“I can’t concentrate,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever work again.”
In bright sunlight, the wrinkles that come so easily to women in a desert climate were evident, with little trace of her former beauty left. She seemed not to care anymore about the illusion she could assume so easily when she chose. Her own escape into work had been lost long ago. Nevertheless, she seemed to have become wiser, as well as older—perhaps in the effort to surmount her own demons.
She went on as though I hadn’t spoken. “I wish I’d listened to Peggy. When Saxon turned away from me, I decided there was nothing more to live for. I gave up everything and hid from life. I destroyed myself in those years. Every single thing I’ve done since then has been horribly wrong.”
Her pain broke through my own barrier of anguish, and I made an effort to respond. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been able to think about anything but Keith since this happened.”
“Yes, you’re being as foolish as I was. Sooner or later, you need to face the fact that you may have to live without your son. The sooner you work at something, the better for you. You needn’t give up the search, but you still have a book to write.”
What she was saying was true, but I didn’t know how to stop thinking of Keith.
“Look at me, Carol,” she said. “Do you want to wind up like me? With nothing? Do you want to throw away the rest of your life? Look at me and tell me what you see.”
I looked at her and saw exactly what she wanted me to see—a wasted life. A life without value, thrown away because of a painful loss that she’d thought she couldn’t endure.
“For me, Saxon really died thirty-six years ago,” she said. “Yet now I’ve let it seem as though he had died all over again. If I’d tried to go on living my own life from the start, I wouldn’t be feeling like this now.”
She had brought me out of preoccupation with my own pain. “You proved what you can do the other night.”
“Yes, I know. The strange thing is that I do care. When you’re young, you think that whatever happens when you’re old won’t really matter. That’s stupid. Whatever your age, life always matters. Perhaps more than ever for me now, because there’s so little time left.”
I touched her hand gently, but at once she drew away, as though she had built a dam against emotion, against affection.
“You’re young, Carol. You’ll marry. You’ll have another child. I never had one at all. Just the same, this time I must come to life. Carol, I want to live!”
My eyes had been dry with rage ever since Keith was taken, but now I began to cry. She didn’t touch me or speak. She offered neither affection nor sympathy. She waited until my weeping stopped, and then she stood up.
“We have a book to write,” she said, and I heard the old note of command in her voice.
Part of me understood what she had done. Perhaps she had lost the habit of true generosity that she’d known as a young woman; perhaps she behaved generously only when she wanted something for herself. It didn’t matter. I was grateful anyway.
“Thank you,” I said, and stood up beside her.
I knew that I still wanted to write about Monica Arlen. Not just of the imaginary woman whom Linda adored like some goddess on a pedestal because of what she’d once been, but the real woman who had suffered pain and loss and tragedy, and yet was now making a last effort to salvage something of her life. I could understand better now what it had cost her to go out on that stage and enthrall an audience, when she knew her real self so well.
“Work and pain aren’t exclusive of one another,” she said as we walked together toward the house. “Though I used to think they were. Of course you won’t give up your search for your son, but in the meantime you’ll work as hard as you possibly can because work is the only anodyne there is. I’ve found that out—perhaps too late—but there’s still time for you.”
I’d started after her down to the house level, when Linda came running from her office.
“Carol! Come to the telephone quickly. It’s Keith on the line, asking for you. Hurry!”
With Monica following, I flew through the house to her office and snatched up the phone with a hand that was shaking, fearful that he might hang up before I could get there. The voice was my son’s, and he had waited.
“Mommy—is that you?”
I tried to keep my own terror from reaching him. “Yes, darling, I’m here. Tell me where you are.”
“Mommy, this is a bad place. Come and get me—please come and get me!”
My knuckles were white with my grip on the phone, but I held on to my control somehow. “Wait, darling. Don’t hang up, and don’t go away. Tell me where you are and I’ll come right away to get you.”
His words rushed out in a tumble. “It was only a game! I didn’t mean to run away. He said it was just a game. He said there was a cave he could show me. But then he brought me here.”
“Where, Keith—tell me where?”
He took a deep breath and I knew he was trying to get his own fear under control. “I’m at that house. Aunt Monica’s house—with the funny name. You know!”
“Cadenza? In Beverly Hills? Is anyone with you? Who brought you there?”
“Ralph brought me. But he’s gone now. Everybody’s gone from inside.”
This was no time for questions. “It will take a while to get there, darling, but I’ll come as fast as I can. Listen to me, Keith. There must be neighbors … can you go and stay at the closest house until we come?”
“I’m afraid. They might be waiting outside. Mommy, I hear something. I’ve got to go now. Come and get me fast!”
He hung up and I stared at Linda and Monica. “I must go to Cadenza at once! That’s where he is, Monica.”
Linda took the phone from my hand, dialed the museum and spoke to Jason. When she’d hung up, she told me he would be here right away. “He’ll drive you there.”
“I’m coming with you,” Monica announced.
Linda started to protest, but Monica hushed her with an imperious wave. “Look,” she said.
Annabella had come into the doorway, and she sat staring at us, her blue eyes wide with mysterious knowledge. The black tail twitched ominously.
“Annie knows more than any one of us,” Monica said softly. “Linda, get her carrying case.”
A strange thought cut through my distraction: The witch’s familiar? I shrugged it off and fled to my room to put a few things into a bag for Keith. Monica was the last person I wanted along, but to dissuade her would take too much time.
When Jason arrived, we were ready. Linda had reluctantly agreed to stay near a telephone while we were gone. She put Annabella, already restless in her traveling case, into the passenger seat. But we weren’t to leave easily, for the cat promptly set up a loud howling.
Monica flung up despairing hands. “She won’t go without the others. Hurry, Linda—fetch them!”
The whole thing seemed wickedly absurd, but as soon as Linda brought out the two white cats in their own travel case, Annabella stopped yowling, and we set off in peace.
We drove toward Los Angeles, turning our backs on Mt. San Jacinto. This was the route I’d followed in bringing Keith to Palm Springs. Only a little while ago—a hundred years ago! So many awful things had happened in this space of time. I was thankful especially for Jason’s calm strong presence—a man I hadn’t even known at the time of my flight from New York.
It seemed as though my heart would never stop its frightened thumping, and once Jason reached out to cover my hand with his own. “We’ll find him, Carol. Just hang in there.” Now I knew that deep anger which burned in him existed against whatever threatened me as well, and I was glad. I could count on him to help me deal with whatever waited for us at Cadenza.
The drive seemed endless before desert and mountains were left behind, and we followed the San Diego Freeway. Most of the city of Los Angeles was made up of thousands upon thousands of single-family homes—small houses that had nothing to do with t
he high rises now going up on Wilshire Boulevard, or with the ostentation of former movie millionaires.
North of Sunset, the car followed a winding road into canyons above the city, and into the area known as Beverly Hills—a tiny enclave in itself, surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. Up here, the homes built by the long-ago movie stars had been large and fantastic. Most of the more conventional Georgian and Tudor styles came later. In the twenties and thirties, those with Hollywood riches had not only imitated Europe; they had enlarged and combined and adapted with great extravagance and eccentricity. At that time, studios wanted their stars to live like stars, and these had indeed been dream palaces where fantasy lives could be played out for the public to see in fantastic settings. Now many of them were gone, and with the passing of time what had once seemed architectural monstrosity became fascinating to a world that lived on a smaller scale.
Monica had driven this way so many times that she knew every inch of the way, and she guided us up a winding road that led to her private eminence on a hill. At the entrance, far below the house, an iron gate beside an extravagant gatehouse stood open.
Monica rolled down her window. “This shouldn’t be unlocked! Where’s the guard?”
There was no one in the gatehouse and we drove on through rows of palm trees and acacias, past what had once been rolling lawns, now overgrown in neglect. The gardener had been let go recently, Monica said, because of her straitened finances, but there was always a caretaker. He lived there, so where was he now? An ominous circumstance that he appeared to be missing, with the gate left open.
The driveway wound and climbed until it reached a wide crescent before the pillared facade of an enormous house, Italianate in its romantic conception—an “ornamental flourish” indeed, this Cadenza.
The central section of the house was like a small Roman temple, with marble arching above the front door, and two Ionic columns on either side supporting a pediment decorated with the figures of a frieze. On either side of the “temple” stretched long arcaded wings roofed in red tile. An Italian country villa in Beverly Hills!
Monica left the car the moment we stopped, running toward one of the two stone lions with long curly manes that posed at either end of a terrace. She flung her arms around a stone neck and called out to us.
“Saxon found these and brought them here from Tuscany!”
I had no time to waste on furbelows, but when I would have run toward the front door, Jason stopped me.
“Wait, Carol. The door’s open, and we don’t know what that means. Let’s look around outside first.”
Monica left the lion and stood staring at the shadowed arcades of the nearest wing. “You’d better listen to Jason,” she said. “I have a feeling something’s wrong.”
Everything about the place seemed too quiet and empty. Unnaturally quiet. No one appeared at the open door, and no face looked out at us from any window. The stillness was like death, with only the distant hum of the city to break the quiet. A stillness that frightened me. If Keith were inside, he would have heard us by now and come running out.
We left Annabella protesting in the car with her Persian friends, and started around one end of the immense building. Once there had been ornamental gardens at the back, and a greenhouse and swimming pool. All too expensive to keep up, Monica said, and all gone now. A shutter or two dangled, ready to fall. I tried to peer through a rear window, but it was set high, and the rear and side doors were all locked upon inner silence. It was an intimidating house—too widespread, too gloomy within its long arcades, too hard and cold with stone and marble, and the evidences of neglect. When I thought of Keith, perhaps trapped inside and alone, I felt more frantic than ever.
“We’ve got to go in!” I protested.
“We will,” Jason said, and when we’d made the complete circuit without being challenged and without finding any sign of life, we returned to the front door. Monica took both cat hampers from the car, insisting on carrying them like suitcases herself, and she hurried ahead of us up the wide marble steps. We followed her into a hall of rose-tinted marble, its proportions so vast that its beauty was like that of a museum, stupendous, but haughty and chill.
“How on earth could you live in a place like this?” I whispered to Monica, not wanting to rouse the echoes.
“It was good publicity copy. But we rattled around. Upstairs we sectioned off some rooms and made them a bit more cozy.”
She set down the cases and let out the three cats. Annabella stepped gingerly onto cold marble, her fur bristling, her tail aloft, as if she sensed with her own radar what lay about her, and didn’t like it. The white cats stayed close to her and to each other, clearly fearful.
The enormous hall was two stories high, with a vaulted ceiling decorated with cherubs and clouds. Marble balusters railed an upper gallery, shadowed and empty. On our far right a black marble staircase curved grandly down from the floor above. I had read about that famous staircase, and it would take very little to imagine Gloria Swanson coming down, lost to reality in Sunset Boulevard, or perhaps a frightened Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Yet Monica Arlen, who had really gone up and down those stairs a thousand times, gave them hardly a glance, her attention still on the cats.
“You’re all right now, my darlings. Nothing will hurt you. What’s wrong, Annie? Tell me what’s worrying you.”
Annabella’s mewing was insistent and more querulous than ever.
“She doesn’t like it here,” Monica said—a deduction that took no great powers to interpret.
I’d had enough of caution, and I ran across rosy marble, forgetting the echoes, and shouting for Keith. His name was flung back at me from hard surfaces, and painted faces on the ceiling seemed to look down at me in scorn. No young voice answered me.
“He won’t hear you,” Monica said. “This is a huge house, and if he’s here he could be anywhere. We’ll have to look. Let’s start over here.”
She strode through a door at the right of a marble fireplace, and Annabella, still bristling suspiciously, led the other cats after her into a drawing room that might have graced a palace. Here a parquet floor shone like satin as sun poured in through windows topped by fanlights. Rugs had been removed, and in one corner marks in the wood showed where a grand piano must once have stood. The few pieces of furniture that were left looked elegantly French, but lonely. Over a doorway were Grinling Gibbons carvings of fruit and flowers, imported from England, and highly esteemed by the California of another day.
The ceiling displayed a design of green leaves in great painted rays and wheels of foliage, from the center of which hung a chandelier, splendid and dusty. The wall in one corner was water-stained.
Once more, Monica reacted. “What parties we used to hold here!” she said sadly. “Everyone who mattered came. Everyone! Marlene Dietrich sat on that very piano and sang “Falling in Love Again.”
I had no time for nostalgia, or for beautiful, empty rooms. I found double doors leading into a corridor, and I rushed along it, opening door after door, calling for my son. Very quickly I lost my way. Rooms seemed to open from other rooms with little reason or pattern. There was an enclosed patio at the heart of the house, to further confuse any sense of direction. Jason came with me and our feet sounded alarmingly loud on bare floors. Anyone who hid from us would be warned well ahead of our approach.
When we entered one room we found a marvelous portrait of Monica Arlen on the wall. She held a blue iris in her hand and smiled at us enigmatically with eyes and lips. The real Monica was there ahead of us, along with her cats, and she was staring at the picture she had posed for so long ago.
This had clearly been a room given over to movie memorabilia, though Linda must have removed most of its treasures to Smoke Tree House years ago. There were a few things left—books on a shelf, a number of ornaments, a pair of ballet shoes from a picture in which Monica had portrayed a dancer who could dance no more. Two cardboard packing boxes stood in the middle of the floor and were half
full, so Ralph must have been at work here. His role in whatever had happened was still a mystery, and seemed all too threatening.
“I always hated that portrait,” Monica said. “I never wanted to pose for it. They made me!”
A strange thing to say, but I couldn’t puzzle about it now. “We’ve got to find Keith,” I said, still sure that he must be here somewhere in these vast reaches.
We wandered on through a banquet hall ornate with more cherubs and tarnished gilt. Beyond it a butler’s pantry opened into a kitchen nearly as large as the dining hall. Here, for the first time, was evidence of human presence. A partly eaten meal for two had been set at one end of a table. An overturned chair lay on its side—again an ominous warning of some disaster.
“Keith is here,” I said. “He was here in this room—I can feel it!”
“Owen Barclay must be back of whatever has happened,” Monica said, putting into words what we all knew very well. “But where is everyone? Anyone? And why would Keith have been left alone to phone you?”
“We haven’t searched upstairs yet,” Jason said. “Will you show the way, Monica?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. There’s another room we haven’t looked into yet. I remember telling Keith about it.”
We had circled the patio into the opposite wing, and she led the way to a carved door that she opened upon a library. A musty smell of long neglect rose to meet us. If there had been renters in this house from time to time, they’d been little interested in books. Though the books were still here—thousands of them, probably installed by the original decorator, since Monica had chosen to take few of them to Smoke Tree House. Along one wall of shelves ran a ladder on a track, and above the opposite wall an overhanging gallery housed still more dusty volumes. It was a room of dark paneling and heavy, dark furniture.
Once more I shouted for Keith. By this time I expected no answer, but a creaking sound reached us from the gallery. I tore up narrow stairs to the railed overhang above, and saw at its far end a Spanish chest covered with intricate carving. As I stared, the lid moved upward an inch or two, and eyes peered out at me through the slit.
Emerald Page 30
