Pandora by Holly Hollander

by Gene Wolfe

  “What’d he do?” I asked. When I saw how Molly was looking at me, I added, “I mean, I know it’s none of my business …”

  Blue said, “It is your business, actually. It’s everyone’s. I have no idea what Larry did, but I doubt that he did anything worse than many hundreds of others. There are no good wars, and Vietnam was a particularly bad one; many of its combatants wore civilian clothes, and much of the fighting took place in densely populated areas. If you desire speculation, mine would be that Larry believed that what he was doing was right, at first. And that by the time he’d changed his mind he’d been given, or was about to get, his commission. A month is a long time in war, and he may have gone on for months acting much as he had before, all the while becoming increasingly certain that he was morally a criminal. A protracted period during which a man acts against his conscience can produce severe psychic stress, though it is invisible at the time. Eventually, of course, he resigned that commission and left the service.”

  “You’re telling us he brought back his own shell,” my father said, “as I did.” He looked old, I thought.

  Sandoz cleared his throat. “You were talking about three wrong assumptions, and even if you were too polite to say I made them all, I’d like to know what the others were.”

  “I was led astray by the other two myself,” Blue admitted. “One was that some sort of mechanism had to have been assembled to detonate the shell; that seemed to point to Lief and suicide, or to Mr. Hollander, who has an elaborate shop in the basement of this house and is reported to be a clever mechanic. It was a day and more after the explosion before it occurred to me that even before someone had put a bomb in it, Pandora’s could have been no ordinary box. A long, long time ago, someone had taken the trouble to have that word, Pandora, lettered on its lid in gold leaf. Last night I escorted Holly home and helped her up the stairs, to the best of my ability. And as I was going out, it struck me that the collection of books on vaults and locks in Mr. Hollander’s study might include references to such a box.”

  “I should have thought of that myself,” Sandoz said. “Did it?”

  My father said, “Yes, it does, and I would imagine from what Mr. Blue has said that he found at least one of them.”

  Sandoz looked at him. “You knew about it, then?” “Certainly.”

  “Did you tell your wife what you knew?”

  My father shook his head. “Why should I? The Pandoras were harmless, and as I saw it I’d only have been spoiling her fun.” He paused, and I thought he was waiting for her to say something; she didn’t, so he went on. “They belong to a class of gadgets called alarm boxes, and were made about a hundred years ago in fair numbers by an outfit called the Dependable Manufacturing Company. They came equipped with a good lock—by which I mean with a lock that was good by the standards of the period, before the introduction of pin tumblers—but they had a second line of defense, which is why we call them alarm boxes. In the Pandoras, it consisted of a spring-wound motor that rang a bell and fired a blank cartridge unless a secret catch on one side was pressed before the box was opened.”

  Blue said, “The people who built those boxes weren’t out to create a murder weapon. The unrifled barrel that held the blank cartridge was not, as you might assume, directed toward the face of the unauthorized opener. It pointed toward the back of the box. The most common method of clearing what was a battlefield of unexploded shells is to detonate them by shooting them from a safe distance with a rifle. Mr. Hollander, who appears to have seen a good deal of action in World War II, may have mentioned that to his wife.” Blue looked at Elaine. “Did he?”

  Sandoz said, “So all she had to do was put a real bullet in the barrel.”

  “Yes, and position the shell so the bullet would strike it. No expert mechanic was required for either, of course. Holly here has a twenty-two rifle—I saw it in a corner of her bedroom—and everyone seems to have known about Mr. Hollander’s PPK; a man who is often away and keeps a gun for protection generally tells his wife where to find it in any case. It’s quite possible there are other guns in this house as well. Presumably there is one that uses ammunition that could be made to fit the Pandora’s chamber. You were patient while I aired my speculations about Larry Lief. Do you want to hear a few more?”

  “Shoot,” Sandoz said. I don’t think he was trying to be funny.

  “I don’t believe Mrs. Hollander was at all sure the shell would explode. If it had not, it would have served her purpose nearly as well. The world would have thought her husband had tried to kill her lover, and I imagine she would have persuaded her husband that her lover had arranged that it should.”

  “Hey!” I said. “Do you remember that I said the letter in the paper showed that the bomb did more than it was meant to?”

  Blue nodded, and Sandoz asked him, “She wrote that?” “I think so. If you haven’t found the machine it was typed on—”

  “We haven’t.”

  “—and you’ve examined any that may be here, I’d suggest you look at those in the Chicago offices of the Hollander Safe and Lock Company, and particularly the one used by Mr. Hollander’s secretary. On two occasions he told me he thought the bombing was the work of terrorists, although even the first time he must have suspected otherwise. No doubt he made the same remark to his wife by telephone from New York, and she—knowing by then of the calls the Liefs had received, which had been publicized by television news—wanted to make it look as though he was blowing smoke in the eyes of the police. Actually the letter struck me as having been written by a woman; thus it was a confirmation of the theory I had already formed.”

  “Before you get off onto that,” I said, “what was the third wrong assumption?”

  “That Pandora’s box could only have been opened by someone skilled in picking locks.”

  Uncle Dee smiled. “Which I, by the way, am not.” It was his real one, back home again.

  “Eventually I did a little more research on Pandora’s story—something I ought to have done much earlier. I told Holly one version shortly before the bomb went off. There is another, in which Pandora is given a box full of evils and told to guard it, but opens it out of curiosity. That one, of course, must have been what the Dependable Manufacturing Company had in mind, and its moral is that women are insatiably curious. I might mention in passing that I myself am more curious than any woman I have ever met.

  “When I read the story, I realized how unlikely it was that Mrs. Hollander should have such a box, and offer it as a prize, without knowing what it contained. No doubt she could have had her husband open it in advance; but if she had, he would surely have guessed later that it was she who had arranged for his war souvenir to be in it and for the blank gun to be loaded. He did in any event, as we know, but that was certainly something she would have sought to avoid. She might have had the man she had made her lover, Larry Lief, open it; but if the shell failed to explode, or he survived the blast, or—as would have been quite possible—he had leaked the secret, she would again have been in great danger.”

  Sandoz said, “You’re going to tell me she opened it herself with a hairpin.”

  Blue shook his head. “She opened it herself with the key. The conviction we all had that Pandora’s box was locked, and, as it were, sealed, when she bought it rested upon her unsupported statement. Her statement was a lie. The box’s alarm mechanism had been exhibited and explained to her before she purchased the box, and the key accompanied it. I doubt that you’ll find it; once she had closed the box and relocked it, the key was merely a danger, and a key is an easy thing to dispose of.”

  Elaine said, “There wasn’t any key!”

  “Yes, there was,” Blue told her. “Yesterday I located the shop where you bought the box, and had a conversation with its owner.” He took one of those mini-cassette recorders out of the side pocket of his jacket. “Do you want to hear it?”

  “No,” Elaine said. She looked at us—my father, Blue and Sandoz and Uncle Dee, Molly and me
. “I think this is the point at which I’m supposed to dash upstairs and blow out my brains with Holly’s little rifle.”

  Behind her chair, Jake rumbled, “No you don’t, lady.” “That’s right. No, I don’t. I’m going to get help, and we’re going to fight this.”

  Hearing her I felt funny. It was the kind of thing I might have said myself.

  How I Got My Job

  The next time I saw Blue I could walk. The Ford wagon that had been Mrs. Maas’s was mine, and I had my stereo and clothes and all my junk in the back, with Sidi’s saddle and some other tack I’d saved. The trees around Blue’s place were already starting to turn when I lugged my portable up the porch steps; it’d been a dry summer.

  Muddy came out to help me with my stuff just like he’d been expecting me; I suppose he thought I’d already spoken with Blue. In a minute I saw Blue in one of the front windows watching us, and went inside to talk to him. “I’m moving in,” I said.

  “So I see. May I ask why?”

  “My father closed the house up and put it on the market. You know that?”

  Blue nodded.

  “This big place ought to have lots of bedrooms, and there’s only the three of you living in it.”

  “We have guests occasionally; besides, some of the original bedrooms have been converted to other uses.”

  “No room for me?”

  I was trying to look down, and I must have pulled it off, because Blue’s voice got softer. “We’ll make room for you, if we must. But what are you doing here?”

  “My father set it up for me to stay with Les and her folks. I’ve still got a year before graduation, and he said he didn’t want me to have to switch schools. He’s got a townhouse down on the Gold Coast. That’s in Chicago, next to the lake.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “Only Les’s folks don’t really go for having me around all that much, and living in the same house, Les and I don’t hit it off like we used to. So I thought of you. I get an allowance—I could pay fifty a month, and I know you could use it. Besides, there’s some questions I have to ask you.”

  Muddy came in then with my stereo and said, “How about the room in back?”

  Blue shook his head. “The big turret. It’s traditional.”

  So that’s how I got to be a princess, captive in her tower. Don’t ask me what Blue thinks he is; he’s no giant, for sure. A dragon, maybe, or a warlock. If that’s what he is, then I’m a warlock’s secretary. I do his typing for him (he’s only a two-finger typist, and he doesn’t have a machine of his own anyhow), and when I answer the phone I say, “Aladdin Blue’s office.”

  Only I’m getting a little ahead of the story. That evening we had a vegetarian dinner, the whole thing picked right out of Tick’s garden, and I got my questions in. Muddy wanted to know about some letter Blue’d gotten, and Blue said that judging from the tone of it there wouldn’t be any money in the job unless he could find some on the side. That gave me my opening. I said, “Do you remember that morning in our living room? You said the letter in the paper had been written by a woman. How did you know?”

  “You have a fine memory.” Blue looked thoughtful for a minute. There was some pretty good summer squash on his plate—I happen to like squash—and he picked up a piece with his fork and then set it down. “For one thing, there was a great deal of underlining. Most people agree that women have a penchant for that type of emphasis, although you could probably find quite a few men who underline more than the average woman. What seemed to me more telling was the use, in a brief letter, of the words bravely and cheerfully. Those are female words; men scarcely ever employ them. I think that says something good about women or something bad about men, though I’m not certain what. It was only an indication, of course, not evidence.”

  “You said that was the second indication you had that my … Elaine …” I drank a little coffee to get my voice straightened out.

  “Holly, are you sure you want to talk about this?”

  “I have to. So tell me. What was the first one?”

  “The rose you found in the bouquet in your hospital room, of course.”

  “You said I had a memory. I’d nearly forgotten about that, and anyway I don’t see what it means.”

  “It meant that the police were wrong in thinking your uncle had been shot when he arrived at the hospital. You said it was a florist’s rose, remember? And that he must have persuaded the florist to insert it in your mother’s bouquet. That seemed very improbable to me. What appeared much more plausible was that he had bought a single rose, which would have cost only a couple of dollars, and brought it to the hospital himself; or that he had gone into some other room—one in which the patients were asleep—and taken the rose from an arrangement there. Once he’d done that, the natural place to put it would be the vase that already held your mother’s bouquet. But either explanation implied that he had been not only in the hospital but in your room; and your mother, we knew, had been in that room with you for a good part of the night.”

  “So she’d seen him. Wasn’t his name on the register? And why did she kill him, anyway?”

  “No, he wasn’t on the register. But then he would not have dared to register. To be admitted, he would have had to explain his relationship to you, and hospitals, especially, are alerted when a mental patient escapes. However, I doubt that a man who had succeeded in escaping from a mental institution would find it difficult to slip past a sleepy receptionist. Perhaps he was in your room when your mother arrived, though it is more likely that he came somewhat later. In any event, they left together and he died in the parking lot.”

  “She was carrying my father’s gun around, then.”

  Blue nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly simply because she was frightened. If her love letters to Larry had not been found, she would have had to see to it that Larry’s to her were, in order to provide a motive for your father. She may have been afraid of what Molly might do when they were made public. Or perhaps she had planned all along to kill someone with your father’s gun. Perhaps she planned to kill him and make it appear a suicide, though I doubt that.”

  “I guess I still don’t understand what she was after.” I took another swallow of coffee and made a face.

  “Freedom.”

  “Yeah, and money. For her I guess there wasn’t any freedom without money. But what was she doing? Why Uncle Herbert?”

  “Again—remember the day I talked to you in the hospital. You said you were rich, but later you called that a lie and said you merely came from a rich family. Even your second statement wasn’t quite true, as wealth is measured in Barton Hills. Your father was the president of a medium-sized corporation. He was paid an excellent salary, but that salary was all he had. The real wealth belonged to your uncle; it was merely administered by your father.”

  “Sure, I knew that.”

  “If your father had died, your mother would have been left with his insurance and his house—ten times more money than most human beings ever see, but not enough to permit her to live as she wished to live.”

  “She could’ve killed Uncle Herbert, then killed my father.”

  “Possibly she could have, though murdering your uncle would have been difficult as long as he remained in Garden Meadow; but she was intelligent enough, I think, to see that if she were to kill them both she lacked the brilliance to escape conviction. Those murders would have directed a much less astute policeman than Lieutenant Sandoz to her. What actually happened was that your father received a letter which seemed to indicate that your uncle had not long to live. That event, I would guess, suggested a much more subtle plan.

  “She had already purchased Pandora’s Box and loaded it with two iron buggy weights—they were used to hitch the horse when there was no post or rail—so that Bill wouldn’t think it empty. Servants talk, you know, and at that time she was very probably planning to put some interesting antique in the box, just as I suggested l
ater.”

  “Those were the weights that Sandoz found under the sofa in the study?”

  “Yes. She should have disposed of them before then, but at the time neither Sandoz nor I had any idea why they were there. Perhaps I should mention that it was Bill, whom they were meant to deceive, who directed me to the shop where she had bought the box. I telephoned him from the kitchen while you were sitting in my office.”

  “But when the letter came, she figured out how to use the box.”

  Blue nodded again. “She would kill in such a way that your father would be blamed. While he was in prison, your uncle would, she thought, die of natural causes. Your father would inherit—nothing in the law bars a prisoner from claiming an inheritance, provided it does not come to him by his crime. She, his wife, would control that money for so long as he remained imprisoned, probably for the remainder of his life.”

  “Only when he figured out that he was going to die, Uncle Herbert went over the fence.”

  Muddy said, “So would I, if I knew I was about to croak—I mean if I was locked up someplace. Al, how about a couple more of these thin-sliced tomatoes?”

  I held out my plate. “I’d like some more, Muddy.”

  “Swell. Everything’s organically grown and good as hell for you.”

  “You think she just decided to hurry things up?”

  “I doubt it,” Blue said. “Perhaps she anticipated the sort of situation Lieutenant Sandoz envisioned—your uncle’s starting a legal fight to remain free. Or perhaps she let something slip there in your hospital room that indicated she had planted the bomb, and shot your uncle to silence him. My best guess is that he knew how the Pandora boxes worked—he had been raised to take over the family business, remember—and he said enough in your hospital room to frighten her. Certainly he had been to the site of the explosion, since he must have picked up your rose there. No doubt he had talked to people who described the drawing, but we’ll never know unless she tells us.”