The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 3

The slope fell away towards the rear of the building, so that the entrance to the basement was at ground level. A few cars were parked in the yard behind it. Inside, there were noises resembling groans and shrieks of anguish, which came from a room at the back of the basement. I made my way towards it among packing cases and cleaning equipment, and looked into a windowless workshop lit by an overhead bulb.

Under it a young man with broad shoulders was planing a piece of board clamped in a vise. Sawdust dusted his reddish crewcut. Curled shavings crackled under his feet. I stood and watched him make a number of passes with the plane. His back was to me, and the muscles in it shifted heavily and rhythmically under his T-shirt.

He didn’t know I was there until I spoke: “Bobby?”

He glanced up sharply. He had bright green eyes. His heavy, slightly stupid mouth and chin reminded me of his mother. Otherwise he was a good-looking boy. His upper lip sported a fresh pink moustache.

“You want something, sir?”

I told him who I was and why I was there. He backed against the pegboard wall studded with tools and looked around his cubicle as if I had deliberately trapped him in it. The plane glittered like a weapon in his hand.

“I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with it.”

He tried to surround this remark with a smile, but his smile was stiff and frightened. I couldn’t tell if this was his reaction to detectives and disappearance or if the fright was chronic in him, waiting for occasions to break out.

“You hope I don’t think you had anything to do with what?”

“The fact that Phoebe hasn’t come back.”

“If you had anything to do with it, now’s the time to say so.”

His green eyes clouded. He looked at me in confusion. He did his best to convert it into anger: “For God’s sake!” But he wasn’t quite man enough. He was mimicking anger, safely: “Where did you get the idea that I did anything?”

“You brought the subject up.”

He tried to reach his moustache with his lower teeth. It was his mother’s mannerism; I had the impression that he hadn’t decided whether he was his mother’s boy or his father’s.

“But let’s not play word-games, Bobby. You were close to Phoebe. It’s natural I should want to question you.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“That’s unimportant. You were close to her, weren’t you?”

He noticed the plane in his hand and set it down on the workbench. With his eyes still averted from mine, he said:

“I was crazy about her. Is that a crime?”

“It’s been known to lead to crime.”

His head came up slowly. “Why don’t you lay off me? I was crazy about her, I told you. I still am. It’s been rough enough, these last two months, waiting to hear from her.”

“You didn’t have to sit and wait.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” He spread his hands, saw that they were dirty, wiped them on the dirty front of his T-shirt. “What do you mean?”

“You could have gone to the authorities.”

“I wanted to.” His mouth did the mousetrap trick.

“But your mother wouldn’t let you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I did.”

“Who’s been telling lies about us? Who have you been talking to?”

“Your mother, and one or two of the tenants.”

“You have no right to come bothering my mother. She only did what she thought was right. She believed that Phoebe had gone off on a trip with her father. We both did,” he added as an afterthought. “We kept expecting to hear from her. It isn’t our fault she didn’t write. You’d think she’d send a postcard at least, to tell us what to do with her things.”

“Why do you think she didn’t?”

“I don’t know, honestly. I don’t know anything about it.”

He was painfully defensive. Perhaps he was simply too scared to co-operate. I realized that I hadn’t been handling him with any tact, and I changed my line of questioning:

“I’m interested in the things she left behind. Can you tell me where they are?”

“Yes. They’re in the storage room. I’ll show you.”

He seemed glad to have a chance to move. He led me around a big gas furnace, ducking under its vents, and unlocked a door in the corner of the basement. Dust-laden sunlight slanted from a high window in the concrete wall. Bobby switched on a hanging bulb. Half-a-dozen suitcases and hatboxes were piled beside a large steamer trunk. The trunk was plastered with hotel labels, American and foreign.

Bobby Doncaster had the key to the trunk on his key ring. He unlocked and opened it. The contents smelled faintly of lavender and of girl. They included masses of dresses and skirts, sweaters, and blouses, an expensive beaver coat. Bobby watched me finger the coat with something like jealousy in his eyes.

“Are the suitcases hers?”

“Yes.”

“What’s in them?”

“All kinds of things. Clothes and shoes and hats and books and jewelry and doodads. Cosmetics.”

“How do you know what’s in them?”

“I packed them myself. I kept expecting to hear from Phoebe, so that I could send her her things.”

“Why didn’t you send them home?”

“I guess I didn’t want to. It seemed so – well, so final. Besides, she told me her father had closed – was closing their house. I thought her stuff would be safer here. I kept it under lock and key.”

“She left a lot of stuff behind,” I said. “What did she take with her?”

“Just a weekend bag, I think.”

“And you believed she went off on a two-months’ cruise with nothing more than a weekend bag?”

“I didn’t know what to believe. If you believe I know where she is, you’re wrong. You couldn’t be wronger.” He added in a gentler tone: “I only hope you find her.”

“You may be able to help me find her.”

This startled him: he was easily startled. “How?”

“By telling me what you know about her. First I’d better have a look at the suitcases.”

I went through their contents in a hurry and found nothing that seemed significant. No letters, no photographs, no diary, no address book. It occurred to me that Bobby might have combed them out.

“Is everything here?”

“I think so. I packed everything I could find of hers. Dolly Lang helped me. She’s – she was Phoebe’s roommate.”

“You didn’t put anything aside, as a keepsake perhaps?”

“No.” He seemed embarrassed. “I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

“Do you have a picture of her?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t. We never exchanged pictures.”

“You mentioned some books of hers. Where are they?”

He pulled a heavy cardboard carton from behind the trunk. The books inside were mostly textbooks and reference books: a French grammar and a Larousse dictionary which was dog-eared with use, an anthology of English Romantic poets, a complete Shakespeare, some novels including Dostoevsky in translation, a number of quality paperbacks on psychology and existentialist philosophy. The name inscribed on the flyleaf, ‘Phoebe Wycherly,’ was in a small, distinctive hand – the kind that is supposed to indicate intelligence and sensitivity.

“What kind of a girl is she, Bobby?”

“Phoebe’s a wonderful person.” As if I’d questioned this.

“Describe her, will you.”

“I can try. She’s fairly tall for a girl, about five foot seven and a half, but slender. She wears size twelve clothes. She has a very good figure, and nice hair, cut medium short.”

“What color?”

“Light brown, almost blonde. Some people wouldn’t call her pretty, but I would. Actually, she was beautiful when she felt good – I mean when she was happy. She has those deep dark eyes. Blue eyes. And a wonderful smile.”

“I take it she wasn’t always happy.”

“No. She had her problems.”

“Did she talk about them to you?”

“Not really. I knew she had them. Her family had broken up, as you probably know. But she didn’t like to talk about that.”

“Did she ever mention some letters that came last spring?”

“Letters?”

“Attacking her mother.”

He shook his head. “She never said anything about them to me. In fact she never spoke about her mother at all. It was one of those closed subjects.”

“Did she have many closed subjects?”

“Quite a few. She didn’t like to go into the past, or talk about herself. She had a rocky childhood. Her parents were always quarreling over her, and it left its mark on Phoebe.”

“In what way?”

“Well, she didn’t know if she wanted to have any children, for one thing. She didn’t know if she’d make a fit mother.”

“You talked about having children?”

“Of course. We were going to get married.”

“When?”

He hesitated, and glanced up at the hanging bulb. The light held his eyes. “This year, after we graduated. I was going on to graduate school. It would have worked out, too.” He pulled his eyes down from the hypnotic bulb. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

“It’s strange your mother didn’t mention this. Does she know about your marriage plans?”

“She ought to. We argued about it enough. She thought I was too young to think about getting married. And she didn’t understand Phoebe, or like her.”

“Why?”

A wry, sideways smile made his mouth ugly. “Mother probably would have felt that way about any girl that I was interested in. Anyway, she’s always hated people with money.”

“But you don’t.”

“It makes no difference to me, one way or the other. I can make my own way, I’m an all-A student. At least I was until this semester, and I still have a couple of weeks to pull it out.”

“What happened this semester?”

“You know what happened.” He looked down at Phoebe’s abandoned belongings, green eyes half-shut, lower lip thrust out. He shook his head tautly. “Let’s get out of here.”

“This is as good a place to talk as any.”

“I don’t want to talk any more. I’m getting pretty sick of your insinuations. You keep hinting that I’m lying.”

“I think you’re holding back on me, Bobby – suppressing some of the facts. I want them all.”

“We can’t stand here all day.”

“Sit down then.”

He didn’t move. “What else do you want to know?”

I picked a fairly neutral subject. “How was she doing in school?”

“Pretty well. She knocked off mostly B’s at the midterms. She was majoring in French, and she has a knack for languages. She told me she was doing a lot better than last year at Stanford – didn’t have so many emotional problems.”

The wry and ugly smile took hold of his mouth again. He straightened it out, but it left the impression that he was mocking himself.

“What about her emotional problems?” I was wondering about his.

He shrugged his muscle-packed shoulders, awkwardly. “I’m no psychiatrist. But anybody could see that she had her moods. She was up one day and down the next. I thought she ought to go to a psychiatrist. She told me she’d tried that.”

“When?”

“Last spring in Palo Alto. She didn’t give it much of a try, though. She only saw the doctor a couple of times.”

“What was his name?”

“I wouldn’t know. Her aunt might be able to tell you. Mrs. Trevor. She lives on the Peninsula near Palo Alto.”

“Do you know the Trevors?”

“No.”

“Or the rest of the family?”

“No.”

“How long have you known Phoebe?”

He thought about his answer. “Just since she came here, in September. About two months altogether. Less than two months.”

“In less than two months you decided to get married?”

“I decided it right away. Something clicked,” he said, “the first time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

“In September. She came to look at the apartment. I was painting the kitchenette.”

“I understood you met her before that.”

“You understood wrong.”

“You didn’t meet her at a beach last summer, and talk her into coming to college here?”

He went into deep thought, which left his face inert and his eyes blind. I thought for an instant that this case was going to be short and successful and bitter: the girl dead, killed by the boy, who was getting ready to crack.

“Yeah,” he said painfully. “As a matter of fact I did.”

“Why lie about it?”

“I didn’t want my mother to find out.”

“I’m not your mother.”

“No, but you’ve been talking to her. You’ll probably be talking to her again.”

“Why is it so important that she shouldn’t know?”

“I guess it really isn’t. It’s just that I didn’t tell her. She wouldn’t have liked the idea of Phoebe taking one of our apartments. She has a suspicious mind.”

“So have I. Were you and Phoebe having an affair?”

“No. We weren’t. It wouldn’t be any business of yours if we were. We’re both adults.”

“Legally, anyway. Were you having an affair?”

“I said we weren’t. You don’t fool around with the girl you want to marry. I don’t.”

I almost believed him.

“Where did you meet her?”

“A place called Medicine Stone, north of Carmel. I went up there for a week in August. They have a good reef for surfing – better than anything around here. Phoebe was staying there with the Trevors and I got to know her on the beach.”

“You picked her up?”

“That’s twisting what I said. She wanted to try surfing, I let her. She was looking for a school to shift to, and I told her about this one. She’d been considering it, anyway.”

“And while you were at it you rented her an apartment.”

“She asked me to find an apartment for her,” he said, flushing.

“So you had a cozy two months.”

His fists tightened; the muscles stood out like brown wood in his arms. I thought he was going to hit me, and I sort of wished he would. Give me a chance to shake out the truth that I felt I wasn’t getting from him.

But he held himself under rigid control. “Crack wise if you like. We had a good two months. Followed by the worst two months of my life.”

“When did you see her last?”

He seemed ready for the question: “On the morning of November the second, that was a Friday – early in the morning. She was going to drive up to San Francisco to see her father off. She asked me to check her oil and tires, which I did. My own car wasn’t running, and on the way out to the highway she dropped me at the corner of the campus. That was the last time I saw her.” He said it without emotion.

“What kind of a car was she driving?”

“1957 green Volkswagen two-door.”

“Do you know the license number?”

“No, but you can get it from the dealer. She bought it secondhand at Imported Motors, in town here. I helped her to pick it out.”

“How long before she left?”

“A month, or more. She found out she needed one here, to get around. The bus service to town is pretty chancy.”

“Was she in good spirits when she left?”

“I think so. You never could tell about Phoebe. Her moods were always changing, as I said.”

“Did she tell you what her plans were for the weekend?”

“No. She didn’t.”

“Or when she was coming back?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think I asked her. I took it for granted that she would be back Sunday night or Monday morning.”

“Did she mention anyone that she was going to see, besides her father?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t ask her what she was going to do all weekend?”

“No.”

“What do you think she did, after she said goodbye to her father and left the ship?”

“I have no ideas on the subject.” But he had ideas. They flickered darkly at the back of his green eyes like fish in water too deep for identification.

Suddenly he looked sick. He lowered his head. The color of his eyes seemed to have run and tinged his cheeks greenish.

“Did you by any chance go along to San Francisco with her?”

He waggled his hanging head.

“Where did you spend that weekend, Bobby?”

He looked at his hands as if they fascinated him. “Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“I mean here. At home.”

Mrs. Doncaster said behind me: “Bobby was here with his mother, where he should be. He came down with a touch of the flu that Friday. I kept him home in bed all weekend.”

I moved sideways along the wall, and looked from the son to the mother. Her face was grim. His eyes were intent on it. He nodded almost imperceptibly. He was very much his mother’s boy at the moment.

“Is that true, Bobby?” I said.

“Yes. Of course.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” the woman said. “Because if you are I want to know about it so that I can take legal recourse. My son and I are respectable citizens. We don’t have to put up with any guff from people like you.”

“Have you ever been in trouble, Bobby?”

He looked to his mother for an answer. She was boiling with answers:

“My son is an upright young man. He’s never been in trouble, and he’s not going to start now. You’re not going to drag him into something like this, just because he had the misfortune to go out a few times with a foolish girl. You go and peddle your dirt someplace else. And I warn you, if you besmirch our good name, you’ll find yourself at the receiving end of legal action.”

She moved on him in a kind of possessive fury and put her arm around his waist. I left them looking at each other.

Outside, the offshore wind was rising. The choppy sea at the foot of the street reflected crumpled light.