“Is that why you took Mackey off the case?”
He nodded. His head stayed low, as if it was too heavy for his neck.
“Were the allegations in the letters true? Specifically, was she having an affair with another man last spring?”
“I suspected that she was. I had no proof. I had no real desire to look for proof. I loved my wife, you see.”
I didn’t see, but I heard him saying it.
“From the first of last year,” he went on, “she spent a great deal of time away from home. She never would tell me where she went, where she stayed. She claimed to have a studio somewhere, that she went away to paint.”
“She had an apartment in San Mateo,” I said. “The chances are she was sharing it with a man or men. Assuming that, do you have any idea who he or they might have been?”
“No.”
“Did you ever question her on the point?”
“Not directly. Frankly, I hesitated to. She sometimes had such violent reactions.”
“Did she ever offer to kill anyone?”
“Many times.”
“Who did she threaten?”
“Me,” he said dismally.
“I’m going to ask you a question you won’t like. Did you prepare those ‘Friend of the Family’ letters yourself, to satisfy your doubts about your wife?”
Mrs. Wycherly wasn’t the only one who had violent reactions. He got up blotched and roaring, shaking both fists at me like a child in a tantrum: “How dare you, you garbage-raker!” He called me other names. I waited for him to subside. It didn’t take long. He fizzled out like a damp firecracker, sputtering: “That’s insane. You must be crazy.”
“Then humor me. Answer the question.”
“I had nothing to do with those ugly letters. They came as a fearful blow to me.”
“How did they affect Phoebe?”
“She was upset, in her quiet way. She takes things quietly, but deep and hard.”
“And your wife?”
“Catherine was very cool about the whole thing. It’s one reason I asked her to type the letter to Mackey. I wanted to see how she’d react.”
“How did she?”
“She was perfectly cool and calm – which wasn’t usual for her. She stayed that way throughout the entire business. Then the week after Easter she went to Reno, and her lawyers wrote me asking for a settlement.”
“Were you surprised by that development?”
“I’d reached the point,” he said, “Where nothing had the power to surprise me. Nothing in this world.”
“How did Phoebe feel about the divorce?”
“She was deeply hurt and shocked.”
“Children take sides when their parents divorce. Which side did your daughter take?”
“Mine, naturally. I thought I’d made that clear the other day. We seem to be going back and forth over the same old ground.”
I was putting off breaking new ground, for fear the shock of Phoebe’s death would make him unavailable for questioning. I still had questions to ask him:
“You recall the day you sailed, and Mrs. Wycherly came aboard?”
“To wish me bon voyage,” he said wryly. “I’m not likely to forget it.”
“Were you aware that Phoebe left the ship with her mother?”
“They left my stateroom together, at least Phoebe followed her out. I had no idea that they left the ship in each other’s company.”
“They rode away together in a taxi. They seemed to be good friends for the moment. At least Phoebe agreed to visit her mother in Atherton that evening.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It’s my business to find out such things. It’s also my business to ask you if you left the ship that evening.”
“For heaven’s sake, are you suspicious of me?”
“Suspicion is my occupational hazard, Mr. Wycherly. You didn’t tell me the sailing was delayed till the morning of the third. You let me assume it went off on schedule.”
“I’d forgotten about the delay. It slipped my mind.”
“That could happen, I suppose. Surely you remember, though, if you left the ship that evening.”
“I did not. I resent the question. I resent your whole line of questioning. It’s insulting and contemptible and I won’t put up with it.” He glared at me with warmed-over rage in his eyes. He couldn’t hold it. In a voice that was almost querulous, he said: “What are you getting at?”
“I’m trying to get at a situation that led to a death. Three deaths, as a matter of fact, and one near miss. How’s your cardiovascular system, Mr. Wycherly?”
“All right. At least it was all right when I had my last checkup, shortly before I sailed. Why?”
“Carl Trevor had a heart attack last night.”
“Carl did? I’m sorry to hear it,” he said in a light queer voice. A strange expression entered his eyes, a foxy curiosity. “How is he?”
“I don’t know. It’s his second attack, and it hit him hard. I left him in the hospital in Terranova.”
“What on earth is he doing in that primitive hole?”
“Recovering, I hope. He and I went to Medicine Stone to look into a report that a car had been found in the sea. It turned out to be your daughter’s car, and it had a body in it, a woman’s body. Trevor identified her. Then he keeled over.”
“Was it Phoebe?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Wycherly.”
He went to the window and stood there for quite a long time looking out at the empty morning. Something indescribable happened to his body. It seemed to me as I watched him that the knowledge of his grief entered his body. When he turned back into the room the foxy look had been wiped from his eyes and mouth. He said in a deeper voice than I’d heard from him:
“So that’s your news. My daughter is dead.”
“I’m afraid so. There is one element of doubt – a discrepancy among the facts I’ve collected. According to one set of facts, Phoebe went into the sea the night of November second: her car was seen around midnight going through Medicine Stone.”
“Was she driving it?”
“I’m not prepared to report on who was driving it. As I said, there’s a discrepancy. According to another set of facts, Phoebe was living in her mother’s apartment in San Mateo for a week after November second. I should say that a girl who called herself Smith and who fits Phoebe’s description was living there.”
Hope flared up in his eyes. “Smith was my wife’s maiden name. Phoebe would naturally use it. It means she’s still alive.”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t, Mr. Wycherly. Your brother-in-law Trevor made a positive identification of her body. You might say it was confirmed by his heart attack.”
“I see what you mean. Carl was very fond of her.” He paced up and down the room, a fat bear of a man caged by reality. “No fonder than I was,” he said, as if that helped. He turned to face me, his face slack and naked in the tight. “Where is Phoebe now?”
“In the morgue in Terranova. It might be a good idea for you to go up there, today. Please don’t get your hopes up. She isn’t pretty or easy to look at, and I’m very much afraid that you’ll recognize your daughter.”
“But you said she was alive in San Mateo, long after she was supposed to be dead. It must be another girl you found in the water.”
“No. It’s more likely that it was another girl who was seen in San Mateo.”
Chapter 24
I drove back up to the Peninsula. I was bone tired, in spite of my fifteen-dollar sleep. Still I was tugged along by a sense of people and places and meanings corning together, filled with that abstract kind of glee which a mathematician has when he’s just about to square the circle. He thinks.
The assistant manager of the telephone company in Palo Alto admitted after some palaver that the number from which Bobby Doncaster had been called belonged to a public telephone in a booth on the grounds of a gas station at Bayshore and Cedar Lane.