“You don’t mean that Mrs. Doncaster didn’t want Phoebe to come back?”
“No. I mean, she didn’t want anything to happen to her. But she was just as satisfied when she didn’t come back. She wanted to think that Phoebe had gone for good. I mean, she kept telling me that one of these days we’d hear from Phoebe. She’d send for her things, from New Zealand or Hong Kong or who knows where, and that would be that. But it isn’t, is it?”
“I don’t understand Mrs. Doncaster’s motive. Does she dislike your roommate?”
“She hates her. It’s nothing personal. I’m not trying to say that Mrs. Doncaster had anything to do with it.”
“It?”
“Whatever happened to Phoebe. She isn’t dead, is she?”
“I don’t know. We still haven’t got to the bottom of Mrs. Doncaster.”
“It’s simple enough.” To Dolly, everything was very simple or very complicated. “I didn’t want to drag his name into it – he’s a nice boy – but Bobby Doncaster had a crush on Phoebe. A heavy crush. He used to hang around with his tongue hanging out a yard, panting. Mrs. Doncaster didn’t like the idea at all.”
“Was it a two-way crush?”
“I guess so. Phee didn’t wave her torch around the way Bobby did. But as a matter of fact–” She caught herself up short, blinking her dimey eyes.
“You were going to say?”
“Nothing.”
“It must have been something.”
“But I hate gossip. And I’m not a snooper, really.”
“I am. This is a serious matter, Dolly. You know it. The more you can tell me about Phoebe’s life, the better chance I’ll have of finding her. So what were you going to say?”
She twisted her legs, untwisted them, and ended up sitting on them in a kind of yogi position. “I think Phoebe came here, to this college, on account of Bobby. She never actually admitted it. But it slipped out one time when we were talking about him. She met him last summer at some beach up north, and he talked her into registering here.”
“And renting an apartment from his mother?”
“Mrs. Doncaster doesn’t know that. And I don’t know it for certain.” Dolly gave me a worried look. “You mustn’t think there was anything going on. Phoebe isn’t that kind of a girl. Neither is Bobby that kind of boy. He wanted to marry her.”
“I’d like to talk to him.”
“That shouldn’t be hard. I heard him down in the basement when I got home from class. He’s working on a surfboard.”
“How old is Bobby?”
“Twenty-one. The same age as Phoebe. But he can’t tell you anything much about her. He didn’t know her. I was the only one who knew her, and I didn’t really know her. Phoebe was – Phoebe is deep.”
“Just what does that mean?”
“Deep. She never let on what she was really thinking. She could put up a perfectly good front, chatting along with the rest of us, but her mind would be on other things. Don’t ask me what things, I don’t know. Maybe her parents. Maybe other people.”
“Did she have other friends besides you?”
“Nobody really close. She was only here a little over seven weeks. I ran into her in the housing office. We were both looking for roommates, and I needed an upperclassman to live with so I could live off-campus. Besides, I liked Phoebe, very much. She was a bit of an odd-ball, and I am, too. We hit it off together, right away.”
“In what way was she an odd-ball?”
“That’s hard for me to say. Psych is not my line. I mean, Phee had two or three personalities, one of them was a poisonality. She could be black, and frankly I’m not so highly integrated, either. So we sort of matched up.”
“Was she depressed?”
“Sometimes. She’d get so depressed she could hardly crawl around. Then other times she was the life of the party.”
“What was she depressed about?”
“Life,” Dolly Lang said earnestly.
“Did suicide ever enter the picture?”
“Sure, we talked about suicide. Ways and means and all. I remember once, we were talking about suicide as an expression of the personality. I’m the Golden Gate Bridge type, the jump-off, highly dramatic.”
“What about Phoebe?”
“She said she’d shoot herself in the head. That was the quickest.”
“Did she have a gun?”
“Not that I know of. Her father had, though, plenty of them, back home in Meadow Farms. Phee thought it was ghastly, having guns around the house. She’d never shoot herself. It was just talk. Actually, she was afraid of guns. Very neurotic, like all nice people.”
Never argue with a witness.
I got up and turned the chair back toward the typewriter. It held a half-filled sheet of typescript, headed “The Psychic Origins of Juvenile Delinquency,” by Dorothea S. Lang, and ending in a half-finished sentence: “Many authorities say that socio-economic factors are predominate in the origins of anti-social behavior, but others are of the opinion that lack of love…”
The e’s were out of alignment. Maybe it was a clue.
Chapter 3
The slope fell away towards the rear of the building, so that the entrance to the basement was at ground level. A few cars were parked in the yard behind it. Inside, there were noises resembling groans and shrieks of anguish, which came from a room at the back of the basement. I made my way towards it among packing cases and cleaning equipment, and looked into a windowless workshop lit by an overhead bulb.
Under it a young man with broad shoulders was planing a piece of board clamped in a vise. Sawdust dusted his reddish crewcut. Curled shavings crackled under his feet. I stood and watched him make a number of passes with the plane. His back was to me, and the muscles in it shifted heavily and rhythmically under his T-shirt.
He didn’t know I was there until I spoke: “Bobby?”
He glanced up sharply. He had bright green eyes. His heavy, slightly stupid mouth and chin reminded me of his mother. Otherwise he was a good-looking boy. His upper lip sported a fresh pink moustache.
“You want something, sir?”
I told him who I was and why I was there. He backed against the pegboard wall studded with tools and looked around his cubicle as if I had deliberately trapped him in it. The plane glittered like a weapon in his hand.
“I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with it.”
He tried to surround this remark with a smile, but his smile was stiff and frightened. I couldn’t tell if this was his reaction to detectives and disappearance or if the fright was chronic in him, waiting for occasions to break out.
“You hope I don’t think you had anything to do with what?”
“The fact that Phoebe hasn’t come back.”
“If you had anything to do with it, now’s the time to say so.”
His green eyes clouded. He looked at me in confusion. He did his best to convert it into anger: “For God’s sake!” But he wasn’t quite man enough. He was mimicking anger, safely: “Where did you get the idea that I did anything?”
“You brought the subject up.”
He tried to reach his moustache with his lower teeth. It was his mother’s mannerism; I had the impression that he hadn’t decided whether he was his mother’s boy or his father’s.
“But let’s not play word-games, Bobby. You were close to Phoebe. It’s natural I should want to question you.”
“Who have you been talking to?”
“That’s unimportant. You were close to her, weren’t you?”
He noticed the plane in his hand and set it down on the workbench. With his eyes still averted from mine, he said: