Vanish in an Instant (24 page)

It was her second mention of the pressure of anger. But Meecham was aware that behind the anger, like a chorus lost in the shadows of a stage while the spotlight followed the principal, there were other pressures; a whole chorus of pressures chosen haphazardly from every period of her life, unrehearsed, dancing out of step and time, scream­ing off-key.

“I didn't plan anything,” she said. “It all just
happened
, and so quick, quicker than telling about it.”

“His wallet was missing.”

“I took it. I stole it. Sometimes I think I feel worse about that than I do about killing him. I was brought up strict, I never stole or told lies when I was a kid. I—well, there was forty dollars altogether. I kept the money and threw the wallet in the snow on my way home. It was snow­ing heavy by that time. That was lucky for me because I never thought of tire tracks or footprints or anything. I never even thought of the girl being left there with Claude's body. That seemed like luck too, at first, having her get arrested. I never dreamed it would turn out like this, me with the money I wanted for Earl, and no Earl to make it worthwhile. Six thousand dollars, and no Earl.”

From the kitchen came the crash of glass and the old lady's voice, thick with the sleep she wooed and fought with like a lover: “A mesh, an awful mesh, mush clean it up fore Victor sheath it.”

“I wasn't scared until I got home and then I realized what I'd done. It hit me the way I'd struck Claude hard and fast, so I could hardly crawl into the house. Everyone was asleep and the lights were off. I rapped on Earl's door and he let me in. I told him what had happened. He didn't get excited, he just kept saying everything would be all right. He fixed me some coffee and when I'd drunk it he made me tell him everything I saw and heard and did, every detail. He wrote down what I said in a notebook. I didn't know then what his idea was, not until he said,
Where will we get the blood
? Where will we get the blood,” she repeated dully.

“Where did you get it?”

“From me, from my arm. I told you that I'd cut my arm on the broken tap. . . . I had to tell you something, I knew you'd seen the bandage. But I didn't cut it, Earl did. It took such a long time to get enough blood and Earl was sick from hurting me. But we had to have it to stain the clothes and it had to be mine because it was the same kind as Claude's.”

“How did you know that?”

“Once years ago he was hurt on the job and had to have a transfusion. They used my blood, so I guessed it was the same kind. We had to take the chance anyway. Earl bandaged my arm. I guess I broke down then and started to scream because Earl put his hand over my mouth and he kept saying,
I killed Margolis, you were home in bed, you know nothing about it, I killed him.

“I was crazy with fear but Earl wasn't. He said no jury would convict him because he was going to claim that he killed Claude to protect the girl, and the police would never be able to prove any other motive because there wasn't any. With me it was different, Earl said. They could trace back and find out about my relationship with Claude, they could pin fifty motives on me.

“I don't know how I got through that night. The next morning I drove over to my sister's in Chelsea, like Earl told me to do. It was Sunday, and Earl had to wait until Monday to go to the police because he wanted to sell whatever he could before they locked him up. I didn't find out that the girl had been arrested until Sunday night. I drove back home right away to talk to Earl. Earl said her arrest wouldn't affect his plan. He was wrong. Neither of us imagined how wrong he was, how it was going to affect not just us but everybody.

“On Monday morning Earl left the house early to sell his old Chevvy and pawn whatever he could, and went over to the Sheriff's office with the confession in his pocket written out and memorized. You know what happened there. . . . He met the girl's mother, Mrs. Hamilton, in the corridor. Earl was never a schemer, never wanted any­thing for nothing. But he had a scheme then when he real­ized Mrs. Hamilton thought her daughter was guilty.

“He came home just before lunch time, terribly excited. He told me all about it, how the girl being a suspect would give me double protection and how the money would take care of Clara and me. He made me promise to look after Clara no matter what happened.

“He brought the money to me late in the afternoon, six thousand dollars. A fortune. Next morning the first thing I did was go down to Devine's and buy back the things Earl had pawned. They were Earl's keepsakes and I thought I'd have them waiting for him as a little surprise when he got out. I did what Earl said to do with the rest of the money. I deposited a little of it in the old account I had under my maiden name and hid what was left. I thought I was safe. Everything seemed so foolproof. Even if Earl's confession was torn apart, suspicion wouldn't fall on me but on the girl. Yes, I felt safe, I even felt hopeful. Earl would get off, we'd go away together, he'd be cured. I was full of crazy dreams like when I was young. I guess Earl didn't have any dreams. This morning he hanged himself.”

The old lady's voice drifted from the other room: “Birdie? You there?”

“I'm here.”

“Going to bed, very tired.”

“I'll help you.” She met the old lady at the kitchen door and took her by the arm. Slowly, the two of them moved across the room. “I can't stay with you tonight, Clara. You'll be hearing from me, though. I have to go away for a while but I'll be back, don't worry. I'll be back, won't I, Mr. Meecham?”

He was sure she would.

The snow had stopped. The air was clear and sharp, and the midnight moon traveled with them along the high­way.

You are leaving Kincaid. Elevation 900, Population 10,550. Come Back Soon!

“She'll be back,” Meecham said. “In a year, two years. Maybe sooner.”

Alice pressed closer to his side, as if the mere mention of departures and returns was a threat of separation. “What will happen to her then? What will she be like?”

“She'll be the same. The pattern is the same—for Birdie, Miss Falconer, Emmy Hearst—and she'll follow it.”

Alice shook her head in protest. “No, that's too cynical. People can change; they
do.
”

“Do they?” The lights of Kincaid were no longer vis­ible, though their reflection shone in the sky. “She'll come back,” he repeated. “If Jim is still around she'll take up with him again. If he isn't, she'll find someone else, some man who will depend on her, a prodigal son she can mother.”

“You must believe in fate, Meecham,” she said gravely.

“Maybe.”

“Then I guess you must be my fate. I didn't
choose
you. You just suddenly loomed up like a—well, like an iceberg.”

“That's a beautiful thought.”

“I mean it to be.”

He took his eyes off the road for a second and looked down at her. Her face was a vague white blur in the dark­ness, anonymous, not Alice's face, but any woman's. He wondered, with a curious feeling of tightness in his throat, how many icebergs were ahead for Birdie and with what reckless skill she'd steer toward them.

Whatever happened, Birdie would survive. Thinking of her and of the girl beside him, Meecham was conscious of a great surge of energy and power, as if he could go on driv­ing forever without food or sleep.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
argaret 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
Wives and Lovers

1

 

In hot weather Hazel liked to sit in the dental chair. Its leather arms and back were cool and there was a fan in the ceiling above it. She loosened the belt of her uniform and leaned back, listening to the hum of the fan and thinking what a fine place it was to sit and realize that except for one bicuspid she didn't have a filling in her head.

From the adjoining room she could hear sharp metallic sounds and the gurgling of water in a basin. Presently the gurgling stopped and Gordon Foster called, “Hazel?”

“Coming.”

She climbed out of the chair and, tightening her belt, followed Gordon's voice into the lab. It was a shoebox of a room, with the ceiling pressed down on it like a lid, and Gordon and herself, two mis-mated shoes, tossed together into the box by a careless clerk.

“Did you want something?”

“No.”

“You called.”

“I thought you might have gone home.”

“It's too hot to move. This is the hottest August I've ever experienced.” She said this each August, and many times each August, but it always seemed true. “Besides, I brought my lunch.”

Gordon looked up from the bridge he was repairing, his eyebrows raised. He didn't talk much when he was work­ing but he often asked silent questions with his brows: Why don't you eat it, then?

“Thin people like you,” Hazel said, dabbing at the sweat that trickled down behind her ears, “don't mind the heat so much.”

“You could eat your lunch out on the grass where it's cooler.”

“I prefer to stay inside.”

“Oh.”

“The ants. It's a bad year for ants.”

Hazel sat on a stool sipping a Coke and looking without appetite at the sandwich she had brought for lunch. Some of the starch that had gone out of her uniform and out of Hazel herself seemed to have found its way into the sand­wich. The bread had curled at the edges and the peanut butter filling had dried and stiffened like buckram.

She held the cold bottle of Coke against her forehead for a moment. “Air conditioning would be nice.”

“I suppose it would.”

“Maybe next summer.”

He glanced at her questioningly—next summer? When is that?—then turned away with a sigh. Hazel was not sure whether the sigh meant that she was to be quiet or that next summer seemed a long sad year away.

“Dr. Foster—”

He shook his head. “Elaine says we can't afford an air conditioner.” Elaine was his wife, and the final authority on office as well as personal expenditures.

“I know. I wasn't going to talk any more about that.”

“Good.”

“I just wanted to say, well, the last few weeks you haven't been yourself.”

He smiled. He had extraordinarily good teeth for a dentist. “Who have I been?”

“I mean it.” Hazel looked stubborn and unamused. “You've lost weight and your color's not good. Those are bad signs in a man your age.”

He was thirty-eight, three years younger than Hazel, and sometimes Hazel felt like his mother and sometimes she felt like a mere sprite of a girl beside him. They were never contemporaries.

“Bad signs,” she repeated. “You ought to go through one of the clinics and get checked up.”

“And you ought to get married again, to some nice fel­low who enjoys being fussed over.”

“You think I'm fussing?”

“Like an old hen.”

“I don't usually.”

“No.”

“So I must have a good reason for doing it now.”

“The reason is, you're a nice normal woman and you don't feel alive unless you're fussing over someone.”

“I've never heard you talk like this before. It just goes to show, things aren't
right
.”

“No,” he said. “No, things aren't right.”

She opened her mouth to speak again, but he had turned his back, and his white starched coat was like a blank whitewashed wall.

The buzzer sounded from the front door and Hazel went to answer it, moving heavily on her heat-swollen feet.

She said over her shoulder, “I could make an appoint­ment for you at the clinic.”

“No, thanks.”

“But if things aren't right—”

“I need a rest, that's all.”

“I'm glad you're admitting it. You haven't had any time off since I came here.”

“Yes, I have. I went up to San Francisco for the con­vention in June.”

“Just three days. That's no holiday.”

He didn't answer. But his shoulders were shaking, as if he was laughing silently to himself. He did that quite fre­quently lately, laughed to himself, and it annoyed Hazel not to know what the joke was. She never asked him, though, because she was a little afraid that he might tell her and that it wouldn't be quite so funny spoken out loud.

The buzzer sounded again and she went out through the hall to the waiting room. Since it was the doctor's after­noon off, the Venetian blinds were closed tight and the front door was locked.

Hazel opened it, squinting against the sudden sun.

“The doctor is not— Oh, it's you.”

The girl said, very brightly and gaily, “Yes, it's me,” as if she had enjoyed every moment standing on the roof­less stucco porch in the blazing noon. Her face looked stiff; the sun seemed to have squeezed all the moisture out of it. In her right hand she carried a suitcase with “Ruby MacCormick” printed on the side in black crayon, and across her left forearm was a red fox fur.

“Me again,” she said blithely. “Is the doctor—?”

“He's working in the lab.”

“I won't disturb him then. I only—all I want is some place to sit down for a minute and think. I can't seem to
think
in this weather.”

“It's cooler inside.”

“I won't bother you.” The girl stepped inside and put the suitcase on the floor and laid the red fox across it. “It's just, I want to sit for a minute. I've been walking. The suitcase is very heavy. I ought to have taken a taxi, except I wasn't sure where I was going.”

Hazel closed the door. “You're leaving town?”

“No. No, I'm moving. The establishment where I've been staying, well, it's awfully low class. Not what I'm used to. If Mummy and Daddy ever found out, well, they'd kill me. I'm used to nice things.”

“I'll get you some water.”

“No. No, I don't want to bother you, Miss Philip. I was just passing and I remembered how kind you were last week and I thought I'd drop in and thank you and then be on my way.”

“What way, if you don't know where you're going?”

“There must be places for a girl of my background.”

Hazel didn't know what her background was. She'd met her only once before, the previous Friday. She had come to the office early in the morning and Gordon had intro­duced her to Hazel as Ruby MacCormick, a friend of one of his nieces from up north. As it turned out, Gordon him­self had arranged the meeting because Ruby was out of a job and he thought Hazel might be able to suggest some type of employment. Ruby was very young and untrained, and the only possibility Hazel could think of was the Beachcomber, a restaurant out on the wharf which was operated, and partly owned, by her ex-husband, George. Because of his temper, and the influx of summer tourists, Ge
orge was constantly plagued by a shortage of waitresses and he was willing to try anyone who could walk and count up to ten. Ruby could do both.

Hazel poured some water from the cooler and the girl drank it thirstily. She was so thin that her Adam's apple was prominent as a boy's, and moved up and down when she swallowed.

Ruby smiled, her mouth still wet from the water. “That was good. It's funny, I didn't even know I was thirsty. Daddy says I was always like that—I never let physical things bother me, I never squalled for food the way some babies do.”

“Have you had any lunch?”

“Not yet. I'm waiting till I go to work. Lunch and dinner are free.”

“You got the job, then?”

Ruby widened her eyes. “Didn't I tell you? I guess I forgot. Mr. Anderson hired me right off the bat.”

“Good.”

“Of course I'm only a waitress, there was no opening as a hostess, but Mr. Anderson says I have a chance to work up . . . I did just what you told me. I went over to the bartender and I said someone had told me he needed a waitress and practically the next minute I was hired. I didn't even have to mention your name, it was that quick.”

Hazel didn't bother informing her that this was the way George did all his hiring, and firing, too.

“Are you and Mr. Anderson friends?”

“We were at one time,” Hazel said dryly. “We haven't seen much of each other lately.” She was usually very quick to tell anyone, even a total stranger, about her per­sonal affairs, including the complete history of her mar­riage to George, but she had no wish to confide in this girl. Ruby's strange talk disturbed her. It was like listen­ing to a bird talk; the words sounded real, they could be understood well enough, but they had no connection with the bird's thoughts.

“Well, I won't keep you.” Ruby rose and picked up the red fox and slung it across her arm with a show of elegant indifference as if she had a hundred such furs stashed away in her drawers at home. But every now and then, as she talked, Hazel had caught her glancing at the fox with anxiety and affection the way a mother glances at a loved but wayward child.

One thing Hazel was sure of—the fox had seen better days; Ruby hadn't.

She said, “What kind of place are you looking for?”

“Oh, just a room. I can't afford anything fancy like I was used to at home. I'm standing on my own two feet now, that's what I wrote and told Daddy.”

“My cousin Ruth has a friend who runs a rooming house. She calls it a tourist home. It's on El Camino del Mar.”

“That sounds like a very high class location.”

“It's the highway. 101.”

“Oh.” Ruby's jaw tightened but when she spoke again her voice was as gay and blithe as ever: “Well, none of my friends up north will know the difference. They'll think it's high class just like I thought.” She paused. “Is it far from here?”

“Ten blocks or so.”

“Oh God.” Ruby sat down again, holding the fox's head close against her face.

Hazel looked away. Dead things made her nervous.

“I can call you a cab,” she said.

“No. No thanks.”

“It's a long way, in this heat.”

“I don't—I don't mind the heat like most people. I'm just a little tired, but I'll manage. I always do. I'm stronger than I look.”

To prove her point she got back onto her feet. She wore winter shoes, black suede pumps scuffed at the toes and heels. Her stockingless legs were very white, as if they'd been frozen.

“I'd better be on my way.”

“Hold it a minute while I phone and see if Mrs. Free­man has a vacancy. It might save you a trip.”

“You're kind, Miss Philip, you're a kind person,” Ruby said, in a surprised voice.

It was too hot to argue so Hazel merely shook her head.

She used the extension phone in the operating room, partly because she didn't want Ruby to overhear her con­versation, and partly because she liked to sit in the dental chair while she was telephoning.

Ruth answered the telephone: “Hello? Hazel? I was just doing the lunch dishes.” Ruth always made a point of telling people what she was doing, had just done or was about to do. In this way she gave the impression that she did as much work as any six people and so could never be accused of being lazy or not earning her keep. “What do you want? I was just about to start on the Venetian blinds.”

“There's a young girl here looking for a room. I thought I'd send her over to Mrs. Freeman's.”

“Is the girl respectable?”

“She's a friend of one of Dr. Foster's relatives from up north.”

“Then she should certainly be respectable.” Ruth was the official baby sitter for the Fosters' three children, and while she hadn't much interest in, or use for, Gordon, she admired Elaine Foster tremendously.

Hazel said, “I don't want to send the girl all the way over there unless Mrs. Freeman has a vacancy. Could you give me her phone number?”

“She doesn't have a phone. What with the girls using it all the time, she had it taken out. But I know she has a vacancy. I saw her last night at the organ recital at church.”

“What's the house number?”