“How did she get here?”
“She flew over from Sacramento early yesterday morning and took a taxi from the airport.”
“Why did she run away again yesterday afternoon?”
“It’s hard to answer that. Evidently she’s more upset than I thought, and needed more security. She was given ground privileges, and I suppose she panicked. I shouldn’t have exposed her to so much freedom.”
“What time did she take off?”
“About this time. Speaking of time, the patient I’m supposed to be with sweats blood when I miss an appointment.” He rose, and looked at his watch. “It’s five-ten. If you’ll come back at eight, I’ll have had my hour with Phoebe, and we can go further into these matters.”
“Where is she now?”
“In her room, with a special nurse. After yesterday’s fiasco, I’m taking no further chances with her security.” He added, with a withering glance at Bobby: “I spent a good part of the night trying to trace her. She’s a valuable girl.”
Trevor had used the same words about his niece.
“How ill is she?”
The doctor spread his hands. “You’re asking impossible questions, at an impossible time. I’d say offhand she’s more upset than ill. She’s over four months pregnant, and that’s enough by itself to account for – ah – unconsidered behavior on the part of an unmarried young woman. She’s been doing a certain amount of acting-out.”
“What do you mean by acting-out?”
“Enacting her fantasies and fears instead of suffering them.” Sherrill’s long patience was fraying. “This is hardly the occasion for me to give you a short course in psychiatry.”
My patience had never been long: “When you get around to talking to Phoebe, there are some specific questions you’d better ask–”
“You mistake my function. I don’t ask questions. I wait for answers. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
Sherrill reached for the doorknob. I said to his back:
“Ask her if she shot and killed Stanley Quillan yesterday afternoon. Ask her if she beat Ben Merriman to death the other night.”
Sherrill turned. His eyes were black and opaque as charcoal. “Are you serious?”
“I’m serious. She killed her mother with a poker last November. Doncaster was a witness.”
His black glance shifted to Bobby, who nodded solemnly.
“Who were these other men?” Sherrill said to me.
“A pair of blackmailers.”
“You say she killed them?”
“I want you to ask her whether she did. If you don’t ask her, let me. There are some answers we can’t just sit around waiting for, and some problems that aren’t just in the mind.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Sherrill said. “I’ll talk to her now. Wait here.”
He went out with his smock flapping around his legs. Bobby subsided into the armchair. He looked at me as if he was sick of me, sick of the world and everybody in it. In twenty-one years he hadn’t had time to get ready for so much trouble. You had to start training for it very young these days.
“You didn’t tell me she was pregnant.”
“That’s why we were going to get married.”
“You’re the father?”
“Yes. It happened last summer at Medicine Stone.”
“Everything happens at Medicine Stone. You’ve put it on the map, boy.”
He hung his head. I went to the window and looked out between the slats of the Venetian blind. The window overlooked a large enclosure paved with flagstones and surrounded by a ten-foot wire fence. A brightly frocked woman holding a raised parasol stood like a mannequin in one corner of the fence. Her face was so heavily powdered that she looked as though she’d stuck it into a flour barrel. A middle-aged man with his chin on his chest was shuffling back and forth across the flagstones, taking one step on each.
“You really think she killed Merriman?” Bobby said in a weak voice.
“It was your idea.”
“I was afraid–” He tried to complete the thought but didn’t know how to.
“For a boy who’s afraid you’ve got yourself into deep trouble.”
“I’m not a boy.” He clutched the arms of the big chair and tried to fill it, to become old and large.
“Boy or man, you’re up against it.”
“I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me if Phoebe – if she’s really finished. I never expected much out of life anyway.”
I sat on the couch near him. “Still, life has to go on.”
“My life doesn’t.”
“It will. Why fight it? You don’t want to be a dead loss to the world. You have certain qualities it can use. Courage is one of them. Loyalty is another.”
“Those are just abstract words. They don’t mean anything. I’ve studied semantics.”
“They do, though. I learned that studying life. It’s a course that goes on and on. You never graduate or get a diploma. The best you can do is put off the time when you flunk out.”
“I’ve already flunked,” he said. “They’ll never let me finish college or anything. They’ll lock me up, probably for the rest of my life.”
“That I doubt. What sort of a record do you have?”
“With the police? I have no record. None at all.”
“How did you get involved with Phoebe Wycherly?”
“I didn’t get involved with her. I fell in love with her.”
“Just like that, eh?”
“Yes. From the first time I met her on the beach, I knew that she was for me.”
“Have you ever been in love before?”
“No, and there won’t be anybody else, ever. That is it. I don’t care what she’s done.”
He had courage, as I’d said. Or stubbornness raised to the nth power, which is almost as good as courage.
“We still don’t know for certain,” I said. “Tell me about Merriman. How did he get into the picture?”
Bobby ran his tongue along the lower edge of his moustache. “He just walked in. He had an appointment with Mrs. Wycherly, and the front door was standing open. He must have heard us in the living room. Phoebe was crying and I was doing my best to comfort her. Merriman walked in and caught us red-handed. He was going to call the police. Phoebe begged him not to, and he relented. He said he would co-operate with her – with us – if we would co-operate with him.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“It was something to do with selling the house. Mrs. Wycherly was going to sell the house through him, that’s what their appointment was about. He was angry because the– because her death interfered with the sale.”
“Did Merriman suggest hiding the body?”
“Yes. We were going to bury her at first, in the garden behind the house. But he said sooner or later it would be found there. I was the one who thought of throwing it in the sea. He helped me carry her out to Phoebe’s car.”
“You said she had no clothes on, is that right?”
“Yes. We wrapped her in a blanket.” A shadow of that image crossed his eyes.
“What happened to her clothes?”
“They were lying on the chesterfield.”
“Did Phoebe undress her?”
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t understand what happened, Mr. Archer. I took off right after that.”
“And left Phoebe with Merriman?”
“I had to.” His forehead was wet. He wiped it with the back of his hand and stayed with his head leaning sideways on his fist. “He told me to get out and not come back. I had to co-operate with him. The one thing I had on my mind was keeping her out of jail. I know now there are worse things than jail.”
He sighed. He was coming out of two months in the moral deep freeze, beginning to feel himself alive in the world once more. His face was painful to look at. I stood up at the window. The woman with the parasol hadn’t moved. She looked as though she hadn’t moved or changed her style since 1928. A flight of blackbirds blew across the green and yellow sky. The man with the hanging head lifted his head and shook his fist at the disappearing birds.