Miles Fletcher was not in the least delighted. “That’s impossible! Do you think I want my wife’s entire life put into print for the public to read?”
She wilted at once, and I knew that she, who carried herself so proudly and courageously, had been held up to shame by her husband.
“This would be the biography of an actress,” I said. “I’m not interested in writing about Laura Worth’s private life.”
“An actress is also a woman,” he told me coldly. “You could hardly do her justice if you thought otherwise.”
“Perhaps it would be possible, Miles.” She was suddenly pleading, as I’d never seen her plead. She actually seemed to care what this man thought. She wanted to placate him. “My life hasn’t been all that dreadful.”
He looked at her coolly, questioningly, and I could see her concern for whatever he might be thinking.
“Anyway, I’m not sure a book is possible,” I said. “Let’s take it a little at a time, and see how it goes.”
Quickly, Laura changed the subject. “Miles, Gunnar Thoresen has invited us all to come up to his hut on top of Ulriken tomorrow. You and Donia, and Leigh and me. You’ll come, won’t you?”
At least he seemed to have no objection to Gunnar. He agreed, though a little grudgingly, and Laura seemed relieved.
“Thank you, darling. Will you tell Donia?”
“Why not tell her yourself? If it comes from you, she’ll feel more welcome.”
Laura’s expression changed and some of her spirit returned. “I don’t want to ask her. I don’t care whether she comes or not. Do you know what your sister has done now?”
Miles stepped away from her with the air of a man beset by woman-problems in which he had no wish to involve himself. “I don’t know, but undoubtedly you’ll tell me.”
“No—not I,” Laura said quickly. “You tell him, Leigh. You’re not prejudiced, as I might be.”
Miles went to Laura’s small desk and pulled out the painted chair with its seat of striped silk. He sat astride it facing us both.
“All right—suppose you tell me,” he said.
Everything about this man made my hackles rise, and I found that I enjoyed telling him about Donia. I explained how Irene had found her strewing the contents of Laura’s trunk about the room downstairs. And when Irene had asked what she was doing, she had said she was searching for evidence. Later we found that she’d taken away the brass candlestick with the dragon decoration.
Miles rose from the small chair with a suddenness that set it rocking. He was no longer uninvolved.
“I’ll talk to her myself,” he said and went out of the room.
I had to know what was about to happen, and I followed him.
By the time I reached the hall Miles was in Donia’s room, and I stepped opposite the open door. He stood facing his sister, with the brass candlestick on a table between them. Donia had taken the trouble to set a candle in the holder and the wick was lighted. The flame swayed in the draft from the window, smoking a little.
“What are you up to now?” Miles demanded of her. “Why did you forage into the contents of Laura’s trunk?”
He towered above his sister across the table, and Donia seemed tiny by contrast. Her brown, rather wizened face was screwed into a grimace and her big dark eyes snapped brightly, venomously.
“I found what I was looking for,” she said, and touched the candlestick. “Isn’t this what you’ve wanted for so long?”
“If you’re here to cause trouble, I’m going to send you home,” Miles told her. “Take that candlestick downstairs and put it where you found it. She’s been disturbed enough by the sight of it.”
Donia bent her boyishly shorn head and blew out the flame with a puff that exaggerated her grimace.
“You know why, don’t you? Anyway, you can’t send me home. You don’t dare.”
Miles turned his head with a quick, watchful movement, and saw me standing there. He crossed the room in two long strides and closed the door sharply in my face. I went back to Laura’s room and found her lying on the chaise longue. But she was not apathetic now. She waited for me anxiously, and some dark excitement seemed to drive her.
“Tell me what happened!” she cried the moment I stepped into the room.
I told her what I had seen and heard, including the words about the candlestick.
She put her hands over her face. “If they know about the candlestick, then it means that Miles must have been in the studio that night. I think I’ve known all along that this must be so, though I’ve not wanted to admit it, even to myself. I don’t see how they managed the alibi, but Donia must have lied for him. He could have been at the studio and still have reached the theater in time to appear to be coming out with her after the performance. This is why my portrait has been scarred. To frighten me, to threaten. If the X is marked into that place—it will mean the end of everything for me!”
“Hush!” I said. I went to kneel beside her. The wild rose fragrance she wore was in her hair, on her skin, as I put my arms around her and held her till she quieted. I half expected her to push me away, but she did not. She made no response, but she suffered me to hold her until the shivering stopped. Then she removed herself gently and rather proudly from my arms. But she was still afraid.
We had reached the verge of mystery, the precipice that led to murder. Fear was tangible in the air around us. Laura was afraid, and I was afraid for her. But she had no wish to cling to me now, and I stood up and moved away from her.
“What can a candlestick have to do with what happened that night?” I asked.
She answered without caution—because she had accepted me. “The candlestick was the weapon that killed Cass Alroy.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “How could it have been? The police, all the newspaper accounts, always gave the same weapon. That iron doorstop in the shape of a cat. The same doorstop that was used on the set of The Whisperer, was the weapon which killed him. Wasn’t it?”
She turned her head helplessly from side to side. “I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“But then what about this candlestick?” I pressed her. “Where does it come in?”
“I carried it away.” The words were hardly more than a whisper. “Oh, I was so strong in those days! I always knew what to do. I could always take charge when I had to—and I was afraid of nothing. I put the candlestick in my dressing room with a candle in it, and no one ever noticed it there. Not the police. Not anyone. There was no need to look for another weapon—they had the doorstop. But I always kept the candlestick—I suppose as a sort of—well, evidence.”
And Donia Fletcher had been looking for “evidence.”
“But I don’t understand any of this,” I said. “I don’t understand why any of it is important now.”
My words seemed to rouse her to an awareness of me. She sat up on the chaise longue and there was a deep entreaty in her eyes.
“I’ve forgotten how young you are. You were hardly more than a baby when all this happened. When Miles comes back, it’s better if you know nothing, understand nothing. You mustn’t speak a word of what I’ve said to anyone. Not to Donia or Miles or Irene. Not to Gunnar.”
She was growing frantic and I had to reassure her. “I promise,” I said.
She relaxed a little, but once more her hands covered her face in distress. “When will it stop?” she murmured. “When will there be an end to it? When will I know?”
“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t be so upset.”
Somehow she seemed as fragile as a doll, and as breakable. There was an urge in me to save her from whatever threatened, to protect her from unknown dangers. I moved toward her again.
We heard Miles’s step in the hallway, and Laura waved me back. “Don’t, Leigh. He mustn’t find us in a touching mother-daughter scene.”
I managed to be well away from her when he walked into the room. Laura lay back on the chaise longue, with not a hair ruffled, and no sign remaining of the shivering woman
I’d held in my arms a few moments before. It was I who was shaken now—and shocked. Shocked by the words she had spoken to me, and by my own protective reaction toward her.
“I’ve talked to Donia about the trunk,” Miles said to his wife. “And I’ve told her to put the candlestick back where she found it. Sometime you must tell me why that candlestick’s existence worries you. But Donia had no business looking through your things. I’m afraid she has an insatiable curiosity.” He glanced at me with distaste. “Perhaps my wife and I can be alone for a little while?”
She threw me what might have been a look of entreaty, but I could not tell whether she wanted me to go, or to stay. Anyway, I had no choice. I went quietly out of the room and left them together.
Donia Jaffe was crossing the hall, carrying the brass candlestick in both hands. The candle had been removed. She smiled at me with a certain bright triumph, and I followed on her heels down the stairs, went with her into Laura’s room. Quite calmly she opened the trunk and dropped the candlestick into it.
“At least I was able to go through nearly everything,” she said cheerfully.
I stared at her. There seemed to be nothing I could say.
When she had lowered the lid of the trunk and turned the key in the lock, she carried the ring of keys back to the sandalwood box, and dropped them inside. Then she whirled to face me.
“So we’re all to go up on Ulriken tomorrow? What a charming little party that will be! I suspect that Gunnar Thoresen has no idea of what he’s letting himself in for.”
“I think he can handle whatever comes,” I said.
“It’s possible. I like these strong Norwegian men. But we may put him to something of a test. See you later.”
She went out of the room and left me standing there, staring at Laura’s trunk with the candlestick hidden from my view. I felt beset by danger on every side. Laura’s fears were real. Her haunting was real. The past was not done with or finished. It was hanging over her now, though I couldn’t be sure where the danger lay, or what form it might take.
But there was even more to frighten me. I couldn’t tell which alarmed me more—the knowledge that I might inflict the ultimate revenge upon Laura Worth if I chose to pursue the road I’d started down and encouraged her in an effort to recapture her career, or my awareness of the strange opposing emotion which had seized me when I knelt beside her and held her in my arms. The latter was a betrayal of myself and my father to a bitter degree, and it dismayed me to think that I might be so weak a person, after all. The girl who had knelt beside Laura wasn’t me. I was the other one—Victor Hollins’s daughter. The one whose anger would never die.
Now, at least, I knew there was something to be learned in this house. Something which grew out of the past and had some desperate bearing on the present. Something which might put a stronger weapon than I’d ever expected in my hands.
Donia had gone through the trunk, but I had not. I had helped to pack away certain items, but I hadn’t handled everything. There had been more packets of letters than those from my father, and I shrank less at the thought of reading them than I did over those Victor Hollins had written. There were no rules of conduct to restrain me now—if my purpose was clear.
Drawn irresistibly, I went to Laura’s dressing table and opened the sandalwood box. Donia had dropped in the keys, but when I took them out I saw that a folded piece of paper had been thrust beneath them. Curiously, I drew it out and opened it.
The sheet was of plain, light-colored wrapping paper, and block letters had been scribbled across it in red crayon, like a child’s scrawl. The words leaped out at me.
DON’T YOU KNOW WHO O IS?
ONLY MEDDLERS NEED TO WORRY.
The crimson letters seemed to burn on the paper, and as I read them over a new pattern began to form itself in my mind.
Laura had been trapped into seeming to have defaced her own portrait, but neither she nor Irene believed she had done it. Laura believed, however, that the threat was against her—that she was the O whom X threatened. Holding this sheet of paper in my hands, I knew better.
The portrait was hung here in this room with me. I was the one who would look at it, not Laura. I was the O who faced some hidden threat. There was someone who didn’t want me in this house—someone who whispered in my room at night, and who had treated Laura’s lovely portrait to vandalism in order to frighten me.
I started to tear up the note, and then thought better of it. Here, indeed, was “evidence.” I put it away in my handbag, postponing any decision as to what I would do with it. I was dealing with a cunning and psychopathic mind given to childish means of threatening me. There were ways of dealing with such a mind and coaxing it to betray itself.
On a table near the window lay the scissors which had been used to scar the picture. I picked them up and looked at the blades. The same bits of canvas and pigments still clung to the tips. Smiling a bit grimly to myself, I went to the picture and turned it outward on the wall. The X space was still empty. Carefully, I scratched an O into the waiting square. Now X was neatly blocked from winning the game. Let whoever it was make what they liked of that.
I thought no longer of going through the trunk.
Chapter 9
The household was in a bustle the next morning in order to be ready by the time Gunnar called to take us up the mountain. Laura, as usual, did not come down to breakfast, but ate lightly in her room. Donia, Miles, and I breakfasted in the dining room, and we were all slightly wary of one another.
Only Irene was in no rush, since she was not coming with us. Her position in the household was never quite clear-cut. Miles and Donia both had a tendency to treat her as an employed housekeeper. By Laura she was accepted on a more intimate basis. How she herself felt about her position, I didn’t know. She preferred to serve us at the table and eat her own meals leisurely by herself later. Yet she displayed no attitude of inequality with those she served.
The moment I finished my coffee I excused myself and went to my room to put on my borrowed winter clothes. I got into Laura’s beautifully cut brown ski pants, and a tan sweater with a bright zigzag design in green. We’d found that a pair of her brown boots fitted me comfortably, and I was lacing them up when Irene tapped at my door.
When I called to her she came in, bringing the Venetian red gown from The Whisperer.
“I’ve pressed it for you,” she said, and went to the wardrobe closet that occupied a space against the wall. It was a closet which held some of Laura’s clothes, and she pushed them along the rod to make way for the red dress. “Miss Worth saw me pressing it, and she also wishes to try it on.”
I stared at her back in surprise, and realized that something had agitated Irene. The very stiffness of her shoulders and neck hinted at some control she was exerting over her own feelings.
“But I thought she hated the sight of that dress,” I said. “I thought she didn’t want to be reminded of anything connected with The Whisperer.”
Irene hung the dress on the rod, and turned slowly about. “I don’t know what’s happened to her this morning. It’s not that she’s merely excited about the trip up the mountain. It’s as if she has grown suddenly younger. She’s a different woman today.”
“But that’s fine, isn’t it?” I said.
“I don’t like it.”
“Why not? Why should a change for the better worry you?”
Irene’s thin, solemn face trembled into lines of concern. “She’s talking too recklessly. She’s speaking of returning to Hollywood.”
“Oh, no!” My cry was involuntary. I tied the laces on my boot and leaned against the sofa back, waiting for Irene to go on.
“She says you’ve told her it’s possible for her to become a star again. She believes you. She says nothing is going to stop her.” There was restrained accusation in Irene’s tone.
“But yesterday she said she was too old, and that it was too late,” I protested. “What’s happened to change her mind?”
/> “She’s done some rearranging of her own thoughts. She’s discarding facts and replacing them with a dream. She’s convinced herself that all America is waiting for her. It’s completely mad.”
I agreed that it was, and I felt both hot and cold at the same time because of my own self-questioning.
“She’ll get over it,” I said. I didn’t know whether what Irene was telling me was good news or bad. There was that tearing in me which pulled me in opposite directions, and I couldn’t seem to face one steady course.
“If you’ve encouraged her in this direction, then you must undo it,” Irene said sternly.
The contrary pull tugged at me. “What if it’s perfectly true that there’s an audience waiting for her?”
“Miss Hollins, if there’s an audience for her in America, they want her as the legend they know. They want her young and beautiful as she used to be, and enormously talented.”
“Talent doesn’t die,” I said.
“But it may grow rusty. She’s not strong enough to face the changes she’d have to make. She’ll only be humiliated, defeated.”
This was what I thought myself, and I said nothing.
Irene moved toward the door. “Miss Hollins, as her daughter, you must persuade her against this terrible foolishness.”
The doorbell sounded, and she went to answer it, leaving me staring at the disturbing visions that had risen in my own mind. From across the room the scarred portrait watched me with lustrous dark eyes, the lips softly parted and faintly smiling. The face of a woman who waited eagerly for love. I hardened myself against its spell. Perhaps she had waited for love, but she had also thrown it away. The O, freshly marked, seemed to glow against the canvas.
Out in the hall I heard Gunnar’s voice and I hurried into the warm woolen jacket Laura had loaned me, tied a bright scarf about my head against the wind that would be blowing on top of Ulriken, and went into the hallway.
Laura had just come running down the stairs, dressed in smartly contrasting black and white. Black ski pants and a white sweater, over which she had flung a black leather jacket of expensive make. A black and white wool scarf was knotted about her neck. Her everyday, clothes might have a vintage touch, but her sports garb was obviously smart and in fashion. Even her visored cap of white leather looked as though it might have come from a fashionable boutique.
Listen for the Whisperer Page 17
