by Dianne Day
“It’s not much, by damn, but it’s mine!” I yelled the words out into the room, knowing that when Father was present I should have to swallow them, and I heard the echoes of my voice bounce off the walls, break into fragments, and quiver at last to rest in the invisible air. Then step by step I forced myself through the rest of the apartment, noting with a merciless eye how shabby the remainder of my furniture was, looking like castoffs because for the most part that is what they were. The maids in our Boston house had had better-looking bedrooms than mine—at least if you considered only the furniture.
Palm of my hand flat against the silken coolness of the spread on my bed, I smoothed it, caressed it, and let my eyes roam over the mementos that made the room special: the postcards tucked around the edge of the mirror over my dresser; a tastefully mounted collection of casual photos taken by Michael in Carmel of all our zany friends there, who were in some sort of costume often as not; tied round one of the bedposts, a shining teal-blue ribbon with a single golden thread running through it, which had been wrapped about the stems of the first bouquet of flowers Michael—then Archer—ever gave me. Then I sat on the bed, pushed back against the headboard, and let it all wash over me: How much happiness I had felt in this bedroom with its shabby furniture (but, admittedly, a good mattress), and quite soon I didn’t give a fig about what Father thought any more.
I did miss Michael though, a great deal. The house seemed so empty. And to think I’d be without him for two whole weeks, such an awfully long time.
A brisk walk before supper, I decided, would be just the thing. And if I should just happen to walk by Frances’s house, I might be able to see if anything were going on. Her house was, after all, right on the way to several other places, such as the little branch library … well, to be perfectly honest it wasn’t on the way to the library at all, but if one were fond of loops as a walking pattern … and I really should go to the library before it closed for the night, as that librarian was keeping her eye out for me for materials having to do with Ingrid Swann.
So it was that I found myself, at an hour when most people are sitting ensconced in their homes with their children crawling all over them, walking briskly down the hill toward Broadway. The McFadden mansion, when I sighted it, was blazing with electric lights; and when I passed it, I felt as if every window were an eye looking at me, watching me suspiciously, curiously, and with a good deal of caution. “Go away!” the house said. “Don’t bother me! Be gone, Fremont Joo-o-o-nes.…”
I, however, am stubborn and pigheaded, and do not take it lightly that a house may be ordering me about. So I stood my ground and became rooted in place on the sidewalk looking up at it. Something was going on in that house that was not the usual sort of thing. I was absolutely sure of it, yet I could not for the life of me see or hear anything beyond those great, thick walls.
Leaving the sidewalk, I walked around to the side where Frances’s favorite door was indeed open. It stood ajar by one or two inches. I feared Patrick Rule would be inside, up those stairs, and I was in an agony of wanting to know. I leaned toward the opening, my already keen hearing sharpened to its highest pitch, and listened: A humming, buzzing of conversation, probably in the kitchen, was all I heard. Not a single individual word had been discernible. Nor any one voice recognizable.
Should I go in? Go up those stairs, burst in on them in Frances’s rooms, warn them? Say something like, Patrick and Frances, be lovers if you must, pupil and teacher if you will (after all, hadn’t I done the same with Michael?), but for heaven’s sake, Not So Near the Dinner Hour! And not in her own house where her husband could come in at any moment.
I placed one foot on the threshold. I told myself I had my own key to this door still; Frances wouldn’t have given it to me if she didn’t want me to use it. I smelled the loamy odors of the garden room, or flower room, or whatever it was that Frances had called it … and then, Crash! Someone had dropped something in the kitchen, a load of crockery by the sound of it.
Whatever had I been thinking of? I came to my senses and fled.
———
I had collected every newspaper article to appear so far in connection with Ingrid Swann’s death, and the following morning sat reading them at my desk. Wish was late; I didn’t mind. As far as I knew he didn’t have a case, so it didn’t really matter; and it had been days and days since a single client had come to our door. We were still in that stage of having to go out and drum up business for ourselves.
With a thrill I realized, just looking at all this publicity for the famous Ingrid Swann, that the investigation I was conducting on behalf of Patrick Rule could make the reputation of the J&K Agency. If I could find the killer when the police couldn’t, and somehow let the press in on it … Oh, I could just see the headlines! For here, every photograph of Ingrid was accompanied by a banner two inches high. And of course every paper had a photograph, because Ingrid Swann had been a beautiful woman. Extraordinarily beautiful. Even the harshness of newsprint could not dim the effect of that face.
She had a neck like her name, like a swan, made to appear all the more delicate by the bouffant Gibson-girl style of her hair, which apparently had been palest blond in shade. As each newspaper had a slightly different photo, it was possible to regard this dead woman from straight on, in three-quarter profile, and in one demure complete profile with head and eyes cast down at an angle. The nose, the cheeks, the perfect rosebud of her mouth all seemed as perfect in proportion and line as those of a Greek statue.
No, I thought with a frown, that was not a good comparison, for the Greeks made statues of heroic size, whereas Ingrid’s features were delicate. More like an Italian Renaissance statue, a little Donatello perhaps—though if I remembered my art from Wellesley, Donatello had mostly sculpted boys. That looked like girls.
I mentally shook myself to stop my mind wandering, got up from my desk, and let my body wander back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. I got this way in the mornings with no one to keep me focused. I had become dependent on Michael, I realized, to talk to me until I was well awake, to help me ease into the day … and now he was not here.
“Ridiculous!” I scoffed aloud. I hadn’t needed anybody to get me going in the mornings before, I had always done it by myself just fine, thank you, for years. Yet I stood staring out the small window over the kitchen sink while the coffee warmed—it would be bitter, too strong, I’d cooked it too long—and thought of nothing except how hard it was for me to think of anything or anyone except Michael. How I wished I’d acted more wisely, listened to his counsel! How I wished I had not driven him away.
That was what I’d done, wasn’t it? My vaunted independence had driven him away many days before the time we’d agreed he should be gone. I wanted him back, wanted to say I was sorry … but it was too late. The damage had been done.
Just then the coffee flared up and boiled over. Before I could snatch it off the fire, the hot black liquid had filled the room with the acrid stench of burned brew. “Botheration!” I said, and set about cleaning it up.
I never did get that cup of coffee drunk, for when I returned with it to my desk, the little bell let out its silvery peal along with the opening of the front door. And A Disaster walked into the office on Divisadero Street.
14
———
Dead Space
Fremont, may I introduce my mother, Edna Stephenson? Mom, this is Fremont Jones, one of the owners of the J&K Agency.”
“Howd’ja do,” Edna said, while I said simultaneously: “How do you do, Mrs. Stephenson.”
Then she said, “Best start out calling me Edna.” This rather unusual request was punctuated by one sharp nod of her head, more like a jerk, setting asway the one forlorn flower that hung from her bonnet rim. She was a short, almost round woman whose physical appearance could not possibly have contrasted more with her son’s. Either Wish must resemble his father, or they had found him under a bush, where he had been abandoned by some tall, thin perso
n.
With a sinking feeling that only increased as Edna toddled into the room, I soon realized why she had phrased her request that way. I raised my eyebrows at Wish in mute supplication, but he just smiled. A benevolent, almost beatific, typically Wish smile that was completely maddening in the circumstances.
“This is your office?” Edna said, going from one desk to the other. She had a pattery sort of walk, with an occasional lurch to one side or the other, like a toddler uncertain on its feet.
Assuming the question to be rhetorical, I did not reply. Instead I folded my arms, tapped my foot beneath my skirt where no one could see, and waited for an explanation.
Wish walked around behind me without a word, took his mother by the elbow, and gently steered her to his own desk. “This is my desk, where I work, Mama.”
“Nize,” Edna said, touching the desk. Then, looking Wish up and down as if to establish the connection between son and desk, she touched it again. The seating arrangement appeared to have been given her blessing.
“Fremont, Mama would like to try the receptionist job for a few days.”
I said noncommittally, “I see.”
The woman’s eyes lit up, and she nodded so vigorously I thought the forlorn flower might fly completely off. “I’d get to talk on the telephone, that’s what my boy Aloysius said. I’m real good at that,” she insisted. “I’m a modern woman, I am, not afraid of newfangled machinery. Why, I took to the telephone just like a duck to water!”
“That’s right, she did,” Wish confirmed, still beaming.
Yes, I thought. I remembered how Wish used to tell me about his mother calling the precinct house where he’d been working as a rookie policeman, and how unless you stopped her she’d keep you on the telephone for hours.…
“Where’s your phone?” So, Edna Stephenson was on such familiar terms with that instrument that she had already adopted the shortened form of its appellation, as more and more people seemed to be doing these days.
“Oh,” she crowed, “there it is!” and then she pounced. Quite a feat that was, since she had to get all the way across the room from her son’s desk to mine on those tiny little feet before pouncing. But she managed it in record time.
I scooted back out of her way and watched, a little stunned, as Edna seized the telephone, removed the ear trumpet portion and held it to her ear, jiggled the hook a couple of times, and then said into the mouthpiece on the base, “Hello, Central?”
Central apparently said hello back, because Edna was quiet for a moment, while her little round, brown eyes danced in pleasure. “No, thank you,” she rather abruptly sang out, “I do not wish to make a call. I just wanted to be sure my telephone is in working order. Ta-ta!”
“It’s working,” she announced. “Now let’s see the rest of the place.”
I couldn’t help but smile, even as I shook my head slowly, in amazement. Edna was already pattering her erratic way toward the conference room, so I said, “Wish, why don’t you help your mother off with her coat and bonnet, and show her the rest of our office space. When you’re in the kitchen, you may want to make a new pot of coffee. Meanwhile I’ll clear my stuff out of the front desk so I won’t have to bother her later to get my things.”
Wish winked, and the beatific smile became more of an elf’s grin. He’d pulled off a coup, and he knew it. “Mama!” He reached one long arm out after her. “Hold up. Let’s hang up your coat and hat first, like Fremont says.”
Edna was in that three-foot-deep arched passageway between the office and the conference room, rapping on the walls and asking with impatient curiosity, “What’s this, then? What’s back there behind this wall? Is there a door? Is it a closet? Well, son, speak up, I can’t hear you!”
“I’m trying, Mama, if you’ll just be quiet long enough for me to tell you.”
“So I’m quiet. Like a mouze.” “Nize” for nice, “Mouze” for mouse … I wondered how many more of these charming little eccentricities of speech Edna had.
“We don’t think there’s anything back there,” Wish explained. “Certainly there’s no door or anything. Architect probably just made a mistake in the proportion of the downstairs rooms compared to the upper ones, and to balance it out created a dead space.”
“Oh?” Edna cackled. “Ha-ha, hee-hee, that’s a good un, dead space, for a detectives agency. Dead space! Ha-ha, hee-hee …” And she was off again.
I smiled, shook my head again in answer to Wish’s mute shrug, and began the job of removing my files and so on from the desk. Of course I had no idea where I was going to go; I hadn’t thought that far ahead, had assumed there would be candidates for the receptionist position to be interviewed before things got so far as my needing to relinquish my desk.
Perhaps Michael’s study, since he wasn’t here? Only as a temporary measure, of course. I approached the small room with my arms full and, in the doorway, stopped, waited a moment, then abruptly turned away.
Michael’s study smelled like him, a subtle masculine scent that I could not possibly describe, somewhere between soap and leather and … skin. I couldn’t work in there, it would drive me mad.
So I camped out at the end of the conference-room table, stacking and arranging things that had been in drawers—and when I was done, I preferred the table to any desk I had ever owned. Everything so easily to hand, plenty of room to spread out. The coffee was perking; its delicious smell wafted from the kitchen, and I let my nose (“noze,” Edna would probably say) lead me back there. Soon the three of us were laughing and talking, and Edna was telling stories on Wish as a boy; then she asked me how I’d liked coming West on the train … and then the telephone rang.
Edna Stephenson was up like a shot, those short legs and tiny feet pumping along with far greater reliability than one would have thought possible. I heard her pick up the instrument and say into it clearly, “The J&K Agency. This is Mrs. Stephenson, the receptionist, speaking. May I help you?”
“You taught her what to say?” I asked Wish, quietly.
“Yep. Made her repeat it to me about a million times.”
“She did it very well,” I acknowledged.
“Fremont, give her a chance. She needs something else to do besides whist at the church and her women’s sodality. We won’t have to pay her much, and if we hit a bad patch and can’t pay, well, she’s well enough off it wouldn’t hurt her once in a while. My dad left her pretty well fixed for money.”
“Hey, Fremont!” yelled a big voice out of a little round woman, all the way from the front room. “This call’s for you!”
———
Three days later I had to admit that Edna Stephenson was not turning out to be at all the disaster I had feared. Wish had done us a favor, probably at some expense to himself—because she did treat him more like a son, like a boy, than like the man he had long ago become. But he bore it with good grace, and Edna, true to her word, had no fear of modern machines whatsoever, so she was soon teaching herself the typewriter. To coin a phrase from school report days, she “showed initiative,” and was forever plucking papers, or whatever, out of my hands, saying, “Here, let me have that, I can do it for you on the phone.”
She could, too. Edna would do things on the telephone that never would have occurred to me. Library research, for example. She would call a reference librarian who was a personal friend of hers and say: “Listen, dearie, I’m at me job—What, you din’t know? I got me a nize little job now. Days, working for a detective agency. That’s right, a detective agency, like for investigatin’ things, same as the police do only better. My son works here, Aloysius, you know. Now, dearie, here’s the thing. We need to know.…”
Whatever we needed to know, if it was in a book, Edna’s friend would find it—and usually pretty quickly, too. (Probably because Edna wouldn’t leave her alone until she’d done it, but no matter.) Edna also had a very neat handwriting, much easier to read in truth than her typing—at least so far—and she produced copious, meticulous notes o
n whatever subject she had been asked to tackle, plus a few she decided to tackle just because they interested her.
Edna’s favorite subject at the moment was Ingrid Swann. She had, by relentless telephoning around town, uncovered something that had not been in any of the newspapers: Ingrid Swann had had a husband, from whom she was not divorced. Nor had she lived with the man for years and years, but he was right here in San Francisco. On the south side, in Bernal Heights. His name was Conrad Higgins. Ingrid Swann’s real name had been Myra Higgins—not a bad name at all, but not nearly so exotic, nor as descriptive of the woman’s beauty, as Ingrid Swann. I decided that I would go to see Conrad Higgins, because if the police had located him they hadn’t told the newspapers. And I badly wanted an edge if not an outright coup.
But first I had to leave some instructions with Edna. I rather dreaded it, for although she was great at taking initiative, she was not so good at following orders. Quite frankly I worried about leaving her alone.
“Edna,” I said in a forthright manner, “I have to be out for a while, but there are some things I want to tell you before I leave.”
“Sure, okay, Fremont.” She leaned back in her chair—her feet didn’t touch the floor, so she looked a little like an old child—and laced her fingers together over her round middle. “What do you need? Don’t look so serious on me. Has someone died?”
“No, quite the contrary. But I’m just a little concerned … Um, it’s about these people who are coming here to the offices this afternoon. One is the principal client in this case you’ve helped me with so much, by gathering all that information on Ingrid Swann.”
“Ooh, that’s the double murder! And the client’s coming here? How exciting.”
