Rose's Last Summer

by Margaret Millar

  “What time were you around here last night?”

  “After midnight.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought Ada might’ve come home.”

  “And she didn’t?”

  “No, she didn’t. I waited around the lathhouse for three, four hours. Ada didn’t come home.”

  “She might be there now.”

  “She isn’t. That’s her room over next to the kitchen. I tapped on her window—we got a special signal. She didn’t answer it.”

  Frank felt a queer uneasiness pricking at his nerves. You needn’t bother looking for Murphy anymore, Ethel had said.

  Ortega stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and lit it. The cigarette teetered nervously back and forth as he talked. “We got a special signal, she always answers. See that car in there, the Buick?”

  “I saw it.”

  “This Buick drives up in the middle of the night, and a guy gets out carrying a suitcase and goes into the house. That’s when the argument started.”

  “What was the argument about?”

  “Money.” Ortega smiled, very slightly. “What do rich people argue about? Money, same as poor people. This man in the Buick wanted money, and him and her, they didn’t want to give it to him. The windows were open. I could hear every word.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “They called him Jack. Mrs. Goodfield kept saying, ‘My God, we got trouble enough.’ And Jack kept telling her she didn’t know what trouble was but she was going to find out real quick. I think the two men must have started to take a poke at each other because Mrs. Goodfield screamed.”

  “Which Mrs. Goodfield?”

  “The young one. The old one, she never comes out of her room that I know of.”

  Ethel screaming, Willett and Jack taking a poke at each other—the picture didn’t make sense to Frank. Ethel and Jack were, according to Greer, terrified of the old lady, and Willett was a model of the devoted son. That they should engage in a brawl while she was upstairs sleeping was incredible.

  Ortega went on talking and the ash from his cigarette dribbled down on his shirt. He brushed it away with the back of his hand. “Someone must’ve caught on then that the windows were open and everybody wasn’t deaf. Mr. Goodfield closed them and pulled the blinds just the way they are now.”

  “Was Jack in the Lincoln with them when they left this morning?”

  “Not unless he was hiding in the back seat. All I could see was him and her. She was driving. She looked funny. Had her head forward and her eyes glued to the road like she was driving a racing car.” He paused, scratching the back of his neck. “They don’t use the car much. Most of the time they stay home, never go out at all that I know of. Ada said that some time they went out she’d show me the house, but they never did except to the inquest and the funeral. When they want something they have it de­livered or they send Ada. I guess they’re scared to leave the old lady for fear she’ll have a bad spell.”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, I better get to work now; I get paid by the hour.” But he still hesitated, pressing the grass down with the toe of his boot and watching it spring up again as if it was made of elastic. “I got to move a bougainvillea. Moving shocks them, shocks them right to death some­times. You have to give them vitamin B. But I guess you already knew that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “It’s not important anyway. Ada says I got to better myself, read a lot and learn important things. The trou­ble is finding out what’s important so you can go ahead and learn it.”

  “That’s everybody’s trouble.”

  “Not Ada’s. She’s smart.”

  Frank wondered how smart. Watching Ortega shuffle wearily across the lawn, he had an idea that as far as the boy’s welfare was concerned it would be better if Mur­phy’s absence turned out to be permanent.

  He went around the side of the house again toward the road where he’d left his car. The back door was still closed and the slats of the Venetian blind squeezed tight, but there were only four bottles of milk lined up on the porch. Where the fifth had been, a small circle of water sparkled in the sun.

  Frank walked slowly past the porch, reached the grilled gate that led to the road, turned around and came back. Officially he had no status; and unofficially it was none of his business that there was someone inside the house who wanted breakfast but who didn’t want to answer the door or to be seen. There was a possibility that old Mrs. Goodfield was not quite as bedridden as she professed to be, or that Murphy had heard Ortega’s special signal and ig­nored it. But the strongest possibility was Jack.

  Frank went up the porch steps trying not to appear quite as furtive as he felt. He had his hand raised ready to knock again when he heard the sudden, loud clanking of an overhead garage door being lifted open hastily and clumsily. He reached the garage just as Jack Goodfield was climbing in behind the wheel of the Buick.

  “Wait a minute! Hey, Goodfield!”

  “Get out of my way, you.” Jack turned on the ignition and pressed the starter switch. But luck—and the fact that the car was in gear—was against him. Instead of going into a steady roar the engine coughed twice and the Buick took three playful leaps forward and stopped with a splinter­ing crash of metal on wood. Simultaneous with the frac­ture of the garage wall came the fracture of Jack’s morale. He sagged forward in the seat, his forehead resting against the top of the steering wheel in a posture of defeat and exhaustion.

  “All right, I give up. I give up.”

  “Are you okay, Goodfield?”

  “Oh sure, I’m great, just great. All right, let’s have it. How much do you want?” He got out of the car, slammed the door viciously, and emerged from the garage shaking his head back and forth as if to shake off the painful glare of the sun. “You might as well ask for the shirt off my back. That’s about all I’ve got. And it isn’t even a good shirt, it isn’t even clean. So go ahead, take it.”

  “Sorry, it’s not my size. Besides, my wife doesn’t like me to wear white shirts, they’re too hard to launder.”

  “For God’s sake, come to the point. You work for Evan­geline’s husband.”

  “I have nothing to do with your amours, Goodfield. I work for the Mental Health Society.”

  “It’s too early in the morning for jokes.”

  “No joke.”

  Jack turned a little pale. “You mean somebody’s gone off their rocker around here? Well, by God, it doesn’t sur­prise me much. Which one is it?”

  “I don’t know. In fact—”

  “Maybe both of them, eh?”

  “It’s not very likely.”

  “Likely or not, that’s my opinion.”

  “Based on what?”

  “The way they’re acting, the way they’ve treated me. Sure, I arrived late and woke them up. Also, I wanted a small loan and that kind of thing doesn’t make you popu­lar. I even grant you that I’m not the most lovable chap in the world. But I’m not absolutely detestable, I’m not completely abominable, I’ve got some good points.”

  “I’m sure you have,” Frank agreed cautiously.

  “You wouldn’t think so from the way they treated me. You’d think I was carrying bubonic plague. They ordered me out right away; they weren’t even going to let me stay the rest of the night, said they didn’t have room. Fantastic, isn’t it? One’s own flesh and blood and a big house like this. Wouldn’t you call that fantastic?”

  “I might.”

  “They just weren’t reasonable, considering that all I wanted was a bed for the night and a small loan and a chance to talk to Mother about some stock I thought of selling.”

  “Goodfield stock?”

  “Yes. It’s mine, it was given to me. Legally, I can do whatever I want with it. I can sell it or I can send it over Niagara Falls in a barrel. I can—�
� He broke off with an embarrassed little laugh. “I don’t know why I’m telling all this to a stranger. You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “I think I would.”

  “I’m not even interested myself, as a matter of fact. All this business stuff bores me. I wasn’t cut out for it.”

  Frank guided him back to the point. “Did you talk to your mother about selling your stock?”

  “Not yet. Last night it was too late, of course, and this morning when I rapped on her door she was still sleep­ing. I noticed a funny smell in the corridor outside her room.”

  “What kind of smell?”

  “Oh, it reminded me a lot of hospitals and sickness and things like that. I wonder if she’s a great deal sicker than they’ll admit. Have you seen her lately?”

  “I’ve never seen her. Captain Greer has—he’s a friend of mine—and he thought she looked fine. He was pretty captivated, in fact.”

  “Oh, she can be captivating all right, but she never wastes any of that on her children. Treats us like mo­rons.” He paused, stroking his chin with his fingertips. “Speaking of morons, how can you tell when somebody’s gone off their rocker? Like Ethel, for instance. Could you tell if she—well, if she suddenly—well, you know—”

  “I might.”

  “It isn’t just the way she acted last night about my com­ing here. I’m not stupid enough to believe that anybody who dislikes me is crazy. Some people have their own good reasons for not liking me. But Ethel hasn’t. We’ve always gotten on well. I remembered her birthdays, I took her places like the opera house where Willett refused to go, and whenever any of her relatives showed up from Wis­consin I acted as extra man, took them around China­town, things like that. Sometimes it was pretty rough; Ethel has a lot of peculiar relatives.”

  Frank suspected that Jack’s standards of peculiarity were themselves peculiar. Ethel’s cousins might have worn the wrong hats or preferred beer to martinis.

  Jack went on chewing over his grievance like a dyspep­tic steer, trying to make it more digestible. “Yes, you might even say that Ethel and I were pals. It was an aw­ful surprise when she turned on me last night, turned on me like a wildcat—I can see you don’t believe that.”

  “It’s difficult. Mrs. Goodfield seems to me to be a very”—ineffectual was the word that occurred to Frank but he changed it—“a very mild woman.”

  “That’s what I always thought, until last night. The change in her was downright frightening. Why, I wouldn’t stay here now if they got down on their knees and begged me. Dead tired as I am, I’m going on my way.”

  “You didn’t get much sleep?”

  “An hour or two. They stuck me in some cramped lit­tle room that belongs to the maid—she’s away on a holi­day—and then first thing this morning the birds started fussing and yipping around. One of them kept tapping at my window—tap, tap, tap. Damned annoying, birds in the morning, especially the tapping kind. I got up about eight-thirty and went upstairs to see if Mother was awake yet. I rapped on her door and tried the knob, but it was locked. That’s another odd thing, for a sick woman to sleep with her door locked so that no one could get inside to help her if she took a turn for the worse. It didn’t seem right, it worried me. People don’t lock bedroom doors unless they’re afraid, afraid of their own family. And that smell in the hall made me nervous.

  “I tried a couple of other doors and they were locked, too. Then I looked out the hall window and saw you com­ing. Right then and there I decided to leave. I couldn’t think of a single reason for staying except my mother, and frankly, Mother’s always been able to look after herself.” He stroked his chin again as if the scrape of his whiskers against his fingertips gave him a reassurance of manhood. “I’m not running out on my duty. It’s just—I’ve got trou­bles of my own, I can’t afford to mess around with women who’ve gone off the beam.”

  Frank wondered about Evangeline who had never been on the beam, but he didn’t bring the subject up because he felt a degree of sympathy for Jack. Like Willett, he was persecuted by his own indecision because he had never been compelled, or privileged, to make any decisions by himself.

  “Avoid trouble,” Jack said. “That’s my motto. When you see it coming, walk away.”

  “Unless it’s too late.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Here’s Ethel.”

  The heavy, black Lincoln rolled ponderously down the driveway like a hearse and came to a stop beside the convertible. Ethel was behind the wheel and Willett was slumped in the seat beside her, his eyes shut, his skin tinged a greyish-yellow. He got out of the car and began walking toward the house, his shoulders heaving with si­lent retches.

  Ethel got out, too, and closed both of the car doors care­fully before she spoke: “What are you doing here, Mr. Clyde?”

  “There’s no law against a neighborly call, Mrs. Goodfield.”

  “I must ask you to leave. I don’t happen to feel very neighborly this morning.”

  “Other people do. Mr. Goodfield here has been very neighborly.”

  Ethel wheeled around and faced her brother-in-law. “What have you been telling him?”

  “Nothing,” Jack said. “Not a thing.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Now don’t go off your—don’t get excited, Ethel, old girl.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Why, nothing but the truth, old girl: that you weren’t very hospitable and I intended to leave.”

  “When?”

  “Right away.”

  “Good. The sooner the better. I’ll get your luggage.”

  “I already have my luggage,” Jack said with pained dig­nity. “But before I go I must say that—”

  “Don’t say anything, Jack. Too much has been said. It doesn’t help matters.”

  “Well, I’ll just pop in and say goodbye to Willett.”

  “Don’t bother,” Ethel said sharply. “I’ll say goodbye for you. Willett is not feeling very well. He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Oh. Well then—” He opened the door of the Buick and climbed behind the wheel, awkwardly, because Ethel was staring at him, her pale eyes cold and suspicious. “Hon­estly, old girl, if I were you I’d visit a doctor. You’re not acting like yourself.”

  “If I acted like myself, I’d get on a slow boat to Sweden and forget I ever heard the name Goodfield.”

  “You see, Ethel? That’s what I mean. You should visit a doct—”

  “For heaven’s sake, will you please go?”

  “All right, all right.” He started the engine. “Goodbye, Ethel.”

  Ethel didn’t say goodbye. She just watched the convert­ible until it slid around a curve and out of sight.

  Frank was shocked by the change that a few days had made in her appearance. He had seen her twice before: at the inquest, wearing a wispy green silk dress and an ex­pression of complete disinterest; and at Rose’s funeral, in a dark suit that made her look very fair and delicate. The fairness was real enough, but her frailty and her un­concern and her benign stupidity were illusory. Perhaps Ethel herself had been taken in by the illusion, did not realize the extent of her passions and her strength and did not want to realize.

  “Mrs. Goodfield.”

  “Please leave. My husband is sick and I have to look after him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why should you be sorry? You’re a stranger to us.”

  “I’m not as much of a stranger as you think.”

  “I see. Jack’s been shooting off his mouth, has he?”

  “A little.”

  “That egghead, that silly, meddling egghead. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t realize the damage he—” She drew in her breath sharply and it made a tinny sound pass­ing through her throat. “Jack’s an awful liar,” she added finally.

/>   “It takes one to catch one.”

  “Then you’d better not catch any, Mr. Clyde. Your rep­utation might suffer.”

  “We can stand around all day exchanging beautiful thoughts but it won’t get us anywhere.”

  “That hardly matters to me since I’m not trying to get anywhere.”

  “I think you’re trying on all eight cylinders.”

  “Oh?”

  “But somebody put sugar in the gasoline.”

  A blank expression crossed her face. “You’re beginning to confuse me.”

  “I don’t believe you’re confused. I believe you’re in trouble, maybe very serious trouble. I’d like to help you.”

  It was clear that the offer came as a shock to her, that the last thing in the world she expected was sympathy; and when it was offered it disturbed her, softened her emotions and dulled the edges of her purpose. “You’re a stranger to us,” she repeated. “Why should you want to help? No. No, I don’t believe it. That policeman sent you.”

  “Greer didn’t send me.”

  “Policemen can be so stupid, so terribly stupid. You’ve got to leave now, Mr. Clyde. You’ve got to. This is my last warning. There’s a gun in the house. We have a right to protect our property.”

  “Where’s Murphy, Mrs. Goodfield?”

  “We have a right to—”

  “Where’s Murphy?”

  “In her room. Sleeping.”

  “Jack told me he used her room last night.”

  “He’s lying.”

  “No, you are. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in a whisper. “I simply don’t know. If I knew, I’d kill her.”

  “Why did you tell Greer she’d come back?”

  “I had to satisfy him, to keep him away from here.”

  “Why do you have to keep him away?”

  “I was warned.”

  “By Murphy?”

  “Someone called me. I think it was Murphy trying to disguise her voice.”

  “What was the warning?”

  “To keep the police away.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or they’d—I can’t tell. That was part of it—I’m not to tell or something terrible will happen to her.”