Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

by Sharyn McCrumb

  I stayed away from the imposter Fergie after that. I didn’t want anyone to think that I suspected. I knew too much, you see, and it would be dangerous to let them find out that I knew. I think poor Andrew minded very much about losing his wife and having to put up with that imposter, but the family’s word is law, so he had to go along, and pretend that the stranger was Sarah. He didn’t have to pretend for long. A few months later the “Duchess of York” took a holiday on the Riviera with a silly-looking Texan, and a photographer conveniently snapped some scandalous photographs that finished the Yorks’ marriage. After that, “Sarah” left Sunninghill Park, left the family, and left public life. I think the family hopes people will forget about her. I wonder where the imposter will go when the furor dies down. Back where she came from?

  Not that it matters. What really concerns me is the whereabouts of poor Sarah, who knew too much. She must have tried to use her knowledge of the family secret as leverage in some battle with the family. Sarah was just impulsive enough to have done such a foolhardy thing. But I know where she is, just as she knew where the real Rudolf Hess ended his days.

  I don’t know what she did with the Hess papers, though. I suspect that the family never found them. When the fire broke out at Windsor Castle, and Andrew was the only family member present, I did rather wonder, but I’m not sure I even want to know where those papers are. They’ve done enough damage as it is. And at least I know what has become of poor Sarah.

  Glamis Castle is in Scotland, a few hours north of the Duke of Hamilton’s estate. In the guidebook I finally found the message Sarah was trying to send me. It is on page six:

  The secret chamber, about which are woven many legends, is thought to be located deep in the thickness of the crypt walls on the left as you face the two small windows at the end. In this room it is said that one of the Lords of Glamis and the “Tiger” Earl of Crawford played cards with the Devil himself on the Sabbath. So great were the resulting disturbances that eventually the room was built up and permanently sealed…

  I’ve done quite a bit of reading on Glamis Castle, birthplace of the Queen Mother-and home of Macbeth. There is a secret room behind walls that are three feet thick. From the left side of the castle one can see the narrow windows high up the wall of rosy stone. They say there is no way into that room, but there must be. Someone took food in to Rudolf Hess for however long he lived there, before he took his secret to the grave. I’m sure the family sees that its prisoners are well-treated. They are not cruel people, only single-minded.

  If you are reading this, Mills, you are now the King, and you must make them do as you say. Take people that you trust and go to Glamis Castle. Your cousin Simon will be the nineteenth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghome by now. I wonder if he will know the family secret. Anyhow, you must find that secret room, and if your Auntie Sarah is still alive, you must get her out.

  Mummy is counting on you.

  With lots of love to my own dear King,

  HRH Diana, The Princess of Wales

  THE MATCHMAKER

  “YOU DON’T LOOK like the head of a dating service,” said Carl, nervously licking his lips.

  The large woman behind the desk smiled and fingered a lock of greasy brown hair that dangled over her glasses. “You were expecting someone more like a game-show hostess, Mr., er…” She consulted the manila folder in front of her. “Mr. Wallin.”

  Just as she said this, the woman looked up from Carl’s file, and Carl had to pretend that he hadn’t been wiping his sweaty palms on his slacks. “Did I expect glamour?” He shrugged. “I guess so. I’ve never been to one of these dating places before.”

  “Naturally not, Mr. Wallin,” said the director blandly. Her expression suggested that all the clients said that, and that nothing could interest her less. “Please sit down. I am Ms. Erinyes.”

  Carl blinked. “Is that Spanish?” His dating preferences tended more toward northern European ancestry.

  “It is Greek. Ancient Greek, as a matter of fact.” Her jowls creased into a smile. “Now let’s talk about you.”

  “I thought you people matched couples up by computer,” said Carl, frowning.

  Another smile. “And so we do, Mr. Wallin, which is why I don’t look like a centerfold. I started this company with personality-matching software of my own design. So, you see, my specialty is not romance or even the social niceties. I am a psychologist and an expert in computer technology.”

  Carl nodded his understanding. That made sense. Now that he thought about it, this Ms. Erinyes reminded him of a couple of people in his night class: the intellectual nerds. The ones whose whole lives revolved around computers. Even their friends were electronic pen pals. Of course Carl didn’t have any friends, either, but he still felt himself superior to the hackers. The one difference between Ms. Erinyes and his ungainly classmates was that she was female. There were no women in the class. Too bad; then he might not have needed a dating service. But, after all, the community college course was in electronics. Carl thought it was fitting that there were no women taking it.

  With a condescending smile at the lard-assed misfit behind the desk, Carl flopped down in the chair and leaned back. “So how come you wanted to see me? I filled out the opscan form, just like the girl out there told me to, but I thought some of the questions were pretty off-the-wall. Like asking me to draw a woman. What was the point of that? Does it matter that I can’t draw?”

  Ms. Erinyes had her nose back in the manila folder again. She was looking at Carl’s drawing: a stick figure with scrawled curls and a triangle for a skirt. The penciled woman had fingerless hands like catchers’ mitts, and no mouth. Her eyes were closed.

  “The questions? Consider it quality control, Mr. Wallin,” she said without looking up. “Computers aren’t perfect, you know. Sometimes we like to check our results against good old human know-how. After all, love isn’t entirely logical, is it?”

  Carl wanted to say, “No, but sex is,” but he thought this remark might count against him somehow, so he simply shrugged.

  “Now, let’s see… Your medical form came back satisfactory, including the blood test. Good. Good. Can’t be too careful these days. I know you appreciate that.”

  Carl nodded. The medical certification was one of the reasons he’d decided to come to Matchmakers.

  “I see you had a head injury a few years ago. All well now, I hope?”

  Carl nodded. “Fell off my motorcycle. Lucky I had a helmet on, or I’d have got worse than a bad concussion.”

  “I expect you would have,” murmured Ms. Erinyes, dismissing motorcycles from the conversation. “Now, let’s see… You are five feet nine,” Ms. Erinyes was saying. “You weigh one hundred and fifty-eight pounds. You are twenty-eight years old, nominally Protestant, never married. You have brown hair and green eyes. Regular features. I’d say average-looking, would you?”

  “I guess,” said Carl. It didn’t sound very complimentary.

  “And do you have any pets?”

  “No. I like things to be clean and neat. I never could see what the big deal was about animals.” He smiled, remembering. “My grandmother had a tomcat, though. We didn’t get along.”

  Something in his voice made Ms. Erinyes look up, but all she said was, “I see that you were raised by your grandmother from the age of two.”

  “What does it matter?” Carl Wallin was annoyed. “I thought women would be more interested in what kind of car I drive.”

  “A 1977 AMC Concord?” Ms. Erinyes laughed merrily. “Well, some of them will be willing to overlook this, perhaps.”

  Carl’s lips tightened. “Look, I don’t make a lot of money, okay? I work as a file clerk in an insurance office. But I’m going to night school to learn about these stinking computers, which is what you have to do to get a job anymore. I figure I’ll be doing a lot better someday. Besides, I don’t want a lousy gold digger.”

  “Nobody does. Or they think they don’t. We have to wonder, though, when sixty-ye
ar-old gentlemen come in again and again asking for ninety-eight-pound blondes younger than twenty-eight.” She grinned. “We tell them to skip the question about hobbies and substitute a list of their assets.”

  “I don’t need a movie star.”

  “Well, that brings us to the big question. Just what kind of companion are you looking for?”

  “Like it says on the form. A nice girl. She doesn’t have to be Miss America, but I don’t want anyone who-” He groped for a polite phrase, eyeing Ms. Erinyes with alarm.

  “No, you don’t want somebody like me,” said Ms. Erinyes smoothly, as if there had been no offense taken. “I assure you that I don’t play this game, Mr. Wallin. I just watch. You want someone slender.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want one of those arty types either. You know, the kind with dyed black hair and claws for fingernails. The foreign-film-and-white-wine type. They make me puke.”

  “We are not shocked to hear it,” said Ms. Erinyes solemnly.

  Carl suspected that she was teasing him, but he saw no trace of a smile. “She should be clean and neat, and, you know, feminine. Not too much makeup. Not flashy. And not one of those career types, either. It’s okay if she works. Who doesn’t, these days? But I don’t want her thinking she’s more important than me. I hate that.”

  For the first time, Ms. Erinyes looked completely solemn. “I think we can find the woman you are looking for,” she said. “There’s a rather special girl. We haven’t succeeded in matching her before, but this time… Yes, I think you’ve told me enough. One last question: have you always lived in this city?”

  Carl looked puzzled. “Yes, I have. Why?”

  “You didn’t go off to college-no, I see here that you didn’t attend college. No stint in the armed forces?”

  “Nope. Straight out of high school into the rat race,” said Carl. “But why do you ask? Does it matter?”

  “Not to the young lady, perhaps,” said Ms. Erinyes carefully. “But I like to have a clear picture of our clients before proceeding. Well, I think I have everything. It will take a day or two to process the information, and after that we’ll send you a card in the mail with the young lady’s name and phone number. It will be up to you to take it from there.”

  Carl reached for his wallet, but the director shook her head. “You pay on your way out, Mr. Wallin. It’s our policy.”

  He stared at the numbers on the apartment door, trying to swallow his rage. Being nervous always made him angry for some reason. But what was there to be anxious about? His shirt was clean; his shoes were shined; he had cash. He looked fine. A proper little gentleman, as Granny used to say when she slicked his hair down for church. But he didn’t want to think about Granny just now.

  Who did this woman think she was, this Patricia Bissel, making him dress up for her inspection, and dangling rejection over his head? That’s all dating was. It was like some kind of lousy job interview: getting all dressed up and going to meet a total stranger who judges you without knowing you at all. He clenched his teeth at the thought of Patricia Bissel, who was probably sneering at him right now from behind her nice safe apartment door with the little peephole. His palms were sweating.

  Carl leaned against the wall and took a few steadying breaths. Take it easy, he told himself. He had never even seen Patricia Bissel. She was just a name on a card from the dating service. He had thought that they were supposed to send you a couple of choices, maybe some background information about the person, but all that was on the card was just the name: Patricia Bissel.

  It had taken him two days to get up the nerve to call her, and then her line had been busy. Playing hard to get, he thought. Damned little tease. Women liked making you sweat. When he had finally got through, he’d talked for less than a minute. Just long enough to tell her that the dating service had sent him, and to let her hem and haw and then suggest a meeting on Friday night at eight. Her place. It had taken her three tries to give the directions correctly.

  She hadn’t asked anything about him, and he couldn’t think of anything about her that he wanted to know. Nothing that she could tell him anyway. He’d decide for himself when he saw her.

  He was one minute early. He liked to be precise. That way she would have no excuse for keeping him waiting when he rang the bell, because they had agreed on eight o’clock. She couldn’t pretend not to be ready and keep him hanging around in the hall like a kid waiting to be let out of the closet. Like a poor, shaking kid waiting for his granny to let him out of the closet, and trying so hard not to cry, because if she heard him, she’d make him stay in there another half hour, and he had to go to the bathroom so bad… She had to let him out-in.

  The door opened. He saw his fist still upraised, and he wondered how long he had pounded on it, or if she had just happened to open it in time. He tried to smile, mostly out of relief that the waiting was over. The woman smiled back.

  She wasn’t exactly pretty, this Patricia Bissel, but she was slender. To the dating service people, that probably counted for a lot; real beauties did not need to use such desperate means to meet someone. Neither did successful guys. Maybe she was a bargain, considering. She was several inches shorter than he, with dull brown hair, worn indifferently long, and mild brown eyes behind rimless granny glasses. She offered a fleeting smile and a movement of her lips that might have been hello, and he edged past her into the shabby apartment, muttering his name, in case she hadn’t guessed who he was. Women could be really dense.

  Carl glanced around at the battered sofa beneath the unframed kitten poster and the drooping plants on the metal bookcase. He didn’t see any dust, though. He sat down in the vinyl armchair, nodding to himself. He didn’t take off his coat and gloves because she hadn’t offered to hang them up for him. She probably just threw things anywhere, the slut.

  Patricia Bissel hunched down in the center of the sofa, twisting her hands. “You’re not the first,” she said in a small voice.

  Carl looked as if he hadn’t heard.

  “Not the first one the dating service has sent over, I mean. I just thought I’d try it, but I’m not sure it’ll do any good. I don’t meet many people where I work. I’m a bookkeeper, and the only other people in my office are two other women-both grandmothers.”

  Carl tried to look interested. “Did your co-workers suggest the dating service to you?”

  She blushed. “No. I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell anybody. Did you?”

  “No.” What a stupid question, he thought. As if a man would admit to anybody that he had to have help in finding a woman. Why, if a man let people know a thing like that, they’d think he was some kind of spineless bed-wetting wimp who ought to be locked in a dark closet somewhere, and…

  She kept lacing her fingers and twisting them, and she would only glance at him, never meeting his eyes. She was so tiny and quiet, it was hard to tell how old she was.

  “You live here with your folks?” he asked.

  “No. Daddy died, and Mama got married again. I don’t see her much. But it’s okay. We weren’t ever what you call close. And I don’t mind being by myself. I know I could have a nicer place if I had a roommate to chip in, but this is all right for me. I don’t mind that it isn’t fancy. A kitten would be nice, though.” She sighed. “They don’t allow pets.”

  “No,” said Carl. He thought animals were filthy, disease-ridden vermin. They were sly and hateful, too. His granny’s cat scratched him once and drew blood, just because he tried to pet it, but he had evened that score.

  Patricia was still talking in her mousy little whine. “Would you like to see my postcards? I have three albums of postcards, mostly animals. Some of them are kind of old. I get postcards at yard sales sometimes…” The whine went on and on.

  Carl shrugged. At least she wasn’t going to give him the third degree about himself, asking if he’d gone to college or what kind of job he had. As if it were any of her business. And she couldn’t very well sneer at his car, considering the dump she lived
in. And so what if his clothes were Kmart polyester? She was no prize herself, with her skinny bird legs and those stupid old-lady glasses. Those granny glasses. What made her think she was so special, going on about her stupid hobbies and never asking one word about him? What made her think she was better than him?

  “I have one album of old Christmas cards and valentines,” she was saying. “Would you like to see that one? I keep it here in the coat closet.”

  She edged past him as she got up to get the postcard album. Her wool skirt brushed against him like the mangy fur of a cat, and he shuddered. Her whining voice went on and on, like the meowing of an old lady’s cat, and the closet door creaked when she pulled it open. Carl smelled the mothballs. He felt a wave of dizziness as he stood up.

  She was standing on tiptoe, trying to reach the closet shelf when Carl’s hands closed around her throat. It was such a scrawny little neck that his hands overlapped, and he laced his fingers as he choked her. He left her there in the dark closet, propped up against the back wall, behind a drab brown winter coat.

  Before he left the apartment, he wiped a paper towel over everything he had touched, and he found the dating service card with his name on it propped up on the bookcase, and he took that with him. His palms weren’t sweating now. He felt hungry.

  Carl was not so nervous this time. It had been several days since his “date,” and there had been no repercussions. He had slept well for the first time in months. The old stifling tension had eased up now, and he smiled happily at Ms. Erinyes. He had been here before. He tilted the straight-backed chair, his mouth still creased into a semblance of a smile.

  Ms. Erinyes did not smile back. She was concentrating on the open folder. “I see you are applying for another match from our dating service, Mr. Wallin. Didn’t the first one satisfy you?”

  Carl wondered whether he ought to say he hadn’t found the woman to his liking, or whether he was expected to know that she was dead. The newspaper item on her death had been a small paragraph, tucked away on an inside page. Police apparently had no clues in the case. He smiled again, wondering if they’d ever show photos of the crime scene anywhere. He’d like to have one to keep, to look at sometimes when the nightmares came. He thought of mentioning it, but perhaps Ms. Erinyes had not seen the death notice.