A Stranger in My Grave

by Margaret Millar

  This letter may never reach you, Daisy. If it doesn’t, I will know why. Your mother has vowed to keep us apart at any cost because she is ashamed of me. Right from the beginning she has been ashamed, not only of me but of herself too. Even when she talked of love, her voice had a bitterness in it, as if the relationship between us was the result of a physical defect she couldn’t help, a weakness of the body which her mind despised. But there was love, Daisy. You are proof there was love.

  Memories are crowding in on me so hard and fast that I can barely breathe. I wish they were good memories, that like other men I could sit back in the security of my family and review the past kindly. But I can­not. I am alone, surrounded by strangers in a strange place. The hotel guests are looking at me queerly while I write this, as if they are won­dering what a tramp like me is doing in their lobby where I don’t belong, writing to a daughter who has never really belonged to me. Your mother kept her vow, Daisy. We are still apart, you and I. She has hid­den her shame because she cannot bear it the way we weaker and hum­bler ones can and must and do.

  Shame—it is my daily bread. No wonder the flesh is falling off my bones. I have nothing to live for. Yet, as I move through the days, shack­led to this dying body, I yearn to step free of it long enough to see you again, you and Ada, my beloved ones still. I came here to see you, but I lack the courage. That is why I am writing, to feel in touch with you for a little, to remind myself that my death will be only partial; you will be left, you will be the proof that I ever lived at all. I leave nothing else.

  Memories—how she cried before you were born, day in, day out, until I wished there were a way of using all those tears to irrigate the dry, dusty rangeland. Dust and tears, these are what I remember most about the day of your birth, your mother’s weeping, and the dust sifting in through locked windows and bolted doors and the closed draft of the chimney. And at the very last moment before you were born, she said to me when we were alone, “What if the baby is like you. Oh God, help us, my baby and me.” Her baby, not mine.

  Right from the first she kept you away from me. To protect you. I had germs, she said; I was dirty from working with cattle. I washed and washed, my shoulders ached pumping water from the drying wells, but I was always dirty. She had to safeguard her baby, she said. Her baby, never mine.

  I couldn’t protest, I couldn’t even speak of it out loud to anyone, but I must tell you now before I die. I must claim you, though I swore to her I never would, as my daughter. I die in the hope and trust that your mother will bring you to visit my grave. May God bless you, Daisy, and your children, and your children’s children.

  Your loving father, Carlos Camilla

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Margaret Millar (1915-1994) was the author of 27 books and a masterful pioneer of psychological mysteries and thrillers. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she spent most of her life in Santa Barbara, California, with her husband Ken Millar, who is better known by the nom de plume of Ross MacDonald. Her 1956 novel Beast in View won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. In 1965 Millar was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year Award and in 1983 the Mystery Writers of America awarded her the Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement. Millar’s cutting wit and superb plotting have left her an enduring legacy as one of the most important crime writers of both her own and subsequent generations.

  A sneak peek at Margaret Millar’s The Fiend

  (1)

  It was the end of August and the children were getting bored with their summer freedom. They had spent too many hours at the mercy of their own desires. Their legs and arms were scratched, bruised, blistered with poison oak; sea water had turned their hair to straw, and the sun had left cruel red scars across their cheekbones and noses. All the trees had been climbed, the paths explored, the cliffs scaled, the waves con­quered. Now, as if in need and anticipation of the return of rules, they began to hang around the school playground.

  So did the man in the old green coupé. Every day at noon Charlie Gowen brought his sandwiches and a carton of milk and parked across the road from the playground, separated from the swings and the jungle gym by a steel fence and some scraggly geraniums. Here he sat and ate and drank and watched.

  He knew he shouldn’t be there. It was dangerous to be seen near such a place.

  “—where children congregate. You understand that, Gowen?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Do you know what congregate means?”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “Don’t give me that dumb act, Gowen. You spent two years at college.”

  “I was sick then. You don’t retain things when you’re sick.”

  “Then I’ll spell it out for you. You are to stay away from any place frequented by children—parks, certain beach areas, Saturday afternoon movies, school playgrounds—”

  The conditions were impossible, of course. He couldn’t turn and run in the opposite direction every time he saw a child. They were all over, everywhere, at any hour. Once even at mid­night when he was walking by himself he’d come across a boy and a girl, barely twelve. He told them gruffly to go home or he’d call the police. They disappeared into the darkness; he never saw them again even though he took the same route at the same time every night after that for a week. His conscience gnawed at him. He loved children, he shouldn’t have threatened the boy and girl, he should have found out why they were on the streets at such an hour and then escorted them home and lectured their parents very sternly about looking after their kids.

  He started on his second sandwich. The first hadn’t filled the void in his stomach and neither would the second. He might as well have been eating clouds or pieces of twilight, though he couldn’t express it that way to his brother, Benjamin, who made the lunches for both of them. He had to be very careful what he said to Benjamin. The least little fanciful thought or offbeat phrase and Ben would get the strained, set look on his face that reminded Charlie of their dead mother. Then the questions would start: Eating clouds, Charlie? Pieces of twilight? Where do you get screwy ideas like that? You’re feeling all right, aren’t you? Have you phoned Louise lately? Don’t you think she might want to hear from you? Look, Charlie, is something bothering you? You’re sure not? . . .

  He knew better, by this time, than to mention anything about clouds or twilight. He had said simply that morning, “I need more food, Ben.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, because I’m hungry. I work hard. I was wonder­ing, maybe some doughnuts and a couple of pieces of pie—”

  “For yourself?”

  “Sure, for myself. Who else? Oh, now I see what you’re thinking about. That was over two years ago, Ben, and the Mexican kid was half starved. Everything would have been fine if that busybody woman hadn’t interfered. The kid ate the sand­wich, it filled him up, he felt good for a change. My God, Ben, is it a crime to feed starving children?”

  Ben didn’t answer. He merely closed the lid of the lunchbox on the usual two sandwiches and carton of milk, and changed the subject. “Louise called last night when you were out. She’s coming over after supper. I’ll slip out to a movie and leave you two alone for a while.”

  “Is it? Is it a crime, Ben?”

  “Louise is a fine young woman. She could be the making of a man.”

  “If I were a starving child and someone gave me food—”

  “Shut up, Charlie. You’re not starving, you’re overweight. And you’re far from being a child. You’re thirty-two years old.”

  It was not the command that shut Charlie up, it was the sud­den cruel reference to his age. He seldom thought about it on his own because he felt so young, barely older than the little girl hanging upside down from the top bar of the jungle gym.

  She was about nine. Having watched them all impartially now for two weeks, Charlie had come to like her the best.

/>   She wasn’t the prettiest, and she was so thin Charlie could have spanned her waist with his two hands, but there was a certain cockiness about her that both fascinated and worried him. When she tried some daring new trick on the jungle gym she seemed to be challenging gravity and the bars to try and stop her. If she fell—and she often did—she bounced up off the ground as naturally as a ball. Within five seconds she’d be back on the top bar of the jungle gym, pretending nothing had happened, and Charlie’s heart, which had stopped, would start to beat again in double time, its rhythm disturbed by relief and anger.

  The other children called her Jessie, and so, inside the car with the windows closed, did Charlie.

  “Careful, Jessie, careful. Self-confidence is all very well, but bones can be broken, child, even nine-year-old bones. I ought to warn your parents. Where do you live, Jessie?”

  The playground counselor, a physical education major at the local college, was refereeing a sixth-grade basketball game. The sun scorched through his crew cut, he was thirsty, and his eyes stung from the dust raised by scuffling feet, but he was as in­tent on the game as though it were being played in the Los Angeles Coliseum. His name was Scott Roberts, he was twenty, and the children respected him greatly because he could chin himself with one hand and drove a sports car.

  He saw the two little girls crossing the field and ignored them as long as possible, which wasn’t long, since one of them was crying.

  He blew the whistle and stopped the game. “O.K., fellas, take five.” And, to the girl who was crying, “What’s the matter, Mary Martha?”

  “Jessie fell.”

  “It figures, it figures.” Scott wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “If Jessie was the one who fell, why isn’t she doing the crying?”

  “I couldn’t be bothered,” Jessie said loftily. She ached in a number of places but nothing short of an amputation could have forced her to tears in front of the sixth-grade boys. She had a crush on three of them; one had even spoken to her. “Mary Martha always cries at things, like sad events on television and people falling.”

  “How are your hands? Any improvement over last week?”

  “They’re O.K.”

  “Let me see, Jessie.”

  “Here, in front of everybody?”

  “Right here, in front of everybody who’s nosy enough to look.”

  He didn’t even have to glance at the sixth-graders to get his message across. Immediately they all turned away and became absorbed in other things, dribbling the ball, adjusting shoelaces, hitching up shorts, slicking back hair.

  Jessie presented her hands and Scott examined them, frown­ing. The palms were a mass of blisters in every stage of de­velopment, some newly formed and still full of liquid, some open and oozing, others covered with layers of scar tissue.

  Scott shook his head and frowned. “I told you last week to get your mother to put alcohol on your hands every morning and night to toughen the skin. You didn’t do it.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you have a mother?”

  “Of course. Also a father, and a brother in high school, and an aunt and uncle next door—they’re not really blood relations but I call them that because they give me lots of things, etcetera —and heaps of cousins in Canada and New Jersey.”

  “The cousins are too far away to help,” Scott said. “But surely one of the others could put alcohol on your hands for you.”

  “I could do it myself if I wanted to.”

  “But you don’t want to.”

  “It stings.”

  “Wouldn’t you prefer a little sting to a big case of blood poisoning?”

  Jessie didn’t know what blood poisoning was, but for the benefit of the sixth-grade boys she said she wasn’t the least bit scared of it. This remark stimulated Mary Martha to relate the entire plot of a medical program she’d seen, in which the doctor himself had blood poisoning and didn’t realize it until he went into convulsions.

  “By then it was too late?” Jessie said, trying not to sound much interested. “He died?”

  “No, he couldn’t. He’s the hero every week. But he suffered terribly. You should have seen the faces he made, worse than my mother when she’s plucking her eyebrows.”

  Scott interrupted brusquely. “All right, you two, knock it off. The issue is not Mother’s eyebrows or Dr. Whoozit’s convul­sions. It’s Jessie’s hands. They’re a mess and something has to be done.”

  Flushing, Jessie hid her hands in the pockets of her shorts. While she was playing on the jungle gym she’d hardly noticed the pain, but now, with everyone’s attention focused on her, it had become almost unbearable.

  Scott was aware of this. He touched her shoulder lightly and the two of them began walking toward the back-exit gate, fol­lowed by an excited and perspiring Mary Martha. None of them noticed the green coupé.

  “You’d better go home,” Scott said, “Take a warm bath, put alcohol on your hands with a piece of cotton, and stay off the jungle gym until you grow some new skin. You’d better tell your mother, too, Jessie.”

  “I won’t have to. If I go home at noon and take a bath she’ll think I’m dying.”

  “Maybe you are,” Mary Martha said in a practical voice. “Imagine me with a dying best friend.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “I’m only trying to help.”

  “That’s the kind of help you ought to save for your best enemy,” Scott said and turned to go back to the basketball game.

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the old green coupé pulling away from the curb. What caught his attention was the fact that, although it was a very hot day, the windows were closed. They were also dirty, so that the driver was invisible and the car seemed to be operating itself. A minute later it turned onto a side street and was out of sight.

  So were the two girls.

  “We could stop in at my house,” Mary Martha said, “for some cinnamon toast to build your strength up.”

  “My strength is O.K., but I wouldn’t mind some cinnamon toast. Maybe we could even make it ourselves?”

  “No. My mother will be home. She always is.”

  “Why?”

  “To guard the house.”

  Jessie had asked the same question and been given the same answer quite a few times. She was always left with an incongru­ous mental picture of Mary Martha’s mother sitting large and formidable on the porch with a shotgun across her lap. The real Mrs. Oakley was small and frail and suffered from a num­ber of obscure allergies.

  “Why does she have to stay home to guard the house?” Jessie said. “She could just lock the doors.”

  “Locks don’t keep him out.”

  “You mean your father?”

  “I mean my ex-father.”

  “But you can’t have an ex-father. I asked my Aunt Virginia and she said a wife can divorce her husband and then he’s an ex-husband. But you can’t divorce a father.”

  “Yes, you can. We already did, my mother and I.”

  “Did he want you to?”

  “He didn’t care.”

  “It would wring my father’s heart,” Jessie said, “if I divorced him.”

  “How do you know? Did he ever tell you?”

  “No, but I never asked.”

  “Then you don’t know for sure.”

  The jacaranda trees, for which the street was named, were in full bloom and their falling petals covered lawns and side­-walks, even the road itself, with purple confetti. Some clung to Jessie’s short dark hair and to Mary Martha’s blond ponytail.

  “I bet we look like brides,” Jessie said. “We could pretend—”

  “No.” Mary Martha began brushing the jacaranda petals out of her hair as if they were lice. “I don’t want to.”
r />   “You always like pretending things.”

  “Sensible things.”

  Jessie knew this wasn’t true, since Mary Martha’s favorite role was that of child spy for the FBI. But she preferred not to argue. The lunch she’d taken to the playground had all been eaten by ten o’clock and she was more than ready for some of Mrs. Oakley’s cinnamon toast. The Oakleys lived at 319 Jacaranda Road in a huge redwood house surrounded by live oak and eucalyptus trees. The trees had been planted, and the house built, by Mr. Oakley’s parents. When Jessie had first seen the place she’d assumed that Mary Martha’s family was terribly rich, but she discovered on later visits that the attic was just full of junk, the four-car garage contained only Mrs. Oakley’s little Volkswagen and Mary Martha’s bicycle, and some of die upstairs rooms were empty, with not even a chair in them.

  Kate Oakley hated the place and was afraid to live in it, but she was even more afraid that, if she sold it, Mr. Oakley would be able by some legal maneuver to get his hands on half of the money. So she had stayed on. By day she stared out at the live oak trees wishing they would die and let a little light into the house, and by night she lay awake listening to the squawk­ing and creaking of eucalyptus boughs, and hoping the next wind would blow them down.

  Mary Martha knew how her mother felt about the house and she couldn’t understand it. She herself had never lived any other place and never wanted to. When Jessie came over to play, the two girls tried on old clothes in the attic, put on shows in the big garage, rummaged through the cellar for hidden treasure, and, when Mrs. Oakley wasn’t looking, climbed the trees or hunted frogs in the creek, pretending the frogs were handsome princes in disguise. None of the princes ever had a chance to become undisguised since Mrs. Oakley always made the girls return the frogs to the creek: “The poor little creatures. . . . I’m ashamed of you, Mary Martha, wrenching them away from their homes and families. How would you like it if some enor­mous giant picked you up and carried you away?”