by Dianne Day
“That is very thoughtful of you.” Arthur gave me a meltingly warm smile. “However, there isn’t a chance in the world that this little book, once it’s published, will be distributed anywhere but right around here. I do it all myself, you see.”
“You publish your own books?”
“Yes and no.” He hunched his shoulders and ducked his head as if, for a moment, he were trying to make himself disappear. Then he lifted his face and a beatific grin spread across his face. “It’s like with the house and all. The experts do the part I can’t do because I don’t know how, and then I do the rest. They do the actual typesetting and the printing and binding, but I do the distribution. You know, I take my books around to various little towns that have bookstores, and sometimes I leave a few copies in a grocery market or a general store—anyplace they’ll sell them. I like doing it. Sometimes I make enough from one book to pay for the printing of the next. I consider that a great success.”
“Yes, indeed! But perhaps you are too modest? There is such an interest at the present time in spiritualism and the occult; mediums communicating with the dead and such are all the rage, so surely ghosts are an equally fashionable topic. Have you ever tried to get a publisher in New York interested in your ghost tales? Or even one in San Francisco, if you want to stay closer to home?”
This time Arthur didn’t pink, he turned scarlet. “Oh, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t—I’d just—”
“You’re shy,” I said gently, laying my hand on his arm in what I hoped was a comforting and friendly manner. “I quite understand. I certainly didn’t mean to embarrass you. I enjoyed typing your ghost stories, and that is a great deal more than I can say for many things I’ve typed in the two years I have been doing this kind of work.”
“L-let me pay you,” he said, slipping out from under my hand and going around to sit at his desk. “Ten cents a page? How many pages did it turn out to be?” He turned the stack over to see for himself so I did not interrupt his calculations, although I remembered how many pages and so could have told him the price. By focusing on this activity he was recovering his equilibrium.
I reflected that I never would have guessed what a sweet, gentle person lay beneath Arthur Heyer’s medium-everything exterior. Not only that, but a multifaceted and modest individual. It is rare in my experience to meet a man (or woman) of considerable wealth who is not interested, first and foremost, in either increasing or parading it. Arthur had turned out to be most refreshing.
He presented his cheque with a flourish and invited me to stay for lunch, which I declined, but I did take a glass of iced tea. We sat at a lovely casement window looking out over the back garden, where he had been working when I arrived. I said, “I shall have to ask you to teach me the names of the plants. Having come from the East, I am unfamiliar with so much of the flora here. For example, what do you call those trees with blossoms that look like red bottlebrushes?”
“Bottlebrush trees,” said Arthur, and we both laughed.
When I judged the mood was right I reached into my leather bag, took out an envelope, and removed from it the picture of Sabrina Howard. “You mentioned that you are fond of Phoebe Broom,” I said by way of introducing the topic in a manner I hoped would be palatable to him.
“I am,” Arthur nodded. “Deputy sheriffs were here. They think something may have happened to her.”
“I know. I think so, too.” I put the photograph face up on the table and slid it across to him. “This woman may have something to do with Phoebe’s disappearance, in an indirect way. Have you ever seen the woman in this picture, Arthur? Do you know who she is?”
“Oh, my.” He picked it up and brought it closer to his face. Apparently he was a bit shortsighted. “Lovely girl, just lovely. No, I don’t know anybody who looks like that. I wish I did.”
“Take your time. She has been seen in this area. Perhaps, if you don’t know her personally, you may have been at some gathering or social occasion where she was present.”
His smooth brow wrinkled with concentration. I presumed that Arthur had a sharp memory; the collection and accurate recording of his tales would require such a trait, and practice would have kept it honed. At last his expression cleared and he said triumphantly, “Yes! I remember her in a white dress, and her hair was different. It was kind of—you must excuse me, Fremont, I don’t know much about women’s hair—anyway she had kind of a long curl or two hanging down in the back, and one of them she’d pull over her shoulder like this.” He stroked the side of his neck, then pulled a long face. “But I can’t remember where it was. I seem to see her with a lot of people around. So either she was somebody’s guest at one of our parties, or else … I know! I could have seen her when my parents were visiting back in the fall. They stayed at the Del Monte Hotel, and there’s always a crowd around there.”
“It certainly sounds likely. Anything else? A name, perhaps?”
After a couple of frowning minutes, Arthur shook his head. “No, sorry.”
“Not at all. You’ve been very helpful.” I restored the photograph to its protective envelope and gathered up my things. “And I’ve truly enjoyed talking with you.”
“You have?” He sounded amazed.
“I have.” I smiled.
Arthur escorted me to the front door. As we reached it he said in a dubious tone, “I keep thinking I also saw the lovely lady in the picture somewhere else, not just the big party, but another time. But the exact place just won’t come to me. It’s as if I can almost see her in a different place, but then the picture gets all dim.”
“Don’t try too hard,” I advised. “Your memory will surely sharpen in time, and when it does, I hope you’ll let me know.”
Oscar and Mimi Peterson were working in their yard in a rather desultory fashion; there was a kind of thick, sludgy quality to the atmosphere around them that made me think they might recently have quarreled. Not an ideal time for a visit, but since they’d already seen me it could scarcely be helped.
There was once a king—of England, I think it was—called Longshanks; King Longshanks had had nothing on Oscar. If anything, Oscar had grown leaner in the couple of months since I’d first met him, which only made him seem taller still. The habitual pallor of his skin had acquired an unhealthy grayish tinge. Even Mimi lacked her usual ruddy glow today.
“Hello,” I called out as I approached. “Isn’t it wonderful that the storm’s finally over!”
Oscar sneered. “Hello, Fremont. It’d be a lot more wonderful if it had never happened at all. Gawd, what a mess! We’ll be forever getting all this farking shite cleaned up.”
“Excuse the crude language, Fremont,” Mimi said with a strained smile. “Thanks for dropping by. You’ve given us the perfect opportunity to stop work for a while. Let’s go inside. Oscar, are you coming?”
“No!” he said viciously. “There’s too much to do.”
“I can come back another time,” I said in an undertone to Mimi, “but before I leave—”
“Don’t be silly!” Mimi swiped her hand on her skirt before firmly taking my arm. “I hope you’ll stay. I can use a change of company.”
Although I did not want to stay, after that I could hardly refuse.
I had never been inside the Petersons’ cottage before, as they seemed to spend a good deal of time—and much of Carmel with them—in the woodsy clearing that was more or less their yard. The layout of the cottage was much like Michael’s, with a kitchen and dining area at one end of the largest room. There were differences, though: The entire cottage was on a bigger scale, and Oscar had built a magnificent fieldstone fireplace at the opposite end of the main room.
“The fireplace is spectacular,” I said.
“Oscar’s masterpiece. Unfortunately we can’t eat stones, and for every one in that fireplace there’s a poem that didn’t get written, and so won’t be published, and Oscar won’t be paid.” She sighed. “If we didn’t have my income—But you don’t want to hear all that. Coffee or tea, Frem
ont? I haven’t made any lemonade today.”
“Coffee, please. Mimi, I know it’s none of my business, but I thought Oscar was the one with the family money.”
She laughed, bitterly. “His family knows him too well. Oscar’s money is in a trust fund. It leaks out to us one lean trickle at a time, and he has exotic tastes.”
“Exotic?” I inquired, but she would not be further drawn. She set about warming over the breakfast coffee without saying more.
I reached into my leather bag and removed a small round tin box printed all over with a pattern of red plaid, which I took over to Mimi. “This is for you. To thank you for spending the night at my bedside when I was hurt.”
Her face lit up as she opened the tin. “Shortbread! How thoughtful you are, Fremont, but you don’t have to give me anything. I was glad to sit with you. That’s what neighbors are for.”
“Nevertheless I am grateful. You must accept it.”
“We’ll open up the tin and have some with our coffee, shall we?”
Mimi and I gossiped and chatted in female fashion, and munched on the shortbread, which proved to be quite good. I ascertained that she did not see anything to be alarmed about where Misha was concerned, which meant either that Mimi was not very observant, or simply that the use of drugs, such as alcohol, did not much concern her. Probably the latter.
When at last I judged the moment was right, I took out the photograph and held it up before Mimi. I did not let go of it, for fear I should not get it back. The few anxious moments I’d felt with Arthur had taught me a lesson: From now on, the photograph would not leave my hands. “Mimi,” I asked without preamble, “do you know this woman?”
Instead of drawing closer, she actually pulled back. Her face, which had become animated and pink-cheeked while we talked, went white. Slowly she shook her head. “No.”
“Take your time.” I leaned over and held the picture closer. “If you don’t actually know her, perhaps you’ve seen her somewhere?”
“No, I’ve never seen her in my life.” Mimi was recovering. Belligerence hardened her square jaw and flashed in her blue eyes. “What are you doing, carrying around a picture of somebody you don’t even know? Who do you think you are, Fremont Jones?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Withstanding anger is not so difficult if one realizes that the angry person is not likely to be careful of what she says, and therefore one might learn something that otherwise one would never know.
Presuming that Mimi didn’t really want to know who I thought I was, just for the sake of response I mumbled, “I’m terribly sorry—”
And she interrupted: “We don’t need busybodies in Carmel, poking their noses into people’s privacy. It’s despicable!”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Oscar came through the door, asking, “What’s the matter?”
I spoke up. “Mimi seems to think I’m meddling, I’m not sure into what, but I was just trying to get to the bottom of something that may have to do with Phoebe’s disappearance.”
“Phoebe!” Mimi exclaimed. Oscar shook his head and trudged over to the sink. “Don’t understand what all the fuss is about. People in this country have a right to go where they want to go, when they want to go. Farking bang-bang shoot-’em-up deputy sheriffs …” His voice trailed off.
“What does the woman in the picture have to do with Phoebe?” Mimi asked. Her eyes looked round and scared, and her anger was gone.
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence, but Phoebe was trying to help me identify her and then all of a sudden she—I mean Phoebe—was gone.”
“Somebody else gone besides Phoebe?” Sitting next to his wife, Oscar removed his glasses and began to polish them on his shirt. Without the glasses his face looked worn and defenseless.
“This woman.” Dead and gone, I thought. I held the photograph toward Oscar. “Do you know her?”
He craned his neck and squinted while continuing to polish the lenses of his glasses. “Never saw her in my life. But then, I don’t pay much attention to people.”
“That’s true,” said Mimi, leaning affectionately into her husband, “he doesn’t. Oscar only just barely lives in the real world. I’m the one who has to keep up with things, and I can tell you for sure the woman in that picture isn’t one of our circle. I’m sorry I jumped all over you, Fremont. It’s just that Oscar and I have a mania for privacy.”
I slipped the photograph back into my bag, saying offhandedly, “Really? You always have so many people around here I’d never have guessed you to have such a mania.”
They looked at each other. “Not personally,” Mimi qualified, “for Carmel. For the whole community. Having the police here—”
“Sheriffs,” Oscar inserted.
“—was difficult for all of us. We just want to be left alone.”
“Amen!” Oscar said emphatically. Then he put his glasses back on, carefully adjusting the earpieces.
I stood up and slung my bag over my shoulder. “I quite understand, and so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”
Both Petersons mumbled separate versions of thanks-for-stopping-by. In the doorway I turned back. “Oh, one last thing I’d like to ask you. Was Phoebe in the habit of taking off abruptly, with no warning? Did she have someone in particular in whom she might have confided?”
“That’s two things,” Oscar observed mildly, without offering to answer either one.
“We didn’t know her well enough to say.” Mimi, of course, filled the gap. As a helpmeet sort of wife, she went more than halfway. “Phoebe kept to herself a good deal. She was very absorbed in her work.”
“I see. Well thanks, and good-bye for now.”
I left with my mind abuzz from the Petersons’ odd dynamics. Even so, I could not fail to notice that the out-of-doors smelled wonderfully fresh after all that rain. I fancied I could almost hear trees and bushes and flowers responding, growing.
Bessie raised her head and whuffled as I came up. “One more stop, old girl,” I said, giving her neck a pat, “and then we’ll go back home.” With a curious mixture of reluctance and anticipation, I turned her head toward Casanova Street, and Xanadu.
Michael had obviously done absolutely nothing in the way of afterstorm cleanup. His yard looked much worse than the Petersons’. I picked up my skirt so as not to drag the hem in the dirt as I went up the walk.
The front door was already open; as I approached, Artemisia’s shapely form materialized on the threshold. “Oh, Fremont!” she wailed. “He’s gone!”
“Gone? What exactly do you mean?”
She sniffled. Her eyes were swollen, so I assumed she had been crying. “I mean he left this morning, at a beastly early hour. I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t, and he wouldn’t take me with him either. He said he needed to be alone, and he went as soon as the storm was over. On that wretched yacht of his!”
“You mean the Katya?”
She nodded, so obviously miserable that I impulsively reached out and put one arm around her. I walked with her to a grouping of chairs near the cold fireplace and sat us both down. “The Katya is a sloop,” I said.
“Sloop, yacht, who cares? I hate boats! I get so seasick!”
“Then it’s a good thing he didn’t take you with him.”
“You needn’t be so reasonable about it.”
“I don’t see why not. If he’s gone, he’s gone. Michael has a habit of doing this, you know.”
“Doing what?” Artemisia wiped her eyes on the tail of the red scarf holding back her wild hair. Her dress, for once, was an ordinary blue cotton flannel with buttons all the way down the front.
“Going off by himself,” I said. “Did you see him before he left?”
She nodded glumly.
“Was he, er, inebriated?”
“Hungover, maybe, but he drank gallons of coffee and ate twice as much breakfast as I’ve ever seen him eat. You may as well know, we had an awful row.”
�
�Really?” I tried not to sound too happy about it.
Artemisia bit her lip and a single tear dripped down her right cheek. “I just don’t understand him, Fremont. First I thought he was in love with a woman in San Francisco, who turned out to be you, but then he didn’t bring her—I mean you—back with him; and when you finally did come on your own you didn’t even take the cottage he found for you, so I thought you didn’t want him anyhow. Which meant I had a chance. Lately I really believed I’d wormed my way into his affections, but—but—” She choked up.
“I do want him,” I said quietly. It was the first time I had acknowledged this to another human being, including my very dear friend Meiling, and I went all dizzy with the risk of it.
Artemisia’s brown eyes widened. “You do? But you’re always pushing him away.”
“I know. And he is always doing the same to me.” I regarded the tips of my shoes peeking out from under my skirt. “That seems to be, at least in part, the nature of our relationship. Anyway, lately I’m not sure about anything.” And I had begun to scare myself with this kind of talk.
“I know just what you mean! Gawd!” She threw the back of her hand against her forehead in a dramatic gesture and slid down in her chair with her feet sticking out pigeon-toed in front of her—a posture that even a four-year-old child would have been chided for. From this position she addressed the ceiling, as if I were not there. “It isn’t as if I wanted to marry the man, for heaven’s sake. I only wanted to have some fun, for us to enjoy each other, maybe even live together; but not all the time because of course I have to have my own space to create my art. Which reminds me,” she tilted her wrist away from her eyes and looked at me without otherwise moving a muscle, “you are typing my Merchant of Dreams, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but there have been some unavoidable interruptions. It’s a fascinating story. I’m awed by your talent, Artemisia. Truly.”
