The Wycherly Woman (7 page)

I had to stand in line again at the telephone booths. Willie Mackey’s office didn’t answer. His answering service told me under compulsion that Willie was up in Marin on a case. He hadn’t left any number to call and his home number was unlisted, even if I was a dear old friend of Willie’s. I wasn’t, exactly, but we had worked together two or three times.

I stepped out of the booth sweating and frustrated. A chiropractor elbowed in past me. His name was Dr. Ambrose Sylvan.

Just for fun, I did the obvious thing and looked up Mrs. Wycherly in the local telephone directories. Her name was in the second book I opened: Mrs. Catherine Wycherly, 507 Whiteoaks Drive, Atherton; with a Davenport number.

When Dr. Ambrose Sylvan had muscled his way out of the booth, I called the Davenport number. A zombie voice told me with recorded politeness that it had been disconnected.

H
IGHWAY
101 divides into two branches on the Peninsula. The western branch, Camino Real, doubles as the main street of a forty-mile-long city which stretches almost unbroken from San Francisco to San Jose. Its traffic movement is slow, braked by innumerable stop-lights. The name of the endless city changes as you go south and cross the invisible borders of municipalities: Daly City, Millbrae, San Mateo, San Carlos, Redwood City, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos.

The eastern branch of the highway, which I took, curves down past International Airport, roughly following the shoreline of the Bay. Mapmakers call it 101 Alternate; the natives of the region call it Bloody Bayshore.

A million people live here between the Bay and the ridge,
in grubby tracts built on fills, in junior-executive ranchhouse developments, in senior-executive mansions, in Hillsborough palaces. I’d had some cases on the Peninsula: violence and passional crime are as much a part of the moral landscape as P.T.A. and Young Republican meetings and traffic accidents. The social and economic pressures make life in Los Angeles seem by comparison like playing marbles for keeps.

I turned off Bayshore, where the drivers drive for keeps, into the bosky twilight peace of Atherton. A sheriff’s car with San Mateo County markings passed me cruising. I honked and got out and was told where Whiteoaks Drive was.

It paralleled Bayshore, about halfway between Bayshore and Camino Real: a quiet street of fairly large estates which was more like a country lane than a city street. Mrs. Wycherly’s number, 507, was engraved in a stone gatepost set in an eight-foot stone wall. The moulded iron gates were chained and padlocked.

Wired to one of them was a metal sign which looked like a For Sale sign. I got a flashlight out of my car. For Sale, Ben Merriman, Realtor, with an Emerson telephone number and a Camino Real address.

The white front of the house glimmered through trees. I turned my light towards it. Oaks on either side of the driveway converted it into a rough green chasm whose gravel floor was drifted with brown leaves and yellowing newspapers. It was an impressive Colonial house but it had an abandoned air, as though the colonists had given up and gone back to the mother country. Blinds and drapes were drawn across all the windows, upstairs and down.

I focused on the newspapers in the gravel. There were twelve or fifteen of them scattered around inside the gates. Some of them were wrapped in waxed paper, against rainy weather; several of them had been trampled into mud.

I reached through the bars, the side of my face against cold iron, and got hold of the nearest one, a
San Francisco Chronicle
still trussed with a string for delivery. I broke the string and read the date at the top of the front page. It was November 5, three days after Phoebe disappeared.

I wanted to see what was inside the house. I put on driving gloves and chinned myself on the top of the stone wall. No spikes or broken glass: the escalade would be easy.

“Get down off there.” a man’s voice said behind me.

I dropped to the ground and turned. He loomed large in the darkness, a dim grey figure in a snap-brim hat.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Looking.”

“You’ve had your look. So beat it, Tarzan.”

I picked up my flashlight and turned the beam on him. He was a big man of about forty, handsome except for an upturned clown’s nose and something about the eyes which reminded me of a Tanforan tout or a gambler on the Reno-Vegas circuit. He wore a sharp dark flannel suit and an indefinable air of failure pinned in place by a jauntily striped bow tie.

The nostrils in his upturned nose glared darkly at me. His teeth glittered in a downward grin:

“Take that light off me. You want me to smash it for you?”

“You could always try.”

He took a couple of steps towards me, as if he was walking uphill, then stood back on his heels. I kept the light on him. His pointed shoes fidgeted in the dirt.

“Who do you think you are?”

“Just a citizen, trying to find an old acquaintance. Her name is Mrs. Catherine Wycherly.”

“She doesn’t live here any more.”

“You know her?”

“I represent her.”

“In what capacity?”

“I’m responsible for the security of these premises. We don’t like prowlers and snoopers around here.”

“Where can I get in touch with Mrs. Wycherly?”

“I’m not here to answer questions. I’m here to see that nobody vandalizes this property.” There was a nasty little whine in his voice. He reached into his back pocket and matched it with a nasty little gun. “Now get.”

My gun was in the back seat of my car; which was just as well. I got.

Crossing Bayshore on an overpass, I felt as if I was crossing a frontier between two countries. There were some white people on the streets of East Palo Alto, but most of the people were colored. The cheap tract houses laid out in rows between the salt flats and the highway had the faint peculiar atmosphere of a suburban ghetto.

Sammy Green earned Sailors’ Union wages and lived in one of the better houses on one of the better streets, almost out of hearing of the highway and almost out of smelling of the Bay. His wife was a handsome young Negro woman wearing a party dress and a complicated hairdo, under which earrings sparkled.

She told me that her husband was in Gilroy for the night; he always visited his folks the second night of his vacation, and took the children with him. No, his parents had no telephone, but she’d be glad to give me their address.

I asked her instead how to get to Woodside, where Phoebe’s aunt and uncle lived.

I
T WAS FIVE WINDING MILES
across the hinterland of the Stanford campus. Eventually I found Carl Trevor’s mailbox on the road that climbed towards the coastal ridge. His place had a name: Leafy Acres. A horse whickered at me from somewhere as I turned up the drive. I didn’t whicker back.

I rounded a wooded curve and saw the long low redwood and stone house, many windowed, full of light. A maid in a black and white uniform answered the door. She turned on outside floodlights before she unhooked the screen.

“Is Mrs. Trevor at home?”

“She isn’t back from Palo Alto yet.”

“Mr. Trevor?”

“If she isn’t back he isn’t back,” she said in an instructive tone. “She went to the station to meet his train. They ought to be here any time now, they’re later than usual.”

“I’ll wait.”

She looked me over, apparently trying to decide whether I belonged in the front part of the house or the kitchen. I assumed my most respectable expression and got bidden into the library, as she called it. It was a beautiful panelled room with actual books on its shelves. The Trevors went in heavily for history, particularly Western Americana.

I leafed through a copy of
American Heritage
until I heard a car engine in the drive. I went to the window and saw them get out of their Cadillac convertible. She climbed out on the driver’s side, a thin woman of about fifty with a face like a silver hatchet. He was a heavy-shouldered man wearing a Homburg and carrying the inevitable brief case. He looked sick.

She offered him her arm as they started up the front steps. He pushed her away, without touching her, in a gesture that combined irritation and pride. He ran up the steps two at a time. She watched him go with naked fear on her face.

The fear was still in her eyes when she came into the library a few minutes later. She had on pearls and a simple dark gown which had probably cost a fortune. A wasted fortune. It accentuated the taut angularity of her body and left her frying-chicken shoulders bare.

“What do you want?”

“My name is Archer, I’m a private detective. Your brother
Homer Wycherly hired me to look for your niece Phoebe. I don’t know whether you’ve heard from him—”

“I’ve heard. My brother phoned me this afternoon. I don’t know what to make of it.” She wrung her hands so hard that they creaked. “What do you make of it? Is she a runaway?”

“I have no theories, Mrs. Trevor. Not yet. I’ve just been over in Atherton, where I found out that Phoebe isn’t the only one on the missing list. Her mother’s house is up for sale, and apparently empty. I was hoping you could tell me where Mrs. Wycherly is.”

“Catherine?” She sat down suddenly, and let me sit down. “What has Catherine to do with this?”

“Phoebe was last seen in her mother’s company. They left the ship together the day your brother sailed. Shortly after that, Mrs. Wycherly seems to have moved out of her house. Do you know anything about the move, or where she’s gone?”

“I don’t keep track of Catherine’s comings and goings. By her own choice, she’s no longer a member of the family.” Good riddance, was the unspoken implication. “As Homer may have told you, she divorced him last May. In Reno.”

“Is that when she moved to Atherton?”

She nodded her thin grey angry head. “Why she chose to come here and become our virtual neighbor!—Of course I know why she did it. She hoped to trade on our standing in the community. But my husband and I were not about to fall in with her plans. Catherine made her bed and she can lie in it.” Her mouth was thin and cruel. “I’m not surprised she gave up on Atherton and moved out.”

“Do you have any idea where she moved to?”

“I told you I do not. I’m sure in any case that you’re on the wrong track. Phoebe couldn’t conceivably be with her. They don’t get along.”

“That may be so. I still have to talk to her.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.” She cocked her head,
as if a moral hearing-aid had switched on and let her hear the harshness in her voice. “You mustn’t think me unchristian, Mr. Archer. Where my former sister-in-law is concerned, we have
had
it, as the young people say. I really did my best for her over the years. I took her into my own house before she married my brother, and tried to teach her the things a lady should know. I’m afraid the indoctrination didn’t take. As a matter of fact, the last time I saw her—” She compressed her lips in a way that reminded me of her brother.

“When did you last see her?”

“That same day. The famous day when Homer embarked on his voyage of discovery. Or escape. Catherine must have read about it in the paper, and saw a chance to get her talons into him one more time. I’m surprised they let her aboard. I’ve seen her drunk before, but never as loud and violent as she was that afternoon.”

“What was she after?”

“Money, or so she said. There Homer was with his millions, sailing off to the South Seas, and there was poor Catherine destitute and starving on the meager pittance that he doled out to her. I felt like telling her that a starvation regime would be good for her figure. But of course her version of the facts was grossly exaggerated, as usual. I happen to know that Homer gave her a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement and pays her three thousand dollars a month alimony in addition. And she spends every penny of it.”

“How?”

“Don’t ask me how. She’s always had expensive tastes, which is doubtless why she married my brother in the first place. I heard she paid seventy-five-thousand dollars cash for the Mandeville house—a ridiculous outlay for a woman in her position.”

“The Mandeville house?”

“The one in Atherton—the one you tell me she’s selling. She bought it from a Captain Mandeville.”

“I see. Getting back to that shipboard scene, did you notice your niece’s reaction?”

“Not specifically. She was appalled, I’m sure. We all were. My husband and I left before it was over. Mr. Trevor has heart trouble, and the doctor wants him to avoid that sort of tension. If Catherine aimed to spoil our leave-taking, she succeeded very well.”

“You didn’t see her leave the ship with Phoebe?”

“No, we’d already left ourselves. Are you sure that information is correct? It doesn’t seem likely.”

“I got it from one of the ship’s officers. They left the dock together in a taxi. I don’t know what happened after that.”

She clasped her hands at her breast. “It’s a horribly upsetting situation. My husband is almost prostrated by it. I should have waited to tell him until he’d had his rest—he comes home from the city so exhausted. But I had to go and blurt it out as soon as he stepped off the train.”

“He’s fond of Phoebe, your brother tells me.”

“Deeply fond. She’s been like a daughter to us, especially to Carl. I do hope you can get her back for him. For all of us, but especially for him.” Her hands had climbed to her throat and were picking at her pearls. “I’m deeply concerned about how this shock will affect my husband’s health. I’ve seldom known him to be so disturbed. And he blames me for what happened.”

“Blames you?”

“When Phoebe didn’t answer our Christmas invitation, he wanted to drive down to Boulder Beach and see that she was all right. I persuaded him not to—he’s not supposed to drive. Besides, I felt she had a right to be on her own if she chose. I naturally believed that it was her choice, that she wanted to be free of family for once in her young life. Perhaps I was a little impatient with her, too, when she failed to acknowledge my letter. In any case, we didn’t go. We should have. We should at least have phoned.”