Creeps Suzette

by Mary Daheim

  “Mother!” Judith hurried to steady the old woman who was teetering dangerously on the walker. “What is it? Something on TV?”

  Frenziedly, Gertrude shook her head. “It’s real. It’s here. It’s hideous.”

  Judith peered over the top of her mother’s head. Renie stood by Gertrude’s card table. She was attired in a beige wool cape, matching slacks, and knee-high black boots. A patch covered her left eye.

  Judith burst out laughing. “It’s Serena, Mother, your niece. She’s playing a little joke on you.”

  Warily, Gertrude turned around. “Serena?” She peered through her trifocals. “What are you doing in that get-up?”

  “It’s a long story,” Renie replied. “First of all, you’re not used to seeing me dressed up.”

  “Dressed up?” Gertrude had hauled the walker back inside. “You look like some Halloween freak. And what’s wrong with your eye?”

  “That’s the long part of the story,” Renie said, sounding a little impatient. “I just wanted to see you before we took off for a couple of days. I stopped at my mother’s first. And yes, she, too, had a fit.”

  “Deb,” Gertrude said scornfully. “My sister-in-law is always having a fit. What now, did her stupid phone break?”

  Aunt Deb was as enamored of the telephone as Gertrude was hostile to it. And though they constantly wrangled and criticized each other, they were basically devoted.

  “Mom’s not used to seeing me dressed up, either,” Renie went on. “And when I’m not wearing my ratty everyday outfits, she insists I paid too much for the good stuff. I can’t win.”

  “You could win the booby prize in that rig,” Gertrude rasped, then turned a puzzled face to Judith. “You’re going away? Where? How come?”

  “I told you, Mother,” Judith said quietly. “We’re going to help out an old friend. I’ll be in Sunset Cliffs, just ten miles away.”

  “Sunset Cliffs,” Gertrude muttered. “That’s where all the swells live. You two won’t fit in unless you’ve been hired as scullery maids.”

  Renie let out a big sigh. “On that vote of confidence, we’re off. Bye, Aunt Gertrude.” She kissed the old woman’s wrinkled cheek.

  Judith embraced her mother. “I’ll call,” she promised.

  “Don’t,” Gertrude snapped. “I won’t answer.”

  They left the toolshed. Collecting her suitcase and handbag from the house, Judith bade Joe a fond farewell. Renie gave him a hug.

  Joe regarded his wife’s cousin with concern. “Are you sure you can do this? You look kind of frail.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Renie assured Joe. “Your wife will be my eyes, not to mention my chauffeur. Thanks for lending her to me.”

  Three minutes later, the cousins were pulling out of the driveway in Judith’s Subaru. “You went to a lot of trouble to convince Joe you had Bell’s palsy again,” Judith remarked, turning the car around in the cul-de-sac.

  “What?” Renie was lighting a cigarette.

  “Coz,” Judith said in disgust, “do you have to smoke in the car?”

  “Definitely,” Renie replied. “Mrs. Burgess probably doesn’t allow smoking in her mansion. Thus, I’m going to inhale as much tar and nicotine as possible between here and there.”

  Judith sighed. “Okay, but open your window. It already smells terrible in here.” She waited for Renie to comply, then continued speaking: “And Joe’s right. You do look terrible. I don’t mean the outfit—it’s very sharp. But somehow you’ve managed to grow pale and drawn, and it’s almost as if one side of your face is paralyzed.”

  “It is,” Renie said as they reached the crest of Heraldsgate Hill. “Still, it’s a light case this time.”

  Judith’s head swiveled as they drove along the avenue, which was flanked by commercial enterprises, churches, apartments, and an occasional residential holdout. “What are you talking about? You don’t have to convince me you’re sick.”

  “I am sick, dopey,” Renie asserted, purposely blowing smoke in Judith’s direction. “I don’t tell big whoppers even in a good cause like you do. The palsy started in right after I left you at Moonbeam’s Friday afternoon. I was going to tell you about it, but you hung up on me. I went to the doctor Saturday, but they said it should go away in a few days without additional treatment. I hope Mrs. Burgess doesn’t scare as easily as our mothers.”

  “Goodness.” Judith felt upset as they began to descend the other side of the hill and were once again in a residential area. “You should have told me.”

  “I didn’t get a chance,” Renie said. “We kept playing phone tag. We haven’t really talked since Friday.”

  “Goodness,” Judith repeated, and went silent until they reached the turn-off from Heraldsgate Hill to the bridge that led over the ship canal. “To think I wasn’t really lying to Joe. Except that you did tell him Mrs. Burgess was sick, right?”

  “She is,” Renie responded, throwing her cigarette butt out the window. “That is, she has all sorts of ailments, not to mention being sick at heart because she thinks somebody is trying to put out her lights.”

  “Good point,” Judith agreed, as the six-lane thoroughfare took them past the city zoo. “By the way, you better fill me in on the family background and whatever else you know about them.”

  Renie shrugged, then lighted another cigarette. “I don’t know that much, and some of it’s just general stuff I’ve picked up from reading about the history of the area. Did you ever hear of Maxwell Burgess?”

  Judith tried to ignore the cloud of cigarette smoke drifting her way. “He was some kind of timber baron way back, wasn’t he?”

  “Right, before the turn of the century,” Renie said. “The Evergreen Timber Company. It’s still around. Anyway, old Maxwell has been dead for many years, as has his wife. But in the 1880s, one of the timber parcels he bought was what became Sunset Cliffs, overlooking the sound and the mountains. Great setting, way beyond the city limits then, and even though they’ve changed the boundaries at least twice, it’s still part of an unincorporated area just north of the dividing line.”

  “I know where it is,” Judith said. “I’ve seen the entrance over the years.”

  “Right,” said Renie. “Anyway, Maxwell clear-cut the whole parcel by the mid-1890s, then got the idea of building a house. As legend goes, he was overcome with a fit of remorse, and reforested the place. But later, when some kind of panic came along and Evergreen Timber was having financial troubles, he started selling off lots. Big ones, for big houses for people with big bank accounts. That’s how Sunset Cliffs became an exclusive gated community some time around World War One.”

  “Have you ever been inside?” Judith asked, finding the patch on Renie’s left eye disconcerting. “I haven’t.”

  Renie shook her head. “While Bev and I were friends in college, I was never invited. I never figured out if I was too shabby to present to her family, or if she was embarrassed by her wealth. Mainly, we socialized on campus and just off-campus. The coffee house and foreign film era, as you may recall.”

  “I do. You and I once went to a Fellini film, and the projector broke down. We thought it was part of the movie, and couldn’t figure out why everybody else was stomping their feet and jeering.”

  “Right. We thought it was one of Fellini’s cinematic innovations,” Renie recalled. “Where was I? Oh, the family. Maxwell had a daughter, Virginia, and a son, Walter. Walter’s first wife died young, leaving him with two very small children, a boy and a girl. He married Leota a short time later, and, as I mentioned, they had Bev, their only child together. Her half-brother, Wayne, runs the timber company, and her half-sister, Peggy, has had a checkered marital career. I think the current husband is number three.”

  “Are these the suspects?” Judith asked with a frown.

  “I suppose, at least in Mrs. Burgess’s mind. Wayne and his wife—I think her name’s Dorothy—live nearby in Sunset Cliffs. Peggy is now married to the pro at the golf course where they have a house on the f
ifth green, or something like that.”

  “So they’re all close at hand,” Judith remarked, as traffic began to get bogged down along the gaudy commercial thoroughfare that led ever northward.

  “Yes,” Renie agreed. “Peggy has two kids, boy and girl, and Wayne and his wife have a son called Bop.”

  “Bop?” Judith wrinkled her nose.

  “That’s right. It stands for something, but I don’t know what.”

  “So nobody lives in the big old mansion except Mrs. Burgess?”

  “Just the servants,” Renie answered vaguely. “I don’t know much about the present setup. Bev wasn’t entirely clear about it.”

  If the Yellow Brick Road had led to Oz among exotic forests and colorful poppy fields, the highway to Sunset Cliffs was crowded with motels, used-car lots, and fast-food restaurants. When the cousins finally made a left at the city limits, the north side of the street boasted card rooms, taverns, pull tabs, and other minor vices that were legal in the unincorporated neighborhoods. Five minutes later, they were out of the low-life section and into a high-rent residential neighborhood.

  Then they arrived at the arched entrance to Sunset Cliffs. Shafts of sunlight filtered through the tall evergreens that shaded the impeccably groomed golf course on their left. Beyond the gatehouse and on their right, they could see nothing but dense shrubbery and more trees. Judith and Renie were five minutes from the hurly-burly of the highway, but in that short span, they had entered a different world.

  The cheerful uniformed young man in the gatehouse asked their names and destination. He never missed a beat when Renie turned to him head-on and displayed her eye patch.

  “Jones and Flynn to see Mrs. Walter Burgess at Creepers,” Renie announced.

  The guard checked his clipboard. “You’re right on time. I’ve got you down for eleven o’clock.”

  “Where is Creepers?” Renie asked. “We’ve never been here before, and I don’t have an exact address.”

  The cheerful smile remained in place. “There are no addresses in Sunset Cliffs,” the young man replied. “Only house names.” Carefully giving complicated directions, he lifted the barrier arm and waved them through. “You can’t miss Creepers,” he called after them. “It’s the last house on Evergreen Drive.”

  Judith drove at the decorous posted speed of fifteen miles an hour. “You have to make an appointment to get in?” she asked Renie.

  Renie nodded. “Security is very tight. Which, now that I think of it, would automatically limit the number of suspects on Mrs. Burgess’s hit parade.”

  “To people who are known to the guards,” Judith mused as they drove among tall stands of evergreens and thick bushes of salal, Oregon grape, and huckleberry. “To familiar faces.” She grimaced as they came to the first fork in the road. “To family.”

  “To family,” Renie agreed. “Let’s hope we can avoid meeting the rest of them. Otherwise, we could end up on their hit list, too.”

  Judith glanced at Renie to see if she was joking. But the eye patch and the limited mobility on the left side of her cousin’s face made it impossible to tell.

  Judith suddenly felt an ominous tingle in her spine. Maybe she shouldn’t have come. The rest that Judith had in mind wasn’t of the eternal kind.

  THREE

  THE DEEPER THEY drove into Sunset Cliffs, the more curious Judith became. This was a far cry from the neighboring palatial estates with their manicured lawns, swimming pools, and tennis courts. There wasn’t a house in sight. The cousins were surrounded by second-growth forest with tall, spare evergreens that almost blotted out the sky. Uphill and down they drove, winding on the serpentine road until they finally spotted a large if undistinguished house through a heavy stand of rhododendron bushes and lush ferns.

  “I was beginning to think nobody lived here,” Judith remarked.

  “There’s a white brick house over here on the right,” Renie pointed out. “The sign says ‘Wind Rest.’ It’s got a mailbox. How quaint.”

  They reached the second fork where the road dipped down, then abruptly rose again. Beyond the evergreens and a stand of madrona trees, they could see the sound below them and the mountains to the west. Then they were back in the deep woods where more houses began to appear at discreet distances.

  “They all look empty,” Renie said. “Maybe most of the owners winter somewhere else.”

  “I’d hate to drive these roads in snow and ice,” Judith said as they passed under a small arched bridge with globe lights and scrollwork carved into the sturdy concrete. “I wouldn’t even want to drive here at night.”

  “Look,” Renie said, pointing through the windshield. “It’s the chapel the guard mentioned. Goodness, it’s beautiful.”

  Judith agreed. The small, perfect church could have been set in an English village. The gray stone building was Perpendicular in style, with delicate tracery around the windows and a handsome bell tower. The chapel looked as if it had always been there, and intended to remain.

  Along Evergreen Drive, however, almost every architectural form had been used. There were sprawling Italian villas, small Moorish palaces, English Tudor, French chateaux, Dutch Colonials, and variations on contemporary Americana. Some of the homes dated back to the early twenties; at least two others were still under construction.

  “Are we lost yet?” Renie asked as the road seemed to wind on forever.

  “I don’t think so,” Judith replied, gesturing to her left. “That house is called Evergreen. I’ll bet it’s the one that belongs to Bev’s half-brother, Wayne.”

  “Probably,” Renie replied, craning her neck. “Damn, I can’t see with this stupid patch. What does it look like?”

  “All one floor, mansard roof, tall arched windows and doorway,” Judith said, almost veering off the road. “Circa 1960, I’d guess.”

  “That’s about right,” Renie responded. “Wayne must be in his mid-sixties. He and—what did I say?—Dorothy probably got married about then.”

  The road seemed to narrow, and there were no more houses, even at a distance. A gentle hill rose before them and at the top, there were two large iron gateposts crowned with lions. The small, tasteful sign read “Creepers.”

  “We made it,” Judith cried, reaching the crest of the hill and a circular driveway. “Oh, my God!”

  “Hmm,” murmured Renie. “That’s the ugliest house I’ve ever seen.”

  “I thought you knew what it looked like,” Judith said. “You described it.”

  “I know I did,” Renie responded. “I was parroting Bev’s description. ‘Richardsonian, Romanesque.’ Whatever the hell that means.”

  “It means ghastly,” Judith retorted. “It looks like a home for mental patients.”

  Going well under the fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limit, the cousins continued up the drive. The house was huge, five stories of dark stone relieved only by an occasional decorative beige band. There was a tower on the near side with dormer windows and a tall chimney. Another tower, not so tall, but bigger all around, stood on the other side of the house. Most of the windows were almost floor-length and rather narrow. The large front porch with its arched openings and stout pillars presented a formidable aspect. Above it was a balcony, with more arches and pillars topped by a roof that jutted out from the front of the house. Up close, Judith and Renie could see that the basement windows were barred.

  “Maybe it is a home for mental patients,” Renie said. “I’d go nuts if I lived there.”

  “Had I but known…” Judith whispered. “Gosh, coz, I was sort of thinking stately homes of England. You know, like the mansion we stayed at in Wiltshire.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Renie snapped. “In case you’ve forgotten, the mistress of the house was murdered during our brief visit. I prefer not to have history repeat itself.”

  “Very late Victorian,” Judith remarked, pulling up in front of the house, which seemed to loom over them. “Ugly period. There’s not much like it anywhere else around here.”

>   “A good thing,” Renie replied, then pointed out the passenger window. “I think I know how it got its name. Much of the lower floors are covered by what looks like Virginia creeper.”

  “Covered like a tombstone,” Judith said. “That’s what it looks like—one big tombstone. With windows.”

  “They’re probably buried inside, like a mausoleum. They’ve got windows so the rich can still look down their noses at everybody else after they’ve passed on,” Renie remarked. “It figures.”

  As the cousins got out of the car, Judith noticed movement behind one of the lace curtains that covered the glass in the big double doors. “We’ve been spotted,” she whispered. “Maybe we should have gone to the tradesmen’s entrance.”

  Renie glanced over her right shoulder. “I’m wondering if Creepers will be even uglier when I have the use of both eyes. Doesn’t this house remind you of Pittsburgh or Savannah or Buffalo?”

  “We’ve never been to any of those places,” Judith answered, opening the trunk and removing the two suitcases. “How would I know?”

  “I’ve seen pictures,” Renie said. “Huge old stone houses actually look okay in context. Impressive, as well as imposing. But this one is definitely not a Pacific Northwest style.”

  Judith handed Renie her suitcase just as a stooped, white-haired man in a butler’s uniform opened the front door. “Mrs. Jones?” he inquired, squinting far beyond the cousins. “Mrs. Flynn?”

  “Over here, Mr. Magoo,” Renie muttered, trying to keep her good eye on the butler and the walkway. “Yes, we’ve arrived,” she went on, raising her voice. “Where should we put the car?”

  “I’ll take it to the garage out back,” the butler replied, moving forward and bumping into a thick pillar. “Later, if you will. Where is it now?”

  “Holy Mother,” Judith said in an undertone. “I don’t want a blind man driving my Subaru.”

  “Maybe he’s some kind of jokester,” Renie said, stumbling over an old-fashioned hitching post that depicted a liveried black footman. “I mean, he must have seen us drive up. Oops!” Renie made another misstep, squashing a couple of promising primroses.