Linda spoke sharply. “Monica doesn’t think it’s a good idea for you to talk to those people. And neither do I.”
“If Saxon doesn’t mind, why should she?”
“She’s upset about everything right now.”
Contradicting this, just as I finished my lunch, a call came to Linda from Ralph. The message was for me. Monica had decided that she wanted to see me right away.
Jason rose from the table. “Suppose I pick you up around nine tomorrow morning. I’ve got to be going now.”
I told him that would be fine, and when he’d gone, I hurried upstairs, hesitating before I knocked on Monica’s door. I couldn’t help remembering with a cold wash of fear that moment when I’d walked into her rooms and found Owen waiting for me. But he wouldn’t be there now.
Ralph came to the door and stared as I walked past him. He could convey more silent insolence than anyone I’d ever known. This I could ignore, as I could not ignore what had happened in the pool.
The living room was dim and empty, with draperies closed. I followed her voice and found her in a pleasant bedroom done in white and soft gray-green. Shaggy white rugs on the polished floor looked as though they’d come from the Andes, and tiny green orchids bloomed on curtains and chaise longue. Somewhere in the past, Monica had abandoned early Hollywood for something exquisitely simple.
The three cats were again in attendance, seated near the bed, and Annabella’s haughty regard followed me as I came in. Propped against huge pillows, Monica looked old and frail, and not at all like the valiant, eager woman who had run up the stairs at El Mirador this morning. Her dark eyes, sunken in their sockets, stared at me through a twilight of pulled curtains.
“I have to know!” She reached out a hand to me. “Come here—sit down close to the bed. Tell me what he said to you!”
She could mean no one but Saxon. I pulled a chair over and sat down, taking her hands in mine. Pity welled up in me because of all she had once been, all she had lost.
“He really didn’t have much to say,” I told her falsely. “I saw some of his photographs, and we talked a little.”
She closed her eyes, and I didn’t know whether she felt relief, or was just concealing her own emotions.
“Never mind,” she said. “If Mr. Barclay buys Cadenza, I’ll be saved after all.”
“Don’t count on it, Aunt Monica. Please don’t count on it.”
Her expression changed to one of alarm—as though I hadn’t been saying the same thing all along. “I must sell that house. It means everything to me now. My life! Of course there will be other offers, but nothing as large as this. Or as immediate.”
I doubted that there would be any offers, but there was no point in arguing further, since she was determined to deceive herself. When the whole thing fell through, they would all believe me. But by that time, Owen might have succeeded in his main purpose—to abduct Keith.
“I suppose Linda has told you I mean to appear at the benefit?”
“Yes. She’s upset because you’ve agreed.”
“Sometimes”—there was a hint of venom in her voice—“sometimes I enjoy upsetting Linda.”
“How can you possibly want to upset anyone so loyal to you?”
“Victims try to find other victims,” she said, unexpectedly astute.
“You don’t strike me in the least as being a victim.”
A sudden fierce light glowed in her eyes. “You’re right—I’m not! Or never for long. And I try not to fool myself all the time. Oh, there’ll be a stir when I walk out on that stage. It may even last for a little while. But I’m out of all that now, and Hollywood can be a lonely place if you’re not on the right lists and don’t get invited to the right parties.”
“Do you care about that sort of thing?”
“I used to. What did Saxon say about my consenting to appear with him?”
“He didn’t seem surprised. He was sure you’d be there.”
“And I will be! This one thing I’ll do!” Once more a valiant determination rang in her voice. “I’ll show him who and what I am. I’ll show him I’m not afraid of him, or of anything he might do. If he’s smart, he should be afraid of me. We’ve been tied together by the past for much too long, and I mean to break that tie.”
I remembered what Saxon had said about being bound to Monica through the years. “Why should you be afraid of him? I don’t think he means you any harm.” Yet I wasn’t sure that was true. I didn’t know what was true.
“He means me every harm. Even though he is to blame for all that happened, he still wants to punish me. He’s waited all these years, and now he means to try. But when I go out on that stage, he won’t dare. Whatever it is he plans, he won’t dare to carry it out. Not if they fall in love with Monica Arlen all over again. I can do it—I know I can!”
She was growing excited, and I held her hands tightly, trying to calm her.
“Don’t, Aunt Monica. You need to stay as quiet as possible now. This has been a difficult day, and you must try to rest.”
Her strength was surprising as she wrenched her hands from mine. “Did you tell Saxon I said he’d killed Peggy Smith?”
I nodded unhappily.
“Did it upset him? Did he admit it?”
Faced with her point-blank question, I had to answer. “He admitted that he was responsible for her death. He said he’d pulled the trigger.”
“That’s something! It’s the first time he’s admitted anything in all these years. Did he tell you the rest?”
“That was all he had to say.”
She lay back upon her pillows again, but her eyes were open, as if she looked into the past and saw again a scene so terrible that it had destroyed two careers, as well as a life. When she spoke, it was as if to herself, as if she’d forgotten I sat beside her bed.
“It happened at El Mirador. I was there. We had to do something to save Saxon from the police. There’d have been a whopping scandal. I helped him to clean up the room in the bungalow where she died. Then we took her out to the desert. I drove her car, and Saxon took her body in his. We left her there, with the gun in her hand. She’d meant to kill him. I saw the struggle when the gun went off. Even the powder burns were right for suicide. It was an accident, but if we hadn’t acted quickly, he’d have been charged with murder. Even if he’d been cleared in a trial, the damage would have been done. Saxon lost his head, so I was the one who had to think what to do.”
I listened to her with shock and sorrow, feeling pity for them both. It would have been better if they’d risked the scandal and gone to the police. The guilty secret they’d contrived together had divided them anyway, as well as doing permanent damage to themselves as human beings.
“Why did Peggy try to kill him?” I asked.
“Because she was jealous. Because she thought he loved her! When of course I was the one he cared about all along. Because I loved him no matter what he’d done, I had to help him. We fooled everyone. By the time she was found, our plans were made, and we never cracked under questioning. We meant to save ourselves, and save those great careers as well. How foolish we were. How blind.”
She was quiet, her eyes closed, while a trickling of tears came from beneath her lids. In the end, they hadn’t saved anything, but now I could begin to understand how it must have been. With the guilt of Peggy’s death between them, the guilt of what they’d done in destroying a life, they might easily have begun to hate each other. Neither must have been without conscience. When they played those retake scenes together, the ugliness that lay between them had shown all too clearly on the screen. She had never forgiven him for an affair with Peggy that had led to what happened. And he had never forgiven her for what she made him do. The awfulness of their actions together would always haunt them.
“He wouldn’t believe me,” she said softly. “He wouldn’t believe that I never stopped loving him, no matter what had happened. His blame for himself carried over to me, so that he became my enemy—as he is now
. Though he needn’t have been. We could have helped each other.”
“Perhaps he’s grown more generous by this time. If he wants to make a gesture of reconciliation, shouldn’t you accept it?”
“That’s not what he means to do. He has an actor’s ego! He can never forgive me for being strong and taking charge, when he was weak. He really believed in that image he projected on a screen, and the truth was more than he could take.” She broke off and closed her eyes. “I’m very tired. But I’m glad we talked, Carol. Now you’ll understand why you must never trust him.”
I drew the coverlet over her, disturbing Annabella, who glared at me. “I’ll sit here for a while, Aunt Monica,” I said. “I’ll be right here if you want anything.”
She roused herself to look at me—the old Monica Arlen look that could warm with affection and gratitude. “Thank you, my dear. I haven’t been much of an aunt to you, have I? But I’m glad you’ve come. I need you now.”
My own quick tears came straight out of my childhood, when I’d have given anything to hear such words from her. Perhaps in some strange and circuitous way, we would come to love and appreciate each other yet, Monica and I. That old concealment of what hadn’t really been a crime was so long ago, and both she and Saxon had paid for it over and over again. So now I consoled myself for knowledge I’d wanted, but couldn’t live with comfortably, because it was going to haunt me too.
Monica reached out to stroke the Siamese. “Annie’s been warning me,” she murmured. “She’s always sensitive to things the rest of us can’t see.”
In that case, she ought to warn Monica against Owen, I thought. But Annabella only curled up contentedly and began to purr under the stroking hand. After a moment or two the Persians joined her on the bed, and went prettily to sleep at Monica’s feet.
Perhaps a half hour passed before Linda knocked on the door, and I went quickly to answer ahead of Ralph.
She looked pleased and excited as she came into the room. “Saxon just phoned me,” she whispered, with a glance at the bed. “He seemed concerned about you. But mainly he wanted to tell me about his idea for an Arlen-Scott room. I think it’s wonderful, and I’ll tell Monica about it as soon as she wakes up.”
But Monica wasn’t sleeping. She opened her eyes and commanded us to stop whispering.
Linda burst out with her news, while Monica listened sleepily. I had misjudged Linda. She wouldn’t be possessive, after all, of the Monica Arlen collection.
Monica, however, took the whole thing calmly and rewarded her with a yawn. “Let’s not get excited until this really goes through. How do we know he means it—or that anyone will care? There were a great many movie people coming to El Mirador in the old days, so why us?”
Linda only beamed. “You’re always too modest. You’ve never realized how much you and Saxon meant to a whole country because of your films. Thanks to television, you’re far from forgotten.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Monica said sadly.
“Of course it matters! You’ll see.”
“I’ve outgrown all those fantasies about fame,” Monica said. “There are more important realities to be dealt with now.”
It occurred to me that there was one reality that hadn’t been dealt with yet, and perhaps this was the time, while she was in a down-to-earth mood.
“Has anyone told you that we discovered some pages torn from a book in the Arlen collection?” I asked.
At once Monica was wide awake, alert. “What pages? What are you talking about?”
Linda looked daggers at me, but I paid no attention, driven by a growing feeling that Monica shouldn’t be kept in ignorance about what went on in her home. She was not as fragile as Linda believed, and it was the tough, unvanquished side of her that I was beginning to respect. Perhaps her “retreats” were a way of renewing her will to fight.
“The index showed Peggy Smith’s name,” I went on deliberately. “However, the chapter that referred to her, and to you and Saxon, has been removed from the book. Have you any idea why?”
She blinked rapidly. “How could that possibly happen, Linda? Unless it was done long ago, when all those things were kept at Cadenza.”
“No,” Linda said. “It had to have happened recently. I remember those references vaguely.” She hesitated, and then gave in with another dark look for me. “I didn’t want to worry you about this, but since Carol has told you, you might as well know. That time when Saxon came up here to try to see you, I left him in that room. I thought he’d be interested in looking around. He’s the only person who could have torn out those pages. Though he claims he didn’t do it.”
“Do you remember what the pages were about?” Monica asked.
Linda frowned. “They were innocuous enough, as I recall. There was some mention of Peggy as a talented sculptor.”
“I know why he might have torn them out,” Monica mused. “No—don’t ask me now. I don’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter anymore. None of this matters now, when so many other problems face us.”
She lay back and closed her eyes again. At a sound, I turned and saw that Ralph had come to the door and was listening openly to every word. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. He might very well be a collector of small details, filing them away, in case he could use them to his advantage one day. It wouldn’t be the first time that an employee in a famous household had sold intimate knowledge. I wished both Linda and Monica would regard him less as a fixture and more as a possible source of future trouble.
I remembered something else Saxon had told me, and since it wouldn’t be any great tidbit for Ralph, I mentioned it.
“Saxon told me to ask you something, Aunt Monica.”
“Yes—go on.”
“He wanted to know if you remember what’s inside the little cuckoo clock that was used in Mirage.”
She countered with her own question. “Do you remember how that clock came to be in the picture?”
“There was an early scene shot in Switzerland—”
“We filmed it on a studio sound stage,” she corrected.
“All right. It was supposed to be in Switzerland. There was a romantic little chalet, with the clock on the wall. And in the picture you had to take the clock with you when you left. You said the cuckoo clock knew too much about you to be left to talk to anyone else. So the character Saxon played bought it from the woman who owned the chalet. And in the big restaurant scene later in America, you brought it to the table deliberately—to remind your love. But there wasn’t anything in the picture about something being hidden in the clock. What did he mean?”
She bristled. “He needn’t think he can get around me that way! Of course I remember what happened in real life. Just don’t let Saxon get to you, Carol. He’s probably still a great charmer.”
She didn’t mean to tell us what had been hidden in the clock. I gave my place by her bed to Linda and returned to Keith.
Young Jonah had gone home, and for the rest of the day Keith and I played games together. I read aloud to him, and sometimes we just talked—the way he used to love doing. He was becoming much more like the little boy I remembered.
I didn’t see Linda alone again until after Monica had retired that evening. She and I sat in the cheerful upstairs sitting room, looking out at the lights of Palm Springs. Tonight she seemed oddly sad and subdued. As I sat reading and making notes, she paged absently through a magazine, until she came to a decision and tossed it aside.
“Monica told me everything tonight,” she said abruptly. “I mean about that terrible time at El Mirador. How horrible it must have been for her. It’s a good thing she was strong enough to save them both—Saxon and herself.”
“Peggy Smith died.” I said. “And I don’t think Monica saved either of them.”
“That’s because things didn’t work out as she expected. Besides, if Jason is driving you to Idyllwild, then it’s necessary for you to be armed with the whole story.”
What was the
whole story? I wondered. “Tell me about Alva and Nicos,” I said. “How much do they know?”
“I can’t tell you that. They were both close to Monica. Nicos was the only person she trusted behind a camera. And Alva was the one who could make her look as beautiful as she wanted to be. Of course they loved her, like everyone else. Until after the breakup, when everything changed.”
“How did those two happen to marry?”
“Nicos always wanted Alva, I gather, but she couldn’t see anyone in those days but Saxon. After he parted with Monica, Saxon began to take Alva out. I suppose Monica was really the pivot around whom they all turned. When she removed herself from them, they had only each other. Of course it didn’t work out because it wasn’t really Alva that Saxon wanted. Perhaps if the baby had lived … After the divorce, Saxon set her up in the restaurant she still runs with Nicos in Idyllwild. And her second marriage seems to have worked out fine. I still wish you wouldn’t go up there, Carol. What can you hope to get from them?”
“Anecdotes, memories—anything they can give me. I never know what I can use until I put it all together. Right now I’d better get back to my typewriter and set some of my notes in order.”
We said good night, and I stood for a few moments in my bedroom doorway, making certain Keith was asleep. I really didn’t feel like working now, and I couldn’t settle down. Too much that was terrible to think about had been opened up for me today. I couldn’t stop those scenes at El Mirador from running through my mind. Peggy Smith senselessly dead, and those two working so desperately to conceal her murder! Accidental, or not, that’s what it had been, even though I’d wanted to make excuses for them, and it had become worse through concealment.
If it hadn’t been for Monica’s machinations, they might have weathered what had happened far better than they had. Hiding everything, contriving false trails, had only set ghosts rampant in both their lives; ghosts on whom they’d never been able to turn their backs. Perhaps Saxon was trying to lay those very ghosts now—and that frightened Monica, yet at the same time caused her fighting spirit to rise.
It was hard to think about anything else, but the book with the missing pages still tantalized me, and I began to wonder if pages on either side of the missing chapter might tell me something. Moving quietly, so I wouldn’t disturb Linda, I hurried downstairs. When I reached Linda’s office, I saw that a light was on in the adjoining Arlen room. When I looked in, I saw Ralph Reese working at something he held in his hands. I watched, ready to run if he made the slightest move toward me, but still curious.
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