It paralleled Bayshore, about halfway between Bayshore and Camino Reaclass="underline" a quiet street of fairly large estates which was more like a country lane than a city street. Mrs. Wycherly’s number, 507, was engraved in a stone gatepost set in an eight-foot stone wall. The moulded iron gates were chained and padlocked.
Wired to one of them was a metal sign which looked like a For Sale sign. I got a flashlight out of my car. For Sale, Ben Merriman, Realtor, with an Emerson telephone number and a Camino Real address.
The white front of the house glimmered through trees. I turned my light towards it. Oaks on either side of the driveway converted it into a rough green chasm whose gravel floor was drifted with brown leaves and yellowing newspapers. It was an impressive Colonial house but it had an abandoned air, as though the colonists had given up and gone back to the mother country. Blinds and drapes were drawn across all the windows, upstairs and down.
I focused on the newspapers in the gravel. There were twelve or fifteen of them scattered around inside the gates. Some of them were wrapped in waxed paper, against rainy weather; several of them had been trampled into mud.
I reached through the bars, the side of my face against cold iron, and got hold of the nearest one, a San Francisco Chronicle still trussed with a string for delivery. I broke the string and read the date at the top of the front page. It was November 5, three days after Phoebe disappeared.
I wanted to see what was inside the house. I put on driving gloves and chinned myself on the top of the stone wall. No spikes or broken glass: the escalade would be easy.
“Get down off there!” a man’s voice said behind me. I dropped to the ground and turned. He loomed large in the darkness, a dim grey figure in a snap-brim hat.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Looking.”
“You’ve had your look. So beat it, Tarzan.”
I picked up my flashlight and turned the beam on him. He was a big man of about forty, handsome except for an up-turned clown’s nose and something about the eyes which reminded me of a Tanforan tout or a gambler on the Reno-Vegas circuit. He wore a sharp dark flannel suit and an indefinable air of failure pinned in place by a jauntily striped bow tie.
The nostrils in his upturned nose glared darkly at me. His teeth glittered in a downward grin:
“Take that light off me. You want me to smash it for you?”
“You could always try.”
He took a couple of steps towards me, as if he was walking uphill, then stood back on his heels. I kept the light on him. His pointed shoes fidgeted in the dirt.
“Who do you think you are?”
“Just a citizen, trying to find an old acquaintance. Her name is Mrs. Catherine Wycherly.”
“She doesn’t live here any more.”
“You know her?”
“I represent her.”
“In what capacity?”
“I’m responsible for the security of these premises. We don’t like prowlers and snoopers around here.”
“Where can I get in touch with Mrs. Wycherly?”
“I’m not here to answer questions. I’m here to see that nobody vandalizes this property.” There was a nasty little whine in his voice. He reached into his back pocket and matched it with a nasty little gun. “Now get.”
My gun was in the back seat of my car, which was just as well. I got.
Crossing Bayshore on an overpass, I felt as if I was crossing a frontier between two countries. There were some white people on the streets of East Palo Alto, but most of the people were colored. The cheap tract houses laid out in rows between the salt flats and the highway had the faint peculiar atmosphere of a suburban ghetto.
Sammy Green earned Sailors’ Union wages and lived in one of the better houses on one of the better streets, almost out of hearing of the highway and almost out of smelling of the Bay. His wife was a handsome young Negro woman wearing a party dress and a complicated hairdo, under which earrings sparkled.
She told me that her husband was in Gilroy for the night; he always visited his folks the second night of his vacation, and took the children with him. No his parents had no telephone, but she’d be glad to give me their address.
I asked her instead how to get to Woodside, where Phoebe’s aunt and uncle lived.
Chapter 7
It was five winding miles across the hinterland of the Stanford campus. Eventually I found Carl Trevor’s mailbox on the road that climbed towards the coastal ridge. His place had a name: Leafy Acres. A horse whickered at me from somewhere as I turned up the drive. I didn’t whicker back.
I rounded a wooded curve and saw the long low redwood and stone house, many windowed, full of light. A maid in a black and white uniform answered the door. She turned on outside floodlights before she unhooked the screen.
“Is Mrs. Trevor at home?”
“She isn’t back from Palo Alto yet.”
“Mr. Trevor?”
“If she isn’t back he isn’t back,” she said in an instructive tone. “She went to the station to meet his train. They ought to be here any time now, they’re later than usual.”
“I’ll wait.”
She looked me over, apparently trying to decide whether I belonged in the front part of the house or the kitchen. I assumed my most respectable expression and got bidden into the library, as she called it. It was a beautiful panelled room with actual books on its shelves. The Trevors went in heavily for history, particularly Western Americana.
I leafed through a copy of American Heritage until I heard a car engine in the drive. I went to the window and saw them get out of their Cadillac convertible. She climbed out on the driver’s side, a thin woman of about fifty with a face like a silver hatchet. He was a heavy-shouldered man wearing a Homburg and carrying the inevitable brief case. He looked sick.
She offered him her arm as they started up the front steps. He pushed her away, without touching her, in a gesture that combined irritation and pride. He ran up the steps two at a time. She watched him go with naked fear on her face.
The fear was still in her eyes when she came into the library a few minutes later. She had on pearls and a simple dark gown which had probably cost a fortune. A wasted fortune. It accentuated the taut angularity of her body and left her frying-chicken shoulders bare.
“What do you want?”
“My name is Archer, I’m a private detective. Your brother Homer Wycherly hired me to look for your niece Phoebe. I don’t know whether you’ve heard from him–”
“I’ve heard. My brother phoned me this afternoon. I don’t know what to make of it.” She wrung her hands so hard that they creaked. “What do you make of it? Is she a runaway?”
“I have no theories, Mrs. Trevor. Not yet. I’ve just been over in Atherton, where I found out that Phoebe isn’t the only one on the missing list. Her mother’s house is up for sale, and apparently empty. I was hoping you could tell me where Mrs. Wycherly is.”
“Catherine?” She sat down suddenly, and let me sit down. “What has Catherine to do with this?”
“Phoebe was last seen in her mother’s company. They left the ship together the day your brother sailed. Shortly after that, Mrs. Wycherly seems to have moved out of her house. Do you know anything about the move, or where she’s gone?”
“I don’t keep track of Catherine’s comings and goings. By her own choice, she’s no longer a member of the family.” Good riddance, was the unspoken implication. “As Homer may have told you, she divorced him last May. In Reno.”