Sleeping Beauty

chapter 10

Elizabeth Somerville came to the front door in a tourmaline mink which almost matched her blond head. It seemed to me she was overdressed, considering her errand. She may have caught my look, because she went back into the house and put on a plain dark coat.

“My family,” she said in the car, “has a fatal gift for ostentation.”

“You look even better in that coat.”

“Thank you – thank you very much.” Her voice was serious, as if she hadn’t had a compliment for some time.

We rode in unstrained silence down the dark hill. I had liked the woman at first sight, just as I had liked Laurel, and for some of the same reasons: their honesty and passionate directness, their concern. But Laurel was a troubled girl, and the woman beside me seemed to have everything under control.

Except perhaps her marriage, which seemed to be on her mind: “I’m not about to explain or apologize for anything. But you must have gotten a rather odd view of us. This dreadful oil spill has thrown the family into a crisis. And now with what’s happened to Laurel–” She took in a deep breath and let it out.

I turned onto the lighted boulevard, heading for the San Diego Freeway. “I know how you feel.”

“How could you possibly?”

“In a situation like this, people get to know each other in a hurry. That is, if the components are present.”

“The nuclear components?”

I glanced sideways at her face. She was smiling in a slightly feline way. I said:

“I don’t think you and I are going to have an explosion. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m sure you’re highly explosive, just as Laurel is.”

“Really? You think I’m like Laurel?” She sounded both complimented and dismayed. “They do say an aunt and a niece have about thirty percent of the same genes – almost as close a relation as mother and daughter. And I feel that way about her.” She leaned toward me. “What happened to Laurel?”

“I don’t know. I think she was ready for almost anything, and very close to the edge of emotional breakdown. I’m not offering this as a theory, just an idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the kidnapping was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Perhaps somebody recognized her and saw she was vulnerable and picked her up on the street. It may have been someone she knew. She may even have gone along willingly.”

“You’re not suggesting that she’s a party to the extortion attempt?”

“No, but it’s not impossible.” I was thinking of what Joyce Hampshire had told me about the Las Vegas incident when Laurel was fifteen. I decided not to mention it to Elizabeth.

She said, “But she’d have no reason. Laurel doesn’t care about money. And if she did, she could always get it from my parents.”

“Not her own?”

“Jack and Marian don’t have much money in the here and now. The company pays him a good salary, of course, but they live right up to it, and beyond. I don’t mean that they couldn’t or wouldn’t raise money for Laurel if they had to.”

“Money isn’t always the main thing in these extortion attempts. The extortioner may think it is. But what he’s really after is some kind of emotional satisfaction. Some kind of revenge on life. Would Laurel do something like that to her parents?”

“I don’t know. They’ve certainly had a lot of trouble with her. And she with them,” Elizabeth added carefully. “Jack and Marian have had a troubled marriage. But all three of them really care about each other. I suppose it’s what they call a love-hate relationship. Odi et amo. Excrucior.”

“What does that mean?”

“ ‘I hate you and I love you. And it hurts.’ That’s my own translation from Catullus. They printed it in the annual at River Valley School.”

“The same school Laurel went to.”

“Yes. You know quite a lot about her.”

“Not nearly enough. I didn’t have much of a chance to question her husband. He was at work.”

“He wouldn’t be able to tell you much, anyway,” she said with faint contempt.

“Why do you say that?”

“He doesn’t really know Laurel. How could he, with his background? I’ve spent some time with them, and if ever I saw an unreal marriage–”

“Tom seems to be in love with her.”

“Whatever that means,” she said. “As far as Tom is concerned, she’s a creature of romantic fantasy. He treats her as if she were a fairy princess. Laurel really deserved something better than that.”

Her voice was surprisingly bitter. I wondered if she was talking about her own marriage as well as Laurel’s.

“How did – how does Laurel feel about him?” And how do you feel about your husband, Mrs. Somerville?

“I think she loved him, in a way, and she was grateful to him. It isn’t easy for Laurel to be intimate with anyone, certainly not with a man. But she really should have had something more than Tom Russo. She’s a remarkable young woman. If she had met her match in life, this dreadful thing wouldn’t have happened.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. Her hair fluffed out, and caught the light of a car coming up behind us. “After what you said about her possible complicity, I don’t think I ought to speculate about it.”

“I was speculating.”

“You certainly were.”

“But I thought the question ought to be raised. I’m not suggesting that Laurel originated the idea. At worst, she simply went along with it.”

“Why would she?”

“She wanted out, and she was so desperate that any out would do. Assume she did go with someone, and that someone made the extortion call to her parents, with or without her knowledge – it doesn’t follow that Laurel is out of danger. In fact, it works the other way around.”

“You mean if she knows who she’s with, he’s just as likely to kill her?”

“That’s what I mean. He or they.”

“But you’re simply imagining all this,” she said with synthetic scorn.

“What else can I do? I said I wasn’t offering you a theory, just some possibilities. You seem to take them seriously. So do I. Remember, I spent some time with Laurel just before she took off. She was wide open to possibility, ready for anything to happen. And if she ran into someone else in the same condition–”

“The nuclear components would come together?”

Her voice was sober. We climbed the ramp onto the midnight freeway. I was keenly aware that I’d brought Laurel this way a few hours before.

“Speaking of nuclear bombs,” Elizabeth said, in the tone of someone hoping to change the subject, “this isn’t the first time tonight that they’ve come up. My husband was talking about bombing earlier this evening, before I persuaded him to go to bed. I know men aren’t supposed to have hysterics, but he was pretty close to it. Of course, he’s been through a lot more than I have, particularly in the last couple of days. I have to make allowances for that, and for the fact that he’s older.”

She seemed to be having a quiet debate with herself on the subject of her husband’s manhood.

“What did he have to tell you about bombing?”

“Nothing worth hearing, really. If anyone but Ben had said it, I would have laughed in his face. He had the wild idea that perhaps our oil well started leaking because some enemy had planted a small nuclear device in the sea floor. Of course, he was very tired, and he can’t drink–”

“Some enemy of the United States?”

“He didn’t go quite that far. Some personal enemy, or enemy of the company. Or someone trying to make the oil industry look bad.”

“It isn’t possible, is it?”

“No.” Her voice was definite. “I think my husband may be getting a bit paranoid. It’s understandable. He’s a sensitive man, and I know he feels terribly guilty. He told me once himself that he was too emotional to be a naval combat officer. He said he realized it when he saw the official photographs of the fire-bombing of Tokyo. He was appalled by them.”

“Did he have something to do with the Tokyo bombings?”

“No. I didn’t mean that. But this oil thing isn’t his first disaster. It’s the second one that he – that he was made to feel responsible for. His ship the Canaan Sound was disabled by fire at Okinawa, and some of his men were lost.”

“Was it his fault?”

“He was the Captain. He naturally assumed responsibility. But Ben has never talked about it. Neither has Jack. I don’t think either of them knows how the fire started.”

“Was your brother Jack aboard the Canaan Sound?”

“Yes. Jack was a young officer just out of Communications School. Ben arranged to take him aboard, so Jack would be under his wing. It wasn’t a very protective wing, I’m afraid. Jack wasn’t on the carrier for more than a week or two when it was ordered to Okinawa, and then burned. That was the end of Jack’s sea duty, and the end of my husband’s naval career.”

“You mean they fired him out of the Navy?”

“Not exactly. They gave him shore duty at Great Lakes. Ben hated it. So did I. But it was much harder on him than it was on me. When I married him, he was terribly ambitious. He used to talk about someday becoming CINPAC. The job at Great Lakes led nowhere, and wasn’t intended to. As soon as the war was over, Ben resigned from the Navy. Fortunately he was married to me, and my father took him into the company.”

Her voice had dropped into the half-conscious rhythm of memory. She was aware of my presence, which made speech possible, but she wasn’t just talking to me. She was telling herself about her life, and finding out how it sounded.

“Is this the end of your husband’s career in the oil business?”

“I don’t know. It feels like the end of a lot of things to me.” Her voice dropped out of hearing, but I sensed its quiet rhythms continuing in her mind. Then it was audible again: “I’m afraid my father has turned his back on us. We disappointed him by having no children. Now he’s got himself a woman named Connie Hapgood. She used to be a teacher at River Valley School, and she’s actually younger than I am. Younger than I ever was,” she added in a flash of wry and angry wit. “Father is in his seventies, but he plans to marry her as soon as his marriage to Mother is dissolved. He’s even talking about having another family.”

“Talking will do no harm.”

“He means it, though. He’s got himself persuaded, with that woman’s help, that he can have a second life. And of course she’ll do her best to get Ben fired and put her own people in. There were rumors of it even before the blowout, and now that it’s happened I’m afraid Ben’s finished.”

“But the blowout was pure accident, wasn’t it?”

“It must have been. Of course. But Father will blame Ben. Father has always had to have someone to blame.” The sentence came out heavy and cold, like a capsule history of her early life. After a while, she added:

“One of the planets – I forget which one – takes something like a hundred and sixty-five years to revolve around the sun. It makes for a long long year. And that’s the kind of a year our family seems to be having.”

“Neptune?”

“It may be Neptune. He’s the god of the sea, isn’t he? Maybe he got mad and blew up our oil well. But please don’t suggest that possibility to my husband. He’d be only too willing to believe it.”