Whisper Her Name

by Kate Wilhelm

  “On a per diem?” Charlie asked.

  Paley said in a tight voice, “I am being compensated for sacrificing my own plans for the sake of our firm.”

  “Of course,” Charlie murmured. “Mr. Paley, what’s Plan B if Pamela Bainbridge happens to find one or all of the checks?”

  “She has no right to them,” he said. “When those checks are found, they must be turned over to our firm, accounted for appropriately, and dispersed according to the terms of the will. Stuart Bainbridge has legitimate power of attorney to act on his father’s behalf. Beyond that I can make no comment.”

  “But there is a Plan B, I assume,” Charlie said.

  Paley remained silent.

  “Just one more thing,” Charlie said, pointing to the file cabinet. “Was that Bainbridge’s or is it yours?”

  “It was his. It has been searched thoroughly. We thought it wise to keep it intact until the estate is settled.”

  “Tax records? Business records? Things of that sort?”

  “Exactly. We, our firm, may need some of those documents when we go into probate.”

  “I want to have a go at it,” Charlie said. “Want me to get it out of here first?”

  “Mr. Meiklejohn, I really must protest. As I said, it has been searched by the detectives, in the presence of the family as well as myself. We were all satisfied. At that time my books were all examined, I might add, as was my desk. It would not be advisable for anyone to have unlimited access to the files now, to take out documents, perhaps misplace them, even destroy them. Also, much of my own work here is highly sensitive, confidential. To prevent any tampering with the files, or the urge to satisfy anyone’s curiosity regarding our firm, I rarely leave the house until the family has gone.”

  “I won’t remove, misplace, destroy or tamper, and your work will remain under your watchful eye,” Charlie said. “The question about the file cabinet is should I rummage around it in here or some other room?”

  “Not in here,” Paley snapped. “It would be most disruptive. I insist that we lock the drawers if you remove the cabinet to a different room.”

  “I certainly agree with that,” Charlie said. “A chain through the drawer pulls and a padlock will do the trick. I’ll bring the gear tomorrow.”

  He rose and pushed the chair back by the table. “Thanks, Mr. Paley. It’s been helpful.”

  #

  In her apartment Eve Parish was eyeing the armoire. Time to open it, she decided, let it air out a few days and be ready for Jenna to use. She got a butcher knife from the kitchen. “Ah, my dear, soon you will be unbound and free again,” she said as she cut the rope that held the doors closed. Her ring tone sounded and she crossed to her desk to see who was calling, hoping it was her sister. It was Earl Marshall.

  “Hello, Earl,” she said.

  “Good. I was hoping to reach you. Join me for a drink, lemonade for you if you prefer.”

  When she didn’t respond immediately, he said, “I know you have some more questions since you didn’t even get to the biggie. Am I writing something new? You have to sit across a little table from me to get an answer to that one. Am I on?”

  “You win,” she said. “I really do have some questions left. So I get to bring the tape recorder, and we stay here in town this time.”

  “You drive a hard bargain,” he said. “Half an hour? At The Pub? Meet you there.”

  “Okay,” she said, then glanced down at herself. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. “Better make it an hour. I have to shower and make myself presentable in public.”

  “What a lovely picture you leave in my head,” he said. “An hour at The Pub.”

  When she walked the few blocks to The Pub, his convertible was parked at the curb. She entered what looked like a student hangout. Booths, a tiny stage for live music, tables too crowded together, dark and cool. He wasn’t in sight. She went to a back door to glance out onto another deck much like the one next door, the Lakeview Café, where she had met Dorothy Dumond. Earl waved to her from a table. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

  “I knew you’d find your way out here,” he said when she joined him. “Tell me, do you ever drink alcohol?” He held up his own glass. “This is an excellent vodka sour.”

  “Occasionally. But not today. Lemonade would be good.”

  He sighed melodramatically and called out, “Lemonade,” to a waiter who was also wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He watched her place her tape recorder on the table and shook his head. “Miss Super Efficiency herself. Tell me, Eve, what do you do for fun?”

  “I like to swim. I’ve been doing it every day. The lake is lovely. I like to hike and ride a bicycle. I like to read, gossip with girlfriends, dance.” She turned on the tape recorder and looked at him. “And are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Working on something? Writing something?”

  “Here’s your lemonade,” he said as the waiter approached. They were both silent as he put a tall glass before Eve.

  She thanked him, took a sip, and nodded toward the tape recorder. “Well?”

  “Persistent little devil, aren’t you?” Earl said. “First, what time do you go swimming? I’ll join you.”

  “No schedule. When it’s convenient. So, are you writing now?”

  “Okay, business first. Look, I told you how I was after Andrea died. Then months waiting for publication, reading proofs, writerly stuff that’s a pain in the ass. A year wasted on a meaningless book tour, a couple more wasted in Hollywood. I had put grief on hold with busy work, but it caught up with me when things quieted down again. I don’t think you can bypass it, and one way or another you deal with it. Another year or longer. I don’t even remember any more. Then the paperback came out and I was on the merry-go-round again. Not so long this time, but still… ” He was looking out over the lake as he talked fast, almost tonelessly.

  He glanced at her, away. “I was feeling pressure to produce something. My editor, my agent. Critics. Every time I signed a book the woman, almost always a woman, would ask if I was writing another one. She just couldn’t wait for my next novel.” There was a note of contempt in his voice.

  He picked up his glass and drank. “I started a bunch of things, Eve. Out of desperation maybe. They didn’t go anywhere, nothing I did went anywhere. Waste basket stuff.”

  He drained his glass and held it up in the air, nodded when he was acknowledged. “I tried traveling. France, Italy, Spain, even Tahiti, for God’s sake. I took up sailing. Not a good sailor, I’m afraid.” He lapsed into silence when the waiter brought his new drink, took the empty glass, and left again.

  “Then I come back to this hole in the woods and can’t stand it here, either. Can’t stand it anywhere.”

  “Why do you come back if you don’t like it?” Eve asked.

  “Dorothy. Our house. Always decision time about the house or some damn thing, and she needs my opinion. Should we sell it? Let her move to an apartment or condo or something. Should we just paint, redecorate? Should we cut the goddamn grass?”

  “You live in New York, Manhattan?”

  “Yeah, and I can’t stand that either.”

  “Then move.”

  “That’s all I do, Eve. I move. But, now listen to me, I’m not punking you. For the first time I’ve started thinking of something good, something important. I’m at peace with you, even with that goddamn tape recorder on. You’re beautiful, but it’s not just that. Beauty is the standard in Hollywood, and it’s vacuous, meaningless. Your beauty is from inside out, serenity, peace, maybe innocence. Whatever it is, it envelops me when you’re near. You bring a sense of peace that I can feel. I want to get to know you, for you to know me.”

  He reached across the table and put his hand on hers. She tensed and his hand held hers more firmly.

  “
Don’t flinch from me, give me the chill treatment. I’m not going to assault you in public, for God’s sake.”

  They both started when they heard Dorothy’s voice. Earl jerked around to look over his shoulder and Eve pulled her hand away.

  “Earl, I’ve been calling all over, looking for you. I saw your car out front.” She glanced at Eve. “Hello, Ms. Parish, I’m sorry to intrude. Earl, Dwight and Edie Bradshaw and a few others are coming by for drinks at five and I promised you’d be there. Edie has some books for you to sign. They’re Christmas presents. I told her you’d be happy to sign them, of course. We’ll all go out to dinner later. I made a reservation at The Cave. Why didn’t you return my calls? I called several times.”

  “My phone’s turned off,” he said. “For a reason,” he added.

  Eve picked up the tape recorder and slipped it into her purse, then rose. “Thanks,” she said to Earl. He was tight-lipped, glaring at his sister, then at Eve. “I’ll be on my way now.” She walked out as fast as she could without breaking into a run.

  Back in her apartment, she locked the door, then went into the study and removed the tape, labeled it and placed it with the other two. “Enough of that,” she said under her breath. “No more interviews with either one of them.”

  She felt more confused about Earl than she had before. Who was he? What lay behind that handsome face? When was he sincere, when not? She couldn’t tell. She looked around the study, saw the rope still hanging from one of the doorknobs of the armoire, and went to pull it away and open the doors. When she did, she drew in a breath sharply. There was a bathrobe hanging in the armoire. It was pushed far back to the side, where apparently it had been for many years.

  She pulled it out and saw that one of the balloon pockets was bulging. Gingerly she reached in and took out a thick notebook. She tossed it down on the futon and looked at the robe in dismay. It must have been hers, Andrea’s. It was very worn and dirty. Faded-pink terrycloth, frayed at the cuffs, stains on the front that could have been from spilled coffee, a cigarette burn or two. Holding it at arm’s length Eve went to the kitchen to toss it into the garbage, but it was too big for the small can. She put it on a chair back and returned to the study to look at the notebook.

  It must have been hers, too, she thought, flipping through the pages. Small handwriting, page after page filled, sometimes illegible, sometimes very neat and readable. She sat on the futon and looked at several pages more slowly. Bits of dialogue, descriptions, characters…

  Frowning, she read a passage, then another and she realized she was reading the novel, Earl’s novel. She went to her desk and got the novel, returned to the futon and began comparing passages, scenes. At least a third of the notebook had pages with abbreviated passages, the word Add followed by short passages or sometimes simply notes. Add—confronting Vernon in part—ch 3 or 4.

  Eve turned to Chapter 3 and quickly scanned the text, and there was a two-page park scene.

  For a long time she sat comparing the notebook to the published novel. Many of the additions had been made, a lot of them had not. “But they could have been,” she said aloud. “They should have been. She was rewriting parts of it.”

  She stared blindly toward the armoire across the room. “She wrote it,” she said softly. “It was her work. He stole her novel.”

  9

  WHEN CONSTANCE LEFT THE LIBRARY, she paused at the television room where she saw Tricia, Lawrence, and Stuart talking in low voices. She started to move on.

  “Come in,” Tricia said. She motioned toward a chair. “Ted called me a while ago and said he’d be back tonight. I thought you and Charlie would want to know.” She appeared to be more strained than ever, with a pinched look and her forehead creased.

  “Do you think there will be a problem?” Constance asked.

  Lawrence answered. “No problem. I tell him I was kidding about a school, we’re sort of buddies again. Maybe.”

  Tricia leaned forward and put her hand on his arm. “Lawrence, for God’s sake, just keep it civil. Don’t goad him any more. We’re all too near the edge to take it.”

  “I’ll be a good little boy,” Lawrence said in a mocking tone. “Jesus, Tricia, what’s he going to do? Start a fistfight? He knows I can whip his ass if he does.” Almost instantly he looked contrite and said, “Tricia, relax. I’m not itching for trouble any more than you are.”

  He turned to Constance. “We’re all going stir crazy. Can’t stand being here day after day and can’t stand being away and not knowing what’s going on. Don’t you and Charlie have any ideas yet?”

  “We’re working on it,” Constance said. “Why don’t you all take some time out. Go to a movie, hike up in the woods, swim.”

  Stuart nodded. “Tricia, there’s music in the park tonight, kids from the college orchestra and a couple of teachers with chamber music. Just what we all need.”

  “To soothe the savage beasts in our breasts,” Lawrence said. “Happens I like chamber music. Let’s all go.”

  After leaving them making plans for when and where to meet, Constance spotted Alice heading toward the back terrace and followed her out. Alice finished emptying the ashtray into a plastic bag and wiped it with a cloth. She flicked the cloth across the tabletop in a desultory manner.

  “Do you have a couple of minutes?” Constance asked. “I’d really like to talk to you. Since you’ve been around here for years, you know things that the others don’t have a clue about.”

  “I been here all my life,” Alice said with a sidelong glance at her. “I see a lot of stuff. What do you want to know?”

  “Please, let’s sit down a few minutes. We’re trying to understand Howard Bainbridge, how he lived, what he did. Of course, the family wasn’t present and can’t tell us. Perhaps you can.”

  “I know a few things,” Alice said, sitting down after a swift look at the door to the house. “I hear stuff and see stuff all the time.”

  “I know you do,” Constance said. “What did Mr. Bainbridge do all the time? Did he have hobbies? Visitors? Was he good to work for? Those are the kinds of things we’re trying to find out.”

  Alice plunged in and Constance let her ramble. “He was okay to work for, never nagged about nothing like washing the windows, not like some do. He went to car shows a lot. Be gone for days at a time, two, three times a year. Just took off without a word most times. But he brought back a lot of stuff about new cars, so I figured he was at the shows. Kept to himself. Not much of a talker, most days he never said a word to me. He acted like I wasn’t here, just went on about his own business like I wasn’t here. He read a lot and watched movies. Sometimes, a lot of times, he just walked over by the lake. He never said so, but he’d come back with his shoes all muddy and stickers all over his pants.” She looked at the door again and her voice dropped to a near whisper. “I think he was haunted. You know, his girlfriend got drowned in the lake. Maybe he heard her calling him or something.”

  She stopped talking and flicked her cloth over the table again, keeping her gaze averted with only a quick glance as if to see if Constance was impressed or believing.

  Constance nodded gravely. “I suppose being back here stirred up a lot of memories for him. What else did he do to occupy himself? Did he fix things around the house? You know what I mean, replace washers, glue a loose chair leg, the sort of things that seem to need fixing now and then.”

  Alice shook her head and scoffed at the idea. “That man didn’t know which end of a screwdriver worked. He was no good with his hands, I can tell you.”

  “Did you know them all when they used to come for vacation, when the boys were young?”

  “Didn’t know them, but I seen them around. Noisy bunch, laughing, playing jokes, tricking each other.”

  “What kind of tricks do you mean?” Constance asked.

  “Hiding things, thro
wing a ball and not letting one of them grab it. Once they took the swimming suit off one of them and wouldn’t give it back and he had to stay in the water because there was girls there watching and laughing. His sister went out with a towel for him.” She giggled.

  Constance laughed. “A dirty boy trick,” she said. “I’ve read that you and Andrea were on the spot when that terrible accident happened. It must have been awful for you girls. Were you good friends? I imagine you talked about it a lot afterward.”

  Alice shook her head. “She was little and didn’t know nothing. I used to tell her things and her ma told me to stop. But she didn’t know nothing. She didn’t know how you make babies, stuff like that.”

  “She’s the one who saw the boat sinking, wasn’t she? Such a little girl to see something like that.”

  “Yeah, and she went running to tell her ma. I seen them pull him out of the water, she didn’t. And I seen them trying to fix the boat and she didn’t. She was dumb. I seen a lot of things she didn’t. She just liked to look at birds with the spyglasses.”

  “Oh, did they repair the boat after that?”

  “Before. They tried to fix it but they didn’t even know how.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  Alice looked sullen and shook her head. “They didn’t want to talk none to me, just to her. They took her picture. Nobody asked me nothing. And he brought her a bicycle and stuff. He didn’t give me nothing.”

  “Did you tell Andrea about trying to fix the boat?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t care. Once they tried to make a fire in the grill and couldn’t even do that right. Their pa had to do it. They couldn’t do nothing right.” She shook her head in disgust.