Mermaid

by Margaret Millar

  A waiter approached the table and Mrs. Holbrook or­dered a cup of coffee and Aragon a bowl of soup. He knew the soup came from a can and nothing much could be done to ruin it.

  “Donny’s a wild boy,” Mrs. Holbrook said. “I had a great many misgivings about accepting him at the school. But he put on a good show during our initial talks. He was sweet, contrite, eager to please, ready to cooperate. I bought the whole act. His first violent rage came as a shock to me. I didn’t report it to his father. Donny himself was the victim of violence. It was almost inevitable that he’d pass it on.”

  “He told me he was on probation. What for?”

  “Assault with a deadly weapon.”

  “Then you’ll have to call the police in on this.”

  “I will, of course. I’m stalling, trying to give him a chance to come back of his own accord. If he doesn’t, his probation will be revoked and he’ll be sent God knows where. I would like to prevent that. Donny’s a victim. His father is what is politely called a wealthy playboy, meaning a rich man without discipline, morals or responsibility. His mother was a bit actress who took to booze and barbitu­rates and eventually overdosed when Donny was five. A succession of stepmothers and live-ins weren’t much im­provement.”

  “Where do I fit into this?” Aragon said. “You didn’t go to the trouble of coming here in order to discuss Donny Whitfield’s case history.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “The boy’s escape is the one I owe you. How do you want it paid?”

  “Let me state my position, not as a person, but as the head of a school which serves an important purpose in the community.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The soup arrived, overwatered and underheated, but Aragon ate it anyway while Mrs. Holbrook watched him with the ill-concealed irritation of someone who is not hungry.

  “You pay me back,” she said finally, “by keeping silent.”

  “About what?”

  “Donny Whitfield. His disappearance is not yet generally known and I’d like to keep it that way as long as possible. He may come back of his own volition. Meanwhile something else has happened. Mr. Jasper has called a meeting of the board of directors for this afternoon at two o’clock at the school. Each member of the board contributes heavily to our endowment fund, so it doesn’t function merely as an advisory committee. I wasn’t invited as I usually am, and Mr. Jasper didn’t tell me the reason for the sudden meet­ing, but I think something more is involved than just Cleo running away from home. My efforts to contact Roger Lennard have failed and I’ve begun to suspect the worst.”

  “What’s your idea of the worst, Mrs. Holbrook?”

  “What you mentioned as a possibility the first time we met, that Cleo and Roger are together somewhere. Even worse than worst, that Mr. Jasper has found out about it. Mr. Jasper has never called a meeting of the board before, in fact has seldom attended one. He must have discovered something linking Cleo and Roger, and he’s going to blame the school for it.”

  “He didn’t discover it,” Aragon said. “I did.”

  “I can’t believe it. Roger’s not a bisexual, or a promis­cuous homosexual. He’s had the same lover ever since he came to town last December. I’ve seen him when he’s come to pick Roger up at the school several times. A man about Roger’s age, a muscle-beach type, evidently the macho partner in the marriage. That’s what Roger called it—a marriage.”

  “Do you know his friend’s name?”

  “We were never introduced, but in our conversations Roger referred to him as Timothy.”

  Timothy North, of the pink bungalow and the exercise machine and the cock-and-bull story about a stranger com­ing into the bar with a lost basset hound. The story had been crazy enough to be true. And Aragon had accepted it because there seemed to be no reason for him to lie.

  “One of the factors in my hiring Roger in the first place was his steady relationship with this man Timothy. Call it a marriage, a pair bond, whatever. They were like an ordinary couple searching for a house to buy which they could afford. Because of the strength of this relationship, I felt Roger could be completely trusted with both the male and female students. I’m at a loss to explain what could have happened.”

  “No one is asking you to explain.”

  “No?” She stared into the cup of coffee as though she could see its bitterness without bothering to taste it. “Do you know how the board of directors will regard this? They will question my judgment, my hiring practices, my character, perhaps even my sanity. The school will be found guilty, its administration, its faculty, its policies, all guilty as charged. They must not be given an additional count against me, like Donny’s running away.”

  “I don’t intend to tell anybody, Mrs. Holbrook.”

  “Oh, they’ll find out anyway, of course. But meanwhile Donny might decide to return voluntarily. It’s quite possi­ble.”

  But her troubled eyes indicated she didn’t think so. Nei­ther did Aragon.

  “It was a mistake to put him on that diet,” Mrs. Hol­brook said. “I argued with the dietitian about it but she insisted it would improve Donny’s self-image if he lost some weight. It’s frightening how logical theories and good intentions can blow up in your face. I wonder—I’ve often wondered—are the Donnys and Cleos worth the trouble they cause? Twenty years ago if I’d heard myself asking a question like that I would have been appalled. Now I sim­ply grope for answers and come up with more questions. How many lives should be warped for the sake of one dis­turbed child? If it’s true about Roger and Cleo, why in God’s name didn’t he have sense enough to realize what he was getting into and back out of it? Couldn’t he see what a dismal future was in store for him?”

  “Cleo will inherit a million dollars when she’s twenty-five,” Aragon said. “That might make his future less dis­mal.”

  “Roger doesn’t care about money. His work, his books, his music, these are the things he values.”

  “A million dollars will buy a lot of books and music. Even if Cleo could be found mentally incompetent to han­dle her own affairs, once she’s married to Roger he will be her guardian, not Jasper, no matter what legal maneuvers he goes through.”

  “You wouldn’t be so cynical about Roger if you met him.”

  “I intend to do just that.”

  “I can’t believe that Roger would—I just can’t believe—”

  “Yes, you can, Mrs. Holbrook,” Aragon said. “You’ve al­ready started.”

  He paid the bill and walked her back to her car, a black Seville parked about a block away. The front bumper overlapped the parking space marker by at least two feet, a fact that did not go unnoticed. A handwritten note pushed under the windshield wiper read Lern To Park. Although she smiled slightly as she crumpled the note in her hand she didn’t look amused. To people in her profession repri­mands were to give, not to take.

  “I’d like to think quite a few of my pupils can spell bet­ter than this,” she said dryly. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Aragon. I appreciate your promise to keep quiet about Donny Whitfield. Things are already bad enough. The Cleo story won’t look very pretty in the newspaper: School Counselor Elopes with Retarded Heiress.”

  “The local paper is usually more tactful than that.”

  “Not where Mr. Jasper is concerned. He’s for oil-drilling in the channel. They stand opposed. They wouldn’t pass up a chance like this to get at him, perhaps at me as well. Some people resent having a school like ours in their vicin­ity. They consider our students dangerous. They’re not, of course.”

  Neither of them mentioned the name of the exception.

  He told her he would be interested in hearing the out­come of the board of directors’ meeting and wrote down on his card the telephone number of his apartment and of his office, which had a twenty-four-hour answering service.

  As he watched her pu
ll away from the curb he hoped her driving was a little better than her parking and a lot better than that of Mrs. Griswold, who’d returned the bas­set hound to the Jaspers.

  He remembered his wild ride through the city streets following Mrs. Griswold to her tenant’s bungalow to pay the reward money.

  Timothy North must have laughed all the way to the bank.

  10

  Shortly before two o’clock the members of the board of directors began arriving. From the north windows of her office Mrs. Holbrook could have watched them, noting which ones had found time to come to a meeting so sud­denly arranged. She stood instead at the south window, surveying the grounds of her school. She knew every square foot of its acreage, the tennis and basketball courts, the pool enclosed by an eight-foot chain-link fence with its gate double-padlocked, the picnic grounds, the corral and dog runs; she knew how much the new roof for the stable had cost; she knew the names of every horse and dog, of every shrub and tree on the property. It was her small kingdom and for thirty years she had lived in it and for it.

  Tears stung her eyes and blurred her vision. Everything seemed to be moving, as if the first tremor of an earth­quake had struck. There was a knock on the door. She blinked away the tears and said, “Come in.”

  A girl entered, carrying an oversized canvas tote bag with the name Gretchen printed on it. She was sixteen, large and sturdy, with a moon face and round eyes and the faint trace of a mustache.

  “I came to clean,” Gretchen said.

  “You cleaned yesterday, Gretchen. Things haven’t had a chance to get dirty.”

  “I see dirt that other people can’t.”

  “All right. Go ahead.”

  The girl began her work at the bottom shelf of one of the bookcases. She sat on the floor, removed a dustcloth from the tote bag and started wiping each book individu­ally. She hummed tunelessly as she worked. The noise didn’t bother Mrs. Holbrook. Gretchen was happy at these times and Mrs. Holbrook was happy for her.

  Her gaze returned to the school grounds. A picnic was in progress and a group of boys was playing basketball, coached by their athletic director, Miss Trimble. A girl was working a quarter horse in the training ring but the pool and the tennis courts were empty. Only one student was using the playground. He was swinging on a tire sus­pended from a limb of a huge cypress tree.

  His name was Michael and he was new and very quiet and Mrs. Holbrook was worried about him. She went down the hall and out the back door and crossed the lawn to the cypress tree. The boy didn’t turn his head or indi­cate in any way that he was aware of her.

  “Hello, Michael,” she said. “Do you like swinging?”

  His eyes were closed and he might have been asleep ex­cept for the movement of his legs.

  “Have you had lunch, Michael?”

  He made a sound that could have been yes or no. She was quite sure it was no. The dietitian had already dis­cussed Michael’s case with her. A problem eater given to hunger strikes, he was at least twenty pounds underweight.

  “I have a bowl of very nice apples in my office,” she said. “Or perhaps you and I could walk down to the grove and pick some oranges. Would you like that?”

  He spoke without opening his eyes.

  “I hate you.”

  “I don’t hate you back, Michael. I think you and I can become good friends. Your mother’s driving down to see you next month. Did you know that?”

  “I hate you.”

  She felt the sting of tears again. She would have liked to hate him back but . . . Instead, she wanted to hold him in her arms and comfort him. He was helpless and possibly hopeless. There was no apparent cause for his condition. He had loving parents, three sisters and a brother, all nor­mal, and no history of childhood illnesses or accidents. He was probably, as one of the counselors had pointed out, the victim of the commonest and most mysterious cause of all, a failure of genetic programming, a fancy name for rot­ten luck. She tried to remember which counselor had said it. Perhaps it was Roger Lennard and perhaps he was talk­ing about himself, not this quiet boy on the swing with his eyes closed to the world.

  “You can’t see anything unless you open your eyes, Mi­chael,” she said gently. “It’s like being blind, and you wouldn’t like to be blind, would you? . . . I know. I bet someone has glued your eyelashes together. Let’s go to the tap over there and wash away the glue, and presto, your eyes will pop open again. How about it?”

  “I hate you.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not so crazy about me, either.”

  She turned and went back to her office, pausing only to pick up some bark that had peeled off the lemona eucalyp­tus tree and toss it in the trash bin. A failure in genetic programming. Rotten luck. She was almost sure now those were Roger’s words and that he’d been talking about him­self. Though he had never openly indicated dissatisfaction with his role in life, she sometimes sensed his uneasiness, his awareness that he was out of sync, out of tune.

  In the office Gretchen was still at work on the bottom shelf of books, still humming, still happy. Mrs. Holbrook picked up the phone and called Roger’s number as she had done a dozen times in the past two days. She was about to hang up when she heard the click of

  a receiver being lifted.

  “Roger? Is that you, Roger?”

  The only answer was a whimpering animal sound fol­lowed by the thud of something falling, or being thrown.

  “Roger, it’s Rachel Holbrook. Are you drunk? Answer me.”

  She waited for a full minute before hanging up. She felt dizzy with anger, days, weeks, years of anger, at the Rogers and Cleos and Donnys and Michaels and boards of direc­tors, years of anger she had never shown, never even real­ized she felt.

  She spoke as quietly and as calmly as possible to the girl sitting on the floor. “I have an important errand, Gretchen. Perhaps we’d better postpone the rest of the cleaning to another day.”

  “No, I can’t. Everything’s terribly dirty. It’s going to take me six months to finish up.”

  “I need your cooperation, Gretchen. My secretary had to go to the dentist. When he returns I want you to give him a message for me. Can you do that?”

  “No. I’m very busy.”

  “Gretchen, for God’s sake—”

  “You told us not to swear,” Gretchen said. “God is a dirty word.”

  The carport beside Space C of Hibiscus Court was occu­pied by a car Mrs. Holbrook recognized as Roger Len­nard’s, a red Pinto station wagon with Utah license plates.

  She stopped her Seville behind it and was about to get out when a man came hurrying toward her. He was an old man, so brown and wrinkled he looked as though he’d been hung out to dry in the California sun like a string of chili peppers.

  “You can’t stop there, lady,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “These are single units, one parking space apiece, no ex­ceptions.” The old man removed his straw hat. “My name’s Abercrombie. I make sure the rules are followed.”

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  “Everybody’s in a hurry. When everybody’s in a hurry nobody gets anywhere. It’s like all the people wanting to drive in the fast lane when the other lanes are open.”

  “Where do I leave my car?”

  “You can go back to the street or you can follow this road to the guest parking lot at the rear.”

  She went back to the street. She had the impression that Mr. Abercrombie’s rules would cover every inch, every nook and cranny, every leaf and blade of grass on the premises. When she returned he had disappeared.

  She knocked on Roger Lennard’s door and said in the voice she reserved for students who were being deliberately malicious, “Roger, it’s Rachel Holbrook. I want to talk to you. Open this door.”

  If there was any response she couldn’t hear it above the sounds of traffic on the st
reet and in the air.

  She knocked again, waited, then tried the door. It was locked. She’d come prepared for that. Now and then one of the students would lock himself in a dorm or lavatory or classroom and she would have to call in a locksmith to ex­tricate him. After a number of these occasions the lock­smith had provided her with a piece of metal, one of the tools of his trade called a picklock, and taught her how to use it. She carried it in her purse as casually as she did her wallet and lipstick. She used it now expertly, her body screening her movements from the possible gaze of Mr. Abercrombie.

  The door opened. The first thing she saw was a kitchen table containing a salt shaker, a bottle of ketchup and a typewriter. There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter and a white envelope beside it. The kitchen chair was overturned and the telephone was on the floor beside it. It was a child’s phone in the form of Mickey Mouse and she couldn’t imagine Roger owning such a thing unless it had been given to him by a practical joker.

  “Roger?”

  She took a tentative step into the room. It was only then that she saw him lying on his side on a couch, his partly open mouth revealing bright red stains.

  She forced herself to go over and touch his forehead. It was warm, but not warm enough. She picked up the tele­phone and called the emergency number printed on the front of it. Then she righted the kitchen chair and sat down to wait for the police and paramedics. She knew what the red stains in his mouth meant: There was noth­ing that could be done for Roger except by experts.

  Even in the dim light she could make out the words on the page in the typewriter.

  She picked up the white envelope and saw with a shock that it was addressed to her at Holbrook Hall. It was ready to be mailed, sealed and stamped with an extra stamp because of its bulk. Impulsively, without even thinking of any consequence of her action, she put the envelope in her purse. Then she called one of the numbers Aragon had written on his card.

  He answered on the second ring. “Yes?”

  “This is Rachel Holbrook,” she said. “I’m at Roger Len­nard’s place. I think he’s dead.”