The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 2

Boulder Beach College stood on the edge of the resort town that gave it its name, in a green belt between some housing tracts and the intractable sea. It was one of those sudden institutions of learning that had been springing up all over California to handle the products of the wartime population explosion. Its buildings were stone and glass, so geometric and so spanking new that they hadn’t begun to merge with the landscape. The palms and other plantings around them appeared artificial; they fluttered like ladies’ fans in the fresh breeze from the sea.

Even the young people sitting around on the grass or sauntering with their books from building to building, didn’t look indigenous to me. They looked like extras assembled on a set for a college musical with a peasant subplot.

A very young man who resembled Robinson Crusoe directed us to the administration building. I left Homer Wycherly standing on the steps in front of it, goggling around with a lost expression on his face.

I’d have laid odds that he was a lost man in almost any environment. On our way over from the valley, he’d told me something about himself and his family. He and his sister Helen were the third generation of the old valley family which had founded Meadow Farms: the town stood on his grandfather’s original homestead. The old man’s pioneer energies had dwindled in his descendants, though Wycherly didn’t put it that way to me. His grandfather had made a farm out of semi-desert; his father had struck oil and incorporated; Homer was nominal head of the corporation, but most of its business was done in the San Francisco office, which was managed by Helen’s husband, Carl Trevor. When I stopped the car in front of Phoebe’s apartment, I made a note of Trevor’s name and address for future reference. He lived on the Peninsula in Woodside.

Oceano Avenue was a realtor’s dream or a city-planner’s nightmare. Apartment houses were stacked like upended boxes along its slope; new buildings were going up in the vacant lots. The street had a heady air of profits and slums in the making.

221 had a discreet sign painted on a board: Oceano Palms. It was a three-storied stucco building girdled by tiers of balconies on which the individual apartments opened. I knocked on the door of number one.

It opened slightly. A woman with iron-gray hair looked out at me as if she was expecting bill-collectors.

“Are you the landlady, ma’am?”

“I’m the manager of these apartments,” she said in a tone of correction. “We’re all filled up for the spring semester.”

“I’m not looking for living space. Mr. Wycherly sent me.

She said after a pause: “The young lady’s father?”

“Yes. We were hoping you could tell me something more about her. May I come in?”

She looked me up and down with eyes that had seen them all and found most of them wanting.

“I very seldom have trouble with my girls. Practically never, you might say. Are you a policeman?”

“A private investigator. My name is Archer. I’m sure you don’t object to telling me what you know about Phoebe Wycherly.”

“I hardly knew her. My conscience is clear.” But her thick figure blocked the doorway. “I think you should take it up with the college authorities. When a girl drops out of school like that, it’s their headache, not mine. Wandering off heaven knows where with heaven knows who. Whom. She only lived here for less than two months.”

“Was she a good tenant?”

“As good as most, I guess. I’m not sure I ought to be talking to you. Why don’t you go over and talk to the college people?”

“Mr. Wycherly is doing that. It will be nice if he can tell them that you co-operated with our investigation.”

She considered this proposition, biting her upper lip and then remembering not to. A tuft of black hairs on her heavy chins quivered at me like displaced antennae.

“Come in then.”

Her living room smelled faintly of incense and widowhood. A square-faced man with an oblong moustache smiled from a black frame propped up on top of a closed upright piano. The walls were hung with mottoes, one of which said: “The smoke ascends as lightly from the cottage hearth as from the haughty palace.” A radio murmured through the ceiling like a mild threat of modernity.

“I’m Mrs. Doncaster,” my hostess said. “Sit down if you can find a place.”

There was nothing on any of the chairs, nothing out of place in the small stuffy room. Except me. I took a platform rocker which creaked when I moved, so I sat rigidly still. Mrs. Doncaster sat down about eight feet away.

“It’s a blow to me, losing a girl like this. I practically never have trouble with my girls. If they do get into trouble – I don’t mean serious trouble, we don’t have that – they come to me for help. I give them good advice, at least I try to make it good. Mr. Doncaster was a minister in the Church of Christ.”

She bowed towards the picture on the piano. The movement seemed to dislodge her stuck feelings:

“Poor Phoebe, I wonder what happened to her?”

“What do you think happened?”

“She didn’t like it here, that’s my opinion. She was used to a different style of living entirely. So she simply picked herself up and went away, to someplace she liked better. She had the money and the freedom to do it. Her parents gave her too much freedom, if you want to know what I think. And I don’t know what Mr. Wycherly thought he was doing – traipsing off around the globe and leaving his young daughter to fend for herself. It isn’t natural.”

“Did Phoebe take her things with her when she left?”

“No, but she had plenty of things, and she could always buy more. She took her car.”

“Can you tell me the make and model?”

“It was a little green car, one of these German imports, Volkswagen? Anyway, she bought it here in town, and you should be able to find out all about it. Most of my girls don’t have cars of their own, and they’re better off without them.”

“I take it you disapproved of Phoebe Wycherly.”

“I didn’t say that.” She gave me a hard defensive look, as if I’d accused her of wishing the girl into limbo. “I never really got a chance to know her. She was in and out, and back and forth in that little green car of hers. She had better things to do than talk to me.”

“How was she doing in her studies?”

“I don’t know. The college could tell you that. I never knew of her opening a book, but maybe she was so brilliant she didn’t have to.”

“Was she – is she brilliant?”

“The other girls seemed to think so. You can talk to her roommate Dolly Lang about that, and other things. Dolly’s a good girl, you can count on her to tell you the truth as far as she understands it.”

“Is Dolly in the building?”

“I think so. Would you like me to call her?” She started to get up.

“In a minute, thanks. What does Dolly have to say about her?”

Mrs. Doncaster hesitated. “I think I’ll let Dolly speak for herself. We don’t entirely agree.”

“Where’s the point of disagreement?”

“Dolly thinks she meant to come back. I don’t. If she meant to come back, why didn’t she come back? Because she didn’t want to, that’s my opinion. This place wasn’t good enough for Miss Wycherly. She was constantly complaining about the facilities, objecting to perfectly sensible regulations. She wanted something fancier and freer.”

“Did she say so?”

“Not in so many words, perhaps. But I know the type. The first thing she did when she moved in was tear out all my good drapes, and put in her own. Without even asking permission.”

“That sounds as if she meant to stay, and to come back.”

“That isn’t what it means to me. It means that she was thoughtless – a spoiled rich brat who cared for nobody!”

The ugly phrase hung in the room. A vaguely appalled expression crept over Mrs. Doncaster’s face, changing the hard mouth and transforming the eyes. They went to the pictured face on the piano with something approaching shame, or even fear. She said to the smiling oblong moustache, not to me:

“I’m sorry. I’m all upset, I’m not fit to talk to man nor beast.” She got up and moved to the door. “I’ll call Dolly down for you.”

“I’d just as soon go up. I want to see the apartment, anyway. What number is it?”

“Seven, on the second floor.”

I faced her in the narrow doorway. “Is there anything important you haven’t told me about Phoebe? About her relations with men, for example?”

“I hardly knew the girl. She didn’t confide in me.”

Her mouth closed like a mousetrap, not the kind that would ever cause the world to beat a path to her door.

I went up the outside stairs to the second floor. Behind the door of number seven, a typewriter was stuttering. I knocked, and a girl’s voice answered wearily:

“Come in.”

She was sitting at a desk by the window, with the heavy drapes closed and the reading-lamp on. A small rabbit-shaped girl in a bulky white Orion sweater and blue slacks. Her eyes were blurred with what was probably thought, and her legs were twisted around the legs of her chair. She didn’t bother to disentangle them.

“Miss Lang? I’d like to speak to you. Are you busy?”

“I’m horribly busy.” She tugged at her short dark bangs, miming advanced despair, and gave me a quick little ghastly smile. “I have this Socio paper due at three o’clock this afternoon and my semester grade depends on it and I can’t concentrate my quote mind unquote. Do you know anything about the causes of juvenile delinquency?”

“Enough to write a book, I think.”

She brightened. “Really? Are you a sociologist?”

“A kind of poor-man’s sociologist. I’m a detective.”

“Isn’t that fabulous? Maybe you can tell me. Is it the parents or the children who are responsible for j.d.? I can’t make up my quote mind unquote.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that about your quote mind unquote.”

“Is it boring? My apologies. Do you blame the parents or the children?”

“I don’t blame anybody, if you want an honest answer. I think blame is one of the things we have to get rid of. When children blame their parents for what’s happened to them, or parents blame their children for what they’ve done, it’s part of the problem, and it makes the problem worse. People should take a close look at themselves. Blaming is the opposite of doing that.”

“That’s good,” she said enthusiastically. “If I can only get it into the right language.” She twisted her mouth around. “ ‘The punitive attitudes of the familial group’ – how does that sound?”

“Lousy. I hate sociological jargon. But I didn’t come here to talk to you about that, Miss Lang. Mr. Wycherly asked me to come and see you.”

Her mouth formed a round O, and then pronounced it. A grey clayey color showed itself under her skin. It made her look years older.

“It’s no wonder I can’t concentrate my mind,” she said. “When you think of that silly girl going off by herself. I haven’t thought of anything else, really, for two months. I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, imagining what’s happened.”

“What do you imagine happened?”

“Terrible things. The things you think about in the middle of the night. Like in that Eliot play about Sweeney Agonistes.” She grimaced. “I had to read it for English 31. ‘Everybody’s got to do a girl in.’ ”

She looked up at me as if I were Sweeney himself, about to do her in. Disentangling her legs from the chair she trotted across the room, a small bouncing white and blue blob. She flung herself on a studio couch where she ended up immobile, back against the wall, knees up, chin on her knees, watching me over them. Her eyes reflected the lamplight like new dimes.

I turned the chair around and sat down with my back to the lamp: “Do you have any reason to think she was done in?”

“No,” she said in a squeaky voice. “It’s just what I’m afraid of. Mrs. Doncaster and everybody else thinks Phoebe went away deliberately. I thought so too for a while. But now I think she meant to come back. I’m practically sure of it.”

“What makes you sure?”

“A lot of things. She only took her overnight bag, with enough clothes for the weekend.”

“Did she plan to stay in San Francisco for the weekend?”

“I think so. She told me she’d see me Monday, anyway. She had a nine o’clock class on Monday morning, and she was planning to be there. She mentioned it.”

“Did she confide in you, Miss Lang?”

She nodded her head. Its movement was restricted by her knees. Her eyes changed from silver to black in the changing reflection of the lamplight, and back again to silver.

“I didn’t know Phoebe long,” she said, “just since she moved here in September. But we got close in a hurry. She was – she’s a good head, and she helped me with some of my courses. She was a senior” – the past tense kept slipping in – “and I’m only a sophomore. Besides, we had some of the same experiences in our background.”

“What experiences?”

“Parent trouble. I won’t go into mine – it’s between me and them – but Phoebe had a ghastly family background, perfectly ghastly. Her mother and father didn’t get along, and finally they got divorced, last summer I think it was. Phoebe felt pretty bitter about the divorce. She felt she had no home to go home to, you know?”

“Whose side was she on, in the divorce?”

“Her father’s. Apparently her mother took him for a lot of money. But she blamed both of them, for acting like children.” She caught herself up short. “There’s that blame idea again – maybe you have something, Mister–? I don’t think you told me your name.”

I told her my name. “Did she talk about her mother very much?”

“No, she hardly even mentioned her.”

“Did she ever hear from her mother?”

“Not that I know of. I doubt it.”

“Did she know where her mother lives, at the present time?”

“If she did, she never told me.”

“So there’s no indication that she may be with her mother?”

“It doesn’t seem very likely. She had a real down on her mother. She had good reason.”

“Did she ever discuss the reason with you?”

“Not right out.” Dolly screwed up her mouth again, as if she was searching for the right words. “She hinted around about it. I remember one night, when we were talking in the dark, she told me about some letters that came to her house. Crank letters. They came last year before the divorce, when Phoebe was home from Stanford for Easter vac. She opened the first one herself. It said some awful things about her mother.”

“What things?”

The girl said solemnly: “That she had committed adultery. The way Phee talked, she seemed to believe what the letters said. She said another thing that I didn’t understand. She said the letters were her fault, and they were what broke up her parents’ marriage.”

“She didn’t mean that she wrote them herself?”

“She couldn’t have meant that. I don’t know what she meant. I tried to get her to talk about it some more, but she went into a tizzy. I brought up the subject again in the morning, and she pretended that she hadn’t said anything.” A queer expression crossed her face. “I don’t know if I should be telling you all this.”

“If you don’t, Dolly, who will? When did this conversation occur?”

“The week before she took off. I remember she was talking about her father’s trip the same night.”

“How did she feel about her father’s trip?”

“She resented it. She wanted to go along, but not with him.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s simple enough. She wanted to take a slow boat to China, all by herself alone. But she didn’t.”

“How do you know she didn’t?”

“Because she planned to come back and finish her senior year. It was very important to her, to get a degree and get a job and stand on her own two feet and not have to take money from anybody.”

“Anybody like her father, you mean?”

“Yes. Besides, a girl doesn’t go away for a long trip and leave all her best clothes behind – her formats, and her Italian sweaters and simply piles of shoes and bags and coats. She even left her blond sheared beaver coat, and it’s worth a fortune.”

“Where is it?”

“With the rest of her things, in the basement. I didn’t want them put there, but Mrs. Doncaster said it would be all right.” Dolly twisted uncomfortably, wrestling with her knees. “It seemed so heartless, moving her things out. But what could I do? After Phoebe’s rent ran out, I couldn’t afford to pay the rent for both of us. I had to find myself another roommate. And Mrs. Doncaster had me convinced for a while that Phoebe had simply pulled up stakes and gone away with her father. I didn’t really know different until yesterday.”

“Where did Mrs. Doncaster get that idea?”

The girl hesitated. “She just had it, I guess.”

“It must have come from somewhere.”

After further hesitation, she said: “I suppose it was wish-fulfillment. She didn’t really want Phoebe to– No,” Dolly broke in on herself. “I don’t mean that the way it sounds.”

“You don’t mean that Mrs. Doncaster didn’t want Phoebe to come back?”

“No. I mean, she didn’t want anything to happen to her. But she was just as satisfied when she didn’t come back. She wanted to think that Phoebe had gone for good. I mean, she kept telling me that one of these days we’d hear from Phoebe. She’d send for her things, from New Zealand or Hong Kong or who knows where, and that would be that. But it isn’t, is it?”

“I don’t understand Mrs. Doncaster’s motive. Does she dislike your roommate?”

“She hates her. It’s nothing personal. I’m not trying to say that Mrs. Doncaster had anything to do with it.”

“It?”

“Whatever happened to Phoebe. She isn’t dead, is she?”

“I don’t know. We still haven’t got to the bottom of Mrs. Doncaster.”

“It’s simple enough.” To Dolly, everything was very simple or very complicated. “I didn’t want to drag his name into it – he’s a nice boy – but Bobby Doncaster had a crush on Phoebe. A heavy crush. He used to hang around with his tongue hanging out a yard, panting. Mrs. Doncaster didn’t like the idea at all.”

“Was it a two-way crush?”

“I guess so. Phee didn’t wave her torch around the way Bobby did. But as a matter of fact–” She caught herself up short, blinking her dimey eyes.

“You were going to say?”

“Nothing.”

“It must have been something.”

“But I hate gossip. And I’m not a snooper, really.”

“I am. This is a serious matter, Dolly. You know it. The more you can tell me about Phoebe’s life, the better chance I’ll have of finding her. So what were you going to say?”

She twisted her legs, untwisted them, and ended up sitting on them in a kind of yogi position. “I think Phoebe came here, to this college, on account of Bobby. She never actually admitted it. But it slipped out one time when we were talking about him. She met him last summer at some beach up north, and he talked her into registering here.”

“And renting an apartment from his mother?”

“Mrs. Doncaster doesn’t know that. And I don’t know it for certain.” Dolly gave me a worried look. “You mustn’t think there was anything going on. Phoebe isn’t that kind of a girl. Neither is Bobby that kind of boy. He wanted to marry her.”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“That shouldn’t be hard. I heard him down in the basement when I got home from class. He’s working on a surfboard.”

“How old is Bobby?”

“Twenty-one. The same age as Phoebe. But he can’t tell you anything much about her. He didn’t know her. I was the only one who knew her, and I didn’t really know her. Phoebe was – Phoebe is deep.”

“Just what does that mean?”

“Deep. She never let on what she was really thinking. She could put up a perfectly good front, chatting along with the rest of us, but her mind would be on other things. Don’t ask me what things, I don’t know. Maybe her parents. Maybe other people.”

“Did she have other friends besides you?”

“Nobody really close. She was only here a little over seven weeks. I ran into her in the housing office. We were both looking for roommates, and I needed an upperclassman to live with so I could live off-campus. Besides, I liked Phoebe, very much. She was a bit of an odd-ball, and I am, too. We hit it off together, right away.”

“In what way was she an odd-ball?”

“That’s hard for me to say. Psych is not my line. I mean, Phee had two or three personalities, one of them was a poisonality. She could be black, and frankly I’m not so highly integrated, either. So we sort of matched up.”

“Was she depressed?”

“Sometimes. She’d get so depressed she could hardly crawl around. Then other times she was the life of the party.”

“What was she depressed about?”

“Life,” Dolly Lang said earnestly.

“Did suicide ever enter the picture?”

“Sure, we talked about suicide. Ways and means and all. I remember once, we were talking about suicide as an expression of the personality. I’m the Golden Gate Bridge type, the jump-off, highly dramatic.”

“What about Phoebe?”

“She said she’d shoot herself in the head. That was the quickest.”

“Did she have a gun?”

“Not that I know of. Her father had, though, plenty of them, back home in Meadow Farms. Phee thought it was ghastly, having guns around the house. She’d never shoot herself. It was just talk. Actually, she was afraid of guns. Very neurotic, like all nice people.”

Never argue with a witness.

I got up and turned the chair back toward the typewriter. It held a half-filled sheet of typescript, headed “The Psychic Origins of Juvenile Delinquency,” by Dorothea S. Lang, and ending in a half-finished sentence: “Many authorities say that socio-economic factors are predominate in the origins of anti-social behavior, but others are of the opinion that lack of love…”

The e’s were out of alignment. Maybe it was a clue.