Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense

by Unknown

  “We know what it’s like for a family to worry and wonder about a daughter,” my mother said. “Go back to the people who love you.”

  That meant Mrs. Peacock, I guess.

  “Just to make sure you get there,” my father said, “let us help toward your fare.” I tried to take my hand away, but he put a folded bill into it and I had to take it. “I hope someday,” he said, “that someone will do as much for our Louisa.”

  “Good-by, my dear,” my mother said, and she reached up and patted my cheek. “Very good luck to you.”

  “I hope your daughter comes back someday,” I told them. “Good-by.”

  • • •

  The bill was a twenty, and I gave it to Paul. It seemed little enough for all the trouble he had taken and, after all, I could go back to my job in the stationery store. My mother still talks to me on the radio, once a year, on the anniversary of the day I ran away.

  “Louisa,” she says, “please come home. We all want our dear girl back, and we need you and miss you so much. Your mother and father love you and will never forget you. Louisa, please come home.”

  BARBARA CALLAHAN

  ___________________

  1935–2009

  BARBARA CALLAHAN was born in Philadelphia and spent much of her life in the area, eventually settling down in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with her husband and five children. She graduated from Chestnut Hill College, a coeducational Roman Catholic institution, in 1956 and taught English and French at the middle school and high school level for three years before turning her attention to raising her family as well as founding the Women’s Cursillo of South Jersey, which organized spiritual retreats, later volunteering with the Kairos Prison Ministry. Between 1981 and her retirement in 1995, Callahan worked as a writer and editor for Datapro Research Corporation, a company devoted to the creation of computer manuals.

  Callahan began to write in the early 1960s, when her children were young, and eventually published more than twenty short stories, many of them suspense-oriented, the last appearing shortly before her death in 2009. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine published her first mystery story, “The Sin Painter,” in 1974, about a group of people enthralled by an artist with sinister motives, and followed up two years later, in its September 1976 issue, with “Lavender Lady,” nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Short Story and republished here. The story centers around Miranda, a singer of growing fame who’s constantly asked by her devoted fans to sing the title song, though she’s grown sick of doing so and has disassociated herself from the song’s true meaning.

  As Miranda narrates, she finds her way back to the terrible childhood circumstances that informed the creation of the song even as she wants nothing more than to block out those memories and to cast them off as untruths. But with each quoted lyric, the reader learns how closely aligned art and truth really are, and how terrible the repercussions of that creative convergence can truly be.

  LAVENDER LADY

  ___________________

  IT WAS always the same request wherever I played. College audiences, park audiences, concert-hall audiences—they listened and waited. Would I play it in the beginning of a set? Would I wait till the end of a performance? When would I play Lavender Lady?

  Once I tried to trick them into forgetting that song. I sang four new songs, good songs with intricate chords and compelling lyrics. They listened politely as if each work were merely the flip side of the song they really wanted to hear.

  That night I left the stage without playing it. I went straight to my dressing room and put my guitar in the closet. I heard them chanting “Lavender Lady, Lavender Lady.” The chant began as a joyful summons which I hoped would drift into silence like a nursery rhyme a child tires of repeating. It didn’t. The chant became an ugly command accompanied by stamping feet. I fled to safety.

  Milo, my manager, found me in the closet with my guitar. His dark eyes, reproving and cold, told me I would be without him if I did not go back onstage. I couldn’t bear the thought of facing the night alone.

  I stood in the wings and listened to him lie. “Miranda will be right back. She broke a string. She loves to sing Lavender Lady as much as you love to hear it.”

  The chanters applauded wildly. Milo slipped offstage and grabbed my arm.

  “They’ll forgive you this time,” he snapped. “Now go out there.”

  “And you, Milo, you’ll forgive me?”

  “Yes, yes, but only this time.”

  Now I must play Lavender Lady at the end of every concert. I used to cry when I sang it but now I am drained so by it that Milo has to come onstage and carry me off. I slump over my guitar in a faint. I’ve been told that audiences love my finale.

  I don’t know exactly what happens to me when I play that song, I can remember only the introduction to it. After that the song takes over and tells me what to do.

  It tells me to stare at a blankness over the heads of the audiences. In a review of my concert in Philadelphia a critic wrote: “Miranda Smith focuses on a fragment of space that becomes quite real to her. Perhaps lavender-colored ectoplasm materializes somewhere below the first balcony. The golden-haired folksinger becomes a medium for the expression of love offered and then terror unleashed. She begins Lavender Lady with a radiant smile and ends it with a sadness so overwhelming that it annihilates her. The last note of the song is like the final beat of her heart. Her arms slide limply over her guitar, her golden hair tumbles over the cold surface of the instrument. She becomes still, terribly still. Then the dark-haired prince, her manager, Milo McGee, comes to carry his Sleeping Beauty away.

  “Once more the Lavender Lady has triumphed by pushing the frail musician into a trance from which, according to McGee, she awakens the following morning. Who is this Lavender Lady and why does she exert such power over the millionairess-singer? McGee has hinted that she is Miranda’s mother, the lovely socialite who abandoned the child when she was eight years old.”

  Milo is such a liar. He knows she isn’t Mother, yet he told a magazine writer that the last time I saw Mother she was wearing a lavender gown. She was wearing a brown fur coat.

  The women hired by my father to care for me were old and irritable. I was horrible to all of them. When Father interviewed the young woman with the long blonde hair, I knew I would like her. As soon as we were introduced, she hugged me. The lavender scent she wore tickled my nose and made me sneeze. She told me she wouldn’t use it any more, but I wanted her to. The lavender was a lovely clue to her presence. I could always find her.

  Lavender Lady, so young and so dear,

  Lavender Lady, I know when you’re near.

  She taught me my lessons at home. We worked hard. Afterward we went down to the pond or to the grape arbor. We played wonderful games until I became tired. Then she put me on her lap and sang to me. At dusk I took her hand. We ran all the way home because we were two princesses being pursued by the Fiend of the Fields who wanted to change us into mushrooms.

  Sometimes we tired of the arbor and the pond. We went outside the estate, across the road, and down to the rock pile. The rock pile was the moon and we climbed all over it. It was fun being a Moon Maiden until we met the Moon Monster.

  The Lavender Lady never called him the Moon Monster. She called him Jim. She told me Jim was our secret friend whom we had met in a secret place. I was never to tell anyone about Jim who sat with his arm around her while I scrambled on the rocks. I never told anyone our secret.

  Lavender Lady, the secrets we shared,

  Lavender Lady, I never was scared.

  Milo keeps secrets well, I think. His lies please him more than the truth. He knows about the Lavender Lady and the Moon Monster. He’s the only one I ever talk to about them. He knows how I begged her to send Jim away. He spoiled our games so finally she did.

  I told Milo about our journey too. The Lavender Lady asked my father if she
could take me to visit her mother. Father wanted the chauffeur to drive us, but the Lavender Lady refused. Her mother would be embarrassed, she told Father, if such a magnificent car pulled up in front of her shabby house.

  The Lavender Lady and I took a bus. It was the first time I had ever been on one. “You poor little rich girl,” the Lavender Lady said as she helped me onto the bus. After a while I didn’t care much for the gaseous odor. I put my head on her shoulder and breathed in her lovely lavender scent until I fell asleep.

  • • •

  She shook me gently at our stop. I looked up and down the street but I didn’t see a shabby house. We walked around the block and waited for another bus. As we sat on the bench the Lavender Lady reached into her large handbag. “Surprise,” she said, “we’re going to surprise my mother. She thinks you are a little blonde-haired girl. We’ll fool her. I’ll put this on you.”

  I laughed and laughed when I looked into the mirror of her compact. I had become a red-headed little girl with pigtails. And I laughed again when she put the red bandanna with black bangs on it over her head.

  Lavender Lady, so pretty and wise,

  Lavender Lady, you loved to surprise.

  Milo is cruel sometimes. I wish I had never told him about the wig. When I wanted to avoid recognition on a flight to Los Angeles, he put a red wig with pigtails on me. After I threw it on the floor, Milo refused to fend off passengers who came to me for my autograph.

  I took off the red wig when we left the bus. The walk was long and hot. The Lavender Lady wanted to run but I told her that the Fiend of the Fields didn’t live around there.

  Her mother’s house was so ugly. The paint was peeling off and the porch was falling apart. We walked up two rickety steps when the door was opened by the Moon Monster.

  “Where is her mother?” I asked him.

  “She went away,” Jim said.

  “Like my mother did?” I asked.

  “I guess so,” he answered.

  I hugged the Lavender Lady tightly. Poor beautiful thing. I knew exactly how sad she must have felt.

  Lavender Lady, such sadness you’ve known,

  Lavender Lady, you won’t be alone.

  Jim pulled me away from her and kissed her. I didn’t like that so I kicked him. He raised his arm to hit me but the Lavender Lady blocked him. She took me into the kitchen and heated some soup. It was chicken noodle but it tasted odd. I fell asleep at the table.

  When I woke up I was lying on a dirty cot in a bedroom. Jim was sitting on a chair next to me.

  “Where did she go?” I cried.

  “To make a phone call. Now go back to sleep.”

  I tried to get up but Jim pushed me down. The room was so smelly. When she returned she would wrap me in her lavender scent and everything would be all right again. When I heard her footsteps downstairs I ran to the door. Jim picked me up and dumped me on that terrible cot, then locked the bedroom door when he left. I pounded and pounded but she must not have heard.

  The next morning she brought me oatmeal. Then she washed my tear-stained face. When she rocked me back and forth in her arms I began to feel better. “Take me away from here,” I begged.

  “He won’t let me do that,” she said. “We’ll just have to do what he says until we get our chance to escape. This is like one of our games by the pond. We’re two princesses but we’ll get away.”

  The Lavender Lady took me outside the awful house. We walked to a field where Stars of Bethlehem curtsied in the wind. She sat down and I made a garland for her hair. After I tired of picking flowers I wondered why we didn’t walk through the fields into the woods, away from the ugly house and away from him.

  “Now,” I told her, “let’s go now. He’ll never know.”

  She shook her head. “He’s upstairs in the house. He is looking at us through binoculars. He’ll overtake us.”

  “But his car is gone. He drove away.”

  “No, little rich girl, that’s a trick. He drove it around the back of the house. He’s still there.”

  When he came walking through the field, smashing the flowers under his feet, she smiled at him. She could pretend so well. She jumped up and hugged him. Together they opened a suitcase filled with money. She tossed some of it into the air.

  “Green snow,” she sang, “green snow, the loveliest snow.”

  Her garland fell off as she danced around with Jim. I picked it up and pulled it apart.

  In fields full of flowers, we spent happy hours,

  Beneath trees dark and shady, dear Lavender Lady.

  Milo is talking now to someone outside my bedroom door. He’s saying, “She didn’t care a hoot for her, you know, but the crazy kid thought she did.”

  “Miranda’s naive,” a voice answers.

  It’s my secretary. Milo is talking to her about me. He must be telling her about my mother. Milo is lying again. I always knew mother never cared a hoot for me.

  When I was back on that filthy cot I could hear the Moon Monster and the Lavender Lady talking, just as I can hear Milo and my secretary now. The Moon Monster was saying something about getting rid of me because I would recognize him later. I became frightened until I heard her say that she would take care of me. Everything would be all right. She would take care of me.

  The next morning he sat sullenly at the table while she made breakfast for us.

  “Why feed her? Hurry up, will you?”

  She flashed him a stern look that silenced him. She winked at me. I winked back. I knew we would be leaving him that day.

  We walked slowly to the field of Stars of Bethlehem. When we were down the hill I grabbed her hand. I touched something in it that was cold and hard. It fell to the ground into the flowers. The sunlight hit it while it was falling and it glistened like silver.

  “My watch,” she cried, “I dropped my watch.”

  She began to push aside the flowers but I pulled at her.

  “Father will get you another one, come on.”

  She continued clawing at the flowers. I wanted her to leave. A game would do it. She loved games. I spread my arms and fluttered them.

  “I’m a butterfly, a yellow butterfly. I’m flying, I’m flying. You’re the Lavender Locust and you must catch me.”

  I flew away. I turned back once and saw her starting to get up. I flew up and down hills. I came to a stream. It was a good place to wait for her. I took off my shoes to wade for a bit

  “Butterfly, butterfly, where are you?” she called.

  She was coming. I was so happy.

  “You can’t catch a butterfly,” I shouted. It was nice that she was playing the game. When she came closer I saw that there was something shiny in her hand. She had found her watch. She stopped by a tree to catch her breath. Then she started to run toward me.

  But I liked being a butterfly. I liked having her chase me. I didn’t want the game to end. I giggled when I saw the stepping stones a few yards from me. I ran in the water to the first one and then to the second. I jumped across on all of them, skidding only once on the green slime that covered them. I sat down across the stream to wait for her.

  Her golden hair flying, she skipped from the first to the second stone. And to the third. But on the fourth stone her foot slipped on the green slime. I screamed as she fell backward and hit the side of her face on the third stepping stone. When her head rolled over I saw the reddish-purple bruise on her fair skin. She tried to get up but she fell back again, back on that hard terrible rock. The stream water next to her turned red.

  Lavender Lady, clear water runs red,

  Lavender Lady, you cannot be dead.

  I cannot sleep tonight as I usually do after a concert. My eyelids have become reddish-purple curtains. They are the same color as the bruise on the Lavender Lady’s face. They are the same color as that ghastly shirt Milo is wearing tonig
ht. I’ve asked him not to wear it, but he told me my secretary likes it.

  They’re still talking outside my door. Milo is not talking about my mother. He is talking about the Lavender Lady and he is telling my secretary a vicious lie about her. I can bear his other lies, but not this one. He is saying that the silver thing I saw in the Lavender Lady’s hand was not a watch, but a knife. He’s saying, “She had a silver pocketknife with her to kill a kid who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.”

  I’ll have to prove to Milo it was a watch. I’ll take him to that stream. Perhaps the watch is still there, rusted and buried under the stepping stone. When I take him, I’ll ask him to wear the reddish-purple shirt. It will go well with his face if he happens to slip.

  Reddish-purple, reddish-purple. What was the word printed on that colored pencil I had when I was a child? Magenta, yes, that’s it, magenta.

  Such a lyrical word. It should be in a song. I need a new song, a new song that will captivate me just as Lavender Lady did. I’m getting a melody in my head right now. It is so sad it makes me cry. This song will be better than Lavender Lady. It will be a better ending for my concerts. It will thrill my audiences. It will overwhelm me.

  I’ve got the first two lines. They go like this:

  Magenta man, once kind and strong,

  Magenta man, you’ve done me wrong.

  VERA CASPARY

  ___________________

  1899–1987

  In her 1979 autobiography The Secrets of Grown-Ups, VERA CASPARY declared, “This has been the century of the woman, and I know myself to have been a part of the revolution.” Caspary had good reason to make this claim: much of her work, which included eighteen novels, ten screenplays and four stage plays, focused on a woman’s right to lead her own life, no matter the costs or the motives of others, especially men. As a screenwriter, Caspary commanded as much as $150,000 for adaptations like Letter to Three Wives. Her sixteen-year marriage to film producer Isidore “Igee” Goldsmith was a transatlantic love affair interrupted by war, disrupted by the HUAC anti-Communist hearings, and marked by financial instability.