Double, Double

Saturday, April 8

As Ellery was setting down his second cup of coffee the next morning his doorbell rang. He opened the door to find a child in the hall. The foyer and hallway were murky and he had to peer. It was evident that the little girl had put on a costume of her mother’s — who must be a character! — and she was pluckily fighting off nervousness.

“Yes?” said Ellery with an encouraging smile.

“Ellery Queen?”

He squinted past her, searching the shadows. The voice had been a woman’s.

“Did you say that?” he asked sharply.

“My name is Rima Anderson. Could you talk to me?”

The next few minutes Ellery devoted to re-stabilization. The world of fiction is made up of heroines, he caught himself philosophizing, industriously contrived by their authors to be all that no woman ever is. Yet here was a girl, in flesh, with blood, who might have stepped out of a book. In fact, as Ellery soon discovered, Rima Anderson had stepped out of a book.

She had a special, unbelievable quality of... consistency. Women are made of skin, hair, muscle, sweat glands, ten thousand things; this girl had the harmony of a figurine. She was of one piece. He kept thinking of Tanagra and terra cotta, and of how breakable she seemed. Yet when she came in her step was soundless. He thought of elves and birds.

When he saw her in the full light there was nothing fragile about her. She was like a miniature fruit at its ripest. A child giving off a womanly disturbance. The child-woman paradox was most emphatic in her eyes. They were as serenely uncluttered, as without guile or guilty knowledge, as the eyes of any little girl; still, under scrutiny, they veiled themselves as no child’s eyes had ever done. The effect was enchanting and fresh, but it carried no conviction. You had to talk yourself into it.

Even her voice. It had a lilt, the music of something formless but significant in nature. The voice of a brook, or a dryad. That’s it, thought Ellery. She’s a nymph who lives in the heart of a tree. And then he remembered who “Rima” was. Rima was the child-woman, the bird-girl of the Venezuelan jungle, in a book he had not read for twenty years.

And here she sat.

But where was old Nuflo, her grandfather? And his dogs Susio and Goloso? One had a right to expect them, and the mora tree, and the hummingbird, and the little silkhaired monkey.

“Is Rima the name you were given when you were born?”

“Rima is the name I was given when I was born.”

By her father. By The Town Drunk. He had named her Rima by benefit of W. H. Hudson and he had made her Rima in fact. To shape a child in the mold of a name is brutal, but poetry. Ellery saw Tom Anderson in a suddenly altered light. Chief Dakin and the Record might still be wrong. Such a man could have poised himself on the edge of Little Prudy’s Cliff and, like Icarus, taken off.

No one in Wrightsville had known this girl well; perhaps she had been a sort of myth to the town, a creature of folklore in the making. The Town Drunk must have hidden her away, protecting the delicate product of his creative energy from the corrosive influences of the community. And Ellery knew without asking that Rima Anderson’s playmates had been birds and small animals, and that her playground had been the natural world in which Wrightsville squats — plain and hill and stream and wood, the wilder woods where hardly anyone ventured. And if her skin had a sheen, and if her hair was waved, and if her lips were as redly soft as young raspberries, it was because Rima had been taught to patronize the cosmeticians of nature, the sun and the wind and the rain. In the world of beauty parlors and cutrate toiletries she walked alone.

The girl wore a house dress of the cheapest cotton, black coarse stockings, flatheeled and papery-looking white “store” shoes, a shrieking bonnet. Everything about her added up to “country store” in some remote rural district; Ellery could recall no shop even in Low Village which carried such outlandish merchandise. She must have walked over to Fidelity, the very poor community west of Wrightsville, or down to Shinn Corners, deep in the southwestern farm country, to get them. Things would be cheaper there, and there would be fewer eyes. Like a bird, she was shy. There was a pallor under her brown skin which told him what contact with New York had done to her. Probably this was her first visit to a big city. Absurdly, he wished he had a finch, or a field mouse, to offer her... and wondered how he could manage to get her back to Wrightsville in some less outrageous costume. It was a problem; and he decided to let inspiration or opportunity solve it.

“How did you happen to come all the way to New York to see me, Miss Anderson?”

She laughed — the unprepared outburst of a bird. “Call me Rima!”

“All right. But why did you laugh, Rima?”

“Nobody’s ever called me Miss Anderson before.” When he repeated his first question, she said, “My father, Thomas Hardy Anderson, used to talk about you.” Thomas Hardy Anderson...

“Tom Anderson?” Ellery asked involuntarily.

“The Town Drunk.” She said it naturally. It was a fact, like the bad reputation of gophers; one stated it and passed on. She has the quick acceptance of all wild things, he thought; a fawn doesn’t question the morals of its father.

“What did he say about me, Rima?”

“Oh, that you were the kind of man who had a compulsion to look for the truth. He told me that if I was ever in trouble and he was gone, I was to come to you. And I’m in trouble.”

“So you’ve come to me.”

“Yes.”

Ellery got up and fiddled with the Venetian blind. When he turned around he said, “I know about his disappearance.”

“I think my father is dead.” It was hard to adjust to her directness. She did not question the source of his information; his knowledge did not surprise her.

“Apparently the Wrightsville police think so, too.”

“Chief Dakin told me that. And a woman from the newspaper. I don’t like her, but I like Chief Dakin.”

“And that’s why you think your father is dead, Rima? Because they’ve told you so?”

“I knew it before they told me.” She was up and over at the window.

“What do you mean, you ‘knew it before’? Do you know something the others don’t?”

“I just know it. If he were alive he’d come back to me, or write. He’s dead.” She kept looking down at 87th Street, with interest, as if the death of her father was of no importance. But again Ellery had to readjust. The rules didn’t apply to her. What seemed curiosity about a New York street was probably caution. The sparrow soars from the pavement crumb to a safe telephone wire, and from there he watches. His watching is mysteriously tied up with his wants.

“People have been known to go away, Rima. Without explanation or warning. Because — let’s say — they’re in trouble.”

“He may have been in trouble, but he would have told me if he had to go away. He’s dead.”

“The struggle on Little Prudy’s Cliff—”

“He was pushed over. He was murdered.”

“Why?”

She fluttered about at that. “I don’t know, Mr. Queen. That’s why I’ve come to you.” Just as suddenly she returned to the sofa, tucked her legs under her, smiled at him. They had turned a corner. Or the sparrow had decided that the man on the pavement was harmless. “May I take off my shoes? They hurt.”

“Please do.”

She took them off, wiggling her toes. “I hate shoes, don’t you?”

“Can’t stand them.”

“Then why don’t you take yours off?”

“Well, I... think I will!” said Ellery, and he removed his shoes.

“I’m going to take off these stockings, too, if you don’t mind. They itch so. Mmmm...” Her legs were honey-colored, beautiful running legs covered with brisk scratches. But the soles of her feet were not at all beautiful; they were covered with a horny integument, like a coating of plastic. She noticed his glance and frowned. “They’re ugly, aren’t they? But I can’t abide shoes.” Ellery could see her flying through the woods. He wondered what she wore in her natural habitat. “At first I thought of talking with his two friends,” Rima went on. “But—”

She makes no transitions, he thought. You follow her flight or you lose her.

“Nick Jacquard? Harry Toyfell?”

“But I don’t like them. Jacquard is no good. And Toyfell makes me...” She grew still.

“Makes you what, Rima?”

“I don’t know... They weren’t good for Daddy. Until a short time ago, they had a bad influence on him.”

“You think Jacquard, or Toyfell, or both, had something to do with what happened to your father?”

“Oh, no. They were really his friends. But I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t like them.”

And it seemed perfectly logical to Ellery at the moment not to question your father’s only close associates about his disappearance on the ground that you disliked them.

He got up and began that hungry patrol of his preserves which in Ellery follows uneasiness. Rima watched him trustfully.

“Tell me all about your father, Rima. Was he originally from Wrightsville? What did he use to do for a living?”

“He was born in Wisconsin somewhere. He never talked about his family. I think he’d had very strict, ignorant parents and they quarreled and he left home in his teens. He wanted to write poetry. He worked his way East and got into Harvard, tutoring to support himself. Some famous Harvard professor told him he’d never be anything but a third-rate poet but that he had the makings of a first-rate teacher. He took graduate courses in education and afterwards got a job teaching English literature at Merrimac University in Connhaven... Hardy wasn’t his real middle name. His real middle name was Hogg. He took Hardy when he enrolled in Harvard.”

Ellery nodded.

“He’d been teaching at Merrimac for eighteen years when he met my mother. She was a graduate student there. By this time he was a full professor and one of the most popular teachers in the university. He was 44, Mother was my age. Neither had ever loved anyone before. They fell in love.”

A bachelor over 40, with a background of family antagonisms and creative frustration, who was forced to sublimate his passion for verbal sound and shape in the teaching of literature, Anderson had poured everything into the first love of his life. Rima’s mother had been a beauty and a poet of promise. “Daddy used to say Mother got more poetry into a grocery list than he’d ever pounded into an ode.” Rima’s mother had come from the Middle West, one of the numerous daughters of a nouveau riche family. Her parents had social plans for her and violently opposed her alliance with a small-salaried college professor “stuck up in the New England woods.” Rima’s mother broke with her family and married her professor.

“They lived on the Merrimac campus and the next year I was born. Daddy named me Rima after the heroine in Green Mansions. When I was 2 he built a little house up in the hills near Connhaven and we moved there, away from everybody. Daddy went in to college every day, mother tended house and me and wrote poems on the backs of envelopes and on grocery sacks, like Emily Dickinson, and I played in the woods. On weekends we’d all three do it. We wore practically no clothes and at night we’d sleep on spruce boughs under blankets and we’d have wonderful times. I think we were the happiest family in the world. When I turned 5, Daddy drove me down to school every day and picked me up again in the afternoons. What I learned I learned from him and Mother and the woods, though... Then, when I was almost 10, Mother took sick and died. Overnight. I don’t know what it was — some rare disease. One day she was with us, the next day she wasn’t.”

Rima sat still.

“I’ll never forget what Daddy said at Mother’s grave, when everybody’d gone away. He hadn’t said a word since her death, just held my hand. ‘This is black wickedness, Rima. There’s no beauty or justice in it,’ he said; and that night, after he put me to bed, he went down to Connhaven and came back very late, drunk.”

Rima’s recollections of those days were of staggering steps, shouts, whisky fumes, wild weeping in the night, and wilder tenderness. Anderson had periods of abstinence, when he would go about pale and silent, his hands trembling; at these times he often reread his wife’s poems to Rima. But the temperate episodes became less and less frequent, and finally they stopped altogether. For the most part Rima was looked after by friends, the wives of faculty members; later, there were threats of legal action if Anderson did not stop drinking or turn the child over to welfare authorities. But Rima herself thwarted all attempts to separate them. “I must have run away from various places a dozen times,” she told Ellery. “Daddy was always kind to me, even when he was very drunk. Nobody could keep me, and after a while nobody tried.” Then the last of a series of painful incidents in class and Professor Anderson was dismissed from the Merrimac faculty.

“That’s when we came to Wrightsville,” Rima said. “Somehow Daddy got an appointment to teach English at Wrightsville High. We lived in Mrs. Wheatley’s rooming house on Upper Purling Street. Mrs. Wheatley looked after me during the day. She’s dead now.”

Tom Anderson’s position on the high school faculty lasted eight months. When Principal Martha E. Coolye caught him with a glass of whisky on his desk during class, he was summarily discharged.

“Five weeks later Mrs. Wheatley put us out for nonpayment of rent. Daddy said, ‘Don’t blame her, Rima. She’s a poor woman and we’re taking up space she could get money for. We’ll find another place to live as soon as I straighten myself out and get a job.’”

Rima’s next recollection was of the shack on the edge of The Marshes. It had been built by some engineers during a survey of The Marshes in one of the periods when public agitation for its drainage threatened to upset Wright County political applecarts. Its roof leaked and its tarpaper covering was all but peeled away. They managed to make it weatherproof and in the intervening years Rima had built an additional room onto it and a new floor from salvaged lumber, and she had grown ivy all over the outer walls. “It’s pretty now,” laughed Rima. “More like a flowerbox than a house.” And the mosquitoes of The Marshes? asked Ellery. “Mosquitoes don’t bite me,” said Rima.

And there they had lived ever since. The land belonged to no one, so far as Rima knew; at least, they had never been molested. In those earlier years repeated attempts were made by the Ladies’ Aid and the town welfare authorities to separate the child from her father, but Rima always broke loose and came back to him. “He needed me. I knew that the day my mother died. He needed somebody who loved him and didn’t condemn him for being drunk all the time. He needed somebody to take his clothes off when he came home, or hold his head when he was more than usually drunk, or read to him, or put him to bed. Where did we get beds, furniture, a stove? I don’t know. Daddy managed to get everything we needed. We didn’t need much.” Finally the attempts to give the girl “a proper home” were abandoned and the Andersons were let alone. “They’ve forgotten all about me!” They had no money beyond the few dollars Tom Anderson earned occasionally doing an odd job and a small sum which arrived monthly, in cash, addressed to “Thomas Hogg Anderson” in care of General Delivery, Wrightsville, bearing the postmark “Racine, Wis.” but no return address. “I think it’s from a brother, or sister, of Daddy’s out there,” said Rima indifferently. “Daddy never talked about it but once that I recall. He said, laughing, ‘I’m the Pariah of the Anderson tribe, darling. Their blood boils from contact with the Untouchable, but they soothe their glossy souls by the payment of a pittance in conscience-money. It’s all for you, baby. I won’t touch a scummy cent of it.’” But he always did. They had made a ritual out of it. Each month her father walked to the post office at Lower Main and the Square, brought back the envelope, Rima opened it with ceremony, she hid the money in a cracker tin on a shelf above the stove while he turned his back; and later Tom Anderson — and the money — would disappear for a day or so. “It went on that way for years. He always insisted that I hide it, and I always did, just to please him. Sometimes he even made me hide it in a different place.” Occasionally, when the need was acute, Rima took a dollar or two from the box before the remittance vanished. But in general she got along very well without money. She raised her own vegetables in a little garden behind the shack, and her father had developed a skill that amounted to art in supplying their household with flour, fowl, fruit, bacon. “You know,” said Rima matter-of-factly, “they called him The Town Beggar just about as often as The Town Drunk. He always resented that. ‘I give them value for consideration,’ he used to say. ‘I amuse them. In the Middle Ages I would have been a jester. I’ve never begged in my life.’” But he had, and she knew it. “It was for me,” she told Ellery. “If it was just for himself, he’d have starved first.” Silently, Ellery doubted this. The hard moral fiber of Tom Anderson had been buried with his wife. The flabby residue sagged to every whim, and most weakly to his craving for forgetfulness.

At times he killed rabbits and other small game in the woods north of The Marshes. Rima never touched them. “They’re my friends,” she laughed. “I couldn’t eat my friends.”

Rima spent her days in the hills and backwoods surrounding Wrightsville. There were sweet wild berries to be plucked, streams to bathe in, injured birds and animals to nurse, hot long-grassed meadows to lie on while her father sat crosslegged by her side lecturing and questioning, book in hand. For the School Board had discovered the uselessness of trying to keep Rima Anderson in a classroom, and there had been talk of a truancy proceeding which would have placed her behind the bars of the County Corrective Home for Girls at Limpscot, upstate. Tom Anderson had roused himself. He stopped drinking for forty-eight hours, Rima mended and brushed his clothes, and then he had marched into town to demand a special Board hearing. At the hearing he pleaded brilliantly his pedagogic qualifications and pledged that he would teach his daughter privately, following the curriculum prescribed by the State Regents. After a confused session the Board voted its assent to this unusual arrangement, on the condition that Rima present herself each semester for examinations in the prescribed high school courses of study, the penalty for failure being punitive Board action.

“We made them eat crow,” gurgled Rima, doubled over. “Daddy never let me get away with anything and I always passed their old exams with high marks.” Rima’s highest marks had come in English literature. “They called him names and sneered at him and said he wasn’t fit to be a father, and a lot of what they said was true, but Daddy never neglected my education and because I loved him and he was a wonderful teacher I learned more than most of the Wrightsville kids. In literature I think I could teach their teachers a thing or two! We had nothing — according to Wrightsville — and if we did have anything they said Daddy pawned it or sold it to get money for liquor. But he never touched our books, no matter how desperate he was, and if you come to Wrightsville, Mr. Queen, I’ll show you a library that will open your eyes.”

And now Tom Anderson was gone. Dead, Rima insisted.

“I want to know what happened to him. How it happened.” Her eyelids came down. “Who did it.” He saw that her hands were in perfect repose. She’s learned an animal discipline, he thought.

“Rima.” Ellery sat down opposite her again. “A few minutes ago, in talking about your father’s two friends — Nick Jacquard and Harry Toyfell — you said they’d exerted a bad influence on him ‘until a short time ago.’ Exactly what did you mean by that? Had he stopped seeing Jacquard and Toyfell? Given them up?”

“He stopped drinking. He gave liquor up.”

Ellery looked at her.

“You think he didn’t. That he couldn’t have. I know he did. In all the years since Mother died he never once tried to give up drinking. Even when he stayed sober for two whole days that time when he had to see the School Board about me, it was for just those two days; he didn’t pretend he was reforming. About a month ago, without any warning, he told me he was through being The Town Drunk. I was surprised and I asked him what had happened. He wouldn’t tell me. ‘Let’s wait and see,’ he said.

“He’d never said anything like that to me before. I suppose that’s why I believed him. At first I thought he just wanted to. But then, as the days and nights passed and he’d come home walking as straight as anybody else and with no whisky on his breath, I knew he was actually doing it. His hands would shake and he’d toss around half the night. There were times when he’d get almost wild and run around the shack as if he were crazy. Once when he thought I was asleep he crawled out of bed and lit a stub of candle and got a bottle of whisky out of a hole in the floor. He put it on the table next to the candle and pulled out the cork and he sat down with his hand on the bottle and looked at it. I could see a big artery jumping under his skin and the sweat was pouring down his face. He sat there that way for fully an hour. Then he put the cork back into the bottle, put the bottle back in the hole in the floor, replaced the floor board, and went to bed again.”

Ellery wondered why she was making such a story up. It couldn’t possibly be true. Not an alcoholic with such a long history of addiction as Tom Anderson. But then he saw the strange clarity of her eyes and he found himself doubting his own doubt.

“Maybe it wouldn’t have lasted,” said Rima calmly. “But it did last for a month. Until the night he died.”

“He continued to see Toyfell and Jacquard?”

“Yes. But he told me it was to test himself. He said that he still went to the Roadside Tavern with them and that while they drank he sat with an empty glass before him. Jacquard laughed at him, he said — he was angry about it. Maybe being angry helped him.”

“So when he quarreled with somebody on Little Prudy’s Cliff a week ago tonight, you think he was sober?”

“I’m positive he was.” She couldn’t possibly be, but she was. And, unreasonably, Ellery was, too.

“And he didn’t get around to telling you why he’d suddenly decided to give up drinking?”

“No. I knew he’d tell me in time. I didn’t want to press him. Daddy couldn’t take much pressure.”

And Ellery, nodding, began to drift about again. After a while he came to a decision. It was an uneasy decision, because Rima was an enigma he had not entirely solved. The case was difficult and called for improvisation. He said to her, “Rima, have you ever sent me a letter?”

It was a ridiculous question. But then Anonymous was always a shy bird, too. It seemed the right shot at the moment. It might flush a look, a tremor, a breath.

But Rima merely shook her head.

Ellery kept looking at her. “Did you know an old man in High Village named MacCaby?”

“Luke MacCaby? I’ve heard about him through Daddy. Harry Toyfell worked for him. But Luke MacCaby is dead. He died leaving a lot of money to a doctor in High Village named Dodd, Sebastian Dodd.”

“Did your father ever talk to you about MacCaby’s death?”

“He told me what he’d heard, especially from Toyfell. But everybody in town was talking about it, he said. Everybody was very excited.”

“Did he know MacCaby?” persisted Ellery.

“I don’t know. Why do you keep asking about MacCaby?”

“Do I ask you why you keep performing tonsillectomies on ailing meadowlarks, Rima? I manage to keep in touch with Wrightsville,” said Ellery manfully, “one way and another. Tell me: What do you know about John Spencer Hart?”

No flash or flicker. She was really trying to remember. “Hart... Wasn’t he connected with Luke MacCaby in some way? I think a man of that name died recently in town, too. I don’t know much about Wrightsville,” confessed Rima. “I hardly ever go into town. The only people I see are kids who wander off into the woods to pick berries and get lost and have to be taken back home. I know more Wrightsville dogs than people. There’s always a gang of them around the shack, scratching themselves and wagging their tails.”

“Did your father know John Spencer Hart?”

“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t! Because now I remember. Wasn’t Mr. Hart a very rich man who lived on a huge estate on North Hill Drive?”

“Did your father ever mention John Spencer Hart?”

“I don’t recall his saying...”

“Did your father know Dr. Dodd, Rima?”

“Dr. Dodd? I don’t know.” She was distressed now; her exquisite little hands fluttered. “You must think I’m stupid. But it’s just that I’ve had no interest in Wrightsville affairs and I never questioned Daddy about whom he knew or what he did or where he went. Not because I didn’t want to know but because he didn’t like being pushed. If he wanted to tell me something, I listened. If he needed my help, I gave it. Otherwise I let him alone. People were lecturing him all the time. I was the only one who took him as he was and respected his rights as a human being, even if according to Wrightsville he was a very poor human being... I just don’t know, Mr. Queen.”

“I understand Dr. Dodd does a great deal of work in Low Village, and I thought—”

“But we’re never sick. I mean, we never were.”

“Not even your father?”

“He was a funny man in some respects. He thought going to a doctor was a sign of weakness. He’d fight off things that would put other people into bed.”

“Rima, you’re the world’s most unsatisfactory client. There’s nothing to go on.”

“I’m so sorry—”

“I suppose you’ll tell me your father hadn’t an enemy in the world.”

“He hadn’t.”

“He must have had at least one!”

“No... Daddy charmed people. Even Mrs. Coolye, the principal who kicked him out of Wrightsville High — the day she dismissed him she cried. Chris Dorfman, the radio car policeman who was brought up last year on charges of breaking the nose of one of Big Tootsie’s girls in a drunken brawl, used to bring Daddy home instead of running him in; he’d tell me, ‘It’s a shame about your old man. He’s a great old guy.’ Nobody’d want to hurt Daddy because of anything Daddy was.”

“What do you mean by that?” Ellery stared at her.

“Some people will kill a ladybug. Not because the ladybug is harmful but because it happens to get in their way. Nothing personal. Just a matter of convenience.”

Ellery kept staring.

“If there’s nothing to go on...” Rima got off the sofa, slowly this time. “You won’t take the case.”

“Rima, how much money do you have?”

The blood flooded her cheeks. “I’m stupid. Of course, your fee. Mr. Queen, I’m sorry. I—”

“I didn’t say anything about my fee. I asked you how much money you have.”

She looked at him. Then, as suddenly as she did everything, she opened her imitation leather purse and held it out to him.

The purse contained a handkerchief, a railroad ticket, a box of wild cherry drops, and some coins. Perhaps fifty cents.

“It’s what I had left after I bought my ticket to New York and return, and paid my bus fare here from Grand Central Terminal. Daddy hadn’t touched the money from Racine last time. Otherwise I couldn’t have come.”

“Bad.” Ellery scowled.

“Bad?”

“It interferes with my plans.”

“Plans? I don’t—”

“I wanted you to look big-cityish when we went back to Wrightsville.”

“You’re coming back with me!” That bird peal again.

“What? Oh, certainly,” said Ellery. “I mean to say, it’s important that you look... smart, Rima. Up-to-the-minute. New York chic, as it were—”

“You want me to buy different clothes.” He blushed slightly as she glanced down at herself, up at him. “I know these are awful,” she said helplessly. “But I couldn’t afford any better. I have no wardrobe.”

“It’s a bother,” said Ellery with a fierce frown. Then his forehead cleared. “See here, I don’t see why we should endanger my plan of action merely because of the lack of a little money. Suppose I advance you a couple of hundred, Rima.”

“Dollars?”

“Why, yes.”

“But I couldn’t ever pay that much back.” She trilled at his childishness.

“Of course you could. You’re not going to keep living in that mosquito-infested flowerpot, are you?”

She was amazed. “Where else would I live?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. But you’ve got to get yourself a job of some sort—”

“Why?”

“Why? Because... because you’ll owe me two hundred dollars!” He grasped her arm and was surprised to find it as pliantly tough as a gull’s wing. “Now we’ve had enough talk. We’re going out to get you a suit, blouses, hat, underthings, stockings, shoes, a hairdo, manicure, pedicure...”

It was the best he could muster on the moment.