Sleeping Beauty

chapter 12

We turned right on Seahorse Lane, which dipped toward the sea, and turned again at Mrs. Lennox’s mailbox. Her name was painted on it in new black lettering: “SYLVIA LENNOX.” The house at the end of the cypress-haunted lane was single-storied, and sprawled like a stucco labyrinth along the edge of the sea.

A young man came out across the lighted courtyard to meet us. He was of normal size but he gave the impression of being dwarfed by his surroundings. He walked on his toes like a dancer, ready to move in any direction. His moist brown eyes looked rather eager to please.

“How are you, Mrs. Somerville?”

“I’m fine,” she said in a tone that denied it, and turned to me. “Mr. Archer, this is Tony Lashman, my mother’s secretary.”

We shook hands. He told Elizabeth that her mother was waiting in her room to see her, and she excused herself.

From the window of the front room where Lashman took me, I could look out across the beach and the water and see the lighted oil platform. I couldn’t tell how close the oil had come to shore, but I could sense its odor invading the house.

The young man sniffed. “Filthy stuff.”

“How does Mrs. Lennox feel about it?”

“She’s pretty ambivalent.” He gave me a quick sharp look to see if I understood what he was saying. “After all, she’s been married to an oilman most of her life.”

“Do you know old Mr. Lennox?”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve never met him. I’ve only been with Mrs. Lennox since she and her husband agreed to separate.” He ran his fingers through his wavy black hair. “This is very much a temporary thing for me. I’m going back to college in the fall. Or else to photography school. I haven’t decided. I only took this job to help Mrs. Lennox out.”

“I understand her granddaughter has been staying here.”

“That’s right, she’s been using the guesthouse.” He turned to face me. “I heard she’s missing.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not surprised. She wasn’t too happy here. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I did my best to cheer her up, but it didn’t do too much good.”

His eyes reflected a facile sympathy, but it soon faded. There seemed to be a restless movement behind them, a constant turning in his head like an occulting light.

“How did you cheer her up?”

“We played a lot of tennis – she plays a fairly good game of tennis. And we had some good old heart-to-heart talks, you know? She wants to do something with her life. I’m the same way myself – creative. Laurel and I have quite a lot in common. I went through a marriage that didn’t work out myself.”

“Her marriage didn’t work out?”

“I didn’t mean to say that, exactly.” He touched his mouth with his fingers. “Laurel hadn’t really made up her mind about it, but I could tell which way it was likely to go. It’s hard to imagine her married to a druggist.”

“Why?” I said.

“You know, a girl with all that charm and class. And all that money in the background.”

He made an inclusive gesture toward the contents of the room. The heavy dark furniture, devoid of charm, failed to support him. There was money there, I thought, but it hadn’t been wholly humanized.

“How much money is there in the background?”

“Millions and millions.”

The thought of the money seemed to excite him momentarily. I wondered if money was his unrequited passion. I doubted that Laurel was.

He became aware that Elizabeth had come into the room. As if the light had altered, embarrassment changed his face and made it almost ugly. But if she had overheard him talking about her family’s money, she gave no sign.

“My mother would like to see you,” she said to me.

She led me through another wing of the house, to a closed white door which she opened.

“Mr. Archer is here, Mother.”

Sylvia Lennox was a thin elegant woman sitting on a canopied bed. A round bedside table held a pink telephone, a glass of water, and two red pills. She lifted her head at a consciously attractive angle. But in spite of her silk cap and robe, and the room that surrounded her like the interior of a pink cloud, she looked rather like an aging boy.

“My lawyer, Emerson Little, tells me that you know John Truttwell.”

“I worked with him on a case once.”

“He seems to have a high opinion of you.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I’m also glad you’ve been in touch with your lawyer.”

“Yes. Emerson will make the arrangements in the morning.” She turned to her daughter. “May I talk to Mr. Archer alone for a minute?”

“Certainly, Mother.” Elizabeth was a little awkward in her presence.

“Could you possibly not call me Mother, dear? I’ve asked you to call me Sylvia.”

“Yes, Sylvia.”

Elizabeth went out, shutting the door a little harder than necessary, but not quite hard enough to upset the wary balance beween her and her mother. Mrs. Lennox waved me into a chair beside her bed.

“I love my daughter dearly,” she said without heat, “but she’s terribly conscious of the generations. I suppose a woman gets that way when she marries an older man. When Elizabeth met Captain Somerville, he was already old enough to be her father. In 1944, when they were married, she was just out of Vassar and barely twenty-one. She thought it would be romantic to be married to a Navy captain, and my husband arranged the marriage. Of course he was thinking of the future of the company – he always had two reasons for doing any one thing he did.” There was acid in her voice, and it etched lines in her face. “But,” she added a little belatedly, “you’re not interested in our family history.”

“I am, though. You and your daughter are very candid.”

“I taught her that, if not much else. She was her father’s daughter.” Her experienced blue eyes came up to the level of mine and rested there coolly. “What did Elizabeth have to say about me?”

I decided to match her candor. “That you’d left your husband, for cause. That you had money of your own. That you were very fond of Laurel.”

“I love her better than myself. She’s my only grandchild.” A fine nest of wrinkles had formed around her eyes, and her look was partly quizzical, partly wincing. “You sound as if you’re interested in my money. I don’t mean that as an accusation. Most people are.”

“I’m not particularly. Older people’s money can be expensive to buy.”

Her head came up as if I had insulted her. But she seemed to see in my face that that hadn’t been my intention, and she subsided.

“I’m interested in your money to this extent,” I said. “I understand you’re putting up the ransom for Laurel.”

“Yes. I can’t afford it, but I’m willing. If Laurel needed it, she could have everything of mine.” She moved her thin arm in a gesture which seemed to take in the house and everything it contained.

“You’re very generous.”

“Not really. I wouldn’t offer up my worldly goods for anyone else but Laurel. But if she were gone permanently, I wouldn’t have much reason to go on living.” She leaned toward me with restrained eagerness. “Elizabeth mentioned that you saw her tonight.”

“Yes.” I told her quickly what had happened between Laurel and me. “I shouldn’t have let her get away from me. I knew she needed help, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I wasn’t prepared to give it, I suppose.”

She reached for me with her narrow brown hand and touched me on the knee. “You’re fond of her, too, aren’t you?”

“Fond isn’t quite the word. She made a deep impression on me, and I’m concerned about her.”

“What sort of an impression?”

“Dark and troubled,” I said. “At the same time quite strong, in her way, and valuable, even beautiful. I never met a girl who cared so much. What’s happening out on the ocean here seemed to affect her as if it was happening to her own body.”

The old woman nodded. “You put it very well. She has so much empathy it’s virtually psychotic. And I think it was this oil spill, with her own family involved in it, that set her off.”

“Is she psychotic?”

“One or two doctors have thought she had psychotic tendencies. One of them came up with the opinion – this was several years ago, some time before Laurel got married, and she was going through a particularly bad spell – I was afraid she might kill herself, in fact–” Her blue eyes widened and filled up with fear which turned inward, away from me. After a blank time, she said, “What was I saying?”

“You were going to tell me about the doctor’s opinion.”

“Yes, I remember now. He thought that Laurel had been frightened or shocked when she was a small child, and that it had left her permanently shaken. He couldn’t get at the source of it – her memory had blanked out.”

“Was he a psychiatrist?”

“Yes. Laurel has seen several psychiatrists. But she didn’t stay with any of them long. This may seem a strange thing to say about a girl who has suffered as much as Laurel and made so many mistakes. But I don’t think she wants to be any different. And of course she’s had her good times. She seemed quite content this last week here with me.”

“I’d like to look at her room.”

“Of course. Elizabeth will show it to you. Laurel spent her nights in the guesthouse. Apparently she liked the isolation.”

“What did she do in the daytime?”

“Her days were quite full, actually. She read, listened to music, walked on the beach–”

“Alone?”

“So far as I know. She played some tennis with Tony, but she has no personal interest in him, I’m sure. She’s still in love with her husband; she told me so herself.”

“Then why did she leave him?”

“He got on her nerves, she told me. She couldn’t bear to live in such intimacy, especially in that dreary little house. I would have been glad to help them buy another house, but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. He’s very much attached to that awful house of his. Apparently he’s lived in it all his life.”

“He’s very independent.”

“Yes. I suppose it’s a virtue in a man.”

“Not in a woman?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always been a little too independent myself. And I’ve ended up quite alone in the world.” The wincing, quizzical look was pinching her eyes again. “Now I’m starting to complain about my lot, and that means it’s time to go to sleep. I wake up very early in the morning. Would you be good enough to hand me my sleeping pills?”

“In a minute. Was Laurel on barbiturates?”

“No.”

“Has she ever been?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“What about other drugs?”

“She’s always been quite careful about drugs. I taught her that. I’ve never believed in them. I only started taking Seconal because I was waking up so terribly early. I’d wake up long before dawn and listen to the seconds of my life ticking away and wonder what I could do for Laurel.” She moved restlessly. “Well, now there is something I can do.”

“You mean the money.”

“Yes. I mean the money. I want you to see that Jack delivers it properly. My son has many good points, but he does tend to get excited in emergencies.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

“Will you go along with him when he delivers the money?”

“You’re asking me to take quite a responsibility, Mrs. Lennox.”

“Elizabeth says that you’re a responsible man.”

“Jack may not think so.”

“I’ll talk to him in the morning. I’ll make it a condition that you go along. We don’t want any slip-ups. Are you willing?”

I said I was, but I added, “Before we go any further, there’s one thing we ought to consider.”

“About Jack?”

“About Laurel. I’ve been told that when she was fifteen or so, she went to Las Vegas with a boy. They ran out of money and faked a kidnapping situation. I understand they collected a thousand dollars from her parents.”

Her face hardened. “Did Jack and Marian tell you this?”

“No. I got it from another source.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I do, Mrs. Lennox.”

“Who was your source?”

“It doesn’t matter. What does matter is the possibility that the same trick is being repeated now, on a larger scale.”

She looked at me with distaste. “My granddaughter is not a criminal.”

“No, but sometimes people do things to their families that they wouldn’t think of doing to anyone else. Especially a young woman who’s under the influence of a man.”

“What man? There is no man.”

“It was a man who called your son tonight and asked for the money.”

She lay back against her pillows and absorbed the implications. They seemed to shrink her body and her face. She said in a diminished voice:

“I simply don’t believe it. Laurel wouldn’t do such a thing to me.”

“She doesn’t know you’re involved.”

“Laurel wouldn’t do it to her parents either.”

“She did once.”

Mrs. Lennox waved the fact away. “If what you heard is true – which I seriously doubt. Even if it is true, she was just a young girl at the time. She’s grown up since, and she’s really quite fond of her parents. Why, she went to visit them this very day.”

She was tired and hurt and suddenly quite old. I rose to go. She stretched out a hand toward me:

“Give me my pills, will you, please? And a sip of water? It must be terribly late, and I wake up so early.”

I offered her the red pills in the palm of my hand. Her fingers pecked them up and placed them on her pale tongue. She drank the water as if it was hemlock.

“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t care what she’s done, I want her back. I’m willing to pay the money for her, sight unseen.”