The Wycherly Woman Read online

  “Did she confide in you, Miss Lang?”

  She nodded her head. Its movement was restricted by her knees. Her eyes changed from silver to black in the changing reflection of the lamplight, and back again to silver.

  “I didn’t know Phoebe long,” she said, “just since she moved here in September. But we got close in a hurry. She was—she’s a good head, and she helped me with some of my courses. She was a senior”—the past tense kept slipping in—“and I’m only a sophomore. Besides, we had some of the same experiences in our background.”

  “What experiences?”

  “Parent trouble. I won’t go into mine—it’s between me and them—but Phoebe had a ghastly family background, perfectly ghastly. Her mother and father didn’t get along, and finally they got divorced, last summer I think it was. Phoebe felt pretty bitter about the divorce. She felt she had no home to go home to, you know?”

  “Whose side was she on, in the divorce?”

  “Her father’s. Apparently her mother took him for a lot of money. But she blamed both of them, for acting like children.” She caught herself up short. “There’s that blame idea again—maybe you have something, Mister—? I don’t think you told me your name.”

  I told her my name. “Did she talk about her mother very much?”

  “No, she hardly even mentioned her.”

  “Did she ever hear from her mother?”

  “Not that I know of. I doubt it.”

  “Did she know where her mother lives, at the present time?”

  “If she did, she never told me.”

  “So there’s no indication that she may be with her mother?”

  “It doesn’t seem very likely. She had a real down on her mother. She had good reason.”

  “Did she ever discuss the reason with you?”

  “Not right out.” Dolly screwed up her mouth again, as if she was searching for the right words. “She hinted around about it. I remember one night, when we were talking in the dark, she told me about some letters that came to her house. Crank letters. They came last year before the divorce, when Phoebe was home from Stanford for Easter vac. She opened the first one herself. It said some awful things about her mother.”

  “What things?”

  The girl said solemnly: “That she had committed adultery. The way Phee talked, she seemed to believe what the letters said. She said another thing that I didn’t understand. She said the letters were her fault, and they were what broke up her parents’ marriage.”

  “She didn’t mean that she wrote them herself?”

  “She couldn’t have meant that. I don’t know what she meant. I tried to get her to talk about it some more, but she went into a tizzy. I brought up the subject again in the morning, and she pretended that she hadn’t said anything.” A queer expression crossed her face. “I don’t know if I should be telling you all this.”

  “If you don’t, Dolly, who will? When did this conversation occur?”

  “The week before she took off. I remember she was talking about her father’s trip the same night.”

  “How did she feel about her father’s trip?”

  “She resented it. She wanted to go along, but not with him.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s simple enough. She wanted to take a slow boat to China, all by herself alone. But she didn’t.”

  “How do you know she didn’t?”

  “Because she planned to come back and finish her senior year. It was very important to her, to get a degree and get a job and stand on her own two feet and not have to take money from anybody.”

  “Anybody like her father, you mean?”

  “Yes. Besides, a girl doesn’t go away for a long trip and leave all her best clothes behind—her formais, and her Italian sweaters and simply piles of shoes and bags and coats. She even left her blond sheared beaver coat, and it’s worth a fortune.”

  “Where is it?”

  “With the rest of her things, in the basement. I didn’t want them put there, but Mrs. Doncaster said it would be all right.” Dolly twisted uncomfortably, wrestling with her knees. “It seemed so heartless, moving her things out. But what could I do? After Phoebe’s rent ran out, I couldn’t afford to pay the rent for both of us. I had to find myself another roommate. And Mrs. Doncaster had me convinced for a while that Phoebe had simply pulled up stakes and gone away with her father. I didn’t really know different until yesterday.”

  “Where did Mrs. Doncaster get that idea?”

  The girl hesitated. “She just had it, I guess.”

  “It must have come from somewhere.”

  After further hesitation, she said: “I suppose it was wish-fulfillment. She didn’t really want Phoebe to—No,” Dolly broke in on herself. “I don’t mean that the way it sounds.”

  “You don’t mean that Mrs. Doncaster didn’t want Phoebe to come back?”

  “No. I mean, she didn’t want anything to happen to her. But she was just as satisfied when she didn’t come back. She wanted to think that Phoebe had gone for good. I mean, she kept telling me that one of these days we’d hear from Phoebe. She’d send for her things, from New Zealand or Hong Kong or who knows where, and that would be that. But it isn’t, is it?”

  “I don’t understand Mrs. Doncaster’s motive. Does she dislike your roommate?”

  “She hates her. It’s nothing personal. I’m not trying to say that Mrs. Doncaster had anything to do with it.”

  “It?”

  “Whatever happened to Phoebe. She isn’t dead, is she?”

  “I don’t know. We still haven’t got to the bottom of Mrs. Doncaster.”

  “It’s simple enough.” To Dolly, everything was very simple or very complicated. “I didn’t want to drag his name into it—he’s a nice boy—but Bobby Doncaster had a crush on Phoebe. A heavy crush. He used to hang around with his tongue hanging out a yard, panting. Mrs. Doncaster didn’t like the idea at all.”

  “Was it a two-way crush?”

  “I guess so. Phee didn’t wave her torch around the way Bobby did. But as a matter of fact—” She caught herself up short, blinking her dimey eyes.

  “You were going to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It must have been something.”

  “But I hate gossip. And I’m not a snooper, really.”

  “I am. This is a serious matter, Dolly. You know it. The more you can tell me about Phoebe’s life, the better chance I’ll have of finding her. So what were you going to say?”

  She twisted her legs, untwisted them, and ended up sitting on them in a kind of yogi position. “I think Phoebe came here, to this college, on account of Bobby. She never actually admitted it. But it slipped out one time when we were talking about him. She met him last summer at some beach up north, and he talked her into registering here.”

  “And renting an apartment from his mother?”

  “Mrs. Doncaster doesn’t know that. And I don’t know it for certain.” Dolly gave me a worried look. “You mustn’t think there was anything going on. Phoebe isn’t that kind of a girl. Neither is Bobby that kind of boy. He wanted to marry her.”

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard. I heard him down in the basement when I got home from class. He’s working on a surfboard.”

  “How old is Bobby?”

  “Twenty-one. The same age as Phoebe. But he can’t tell you anything much about her. He didn’t know her. I was the only one who knew her, and I didn’t really know her. Phoebe was—Phoebe is deep.”

  “Just what does that mean?”

  “Deep. She never let on what she was really thinking. She could put up a perfectly good front, chatting along with the rest of us, but her mind would be on other things. Don’t ask me what things, I don’t know. Maybe her parents. Maybe other people.”

  “Did she have other friends besides you?”

  “Nobody really close. She was only here a little over seven weeks. I ran into her in the housi
ng office. We were both looking for roommates, and I needed an upperclassman to live with so I could live off-campus. Besides, I liked Phoebe, very much. She was a bit of an odd-ball, and I am, too. We hit it off together, right away.”

  “In what way was she an odd-ball?”

  “That’s hard for me to say. Psych is not my line. I mean, Phee had two or three personalities, one of them was a poison-ality. She could be black, and frankly I’m not so highly integrated, either. So we sort of matched up.”

  “Was she depressed?”

  “Sometimes. She’d get so depressed she could hardly crawl around. Then other times she was the life of the party.”

  “What was she depressed about?”

  “Life,” Dolly Lang said earnestly.

  “Did suicide ever enter the picture?”

  “Sure, we talked about suicide. Ways and means and all. I remember once, we were talking about suicide as an expression of the personality. I’m the Golden Gate Bridge type, the jump-off, highly dramatic.”

  “What about Phoebe?”

  “She said she’d shoot herself in the head. That was the quickest.”

  “Did she have a gun?”

  “Not that I know of. Her father had, though, plenty of them, back home in Meadow Farms. Phee thought it was ghastly, having guns around the house. She’d never shoot herself. It was just talk. Actually, she was afraid of guns. Very neurotic, like all nice people.”

  Never argue with a witness.

  I got up and turned the chair back toward the typewriter. It held a half-filled sheet of typescript, headed “The Psychic Origins of Juvenile Delinquency,” by Dorothea S. Lang, and ending in a half-finished sentence: “Many authorities say that socio-economic factors are predominate in the origins of anti-social behavior, but others are of the opinion that lack of love” …

  The e’s were out of alignment. Maybe it was a clue.

  chapter 3

  THE SLOPE FELL AWAY towards the rear of the building, so that the entrance to the basement was at ground level. A few cars were parked in the yard behind it. Inside, there were noises resembling groans and shrieks of anguish, which came from a room at the back of the basement. I made my way towards it among packing cases and cleaning equipment, and looked into a windowless workshop lit by an overhead bulb.

  Under it a young man with broad shoulders was planing a piece of board clamped in a vise. Sawdust dusted his reddish crewcut. Curled shavings crackled under his feet. I stood and watched him make a number of passes with the plane. His back was to me, and the muscles in it shifted heavily and rhythmically under his T shirt.

  He didn’t know I was there until I spoke: “Bobby?”

  He glanced up sharply. He had bright green eyes. His heavy, slightly stupid mouth and chin reminded me of his mother. Otherwise he was a good-looking boy. His upper lip sported a fresh pink moustache.

  “You want something, sir?”

  I told him who I was and why I was there. He backed against a pegboard wall studded with tools and looked around his cubicle as if I had deliberately trapped him in it. The plane glittered like a weapon in his hand.

  “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with it.”

  He tried to surround this remark with a smile, but his smile was stiff and frightened. I couldn’t tell if this was his reaction to detectives and disappearance or if the fright was chronic in him, waiting for occasions to break out.

  “You hope I don’t think you had anything to do with what?”

  “The fact that Phoebe hasn’t come back.”

  “If you had anything to do with it, now’s the time to say so.”

  His green eyes clouded. He looked at me in confusion. He did his best to convert it into anger: “For God’s sake!” But he wasn’t quite man enough. He was mimicking anger, safely: “Where did you get the idea that I did anything?”

  “You brought the subject up.”

  He tried to reach his moustache with his lower teeth. It was his mother’s mannerism; I had the impression that he hadn’t decided whether he was his mother’s boy or his father’s.

  “But let’s not play word-games, Bobby. You were close to Phoebe. It’s natural I should want to question you.”

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  “That’s unimportant. You were close to her, weren’t you?”

  He noticed the plane in his hand and set it down on the workbench. With his eyes still averted from mine, he said:

  “I was crazy about her. Is that a crime?”

  “It’s been known to lead to crime.”

  His head came up slowly. “Why don’t you lay off me? I was crazy about her, I told you. I still am. It’s been rough enough, these last two months, waiting to hear from her.”

  “You didn’t have to sit and wait.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” He spread his hands, saw that they were dirty, wiped them on the dirty front of his T shirt. “What do you mean?”

  “You could have gone to the authorities.”

  “I wanted to.” His mouth did the mousetrap trick.

  “But your mother wouldn’t let you.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I did.”

  “Who’s been telling lies about us? Who have you been talking to?”

  “Your mother, and one or two of the tenants.”

  “You have no right to come bothering my mother. She only did what she thought was right. She believed that Phoebe had gone off on a trip with her father. We both did,” he added as an afterthought. “We kept expecting to hear from her. It isn’t our fault she didn’t write. You’d think she’d send a postcard at least, to tell us what to do with her things.”

  “Why do you think she didn’t?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. I don’t know anything about it.”

  He was painfully defensive. Perhaps he was simply too scared to co-operate. I realized that I hadn’t been handling him with any tact, and I changed my line of questioning:

  “I’m interested in the things she left behind. Can you tell me where they are?”

  “Yes. They’re in the storage room. I’ll show you.”

  He seemed glad to have a chance to move. He led me around a big gas furnace, ducking under its vents, and unlocked a door in the corner of the basement. Dust-laden sunlight slanted from a high window in the concrete wall. Bobby switched on a hanging bulb. Half-a-dozen suitcases and hat-boxes were piled beside a large steamer trunk. The trunk was plastered with hotel labels, American and foreign.

  Bobby Doncaster had the key to the trunk on his key ring. He unlocked and opened it. The contents smelled faintly of lavender and of girl. They included masses of dresses and skirts, sweaters and blouses, an expensive beaver coat. Bobby watched me finger the coat with something like jealousy in his eyes.

  “Are the suitcases hers?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s in them?”

  “All kinds of things. Clothes and shoes and hats and books and jewelry and doodads. Cosmetics.”

  “How do you know what’s in them?”

  “I packed them myself. I kept expecting to hear from Phoebe, so that I could send her her things.”

  “Why didn’t you send them home?”

  “I guess I didn’t want to. It seemed so—well, so final. Besides, she told me her father had closed—was closing their house. I thought her stuff would be safer here. I kept it under lock and key.”

  “She left a lot of stuff behind,” I said. “What did she take with her?”

  “Just a weekend bag, I think.”

  “And you believed she went off on a two-months’ cruise with nothing more than a weekend bag?”

  “I didn’t know what to believe. If you believe I know where she is, you’re wrong. You couldn’t be wronger.” He added in a gentler tone: “I only hope you find her.”

  “You may be able to help me find her.”

  This startled him: he was easily startled. “How?”

  “By telling me
what you know about her. First I’d better have a look at the suitcases.”

  I went through their contents in a hurry and found nothing that seemed significant. No letters, no photographs, no diary, no address book. It occurred to me that Bobby might have combed them out.

  “Is everything here?”

  “I think so. I packed everything I could find of hers. Dolly Lang helped me. She’s—she was Phoebe’s roommate.”

  “You didn’t put anything aside, as a keepsake perhaps?”

  “No.” He seemed embarrassed. “I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  “I’m sorry, I haven’t. We never exchanged pictures.”

  “You mentioned some books of hers. Where are they?”

  He pulled a heavy cardboard carton from behind the trunk. The books inside were mostly textbooks and reference books: a French grammar and a Larousse dictionary which was dog-eared with use, an anthology of English Romantic poets, a complete Shakespeare, some novels including Dostoevsky in translation, a number of quality paperbacks on psychology and existentialist philosophy. The name inscribed on the flyleaf, ‘Phoebe Wycherly,’ was in a small, distinctive hand—the kind that is supposed to indicate intelligence and sensitivity.

  “What kind of a girl is she, Bobby?”

  “Phoebe’s a wonderful person.” As if I’d questioned this.

  “Describe her, will you.”

  “I can try. She’s fairly tall for a girl, about five foot seven and a half, but slender. She wears size twelve clothes. She has a very good figure, and nice hair, cut medium short.”

  “What color?”

  “Light brown, almost blonde. Some people wouldn’t call her pretty, but I would. Actually, she was beautiful when she felt good—I mean when she was happy. She has those deep dark eyes. Blue eyes. And a wonderful smile.”

  “I take it she wasn’t always happy.”

  “No. She had her problems.”

  “Did she talk about them to you?”

  “Not really. I knew she had them. Her family had broken up, as you probably know. But she didn’t like to talk about that.”

  “Did she ever mention some letters that came last spring?”