  “About fourteen pounds, I’d guess. He’s added to it for years.” She turned the heat off on the stove and reached for a plate. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “both your father and I suspect Mrs. Mullins.”

  “Mrs. Mullins?”

  “I know, it sounds preposterous. But after all, she is here twice a week, completely on her own, and your father tells me he’s missed change he’s left about, on his bureau and in the brass tray in the hallway, and even in the pockets of his suits!” Mrs. Edlin placed the plate before her daughter. “There you are, darling.” “Thanks, Mother.”

  “You don’t mind if I run along upstairs, do you? I’ve got an awfully lot to do before our outing.”

  “Go ahead, Mother,” Mary Drew Edlin said.

  She sat at the table gulping her egg until she heard her mother moving about upstairs. Then she picked up her glass of milk and hurried to the phone in the hallway. She sipped the milk slowly as she called the Kent house and waited to hear Martha’s voice answering.

  “Hello, Moly,” she said. “Listen, we’d better stick to our original plan and take her to Southwark. I don’t think the stairs would kill her. I just checked on it.” She paused a moment listening, sipping the milk; then she said, “Oh, I thought of that, too. I agree, there’s no sense naming Stoke. It might be his day off, or something equally gruesome. Better just to say we didn’t see anyone, we just heard her screaming,” pausing again to sip more and listen more; and, “just drop the blue stone in the path. I’ll say, ‘What’s that,’ and when she bends to see, I’ll club her with our egg.” She gave a giggle, “Oh, I know, Moly, I’m just tingling! What? … Carry it in your drawstring bag. Will it be too weighed down?” She set the empty milk glass on the table. “Yes,” she said, “I agree. Well, V for Victory, and all that! And say, Moly — God bless America!”

  She hung up smiling.

  Then she walked through the kitchen back to the staircase. She stood at the bottom and cupped her hand to her mouth, then shouted, “Mother darling, can I do anything to help you?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  DOCTORS DISAGREE ON GIRLS!

  — Weerdale Sentinel headline during the Edlin-Kent trial

  WEERDALE, AUG. 29. — Again there was a stampede of people, mostly women, for the front seats when the Court doors opened shortly before nine o’clock this morning, on the fifth day of the Edlin-Kent trial.

  Many women jumped over the backs of the seats in the front row of the upstairs gallery, and craned over the railing, when the girls were brought into the dock.

  Mary Drew Edlin and Martha Kent are charged with murdering Louisa Edlin, mother of Mary Drew, on June 8.

  Thus far, both psychiatrists, Dr. Rose Mannerheim for the defense and Dr. John Evans for the Crown, have said practically the opposite of each other, in their considered opinions as to whether or not the Edlin and Kent girls are diseased in mind.

  The following excerpts from their testimony on questions pertinent to this case illustrate the remarkable contrast in medical opinion heard throughout the course of this sensational murder trial.

  On the question of sanity

  Dr. Evans: “I do not consider either girl insane. This crime had an intelligible motive. Furthermore, it was carefully planned and premeditated. It is my opinion that the Edlin and Kent girls want to be thought insane, in order to regain liberty at an earlier date than if they were convicted.

  Dr. Mannerheim: “I have interviewed both girls and thoroughly familiarized myself with this case. On a date before this murder, I interviewed Mary Drew Edlin. It is my considered opinion that they are mutually insane, certifiable under the Mental Defectives Act.”

  On their interviews with the girls

  Dr. Evans: “When I asked Mary Drew Edlin if she knew what she had done, she replied, ‘Oh, don’t be such a fool!’ … Martha Kent told me, when I asked her the same question, ‘Someone should examine your head!’ Mary Drew Edlin told me further that she was ‘raving,’ and that ‘madness is so much more imaginative than sanity’! … Martha Kent told me that my taste in neckties was ‘shocking,’ and that I ought to have plastic surgery done to give me a chin.” (At this point in the proceedings, a woman in the gallery shouted, “Hooray!”)

  Dr. Mannerheim: “All that Mary Drew Edlin was concerned over was w
hen she would be reunited with Martha Kent. She seemed unable to comprehend the fact that in all probability, this would never be. She spoke time and time again of ‘When I see Moly again,’ or ‘I can’t wait to tell Moly about …’ until I asked her point-blank: Do you really believe you and Martha will see each other again? She was quite cocksure. She offered to bet me thirty pounds that she certainly would.

  “The Kent girl asked me to tell Mary Drew Edlin that L.L. missed her. L.L. was a softer side, in their games. As they progressed with their murder plans, they seemed to omit L.L. and Rob from their discussions. Raynor and Gretchen, their dark sides, took over. Martha Kent was very sad throughout the interview, but apparently only because she was not with the Edlin girl. She asked me if I would get her a photograph of Mary Drew. When I asked Martha Kent if she was sorry that she had helped murder Mrs. Edlin, she answered, ‘There wasn’t any choice.’ I asked again, ‘Are you sorry?’ She said, ‘If you mean, would I do it again, yes I would.’ ”

  On their homosexuality

  Dr. Evans: “There is no doubt in my mind that these girls have engaged in some sort of physical relationship. This is not necessarily uncommon between members of the same sex in adolescense. It seemed to me more of a pretense at imitating love between members of the opposite sex; that is, imitating the real thing. In my opinion, homosexuals do not imagine themselves as members of the opposite sex during sexual activity. I believe the homosexual aspect of this case is greatly overstressed.”

  Dr. Mannerheim: “I believe they are overt homosexuals. I believe they are deluded into imagining that they are not. Nowhere in the diary, nor in the correspondence, do they mention loving one another as one another; only as Raynor and Gretchen, or Rob and L.L. I believe that by taking the male role — either one of them — and acting out their lovemaking as male-female, they were able to delude themselves into believing there was nothing wrong with what they were doing, just as they deluded themselves into believing they were ‘special,’ ‘above the law,’ geniuses who would sell their novels to Hollywood, and all the rest. I believe that eventually, as Rob and L.L., they might have realized their feeling for one another in a less deluded light. There is evidence of that when the Edlin girl records in her diary, ‘We both have trouble pretending Rob and L.L. It’s so real sometimes.’ But Raynor and Gretchen won out, as did insanity win out over sanity ultimately.”