The Three Roads Read online

  PRAISE FOR ROSS MACDONALD

  “[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Macdonald should not be limited in audience to connoisseurs of mystery fiction. He is one of a handful of writers in the genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Most mystery writers merely write about crime. Ross Macdonald writes about sin.”

  —The Atlantic

  “Without in the least abating my admiration for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, I should like to venture the heretical suggestion that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either of them.”

  —Anthony Boucher

  “[Macdonald] carried form and style about as far as they would go, writing classic family tragedies in the guise of private detective mysteries.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “[Ross Macdonald] gives to the detective story that accent of class that the late Raymond Chandler did.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  Ross Macdonald

  THE THREE ROADS

  Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.

  ALSO BY ROSS MACDONALD

  The Dark Tunnel

  Trouble Follows Me

  Blue City

  The Moving Target

  The Drowning Pool

  The Way Some People Die

  The Ivory Grin

  Meet Me at the Morgue

  Find a Victim

  The Name is Archer

  The Barbarous Coast

  The Doomsters

  The Galton Case

  The Ferguson Affair

  The Wycherly Woman

  The Zebra-Striped Hearse

  The Chill

  Black Money

  The Far Side of the Dollar

  The Goodbye Look

  The Underground Man

  Sleeping Beauty

  The Blue Hammer

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JANUARY 2011

  Copyright © 1948 and renewed 1975 by Kenneth Millar

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1948.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales in entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Millar, Kenneth (Ross Macdonald).

  The Three Roads [by] Ross Macdonald.

  New York, Knopf, 1948.

  p. cm.

  PZ3.M59943 Th PS3525.I486

  48007047

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74074-8

  www.blacklizardcrime.com

  Cover design by Joe Montgomery. Cover photographs: (top) © SuperStock; (bottom) © Masterfile

  v3.1

  For now am I discovered vile, and of the vile. O ye three roads, and thou concealed dell, and oaken copse, and narrow outlet of three ways, which drank my own blood …

  SOPHOCLES, Oedipus Tyrannus

  contents

  Cover

  Praise for Ross Macdonald

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  PART I - SATURDAY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PART II - SUNDAY

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART III - MONDAY

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART IV - DOOMSDAY

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part I

  SATURDAY

  chapter 1

  From the veranda where she had been left to wait she could see the golf course adjoining the hospital grounds. Along the distant hillside, still green from the winter rains, a tiny man in faded suntans was chasing an invisible ball. She had been watching him for some time before she noticed that he handled his club in an unusual way. He was teaching himself to play golf with one hand. She hoped he had been left-handed to begin with.

  She forgot the tiny man when she heard Bret’s footsteps behind her. He turned her toward him, holding her by the shoulders in a grip that almost hurt and studying her face. Looking up into his calm eyes, she understood the doubt that lay behind them. She felt it in her own mind whenever she came to see him after a week’s absence, uncertain and bereft, like a relative called upon to identify the victim of a drowning.

  Bret hadn’t really changed, but he had taken on weight during his nine months in the hospital. It had altered the lines of his cheek and jaw and made his old gray uniform seem too small for him. She could never wholly free her mind of the suspicion that this Bret Taylor was an impostor, living a healthy vegetative life in a dead man’s clothes, battening on the love she owed to the man that was lost.

  She shivered against him, and he tightened his arms around her. She had no right to such fantastic notions. It was her job to bring reality to him. She was his interpreter of the outside world, and she mustn’t forget its language. But even with his arms round her she was chilled by the old terror. During the first few minutes of their meetings she always skated on the thin ice at the edge of sanity. Her whole concern was to keep her feelings from showing in her face.

  Then he kissed her. The contact was re-established and drew her back to her emotional center. The lost man had been found and was in her arms.

  The orderly who had accompanied Bret as far as the door reminded them of his presence. “You want to stay out here, Miss West? It gets kind of chilly in the afternoons.”

  She looked at Bret with the deference that had become instinctive with her. Since he had no large decisions to make, let him make all the small ones.

  “Let’s stay out here,” he said. “If you get cold we can go in.”

  She smiled at the orderly, and he disappeared. Bret placed two deck chairs side by side, and they sat down.

  “And now I’d like a cigarette,” she said. The case in her bag was full, but she preferred to have one of his. Apart from the fact that it was his, which was important, it helped build up the illusion of casualness and freedom.

  “They always call you Miss West,” he said when he lit her cigarette.

  “Inasmuch as that’s my name—”

  “But it isn’t your real name?”

  For a moment she was afraid to look at him, afraid that his mind had reverted to the time when he didn’t know her. But she replied in a sweetly reasonable voice: “Well, no, it isn’t. I explained to you that I started to work in Hollywood under my maiden name. I never use my married name except on checks.”

>   “I didn’t remember,” he said humbly.

  “Nobody can remember everything. I’ve even forgotten my own telephone number.”

  “I’ve forgotten my own name. My memory’s getting better though.”

  “I know it is, every time I come.”

  He said with sober pride, like an explorer announcing the discovery of a new island: “I remembered Kerama Retto the other night.”

  “Really? That’s the news of the week.”

  “The news of the year for me. I remembered the whole thing. It was so real I thought it was happening over again. I could see the rice paddies above the harbor in the glare of the explosion. It was so bright it blinded me.”

  She was dismayed by his sudden pallor. Along his hairline there was a row of minute sweat drops that the February sun did not account for.

  “Don’t talk about it if it’s painful, darling.”

  He had turned away and was looking across the lawn, which sloped down from the veranda into the valley holding the sunshine like a lake of light. Its very peace, she thought, must make it seem more dreamlike to his unpeaceful mind than the remembered terraces of that island off Japan.

  The silence between them was too full of echoes, and she broke it with the first words that entered her head. “I had fruit salad for lunch. I had to wait twenty minutes to get into the dining-room, but they do make good fruit salad at the Grant.”

  “Do they still put avocado in it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I bet you didn’t eat the avocado.”

  “It’s always been too rich for me,” she answered happily. He was remembering everything again.

  “We had avocado salad for lunch on Wednesday or Thursday. No, it was Wednesday, the same day I had my hair cut.”

  “I like you with your hair cut short. I always have.”

  The direct compliment embarrassed him. “It’s convenient for swimming anyway. I didn’t tell you I was swimming on Thursday.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “I expected to be afraid of the water, but I wasn’t. I swam under water the full length of the pool. I soon get tired of swimming in a pool though. I’d give anything to get into the surf again.”

  “Would you really? I’m so glad.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I may have had an idea you’d hate the sea.”

  “I hated the idea of it for a while, but I don’t any more. Anyway I could never hate La Jolla.”

  The happiness inside her pressed tears into her eyes. La Jolla had only one meaning for her; it was the place where they had met. “Remember the day the seals came in?” She winced at her word “remember.” It was always coming up, like the word “see” when one was talking to a blind man.

  He leaned forward abruptly in his chair, his hunched shoulder muscles stretching his uniform tight. Have I made a mistake? she thought in terror. It was so hard to preserve her balance between a soothing therapeutic attitude and the irrational love she felt for him.

  All he said was: “We’ll have to go back there together—soon. It seems incredible that it’s only fifteen miles from here.”

  “I know you’ll be able to go soon. You’re getting so much better.”

  “You honestly think so?”

  “You know you are.”

  “Some days I feel perfectly well,” he said slowly. “I can hardly wait to get back to work. Then my mind comes to a blank space, and I feel as if I’m back where I started. Have you ever imagined a total vacuum? A place where there’s no air, no light, no sound? Not even darkness, not even silence. I guess it’s death my mind comes up against. I guess I’m partly dead.”

  She put her hand over his taut fingers, which were gripping the arm of his chair. “You’re very much alive, Bret. You’re making a perfect comeback.” But his gloomy tension alarmed her and set her thinking. What if she wasn’t good for him? What if he’d be better off without her? No, that couldn’t be true. The doctor had told her more than once that she was just what he needed, that she gave him something to live for.

  “It’s taking a long time,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get out of this place. Sometimes, I don’t really want to. I feel a little bit like Lazarus. He couldn’t have been very happy when he came back and tried to take up his life where he left off.”

  She told him sharply: “You mustn’t talk like that. Your life isn’t half over, darling. You’ve only been ill for less than a year.”

  “It feels as long as prehistoric time.” He had enough humor to smile at his own hyperbole.

  “Forget the past,” she said impulsively.

  “I have to remember it first.” He smiled again, not a good smile, but it was something.

  “You are remembering it. But you can think of the future too.”

  “I’ll tell you what I do think about a good deal of the time.”

  “What?”

  “I think of us together. It’s thinking of that that keeps me going. It must be hard for you to be a hospital widow.”

  “A hospital widow?”

  “Yes. It must be hard for a woman to have a husband in a mental ward. I know a lot of women would clear out and get a divorce—”

  “But, darling.” It would have been so much easier to pass it over or to humor his delusion, but she stuck to the difficult truth. “I’m not your wife, Bret.”

  He looked at her blankly. “You said you didn’t use your married name—”

  “My married name is Pangborn. I told you I divorced my husband.”

  She watched the manhood draining out of his face and could think of no way to rescue it. “I thought we were married,” he said in a high, weak voice. “I thought you were my wife.”

  “You have no wife.” She didn’t trust herself to say anything more.

  He was searching desperately for some excuse, for anything to mitigate his shame. “Are we engaged then? Is that what it was? Are we going to be married?”

  “If you will have me.” There was no atom of irony in any crevice of her mind.

  He got out of his chair and stood awkwardly and miserably in front of her. His blunder had shaken him badly. “I guess it’s time for you to go. Will you kiss me good-bye?”

  “I’d die if I couldn’t.”

  His mouth was soft and uncertain, and he held her very gently. He left her abruptly then, as if he could not bear to stay with her any longer after his humiliation. She was proud of the way he went back to his room alone, like any normal man retiring to his hotel room, but his mistake had shocked and worried her. She had had him in her grasp for a moment, and then he had slipped away again, to a place where she did not dare to follow.

  chapter 2

  Commander Wright raised his arm and pointed across the valley. “See that chap with the golf club?”

  Paula heard the words without grasping their meaning. It seemed to her that the afternoon was repeating itself. Her meeting with Bret had only been a rehearsal, and the set was being arranged for a final retake. The tiny man in suntans was pursuing his invisible ball back and forth along the hillside. Soon Bret would come out on the veranda, and he and she would read their lines again. But this time there’d be no mistakes, no hideous sting in the tail of their conversation. She’d have a chance to tell him the good news about Klifter, and they’d part on a note of hopefulness for once.

  Then she felt the chilly touch of the wind that always sprang up from the bay in the late afternoons. It brought her back to reality with a pang. Bret had come and gone, and the mistake he had made could not be changed by dreaming.

  Wright cocked his finger impatiently and pointed again. The heavy black hair on the back of his hand glistened like iron in the sun. “You see him, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. I’m afraid Bret’s notion that we were married got me down.”

  The doctor grunted and shifted his body in the creaking deck chair. “That’s precisely what I’m trying to explain. That chap with the gol
f club has a simple problem compared with Taylor’s. He lost an arm, and that’s no fun, but he can get along without it. He’s only got a physical adjustment to make, and he’s doing that now. That’s what Taylor would like to do.”

  “I don’t quite see the analogy.”

  “Taylor would rather suppress certain memories than live with them. He’d rather go armless than grow a new arm. But so long as he suppresses those memories of the past he can’t make a healthy adjustment to the present. Past and present are so intertwined that you can’t abandon one without losing your grip on the other. Loss of the present is a fair description of insanity.”

  “But he’s not insane!” The words flew out in protest, almost of their own accord.

  He turned to smile at her, baring his strong white teeth. “You shouldn’t get excited about words, Miss West. They’re all relative, especially the ones we use in psychiatry. I think he’s listed in the files as ‘traumatic neurosis with hysteric symptoms.’ Does that suit you better?”

  “I have no deep respect for words. They’re my business after all. But ‘insanity’ sounds so hopeless.”

  “It isn’t necessarily hopeless. But I didn’t mean to imply that Taylor is insane. Insanity is a legal concept, and from the legal point of view he’s compos mentis. He goes through intelligence tests in a breeze. His orientation is still uncertain, but he could probably leave here tomorrow and get along for the rest of his life as well as most.”

  “Could he really?”

  “If he didn’t have to face any serious crisis.”

  “But there seem to be such dreadful gaps in his memory. In some ways he’s worse than he was four months ago. He didn’t think we were married then.”

  “I wasn’t surprised when that cropped up. He’s taken a little step back in order to take a big step forward. Four months ago he refused to admit the possibility that he had been married.”

  “Doesn’t he remember his wife at all?”

  “No, but he will. I see a great deal more of him than you do, and I’m honestly not worried by these temporary setbacks. He’s on the point of total recovery, and unconsciously he knows it. His mind is fighting that prospect with every weapon at its disposal, and fighting a losing battle.”