“Is that when she moved to Atherton?”
She nodded her thin grey angry head. “Why she chose to come here and become our virtual neighbor! – Of course I know why she did it. She hoped to trade on our standing in the community. But my husband and I were not about to fall in with her plans. Catherine made her bed and she can lie in it.” Her mouth was thin and cruel. “I’m not surprised she gave up on Atherton and moved out.”
“Do you have any idea where she moved to?”
“I told you I do not. I’m sure in any case that you’re on the wrong track. Phoebe couldn’t conceivably be with her. They don’t get along.”
“That may be so. I still have to talk to her.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.” She cocked her head, as if a moral hearing-aid had switched on and let her hear the harshness in her voice. “You mustn’t think me un-Christian, Mr. Archer. Where my former sister-in-law is concerned, we have had it, as the young people say. I really did my best for her over the years. I took her into my own house before she married my brother, and tried to teach her the things a lady should know. I’m afraid the indoctrination didn’t take. As a matter of fact, the last time I saw her–” She compressed her lips in a way that reminded me of her brother.
“When did you last see her?”
“That same day. The famous day when Homer embarked on his voyage of discovery. Or escape. Catherine must have read about it in the paper, and saw a chance to get her talons into him one more time. I’m surprised they let her aboard. I’ve seen her drunk before, but never as loud and violent as she was that afternoon.”
“What was she after?”
“Money, or so she said. There Homer was with his millions, sailing off to the South Seas, and there was poor Catherine destitute and starving on the meager pittance that he doled out to her. I felt like telling her that a starvation regime would be good for her figure. But of course her version of the facts was grossly exaggerated, as usual. I happen to know that Homer gave her a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement and pays her three thousand dollars a month alimony in addition. And she spends every penny of it.”
“How?”
“Don’t ask me how. She’s always had expensive tastes, which is doubtless why she married my brother in the first place. I heard she paid seventy-five-thousand dollars cash for the Mandeville house – a ridiculous outlay for a woman in her position.”
“The Mandeville house?”
“The one in Atherton – the one you tell me she’s selling. She bought it from a Captain Mandeville.”
“I see. Getting back to this shipboard scene, did you notice your niece’s reaction?”
“Not specifically. She was appalled, I’m sure. We all were. My husband and I left before it was over. Mr. Trevor has heart trouble, and the doctor wants him to avoid that sort of tension. If Catherine aimed to spoil our leave-taking, she succeeded very well.”
“You didn’t see her leave the ship with Phoebe?”
“No, we’d already left ourselves. Are you sure that information is correct? It doesn’t seem likely.”
“I got it from one of the ship’s officers. They left the dock together in the taxi. I don’t know what happened after that.”
She clasped her hands at her breast. “It’s a horribly upsetting situation. My husband is almost prostrated by it. I should have waited to tell him until he’d had his rest – he comes home from the city so exhausted. But I had to go and blurt it out as soon as he stepped off the train.”
“He’s fond of Phoebe, your brother tells me.”
“Deeply fond. She’s been like a daughter to us, especially to Carl. I do hope you can get her back for him. For all of us, but especially for him.” Her hands had climbed to her throat and were picking at her pearls. “I’m deeply concerned about how this shock will affect my husband’s health. I’ve seldom known him to be so disturbed. And he blames me for what happened.”
“Blames you?”
“When Phoebe didn’t answer our Christmas invitation, he wanted to drive down to Boulder Beach and see that she was all right. I persuaded him not to – he’s not supposed to drive. Besides, I felt she had a right to be on her own if she chose. I naturally believed that it was her choice, that she wanted to be free of family for once in her young life. Perhaps I was a little impatient with her, too, when she failed to acknowledge my letter. In any case, we didn’t go. We should have. We should at least have phoned.”
Her fingers were active at her throat. Her pearls broke, cascading down her body, rolling in all directions on the floor.
“Damn it!” she cried. “This is the day when everything happens to me.”
Kicking pearls out from under her feet, she moved to the doorway and jabbed a bell push with her thumb. The maid came running, got down on her knees at once and began to pick up the pearls.
A middle-aged man in a plaid smoking jacket leaned in the doorway and watched the scene with barely repressed amusement. His balding head was large for his body, and rested like a pale cannonball on his shoulders without much intervention from his neck. His voice was deep, and seemed to take a certain pleasure in its own depth:
“What goes on, Helen?”
“I’ve broken my pearls.” Her narrow look implied that in some obscure way he was responsible.
“It isn’t the end of the world.”
“No, but it’s exasperating. Everything seems to be happening at once.”
The kneeling maid gave her a quick glance, sideways and upward. She said nothing. Mrs. Trevor moved on her husband with a kind of furious maternality:
“You’re supposed to be lying down. We don’t want anything else to happen today.” It sounded like a move in a complex verbal game which nobody ever won.
“Nothing will,” he said. “I’m feeling much better.” He looked inquiringly at me. His eyes were blue and intelligent.
“I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Trevor.” I started to tell him who I was, but Helen Trevor intervened:
“No, Mr. Archer. Please. I don’t want my husband troubled with these affairs. I’ll be glad to answer any other questions you–”
“Nonsense, Helen, let me talk to him. I’m perfectly all right now. Come with me, Mr. – Archer, is it?”
“Archer.”
Trevor turned his back on his wife’s protests and led me to a small study off the library. He closed the door with a small sigh of relief.
“Women,” he said under his breath. “Let me get you a drink, Mr. Archer. Scotch or Bourbon?”
“Nothing, thanks. I’m driving, and Bayshore is murder.”
“Is it not? I prefer to commute by Southern Pacific. Now sit down and tell me what all this is about Phoebe. The version I got came by way of my wife, and it’s probably garbled.”
He placed me in a leather armchair facing his and listened to what I had to tell him. There was a silence when I’d finished. Trevor sat immobile. He gave the impression of mental or physical pain stoically endured.
“I blame myself,” he said finally. “I should have looked out for her, if Homer wasn’t willing to. Why he had to choose this winter to forsake his responsibilities and become a white shadow in the South Seas–” He punctuated the unfinished sentence with his fist on his knee. “But the real question is, what are we going to do about it?”
“Find her.”
“If she’s alive.”
“They usually are,” I said with more assurance than I felt. “They turn up counting change in Vegas, or waiting table in the Tenderloin, or setting up light housekeeping in a beat pad, or bucking the modelling racket in Hollywood.”
Trevor’s thick eyebrows came together and tangled like hostile caterpillars. “Why would a well-nurtured girl like Phoebe do any of those things?”