Wicked Stepmother

by Michael McDowell

  “Well,” asked Cassandra, “has he found anything?”

  “The P.I., you mean?” Jonathan grinned, amused by the jargon. “Nothing major, I guess. He would have called. But I’m going to speak to him this week. So I think I’d like to have a little conference soon. You and me and Verity. Whether our P.I. has found out anything or not. We should decide—together—how we’re going to handle Louise. That woman just gets worse and worse.”

  Cassandra laughed. “Father always wanted us to be closer. And Louise is accomplishing that. Why don’t the three of us get together next weekend, and plan strategy?”

  “That sounds good. And why don’t we go down to Truro? We’ll be relaxed, and besides, I don’t want Louise dropping in unannounced in the middle of it. It’s the sort of thing she’d do if she suspected anything.”

  “I’ll have the house opened this week. You’re right. Louise is not likely to bother us there. And we’ll also try to figure out a way to get that investment money out of Mr. Strable.”

  “Good,” said Jonathan. “The poor little rich boy will get all his problems solved down at the beach.”

  13

  “Dear Mr. Cirina,” Cassandra wrote at the top of a small sheet of Iphigenia stationery, “I was very pleased to have the opportunity to read your cycle of poems, Reckless Dust, but I fear that its principal themes of necrophilia and decay make it unsuitable for an appearance in Iphigenia. Sincerely yours, Cassandra Hawke, Editor.” She signed her name, typed a label with Mr. Cirina’s address, placed the label on a large gray envelope, and shoved in a pile of pages at least an inch thick. She sealed the flap with tape, and tossed the envelope with a sigh into the wooden tray marked “Mail.”

  The room was hot. More than that, it was dark because of a power outage, and Cassandra had to turn her manual typewriter so that the dim light of the overcast day shone upon the paper in the bail. A fan with blue blades sat desolately on the corner of her desk, unmoving. Out on Brattle Street, the sidewalks were crowded with summer-term students at Harvard. Despite the fact that no signals were working, traffic moved as usual—Cambridge drivers tended to ignore them at the best of times, and the set of lights that had previously been right in front of the offices of the Menelaus Press had been removed a year before, since they were no more than a joke. Cassandra lifted her eyes above the leafy trees and roofs of surrounding buildings. The sky was darkened to a steely gray by thick unmoving clouds, and the still air was strong with the smell of impending summer rain. From down the hall she could hear Sarah’s transistor radio playing a golden oldies station. The Beach Boys were singing “I Wish They All Could Be California Girls.”

  Cassandra picked up the clipped manuscript that lay at the top of a pile of unsolicited submissions at the corner of her desk. She went over to the window, leaned against the sill, and shifted so that the light fell upon the pages as she turned them. There were three poems, by Mr. Eugene Lefavre, called “Trash Bag Love,” “Dancing in the Sink,” and “Housewives in Cellophane”—each a monologue composed in rigid blank verse. She quickly typed out a rejection note for that one too.

  From down the hall, Sarah’s radio was now playing the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer.” Cassandra picked up a third manuscript, and went to the window with it. Outside, in the little garden before the building, most of the Menelaus employees sat with cups of coffee and pastries brought from the Blacksmith’s House bakery around the corner. They had taken the excuse of the power outtage to abandon their desks.

  Cassandra glanced up at the sky again, and her thoughts drifted to the coming weekend with Jonathan and Verity at their Cape house in Truro. Verity had agreed to it with surprising alacrity, and taken elaborate precautions against Louise discovering any of their plans. Now that she knew about the investigator Jonathan had hired, Verity seemed eager to participate in family ventures. No one else, not even Apple, Rocco, or the servants were told of the investigator or the meeting Jonathan had called to discuss his findings. Cassandra and Verity themselves would open up the house late on Friday afternoon.

  The telephone rang, startling Cassandra from her thoughts; she had forgotten that blackouts don’t affect phone service.

  It was Rocco on the other end, changing their plans for the evening. Lenny had at the last moment procured a play date for the band.

  “Where are you playing?” With the receiver cradled against her ear, she went over and shut the door. Cutting the cross-­ventilation would raise the temperature, but it would also keep out the noise of the Doors’ “L.A. Woman.”

  She walked back to the window. As she talked to Rocco, she stared at the sky. “Rocco, you told me you weren’t going to play the Basement anymore. You told me—”

  As Rocco explained, she stuck her hand out the window to see if the rain had yet begun to fall. She felt a drop or two on her palm.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Cassandra replied quickly. “Because the Basement’s crowd is made up entirely of Northeastern students. They’re drunk when they get there and their idea of a good time is to see who can throw up the farthest. Those people don’t care who’s playing, so long as it’s loud enough so they don’t have to talk to their dates.”

  Outside, the rain began to fall in earnest. The Menelaus employees all scurried inside through the front door, directly beneath Cassandra’s window.

  “I know what the take at the door is like there,” said Cassandra. “And of course it’s good, but it’s an audience that doesn’t carry any weight. The people who go to the Basement are people who don’t want to have to stagger home more than two blocks. These aren’t the people who’ll follow you bar to bar. When you play at the Basement, you’re not building. You’d be surprised how much this is like trying to establish a subscription basis for a little magazine—it’s just like it, in fact. You’ve got to have your base. It makes me furious that Lenny would book you into a place like that for three nights. Three nights completely wasted, so far as I’m concerned.”

  The rain began suddenly to come down hard, and at such an angle that it splashed on the windowsill. With one hand, Cassandra lowered the windows as she listened to Rocco.

  “No,” she said at last, “of course I’m going to come. I’m not mad at you—I’m mad at Lenny. I think he’s wasting your time. I think he’s living hand to mouth on his commission. He’d book an English band in an Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day if it got him fifty dollars. . . . No, I don’t know what time it is, the power’s off here. I’m going home early today. I’ll see you at ten. If I can get away a little earlier, I’ll come over to your place first. Oh, by the way, I talked to the contractor. He said the job will take about a month and they’ll start tearing the walls out next week. Okay? Good. See you at ten.”

  His reply was lost beneath a great roll of thunder. The sky outside had darkened, and now was nearly black. Suddenly it was lighted up with flashes of lightning, and a sharp crack of thunder told that it had struck very close. Cassandra hung up the telephone.

  The windows were open at the top, and the room quickly filled with the fragrance of the rain. The rain beat upon the windowpanes and thrashed the trees outside. The Menelaus sign swung creakily. And, just faintly underneath it all, she could hear Sarah’s radio, playing The Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

  That evening Cassandra went down the short narrow staircase of the Basement. She paid the two-dollar cover charge to a heavyset man with close-cut black hair and a full black beard. He sat on a stool by the door with a small cash box resting on one wide thigh. He reached out for her hand, and was about to stamp it, but Cassandra declined. “Hey,” he said, “what if you want to go outside and smoke some weed?”

  Cassandra still declined. She stepped through a low doorway, and went a few steps over to the bar. She seated herself on a stool and ordered a glass of white wine. It was nearing ten o’clock and the bar was doing brisk business for a Tuesday night. With a practiced eye, Cassandra looked the place over, and saw that the lighting was ill-designed and entirely t
oo bright—it served only to emphasize the dinginess of the place. A jukebox near the restroom doors was blaring Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” unpardonably out of date. On the raised dais that served as a stage she saw that the band’s equipment had been set up, but she didn’t see any of the members of the group about. She did, however, see Lenny Able, the band’s agent, standing halfway down the bar. As he waited for the bartender to mix his drink, Lenny looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He smoothed a hand over his fuzzy beard, and pushed his frizzy hair farther down over his forehead. He adjusted the open collar of his floral-patterned shirt. The gold chains around his neck gleamed under the bright light. Lenny took a satisfied breath and glanced away from his image only when the bartender placed his drink before him. Lenny paid and then made a pointed display of slapping down a generous tip. He did not leave until the bartender had seen the tip, taken it up, and acknowledged it with a nod.

  Cassandra turned her head as Lenny passed by her. He did not see her. He went and stood by the doorman only a few feet behind Cassandra. Cassandra could make out most of their conversation. She was amused by Lenny’s Mr. Gladhand routine. The doorman, who it turned out was also the manager of the place, merely grunted, always in the same tone, at anything Lenny said. As she listened with half an ear to Lenny’s inanities, she looked over the increasing crowd, wondering that so many, so young, could be so drunk so early in the evening.

  “Don’t bust my ass with shit like that,” she heard the doorman say in a loud voice. Cassandra shifted a little until she could see him and Lenny in the mirror. She strained to catch more of their conversation.

  “Hey, come on, Charlie, you known me a long time.”

  “So what? I say what groups play here.”

  “Hey,” said Lenny affably. “I bring you my best acts. Class shit. Look here, People Buying Things is fucking packing ’em in.” Lenny waved a hand to take in the bar behind him. “Fucking look around, man.”

  “It’s two-for-one on beer, Able. That’d pull ’em if the Russians were dropping the bomb and this was ground zero.”

  “Yeah sure, but what about Friday? Friday when you got a five-dollar cover, you got to have some class shit to bring ’em

  in.”

  “Sure, sure, bring ’em back.”

  “Great. So terms, talk terms to me, man.”

  “You give me five hundred,” said the doorman, “and you get full take at the door.”

  “Hey, no way, man, five hundred, that’s robbery.”

  “Don’t call me man,” said the doorman. “Five hundred, take it or leave it.”

  “Hey, what if there’s a blizzard or something?”

  “This is July. Ain’t gonna be no blizzard.”

  “Sure,” said Lenny, after a moment’s consideration, “give you five hundred. This band’ll pull ’em in off the streets.”

  “Five hundred,” repeated the doorman, “up front. Tomorrow morning, or I don’t put it on the radio and in the papers.”

  “Hey, no way!” cried Lenny. “You’ll get your fucking five, I can’t front bills like that.”

  The doorman shrugged. “Then screw it. Hey, I’ll get fucking Surgical Penis Clinic in here. I love those fucking girls. They tear the fucking place up.”

  “Hey, man, do it for four.”

  “No.”

  “Two-fifty up front, and two more as soon as it walks in the door on Friday night.”

  “Five up front. Hey, Able, move your fucking ass, you’re blocking traffic.”

  Lenny scrunched against the wall to let in a group of six or seven already drunken members of a college fraternity.

  “I can’t give you five up front,” said Lenny.

  “Then fuck you,” said the doorman. “Hey, you’re supposed to be this band’s fucking agent and manager. What kind of guts have you got behind them if you won’t even put up a lousy fucking five hundred dollars? You don’t think they can pull in a hundred lousy fraternity jocks from across the street on a fucking Friday night?”

  “Sure! Sure I’m behind ’em two hundred percent. It’s this up-front shit I don’t want to deal with.”

  “Then fuck off, cheapskate, and leave me alone to make change.”

  Lenny glared at the doorman and manager of the club, and then walked off, muttering.

  Cassandra finished off her drink and signaled for another. She wondered what she ought to do: tell Rocco and Apple what she’d overheard, silently offer to lend Lenny the five hundred dollars, deal with the manager of the place herself, or simply do nothing at all. She sipped at her second drink, still considering the business, when her attention was drawn to a table nearby. A college student stood up suddenly, knocking his chair over behind him. His friends around the table were laughing. The college student lurched to the side, and threw up into the lap of the girl who was sitting next to him.

  It was then that Cassandra decided to say nothing at all. One night’s profits, and radio and print exposure, did not weigh sufficiently against the uselessness of such an audience as this.

  14

  The Hawke summer house in Truro on Cape Cod was a modest structure built in the thirties, one-storied, gray-shingled, and weather-beaten. At one end of the house were four small bedrooms and two baths, at the other a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. The front door opened onto a bare, grassless stretch of white sand sloping down to the rocky beach. A small dune rose up behind the house, just high enough to make the house invisible to walkers or drivers on the shell-paved private road that wandered along the coast here. The house’s casual, comfortable furnishings and its low-key appearance masked its real value, since few properties on this part of the Cape could now boast two hundred yards of private beach—so much had been taken over in the creation of the National Seashore in the fifties.

  On Friday afternoon, Cassandra took off from work early, picked up Verity, and arrived in time for late-afternoon sunbathing. The house had been opened at the beginning of June, but none of them had used it with any frequency. Cassandra and Jonathan had been too busy, and too disturbed by the death of their father; Verity had been too lazy to be bothered with the trip down. As soon as she had put away her clothes in bureau drawers fragrant with lavender, Verity announced with unaccustomed energy, “I’m going over to the grocery store.”

  She brought back lobsters, avocados, and a sampling of fresh fruit. “This place seems so empty with just us. I wish you had invited Rocco and Apple.”

  “No. This weekend is family, just family. Besides, People is doing a fill-in at Channel One tonight and tomorrow,” said Cassandra. “It came up this afternoon when Amoebas in Bondage had to cancel. It’s going to be broadcast live on ZBC radio. Unfortunately, the signal won’t reach this far. I really wish we could hear them. They’re playing with Solar Blood and Judy’s Tiny Head.”

  Verity looked up with a grin. “You’re really getting into all this, aren’t you?”

  Their dinner was relaxed and pleasant. Over the Atlantic the sky was a refulgent cobalt. Verity asked Cassandra about the Press and her projects there. And when Cassandra replied, Verity seemed genuinely interested.

  Afterward, as Cassandra made coffee, Verity shaped four lines of coke on the glass coffee table. This time, without demur, Cassandra joined her sister, not admitting until afterward that it was her first time.

  They sat at opposite ends of a bamboo couch with faded green cushions. Light from a fringed floor lamp burned low and cast the room in comfortable shadow. A cool, salt-sparked breeze drifted into the room from the ocean, and the steady, gentle lapping of the water was matched by the creaking of Cassandra’s rocker, as she levered it with one foot on the bare wood floor.

  “I’m glad we came here,” said Verity at last.

  “Me too,” said Cassandra quickly. “I don’t know, just when I think the family is falling apart, and I wonder if it’s the result of Father’s dying, something like this happens, and I know we’re still in there together. For one whole weekend, we do
n’t have to think about anything but a strong wind and a good tan.”

  “For one whole weekend,” said Verity, “I’d like not even to hear Louise’s name mentioned.”

  The mood was broken by the ringing of the telephone.

  “Christ,” breathed Verity, “why did Jonathan have to remember to connect it?”

  Cassandra shrugged apologetically. “Because we always think of everything. It’s a bad habit, I guess.” She got up to answer.

  “It’s Jonathan,” she said to Verity, then spoke into the tele­phone. “Are you coming down tonight? Or are you waiting till tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be down in the morning,” Jonathan replied. “One of the taillights is out on the trailer, and I’m afraid to drive down there tonight. I’ll come down early in the morning.”

  “You’re in Brookline?”

  “Yes, I came over to hook up the boat. I might as well spend the night here, since I’ll be leaving so early.”

  Jonathan was calling from the darkened study at the front of the house. The only illumination was through the fanlight above the front door, patterning a soft glow on the marble floor of the hallway outside the study.

  “Did you find out anything from that detective in Atlantic City?” Cassandra asked.

  “Yes. A great deal. And I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’m not going to say anything over the telephone.”

  “Verity and I want to know!” Cassandra protested.

  “Tomorrow,” said Jonathan, and hung up the telephone.

  He did not hear the click of the extension phone upstairs being dropped into its cradle a moment later.

  The next morning Cassandra was waked by the unexpected smell of frying sausage, perking coffee, and a third, sweet odor she couldn’t immediately identify. She was puzzled, since Verity never rose before noon. She pulled on a pair of faded jeans and a blue cotton work shirt, which she knotted beneath her breasts. She stepped into her leather sandals and made her way down the hallway toward the kitchen. Passing a window that looked out toward the bay, she paused to watch two sandpipers hurrying across the beach. Just before she reached the doorway to the living room, she heard the sound of shattering glass.