Vanish in an Instant (25 page)

“1906.”

“Thanks.”

“Hazel? Are you still there? . . . When I finish the blinds, I have to go over to the Fosters' to baby-sit, but when I come home I thought I'd wax all the window sills.”

“You don't have to.”

“Wax is a preservative.”

“All right, then. All right.” There was no use in arguing with Ruth. Hazel knew that by evening the window sills would all be waxed and Ruth would be lying on the bed with a wet cloth across her eyes.

Gordon came in from the lab and began washing his hands at the basin.

Hazel climbed awkwardly out of the dental chair. “Have you finished?”

“With the bridge, yes. I still have that inlay to cast.”

“I can help you.”

“It's your afternoon off as well as mine.”

“In this weather there's nothing I want to do anyway.” There was something, but she would never have admitted it to anyone: she wanted to go down to the beach in a brand-new bathing suit and look the way she had twenty years ago when she and George were married. She had changed in those twenty years, and so had George, but it was characteristic of Hazel that she noticed more changes in herself than in him.

Gordon dried his hands on a linen towel. “Who was at the door?”

“That girl, the one who was here last week.”

“Girl?”

“Ruby MacCormick.”

“Well,” he said, carefully. “What did she want?”

“She's still here.”

“Oh.”

“She wants a room. She's moving. I was just trying to find a place for her to go.”

“And did you?”

“I think so. It's on the highway, 1906.”

“Not a very good location.”

“The best she can afford, that's my opinion. She talks big, but I can tell. Any woman could.”

He threw away the towel and stood for a moment with his clenched fist pressed against the left side of his chest. It was a way he had of standing lately, as if all his prob­lems had gathered together in a tight little bunch around his heart, and the pressure of his fist was meant to dispel them.

Hazel leaned over and picked up the towel and put it in the laundry container. She spoke quietly: “Maybe you'd better go out and say hello to her, just for politeness's sake.”

“I'd prefer not to.”

“All right then, I'll say it for you.”

“Do that.” He hesitated a moment. “Did you bring your car this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps it wouldn't be too much out of your way to drive the girl as far as the highway. I feel a certain obliga­tion to her because she's a stranger in town.”

“Well, so do I, only I wanted to stay and help you cast the inlay. I'll pour it up for you.”

“I can do it alone. Or you can come back later, if you insist.”

“I'll come back.”

“Thank you, Hazel.”

He sounded so deeply grateful that she wasn't sure what he was thanking her for; it couldn't be for anything so trivial as offering to help him with the inlay, or driving Ruby over to the highway.

On the way to Mrs. Freeman's, the girl sat quiet and motionless except when Hazel's old Chevy hit a bump or turned a fast corner, or when Hazel asked a direct ques­tion: “What made you decide to come to Channel City?”

“I wanted to get away from home.”

“This is a tough place to make a living.”

“I have a job.”

“You'd do better down south. Some of the big airplane factories—”

“I like it here.”

“There's not much chance of promotion being a waitress at the Beachcomber.”

“Mr. Anderson says I can work up to cashier or hostess if I try.”

“And after that?”

Ruby frowned and then rubbed away the frown lines with the tip of her forefinger. “After that I might get married.”

“Have you a boyfriend back home?”

“Loads of them, but they're all silly and immature.”

“How old are you, Ruby?”

“Old enough.”

Hazel wanted to laugh—the things the girl said were funny, but the way she said them was not. There was an air of stubborn earnestness about her, as if she had in the back of her mind a single and solemn purpose that ob­literated all others.

Hazel stopped the car in front of 1906, a two-storied frame house with a sign nailed to one of the porch pillars: “Mrs. Freeman's Tourist Home, Ladies Only, Reason­able Rates, Ocean View.” The house, like the scrawny shrubs planted around it and the parched lawn in front of it, bore the marks of the drought years.

“It's not much to look at from the outside, but it's clean inside. Mrs. Freeman is a very clean woman,” Hazel added quite severely, as if Ruby had accused Mrs. Freeman of being a very dirty one.

Ruby opened the car door. “Thank you for the ride.”

“That's all right.”

“I didn't want to admit it but I was awful tired. You just about saved my life.”

“It was Dr. Foster's idea.”

“It was? Heavens, I didn't think he'd even remember me, honestly.”

But the word, honestly, was contradicted by the coy and artificial tone of her voice. She's lying, Hazel thought. She expected to be remembered, and wanted to be. I wonder what her game is.

Ruby put her suitcase on the ground and started to close the car door.

“Leave it open,” Hazel said. “It's cooler.”

“But you can't drive with it open.”

“I thought if you wouldn't be too long I'd wait here for you and drop you off at work on my way back to the office.”

The girl looked wary. “I couldn't ask you to do that.”

“You didn't ask me. I offered.”

“But why? Did Dr. Foster—?”

“No. This is my own idea.”

“Thank you.” She stood in the blazing sun, stroking the red fox. “You've changed my day, Miss Philip.”

“Have I?”

“It started out very bad, worse than I would ever tell anyone. But now it's changed. You've brought me luck. I feel, I honestly feel
lucky
.”

“I'm glad you do,” Hazel said. She wasn't certain what luck meant to Ruby or how the girl would use it now that it had come her way.

The front door opened and Mrs. Freeman came out on the porch, a tall, stout, middle-aged woman in a printed silk dress that blew around her like a tent. She peered down at the car with the look of chronic suspicion that landladies acquire after years of people. Then, very abruptly, she turned and went back into the house as if she had lost all interest in the car because she'd been ex­pecting someone else.

Inside the house again, Mrs. Freeman leaned against the banister and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.
I thought it was him, I thought for sure. He said, any day now, any day. One of these days . . .

Ruby picked up her suitcase. “I'm kind of scared. Would you come in with me?”

“I don't know her. She's a friend of my cousin's, not mine. Besides, you're lucky now, remember?”

“Yes, I'm lucky. This is my lucky day. People will like me and I will like them.”

So that's her idea of luck, Hazel thought. It had nothing to do with money or jobs. Luck was being liked and lik­ing; and the day which for Ruby had started out very bad, worse than she would ever tell anyone, must have started with hate. Someone had hated Ruby and she had hated in return, and Hazel had changed the day by being kind to her. Hazel wondered who would go to the trouble of hating a girl like Ruby.

Ruby went into the house, and the door closed on her like the page of a book.

Hazel lit a cigarette but the smoke was so hot and acrid that it parched her mouth and stung her eyes. She threw the cigarette out of the window, thinking of George, because it was one of the things she did which annoyed him, throwing lighted cigarettes out of the car. Whenever he read in the newspaper about a forest fire, he practically accused Hazel of being responsible for it even though she'd been several hundred miles away at the time it started and hadn't been smoking anyway. Many of the things for which George held Hazel responsible were justified, but starting forest fires was not one of them.

George was a most unreasonable man. Still, Hazel got out of the car and crushed out the cigarette under the rub­ber heel of her white nurse's oxfords, wishing that George would pass right that moment and see her. She frequently got a certain sly satisfaction out of correcting the minor faults he'd found in her. The major ones she retained; they were as much a part of her as her skin, but, like her skin, they had sagged a little with the years and no longer fitted so tight.

In five minutes Ruby came out again, without the suit­case and the fox fur. She was smiling and the smile sof­tened the angularity of her jaw and made her look quite pretty.

She got into the car, almost out of breath, as if she'd been running. “She
is
nice, really
nice,
I mean.”

“Good.”

“She liked me right away, too. I told you I felt lucky, didn't I?” She began to hum softly to herself, “I'm Look­ing Over a Four Leaf Clover.”

Hazel made a quick, illegal U-turn and headed south toward the harbor. Heat rose from the highway in waves, so that the white road markers looked uneven and the outlines of the passing cars were blurred. In the distance a strip of sea was visible, an ice-blue promise of relief from the heat.

“If I brought you luck,” Hazel said, “maybe you'll take my advice.”

“What advice?”

“Don't stick around this town.”

“I have to.”

“It's no place for a kid like you with no occupational training. It'd be different if you were going maybe to nurse's school or beauty college, something like that.”

“I hate sickness and I hate other people's dirty hair.” The girl paused. “Why are you so anxious for me to leave town?”

“I'm not anxious. There's nothing personal in it. I just think it'd be a good idea.”

“Well, it isn't.” Ruby turned and looked stubbornly out of the window. “I'm staying. I have a job, I'm self-supporting, and I can live where and how I want to.”

Hazel was silent, watching the strip of sea expand on the horizon. She said, finally, “That business about all the boyfriends back home—malarkey, wasn't it?”

The girl didn't answer.

“There's only one boyfriend and he's here, in this town. Is that your story, Ruby?”

“You're very nosy,” Ruby said.

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MARGARET MILLAR
 

Available as individual ebooks or in a special seven-volume collector's set

 

Volume I

 

The Paul Prye Mysteries

The Invisible Worm
(1941)
The Weak-Eyed Bat
(1942)
The Devil Loves Me
(1942)

Inspector Sands Mysteries

Wall of Eyes
(1943)
The Iron Gates
[
Taste of Fears
] (1945)

 

Volume II

 

Fire Will Freeze
(1944)
Experiment in Springtime
(1947)
The Cannibal Heart
(1949)
Do Evil in Return
(1950)
Rose's Last Summer
(1952)

 

Volume III

 

Vanish in an Instant
(1952)
Wives and Lovers
(1954)
Beast in View
(1955)
An Air That Kills
(1957)
The Listening Walls
(1959)

 

Volume IV

 

A Stranger in My Grave
(1960)
How Like an Angel
(1962)
The Fiend
(1964)
Beyond This Point Are Monsters
(1970)

 

Volume V

 

Tom Aragon Novels

Ask for Me Tomorrow
(1976)
The Murder of Miranda
(1979)
Mermaid
(1982)

 

Volume VI

 

Banshee
(1983)
Spider Webs
(1986)
The Couple Next Door: Collected Short Mysteries
(2004)
It's All in the Family
(1948) (semi-autobiographical children's novel)