Rose's Last Summer

by Margaret Millar

“Goodbye, Frank.” Another silence. “You want to know something? Now that I won’t have to put up with you anymore, I think you’re a pretty nice egg.”

  She hung up before he could answer.

  The postcard arrived in the next morning’s mail. The message side contained nothing but a crude pencil sketch of a rose.

  The postcard pleased him. He thought of it off and on all day, and kept it in his pocket to show to Miriam when he got home for dinner that night.

  Miriam met him at the door. She had the evening news­paper in her hand and her face looked pale and stony as it always did when she was trying not to show her emo­tions in front of the children.

  “Rose is dead,” she said, and pressed her forehead tight against his shoulder.

  2

  She was found by Ortega, the young gardener on the Pearce estate that had been rented to some summer people from San Francisco. Ortega went out early Tues­day morning to set out a flat of larkspur in the bare patch of ground between the patio and the garage. Rose was lying on her face beside the lily pool. A small, white can­vas garden chair was overturned behind her, and just out of reach of her hand was a battered rawhide suitcase cov­ered with scraps of labels.

  That was all Ortega stayed to see. He dropped the flat of larkspur and ran toward the house, making little grunt­ing noises of distress.

  Willett Goodfield was at the table in the dinette whose windows faced eastward to the mountains. The morning paper was open in front of him, though he wasn’t reading it. It was his habit to keep the paper there in case Ethel, his wife, should unexpectedly show up for breakfast; then, by staring at it, he could subtly show her that he preferred to be alone first thing in the morning until he became adjusted to the new day. This business of adjusting wasn’t getting any easier. There were money difficulties, there was worry over his mother and the recurring pain in his back which Willett diagnosed as kidney stones if he was depressed, and imagination, if he wasn’t. There was infla­tion, his new bridge which didn’t fit properly, the exorbi­tant rent on this house he’d been forced to take for the summer, and the battery on the Lincoln which kept going dead.

  Willett was pink and portly. He looked like a banker or a lawyer. In actual fact, he had never done anything in his thirty-five years except pay occasional and ineffectual vis­its to the doll factory which his father had built and which had supported the entire family ever since. At his father’s death all the stock had gone to his mother, Olive. Olive had had a brief and glorious fling at being a business woman and then lost interest and went back to her hobby of raising begonias. Willett adored his mother and personally escorted her begonias to all the flower shows when Olive was unable to do it herself. For the past several years Olive had been very ill. She frequently discussed her approaching death, not in an effort to get attention or pity, but to accustom her children to the cold fact.

  Mother, Willett thought, and had to blink his eyes to keep back the tears.

  Ortega blew into the room, his heavy work boots crash­ing over the waxed concrete floors.

  “Sir, sir,” Ortega said. “A lady lying down dead, sir, oh my golly.”

  “You should learn to knock before—”

  “A poor old lady—my golly, sir, come quick.”

  Ortega was grinning broadly, out of nervousness, and his face was the color of ripe limes.

  Ortega went with the house—his services were included in the rent—and Willett had never spoken to him before or even noticed him particularly.

  “A dead woman, you say? Well.” Willett cleared his throat. “Well, I’ll tend to the matter immediately.”

  He got up, glanced at the hall door in the faint hope that Ethel would appear so that she could accompany Ortega while he, Willett, phoned for the police. More authoritative that way.

  Ethel did not appear. Breathing hard from annoyance, not exertion, Willett followed Ortega around the side of the house to the lily pool and Rose.

  Narrowing his eyes so as not to get too clear or vivid a picture of anything, Willett glanced briefly at the wom­an’s body and returned to the house to call the police. He was trembling all over and the pain in his back was in­tense.

  After a while Ethel floated downstairs in a long silk robe.

  “I was watching from my window,” she said.

  “That was a big help.”

  “What could I do?”

  She sat down at the glass-topped iron table and gazed, chin in hands, at the blue ridge of mountains. She had a wide, milk-white forehead and dark, deep-set eyes so that she always looked as if she were thinking great thoughts. The truth was that she rarely thought at all; she was afraid to. When she spoke she spoke softly, and when she asked a question she lowered her voice at the end of it as if she didn’t expect or deserve an answer. “Aren’t the mountains pretty in the morning.”

  “Mountains. I’ve got more on my mind than moun­tains.”

  “Why get excited?” She reached slowly for the cigarette box in the center of the table. All of her motions were very slow and graceful; she seemed to move underwater. Ethel floated in and out of rooms, and up and down stairs; her hand floated out for a cigarette and floated back to her pale, full mouth. She was pale all over as if the water had washed out all her color. “Why get excited? Every­thing’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”

  “You haven’t any feelings.”

  “Well, isn’t it.”

  “Everything’s going to be fine!” Willett shouted.

  “You’ll wake your mother,” Ethel said, very softly.

  Willett’s face purpled like a ripening plum and his chubby little hands curled into fists. “You’d better watch your tongue.”

  “What did I say?”

  The front doorbell rang and Ethel made a slight move as if she intended to answer it.

  “I’ll get it,” Willett said. “You go upstairs and see if she’s all right.”

  “She’s sleeping. I looked in on my way down. She had all that sleeping stuff last night, didn’t she?”

  “Go upstairs and stay with her.”

  “I can’t just sit there and watch her sleep, can I.”

  “You can stay out of sight, can’t you?”

  The doorbell rang again. “They might want to ask me some questions.”

  “Ethel.”

  “Well, all right, only it won’t be much fun watching somebody sleep. I wouldn’t mind answering questions.”

  “There’s no reason why they should want to see you at all.”

  “Why not. I live here, don’t I.”

  “Ethel, for God’s sake, don’t argue.”

  “Who’s arguing,” Ethel said. But she went upstairs. When Willett swore, it meant that he was at the end of his rope and it was better to avoid him. Poor Willett. She wished she didn’t hate him so much. It would make life easier for both of them.

  She opened Olive’s door, saw that the old lady was still sleeping, and went on to her own room. Here, curled up on the upholstered window seat, she watched the people below moving around the patio and the lawn, or stand­ing in small tense groups near the lily pool. As the news spread the crowd grew. There must have been over fifty people already, but Ethel recognized only three of them: Ortega in animated conversation with a policeman, Wil­lett wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, and Ada Murphy, the maid, just returned from town with a large bag of groceries which she clung to with both arms.

  They all looked quite absurd, yet Ethel envied them. She would have liked to defy Willett and go down and mingle with the crowd, talk a little, listen a great deal, and experience that sense of excitement and comradeship which sudden death arouses in the living. But she didn’t have the energy to move until the old lady called her name.

  “Ethel?”

  “Coming.” She crossed the hall and opened the door.

  The old lady’
s eyes were open and glared like twin glass marbles among the pillows. Her voice was husky with sleep. “Have they found her yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have they found out who she is?”

  “I don’t know. Willett wouldn’t let me stay down.”

  “I hope everything will be all right.”

  “Willett said it would be.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll make your breakfast. Murphy’s back with the eggs.”

  The old lady turned and coughed into her pillows. “I had a bad dream, a hell of a dream, but I feel pretty good now.”

  To the very young people the name Rose French meant nothing. In the older ones—Captain Greer, Willett and the photographer from the local paper—it evoked a cer­tain nostalgia and regret. Rose was part of the good old days, and the good old days were gone.

  Whispers went around the crowd that Rose had been attacked, drowned, strangled, shot; but when Greer turned her over he found no marks of violence at all ex­cept for the abrasions on her nose and forehead where she had fallen on the flagstones. The dark areas around her neck and head were not bruises, Greer assured Willett; they were usually present in normal deaths. Rose did not look normal, though. Her mouth was open, the jaw loose, and her cheeks were sunken and grey as putty.

  Identification was not immediate or positive. No one said, at the first sight of her, “That’s Rose French.” Greer found her purse underneath the body, and there were some letters in it, a Bank of America checkbook, a driver’s license that had expired seven years before, a religious pamphlet, and half a dozen penny postcards all of them addressed to Mr. Frank Clyde, 321 Montecito Street, La Mesa. There was no message written on any of them. Greer drew only one conclusion from the postcards, that Rose hadn’t expected to die. In his opinion, the cards plus the fact that the suitcase was packed for a trip, with sev­eral changes of clothing, toothbrush, aspirin tablets, comb, and a pint of bourbon wrapped carefully inside a pink boned corset, ruled out suicide. Obviously Rose was go­ing somewhere. Perhaps she had taken a shortcut to the railway depot, which was only a quarter of a mile farther on, and coming upon this pleasant little garden, she had stopped to rest a while.

  “Why here?” Willett kept saying. “Why in my garden? There are signs up, No Trespassing.”

  “I don’t imagine a woman like Miss French would pay much attention to signs.” Greer had taken an instant dis­like to Willett and was rather pleased that Rose, with a choice of gardens, had chosen Willett’s.

  Greer was a large, quiet man whose face people could never remember. The most conspicuous thing about him was the broad-brimmed Stetson he wore, winter and sum­mer, year after year. These hats were not uncommon in La Mesa. Quite a few men wore them—doctors, business­men, brokers—as a sign that they lived on ranches out of town and had half a dozen lemon trees, a couple of avo­cados and a horse. Greer wore his because it was comfort­able, kept the sun out of his eyes, and made people like Willett undervalue him as a hick.

  “The least you could do is send all these people away.” Willett’s eyes were bloodshot and trickles of sweat slid down behind his ears and soaked into his hard, white col­lar. He seemed ready to pop his skin, like a sun-swollen tomato. “My mother’s a very sick woman. She can’t stand any excitement. Send all those people away.”

  “I would if I had a couple of divisions of marines,” Greer said.

  “You’re supposed to have some authority.”

  “I have the authority but I haven’t the men. It’s im­possible to keep people away from fires, accidents, mur­ders—”

  “Murders! Good God, you’re not implying that this woman was murdered?”

  “I simply don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”

  “But that would be terrible, terrible. My mother’s a very sick woman. This sort of thing might easily—”

  “Mr. Goodfield, why don’t you go back to the house? I’ll talk to you later.”

  It was noon before the last of the crowd disappeared and Ortega was left to survey the wreckage. The lawn was littered with cigarette butts and gum wrappers; orange peel floated in the lily pool; the bed of Marconi shastas was trampled into rubbish, and the flat of larkspur had been overturned and split down the middle as if a heavy man had used it to stand on to get a better view of Rose.

  Ortega was in an agony of self-recrimination. He had been careless—it was the wrong time to set out larkspur— he should have waited till evening or a cloudy day. But no, he had not waited, and he had paid for his carelessness by finding a dead woman and having the daylights scared out of him and the shastas ruined.

  His picture in the evening paper did little to console him. In the picture he was grinning (from sheer nerv­ousness) and his family and friends told him it looked disgusting, him grinning like that when a lady just died.

  3

  There were two pictures of Rose in the paper. One Frank had seen before on the wall of Rose’s room, a glam­orous still taken when Rose was about forty. The second was a scene from an early movie showing Rose virtuously resisting the advances of a sleek young man identified as Dwight Hamman, the second of her five husbands. Rose had mentioned only three of her husbands to Frank; the other two came as a surprise.

  He experienced an even greater surprise when he read the account of her death. According to police estimates, Rose had died about noon on Monday.

  He phoned Greer immediately, and after dinner he drove down to the white stone building that contained the police offices and the city jail. The grounds of the building were kept immaculate by a volunteer jail crew made up mostly of petty thieves, drunks and non-support cases. Frank knew a great many of these men, particularly the repeaters. Some had been referred to his office for help; others he had met at the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous which were held once a week at the jail and which Frank attended sometimes for information.

  Frank had known Greer for two years. There was a con­siderable difference of viewpoint between the two men and disagreement over techniques, but they were moder­ately friendly. Frank believed that Greer was a just man if not very bright, and Greer was willing to admit that the clinic occasionally did some good, however slight or im­permanent.

  Greer’s office was a big square room with dazzling fluo­rescent lights that gave everyone a prison pallor.

  “Sit down,” Greer said.

  “Thanks.”

  Greer sat down, too, rubbing his eyes. “Those damn lights give me a headache. And don’t kid me it’s psychoso­matic, either.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You psych boys are a funny bunch. A guy falls down an open manhole for instance. Does he fall because he needs new glasses? No. Because he’s thinking of some dame and isn’t watching where he’s going? No. He falls because he was rejected by his old lady or something.”

  “We won’t argue,” Frank said. He knew Greer was touchy on the subject because he had a duodenal ulcer.

  “Jesus, next thing you know you guys will be trying to cure death by psychoanalyzing everybody.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Greer.”

  “I never worry,” Greer said, stroking his forehead in an unconscious attempt to erase the worry lines. “This is a funny business about Rose French. This morning I thought I had it all figured out.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it doesn’t make sense.” Greer took a pipe out of his pocket and put it in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t light it because there was no tobacco in the pipe. He used it as a prop, for chewing on, tapping his desk, scratching the side of his neck, or emphasizing a point he was mak­ing. “You knew Miss French fairly well?”

  “I knew her as well as she let me know her. I have no information on her that she didn’t volunteer.”

  “You mentioned over the phone that you’d seen her recently.”

  “On Sunday, late in the morn
ing, I went to her board­ing house. The landlady, a Mrs. Cushman, had called me and said Rose was acting up a little, so I went to try and straighten her out.”

  “You’re quite a boy scout.”

  “Helping other people helps me. It’s the same princi­ple as A.A. They stay sober by helping other people stay sober.”

  “Some of them.”

  “Some of them.”

  “So you straightened Rose out.”

  “No, I didn’t get anywhere with her. She wouldn’t communicate.”

  “So?”

  “So I took Miriam and the kids to the beach.”

  “And that’s all you wanted to tell me.”

  “Not quite all,” Frank said. “At three o’clock on Mon­day afternoon Rose called me on the phone and told me she had a job and was leaving town.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “It happened.”

  “It couldn’t have happened,” Greer said. “By that time she’d been dead for three hours or more.”

  “Some mistake’s been made.”

  “Perhaps by you.”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t think so. Take a look at this.” He brought out the card Rose had sent him and tossed it on the desk. “It’s postmarked 6:30 p.m.”

  Greer tapped the card with his pipe. “Why the picture and no message?”

  “One of Rose’s little jokes. When she told me she was leaving town to take a job, I asked her to keep in touch with us so we’d know she was all right.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “As a housekeeper. That was her story anyway.”

  “Didn’t you believe it?”

  “I did yesterday. Now I don’t know what to believe. Maybe it wasn’t Rose on the phone yesterday afternoon. I’m no specialist on voices, but it certainly sounded like her and things she said were typically Rose. And if it wasn’t Rose, who was it?”

  “A close friend, a woman who knew her very well and knew, too, about her connection with you.”

  “What would be the point of such a call?”

  “I can only guess,” Greer said. “Rose was already dead and the woman didn’t want it known. Perhaps she in­tended merely to falsify the time of death, or perhaps Rose wasn’t meant to be found at all—it was to be a dis­appearance.”