“Mr. Henderson.”
Henderson dragged himself rather irritably out of the Garden of Eden. “Welcome back, Miss Brewster. Did you have a nice vacation?”
“I was only gone for two hours.”
“Two hours can be an eternity in this madhouse. The Admiral’s wife was just in here complaining that we have too much chlorine in the pool and not enough pH. What the hell is pH? When you find out, buy some and pour it in.”
“Mr. Henderson, this is Mr. Aragon.”
“I can’t help that. My God, people expect me to solve all their problems.”
“I don’t expect you to do anything about mine,” Aragon said.
“You don’t. Good. Stout fella. Now if you’ll pardon me, I have important work to do, pH and all that.”
“I understand.”
“Of course, of course you do. Very understanding face you have there. Not many of them around these days.”
Henderson departed, wondering why he was always meeting such odd people. Perhaps it was a family curse.
“We keep two files on each member,” Ellen told Aragon. “One is for regular office use: address, phone number, occupation, names of family members, and so on. The other is private, to be used only by Mr. Henderson and the executive committee. It contains each member’s original application for membership and the names and comments of their sponsors, letters of resignation and reinstatement, pertinent financial records, lists of other clubs they belong to. Some of this is useful, but mainly the file is a hodgepodge that should be cleaned out or updated.”
“What’s your definition of hodgepodge?”
“Oh, complaints from one person about another person, perhaps one or both of them long since dead, old newspaper clippings covering social events, divorces, scandals and the like; cards from members traveling abroad; photographs, many of them unidentified and unidentifiable.”
“Apparently you have access to the file.”
“Only when Mr. Henderson wants me to look something up,” Ellen said. “He keeps the key.”
“But you can ask him for it any time.”
“Yes.”
“Will you?”
“I’m supposed to have a good reason.”
“Mrs. Shaw skipped town under unusual circumstances. That good enough?”
“We’ll see if Mr. Henderson thinks so.”
While she went to get the key Aragon stood at the door and watched the people. There were about twice as many of them as there had been during the morning. Several small groups were having late lunch on the terrace and most of the chaises on the opposite side of the pool were occupied. The water of the pool itself was being churned up by half a dozen earnest swimmers doing laps to a pace clock. On the lifeguard tower an ivory-haired young man was picking absently at his chest, peeling away the dead skin of his latest sunburn.
The elderly man in shorts and tennis visor was still busy writing but he had changed his position from the terrace to a chair under a cypress tree at the corner of the fence. The tree was bent and twisted by the wind and salt air. It seemed a good place for him.
Ellen came back carrying the key and looking a little embarrassed, as though Henderson might have given her a reprimand or a warning.
Her voice was subdued. “Listen, I’m sorry I said some of those things about Mrs. Shaw and Grady.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know for sure whether they’re together or not. They both left at approximately the same time but that may be only a coincidence. She takes trips every now and then, cruises and stuff like that. As for Grady, lifeguards come and go around here like the tides. It’s a boring job and the salary’s lousy, that’s why we mostly have to hire college kids who are subsidized by their families. Grady isn’t a kid and he has no family. We all knew he wouldn’t last.”
“It’s funny he didn’t last long enough to pick up his paycheck.”
“Where — how did you find that out?”
“Frederic told me.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“He had the idea,” Aragon said carefully, “that Mrs. Shaw was, in his words, Grady’s new chick.”
She looked down at the key in her hands, turning it over and over as if she was trying to remember what lock it fitted. “So even the kids were talking about it.”
“Or kid. And he’s not exactly typical.”
“They probably all knew before I did, everyone in the club. What a prize cluck that makes me. I never even suspected her because she’s so much older, and that day in the office they both pretended to be meeting for the first time.”
“Some first meetings can be quite electric,” Aragon said. The word reminded him of Hippollomia and his truck trapped behind Mrs. Shaw’s locked gate. “There is no electric... Missus forgot to pay.”
She said, “Afterward I watched them walk down the corridor together. There was something about them, something inevitable, fated. I couldn’t describe it but I knew Grady was walking out of my life before he was even in it.” She turned away with a shrug. “So scratch one lifeguard. He won’t be back.”
“Not even for his paycheck?”
“He won’t need it. Miranda Shaw is a very wealthy woman.”
He didn’t correct her.
The files took up half the width of one wall of the office. They were painted pastel blues and pinks and mauves to help conceal their purpose. They still looked like files. Ellen unlocked the blue one.
The material on the Shaws was sparse. Attached to an application form dated twenty years previously were enthusiastic comments from the Shaws’ sponsors, Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Godwit, and their seconders, Dr. Franklin Spitz and Mrs. Ada Cottam, and a card with a single word printed on it and underlined: OIL. Whether it was the OIL or the enthusiastic support, the Shaws were admitted to membership in the Penguin Club the following month, paid the initiation fee and a year’s dues in advance and rented cabana number 22. Neville Shaw’s other affiliations included the University Forum, the Greenhills Country Club, Turf and Tanbark, Rancheros Felicianos and the Yale Club.
An old letter from Shaw addressed to the manager and the Executive Committee deplored the kind of music played at the New Year’s Eve Ball. A later one canceled the rental of cabana number 22, citing excessive noise from 21 and 23. To the bottom of this someone had added a brief comment in ink: Party Pooper!
There were only two recent items in the file, a copy of a delinquent-dues notice signed by Walter Henderson, and a greeting card bearing an indecipherable postmark and addressed to Miss Ellen Brewster, in care of Penguin Club, Santa Felicia, California.
“Go ahead, read it,” Ellen said. “It’s not personal. She wrote cards like that to a lot of people. I think she was homesick, she didn’t enjoy traveling, especially in Mexico.”
“Where was she in Mexico when she wrote this?”
“Pasoloma.”
He had never heard of it.
Dear Ellen: Heavenly weather, blue sea, blue sky. Only fly in ointment is more like a mosquito or flea, what the tourists call no-see-ums. My husband is off on a 3-week fishing trip but I get seasick so I’m here on the beach, scratching. By the way, a mistake must have been in our last billing. I’m sure my husband paid it promptly as usual. Regards, Miranda Shaw.
“She didn’t like Pasoloma,” Ellen said. “There’s nothing to do except surf and fish, she told me. Yet she kept going back.”
“Did her husband always go with her?”
“As far as Pasoloma. Then he’d charter a fishing boat for two or three weeks and do his thing while she did hers.”