by Dorothy Eden
After lunch the children wanted to go down to the lake. Kate said they could go alone, then changed her mind and said she would go with them. You never knew, Alexander might do something crazy like falling in. Grace and Peter could stay and snooze by the fire if they were too lazy for a walk.
Peter said he certainly was too lazy. Grace would have liked the walk, but she decided to take the opportunity to tell Peter about the mysterious visitor to Willa’s flat yesterday. She preferred the children, with their so quickly strained eyes, and Kate, too, for that matter, not to hear.
Peter looked at her silently while she told him. He didn’t laugh skeptically. He frowned a little, his sandy brows drawn together, and asked Kate what she thought the intruder—if he existed outside her imagination—was looking for?
The diary? Grace regarded that as private as the secret signature on Willa’s letter. If Peter knew about it, he would want to read it. Intuition had made her happy enough to let Polsen read it. But Peter was at once too flippant and too much the heavy boss to allow him to see that curious outpouring. Not at this stage, anyway.
“I don’t know. Letters, perhaps. Something that would incriminate him. Winifred Wright talked about a married man. It’s all a bit sordid, isn’t it?”
“Mucky,” said Peter. He reflected, his arms folded behind his head. He was only attractive when he was animated and laughing. “Have you had a good look around in the flat yourself?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Found anything?”
“Nothing of significance. And yet too much. All those perfectly good clothes. Makeup things, that scent that was spilled. Suitcases. Willa must have been living beyond her income.”
“And now she’s having another shopping spree, I expect. She must have found herself a millionaire.”
“If she has,” said Grace, after a pause, “that’s surely a story the newspapers will want to use.”
“Sure. Let them ferret it out.”
“In the meantime, I’m having the lock of the door changed. I don’t care to have someone with a spare key wandering about.”
“You’re really thinking up a mystery, aren’t you, love?”
Grace frowned, curling up on the hearthrug, wrapping her arms around herself in a chilly way, in spite of the heat of the fire.
“I don’t need to think it up. It’s been one from the moment I arrived.”
“Daddy! Daddy!” shouted Georgy. “Look what we found!”
The children had burst in, followed by Kate. Georgy was thrusting a muddy object into her father’s hands. He took it gingerly, looking up inquiringly at his wife.
“It’s only a pair of sunglasses,” she said. She was looking pinched and pale in spite of her walk. “Georgy spotted them in the mud at the edge of the lake.”
“But they’re Willa’s, Daddy!” George declared. “She always wore them.”
Peter scraped some mud off the tortoiseshell frames. He stared at the glasses thoughtfully, no expression on his face.
“I expect there are plenty of this kind about. They aren’t necessarily Willa’s. If she had lost them, she’d have said so.”
“Perhaps she did say so,” Kate murmured, in a tight voice.
Peter looked at her.
“Darling, if you’re suggesting—”
Kate signaled violently for him to be quiet. She turned to the children and said in an unnaturally bright voice, “Willa must have been here sometime when we weren’t. That’s why we didn’t know about her losing her glasses. That is, if they are hers. We aren’t sure of that.”
“But they are, Mummy,” Georgy insisted. “Look, they’re made like a butterfly. Willa used to show us. Didn’t she, Alexander?”
“So is she truly lost in the forest?” Alexander asked, his too-large eyes comical in his small, freckled face.
“Alexander, will you stop that nonsense!” Peter exclaimed thunderously. “Kate, can’t you get him out of this whining?”
“I weren’t whining,” Alexander protested, his knuckles dug in his eyes. Kate silently folded him in her arms, while Peter muttered, more quietly, something about the boy being outrageously spoiled.
Grace put her hand out for the mud-encrusted glasses. “I’ll take those. I’ll keep them for Willa.”
Did Peter hesitate? Almost at once he said, “If you want them. They only look fit to chuck away—lying in that stinking mud.”
All the way home Kate didn’t say a word. Her profile was sharp, tense, unforgiving. She was obviously convinced that Peter had taken Willa to the cottage, unknown to her, on one of the weekends when she had imagined he was with his men friends, elk hunting. That was a quarrel husband and wife would have to sort out. More significantly to Grace, it was now clear that Peter knew more about Willa than he was prepared to say. Well, she had no intention of prying into his indiscretions, unless they had any bearing on Willa’s whereabouts. The dark glasses could well have been lost sometime ago. It would have been easy enough to replace them. All this must have happened in the summer, long before the present mystery.
Now it was nearly winter, the wind had a knife-edge, and as the twilight advanced, the flaring light of the birches went out, leaving the forest, quite dark. Although the ballooning gray clouds had rolled up and were now touched with an icy silver light, it did not seem as if any snow were going to fall that evening.
Chapter 7
GRACE WOULDN’T GO UP to see Polsen when she arrived home. He had never invited her into his rooms. Not that there had been much time for him to do so, she told herself fairly. She had known him only two days.
But he had told her that Sundays were sacrosanct to Magnus, and she had no intention of encroaching on them. Not even, she said to herself, if it had been Willa’s body they had found by the lake.
It was only her glasses, Polsen. But they were covered with mud, and creepy! Really creepy. When did you last see her wearing those butterfly glasses?”
Grace couldn’t stop shivering as she walked around Willa’s flat, talking aloud. She had drawn all the curtains to shut out a high, glittering moon moving behind the great snow clouds and had switched on all the lights. The bedroom still smelled of the Balenciaga perfume. It was, however, completely orderly and exactly as she had left it that morning. The intruder had not been back.
Willa, of course, as Peter had said, must have bought another pair of glasses.
Exactly the same? Well, why not. If a shop had one pair, it very likely had several. Tomorrow she must go shopping for dark glasses with tortoiseshell rims shaped like a butterfly. Where would Willa be most likely to shop? At the nearest drugstore or at a big department store like N.K.? Fru Lindstrom might know. She might even remember Willa complaining about losing her glasses.
(But wouldn’t she have gone back to look for them? They would surely have been easy enough to find by the lake where she had been swimming.)
And if there were none of that particular make available in the shops, if Grace were told they had never been stocked, that they must have been bought in England, then it would be clear that Willa had lost them very recently, as recently as her departure on her presumed honeymoon…
Grace went into the bathroom and held the glasses under a running tap, scouring them fiercely with a hard-bristled brush to remove every last vestige of mud. When dried, she put them on reflectively and was startled by the way her face had changed, grown enigmatic, almost invisible. Was that the answer to Willa’s sudden idiosyncrasy about wearing dark glasses, that she wanted to be invisible? Surely not extrovert Willa!
The unfamiliar face looked back at her from the bathroom mirror in a haze of muted green. Let’s get into Willa’s personality further, she suddenly decided, and stripping off her slacks and sweater, she riffled through the clothes in the wardrobe. The gold dress? No, not that, but the extravagantly wide-legged jersey silk pants suit was a suitable lounging garment for an evening at home.
The canary hair could not be simulated. Grace compromised by brus
hing her own dark, spiky locks back from her face and pinning them in a skinny topknot. She applied pale lipstick generously. The silk jersey felt luxurious against her skin. She was lost in the flowing trousers, an undersized femme fatale, with the dark glasses swallowing up her face.
So this was being Willa, a creature in disguise, putting on an act of being someone far more interesting and irresistible than a secretary, until finally she was caught permanently in her act.
But it was fun, Grace realized reluctantly. She herself almost felt gay and irresponsible, which was a strange and heady emotion. Perhaps she ought to stop being so much herself, to escape outside her own skin occasionally.
“Come in, Axel, Sven, Jacob, Gustav—whoever you all are,” she said loudly, and the door opened and Polsen walked in.
She had to take off her glasses to see him properly. As she did so, he said grimly, “That’s better. Now get out of the rest of that gear. Fast.”
“But, Polsen! I was only—”
“Only living in that damned fantasy Willa lived in! It doesn’t suit you. Willa, perhaps. What was she without a fantasy? But not you, for God’s sake! Besides, it’s dangerous as well.”
Dangerous? From a personality point of view, perhaps. Grace was thinking another thing, in mild surprise. Polsen hadn’t liked Willa. And he definitely wasn’t expecting her to come back. The shock in his face had given him away.
“I didn’t invite you in,” Grace said sulkily from the bedroom.
“You did. I distinctly heard your voice saying come in.
“I didn’t hear you knock, and you weren’t invited in. Anyway, this is Sunday, and you’re supposed to be with your son.”
His voice was calmer. “It is nine o’clock, if you will look at the time, and Magnus has been in bed one hour exactly. Now! I call that an improvement.”
This was because Grace had appeared in her red woolen dressing gown and with the pins taken out of her hair.
“I’m sorry I spoke so rudely. I just didn’t care to see you dressed in that vulgar way.”
“Did you think Willa vulgar?” Grace asked.
“Of course. It suited her. It doesn’t suit you. And I only came to ask if you had noticed the bolt I had put on your door. Fru Lindstrom allowed me to use her key, and Magnus and I did this for you. It works from the inside, so you will feel safe until the lock is changed.” His voice altered. “What’s that you’ve got?”
“Willa’s glasses,” Grace said, swinging them in her hand. She knew he had recognized them. She had heard the sharp, aware note in his voice.
“You didn’t find them here!”
“Why do you say that? Because you knew Willa only has one pair and she’s never without them? But perhaps she bought another pair after she lost these. She must have, because the children found them today by the lake, covered in mud, and Peter Sinclair said they must have been there all summer.”
He stared at the glasses, frowning deeply. Once again Grace found his enigmatic expression infuriating. Why couldn’t he tell her what he was thinking?
“Well? Do you think that, too?” she said impatiently.
“How am I to know? My eyesight isn’t perfect. I could have sworn they were the glasses Willa was wearing the last time I saw her. That wasn’t the beginning of the summer.”
“Kate Sinclair thought her husband and Willa had been down to the cottage alone.”
“Did she say so?”
“She didn’t have to say so. I could read her face. She’s unhappy and not just because she wants to go back to England. If she was jealous of Willa, she no longer has any need to be. But she still goes on brooding, and the children are upset and edgy, and Peter goes off for weekends shooting alone. Or presumably alone.”
Polsen nodded slowly.
“I see. Then if Willa lost these glasses early in the summer, she must have been able to buy another pair exactly the same.”
Grace didn’t bother to say that his reasoning was elementary.
“I thought I’d try a few shops tomorrow.”
“A good idea. You ought to be able to find out whether that kind is sold here. They aren’t so ordinary. So tell me, what else happened today? Was it a pleasant day?”
Grace was thinking overwhelmingly of the chilly lakeside, the surrounding forest. Like Alexander, she was getting an obsession about the forest.
“Polsen, do you remember a young man from the British Embassy being accidentally killed when he was elk shooting? Called Bill Jordan.”
“I remember, of course. It was only a few weeks ago. There were headlines about it. British diplomat in tragic accident. That sort of thing.”
“But you’re saying it as if you don’t believe a word! It really was true. Peter told me about finding the body. It must have been horrible.”
“Oh, I’m not saying the poor fellow wasn’t dead. I only don’t believe the official report. Nor did many other people.”
“Suicide?” Grace had a sense of shock, unreasonably severe.
“That was more likely than that a man who could handle a gun should accidentally shoot himself in the stomach.”
“I see. It had to be hushed up. No scandal in the embassy. Was there any talk of anything in Bill Jordan’s private life that would make him do such a thing?”
“That could be hushed up, too. How would I know, except that Willa seemed to think it an unnecessary tragedy. She said Bill Jordan was nice; everyone liked him; he hadn’t stolen the petty cash. Why? That was what she said, too.”
“I can’t bear those cemeteries full of tall trees and short gravestones,” Willa had written. “They are too melancholy. They make the trees so important and us so unimportant…”
Us…
Grace sprang up.
“Have a drink, Polsen. I need one. Whiskey? And what did you do today? You and Magnus?”
“Oh, many things.” Instantly he was another person, his expression soft and reminiscent. (You look daft when you go all sentimental like that, Grace wanted to say scathingly.) “Magnus, for one thing, has an extremely large appetite. After lunch we went to see the Haga Pavilion. Now that’s a place for you to see, Grace. It was built by Gustav the Third in the French manner. It’s small and elegant. There’s a mirror room and a library and a lot of steep stairs up to very small attics, where it is said that Gustav kept his queen. She would, of course, get a fine view over the lake.”
“What did you say?” Grace asked, pausing with the whiskey bottle in her hand.
“She would get a fine view.”
“No—about the attics. ‘The poor queen in the attic.’ That’s in Willa’s diary.”
“So it is. But I assure you, those attics are quite empty.”
“Another attic. Somewhere else. Someone shut up. Polsen, am I going mad?”
He came toward her and ruffled her hair. His big hand was heavy on her head. Reassuring.
“You, with this cool sensible head? Of course, you’re not going mad. But don’t get too much caught in Willa’s fantasy. Look at it dispassionately.”
“It’s getting beyond being dispassionate. It’s making me feel creepy. And it’s too quiet in this room when I’m alone. I have to talk aloud.”
“Then don’t stay in it too much. Tomorrow morning, while I take my class at the university, you shall go shopping for dark glasses. In the afternoon I can spare some time to take you over to the old town.”
“To look for the door with the dragon?” Grace asked.
“Is that the next item on our list?”
Grace began to laugh shakily. “You make it seem like a game. You’re enjoying playing it.”
He gave her an indulgent smile. She guessed that that was the way he smiled at his son. Well, it was better than indifference. But Willa, with her sexy vulgarity, would not have been looked at as if she were a child.
No butterfly glasses. The blank stares met Grace everywhere. Nej, such glasses had not been bought in this shop. They were not Swedish, fröken. Imported, perhaps, but
where they could be bought, no one knew.
Grace rang Fru Lindstrom’s doorbell, deliberately wearing the glasses. That lady gave a great start, her eyes popping.
“Goodness gracious, Fröken Asherton, I thought at first that you were Fröken Bedford. You have the same glasses.”
Grace took the glasses off, her experiment too successful. Why did everyone seem so startled at the thought of Willa appearing? She hated these glasses. They made the world look a moldy sinister green.
“My cousin always wore them, didn’t she? Did you ever see her without them?”
“For going to work, yes. But usually in the evenings or at weekends she had them on. She wore them like—you know”—she patted her cheeks—“makeup.”
“Was there a time in the summer when she didn’t wear them?”
“Nej. I didn’t notice. Why do you ask?”
“I thought she might have lost them and had to get some more.”
“I never heard of her losing them.”
“Then was she wearing them the day she left here?”
Fru Lindstrom considered. “I think not,” she said at last. “She had her coat with a fur piece round her neck and a fur hat to match. She looked very nice, very smart. No, I remember that she wasn’t wearing her glasses because I saw how her eyes shone. I thought what a pity it was to always hide them behind dark glass. Like a blind person. She wasn’t blind, your cousin.”
“Was someone waiting for her that day?” Grace asked, wondering why she hadn’t asked that question before. Gustav? Perhaps Fru Lindstrom had actually set eyes on him.
But she hadn’t. She shook her head. “She went in a taxi. She must have telephoned for it. She waved to me and was gone. I was too far off to hear what address she gave the driver.”
Fru Lindstrom wasn’t in the least ashamed of admitting her curiosity. But in a moment her expression changed to suspicion.
