A Woman’s Eye

A recipient of the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America, DOROTHY B. HUGHES is also the biographer of Erie Stanley Gardner. Although she wrote several novels featuring an Inspector Tobin, most of her work is in the suspense, rather than the mystery field. Three of her major works were successfully filmed-The Fallen Sparrow, Ride the Pink Horse, and the magnificent In a Lonely Place. Hughes lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Time and place do not matter. They are happenings. Simply happenings.

There are other happenings. Some you don’t or won’t remember. Some you will. Deliberately. It is not that you remember the important and don’t remember the unimportant. Often it’s the other way around. Like dancing with Voss.

Sometimes I think of Voss and I cry. Tears. Wet tears. I don’t cry easily. I don’t make myself cry. It’s just a happening.

I didn’t actually know him. He was just someone I danced with. When I was fourteen years old. By the accident of him being there and me being there when the music changed. Does anyone remember the “Paul Jones”? Sort of like a grand march only gentlemen going one way and ladies another. Touching hands but not clasping, touching in passing. Until the music changes. Without warning. Like in “Going to Jerusalem.” Musical chairs.

And that happening was when the music changed. I was right beside Voss. So I danced with Voss. Close tight, chest to chest, feeling him surrounding me. Engulfing me. Almost as if I were an integral part of his body. For those few moments.

I was nothing to him. Not a happening to him. It was simply the way he danced. To him that was the happening. To dance. As if dancing were created by him, for him.

Except Elektra. When he danced with Elektra they were one person. Not two dancing. One. Transformed. Two become one. Tightly together. Never again one and one. Two melded. Like by flame. The flame of movement and music.

My cousin Katty was sixteen going on seventeen. She and her very best Mends-four or five of them-would have none of Voss. He wasn’t privileged. Their cant word of the summer. He worked in a butcher shopl Henschel’s Butcher Shop. His uncle Gus. Underprivileged. As if Voss had blood spattered all over his clothes. Like Uncle Gus had on his white apron when he waited on my aunt Georgie. In those days in a small town, meat didn’t come prepackaged and iced by Armour or Swift. It came from a nearby farm. The farmer butchered and brought the haunch to the butcher shop. It was hung in an icebox room out back. The butcher cut from the haunch what the customer wanted. Sometimes blood would spatter on his white apron.

Voss worked mostly at the front counter. By the cash register. By the big front window.

But the girls shrieked “underprivileged” when I asked about him. The girls accepted only the privileged. Like Katty’s choice for the summer, Roddy Rockefeller. No, not the rich Rockefellers with the wizened old golfer who gave a dime-a-day tip to his caddy. Rockefeller is a common name in upstate New York.

“What’s Claude?” I asked them. Deliberately to provoke them. Claude had to be privileged. He was a Clark. Founders of Clarksvale back in Revolutionary days. His father was owner and president of the bank. The one where Aunt Georgie used to work and now owned a big piece of.

Of course they shouted with laughter at my question. “Whey-face?” I did not ever understand “Whey-face.” He had a round doughy face. Something about curds and whey.

They added their other names for him. “Toady.” “Cipher.” And one daring friend of Katty’s who considered herself sophisticated, “Faggotty.”

Voss let Claude hang around. That was about all. Voss was a loner. He didn’t have friends. Didn’t want them.

We went back to the village every other summer. We-my mother, the children-my eight-year-old brother and six-year-old sister, and me. My father wanted us to know his people. He didn’t come with us. He had his business as excuse. He had had enough of villages before he walked away from them to make his mark in the city. And did, all the way to California.

Every other summer we took the train-there were trains in those days-from California to New York, upstate New York, Change at Chicago to the N.Y. Central. Disembark at Albany. But not for the local train. Met there by Aunt Georgie and her chauffeur Fred. He was one of the garage men in a chauffeur cap. We stayed with Aunt Priscilla. George was the younger sister by two years. She was the businesswoman. She owned half the town by now. Aunt Priscilla was the stay-at-home who took care of her kinfolk’s children.

Katherine-Katty-had always lived with Aunt Pris. Her mother died in childbirth and her father was in the air corps, a captain or something. He wasn’t on land very often.

This summer Aunt Pris also had the Tompkin boys. Their father, a nephew, was an archaeology professor at one of the universities, and so was his wife. They were off to some big dig deep in South America. No place to take little boys. The boys were around my brother’s age.

I shared Katty’s room in summer and we didn’t see much of the children. Not if we could help it.

The village itself was a happening. For a girl born and raised in a big city, it was like a storybook holiday. Walking around town. No traffic. No streetcars. No buses. A post office with its walls of neat little golden boxes. An ice-cream parlor with tables and chairs.

And every Saturday night there was dancing on the pavilion in the town park. Which was how a fourteen-year-old came to dance with an older young man. That summer at Quichiquois. That summer of Elektra.

An open pavilion up a flight of steps to raise it above the park benches and the paths below. The pavilion was also the bandstand. The band played there in summer every night. Except Saturday. On Saturday night there was an orchestra, a real orchestra. Live music, it is called today. Miss Estelle had for some twenty-five years taught classical piano to all the children of the village whose parents were music minded, but on Saturday night in summer she played mean jazz. Deacon Raven of some local church played violin for the service. For dancing at the pavilion, he played a jazz fiddle. The drummer was the owner of the local hay-and-feed store. He was in the National Guard band. On special occasions, the city fathers would enlist a clarinet player, a young farmer up the road a piece who played in his college band. Musicians who aren’t professionals have a certain spirit. They play for the love of it, certainly not for the pittance they are paid.

Everyone danced. Little children capered with one another. Or now and again politely waltzed with their mums or dads. Even the grampaws and gramaws sashayed around the floor.

And I danced with Voss. A happening only that once. Although after that night the older girls taught me how to lag, Without appearing to lag. No one would know you were looking for one specific partner, When you saw him you would lag a step here or there until he was almost beside you, Katty and I would practice it at night in her bedroom, But I never had a chance to try it out for real.

Because Aunt George decided. She made all the decisions in the family. Aunt Priscilla acquiesced or did not. If she did not, it was the end of that happening. Aunt Pris was a woman of few words. Quietly spoken. Aunt Georgie was the talker. Emphatic. Accurate. Almost always. A businesswoman, accustomed to dealing with men. With yea and nay. No palavering.

She decided that the children should have three weeks at Lake Quichiquois. There are myriad small lakes all through the Berkshires. This was nearest to Clarksvale, about twenty miles. No resort. Just summer cottages. Friends of Aunt George offered theirs as they were going north to visit family for several weeks. The cottages were in the woods above the lake. Each was surrounded by woods, land was not costly, everyone had privacy. Just comfortably set far enough apart.

Aunt Priscilla acquiesced. My mother, being company, had no yea or nay. My mother preferred the busiest city street to the beauties of the woods. Not to the beauty but to the creatures that came with it, flies and spiders and bees and creepy crawlers. But my mother was company. Polite. Company was expected to acquiesce.

Of course, Aunt Georgie wasn’t going. Shut up for three weeks surrounded by children? Like my father, she had business excuses.

After her decision, Aunt Georgie said, “I have a hired girl to go along. No sense of you and Elizabeth [my mother] turning your holiday into a wash and iron and cook for six children.”

Aunt Priscilla was wary. “Who is the hired girl?”

“I hired Elektra.” Aunt Georgie slid the name off her tongue as if she just recalled it.

A look. From one to another of the aunts. And returned the other to the one. Aunt Pris decided, half-reluctantly, “Well, she’s as good as we could hope for this late in the summer.”

Imperceptible. Aunt George had been apprehensive. Priscilla could have said no. She hadn’t. Now Aunt Georgie could resume her position as head of the family. In name. She paid the bills.

“She’s strong,” Aunt George said. “Remember how she took up all your rugs last spring-beat them like a man would, the air was grimy.”

“And laid them all again,” Aunt Priscilla mentioned. “And she would carry the whole laundry in one load up the stairs.”

There were twenty-three steps up from the living room to the second floor. I had counted them. I always count steps. Another eighteen up to the attic bedrooms where the boys slept, and live-in help when Aunt Priscilla tolerated it.

I don’t know how many steps to the basement. I didn’t go to the basement. The furnace was there and the storage. Years of the Saturday Evening Post and the Geographic, and old trunks filled with old clothes.

Elektra was strong. Elektra didn’t natter. She was scrub clean. The aunts ticked off her good points. Nothing said of the bad. Of the cause for apprehension one to the other. Somehow I didn’t want to ask Katty. Katty had a way of embroidering words to make a bland story an exciting one. If not exactly a true one.

I’d seen Elektra, of course. Someone must have said, “There’s Elektra.” Wriking on Main Street. Or going into the post office. Or sitting at a soda table at the soda fountain. “There’s Elektra.” I could describe her as if I’d seen a snapshot of her. Tall. Man tall. Lean. Man lean. Straight black hair, held back by a barrette. Hanging to her waist. Not when she was working. Then piled in braids or in loops. High ruddy cheekbones. Straight nose. Like on an Iroquois.

I’d seen her. She delivered the ironing that Aunt Priscilla sent to Gammer Goodwife. Gammer lived in that big square yellow rooming house on the terrace you passed walking to town. The townsfolk called it the “Poor House.” Elektra lived there too. She was kin to Gammer.

I’d seen Elektra. Dancing with Voss.

I couldn’t but wonder if Katty had put the idea of Lake Quichiquois into Aunt Georgie’s head. Linda, her best friend, was going up there for the rest of the summer. Her family owned a summer cottage there. There was a boys’ camp across the lake. For little boys, but the counselors were privileged!

And so we went to Lake Quichiquois. Aunt George’s chauffeur, Fred in the chauffeur’s cap, drove us up there in the seven-seater. The ladies in the backseat. My younger sister squeezed in by my mother. Katty and I on the jump seats. The three little boys in front with Fred.

Elektra would be up the next day. Fred was borrowing a pickup truck from the garage to carry our trunks. The aunts always took trunks, even for a short stay. Elektra would ride with Fred in the cab of the pickup.

Time goes quickly by the water. Too quickly. We are water people. Quichiquois was a dream happening. Elektra would have the breakfast cooked and served before eight o’clock every morning. She’d red up the kitchen while we waited out the dictum: “Do not go in the water until one hour after eating.” We wouldn’t. But we would go down to our dock before the hour was up and the children would splash through the shore water. Elektra would get our rowboat turned over, ready to row out for anyone in trouble. Elektra was a strong swimmer. She cleaved the water as beautifully as a dolphin.

Dover Camp, a long established one, was just across the lake. The little boys and our boys could and did exchange taunts across the water.

And of the three counselors, two were already in college, lordly sophomores the coming year. The other was a senior in prep school. Katty and Linda were in rhapsodies. New boys-or as they called them, men-and these girls were practiced at making boyfriends. The boys were at Brown, and the girls’ college was just across the Massachusetts line. The talk became all about football games and weekend soirees. And house parties in the spring.

Across the lake was also Mr. Gruen’s general store and soda fountain. The meeting place for all lakers. He had a year ago built on a room for the soda fountain. He had old-fashioned tables and chairs in there during the week, but they were moved out on Saturday and there was dancing to a juke box. No Paul Jones.

The Dover Camp boys only had to walk downhill a short way to the soda fountain. On our side it was a quarter-mile walk, after we reached the lane from the cottage, down to the bend that led to the store. It was much shorter to get into the rowboat and row right across to the store dock. If you knew how to row. We didn’t. Elektra did. She tried to teach us. It isn’t easy to learn to row. The boat goes around and around in circles. Unless you have a very strong arm. Muscles. Like Elektra. The children, Katty, and I were allowed to go with Elektra in the boat on Saturdays. My mother and Aunt Pris would walk over later to fetch the little children home early. Katty and I were allowed to stay until the eleven-fifteen closing. With Elektra.

Until our first Saturday evening, I had not known Voss was also working at the camp. Three afternoons a week. Instructing the young campers on the fine points of sailing.

And I couldn’t help but wonder which one of them had decided to find a job up at the lake, when the other had been already hired.

The cottagers danced. Katty and Linda and the counselors danced. The little boys and girls tried to dance. Voss and Elektra danced together. I watched from the sidelines. So did Whey-face.

I never did find out why he was called Whey-face. The girls would simply explode into “curds and whey” when I asked. He was sort of doughlike, not fat but a bit puffy; he would always be a little off side. No matter how fine an education he would have. No matter that when he grew up he would take over the president’s chair at the bank and his father would retire to chairman of the board.

Both Claude and I just sat on the bench in the corner and watched the dancers. Sometimes I’d get him up on his feet and would try to show him how to move to the music. But he never understood rhythm or timing or movement. Two left feet. He always came out to the lake on dance nights to drive Voss back to town, On weeknights Voss hopped a ride to Clarksvale with workers at the camp.

Once-just once at Quichiquois-I danced again with Voss. He walked over to where Claude and I were sitting to ask Claude something or other. I think he recognized how my feet were in rhythm even while sitting down there on the bench. He would understand because he was a dancer. Not a professional, but bred in the bone, roiling in the blood. Without warning, he took my hand and pulled me up from the bench, said, “Come on,” and we danced out onto the floor. Entirely different from the Paul Jones. A jazz jazzy. Exhilarating.

When Elektra came back from powdering her nose or whatever, Voss sat me down. He winked at me as they went off. But ours had been the best jazzy of the evening. It even led to my having some dances with Katty’s older boys. Yes, I too have dance in my blood and bones.

It was that same night that I asked Claude how Voss could know so much about sailing to be able to teach the boys. Claude looked at me aghast. How could I know Voss and not know that? I tried to explain that I didn’t know Voss. It was our hired girl who knew Voss. I’d just happened to dance with him once in the Paul Jones at the pavilion.

So Claude told me, “He’s going to join the coast guard. He’s been studying all this year to pass their tests or whatever you have to do to get in. He used to sail when he was a boy and lived up the coast. His father was a sailor. On a cargo boat. His father sailed all the way to China.” It could be so. Or a sailor’s yarn to a small hero-worshiping boy. It didn’t matter. Voss would be a sailor if that was what he wanted.

I remember so well everything about that last dance night. It was getting on to eleven thirty, and I didn’t see Elektra anywhere. I excused myself to Claude and walked across to where Katty was whooping it up with her current favorite boyfriend. Katty didn’t shoo me away. Maybe I looked that worried. “Where’s Elektra?” I asked her.

She surveyed the dancers on the floor. “She’s probably down at the boathouse,” she said.

“What’s she doing down there?” I asked. Innocence. Too young. For a beat Katty and her friends just looked at me. And Linda started laughing. Katty joined in. The boys were politely inexpressive. They were sophisticates.

After she’d stopped laughing, Linda said, as if everyone knew that, “It’s where couples go.”

Katty added, “When they want to be alone.”

“Smooching,” Linda said.

I caught on. I wasn’t that innocent. Necking, they called it at my school.

“She’ll be here after the music stops,” Katty said. “She wouldn’t dare not,” she explained to her friends. “She knows Aunt Priscilla is waiting up.”

Truly true. Aunt Priscilla wasn’t as sharp-tongued as Aunt George. But you could bully Aunt George by a temper tantrum. Katty explained it to me early in the summer. Aunt Priscilla was immovable.

When Mr. Gruen dimmed the colored lights and set the juke box for the last dance, always “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” I saw them. Elektra and Voss. Dancing. Two become one. I watched through the whole record. Daydreaming. Why call it “day” when it’s at night? Someday I’d grow up and have a boyfriend who danced like Voss.

Voss and Claude said good night and walked off. Elektra rowed us home. Aunt Pris glanced at her watch. “It will be midnight before you get to sleep.” This was a nudge to go to bed, not stay up talking. “And we have to start packing up tomorrow. Aunt George and Fred will be here Monday morning.”

Katty and I didn’t talk much. Too tired. Too much, each of us, to remember. From the beginning of summer through this our final night of the boys’ farewell across the water. “Good Night, Ladies…”

We had to miss Sunday morning church when at the lake. The nearest was in Clarksvale, too far to walk. Aunt Priscilla read her Bible. The children were kept quiet, and Katty and I usually slept until noon. In the afternoon we were allowed to swim and splash by our dock.

This Sunday was different. I woke-it wasn’t eight o’clock-to the children gabbling in loud voices. Loud voices. Like on a weekday. My mother and Aunt Pris were ahead of me to the kitchen. Mother with her hair still in kid curlers, Aunt Pris with her gray hair in a plait down her back. Both in their nightgowns and robes. Aunt Pris was asking, “Whatever is the matter?” and my mother saying to her two, “Quiet. Quiet now. What’s wrong?”

The children all talked at once. Emerged, one question. “Where’s Elektra?”

Aunt Pris was dubious. “She isn’t here?”

“No, She isn’t here,” all talking again at once. Almost shouting. “She’s not here. There’s no breakfast.”

“Perhaps she overslept,” Aunt Pris said. She hesitated. Then made her way to the back of the house, past my room, sleepy-eyed Katty just emerging, saying, “What’s wrong?”

On to Elektra’s bedroom beyond. Aunt Priscilla proper. Knocking on the door. Calling gently, careful not to startle a sleeper. “Elektra… Elektra… it’s Miss Priscilla.”

No response. She tried it again, a bit louder. Again no response. Aunt Priscilla took hold of the doorknob. Reluctantly. It was against all the principles of good manners. To open another’s bedroom door. Even a servant’s. But with no sound within, she did open the door, one small slant. Enough to peep inside. Then wider. And she said, “She isn’t here.”

“She must be around someplace.” Katty and I had followed into the room. Katty said, “She can’t have left. She hasn’t taken her things.” The hairbrush was on the bureau. The box of powder and the puff also there. Her nightdress still folded neatly over the back of a chair. The bed already made up. Or was it used last night?

“She’ll be back,” Aunt Priscilla decided. “I’ll dress and then I’ll cook breakfast.”

Mother said, “I’ll give the children some cornflakes and milk to tide them over.” She had already put the kettle on for Aunt Priscilla’s morning tea.

Aunt George came up in the afternoon. She said the same as Aunt Priscilla. “She’ll be back.” Her reasoning was different’ “I owe her five dollars. For last week. She won’t leave without her pay.”

But she didn’t come back. Not that day.

Not the next day. My small suitcase was packed. All else was confusion. Katty trying to curl her hair before closing her suitcase. Aunt Priscilla had packed all of Elektra’s belongings into her own trunk. There wasn’t much. The skirt and shirt she wore to work in, the few cosmetics, even her toothbrush and toothpaste had been left behind, and her undergarments (one to wear, one to wash, one to dry), her bedroom slippers, and an old night-robe that Aunt Pris had given her. Of course she’d taken her purse with her; the one she carried last night wasn’t in the room. There’d be a comb and lipstick and powder compact in it.

Aunt Priscilla was trying to get everything shipshape, as it had been when we arrived. Mother was trying to get her children ready to leave. Aunt George arrival and added to the confusion while insisting, “Of course Elektra’s gone back to Clarksvale. For reasons of her own.” She finally took the Tompkin boys out to Fred, let him keep them busy out by the truck.

I managed to slip out the side door at a propitious moment when all the others were in the house or in front by the cars. I skulked rapidly through the trees until I was on the path that led to High Peak. It wasn’t a real path. Just bumpy earth, pebbles and rocks, bits of green that wasn’t weeds or wild grass, just green stuff. I zigzagged up the path to the promontory at the top. High above the shore. Elektra’s special place. One afternoon when Katty and Linda were being exceptionally boy-crazies, Elektra had let me go with her to the peak. This was her time off from children and chores-why would she take me with her? Maybe because Voss danced with me once in the Paul Jones.

She didn’t talk about him. She didn’t talk when we were there. She just stood on the promontory and looked at the sky or down at the water. Under the promontory but still high on the slope there was a shelf. Not far below the peak. No way to get to it except by zigzagging down the slope and stooping your way under the protruding upper slope. She didn’t take me there. She didn’t go there either. Just pointed it out to me as we leaned over the tip. Scary.

I didn’t want to go there now. She wasn’t there. But she had been here last night. With Voss? A farewell? In each other’s arms. Two into one. “Stop dreaming,” Katty would say. Or my mother. Or anyone if I spoke of it. But I knew. Before I saw the bead, the red glass bead on the green stuff scattered on the earth. She wore those beads to the dance last night. She always wore them with her summer dress, her white dress with the little roses sprinkled across the pattern. The beads almost looked like crystals. Not really. They were pretend, cut like crystals, but made of glass. They were a little handful of beauty to her. She must have searched for them when the strand was broken. Caught on a tree branch, or the button on a man’s jacket. Too dark to find all of them. I looked. There was one out on the tip, but I didn’t go there. I scruffed through the green and found another. And another, with leaf mold patterning it. No more. I hadn’t time to search for more. I ran until the cottage was in sight. Then I just hurried, the beads tight in my left fist. Fred was loading the last of the suitcases.

My mother came to me with, “Emmy, where have you been?” and as she looked into my face, softly, “Saying goodbye?”

She understood the need to say good-bye. To the woods and the water. To some of summer memories. In some secret place you had marked as your own.

Another week and the end of August. Of summer. My mother and the children off for California and school days again. Long good-byes until Christmas. Behind the scenes it had been decided that I would enter Mount Academy this year, the school where the women of my father’s family had all attended to be finished. Katty had graduated there this spring. My mother approved though as a Californian she had been finished there. I would stay on with Aunt Priscilla until school started. Aunt George had assured me that with a diploma from Mount Academy I could attend any college of my choice. Such was its academic standing. Even Cambridge? Yes, even Cambridge. I doubted. Cambridge wasn’t exclusively female, and Aunt Georgie with all her modern ideas and bold businesss maneuvers did not hold with coeducation. It was all right for primary students. Although better for the girls to go to Miss Mastersons and the boys to Albany Cadet. No hanky-panky.

It was one of those last nights before Katty would depart for college. Aunt Pris, Katty, and I had had early supper and cleanup and were relaxing in the living room. Until Aunt Georgie came by. She was again all het up about Elektra. She’d been at some meeting and none of the women knew anything about the disappearance of Elektra. No one had seen her since she went to the lake with us. They seemed to think Aunt Priscilla and Aunt George were to blame.

Aunt Priscilla said, “Stop worrying your head about the five dollars. I was going to have to let her go anyway. She was beginning to show.”

They exchanged a few of their wise looks and dropped the subject.

Later when Katty and I went up to our room, I asked her. “What did Aunt Pris mean? Beginning to show.”

Katty just looked at me. Stared. Finally she said, “You know.”

“I don’t know. If I knew, why would I ask you? ‘Beginning to show’? Do you know?”

“Of course I do. Everybody knows. That she’s going to have a baby. That’s what it means.”

“She’s married!” I could not believe it. But if she and Voss were married…

“No. She’s not married,” Katty stated.

But if she’s not married, how can she-I didn’t ask that question out loud. Some people did. We just didn’t know people who did. I sighed to Katty. “How do you know all these things?”

“Emmy,” she told me, “you find out a lot living with the aunts. You keep quiet and listen and they forget you’re there. And you learn a lot.”

I figured for myself. In a small town you learned things that city girls didn’t know about. Small towns were evolved from farm country. Where life and death were the beginning and end, and in between were all manner of happenings.

Another week of flurry and then we drove with Katty to Albany to put her on the train for New York. Three of her friends were also going to the college on the Hudson. Linda, of course, and Willa and Maleen. The college proctors would meet the train with the school bus.

When we returned to the house late that afternoon, we collapsed into chairs, even Aunt Georgie. I would be the next to go. But only as far as Hudson, where I’d be met by the school bus.

I’d stopped listening to the aunts long before they were talked out. It became tiresome listening to all the memories of Aunt A and Uncle B and Cousins C, D, E, etc. When I didn’t know any of them. They were reminiscing to each other, remembering their own college days.

Finally Aunt Georgie gathered her gloves and string bag and high-stepped to the front door. She’d sent Fred and the car home; she’d be walking. Of course she carried her umbrella as always, to ward off sun or rain.

She said to me, “You be ready in the morning, Emmy. I’ll come by for you about ten o’clock.”

Aunt Priscilla showed mild surprise. “You’re taking Emmy along?”

“I certainly am.” Evidently I’d missed something in their long conversation. “She’s the last to see Elektra.”

“I saw her,” Aunt Pris corrected.

“You weren’t with her all evening. Or in the boat.”

I could have told them I knew no more than Aunt Pris. Elektra never talked. She spoke necessary words, but she never talked. Not even phrases like “Is my lipstick on straight?” “Docs my petticoat show?” Things all females say to each other.

Instead I asked, “Where are we going?”

“We’re going looking for Elektra. Find out where she is. Find out why she hasn’t been around for her five dollars. You think of some questions yourself, Emmy. We’ll both ask questions.”

I reacted in my veins. In my bones. I was to be a Miss Paul Pry. I could ask a dozen questions. I could ask Voss: “Where did she spend the night? How did she get back to Clarksvale? How did she break her strand of red glass beads?” But I wouldn’t. It was none of my business. Just the same, I carried the three red glass beads along in my party handkerchief deep in my little purse, where I had tucked them away while we were still at the cottage. While no one was looking at me. Before I got into the car and shared a jump seat with Katty.

I was ready for Aunt George when she arrived next morning. She had walked over. “No sense in taking the car. More trouble than it’s worth.” She was thinking out loud. “We have to prowl.”

We prowled along Town Street, which carried you into Main Street. But we stopped before then. We stopped at the big yellow boarding house where Elektra had lived. A flight of wooden steps led up to the porch. Aunt George didn’t ring or knock on the door, she opened it. She knew her way around here. I followed her. She walked past the staircase that mounted to a second floor, and strode down the uncarpeted corridor, all the way to a door near the back of the house. She knocked a ratatat on that door. And again, stronger. From within now came a voice shouting, “Who’s that come knocking at my door?” Aunt George shouted back, “Just Aunt George, Gammer, that’s who.” Everyone in town called her Aunt George or Georgie.

Came another shout: “George Fanshawe?”

“What other George do you know. Gammer?”

Sometime along the years I’d heard, just like an aside from someone in the family, that Aunt George had been married once on a time. Not for long. That’s why she wasn’t a Davenport like Aunt Priscilla and my father and his family.

“Well, don’t stand out there yammering, Georgie. Come on inside.”

My aunt opened the unlocked door and went in, me following behind her.

“Gammer,” she said, “this is my niece Emmy.”

I managed to stammer a “How d’you do” to the diminutive old woman in the big rocker with varnish peeling from it. This was Gammer Goodwife, supposed to be kin of Elektra. Half-toothless, a browned corncob pipe clutched by the few remaining teeth. A squawky voice like something was caught in her throat. The ironing woman. Hard to believe that those rheumatic cramped fingers could iron ruffles until they rippled. Could iron linen napkins down to the very edge of the hand hem. Could iron lace as delicately as if she’d spun it. She took one look at me out of her spiteful black eyes and dismissed me as without interest.

She had three different ironing boards set up in her large untidy room. One, oversize, for sheets, tablecloths and such; a middle-size one for the usual clothes wash, and a baby one, a sleeve board it was called. Probably for the ruffles and laces. A screen closed off a corner of the room. Behind it, Aunt Georgie told me later, was the bed and washbasin. An old-fashioned rooming house with the bathroom down the hall.

“I don’t have your laundry done,” Gammer spat.

“I didn’t come for my laundry,” Aunt George informed her. “I didn’t bring any this week.”

“Then what you doing here?”

“I’m looking for Elektra.”

“Well, you can see she an’t here.” Gammer set the rocker rocking hard again. “She’s up at the lake with your sister.”

“She isn’t up at the lake. We’ve all left the lake.”

“Did you bring her back here?”

“We couldn’t,” stated Aunt George. “She left before we packed out.”

“Why did she leave?”

“That’s what I want to know. I want to ask her.”

“Well, she an’t here.”

“Where’s her room?”

“She an’t in her room.”

“How do you know she isn’t up in her room?”

Gammer cackled. A cackle laugh. I’d read of them. But I didn’t know there was really such a sound.

She dug her fist into a voluminous pocket in her skirt. “Because I got her key.” She unreeled a long chain attached inside the pocket. On the end of it was a large ring of keys. “She leaves it with me when she’s out of town. So nobody gets into her things.” She beetled suspiciously at Aunt George.

“You haven’t seen her since she came back? You haven’t had any message from her?”

Gammer kept humming “Nnnnoooo” and rocking harder. Like little boys do to make it go faster.

“Then where is she?” Aunt George said. Not exactly to Gammer. At her own frustration.

But Gammer responded. “She’s a Canuck. I told you that before. A Canuck witch.” She restarted the rocker. “She flew away-up high-way up high…”

“On your broomstick,” Aunt George bristled. She’d had enough of Gammer’s antics. She stood up and brushed the dust off her skirt, although the chair she’d sat on had been brushed by her handkerchief before she sat down on it. “If you do see her or hear from her,” Aunt George instructed, “tell her I’m looking for her. To pay her the money I owe her.”

The rocking stopped like that. “You can pay me. I’ll give it to her.”

“I’ll pay her. No one else.”

“You think I’d spend it on myself.”

“I pay what I owe to the one I owe.” With that she stalked out while Gammer was still embroidering her role as a caretaker of Electra’s money as well as her room. I sidled out beside Aunt George. I didn’t want to be left alone in that room with Gammer.

All the way to Main Street Aunt George kept talking to herself, not to me, about the perfidious Gammer and her grandniece. I managed to keep up with her fast walk by saving my breath. Only three blocks to Main Street.

Waiting to cross the street, I could ask, “Now where do we

go?”

“We’ll go to Gus Henschel’s. I understand his nephew, Voss, and that girl were what we used to call an item.”

“Did everybody know?” Somehow I’d thought it was a private affair, known only to Katty and her friends who saw than dancing together.

“It’s the talk of this town the way she went after him.” She was opening the door of the butcher shop before I could think of some excuse to keep from going in there. I didn’t want Voss to see me and think I’d talked about him and Elektra.

Voss wasn’t up front today. His uncle was. He was arranging steaks for his display case. “Morning, Miss Georgie,” he said, but it was a glum morning from his expression. “What can I do for you today?”

“You can let me talk to that nephew of yours.”

“Voss?”

“I understand that is the name.”

He peered over the counter at me. I was too young to be a friend of Voss so he dismissed me from his answer. To Aunt George he growled, “I’d like to talk to him myself. That javel never come back from the lake. That camp has been calling and calling him. He hasn’t been around there either.”

Aunt George was only temporarily speechless. “You haven’t seen Elektra?”

“That the pawky girl been hanging around him all summer?”

“She hasn’t been around lately?”

“Not since she went up to the lake with your sister. Leastways that was what she told him.”

Both of them gone. Together. But she wouldn’t go without taking her belongings. Yes, she might. If he was in a hurry. He’d have some money with two jobs. He’d buy her a new hairbrush and nightgown.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Uncle Gus was saying. “But he’ll be around once he runs out of money. I paid him before he went off to the lake that Saturday. He’ll be back.”

“I owe Elektra some money. I don’t like to owe money. If either of them turns up, you let me know. Right off. Hear?”

“I ain’t deef, Aunt George. I hear.”

And she stomped away, me trailing. Again talking to herself. “They’ll turn up when they want money.”

I could have told her they weren’t coming back. They had each other. But she wouldn’t have believed me.

II

Ten years ago. Eleven come summer. High school and college over and done. Two years assistant women’s editor on a medium-small-town newspaper. You want to know what an assistant women’s club editor covers? Women’s club meetings. Women’s club social teas. Women’s club holiday occasions. Washington’s birthday cardboard hatchets. Cotton Easter bunnies in straw bonnets. Fourth of July crepe paper firecrackers. September, miniature grandmothers’ school slates. October, take your pick, witches, brooms, jack-o’-lanterns. November, yarn turkeys. No need to illustrate December and January. How often can you write that the decorations were so charming, unique, attractive, amusing-add your own adjectives,

I couldn’t get out of the groove. The editor wanted me where I was. I could spell.

On a September morning, I read on the AP tape, DATELINE CLARKSVALE. HUMAN BONES FOUND AT LAKE QUICHIQUOIS.

I didn’t have to read on. I knew exactly where, and, without knowing, I knew who. And a chance to break from my shackles. I knocked on Editor Briar’s door. His office is a square of window glass, but we observed the courtesy of a knock. He was chewing his pencil. Obviously working on his weekend editorial. Yes, he uses a pencil. A yellow wooden pencil with very black lead.

“Mr. Briar,” I said, “I’d like to leave now. My page has gone to press.”

“Who’s going to read proof?”

“You are,” I told him. “Or one of those callow youths you call reporters.” I’d known Mr. Briar a long time. Since I was subeditor on the college paper. I knew how to give him just enough information to whet his news appetite. “I have a story that takes investigative reporting, and I want to get at it ahead of the pack.”

He stuttered and glowered and called anathema on my head. A hot story was for callow Quentin, the one he was training to be a star metropolitan reporter. Like he’d always wanted to be.

He was wasting my time. I interrupted him. “It just came over AP. Finding bones upstate. Human bones.”

His pink face glistened. “I’ll send Quent-”

“Indeed you won’t,” I countered. “I have the inside track. I was there.” Stress on there. “When that girl disappeared. I can beat the city slickers. They’ll be coming around. But I know these folks. See you Monday.”

With which I was out the door, leaving him to his blood pressure.

I retrieved my ear from our parking lot and took off for Clarksvale, Ninety miles upstate, I didn’t stop to pack up anything. I could buy a toothbrush. Borrow everything else from Aunt Priscilla or Aunt George.

I stopped at Aunt Priscilla’s house-it was on the way into town. After ejaculations of surprise, I told her, “I’m here to cover the big story. Finding human bones at Quichiquois,”

“I’ll call George. She’ll want to hear about this.”

Aunt George was over to Aunt Priscilla’s in a trice. She must be well in her sixties now and just as spry and as domineering as ever. As that summer of Elektra.

“You think it’s Elektra,” she said after I’d given her a rundown on the news story.

I did think so. I’d always thought that she had never left the lake. But couldn’t let myself say it back then. Didn’t want it to be so.

“Aunt George, you come uptown with me,” I invited. “You know all these local officials. In case they try to freeze me out. I want the story.”

“You’ll get it.” She did not doubt. She was too accustomed to getting what she wanted from the town fathers.

As we came out on Aunt Priscilla’s porch she asked, “Is that your car?” nodding to where it stood in the driveway.

“We’ll walk,” she told me, just as she always said ten, almost eleven, years ago. “Easier than trying to park. Talk to more people anyhow,”

And there were plenty of people out on Main Street. Gossiping. Gawking. And there was Claude, near the bank, his father’s bank. Also Aunt Georgie’s.

He greeted us Claude-like. “Good morning, Aunt George, Hello, Emmy. You haven’t been to Clarksvale for a long time.” He was still a whey-face, but he had some assurance now. He had been appointed an attorney with the county.

Aunt Priscilla had kept me informed of all Clarksvale news. She wrote me every week.

Claude and I shook hands. As visitors do.

Aunt Georgie said to us, “I’m going on down to the courthouse.” Where she could gather information.

Claude said, “You’re here about the bones.”

I showed him my newspaper card. “It was on the AP wire this morning.”

“We sent the bones to the lab in Albany. Two weeks ago. They’re on the way back here now. With the report.”

I was reluctant but I asked. “Do you know…”

“Yes.” He said almost to himself, “The director informed me. I inquired…” It took a moment or so before he could continue. But he said it without inflection. “They are male bones. The bones of a young man probably in his twenties. The skull has been bashed.”

I only half asked. “They were found under the promontory, the one called High Peak.”

“There is a ledge, an open cave. The bones were there. Nothing left of clothing.”

“No leather? A belt? A wallet?”

“Not after ten years. Pumas take refuge there if a winter storm interrupts their hunting. Sometimes there are bears.”

I didn’t want to say it but I had to. “She killed him.”

“We don’t know that.”

“She loved him. He was going away. She couldn’t let him go.”

“If she did, we will never know,” Claude said. “She cannot be brought back to trial. Not without evidence. Even if she is found.”

“She was carrying his child. He was leaving her and their child.”

Somewhere there is a little girl, near ten years old. Straight as a lance. Long dark hair hanging down her back. Or a sandy little boy. Agile. Scrawny but muscular. Strong.

“She loved him.” I kept repeating it. Not for Claude. For myself.

Claude said, “I don’t think she planned it. I don’t think she intended it. I think it was by accident.”

In a rage, she struck him. There were some sizable rocks on the promontory. There would be some in the cave. And kept striking him until he was gone. Before she knew what she was doing.

He broke the strand of beads trying to get away from her. She must have had a rock. He was stronger. If it had been possible to get away from her, he could have stopped her.

“I hope you won’t mention her in your story. Why torment her further? She’ll always live with this. An agony of loss.”

He had loved Voss. The way he’d never love anyone else. Nothing homosexual about it. A teenage boy’s hero-worship of his hero.

“I won’t. There may be gossip but it will come to nothing. There aren’t many who really knew her.” And I hesitated. “Gammer…”

“Everyone knows Gammer makes up tall tales.”

We were left with a pause of silence, each in his own thoughts. Then Claude said, “Shall we go down to the courthouse? It’s time for them to get here with the report. You can call your paper from my office.”

Together we walked the half block. On the way he said, “I’m going to be married this spring. To Willa. Do you remember Willa?”

“She was one of Katty’s very best friends.”

“We’ll have a church wedding. Bridesmaids, attendants. All the frills. Willa wants it. We’ll send you an invitation. I hope you’ll be able to come. Katty’s coming from Maryland.”

Katty’s husband is in government.

It occurred to him. “You’re not married?”

“Not yet. I’m a career woman. I’m younger than Katty and her friends.”

“That’s right,” he recalled. “You were just a little girl. You sat on the bench with me and we watched Voss.”

“That’s right,” I echoed. I closed my eyes and I could see him, “He was a wonderful dancer.”

Maybe to keep from tears, he laughed. “You tried to teach me to dance.”

I laughed for the same reason. “You had two left feet.”

So we went into the courthouse to hear the full report on the tones. Just another happening.

But I did not tell Claude that I would give up the story. I wouldn’t mention Elektra. Not unless someone else did. But I would try to find her, I’m an investigative reporter. I have to know the entire story.