“Why?”
“Her lies are probably being used to mask an actual guilt which she can’t face.”
“Or an actual person whose skin she wants to save?”
“Perhaps. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’m groping just as you are.”
Phoebe was watching us between her fingers. She closed them like scissors when I looked directly at her. I turned back to Sherrilclass="underline"
“You think she’s really guilty of something?”
“I think she thinks she is.” He was pale and sweating in his earnestness. “I’m more concerned with what she thinks than with the objective fact. That has to come to me refracted through her mind, otherwise I can’t reach her.”
“You can guess at the objective fact.”
“Yes. It may have to do with those letters her family received. They’ve been very much on her mind.”
“I hear you talking about me,” Phoebe said across the room. “It isn’t good manners to whisper about a person in her presence.”
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said.
“I don’t care, not really. If you want to talk about the letters, why don’t you say so out loud?”
“All right. Did you write them, Phoebe?”
“No, that’s one sin I haven’t got on my conscious – on my conscious. But I was the cause of it all.”
Sherrill sat on the bed, suddenly and completely absorbed in his patient. “What were you the cause of?”
“The whole awful mess. I told Aunt Helen about them, you see.” She added with a kind of hushed melodrama: “I tit the fuse that blew everything to pieces.”
“Who is Aunt Helen?”
“Father’s sister, Helen Trevor. She drove me home to Meadow Farms last Easter, and on the way I mentioned that I’d seen them. I didn’t realize what it meant–” She shook her head violently. “I’m lying again. I did know what it meant. I was jealous of them.”
“Who were you jealous of?”
“Mother and Uncle Carl. I saw them together late one night, when I was coming down from the city with a boy. We stopped for a red light in San Mateo, and this taxi stopped beside us. Mother and Uncle Carl were in it, with their arms around each other. They didn’t notice me. They were all wrapped up in each other.
“I brooded about it for a week or two, and then when I had the chance I told Aunt Helen. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t say a word all the way to Meadow Farms. But when the letter came next day I knew who had written it. I could see it on her face at the breakfast table.”
“But you didn’t tell anyone?”
“I was afraid to. I’ve always been afraid of Aunt Helen. She’s so sure of herself, so pure, so righteous. Besides it was really my fault. I knew what I was doing when I told her about them, and what would happen.” She said in a rough, hoarse voice which didn’t sound like her own: “Divorce, and destruction, and death.”
“Did Aunt Helen kill your mother?” Sherrill said.
“No. It was partly her fault. But mostly mine.”
“You didn’t do it yourself, did you?”
She shook her bright unkempt head. Her eyes were changing again. She looked like a girl with a secret she wanted to lose:
“Mother was already dying when I got there. The door was open, and I heard her moaning.” Phoebe moaned. “I don’t want to talk about it.” But she went on, as though a barrier had broken in her mind: “I found her in the drawing room lying in her blood. I held her poor head in my arms. She knew me. She couldn’t see, but she knew me by my voice. She said my name before she died.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“I asked her who hurt her. She said it was my father. And then she died. I sat there on the floor with her head in my lap. I was afraid to move for a long time. I’d never seen a dead person, except for Grandfather a long time ago. But after a while I wasn’t scared any more. All I felt was pity for her. Pity for both of them.” She raised her face. It was bright with candor. “They had such a rotten life together. It was such a rotten way for it to end.”
I said: “Did your father ever threaten to kill your mother?”
“Lots of times.”
“That day on the ship?”
“Yes.” She was breathing quickly through widened nostrils. “She said he was going away and leaving her practically penniless. He said she threw her money away and would never get another cent from him. She said if he didn’t help her, she’d ruin his name in California. That’s when he threatened to kill her. Then he got some ship’s officers to take her away.
“I felt sorry for her. I invited her to ride along in my taxi and I tried to cheer her up a little bit. She wanted me to come to Atherton with her. I couldn’t, because Bobby was waiting at the hotel. I promised to come and visit her that evening. But Father got there first.”
“Did you see him in Atherton?” I asked her.
“No. All I have to go on is what she said. I remember her exact words. I think I do. ‘Your father did this to me,’ she said, and then she died. I told Bobby I did it so that he would help me. It was a dirty trick to play on Bobby, but Father came first. I had to protect Father. When the Merriman fellow came in, I told him the same thing, and he believed me.”
Phoebe had slumped forward with her elbows on her knees. She pressed her head between her hands as if she hoped to squeeze it empty of pain. Sherrill and I exchanged a long look across her. She said:
“I still don’t understand how Father got there. He was already supposed to be at sea. Did he use a helicopter or something?”
“He didn’t have to. The sailing was delayed by engine trouble.”
“What will they do to him? Will he be executed?”
“There’s no danger of that,” I said. Men with money never saw the inside of the gas chamber.
“They’ll put him in jail, though, won’t they? Father is so sensitive. He won’t be able to stand that.”
“He may not be so very sensitive. Remember that three people have died violent deaths.”
“Father didn’t kill those horrible men. I’ll never believe that he did.”
“You’ve been acting on the belief,” I said. “Isn’t that why you tried to take the blame for all three killings?”
She answered my question with another: “But why would he do such a thing? He didn’t even know them. Father had nothing to do with people of that sort.”
“He probably made their acquaintance very quickly in the last few days. My guess is they approached him and tried to blackmail him, just as they’d been blackmailing you, and your mother before you.”
“I see. So that’s my fault, too.”
“Do you want to explain that, Phoebe?” Sherrill asked her.
“No. There are things that can’t be said.”
“There’s nothing that can’t be said.”
She gave him a slanting sidewise look. “You don’t know what I did, what I really did.”
“I’ll know if you tell me. It can’t be so very terrible.”
“You think not?” She was full of guilt again. She seemed to have an inexhaustible reservoir of guilt.
I said: “Did you finally break down and tell Merriman that your father had killed your mother?”
She nodded almost imperceptibly.
“When did you tell him, Phoebe?”
“The last time I saw him. Was it three days ago? Anyway, I betrayed my father. I made the whole thing in vain. The whole horrible two months were all in vain. I told that man my mother’s dying words. I should have cut out my tongue first.”
“Did he use force to get it out of you?”
“No. I don’t even have that excuse. It was afterwards that he hit me, when he wanted to make love to me, and I wouldn’t let him. I never let him.”
“Why did you tell him that your father was guilty?”