The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  “How?”

  “Go down and open up the house at Casey Key and look in Mom’s desk. I have to do that anyway, the lawyers say. She was very tidy about business things. File folders and carbon copies and all that kind of thing. It will all be in the folder for that year, the year she sold it. It was such a great boat. I hope your friend finds her and can buy her. Daddy said she was forgiving. He said you could do some absolutely damfool thing and the Lady would forgive you and take care of you. If you could give me your address, I could mail you the name and address of the man who bought her.”

  “Do you plan to go down there soon?”

  “We talked about going down Saturday morning and driving back Sunday afternoon. It ought to give us enough time. But it depends on … how Maurie is.”

  “Is she physically ill?”

  “In addition to being mentally ill? Is that what you mean?”

  “Why the indignation? Trying to knock yourself off isn’t exactly normal behavior.”

  “I get … too defensive about her, maybe.”

  “Just what is wrong with her?”

  “It depends on who you ask. We’ve gotten more answers than we can use. And more solutions. Manic depressive. Schizophrenia. Korsakov’s Syndrome. Virus infection of a part of the brain. Alcoholism. Name it, and somebody has said she has it.”

  “Korsa-who?”

  “Korsakov. Her memory gets all screwed up. She can remember everything prior to this past year, but the past year is a jumble, with parts missing. I think sometimes she uses it as a … convenience. She can really be terribly sly. As if we were against her or something. And she does manage to get terribly stinking drunk, and she does manage to sneak away from us, no matter how careful we both are. We put her in a rest home for two weeks, but she was so upset by it, so confused and baffled by it all, we just couldn’t stand it. We had to bring her home. She was like a little kid, she was so pleased to be home. Oh, she’s not buggy-acting at all. She’s sweet and dear and a lovely person, really. But something has just … broken, and nobody knows what it is yet. If I hadn’t told you all this, you could come to the house and never know anything was wrong, really.”

  “But she has tried to kill herself?”

  “Three times. And two of them were very close calls. We found her in time the time she took the sleeping pills. And Tom found her in the tub after she cut her wrist. The other time it was just something she’d prepared, a noose thing out of quarter-inch nylon, over a beam in the boathouse. All clumsy knots, but it would have worked.”

  “Does she say why she keeps trying?”

  “She doesn’t remember why. She can sort of remember doing it, in a very vague way, but not why. She gets very frightened about it, very weepy and nervous.”

  “Who’s taking care of her now?”

  “Tom is home with her. Oh, you mean what doctor? Nobody, actually. You could say we’ve run out of doctors. There are things Tom and I can do for her. She was doing pretty well until Mom died. Then she had … some bad days.”

  “Would she remember me?”

  “Of course! She hasn’t turned into some kind of a moron, for heaven’s sake!”

  “What about those nuisance phone calls you mentioned?”

  Her expression was guarded. “Oh, just from people she gets involved with when she … manages to sneak out.”

  “She gets involved with men?”

  “She goes out alone. She gets tight. She’s very lovely. It’s hell on Tom and it isn’t any of your business.”

  “That’s no way to speak to your kindly old uncle.”

  A wan smile. “My nerves are ragged. And that part of it just … makes me want to resign from the human race. Those damned oily voices on the phone, like filthy children wondering if Maurie can come out and play. Or like the way you see packs of dogs, following. They don’t know she’s sick. They don’t even give a damn.”

  “How often does she sneak off?”

  “Not often. Maybe three times in the last four months. But that’s three times too many. And she never remembers much about it.”

  I took her empty glass and built her a fresh drink and took it to her, saying, “You must have some kind of a theory. You probably know her as well as anyone in the world. What started all this?”

  “When she had the second miscarriage, it was because of some kind of kidney failure. She had convulsions. I thought that could have done something to her brain. But the doctors say no. Then I thought she might have a tumor of the brain, but they did all kinds of tests and there’s nothing like that at all. I don’t know, Travis. I just don’t know. She’s the same Maurie, but yet she’s not. She’s more … childlike. She breaks my heart.”

  “Care if I stop by and say hello?”

  “What good would it do?”

  “And what harm could it do?”

  “Is it just kind of a sick curiosity?”

  “I guess that’s my bag, going around staring at crazies.”

  “Damn you! I just meant that—”

  “She’s not on display? Right? Okay. She was twenty. She took that ugly business about Mick with a great deal of class and control. I knew how much she adored her father. Look, I didn’t ask to be let in on all the family secrets. But I was. I’d like to see what she’s like. Maybe you’re too close to it. Maybe she’s better than you think she is. Or worse. Can you think of anybody else who hasn’t seen her since she was twenty?”

  “N-No. Suppose I ask Tom what he thinks. And phone you here either later this evening or in the morning.”

  When she finished her drink, I walked her out to her little red Falcon wagon. She thanked me for the drinks and apologized for being so tired and cross and edgy, and drove off.

  She phoned in the morning and invited me to lunch at the house. She said Maurie was looking forward to seeing me again, and that Tom would join us for lunch if he could get away.

  Six

  Bridget Pearson apparently heard the sound of tires on the driveway pebbles and appeared from behind the house, on the lake side. She wore yellow shorts and a white sleeveless top and had her hair tied back with yellow yarn. Her sunglasses were huge and very black.

  “So glad you could make it! We’re out back. Come along. Tommy fogged the yard before he went to work, and there’s hardly a bug. He should be along any minute.”

  She kept chattering away, slightly nervous, as I followed her out to the slope of lawn overlooking the lakeshore. Tall hedges of closely planted punk trees shielded the area from the neighboring houses. There was a redwood table and benches under a shade tree, a flourishing banyan. The two-story boathouse was an attractive piece of architecture, in keeping with the house. There was a T-shaped dock, iron lawn furniture painted white, a sunfish hauled up onto the grass, a little runabout tethered at the dock. The makings of the picnic lunch were stacked on one end of the redwood table. A charcoal fire was smoking in a hibachi. She pointed out the pitcher of fresh orange juice, the ice bucket, the glasses, the vodka bottle, and told me to make myself a drink while she went to tell Maurie I’d arrived.

  In a few moments Maureen came out through the screened door of the patio, moving down across the yard toward me, smiling. Her dead mother had written me that she was stunning. In truth she was magnificent. Her presence dimmed the look of Biddy, as if the younger sister were a poor color print, overexposed and hastily developed. Maurie’s blond hair was longer and richer and paler. Her eyes were a deeper, more intense blue. Her skin was flawlessly tanned, an even gold that looked theatrical and implausible. Her figure was far more rich and abundant and had she not stood so tall, she would have seemed overweight. She wore a short open beach robe in broad orange and white stripes over a snug blue swimsuit. She moved toward me without haste, and reached and took my hands. Her grasp was solid and dry and warm.

  “Travis McGee. I’ve thought of you a thousand times.” Her voice was slow, like her smile and her walk. “Thank you for coming to see us. You were so good to us a long time ago.�
� She turned and looked over her shoulder toward Biddy and said, “You’re right. He isn’t as old as I thought he’d be either.” She stretched up and kissed me lightly on the corner of the mouth and squeezed my hands hard and released them. “Excuse me, Travis dear, while I go do my laps. I’ve missed them for a few days, and if I stop for any length of time, I get all saggy and soft and nasty.”

  She walked out to the crossbar of the T and tugged a swim cap on, dropped the robe on the boards and dived in with the abrupt efficiency of the expert. She began to swim back and forth, the length of the crossbar, so concealed by the dock that all we could see were the slow and graceful lift and reach of her tanned arms.

  “Well?” Biddy asked, standing at my elbow.

  “Pretty overwhelming.”

  “But different?”

  “Yes.”

  “How? Can you put your finger on it?”

  “Maybe she seems as if she’s dreaming the whole scene. She sort of … floats. Is she on anything?”

  “Like drugs? Oh, no. Well, when she gets jumpy, we give her a shot. It’s sort of a long-lasting tranquilizer. Tom learned from one of the doctors and taught me how.”

  I watched the slow and apparently tireless swimming and moved to the table to finish making my drink. “There’s nothing vague or dazed about her eyes. But she gives me a funny kind of feeling, Biddy. A kind of caution. As if there’s no possible way of guessing just what she might do next.”

  “Whatever comes into her head. Nothing violent. But she is just … as primitive and natural as a small child. Wherever she itches, she’ll scratch, no matter where she is. Her table manners are … pretty damned direct. They get the job done and in a hurry. And she says whatever she happens to be thinking, and it can get pretty … personal. Then if Tom or I jump on her about it, she gets confused and upset. Her face screws up and her hands start shaking and she goes running off to her bedroom usually. But she can talk painting or politics or books … just so long as it’s things she learned over a year ago. She hasn’t added anything new this year.”

  We heard another car on the pebbles and she went hurrying off around the corner of the house. She reappeared, talking rapidly and earnestly to the man walking slowly beside her. A certain tension seemed to be going out of his posture and expression, and he began to smile. She brought him over and introduced him.

  He was tall and wiry, dark hair, dark eyes, a face that had mobility and sensitivity, and might have been too handsome without a certain irregularity about his features, a suggestion of a cowlicky, lumpy, aw shucks, early-Jimmy-Stewart flavor. His voice did not have the thin country whine of Mr. Stewart, however. It was surprisingly deep, rich, resonant, a basso semi-profundo. Mr. Tom Pike had exceptional presence. It is a rare attribute. It is not so much the product of strength and drive as it is a kind of quality of attention and awareness. It has always puzzled and intrigued me. People who without any self-conscious posturing, any training in those Be Likable and Make Friends courses, are immediately aware of you, and curious about you, and genuinely anxious to learn your opinions have this special quality of being able to somehow dominate a room, a dinner table, or a backyard. Meyer has it.

  He shed his lightweight sports jacket and pulled his tie off, and Biddy took them from him and carried them into the house. With a tired smile he said, “I’ve been worrying all morning about how Maureen would react to you. It can be very good or very bad, and no way to tell in advance. Biddy says it’s been fine so far.”

  “She looks great.”

  “Sure. I know. Dammit, it makes me feel … so disloyal to have to act as if Biddy and I were keeping some kind of defective chained up in the cellar. But too much exposure to outsiders shakes her up.” His quick smile was bitter and inverted. “And when she gets upset, you can be very very sure she’s going to upset the outsider, one way or another. She’s going to find her way out of the thicket. Someday. Somehow.”

  “It must be pretty rough in the meanwhile, Tom.”

  “And there’s another reason I feel guilty. Because most of it lands right on Biddy. I’m out of here all day working. We’ve tried and tried to find somebody to come in and help out, somebody kind and patient and well-trained. We’ve interviewed dozens. But when they find out the trouble is maybe in some psychiatric area, they back away.”

  Biddy had returned and was busying herself with the food. I asked what luck they were having with the doctors. He shrugged. “They raise your hopes, then say sorry. One recent diagnosis was that a calcium deposit was diminishing the flow of blood to the brain. A series of tests, and then he says sorry, it isn’t that at all. The symptoms just don’t fit anything in their books. But I have some people who keep checking, writing letters.”

  “Excuse a painful question, Tom. Is she deteriorating?”

  “I keep wondering about that. I just don’t know. All we can do is wait and watch. And hope.”

  Maurie stopped swimming, put her palms flat on the dock, and came vaulting up, turning in the air to sit on the edge, lithe as a seal. She got up and smiled up the slope at us. She used the short robe to pat her legs dry, then put it on, pulled her swim cap off, and shoved it into the robe pocket, shaking her hair out as she walked. As she approached Tom Pike her slow, floating assurance seemed to desert her. She came to him with downcast eyes, shoulders slightly hunched, her welcome smile nervous, her walk constricted. She made me think of a very good dog aware of having disobeyed her master and hoping to be so engaging and obedient that the infraction will be forgiven and forgotten. He kissed her briefly and casually and patted her shoulder and asked her if she had been a good girl. She said shyly that she had been good. It was a most plausible attitude and reaction. She was the wife and no matter how lost she had become, she could not help knowing that she no longer measured up to what they both expected of her. It seemed more an awareness of inadequacy than a conscious guilt.

  Mosquitoes were beginning to regroup under the banyan shade. Tom went and got the little electric fogger and plugged it into a socket on one of the flood lamps and killed them off, commenting to me when he was finished that he hated to use it because it was so unselective. “When I was a kid, we’d sit on the screened porch on a summer evening and see clouds of mosquito hawks—dragonflies—darting and swooping, eating their weight. Then the bats would begin when the sun went down. So we’ve killed off the mosquito hawks with the spray and we’ve killed the other bugs the bats ate, and now there’s nothing left but billions of mosquitoes and gnats, and we have to keep changing the spray as they get immune.”

  “You grew up around here?”

  “In the general area. Here and there. We moved around a lot. Steaks ready, Bid? Time for one more drink, then, Trav. Let me fix it for you. Maurie, darling, you are supposed to be tossing the salad, not sampling it.”

  She hunched herself. “I didn’t mean … I wasn’t—”

  “It’s all right, darling.”

  At one point while we were eating, one scene, like a frozen frame, like a color still, underlined the strange flavor of the relationships, of the ménage. Maurie and I were on the same bench on one side of the picnic table, Maurie on my left. Biddy was across from me. Maurie was eating very politely and properly, and I glanced over and saw the two of them watching her. Husband and kid sister, looking at the wife with the same intent, nervous approval, as a couple might watch their only child plodding through a simple piano solo for visiting relatives. Then the frozen frame moved once again as Biddy lifted the poised fork to her lips and as Tom Pike began chewing again.

  Later, as Biddy was saying something to me, Tom’s low voice in a sound of warning, saying merely “Darling!” made Biddy stop abruptly and look quickly at Maureen. I turned and looked at her and saw that she had hunched herself over her plate, head low, had picked up her steak in a greedy fist, and was tearing and gobbling at it. She dropped it back onto her plate and sat, eyes downcast, while under the shelter of the edge of the table she wiped her greasy fingers on the top o
f her bare thigh, leaving streaks of sheen across the firm brown.

  “You forgot again, dear,” Tom said in a gentle voice.

  Maurie began to tremble visibly.

  “Don’t get upset, honey,” Biddy said.

  But suddenly she wrenched herself up and away, striking the edge of the table so solidly with her hip that drinks and coffee slopped out of the glasses and cups. She ran toward the house, sobbing audibly in her blundering, hopeless flight. Tom called sharply to her, but she did not look back or slow down. Biddy got up quickly and hurried after her.

  “Sorry,” Tom said. “I guess you can see why we don’t … Biddy will get her settled down and …” He pushed his plate away and said, “Ah, the hell with it!” and got up and walked down toward the lakeshore.

  He was still there when Biddy came walking back out. She sat opposite me. “She’s resting now. In a little while she won’t remember what happened. I want to have Tom look at her and see if he thinks she needs a shot. Is … is he all right?”

  “He acted upset.”

  “It’s because she was doing so well.”

  She stared down toward the silent figure by the lakeshore. I was at an angle to her that gave me a chance to see more than she would have wanted me to see. Her face had a soft and brooding look, lips parted. It was adoration, worship, hopeless helpless yearning love. I knew why she had started to go to pieces in the cocktail lounge. It was a situation nicely calculated to fray her to the breaking point, to have been for a year in this house with the deteriorating wife, the concerned and suffering husband. Loyalty to the big sister. And a humble self-sacrificing love for the husband.

  After a little while we all went inside. Tom went up and looked at her and came back and said she was sleeping. He sat for a moment, glancing at his watch.