Evelyn Merrick was waiting for Blackshear in the lobby when he arrived twenty minutes later.
“I got here as soon as I could,” Blackshear said. “Where is Helen?”
“Locked in her room. I followed her up and tried to talk to her, but she paid no attention to my knocking. So I listened at the door. I could hear her inside.”
“What was she doing?”
“You know what she was doing, Mr. Blackshear. I told you when I called you. She was telephoning, using my name, my voice, pretending to be me.”
Blackshear was grim. “I wish that’s all it was, a child’s game, like pretending.”
“What else is it?”
“She has a rare form of insanity, Miss Merrick, the disease I thought you had. A doctor would call it multiple personality. A priest might call it possession by a devil. Helen Clarvoe is possessed by a devil and she gives your name to it.”
“Why should she do that to me?”
“Are you willing to help me find out?”
“I don’t know. What must I do?”
“We’ll go up to her room and talk to her.”
“She won’t let us in.”
“We can try,” Blackshear said. “All I seem able to do for Helen is try. Try, and fail, and try again.”
They took the elevator up to the third floor and walked down the long carpeted hall to Miss Clarvoe’s suite. The door was closed and locked. No light showed around its edges, but Blackshear could hear a woman talking inside the room. It was not Helen’s voice, tired, uninterested; it was loud and brash and shrill, like a schoolgirl’s.
He rapped sharply on the door with his knuckles and called out, “Helen? Let me in.”
“Go away, you old fool, and leave us alone.”
“Are you in there, Helen?”
“Look at the mess you’ve got me in now. He’s found me. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You’ve always been jealous of me; you’ve always tried to cut me out of your life. Now you’ve done it, calling in that man Blackshear and the police to hunt me down like a common criminal. I’m not a common criminal. All I did to Terola was touch him with the scissors to teach him a little lesson. How was I to know his flesh was soft as butter? An ordinary man wouldn’t even have bled, my touch was so delicate. It wasn’t my fault the poor fool died. But the police won’t believe that. I’ll have to hide here with you. Just you and me, how about that? God knows if I can stand it, you should be able to. You’re dull company, old girl, you can’t deny that. I may have to slip out now and then for a bit of fun.”
Blackshear tried to call out again but the words died of despair in his throat: Fight, Helen. Fight back. Stand up to her. He began pounding on the door with his fists.
“Listen to that, will you? He’s trying to break the door down to get to his sweetheart, isn’t that touching? Little does he know how many doors he’ll have to break down; this one’s only the first. There are a hundred more and that pitiful idiot out there thinks he can do it with his fists. Funny boy. Tell him to go away, Helen. Tell him not to bother us. Tell him if he doesn’t go away he’ll never see you alive again. Go on. Speak. Speak, you ugly crone!”
A pause, then Helen’s voice, a tattered whisper, “Mr. Blackshear. Paul. Go away.”
“Helen, hang on. I’m going to help you.”
“Go away, go away.”
“Hear that, lover boy? Go away, she says. Lover boy. God, that’s funny. What a romance you had, eh, Helen? Did you really think anyone could fall in love with you, you old hag? Take a look in the crystal ball, you crow.”
She began to laugh. The sound rose and fell, a siren screaming disaster, and then there was a sudden silence, as if the loud night were holding its breath.
Blackshear pressed his mouth against the crack of the door and said, “Helen, listen to me.”
“Go away.”
“Unlock your door. Evelyn Merrick is here with me.”
“Liar.”
“Unlock your door and you can see for yourself. You are not Evelyn. Evelyn is out here with me.”
“Liar, liar, liar!”
“Please, Helen, let us in so we can help you. . . . Say something to her, Miss Merrick.”
“We are not trying to fool you,” Evelyn said. “This is really Evelyn, Helen.”
“Liars!” But the lock clicked and the chain slid back and slowly the door opened and Miss Clarvoe’s tormented face peered out. She spoke to Blackshear, her pale mouth working painfully to form the words: “Helen is not here. She went away. She is old and sick and full of misery and wants to be let alone.”
“Listen to me, Helen,” Blackshear said. “You are not old and sick. . . .”
“I’m not, no. She is. You’re mixed up. I’m Evelyn. I’m fine. I’m twenty-one. I’m pretty, I’m popular, I have lots of fun. I never get sick or tired. I’m going to be immortal.” She stopped suddenly, her eyes fixed on Evelyn Merrick, fascinated, repelled. “That girl—who is she?”
“You know who she is, Helen. She’s Evelyn Merrick.”
“She’s an impostor. Get rid of her. Tell her to go away.”
“All right,” Blackshear said wearily. “All right.” He turned to Evelyn. “You’d better go down to the lobby and call a doctor.”
Miss Clarvoe watched Evelyn go down the hall and get into the elevator. “Why should she call a doctor? Is she sick?”
“No.”
“Why should she call a doctor, then, if she isn’t sick?” She added peevishly, “I don’t much like you. You’re sly. You’re a sly old man. You’re too old for me. Not much use your hanging around. I’m only twenty-one. I have a hundred boy friends. . . .”
“Helen, please.”
“Don’t call me that, don’t say that name. I’m not Helen.”
“Yes, you are. You’re Helen, and I don’t want you to be anybody else. I like you exactly as you are. Other people will, too, if you’ll let them. They’ll like you just as you are, just for yourself alone, Helen.”
“No! I’m not Helen, I don’t want to be Helen! I hate her!”
“Helen is a fine young woman,” Blackshear said quietly. “She is intelligent and sensitive—yes, and pretty too.”
“Pretty? That crock? That hag? That ugly crone?”
She started to close the door but Blackshear pressed his weight against it. She released the door and stepped backward into the room, one hand behind her back, like a child concealing a forbidden object. But Blackshear did not have to guess what she was concealing. He could see her image in the round mirror above the telephone stand.
“Put down the paper knife, Helen. Put it back on the desk where it belongs. You’re very strong, you might hurt someone accidentally. . . . How did you meet Terola in the first place, Helen?”
“In a bar. He was having a drink and he looked over at me and fell in love with me at first sight. Men do. They can’t help it. I have this magnetism. Do you feel it?”
“Yes. Yes, I feel it. Put down the knife, Helen.”
“I’m not Helen! I am Evelyn. Say it. Say I’m Evelyn.”
He stared at her, saying nothing, and suddenly she wheeled around and ran across the room to the mirror. But the face she saw in it was not her own. It was not a face at all, it was a dozen faces, going round and round—Evelyn and Douglas and Blackshear, Verna and Terola and her father, Miss Hudson and Harley Moore and the desk clerk and the little old man in the elevator—all the faces were revolving like a ferris wheel, and as they revolved, they moved their mouths and screamed out words “What’s the matter with you, kid, are you crazy?” “You’ve always told the most fantastic lies.” “What a pity we didn’t have a girl like Evelyn.” “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” “Why can’t you be more like Evelyn?”
The voices faded into silence, the ferris wheel of faces stopped, and there was only one image left in the mirror. It was her own face, and the mouth that moved was her own mouth, and the words that came out were uttered by her own voice: “God hel
p me.”
Memory stabbed at her with agonizing thrusts. She remembered the bars, the phone booths, the running, the strange streets. She remembered Terola and the odd, incredulous way he looked just before he died and the acrid smell of the coffee boiling over on the stove. She remembered taking the bills from her own money clip and then thinking later that they’d been stolen. She remembered the cat in the alley, the rays from the night air, the taste of rain, the young man who’d laughed because she was waterproof. . . .
“Give me the knife, Helen.”
In the mirror she could see Blackshear approaching, slowly and cautiously, a hunter with a beast in view.
“It’s all right, Helen. Don’t get excited. Everything’s going to be all right.”
A pause, and then he began to talk again in a low, persuasive voice, about doctors and hospitals and rest and care and the future. Always the future, as if it was definite and tangible, rosy and round like an apple.
She stared into the crystal ball of the mirror and she saw her future, the nights poisoned by memories, the days corroded by desire.
“It’s only a matter of time, Helen. You’ll be well again.”
“Be quiet,” she said. “You lie.”
She looked down at the knife in her hand and it seemed to her that it alone could speak the truth, that it was her last, her final friend.
She pressed the knife into the soft hollow of her throat. She felt no pain, only a little surprise at how pretty the blood looked, like bright and endless ribbons that would never again be tied.
FOOLS’ GOLD
Dolores Hitchens
Chapter One
THE FIRST time they drove by the house Eddie was so scared he ducked his head down. Skip laughed at him. Above the rattling of the motor, Skip jeered, “What’s the matter with you? Afraid the old woman’s got X-ray eyes or something? She’s a mind reader, maybe? She’s looking out now and spotting us? You nuts?” What he really meant, as Eddie knew, was that Eddie was chicken.
Now that they were past the house, headed downhill past empty lots, Eddie cast a glance back. “Hell, it’s such a doggone big place, that’s all. Important-looking.” And in this hour of near twilight, in his opinion, kind of spooky and ominous.
“The bigger they come the harder they fall,” Skip pronounced. He was peering ahead to the corner where the side street entered the main boulevard from Pasadena. Suddenly he chucked Eddie in the ribs. “Hey, there’s the chick now!” His tone had taken on a certain confidential excitement.
A girl of around seventeen sat on the bench at the bus stop. She had a couple of books in her lap, one open between her hands, and her head was bent over it, the book slanted so that its pages caught the last thin light from the sky. Her hair was short and curly, a soft lustrous brown. “Look at that. A dish,” Skip was saying. As they went by Eddie gave her a single nervous glance and Skip an all-out stare, but she didn’t look up. She wore a plain blue coat that looked old for her, white sandals, and a small white handbag hung from her wrist. Her lashes and little winglike brows were dark against the creamy color of her skin.
“She’s on her way to night school now,” Skip explained. “Taking a secretarial course. The old lady tried to goose her into nursing school, but she wouldn’t bite. You want to meet her tonight? I could introduce you when typing class is out. Be in the hall.”
“Maybe one of us ought to kind of lay low,” Eddie said. “I mean——” He paused to watch what Skip was doing with the car. Skip had waited for a lull in the traffic on the boulevard, then cut sharply into a U-turn. “Hey, for the lova Pete!”
“Just going back for another look. We’ve got to have that layout down pat.”
“Oh, Lord.” Eddie hunkered down into the seat, trying to squirm out of sight of the bench. “You want her to know we’ve been out here?”
“Why not? It’s a free country.” Skip often pretended to be dense like this.
“Look, afterwards, when the thing happens, won’t they begin to ask about strangers hanging around, other people in the neighborhood——”
“Oh, relax, for Chrissakes.” Skip swung the car jauntily close to the bench on which the girl sat, then whistled his wolf call. She lifted her face at that, staring at the car; but Eddie sensed that she hadn’t recognized Skip. She wore a confused, foggy expression, as if her mind were on the book or as if her eyes, tired from reading, had trouble adjusting to the distance.
The old car puffed and rumbled as it started back up the grade. Skip nursed it with gas from the choke. Eddie said, “She didn’t seem to know you.”
“Getting dark,” Skip said. “Anyhow, we’ll meet her tonight at school.”
He had already dismissed Karen Miller from his mind, Eddie saw, and was again fascinated by the house. The roof made a tall, turreted line against the darkening sky. It was an aloof and aristocratic old house, settled in amid dusty cedars and deodars, surrounded by almost a square block of lawns and shrubs. A mansion, Eddie thought, and the idea of fooling around it and the old woman who owned it made prickles of icy bumps crawl on his arms.
Suddenly a couple of lights went on inside, one upstairs and one down. “Doggone!” Skip muttered. “You see that? Both at once? Somebody’s there with her. I’ll find out from Karen tonight who it is.”
“Maybe a maid.” Eddie needed to do something with his hands, so he took cigarettes and a pack of matches from his jacket pocket and lit a smoke.
Skip shook his head. “She doesn’t keep a servant. Too cheap. She makes the chick help her and together they do it all, a hell of a job from what Karen tells me. A regular moperoo.”
“A place that big . . . must be a hundred rooms——”
“Nah. All she has is a gardener. He comes by the day, three times a week. Old guy, deaf as a post. Lives miles from here.”
“Well, then, this relative of hers——”
Skip’s teeth gleamed as he smiled. He was small and wiry, a reddish blond with pale, stony eyes, and when he smiled he looked like a fox. “Yeah, it must be him, the guy from Las Vegas.” They were past the house now. Looking back at it through the masking branches of trees, Eddie caught a cold, faint twinkle of light like a star’s, and this somehow seemed a warning, making the place more dangerous, more impregnable than ever. He choked over words he couldn’t get out.
The car picked up speed as the street leveled out. Beyond the Havermann place the street skirted vacant hilly acres rising to foothills, then descended again to another through boulevard, this one cross-town from Los Angeles, the route they’d taken to get here. Neon signs and street lamps were beginning to flare against the dusk. “Well, what do you say?” Skip asked. “Want a hamburger and coffee before we go on?”
“Sure,” Eddie said, trying to sound easy. His hands were cold and his fingers kept wanting to twitch; he felt a repeated need to swallow. He hoped that Skip didn’t notice his nervousness, and at the same time he envied Skip’s cool manner. This was something to keep you bug-eyed.
They parked near a diner and went in. It was fairly full, but they found a couple of stools near the end. When the waitress had come, taken the order and gone again, Skip began to toy with a pencil on a paper napkin. He muttered to Eddie, “I’ll bet it’s at least fifty grand.” He wrote it out on the napkin: $50,000.00, and Eddie broke into a sweat. They were right in the open, under lights, next to other people. He grabbed the napkin and shoved it in his pocket and Skip laughed.
“What’s the matter, Eddie?”
“Well, that just wasn’t smart.”
“Who says?”
“I do.” But Eddie didn’t back it up with a glance at Skip; he fiddled with the coin receiver for the juke box, reading the array of record titles, finally dropping in a dime for a tune.
“You got a complaint? You want to run this show?”
“It’s still your show,” Eddie said stiffly.
Skip stared for another moment and then his mood underwent one of its quick causeless changes. He stuffed the p
encil into his coat pocket and slumped on the stool, bracing his head with his hand. “Oh, what the hell.” He began to watch an old man working behind the counter, cleaning off the dirty dishes into a big tin tray. The man was about sixty, going to fat, had watery eyes and almost no hair, wore a white tee shirt and a white duck apron. His big arms were pocked with scars and a network of broken veins. “See him? You know what? In a few years that’s you and me, Eddie old boy. Restaurant swampers. Or dishwashers. If we’re lucky. If we aren’t lucky we’ll be hobos, freezing in rags in a culvert.”
Eddie felt cornered. “Ah, don’t start singing the blues for Chrissakes.”
But Skip slumped lower, his eyes dull. “Figure it out. I’m twenty-two. You’re almost as old. Who’re we trying to fool, going to night school, me taking typing and bookkeeping and you studying metalwork. Who’s going to hire us when we finish?”
Eddie looked at him. “We could get a break.”
“Who from? Some personnel manager? Some cluck too dumb to want to know what we’ve been doing up to now?”
Eddie shifted his position, began to fish for another dime to drop into the record player. But Skip grabbed his wrist and held it, his finger digging into his flesh. “They give you a form to fill in, see? Every year for the past five years——” With his free hand Skip sketched five imaginary lines on the counter. His lips were pulled off his teeth in a fierce, foxy grin. “Where were you last year, friend? And the year before that? Weren’t you in some kind of little trouble? Would you care to give us your former address? Wasn’t it out in the country and weren’t you sort of working for the state?”
Skip released Eddie’s hand suddenly and Eddie sat huddled, wondering who had been watching.
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