A Stranger in My Grave

by Margaret Millar

  Daisy had heard it all before. The tone varied, the clichés var­ied, but the message was always the same: that she, Daisy, was a very lucky girl, who ought to be grateful every day of her life that Jim remained married to her even though she was sterile. Mrs. Fielding was too subtle to say any of this outright, but the impli­cation was clearly made: Daisy had to be a super wife because she couldn’t be a mother. The marriage was the important thing, not the individuals who contracted it. And the marriage was impor­tant, not for any religious or moral reasons, but because it meant, for Mrs. Fielding, the only real security she’d ever had. Daisy understood this and felt both sympathetic, because her mother had worked very hard to keep the family going, and resentful, because it seemed to Daisy that it wasn’t her own life or marriage or husband; half, or more than half, belonged to her mother.

  “Are you listening to me, Daisy?”

  “Yes.”

  “On Piedra Street?”

  “I may have been on Piedra Street. Why? What difference does it make?”

  “Someone saw you,” Mrs. Fielding said. “A next-door neighbor of Mrs. Weldon’s, called Corinne. She claims you were walking with a good-looking dark young man who has some connection with jails or the Police Department. Were you, Daisy?”

  She was tempted to lie about it, to keep Pinata safely and secretly locked inside her private drawer, but she was afraid that a lie would be more damaging than the truth. “Yes, I was there.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “He’s an investigator.”

  “Do you mean a detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why on earth would you be walking around town with a detective?”

  “Why not? It was a nice day, and I like walking.”

  There was a silence, then Mrs. Fielding’s voice, as smooth and chilling as liquid air. “I warn you not to be flippant with me. How did you meet this man?”

  “Through my—through a friend. I didn’t know he was an investigator at the time. When I found out, I hired him.”

  “You hired him? What for?”

  “To do a job. Now that’s all I have to say on the subject.”

  She started toward the door, but her mother called her back with an urgent “Wait.”

  “I prefer not to discuss—”

  “You prefer, do you? Well, I prefer to get this settled between the two of us before Jim finds out about it.”

  “There’s nothing to settle,” Daisy said, keeping her voice calm because she knew her mother was waiting for her to lose her tem­per. Her mother was always at her best when other people lost their tempers. “I hired Mr. Pinata to do some work for me, and he’s doing it. Whether Jim finds out about it doesn’t matter. He hires people at the office all the time. I don’t make an issue of it, because it’s none of my business.”

  “And you think it’s none of Jim’s business that you should go traipsing all over town with a Mexican?”

  “Whether Mr. Pinata is a Mexican or not is beside the point. I hired him for his qualifications, not his racial background. I know nothing about him personally. He doesn’t volunteer any informa­tion, and I don’t ask for any.”

  “Tolerance is one thing. Foolishness is another.” There was a curious rasp in Mrs. Fielding’s voice, as if her fury, which had been denied admittance into words, had broken in through the back door of her larynx. “You know nothing about such people. They’re cunning, treacherous. You’re a babe in the woods. If you let him, he’ll use you, cheat you—”

  “Where did you learn so much about a man you’ve never even seen?”

  “I don’t have to see him. They’re all alike. You must put a stop to this relationship before you find yourself in serious trouble.”

  “Relationship? For heaven’s sake, you’re talking as if he were my lover, not someone I happened to hire.” She took a deep breath, fighting for control. “As for traipsing all over town, I didn’t. Mr. Pinata escorted me to my car at the conclusion of our business appointment. Now does that satisfy you, and Mrs. Weldon, and Corinne?”

  “No.”

  “I’m afraid it will have to. I have nothing farther to say on the subject.”

  “Sit down,” Mrs. Fielding said sharply. “Listen to me.”

  “I’ve already listened.”

  “Forget I’m your mother for a minute.”

  “All right.” It was easy, she thought. The green watery light coming in through the doorway from the lanai made Mrs. Field­ing’s face look strange and opalescent, like something that lived in the depths of the sea.

  “For your own sake,” Mrs. Fielding said, “I want you to tell me what you hired this Pinata to do.”

  “I’m trying to reconstruct a certain day in my life. I needed someone—someone objective—to help me.”

  “And that’s all? It has nothing to do with Jim?”

  “No.”

  “What about this other man, the one whose name is on the tombstone?”

  “I’ve found out nothing further about him,” Daisy said.

  “Are you trying to?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Fielding repeated shrilly. “What do you mean, of course? Are you still being foolish enough to believe that his tombstone is the same one you saw in your dream?”

  “I know it’s the same one. Mr. Pinata was with me at the cemetery. He recognized the tombstone before I did, from the description I’d given him from my dream.”

  There was a long silence, broken finally by Mrs. Fielding’s painful whisper. “Oh, my God. What will I do? What’s happen­ing to you, Daisy?”

  “Whatever is happening, it’s to me, not to you.”

  “You’re my only child. Your welfare and happiness are more important to me than my own. Your life is my life.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why have you changed like this?” Her eyes filled with tears of disappointment and anger and self-pity, all mixed up together and inseparable. “What’s happened to us?”

  “Please don’t cry,” Daisy said wearily. “Nothing’s happened to us except that we’re both getting a little older, and you want a lit­tle more of my life than I’m willing to give.”

  “God knows I only try to make things easier for you, to protect you. What’s the use of my having gone through everything I did if I can’t pass on to you the benefit of my experience? My own mar­riage was broken. Can you blame me for trying to keep yours from turning out the same way? Perhaps if I’d had someone to guide me, as I’ve guided you, I’d never have married Stan Fielding in the first place. I’d have waited for someone reliable and trustworthy, like Jim, instead of tying myself to a man who never told a straight story or did a straight thing from the day he was born.”

  She went on talking, pacing up and down the room as though it were the prison of the past. Daisy listened without hearing, while she tried to remember some of the lies her father had told her. But they hadn’t been lies, really, only bits of dreams that hadn’t come true. Someday, Daisy baby, I’m going to take you and your mother to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower. Or to Kenya on a safari, or London for the coronation, or Athens to see the Parthenon.

  If they were lies, they belonged as much to life as to Fielding. No one believed them anyway.

  “Daisy, are you paying attention to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must stop all this nonsense, do you understand? We’re not the kind of people who hire detectives. There’s some­thing squalid about the very word.”

  “I’m not sure what kind of people we are,” Daisy said. “I know what we pretend to be.”

  “Pretense? Is that what you call putting up a good front to the world, pretense? Well, I don’t. I call it simple common sense and self-respect.” Mrs. Fielding pressed one hand to
her throat as if she were choking on the torrent of words gushing up inside her. “What’s your idea of how to get along in life—hiring a hall and shouting your secrets to the whole city?”

  “I have no secrets.”

  “Haven’t you? Haven’t you? You fool. I despair of you.” She fell into a chair like a stone falling into a pond. “Oh God. I despair.” The words rose from the very bottom of the pond. “I’m so—tired.”

  Daisy looked at her with bitterness. “You have reason to be tired. It takes a lot of energy to lead two lives, yours and mine.”

  The only noise in the room was the nervous panting of the col­lie and the tea tree pawing at the windowpane as if it wanted to get in.

  “You must leave me alone,” Daisy said softly. “Do you hear me, Mother? It’s very important, you must leave me alone.”

  “I would if I thought you were strong enough to do with­out me.”

  “Give me a chance to try.”

  “You’ve picked a bad time to declare your independence, Daisy. Worse than you realize.”

  “Any time would be a bad time as far as you’re concerned, wouldn’t it?”

  “Listen to me, you little fool,” Mrs. Fielding said. “Jim’s been a wonderful husband to you. Your marriage is a good one. Now, for the sake of some silly whim, you’re putting it in jeopardy.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that Jim would actually divorce me simply because I’ve hired a detective?”

  “All I meant—”

  “Or could it be that you’re afraid the detective might find out something Jim doesn’t want found out?”

  “If you were younger,” Mrs. Fielding said steadily, “I’d wash your mouth out with soap for that remark. Your husband is the most decent, the most moral man I’ve ever met. Someday, when you’re mature enough to understand, I’ll be able to tell you some things about Jim that will surprise you.”

  “One thing about him surprises me right now. And I discovered it without the help of any detective.” Daisy glanced briefly at the rolltop desk. “He’s been paying Adam Burnett $200 a month. I found the check stubs.”

  “So?”

  “It seems peculiar, doesn’t it?”

  “Obviously it does to you.”

  “You sound as if you know something about it.”

  “I know everything about it,” Mrs. Fielding said dryly. “Jim bought some acreage Adam owned up near Santa Inez Pass. He intended to build a mountain hideaway on it as a surprise anni­versary present for you. I’m sorry I’ve been forced to tell. But it seemed wiser to spoil the surprise than to let your suspicions keep on growing. You must have a guilty conscience, Daisy, or you wouldn’t be so quick to accuse others.”

  “I didn’t accuse him. I was simply curious.”

  “Oh? Just what did you think Adam was being paid for?” Mrs. Fielding got up out of the chair as though her joints had stiffened during the hour. “This man Pinata is obviously a bad influence on you to have affected your thinking like this.”

  “He has nothing to do with—”

  “I want you to call him immediately and tell him he is no longer in your employ. Now I’m going over to my cottage and get some rest. The doctor says I must avoid scenes like this. The next time I see you, I hope the cause of them will have been removed.”

  “You think firing Pinata will solve everything?”

  “It will be a start. Someone has to start somewhere.”

  She walked to the door with brisk, determined steps, but there was a weary stoop to her shoulders that Daisy had never seen before. “I despair,” her mother had said.

  Why, it’s true, Daisy thought. She despairs. How extraordinary to despair on a bright, sunny afternoon with Pinata somewhere in the city.

  She looked across the room at the telephone. Its shiny black cord seemed like a lifeline to her. All she had to do was pick up the receiver and dial, and even if she couldn’t reach him person­ally, he would get her message through his answering service: Call me, meet me, I want to see you.

  The phone began to ring while the sound of her mother’s step was still on the stairs. She crossed the room, forcing herself to walk slowly because she wanted to run.

  “Hello?”

  “Long distance for Mrs. Daisy Harker.”

  “This is Mrs. Harker.”

  “Go ahead, ma’am. Your party’s on the line.”

  Daisy waited, still hoping, though she had no reason to hope, that it was Pinata, that this was his way of reaching her in the event Jim or her mother might be around when he called.

  But the voice was a woman’s, high-pitched and nervous. “I know I shouldn’t be phoning you like this, Mrs. Harker, or maybe I should say Daisy, though it don’t seem socially proper to call you Daisy when we never even been introduced yet—”

  “Who is this calling, please?”

  “Muriel. Your new—new stepmother.” Muriel let out an anx­ious little giggle. “I guess this is kind of a shock to you, picking up the phone and hearing a perfect stranger say she’s your stepmother.”

  “No. I knew my father had married again.”

  “Did he write and tell you?”

  “No. I heard it the way I hear everything else about my father—not from him but from somebody else.”

  “I’m sorry,” Muriel said in her quick, nervous voice. “I told him to write. I kept reminding him.”

  “It’s certainly not your fault. You have my best wishes, by the way. I hope you’ll both be very happy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “I’m in Miss Wittenburg’s apartment across the hall. Miss Wittenburg promised not to listen; she has her fingers in her ears.”

  To Daisy it was beginning to sound like an April Fools’ joke: I am your new stepmother—Miss Wittenburg has her fingers in her ears. . . “Is my father there with you?”

  “No. That’s why I decided to phone you. I’m worried about him. I shouldn’t have let him go off by himself the way he did. Hitchhiking can be dangerous even when you’re young and strong and have no outstanding weaknesses. I guess,” Muriel added cau­tiously, “being as you’re his daughter, you know he drinks?”

  “Yes. I know he drinks.”

  “He’s been pretty good lately, with me to keep an eye on him.

  But today he wouldn’t take me along. He said we didn’t have the money for bus fare for both of us, so he was going to hitchhike up alone.”

  “Do you mean up here, to San Félice?”

  “Yes. He wanted to see you. His conscience was bothering him on account of he walked out on you last time when he lost his nerve. Stan has a very strong conscience; it drives him to drink. It’s like he always has a bad pain that has to be numbed.”

  “I haven’t seen him or heard from him,” Daisy said. “Are you sure he intended to come right here to the house?”

  “Why, yes. Why, he even mentioned how maybe you’d all have some champagne to celebrate being together again.”

  Daisy thought how typical it was of her father: to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower, to London for the coronation, to San Félice for a champagne celebration. Her sorrow and anger met and merged in a relationship that weakened them both and conceived a monster child. This child, half formed, tongueless, without a name, lay heavy inside her, refusing to be born, refusing to die.

  “Stan wouldn’t like me phoning you like this,” Muriel said, “but I just couldn’t help it. Last time he was up there, he got involved with that waitress, Nita.”

  “Nita?”

  “Nita Garcia. That’s what he called her.”

  “The report in the paper said her name was Donelli.”

  “It said Stan’s name was Foster. That don’t make it true.” Muriel’s dry little laugh was like a cough
of disapproval. “Sure, I’m suspicious—women are—but I can’t help thinking he’s going to see her again, maybe get in some more trouble. I was hoping— well, that maybe he’d be in touch with you by this time and you could set him straight about associating with the wrong people.”

  “He hasn’t been in touch,” Daisy said. “And I’m afraid I couldn’t set him straight if he were.”

  “No. Well. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She seemed ready to hang up.

  Daisy said hurriedly, “Just a minute, Muriel. I wrote my father a special delivery letter on Thursday night asking him an impor­tant question. Was this the reason he suddenly decided to come and see me?”

  “I don’t know about any special delivery letter.”

  “I sent it to the warehouse.”

  “He didn’t mention it to me. Maybe he never got it. He was reading some other letters from you, though, just before he decided to leave. He kept them in his old suitcase. You know that old suitcase of his that he lugs around full of junk?”

  Daisy remembered the suitcase. It was the only thing he’d taken with him when he’d left the apartment in Denver on a winter afternoon: “Daisy baby, I’m going to take a little trip. Don’t you stop loving your daddy.” The trip had lasted fifteen years, and she hadn’t stopped.

  “He was reading a letter of yours,” Muriel said, “when he sud­denly got the blues.”

  “How do you know it was from me?”

  “Right away he started talking about how he’d failed as a father. Besides,” she added bluntly, “nobody else writes to him.”

  “Did he mention what was in the letter?”

  “No.”

  “Did he put it back in the suitcase?”

  “No. I looked right after he left, and it wasn’t there, so I guess he took it with him.” Muriel sounded both apologetic and defen­sive. “He doesn’t keep the suitcase locked, just chained.”

  “How did you know what particular letter to look for?”