“Of who, honey?” I said with an innocent smile.
“Oh—just the lady who used to—have this room. Mrs. Dunningham. Well, I better run along.”
“Oh, stick around. I’m not doing anything.”
The rose color came flushing up under that pretty, clear olive skin, and Wynola threw me a glance that seemed as pleased as it was scared, but she was backing toward the door at the same time, saying, “Thanks, I couldn’t. I have to—I have ironing. Thanks.” Next minute she was gone.
I stood surveying the closed door, thinking, Well, nice try, anyway—I suppose. I glanced at my archaeology book half under the chair cushion, then out the back window at the steady rain and Mrs. Hockins out in it. Then I sighed, told myself I hoped I knew where my duty lay, and struggled into my raincoat.
The garden was just as soggy as it had seemed from inside my nice cozy room, but I went out anyway, trying to look as if it were quite normal to stroll about admiring roses in a downpour. It was at least as normal as to prune them under such conditions, which was what Mrs. Hockins was doing. She had a big basket half full of unwanted bits, and was so busy collecting more that she didn’t hear me come up behind her.
“My, those pink ones sure are pretty,” I said chattily.
She turned to stare at me, not unnaturally. “Oh. Good afternoon.”
“Not very, I guess, is it? But they say Oregonians are half duck.”
She gave me a quarter-inch smile and murmured something polite but baffled. I could scarcely blame her. Obviously, she had no notion who I was or where I’d sprung from, felt little enthusiasm for bright-blue eyelids and none for conversation at the moment.
I took a long, desperate breath, eased around with my back to the direction the rain was driving from, and asked her what kind of roses those yellow ones were, then what kind the big white ones were, then said didn’t roses have funny names sometimes though, and she said yes, or maybe it was just that they were named after funny people. Of course I laughed merrily, to encourage her, but she only smiled another quarter of an inch and looked at a dead bloom nearby and at the clippers in her old, fragile, veined hands. I said roses must be quite a hobby with her. Then I couldn’t think of another solitary thing to say about roses, and Mrs. Hockins asked if I weren’t getting my feet awfully wet out here. I said I always had liked to walk in the rain, which she didn’t believe any more than I did.
I had one more go at it and told her where I lived. “The room that used to be Mrs. What’s-Her-Name’s—Dunningham’s. Wynola says you knew her pretty well.”
Her face changed a bit at that, but she seemed to draw even further into herself. “Yes. Yes, Mrs. Dunningham was my friend.” She looked past me toward my windows, turning the clippers over and over, slowly, in her hands. “I’ve often had tea in that room, winter afternoons. I miss her.”
“I’m sure,” I murmured. I wanted to say, Come have tea with me sometime—but I simply couldn’t bring myself to it. She was being civil enough, but she wanted my company about as much as she wanted mildew on her roses. Suddenly, I felt frightfully sorry for her, without knowing just why. I uttered one or two other inanities, to which she responded patiently, while her eyes wandered back to the roses. She couldn’t resist just clipping one dead bunch that had been worrying her. So I let the conversation die its natural and overdue death, wandered on to stare at some other flowers while my feet got even wetter, and finally returned to the house, feeling frustrated and discouraged and queerly snarled up inside. On my way down the back hall, I met Dr. Edmonds and Dave Kulka emerging from the kitchen, talking animatedly. Dr. Edmonds said hello and gave me one of his brisk, bracing little nods; Dave Kulka glowered scornfully, as usual. Both of them walked straight past me to the stairs.
I went into my room, shed my soggy shoes and raincoat, and eyed my reflection in the glass. “To what, Miss Smith,” I asked it, “do you owe your overwhelming popularity? Your magnet-like attraction for people of all ages, who keep following you about in clusters, eager to tell you the story of their lives? Would you mind describing for the Courier—”
I dropped that and put some dry shoes on and found my place in the archaeology book. But I couldn’t put my mind to it now; I kept looking out the window at Mrs. Hockins puttering about her roses, or thinking how brightly impersonal Dr. Edmonds’ friendliness was beginning to seem. The truth is, I was fighting off a kind of panic. It looked as if Georgetta were turning out as friendless as Shan Lightley, and knew just as little what to do about it, and were just as incapable of getting next to people, much less sleuthing. When the cuckoo flung himself out to remind me I’d spent a full half hour getting soaked for absolutely nothing, I came near hurling a shoe at him.
Instead, I went out to the front hall to see if the mail had come and found a letter from Dad, sent on by Miss Jensen in a discreet white envelope to cover the British postmark and stamps. He said Charlie Frost had baldly ordered him to leave me alone to work something out by myself for once, and that he would—having been presented with a fait accompli that left him precious little choice. But might he say one thing—that a girl like me without a college education was like a fiddler without one hand. If I would just believe that, this incomprehensible balkiness of mine—mere matter of adjustment, probably—would vanish, and I could get on with things. Then he quit grumbling and muttering and said he hadn’t a doubt I’d work things out and do it well, since I succeeded at everything I tried.
I stared a moment at that last remark, wondering if it were possible Dad had sort of forgotten whom he was writing to, just for a minute. Or if he’d just wanted to make encouraging noises and hadn’t noticed how peculiarly unsuitable these were. Or if he could possibly, conceivably, have failed to grasp any better than that what I was all about. Of course the irony of the remark’s coming at this precise moment was pure coincidence. But just what Dad might mean by “succeeded”—my high marks at school, maybe?—I couldn’t imagine. The whole thing was as unaccountable as if he had forgotten my name.
I gave it up and read the rest of the letter—eagerly, because it seemed a long time since I’d heard. He said he and Jeanne were in London, along with half the rest of the international press, because of the Cabinet crisis (which he assumed, erroneously, I’d read all about), that Jeanne had a new camera, that they’d just lunched with Harlan Manning of the Chicago Trib, whom I would probably remember . . .
Whom I would probably remember, I thought incredulously. I was dumbfounded again at how little Dad seemed to remember about me. Had he forgotten my thirteenth birthday, when he and Jeanne were delayed ten hours in reaching Copenhagen, and Harlan took me to Tivoli for the day? Had he forgotten who finally found my passport that time in Rijeka? Who once taught me how to say “scram” in fourteen languages? Who . . . well, obviously he had. But I had not.
“And, Shan, Willy Bach is here, out of the hospital at last. He says Franz was six-feet-one last time he measured. Jeanne sends her love and asks if you want her to send some of those shoes from Harrod’s—I assume you’ll know what she’s talking about. I phoned your mother just now to see if she had a message for you, and she did—you must absolutely catch her new film when it comes to Portland. I’m sorry, Shan, she’s just that way, nobody can do anything about it, though God knows I tried. Well, so long, Luv, we’re going to run down to Beckenham to Ann and Kingsley’s for the weekend, and it’s time to get moving. Love and lots of it, Dad.”
I came out of the letter slowly, the way you come out of an anesthetic, and looked about the stranger’s room where I was sitting and wondered what I was doing there, anyway—what I was doing in Portland, what I was doing in the States. For a minute I was so shocking homesick to see Dad and Jeanne, or Harlan or Franz or even Ann and Kingsley Benton-Jones, whom actually I can’t stand, that I thought I’d just break down and howl. I’d even have settled for Mother, right that instant, and if the film had been in town, I’d have gone to
it.
However it wasn’t, so I folded the letter and went over to hide it under my underwear in the dresser. As I shut the drawer, I caught sight of Georgetta in the glass—hairdo, eye shadow, rhythmically moving jaw—and instead of howling ended up laughing. I don’t know why, but it cheered me up—particularly when the cuckoo popped out at that moment to say exactly what I was thinking. Moreover, the rain had stopped, and there was even a feeble ray of almost-sunshine glimmering out there in the wet garden. And Sherry, at least, seemed to like my company, even if he didn’t ask me out. One of these days I might even find the nerve to invite Mrs. Hockins to tea.
I slung on my cardigan humming, “. . . merrie sing cuccu”—now there was one thoroughly cheerful medieval song—and went out and walked hard for an hour and breathed a lot of damp fresh air. By the time I got back, my morale was up to normal. The day hadn’t really been wasted. I’d identified Mrs. Hockins, thanks to Wynola. I’d identified all the legatees now, except the elusive Brick Mulvaney. I wondered if Wynola might know him, too. At that point I had a brilliant inspiration—I’d ask Wynola to tea on my next day off.
3
My next day off happened to fall on July 4, but I had no other engagements (as I scarcely need mention), and if Wynola did, she broke them.
She put on her best dress to come to tea. It was rose-colored linen, exactly the shade of that tint along her cheekbones, and it was well cut and slimming. In spite of her bushy hair and large black oxfords, the overall improvement was considerable, and my admiring comment was quite sincere.
“Oh, thank you. Do you really like it?” she breathed, and became almost pretty for a minute.
“Mm-hm. Where’d you buy it?”
“Well, I—it was a present. Mrs. Dunningham—” She stopped, flushed, and subsided into a chair as if she wished it would go on through the floor with her.
“Mrs. Dunningham what?” I asked carelessly, on my way to the kitchenette.
“Nothing. She gave me the dress, is all.”
“Well, how nice!”
There was a small silence, which I filled with cup rattling and a chummy smile over my shoulder. Wynola was clenching her hands together and looking as guilty as if she’d stolen the crown jewels. I decided that now was the time to break this conspiracy of silence and asked straight out what Mrs. Dunningham had been like.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Wynola burst out in a desperate but still tiny voice. “I didn’t mean to mention her, even. We all said we wouldn’t.”
“You did? But why?”
“Well—because of you. Mom and Dr. Edmonds . . . I mean, everybody thought it’d be—just better. If we didn’t talk a lot about her in front of you.”
This was going incredibly well. What a job lot of crooks—and they didn’t seem like crooks at all, really, especially Dr. Edmonds. Or old Mrs. Hockins. Or Sherry.
All of a sudden the whole thing simply revolted me—what they had done, what I was doing. I wished I’d never heard of College Street, never met any of these people, and were on my way to Madagascar. I jammed the lid onto my biscuit tin, plastered a smile on my face, and carried the tea tray over to the little table between the two chairs.
“Well, gee, why shouldn’t you talk about her?” I asked brightly. “I been kind of wondering why her stuff is still here, and all. You’d think her relations would come get her things.”
“She—she wanted her things to stay here. To belong to this room. She gave them to my mom.”
“Hm! That’s funny. Most people would want their own family to have their things. If they have any family.” There. I’d slid in my dratted wily question.
“Yes,” Wynola said uninformatively. She took the cup of tea I handed her and added, as if she couldn’t stop herself, “She wasn’t like most people.”
I thought this an understatement, but I merely smiled encouragingly and passed the sugar.
“Oh, I quit using sugar. I promised Mrs. Dun— I mean, I can’t.” Wynola sank back, crimson, and folded her lips, whereupon the conversation dropped dead. No matter what I did, I could get nothing out of her but monosyllables accompanied by small, agonized smiles intended to show me how much she was enjoying herself. And suddenly I just couldn’t pump her any longer—I felt too sorry for her. I started talking about my sister Charmeen, and she began to relax a bit. Once she actually laughed, and I was feeling quite successful—though not as a detective—when I got some unexpected help from the cuckoo, who popped out to announce that it was three o’clock. I said, “That bird is always telling me I’m crazy. And at the most appropriate moments.”
Wynola’s whole face lighted up. “Oh, do you feel that way, too? That’s why Mrs. Dunningham liked cuckoo clocks—she said they kept a person reminded of the ridiculousness of the human race.”
It was so obviously a direct quote that I felt the old lady’s ghost had sailed right in the window and joined the conversation. I said involuntarily, “She sounds like fun.”
“Oh, yes, I—she—” Wynola was heading for her shell again.
“Look, honey,” I said. “I wish you’d just cut loose and tell me all about Mrs. Dunningham. You want to talk about her, and I want you to. I can’t see why anybody’d tell you not to.”
“Because—it might make you feel bad.”
Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. I said blankly, “Make me feel bad? How could it?”
Her face cleared; she was practically glowing all of a sudden. “I told Mom you weren’t like that. But she said she knew how it was to come from a small town and not to know anybody, and if we all kept talking about Mrs. Dunningham this and Mrs. Dunningham that, you’d think we were always comparing. But we wouldn’t have been, only she was just so wonderful, and—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean—the idea was not to hurt my feelings?”
“Yes,” Wynola said simply.
I felt as if I’d sat down on a chair that somebody had just removed. Then in a second my brain got working again, and I realized this was just what they’d told Wynola, who obviously believed it and knew nothing about the swindle. But then I remembered Mrs. Jackson’s remark to me about coming from a small town herself—but then I tried in vain to imagine Dave Kulka being delicately solicitous of my sensitive feelings—and, well, I was very busy thinking for a minute. Meanwhile, I held out the plate of macaroons and muttered, “Have another biscuit.” Wynola looked a bit startled, and I came out of my trance in a hurry. “Cookie, I mean,” I added with a tossed-off little laugh.
“You know, in England everybody calls cookies ‘biscuits.’ Mrs. Dunningham told me when she came home,” Wynola said, gazing at the macaroons hungrily but not taking any. “Thanks, but I’m supposed to be on a diet. Mrs. Dunningham said I’d be a different girl if I lost twenty pounds. I did lose six, but after she died—well, I kind of gained them back.”
“She went to England? You mean while she lived here?”
“Yes, last summer. Not by herself, she knew she was kind of—well, old—to go alone, so that’s why she took Sherry along, to look after the—”
“She took who?” I said in a thin high soprano.
Wynola looked mildly surprised at my surprise. “One of the college students, George Sherrill. I thought you might have met him over at the Rainbow.”
“Oh. Mm-hm, I have,” I said, collecting myself and making an upper-case, underscored mental note to grill Sherry about this at the first opportunity. Meanwhile, I saw another opening. “I was only thinking it was funny she wouldn’t take one of her own relatives.”
“I guess she didn’t have any,” Wynola said without much interest. “At least, I never heard her mention them. Maybe they’d all died or something.” She thought a minute, while I was awarding myself a small medal for having finally got a definite statement on this subject, then she added, “That must’ve been it. Because she said once she’d bee
n waiting fifty years to see Stonehenge, and she’d just realized there was nothing stopping her. You know about Stonehenge? It’s a queer kind of—”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said cautiously.
“There’s a whole book here about it that she used to read me out of. She used to read me Grimm’s Fairy Tales, too.” Wynola glanced at me defensively. “You might think I was too old for those, but she read them herself, all the time. She said fairy tales were good for people.”
“Good for people? How?”
“Well—she said, ‘Same way helium is good for a balloon.’”
I was beginning to be delighted with Mrs. Dunningham, dotty old lady or not. I filled Wynola’s cup, remarking, “This is her tea we’re drinking—I found it on the shelf.”
“Oh, I know it’s hers. I recognized the taste.” Wynola smiled tremulously, let her eyes wander around the room, and said it seemed so natural to be sitting in this chair again, drinking this tea out of these yellow cups, and that Mrs. Dunningham used to say it was the best way to get acquainted with somebody, over a teacup. “I don’t know why she wanted to get acquainted with me,” Wynola added as if she’d never ceased to be dumbfounded about it. “Nobody else ever has. But she used to invite me to tea just like a grownup and ask me what I thought about things and all, just like she was really interested. Mom used to say, ‘Watch out you don’t get hurt. People are nice just so long as it suits them and no longer,’ and that’s right, I guess. But Mrs. Dunningham was always nice. I guess it kept on suiting her.”
“What was she like, Wynola? What’d she look like?”
“Oh, she was a real little lady. I’d of made five of her,” Wynola said in a wistful voice that made me suddenly wish I were overweight myself, just to keep her company. “But she never did make me feel big and fat and clumsy like most people do. She made me feel like I was just about her size. She even made me feel—” Wynola stopped and gave an embarrassed laugh. “Oh—I don’t know what I started to say. Anyhow, she was real tiny, and she had brown eyes, and—you know, white hair—I can’t describe her.”