by Alice Duncan
“Please don’t bother with feeding me, Vi,” said I nobly—at that point, I could have eaten the entire cow raw; to heck with the roasted parts. “I can fix myself a sandwich.” And it would be quicker than her fixing me a full dinner plate and warming it up.
“Fiddlesticks. You look like you’re going to drop in your tracks, Daisy Majesty. You just come right out here and plop yourself in this chair and wait five minutes. It won’t take me more than that to get a real meal ready for you to eat.” Aunt Vi didn’t believe in sandwiches unless you were going on a picnic somewhere far, far away from your own home.
Outnumbered and overruled, I tried to be polite as I conceded the point. “Thanks, Vi. Let me hang up my hat and get comfortable.”
Getting comfortable would probably have taken a week of sleep, a healthy husband, and a million dollars, but it felt good to take off my hat, slip out of my lovely foulard dress and hang it up, remove my shoes and stockings, throw on an old polka-dot wrapper, and shove my tired feet into a pair of floppy slippers that probably should have been discarded eons before, but which were so comfortable I couldn’t bear to part with them.
I limped out to the sun porch, kissed Billy, and collapsed into the chair beside him. “My land, but those people have problems,” I announced in a tired voice. “Quincy Applewood came back, though.”
“What about Kincaid?” Billy asked.
“No sign of the old buzzard yet,” said I.
“Daisy!” Ma had always tried to make me behave like a lady, but her efforts hadn’t panned out very well.
“But he is an old buzzard, Ma. He’s a thief and a lecher. He used to chase Edie Marsh around in his wheelchair.” My mother gasped. Pa chuckled. I’ll never understand men. “The police think Quincy murdered him and re-stole the stolen bearer bonds.”
“This is getting confusing.” Billy chuckled, and my heart went all warm and gooey.
“You’re telling me. What’s even worse is that the man who drove Mr. Kincaid away from the mansion last night bopped Quincy over the head with a tree trunk or something and I had to doctor the poor boy.” I shuddered, remembering.
“You?” Billy’s eyes opened so wide, I could see how gorgeous they were even in the dark.
“Good heavens.” Ma again, pressing a palm to her heart.
“That’s my girl,” said Pa, who was much more easygoing than Ma.
“Maybe. But I didn’t like doing it. It was horrid. He had a lump on his head the size of a boulder, and there were even bugs stuck in the dried blood there.”
“Good God.” Billy.
“How awful!” Ma.
“Be damned. Were they alive?” Pa. Of course.
God bless him. I laughed. “Naw. They were only dead ants, but the experience wasn’t one I care to repeat any time soon. I don’t think I’m cut out for nursing.”
Aunt Vi was as good as her word, and within five minutes I was trying to act like a lady for Ma’s sake, but I’m afraid I ate too quickly to maintain a true ladylike appearance. Since I’d been in the middle of describing the state of affairs at the Kincaid mansion when the food came, not even Ma chastised me for gobbling my food. She was as eager as everyone else there to hear the scoop.
As soon as I’d downed the very last bite of pot roast, carrots, pearl onions in Aunt Vi’s special and never-to-be-forgotten cream sauce, potatoes, and gravy, I sat back and sighed. “That was the best pot roast you’ve ever made, Vi.”
Aunt Vi shook her head. “You’re as bad as Billy, Daisy Majesty.”
“Sure, I am.” I reached for Billy’s hand and squeezed it. He returned the pressure. “We’re alike like that.”
“Hmph. Well, all I can say is that you’d better not tell any more of your story until I get back with your piece of coconut cake, young lady.”
“Coconut cake?” Awed, I stared up at my sainted aunt. If there’s one thing on earth I love almost more than Billy or Scotch shortbread, it’s coconut cake the way Aunt Vi makes it—white cake with fluffy white frosting sprinkled with flaked coconut. I could die happy if my last meal ended with Aunt Vi’s coconut cake.
But I respected her wishes. Gazing up at the sky, I muttered tritely, “The moon’s sure bright tonight. It looks kind of like a silver dollar, doesn’t it?” I sighed, overjoyed to be back in the bosom of my family. And being waited on, too. Life couldn’t get much better than that. Well, unless Billy were to get better, but there you go. There are always a few kinks getting in the way of perfection.
“Yeah, but you can’t see the stars so well when the moon’s this bright,” Billy said, not complaining, just stating a fact.
“True.”
“I wonder what that telescope’s finding up there,” mused Pa. He’d always been intrigued by gadgets, and I’m sure he’d love to visit the telescope.
“Maybe we can all take a trip up to Mount Wilson one of these days and see for ourselves,” I said.
There used to be a small-gauge railway that took rich people (and their servants, although I’d wager they stayed in less opulent cars than their employers) up to the lodge at Mount Wilson, but the lodge had burned down a few years before. I think the railroad was still running, though, and I knew that somebody, probably at the California Institute of Technology (I had a hard time remembering it wasn’t Throop College any longer) held guided tours through the planetarium at Mount Wilson.
“That would be swell,” said Billy. “I wonder if I could go, too.”
He sounded so pensive, I almost cried again. I was beginning to wonder if my monthly was coming early. I don’t generally get weepy at the drop of a hat.
“We’d see to it that you came with us, Billy. Don’t you ever worry about that.” Pa patted Billy on the shoulder.
As a rule, Billy didn’t like people patting him on the shoulder in exhibitions of compassion or sympathy, but he never minded when Pa did it. Pa was like that. Everyone loved him because he was, purely and simply, a good man. There was no getting around it. It was a fact of life.
And, when I wasn’t feeling unjustly burdened by life, I felt honestly blessed to have been born into such a wonderful family. Heck, look at the Kincaids. They had more money than God, and their family was a total disaster except for Harold, and he wasn’t exactly normal.
Aunt Vi brought me a big piece of coconut cake and a glass of milk, and the only sounds that could be heard for the next several seconds were those of my own slurping and gulping. Again, Ma didn’t complain about my manners. Not being scolded by my mother was the best of all ways to conclude a ghastly day, and I appreciated it.
When there wasn’t any food left for me to eat after I’d devoured the cake, I finished my tale of Quincy’s unfortunate beating, my unfortunate nursing, and Detective Rotondo’s unfortunate interrogation.
“The rotten policeman actually believes Quincy killed Mr. Kincaid and took the bearer bonds,” I announced, vexed. “He’s such an idiot.”
I felt Billy shrug beside me. “I don’t think Sam’s anything close to being an idiot. I think he’s smart as a whip and probably great at his job.”
Staring at my beloved, I recalled their gin rummy game and the fact that Rotondo had visited him this morning. “You were beating the pants off him in gin rummy,” I reminded him.
I heard the grin in Billy’s voice when he answered my irate declaration. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean beans when it comes to police work. He told me a lot of things about the police while we were playing, too. If I were still a whole, sound man, I might even try to get into the police force.”
“You? A policeman?” My mind boggled, although I think I disguised it. “I never knew you were interested in police work.”
“I never knew it either, until I talked to Sam.”
Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam. Foolishly, I resented the fact that the two men were into a first-name relationship. Also, I didn’t trust Rotondo—Sam, to Billy—not to have been using Billy to get information in a sneaky way. Not that Billy knew a thing about the Kincaids, but
I still didn’t trust Rotondo. Sam, indeed!
“Brother, it sounds like that family’s in a whole lot of trouble,” said Billy, dropping the Sam subject, for which I could only be gratified. “What do you think happened to old man Kincaid?”
“I think he took a bolt for the ocean and aims to get a boat and hie himself off to some other country with his stolen loot. The police think Quincy stole the money from him, killed him, and hid the money and, presumably, the body somewhere.” I sniffed significantly.
“Why’d he aim for the ocean when the land border to Mexico is so close?” Billy wanted to know.
It irked me that men stuck together even when they were apart. My own dear Billy was beginning to sound like Detective Rotondo, and I didn’t like it.
“Because there are guards there,” I said, trying not to sound as irked as I felt.
“But there aren’t many of them. Heck, Daisy, face it, the border into Mexico is easy to cross. Or he could have driven to Arizona and gone to Mexico that way.”
“They posted more guards at the California-Mexico border, specifically to stop Kincaid if he headed that way.” Golly, Arizona hadn’t once crossed my mind, and I felt I’d missed a good idea to fling at Rotondo. Sam. Whoever he was.
“Ah.”
“But it’s a lot harder to drive to Arizona than it is to drive to the Los Angeles Harbor,” Pa pointed out. “Think of all that desert to cross. I’m sure Kincaid has a better machine than we do, but no automobile ever invented can cross a desert without getting into trouble with water or blown tires. And if he has a machine with a battery, I hear they don’t do so good on the desert.” He shook his head. “I sure wouldn’t want to be stranded between California and Arizona, or Arizona and the Mexican border with no water. A man would die from dehydration before the day was out.”
I leaped upon this salient point with both feet. “Exactly! That’s why I think your precious Sam ought to notify the Coast Guard to be on the lookout for Kincaid’s get-away boat. Or whatever it is. But will he listen to me? Of course, not.” I thought Sam believed my ideas were foolish because I was a woman and a so-called fortune-teller, but I didn’t say that for Billy’s sake. If he liked the man, so be it. Nuts. “For all I know, Mr. Kincaid bought himself a yacht and plans to sail to the Hawaiian Islands.”
“I’ve got to admit you have a point there, Daisy,” Billy conceded. How generous of him.
“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” said Ma.
Now let me say right here and now that I adore my mother. She’s an excellent accountant and a whiz when it comes to dealing with numbers. Heck, she’s head bookkeeper at the Hotel Marengo, and has to deal with numbers in the hundreds of thousands (I’m talking about dollars here), but she doesn’t have enough imagination to fill a thimble. She could never even come up with bed-time stories for Walter, Daphne, and me when we were kids. It was Pa who had the imagination in the family. Well, Pa and me. When it came to imagination, I was a chip off the old fatherly block, in fact. But Ma . . . well, she was a swell person.
Therefore, when Ma endorsed my idea, I looked at it again, worried that Rotondo was right and I was a moron.
Oddly enough, it was Billy who came to my rescue. Since he’d come back to me, broken and wasted, I’d taken over the job as rescuer in our marriage. “It makes more sense to head for the ocean than to drive to the border, now that you’ve brought the desert into it, Pa.” He called my father “Pa” out of habit, since his own parents were gone.
“Exactly,” said I, pleased that Billy was actually agreeing with me for once. “That’s why I suggested that Detective Rotondo call on the Coast Guard to patrol.”
On a sigh, Pa said, “It’s a long border between Oregon and Mexico, and it’s a mighty big ocean, Daisy. It might be more difficult to find a man on water than on land, where motorcars have to drive on roads.”
I’d actually thought about that, too, and had an answer handy, more or less. “True, but they have new equipment. What do they call it? Radio? They can communicate from boat to boat using it. I read about it in the Star News a while back.”
“That’s right,” Billy said, sounding enthusiastic for once. “I read about that, too. The article said that one of these days, and not far off, either, people just like us will have radio-signal-receiving sets in our houses. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“It sure would.” Pa sounded even more enthusiastic than Billy. He always did.
“I guess,” I said. “But why would you want to listen to what the Coast Guard boats are saying to each other?”
“It wouldn’t be just the Coast Guard, Daisy.” Lord bless him, Billy didn’t scoff at me for my question. Much. “I read in a magazine at the library that once you’ve got your radio-receiving machine hooked up, you can listen to music or even hear stage plays over the receiver.”
“Really? Gee, I wonder what it would be like to hear a play and not see the actors acting in it.” A couple of times we’d gone to see Gilmor Brown and his Savoy Stock Company at the Old Savoy Theater on Fair Oaks.
I liked going to the theater, but it was difficult for Billy, since he had to climb up stairs, which spoiled him from doing any other kind of exercise for hours afterwards. And then somebody had to heave his wheelchair up the same stairs, and he had to sit in an aisle in order to watch the play, because he was too winded to climb out of his chair and sit on a real seat.
He’d never allow Pa to lift and carry him. Plus, he hated being noticed except when I wheeled him down Colorado Boulevard during the annual Armistice Day Parade, because he was only one of several other men in wheelchairs, most in even worse shape than he was. At the theater, people couldn’t help but notice him in his wheelchair because it blocked an aisle.
“I’m not sure I’d enjoy listening to a play without being able to see the actors,” said Ma, giving an example of that defective imagination I mentioned earlier.
“I think it would be great,” I said to her. Because she needed more explanation than most people due to the one flaw in her essential composition, I added, “It would be like reading a book, Ma. When you read a book, you see the words but supply the characters with their looks and so forth in your head.”
Ma said, “Oh.”
“Exactly,” said Billy. “Boy, it would be great to be able to listen to the news on a radio-receiving set, too.”
“But we get the news in the Star News,” said Ma.
“True, but maybe we’d get it faster over the radio-receiver than the newspaper. Even when newspapers print specials, it takes time.”
“And don’t ever forget that people are always coming up with new ideas,” said Pa, who actually did come up with new ideas occasionally, unlike Ma. “I’d bet my entire fortune—” This, needless to say, was a joke, since he didn’t have one. “—that if radio-signal-receiving sets become popular, folks will begin writing stories specifically for them.”
“Oh, boy, I hadn’t thought about that. What fun, to be able to sit down in your own house and listen to a real, live play on a machine!”
Okay, that made a dog and a radio-receiving set I was going to buy for Billy as soon as I could. For all I knew, radio-receiving sets cost a mint, but I was fairly sure I could get Mrs. Bissel to give me one of her dachshunds without much trouble. Mrs. Bissel was a sweetheart, but she was even dimmer than Mrs. Kincaid, and she absolutely loved people who loved her dogs. I expected her to call me to conduct a séance any day now, and I was going to see if she’d trade a séance for a dachshund.
Sometimes when I think about it, my life seems kind of strange. But it was mine, and I lived it as well as I could.
# # #
To my shock and intense pleasure, not to mention Billy’s, Mrs. Kincaid didn’t telephone the next day. Or the next. Or even the next. I went to choir practice on Thursday, praying I wouldn’t return home to a message begging me to race to the Kincaids’ house, and there wasn’t one.
We went to church on Sunday morning, and there was no Sam
Rotondo sitting in the congregation to sabotage the service for me. As luck would have it, I didn’t have to sing any duets that day. He’d chosen the one day during which his presence would upset me to show up. I considered such behavior typical on his part.
He and Billy, however, were becoming closer and closer. Darned if the man didn’t come over twice that week to play gin rummy with Billy and Pa. He wouldn’t talk about the Kincaid case, claiming it was against police procedure. I just bet.
I chose to ignore them and make myself a new dress in a gorgeous cream-colored silk, having found the material on sale in Nash’s Department Store’s fabric department. I usually wear dark colors, but I’d rationalized the expenditure by deciding the creamy color would blend in with my skin tone and make me look mysterious. And if it didn’t, I could always wear the dress to church.
Billy must have told Sam—I was beginning to think of the man as Sam now, too, drat it—about radio-receiving sets, and they talked about them during one entire gin rummy evening. Pa joined in the conversation with gusto, as usual. As Ma brought out the hemming stick and stuck pins around the bottom of my cream-colored dress—it had one of those modern, up-and-down, uneven hems so Ma had to adjust the metal measuring stick every few pins—we could hear them, yakking away like gossiping woman.
“I don’t care what anyone says, Ma. Men are as bad as women when it comes to talking about silly things.”
She glanced up from her hemming stick, pins fanning out from her mouth and making her look like a gargoyle. “Do you think so, dear? I rather enjoy hearing Billy and your father enjoying themselves.”
When she put it like that, I felt guilty. “I do too, Ma,” I said, lying through my teeth.
What was the matter with me? I knew good and well that I was jealous of Sam Rotondo, and I couldn’t figure out why. Perhaps because we’d gotten off to such a rocky start (Sam and me, not Billy and me. Our rockiness had come with the war), I didn’t like the fact that Billy liked him, if that makes any sense.
