Archer nodded but his look was thoughtful. As he rose to go he was remembering that Dr. Tatum’s surgery had worked, all right; the fetus had been aborted. The infection had come on afterward.
“Do you have any idea why . . . sick as she was . . . she hadn’t come back to Dr. Tatum for treatment?”
“I can’t imagine why she had not,” Miss Povell answered. “She must have known he would have done anything to help her.”
Archer went to the door, hesitated there. “Did you like Barbara Martin?” he asked suddenly.
“Very much.” Miss Povell had risen from her chair; some pink color had come up into her face as they had talked, but now it was dying away. She looked tireder, Archer thought.
“What kind of girl was she? I mean—giggly, or loud, or obviously coquettish?”
“None of those. She was shy. Respectful with older people. She used very little make-up. Her clothes were conservative for a youngster. She was a nice child—a thoroughly nice child.” The color had returned, burning in two angry spots on Miss Povell’s cheeks. “That boy should have been sent to prison for a good term of years.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Archer thanked her and left.
Crossing the channel, seated in his car on the little auto ferry, he stared through the windshield at the approaching shore of the peninsula. Bright sun shone on the patchwork of homes, stores, apartment buildings, variegated stucco and redwood and stone facing. It reminded him suddenly of a puzzle, put together by an idiot. Somewhere in its maze was the box where the letter had been dropped—the post-office people would be checking now to find it. Somewhere in there was the brain, the creature who had written the letter.
“Goddamn you,” Archer said half aloud. “Goddamn your filthy black heart.”
The ferry hooted its warning to the crew in the slip. Archer reached for the key and the motor purred into life.
Molly carried the sack of lunch stuff. Larry put the box with the ice and beer on his shoulder and trudged after her. The rim of the bluff broke sharply and below was a tiny semicircular beach. Molly scrambled down, loose stones falling around her. On the beach she turned to watch Larry. He looked big and bronzed in the sun. The sun also highlighted his blond hair and smoothed the planes of his face, so that he looked extremely young. She thought despairingly that he looked about fifteen.
He put the box on the sand and glanced around lazily. Molly said, “I don’t think anyone’s been here since we were. There isn’t a scrap, not even a pop bottle.”
Larry nodded. “How about a beer? We’ll leave the bottles to show we own the place.”
They sat down and he opened beer and they drank. The sun had heat, reflected off the overhanging cliff, and the seaweed and ocean smells seemed trapped in the pocket here, strong and clean. Molly stretched and drew a deep breath. “It’s a beautiful day. I wish that a day like this could last forever.”
He grinned at her over the bottle. “We’ll have other days.”
Molly nodded. “I get scared sometimes though. I dream things.”
“About what?”
“You know.”
The sand was coarse and crystalline, almost white in color. Molly pushed off her straw kicks and dug her toes into the sand. She looked out at the sea. The sun seemed to reflect off the water as if off a mirror. The waves rolled in, enormous and green, turned over with a thunderous spray of rainbow light. “I like this particular day awfully well, though,” Molly said. “I like it a lot. It’s good to be out of town, all alone. Where no one can see us. Even when we’re in the shack with the door locked I’m never really easy. Every minute I’m expecting some horrible big banging on the door.”
“With police whistles,” he teased. He was grinning again, thoroughly amused. The sun glinted in his eyelashes and shone on his strong white teeth.
She said suddenly, “I wish Mr. Freitag hadn’t asked you all those questions.”
“Ah, he’s just a nosy old biddy,” Larry answered. “He carries his classroom around with him. Invisible blackboards. Anybody under twenty-one, he’s got to quiz ’em and show off.”
“You should have made an excuse and gotten away from him,” Molly said. “Or else, even better, brought the conversation around to age, and told him you’re nineteen or twenty.”
Larry’s expression suddenly hardened. “Chrissakes, why? My age is none of his damned business. I’m making my own living, I’m keeping my nose clean. I’m not asking old Sister Freitag for a damned thing.”
“That isn’t the point,” she said patiently. “In California it’s the law, you go to school until you’re eighteen or have graduated from the twelfth grade. Anything less, you’ll be looked up by the juvenile officers.”
He turned to face her. His eyes were angry. “Molly, look. They put me back in school, I’ll be in the eighth grade. The eighth grade. It’s ridiculous. They’re going to shove me in with a lot of little kids? Me? I’d disrupt the classroom.”
“The law——”
“To hell with the damned law. There must be some out, some way that it’s done with common sense. Before I have you ragging me over it I’ll walk up to the nearest juvenile bull and explain the situation. I’ll tell him how I’ve been on my own for three years. I’ll ask him to figure out how he can arrange to put me back in school. According to the law. I’ll want to know who’s going to support me while I crack books and do homework. Who’ll buy my clothes and my eats. Who’ll supply spending money so I can have a soda in the candy store, along with the other kiddies.”
She had retreated into misery. “They can put me in prison for what I’m doing with you.”
“Over my dead body.” He got up, dropping the empty bottle in the sand. He jerked the T-shirt up over his broad shoulders, flung it down by the bottle, shucked the denim pants down off his legs. He wore a faded black knit swim suit under the pants. “Let’s go in, I’ll race you.” He looked down at her, where she sat hunched with averted face, the black hair blown across her eyes. “Hey, you.” He dropped to his knees beside her, put fingers under her chin, forced her to look at him. “I don’t know where you’ve been all these years, Molly, or what sort of folks you’ve run around with, that you seem to think everybody in California under eighteen automatically has to be a virgin. Where I come from they never heard of such a crazy rule.”
She put her hands up to touch his bare arms. “I just have a feeling as if a . . . a truck is going to run over us.” Her hands tightened. “As if . . . any minute . . . we’ll find somebody looking down at us from the top of that bluff. I have a sense of being followed and watched, of something getting ready to happen. All the time. And I can’t throw it off.”
“Who’s interested in what we’re doing? Your folks?”
She shook her head, crouching against him.
“Nobody gives a damn about me but you.” He put his mouth down, she felt his breath on her face, and then he kissed her. “We ought to go in. Come on.” His hands fumbled at the back of her neck, unknotting the halter tie.
“No, wait. My suit’s still in the car. I’ll have to get it.”
“All right.” He kissed her again, and then there was sudden urgency in his fumbling. “If there is some invisible juvenile bull at the top of the bluff, let’s give him something to look at, first”
“No . . . no, Larry!”
“Because this is a day we want to remember forever——”
“Not . . . now.”
But she was prone on the sand, his arm was hard and heavy across her waist, his hands pinning her shoulders had the weight of stones. She felt the heat of the sun on her bare breasts, and the thunder of the surf seemed far away, muffled in the thudding of her pulse.
Another sound cut in, small and sharp, as imperative as the preliminary rattle of a whip. A terrible shock brought Molly up to struggle against him. There had been a fall of little stones off the bluff. Someone was up there. She writhed free as he tried to catch her. She tied the halter into place as she sprang to her feet
. Then she was running.
She had to confront the face she imagined, the face of terror that had followed and looked down, spying upon their moment of love-making.
Breath tore at her lungs, her feet felt cut and raw, as she reached the rim and toppled there, the distance a dizzying blur. Larry was with her in the next instant; and then when she could see clearly, there was nothing between them and the shabby little car sitting alone in the sun. A long way off against some foothills was the coast highway, busy with bug-sized traffic, too far even for the noise to reach them. The only movement was that of summer-dried grasses under the sea wind, the only sound that of the surf.
She turned to Larry, clung to him shaking. “I thought I heard someone.”
“There’s nobody here but us.”
He carried her back down to the beach. She was wrung out, heavy with lethargy. She wanted to sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LOTTIE TOMLINSON went into the bathroom and ran the cold water tap, put hands and wrists into the basin, then splashed her face. When she lifted her face from the towel she found herself looking back from the glass, and then suddenly she could see the marks left by the weeks since Edie had died. The Italian cut had grown out shaggy and uncurling. Her face had thinned in the cheeks and temples, giving an effect of hollow malnourishment. Her skin looked dry and withered.
She loosened the scrap of silk holding her hair, shook the hair down around her face, studied herself critically. “I’m an old lady,” she said softly, frowning at herself. “I’ve gotten old, grieving for Edie.” All at once a sense of alarm, the first rousings of self-preservation, ran through her; and at the same time she seemed to take a great step past all the numb, distracted sorrow and to be in the open, to be self-possessed, clear-headed. She opened the medicine chest, took out a jar of cream, and began to scrub it into her skin.
Afterwards she glanced down at the clothes she wore as if seeing them for the first time that day. An old white school blouse of Edie’s, too tight across the bust. Blue corduroy pants, worn thin on the knees. The scuffed sandals she should have discarded long ago. Old things. Shabby, dismal things.
What happened to me?
She tried to think back, tried to re-create the feeling of lostness and fear of living that had come over her when Edie had died.
I wanted to grieve forever, she thought. She felt a pang of guilt, then put it firmly aside. Edie wouldn’t want me to go on like this. I can’t imagine why I felt it was somehow due her.
She went into the studio room, sniffing at the air of staleness, looking around, seeing the untidiness and the layers of dust, the unswept floor, the neglected loom, the fallen scraps of samples. “I’ve been away somewhere,” she said to herself, not quite understanding what she meant by it.
It occurred to her that perhaps most people who go through a deep and irreparable loss suffer this same thing, this locking in of despair that seems to have no end until, suddenly and miraculously, it breaks.
“Edie . . . Edie . . .” she whispered into the silence, but her sister’s name brought no clutch of agony, only the remembrance of love.
She saw the chair then, the one where the detective, Archer, had sat earlier this same day. His visit seemed far distant in time, past some bridge of contact, in some other and separate part of her life. She thought back, impatient with herself. How had she acted with him?
Like a fool.
She should of course have listened calmly and carefully to what he said, then replied, with common sense. She’d have to go to see him. Now.
She went into the bathroom, shed her clothes, and showered, rubbing herself hard with the towel. Then she removed the cream from her face and applied make-up. She hurried into the bedroom and opened the closet and started to search for a dress to wear, but the hair falling about her face, damp and lank, distracted her. She went to the dresser, opened a drawer. She took out a pair of gold-banded combs, lifted the hair at either side of her head, and pinned it back. Then she brushed it softly into a roll on the neck.
The appearance of self-neglect was gone.
She selected a brown linen dress from the closet, held it against her for a judge of fit. Because she had lost weight it was going to be loose, but then it was one of the newer styles, new late last summer, and not expected to hug the waist.
She put on hose. How long since she’d worn nylons? She couldn’t remember. At Edie’s funeral, probably. Shabbiness had grown into a uniform.
With white pumps, white purse under her arm, she took a final look at herself in the mirror. Suddenly the knowledge of how changed she would seem to Archer swept over her and in spite of the seriousness of her mood, she smiled. She walked out through the front door, locked it, and turned to the courtyard.
The door of the other downstairs flat was closed, the blinds drawn at the windows. She noted the paper lying spread on the step, and the part of her that had suddenly awakened from long grief was now avid for news of the world. She stooped, picked up the paper, stood there to read the headline. But nothing seemed changed, or at least the paper made the current crises sound like all the old ones; the ferment of politics, the clash of minor foreign wars, the dismay over local crime seemed of a pattern she’d always known. She put the paper back on the step.
The place had an air of vacancy, she thought, as if her co-occupant were gone for the day. But moving off towards the street, she revised this impression. The sense was not so much one of emptiness as of secrecy. He’d been in there last night, she knew. She had heard the typewriter. She had not heard him go out during the morning, though he well might have without her knowing, since she had paid little attention to anything beyond the perimeter of her misery.
She had long sensed his interest in her affairs. At the time of Edie’s death he had been one of the people whose sympathy she had rebuffed. She had shrunk from the solicitude of anyone living so close, fearing an intrusion on her grief. He had seemed to understand how she had felt, and had left her alone.
But Edie had been friendly with him.
He had moved into the next flat a month, perhaps a little more, before Edie had died. A day or so after his arrival Edie had noticed an injured bird in the shrubbery and he had helped her to catch it and doctor it. The bird had died afterwards, and he and Edie had buried it. He had helped her patch a sail for the dinghy. Edie had been a great chatterer, and probably she had told him a good deal about herself and Lottie and their domestic arrangements. Under such circumstances, he might have felt that he was obliged to express his sympathy in her time of grief.
She hadn’t seen him recently to speak to. She had noticed his passing in the courtyard, if she were working at the loom. She knew that he typed in the evenings. Class work? Somehow she had absorbed the knowledge that he had a large classical record collection; no doubt without being aware of it directly, she’d caught snatches of his hi-fi.
On the bus she dismissed him from her thoughts and began to consider the coming interview with Archer.
At the police station, she had to wait. Archer wasn’t in, though he was expected shortly. She sat in an anteroom. There was a counter, a couple of officers on duty, a phone board, a typist working on reports. It wasn’t a big police force. There never had been very much crime.
She recalled their interview of the morning. Archer thought that there was something strange about Edie’s death. He always had, she sensed, even before the arrival of this anonymous letter he had mentioned just before leaving. He had tossed the information about the letter in as if as a final goad to rouse her. She scarcely believed in that letter. Somehow she had a much firmer conviction about Archer’s interest and bloodhound instincts than she had in the letter.
Archer came in hurriedly. He noticed her, nodded, then took a swift second look. Behind the lenses, his eyes widened.
“Mr. Archer——”
He controlled his air of surprise. “Miss Tomlinson. Glad to see you. I’ll be with you in a minute. Come in.” He put her in an office
, his own, she decided, and then went out quickly again.
Matthews was sitting with his elbows on his desk, hands clenched, forehead dropped forward to rest on his knuckles. His face was hidden by his fists but Archer thought that the crew cut was grayer, dustier than ever. When he lifted his head his big face seemed to have taken on the malevolent dilapidation of a piece of old driftwood.
“Well, you’ve been gone long enough.”
“I had to check the autopsy report on Barbara Martin. In Santa Ana. Then I talked to the nurse, Miss Povell. I telephoned the Martins, trying to run down an old prescription bottle the Martin kid had with her at the end. The family’s pretty well split up. The mother’s in the East with the younger kids; the husband still lives here, but he doesn’t know anything about a prescription bottle. He’s going to look.”
Archer sat on the edge of the desk.
“I take it you think the prescription bottle means something.”
“This is what it could mean,” Archer said. “The girl was missing for three days following the abortion. Hid out somewhere. Her folks filed a missing-person report here. Dr. Tatum claimed at the trial that he hadn’t known where she went. The point is, during those three days this infection—infection that Doc could have stopped in its tracks—flared up and raged out of control. Killed her. She must have known, even young and inexperienced as she was—she must have known she was in terrible need of medical care.”
Matthews was tense, stretched tall in the chair. “Someone kept her prisoner until it was too late? But wouldn’t she have told it?”
Archer shook his head. “Not that way. According to what Miss Povell said, the kid must have been doctoring on aspirin. Like trying to put out a forest fire by spitting on it. She had aspirin with her, but it was in a prescription bottle. She told Miss Povell it didn’t work. Miss Povell thought she was talking about the abortion, but I don’t believe it. The kid was talking about the medicine. She couldn’t understand why it hadn’t helped.”
Matthews made a bitter mouth. “She thought it was something better? Is that what you mean? But wouldn’t she know aspirin by looking at it? It says ‘Bayer’ on it or something.”
The Watcher Page 6