Sleeping Beauty

chapter 37

Somerville escorted me to the front door, apologized for being very tired, and said good night. His wife didn’t appear.

I sat in my car for a minute, looking out over the city which stretched like a luminous map to the horizon. It was hard to pick up its ever-changing meaning. Its whorls and dots and rectangles of light had to be interpreted, like an abstract painting, in terms of everything that a man remembered. The thought of Laurel, still lost somewhere in that maze, went through me like a pang.

A door opened at the back of the garage, spilling out light. Smith emerged and came toward me, trampling on the heels of his long shadow. I got out and went to meet him.

“I wanted to ask you,” he said, “has Miss Laurel turned up yet?”

“Not yet. I’ve been looking for her.”

“You’re Mr. Archer, isn’t that correct?”

I said I was.

The black man reached into his trousers pocket and brought out a plastic tube or vial between three and four inches long. “Is this yours?”

I took it into the lighted toolroom at the back of the garage. The label on the vial was that of a Pacific Palisades drugstore which I patronized, and had my name clearly typewritten on it. It said:

After a blank moment, I realized that it was the vial which Laurel had taken from my medicine cabinet. It was empty. Hope and fear collided in my chest.

I turned to the man behind me. “Where did you get this?”

“Right here. It was in the wastebasket in the toolroom bathroom.”

“And it was empty?”

“It sure was. I didn’t take anything out or put anything in. Was there some medicine in it?”

“Sleeping pills,” I said. “The same ones that Laurel took from my bathroom.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“I’m afraid they are. Will you show me where you found this empty tube?”

He opened a painted green door at the end of the toolroom and pulled the chain of a light over his head. The small room contained a toilet and a washbasin with a mirror on the wall above it and a white plastic wastebasket on the floor underneath.

The wastebasket was empty. There was no sign of Laurel anywhere in the room. I found myself peering intensely into the mirror as if her vagrant image might somehow have left its traces on the glass. I caught a glimpse of Smith’s face looming dark and opaque over my shoulder.

“When did you find the vial?”

“Just now, since I got back from the Point. I didn’t think it meant anything, and then I saw your name on it. With what you told me, it means that she’s been here, doesn’t it?”

“I think so. I hope so. Who uses this room?”

“Just me, and sometimes the man who helps with the gardening.”

“Does he live in?”

“No, sir. He’s Mexican. He comes over here from the barrio.”

“When did you last come in here – I mean before you found the vial?”

He thought about the question, chewing at his lips with gold-glinting teeth. “Sometime this morning, early.”

“Did you happen to look in the wastebasket then?”

“No, sir. I can’t say I did. But I might have noticed if that tube had been in it.”

“And you don’t think it was?”

“I couldn’t swear to it one way or the other.”

“When was the last time you can swear the wastebasket was empty?”

“I emptied it yesterday,” he said. “The garbage was collected yesterday.”

“So Laurel could have been here any time since?”

“I wouldn’t say any time. I’ve been around here part of today, between the two trips I made to the Point, this morning and this evening.” He gave me an anxious sidewise look. “I hope you don’t think I did anything wrong.”

“There’s no suggestion of that.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” But he sounded incredulous, and far from glad.

Trailed by Smith, I went back to the front door of the house. He unlocked it for me and let me in. The interior was dark and silent, and it made me feel like a burglar.

Elizabeth appeared at the end of the hall. She was still fully dressed and wide awake.

“Archer? I thought you’d gone long ago.”

“I was on my way, but Smith found something interesting.” I showed her the empty vial and explained its importance. “I don’t want to raise your hopes too much, but this probably means that Laurel’s been here in the last twenty-four hours, possibly even tonight.”

“But it’s empty. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It worries me.”

Elizabeth’s eyes turned blue-black. “You think she swallowed the capsules?”

“It’s possible.”

“She could be on the property now somewhere. She may be dying.”

I got the flashlight out of the trunk of my car. Smith turned on all the outside lights. The three of us made a search behind the trees, under the wet hedges, and through Laurel’s old hiding places.

The bloody rat was still on the floor of the pool house. The Captain’s picture looked down through cracked glass from the storage-shed wall. It seemed strangely like the memento of a dead man, a man who had died long ago on the far side of the ocean.

Smith came into the shed and found me standing in front of the picture. He stood beside me, and said with some feeling:

“He was the best captain I ever had in the Navy. I don’t know what happened to his career.”

“What caused the gasoline spill on the Canaan Sound? You were there, weren’t you?”

He glanced down at his withered hand. “I was there. But don’t ask me what caused it. Things go wrong for some men. First the gas tank went bad on him, and now it’s happening again with this underwater oil. The Captain does everything by the book, but gas tanks and underwater oil wells don’t know about the book. You have to be lucky dealing with them, and the Captain doesn’t have that kind of luck. He’d be better off doing what he always wanted to do – teaching at Annapolis.”

As we moved back toward the house, empty-handed and anxious, Marian came out of the open front door. Her gray-streaked hair was rumpled and her dress was twisted on her hips, as if she had dressed in the dark and in a hurry. She looked around rather wildly under the lights.

“What’s going on out here?”

“Apparently Laurel paid us a visit today,” Elizabeth said. “But she didn’t stay.”

I told Laurel’s mother what Smith had found, and what I thought it meant. She grasped me by the shoulders. She was surprisingly strong, like a hurt cat, and she shook me:

“You’ve got to find her.”

“It’s all I’m trying to do, Mrs. Lennox.”

“Where do you think she is now?”

“I have no way of knowing. It’s possible she went home.”

“Which home?”

“You’d know better than I would. You’re her mother.”

She rushed into the house. I followed her and found her telephoning in the Captain’s study.

“You’ve got to help us look for her, Mr. Russo,” she was saying. She sounded close to hysteria. I lifted the receiver from her hand and spoke to Tom:

“Have you seen her or heard from her?”

“No, sir, I haven’t. You think I should go out looking?”

“It’s a big city, Tom. You might as well stay home. She may try to contact you.”

“Okay, I’ll stay home.”

“Have you seen Gloria, by the way?”

“Not since I dropped her off in Redondo Beach. That makes two of them missing.”

“At least there’s some hope that Laurel is alive.” I hung up.

Marian was at my elbow. “You told him he should stay home, that she might try to contact him. She might try to do the same to me. After all, I’m her mother.”

“That’s true.”

“But our house is standing empty. What if she goes home and there’s nobody there? I’ve got to go home.”

“You’re tired, dear,” Elizabeth said.

“Not really. I couldn’t possibly sleep, anyway. I seem to have given up sleeping. Will you lend me a car?”

“You shouldn’t drive yourself,” Elizabeth said.

I would have liked to volunteer, but I was so tired I didn’t trust my driving. Smith said he would take her back to Pacific Point.

She promised to let me know if she heard from Laurel.

Turning down the hill toward home, I noticed that the view of the city had changed. It seemed larger, more luminous, and less abstract. It stretched between the mountains and the sea like a living substance with the power to be hurt and to hurt.

I switched off the thinking and feeling part, and drove home on automatic pilot.