by Mary McCoy
“I told you I got the matchbook from my father’s desk,” I said.
“You didn’t tell me you tore the place apart. No more stunts, Alice.”
“Okay,” I said, realizing that my adventure with Ruth and Rex earlier today probably qualified as exactly the kind of stunt Jerry was talking about.
“I’ll meet you at the hospital tomorrow, Alice, and I’ll tell you everything then—I promise. But in the meantime, remember I’m on your side. And Annie’s.”
He hung up on me, and I stood there feeling more confused than ever, and very far away from the truth of things. Jerry hadn’t told me the whole story, true, but he’d admitted as much. I certainly hadn’t told him how I’d spent my afternoon, and wasn’t sure if I was going to. If he really was on Annie’s and my side, it would only make him worry. And if he wasn’t—well, that possibility was never very far from my thoughts.
Then I thought back to the day before and the strip of paper he’d placed in my hand at the hospital. At first, I hadn’t understood. It was just a long vertical row of letters, written in a tiny and cramped hand. But then I remembered something Annie once told me: It’s called a scytale. You can use a pencil or a curtain rod, or whatever you want, so long as you and the person you’re sending the message to agree on the key.
It was one of Annie’s codes. I’d wound the strip of paper around the pencil stub, pulling it tight until the letters lined up across the length of the pencil, and I saw what they read:
TRUST ME
Jerry had asked me to put an awful lot of faith in a scrap of paper. Still, I trusted him more than I trusted my parents. I was, at that moment, actually fairly furious with my parents. What kind of people leave their daughter alone in the house the night after a break-in so they can go out for dinner? I’d done the breaking in, of course, but they didn’t know that. In a few hours, they’d stumble through the front door laughing or fighting. Either way it would be loud enough to wake me up and remind me exactly how miserable and lonely it was to live in their house.
The idea of staying there for another second was more than I could bear. I packed a bag for the hospital, filling it with toiletries for Annie, a change of clothes, and most important, the envelope I’d taken from my father’s safe. I left another note in the kitchen, this one saying that I didn’t feel safe in the house and had gone to Cassie’s. I hoped they felt terrible when they read it, if they read it.
There was only one more thing to do before I could go, and I dreaded doing it. The last time I asked Cassie to cover for me, I’d been manic and close to tears, and she’d still balked at the idea. If I asked her again, she’d want to know the reason, and I couldn’t tell her. Still, there wasn’t any way around it. I needed her help.
Cassie’s mother answered the front door when I knocked, and invited me in without looking very happy about it. Even in better times, I’d never gotten the feeling that Mrs. Jurgens was all that fond of me.
“Twice in one week. To what do we owe the honor?” she sniffed, pointing toward the strip of carpet that ran the length of the foyer. “Your shoes, dear. Please.”
Mrs. Jurgens was from the Midwest and made everyone take their shoes off when they went inside her house. My mother had gone there for afternoon tea once and came home raving that she’d been treated like a common field hand.
“If she thinks I’m going to track dirt all over her clean floors, then perhaps she shouldn’t have invited me into her home,” she’d said.
“Maybe it’s hygiene,” my father had mumbled from behind his newspaper.
“Maybe it’s provincial.”
I kicked off my shoes and went upstairs to Cassie’s room.
Mrs. Jurgens called up after me. “Don’t keep her too long, Alice. She has to get up early for field hockey practice tomorrow.”
Cassie was sitting on the bed when I got there, brushing her hair and trying to look like she hadn’t heard me downstairs a minute before.
“What do you want?” she said. The brush whipped through her hair with such force I was surprised it didn’t pull it out by the roots. “I know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something.”
At one time, I would have bounded up the stairs and taken my customary spot on the window seat. Now I stood uneasily in the doorway, waiting to be invited in. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, I closed the door behind me and took a seat in the straight-backed desk chair.
It had been a mistake to come here. Cassie and I weren’t close anymore, not the way we used to be. And yet, in the years since, there’d been an understanding between us that we’d never be the kind of friends who traded in on the history between us. Apparently, that’s the kind of friend I was now. The kind who called in favors for old time’s sake.
“It’s important, Cassie.”
“Important how?”
She stretched her legs out across the bed and hugged a pillow in a white eyelet cover to her chest. When we were younger, I used to want a bedroom like Cassie’s, with its little-girl ruffles and lace and ballerina music boxes. Now I couldn’t imagine someone our age choosing to keep her room that way. Maybe Cassie acted younger than me because I had an older sister to emulate, and she only had a bratty little brother. Or maybe it was because of her ordinary family, and their rules about shoes, and their regular, steady love.
“I can’t stay in that house,” I said.
“Is it your mother?” Cassie asked. She relaxed her grip on the pillow and her eyes softened a bit.
Cassie knew how much my mother had started drinking after Annie left home, but she didn’t know what it was like to live with her. It wasn’t like the movies, where the drunks are always yelling and throwing vases at other people’s heads. Living with my mother was more like living with a very well-behaved ghost who occasionally woke you up in the middle of the night rattling the doorknobs or crying softly.
I shook my head.
“I don’t believe you,” Cassie said.
“I’m not lying.”
“But you’re not telling the truth, either.”
“I have to be away for the next couple of days, and they can’t know where I am. I need you to cover for me. You probably won’t even have to lie to them. I doubt they’ll even check.”
I tried to meet her eyes so she could see how truthful I was being, but she wouldn’t even look at me. There was a brass cup filled with a dozen identical fountain pens on Cassie’s desktop. I picked one up and pulled off the cap, then put it back on, then I pulled it off again. When Cassie finally spoke, her words were half muffled by her pillow.
“I’m not going to help you disappear, Alice. I’m not going to lie for you if you’re trying to do what Annie did.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I said.
“Then why can’t you tell me?”
Why couldn’t I? My sister was in the hospital. There was nothing shameful about that fact on its own. It was all the other parts I didn’t want to tell her. Annie might die, and I hadn’t even told my parents where she was. I couldn’t decide whether that said more about them or me.
I took a deep breath and said, “If you need to reach me, and I mean if you really need to reach me, I’ll be at the County Hospital.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Cassie looked at the clock on her bedside table. “You should probably go. I’ve got chores.”
“Are you going to help me?” I asked.
I’d forgotten that Cassie had a habit of chewing on the inside of her cheek when she was upset about something.
“One day,” Cassie said. “If you’re not home by this time tomorrow, I’ll tell your mom.”
Ordinarily, I would have made a crack about tattling, but Cassie was clearly doing a number on herself with her molars. I was afraid she’d draw blood. I thanked her instead, but she didn’t say, “You’re welcome.”
“Don’t make me sorry I helped you, Alice.”
I wen
t downstairs, got my shoes, and showed myself out.
When I went back to the hospital, the first thing I did was to beg a pan, a sponge, and soap from the nurse’s station. Like most county hospitals, this one was overcrowded and understaffed, and while Annie’s condition meant that she at least got her own room, the nurses hadn’t been so vigilant about less life-threatening things like grooming. As gently as I could, I gave Annie a bath, washed her face, and brushed her hair.
For the first time since I’d come here, I tried to think of Annie as my sister. Not just the idea of a sister, not just the questions she raised and the dark, vengeful thoughts in my head as I plotted against the people who’d hurt her. But my sister. My sister who knew me, understood me, and loved me like nobody else ever had. I couldn’t make her wake up, couldn’t find the people who’d done this to her and make them pay, but at least I could do this for her.
Once it was done, I settled in the chair next to her bed for the night. She looked so helpless and fragile lying there, so different from all the ways I remembered her. She didn’t look like the girl who worked ciphers on Sunday nights or the girl who sang at cocktail parties or even the girl in the school picture that I’d shown to Wanda.
Picture.
The word knocked something loose in my memory, and I reached for my purse, pulling out the envelope of photographs I’d taken from my father’s safe. I hadn’t recognized the woman in the first shot, but it wasn’t the only glossy print in the envelope. From a different angle, in different clothes, maybe she’d look familiar to me, or maybe there’d be a name written on the back. Or if she’d really been in an Insignia Pictures movie, maybe one of the nurses would recognize her.
I slid the first photograph out of the envelope and studied it more carefully, looking for any clues that might reveal who the woman was. She wore a black bathing suit and satin gloves that reached her elbows. One hand rested on her hip, the other held an apple. Her lips were pursed into a neat little bow of a smile, and she had dark, wavy hair and porcelain skin like Snow White. But when I looked closely at her face, I could tell she wasn’t the type to attract singing woodland creatures or charming princes. There was a hard set to her jaw and a defiant yet weary look in her eyes that seemed to say, “Let’s just get this over with.”
I put the photograph down at the foot of Annie’s bed. When I pulled out the next one, though, it wasn’t the woman who looked like Snow White. It was a different actress, one I recognized even though I’d never seen a single movie she was in. She was famous for different reasons.
A few years before, Camille Grabo was front-page news after the police caught her snorting cocaine with a married actor in her Hollywood Hills bungalow. Both she and the actor went to jail, but he’d been famous and she hadn’t been. He’d made a lot of money for the studio and she hadn’t. That didn’t stop anyone from splashing her pretty face all over the newspapers, pictures of her cleaning her cell, standing behind bars looking remorseful, or curled up on her prison cot after a bout of food poisoning. After they served their sentences, the actor went right back to work and made more money than ever, but no studio would touch Camille Grabo with a ten-foot pole. Rumors about her filled the pages of the sleazier movie magazines that Cassie read—that Camille Grabo was addicted to heroin and running around with mobsters, or smashing up cars and trying for a comeback as a nightclub singer. That was two years ago, and since then, not a peep, not a headline. It was as if Camille Grabo had disappeared completely. Not Hollywood’s most original cautionary tale, but there was certainly nothing halfway about it. I’d give her that.
I wasn’t sure what these women had to do with each other, what their pictures were doing in an envelope in my father’s office. When I saw the next one, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
As I pulled it out of the envelope, a wave of nausea passed through my body. How old was the girl in this picture? I wondered. Thirteen? Fourteen? She had been made up to look like Jean Harlow, reclining on a chaise longue in a platinum-blond wig and frilly underwear, but all the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the features she hadn’t grown into yet, the smile that was a little too eager to please. Worst of all, her eyes looked glassy and unfocused, and I wondered if she’d been drunk or drugged when the photograph was taken.
What if the pictures aren’t his? I thought. What if he’s holding on to them for someone at the studio?
It didn’t help. This girl was younger than me, and her picture was in my father’s safe. He hadn’t turned it over to the police or ripped it into a hundred pieces. He’d kept it.
I couldn’t stand to look at it any longer—I couldn’t stand to touch it. But even after I’d stuffed it back in the envelope, I couldn’t get the image of the girl out of my head. It made me sick, knowing that a picture like that was lodged in my head, and that I’d have to carry it around with me.
And then there was the girl. I wondered where she was now, if someone was looking out for her, and then a chilling thought crossed my mind. It was bad enough that my father had her picture. What if he knew her? What if he’d stood by and let this happen to her?
I shuddered, and pulled the last photograph out of the envelope, half afraid to look.
In for a penny, in for a pound. What else are you capable of, you rotten-hearted, sorry excuse for a father?
When I saw it, I began to get some ideas.
Because the woman in the picture was Ruth.
The photograph fell from my hands and drifted to the floor.
In place of the tasteful plum lipstick and plain gray shirtwaist, Ruth wore false eyelashes and black garters, but there was no denying she was the woman I’d met that afternoon.
The woman who’d tried to hand me over to Rex.
Rex, who was apparently on friendly terms with my father.
I curled up on the floor next to Annie’s bed, gripping the sheets in my fists. I buried my face in them, shutting out the light and noise of the hospital until it was just me alone with the things I knew. Detail by detail, I forced myself through them.
My father had a picture of Ruth in his safe. Ruth knows Rex. Rex set Annie up at the Stratford Arms, but Annie found out Rex knew our father. She ran away, but it didn’t matter. Someone tried to kill her. My father had the pictures. My father had the pictures.
The pieces didn’t fit, and they didn’t make sense.
Who took the pictures, then? Rex? My father? Was that what made Annie run away from home? Was it the reason why she got away from Rex?
I needed a decent night’s sleep, a bath, a meal, someone I could trust, a new set of parents, and cab fare. But right at that moment, what I needed most were answers.
That was what finally got me up off the floor sometime around dawn. I let go of the bedclothes, picked up the picture of Ruth, and laid it at the foot of the bed with the others. They weren’t pleasant pictures to look at, even for a short time, though I doubted that I was their intended audience. No one who was looking even a little bit closely would have mistaken any of them for professional jobs, much less publicity photos. The costumes and poses were lazy, the lighting was bad, the sets and backgrounds nonexistent. My brain worked to piece together what these people had to do with one another, what their pictures were doing in my father’s safe: the woman who looked like Snow White, Camille Grabo, Ruth, and the girl.
Then I noticed something sloppy in the background of Ruth’s picture, something any photographer with half a brain would have tried to hide, and suddenly, it didn’t matter that I was supposed to be here when Jerry arrived, or that he’d be here at any moment.
I knew exactly where I had to go next.
The receptionist at Fleming’s Fine Family Photography told me that Milton Fleming was not in. However, Milton Fleming made an annual appearance at the high schools near Hollywood, hawking his unique photo packages—“perfect for yearbook pictures or head shots”—and while his pitch failed to invigorate my school spirit, his voice, raspy and harsh from a lifetime of cigarette smoking,
certainly left an impression. Not even the wad of phlegm lodged in his throat could keep that voice from penetrating the glass door of the back office.
I looked over the receptionist’s shoulder, glared in the direction of the door, then back at her.
“He’s not here?”
“No, dear, I’m sorry.” She gave me a thin smile. “Perhaps I could take a message for him?”
“Yes, please,” I said, smiling back at her.
“And what would that message be, dear?”
I cleared my throat and delivered my message loudly enough that it would require no intermediary to reach Mr. Fleming.
“I WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS A SITUATION INVOLVING PHOTOGRAPHS OF A PORNOGRAPHIC NATURE TAKEN IN THIS STUDIO.”
The customers browsing in the showroom froze and turned to stare at me. One woman grabbed her child by the elbow and dragged him out of the shop. The bell hanging above the door trilled on their way out.
“PERHAPS YOU’D LIKE TO SEE SOME OF THEM.” I started to reach into my purse, and the receptionist’s hands flew to her face.
Before she could speak, though, the office door swung open and Mr. Milton Fleming appeared, in the flesh.
“What the hell is going on out here?” he wheezed.
I nodded politely and extended my hand. “Mr. Fleming. If you have a moment, I’d like a word in your office.”
“And who the hell are you?”
“A concerned party.”
He snorted. “Concerned party, my foot. Who put you up to this?” He stepped forward and stuck a finger in my face. I held my ground and pulled the picture of the underage girl in the pinup lingerie out of my purse.
“Who put her up to this?” I said, holding it up to make sure he got a good look at it.
The few remaining customers did not even attempt to conceal their eavesdropping.
“I’ve never seen that girl before in my life, and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now, get the hell out of my shop before I call the cops.”
