Sleeping Beauty (16 page)

“Then maybe you’re part of the solution.”

She gave me a flashing smile, like a knife gleaming briefly from concealment. “As a matter of fact, I think I am. Let’s get
one thing straight. I love William Lennox. That’s more than you can say for the members of his family—certainly more than you can say for his wife.”

I drove down the long lane, which was almost blocked at one point by a bulldozer pulled to the side. I maneuvered the Cadillac around it.

The house stood on a rise above the beach. It was two-storied, white with a red tiled roof, and it stretched out for a hundred feet on either side of the entrance. Mrs. Hapgood took me into an oak-beamed room furnished like a medieval castle, with high-backed chairs and massive tables and couches too large for ordinary human use. She left me there and went to find Lennox.

I stood by one of the great windows and looked out over the ocean. It was a clear day and I could see, almost halfway to the horizon, a flight of shearwaters like a scrap of dark chiffon blowing along the blue surface. Off to the north, the color seemed to change from blue to brownish, and the sea seemed flat and inert. The oil slick was moving south with the current from Pacific Point.

William Lennox and Mrs. Hapgood came into the room. They weren’t touching, or even close, but they seemed to be very conscious of each other. They moved together with a certain pride.

Lennox wasn’t a big man like his son, but he was one you would notice anywhere. He was wearing a white shirt with a green stone at the throat. He walked upright, with his white head held high, and came across the room with his hand outstretched to greet me.

His hand was thin and frail, scrolled with enormous blue veins. His eyes peered at me from their wrinkles like blue lights shining through a screen.

“Mr. Archer? How are you?” His handshake was firm. “Can I get you a drink?”

“Not when I’m working, thank you.”

“You’re very austere,” the woman said dryly.

The old man cleared his throat. “Connie tells me that my son has been shot. Is it bad?”

“A bullet creased him just above the ear. It didn’t look as if it penetrated the skull. I called an ambulance right away, and they took him back to the hospital in Pacific Point. The other man was shot, too, but he got away with the money.”

“Jack shot him?”

“In the leg, apparently.”

“Where were you when it happened?” His voice was quiet and even, but his blue gaze stayed on my face like a palpable force.

“About half a mile up the road.” I explained why.

Lennox’s face reddened slightly, and then grew pale. “The whole thing’s been bungled. I’m not blaming you, Mr. Archer. I blame my wife and that stupid lawyer of hers. I should have gone there myself.”

“And been shot?” Connie Hapgood said.

“I would have shot first. I would have blown his head off.”

The woman touched his arm, reminding him that he was getting excited. He took a deep breath and turned away. He walked to the end of the room, stood facing the wall for a moment, and then came back.

“Have the F.B.I. been called in?”

“No.”

“Why not? What’s Sylvia doing?”

“Trying to protect your granddaughter, I believe.”

“This is a hell of a way to protect her.” He gave me a hot and narrow look. “Did you recommend this?”

“I was in favor of keeping them out, yes. I still haven’t told the whole story to the police.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t get excited, William,” the woman said. “Why don’t we all sit down and relax a bit?”

“I prefer to stand.” He turned to me. “I don’t understand your purpose in concealing evidence from the police and the F.B.I.”

“You may not want to hear my reason.”

“On the contrary, I insist on hearing it.”

“Whatever you say. Do you want me to talk in front of Mrs. Hapgood?”

“Yes. Quit stalling, man.”

“This may not be a kidnapping in the ordinary sense. It doesn’t feel like a kidnapping to me.”

“What in hell does it feel like?”

“I can’t say. But I found out last night that Laurel has been involved in a similar case before. When she was fifteen or sixteen, she ran off to Las Vegas with a boy. The two of them asked Laurel’s parents for ransom money—a thousand dollars, I believe. And apparently they collected.”

He squinted at me from a network of wrinkles. “I knew that she’d run off that time, of course. But Jack never told me about the money angle.”

“He wouldn’t,” Connie Hapgood said. “He wasn’t going to tell you this time either. But Sylvia couldn’t raise the hundred thousand, so you had to be told.”

He shook his head as if her words were insects attacking him. “I don’t believe that Laurel would do such a thing. She isn’t a cheat. And if she needed money, she could have come to me directly.”

“She’s afraid of you,” the woman said. “She always has been, since she was a girl in school. And remember it isn’t the first time she’s played this trick on the family.”

“I don’t believe it.”

He turned to me again. His shoulders were visibly bowed now and his arms were hanging loose, as if he’d lost the principle that kept him controlled and upright.

“I know that Laurel has had her emotional problems. But she wouldn’t lie to me, or cheat her own family. She simply isn’t that kind of a girl.” He seemed close to breaking down and crying; then his grief changed back to anger. “Damn it to hell, if she did do it, somebody put her up to it. If it was that husband
of hers, I’ll blow his head off. What’s his name? Russo?”

“It wasn’t Tom Russo.” But even as I said that, I realized that I couldn’t be quite sure. Tom had his problems, too; death haunted his dreams and perhaps his waking life.

The woman was watching Lennox with sharp attention. She may have realized that she had spoken too harshly. Driving her wedge into Lennox’s family, she had inadvertently driven it into him. She moved toward him and put her arm around him.

“It’s time you took a rest, William. You’ve had too much for one day.”

“I can’t rest. Who will look after things?” He spoke with an old man’s querulousness. “Everything’s going to pieces. Jack is shot and Laurel’s missing and our new well blew out. And Sylvia sits up there and laughs about it. Damn Sylvia to hell. And damn Ben Somerville. Why did I have to surround myself with losers?”

The woman led him out of the room by the hand. As she passed me, she gave me a keen promising look which made me wait for her to come back.

She was gone for some time. When she returned, she had changed her riding costume for a dress and was carrying a book in her hand.

“I gave him a tranquilizer,” she said, “and got him to lie down. These grim realities are very hard on William. He lives in dreams, he always has. He came out here after the first war with
the dream of founding an empire and a dynasty. All he had to start with was a few thousand dollars which he’d saved and some experience in the Pennsylvania oil fields. And he made the dream come true.” Her eyes swept the room, which looked very much like a dream that had solidified around the dreamer. “Now it’s breaking up around him, and he can’t stand it.”

“You put it to him pretty strongly about Laurel.”

“I have to, or he’ll go on dreaming about her. Men are so unrealistic where women are concerned. It’s been obvious for at least fifteen years that Laurel Lennox is a schizoid personality. But her family go on treating her as if she were perfectly normal, and being surprised and dumfounded when she turns out not to be.”

“Are you a psychiatrist?”

“No, I am not a psychiatrist.” But she gave me a look which conveyed the idea that where Laurel was concerned I was just another dreaming man. “I have studied some psychology, and I know Laurel.”

“You’ve known her for fifteen years?”

“Longer than that. I started teaching at River Valley School eighteen years ago. I’ve known Laurel since she was eleven or twelve. And she’s always lived in a world of her own, a not very happy world where not very nice things happen.”

“That’s true of a lot of children. Ordinarily, though, we don’t blame them.”

“I’m not blaming her, for heaven’s sake. I’m trying to inject a little realism into this situation. It would be a poor bargain for all of us if Laurel picked up a little money or a little loving at the expense of breaking her grandfather’s heart. I mean that literally. He’s old enough, and vulnerable enough, and enough involved with her to be killed by it.”

“We don’t want that to happen,” I said, thinking of the powerful reasons the woman had for keeping him alive.

Her dark gaze probed at my face. “You’re not taking me quite seriously, are you?”

“I take you very seriously, Mrs. Hapgood. I always will,” I added half seriously.

She smiled, and her whole appearance changed, the way a young girl’s will when her feelings are touched. “Then I’ll show you something that may interest you.”

It was in the book in her hands, a large thin volume with the title
River Valley Annual
printed across the front of the green cloth binding. She opened it on a refectory table which stood against the wall, and leafed through the pages as I looked over her shoulder.

There were some stories and poems by the River Valley students, reports on soccer and girls’ hockey and the debating season, a message from the headmaster, and a double-page spread of photographs of teachers. Among them I recognized Connie Hapgood herself, a girl in her twenties, with shaggy hair, wearing a bright appealing unfinished look.

She lingered over her picture for a moment, as if the girl she had been had taken her by surprise. “I forgot I was in this book.”

“You haven’t changed much.”

“Liar. That was fifteen years ago. Fifteen long years.”

With visibly nervous fingers, she turned some more pages to the photographs of the graduating seniors. The pictures were captioned with the students’ names and predictions of their futures, evidently written by their classmates. Connie pointed out a rather fat-faced boy with an uneasy smile and dark angry dubious eyes. His name was Harold Sherry, and his prediction was: “World’s greatest gourmet. Seriously, when Harold discovers himself, it will be a major discovery!”

Connie read it aloud in a meditative tone, and added, “I wonder if Harold ever did discover himself.”

“Is this the Harold who ran off to Vegas with Laurel?”

“This is the Harold. The school expelled him, of course, in addition to what the court did, and he never did graduate. But it was too late to take his name and picture out of the yearbook.”

“What did the court do?”

“Put him on probation for six years.”

“That’s fairly stiff.”

“I agree. All he did, after all, was run off with a girl who was perfectly willing to go along. Who may have instigated the Las Vegas trip, in fact. But nothing was done to Laurel, because she was two or three years younger than Harold. And things got worse for him. He broke probation and ran away, and they brought him back and put him in jail for a while. His father turned his back on him, which did him no good with the court.”

“Who is his father?”

“Roger Sherry. He was an engineer, and he lived here in El Rancho at the time. His wife still does. Mr. Sherry and his wife split up, I think over Harold. That little escapade in Las Vegas was really the end of the family.”

I picked up the book and carried it to the window. Harold Sherry’s unformed face seemed vaguely familiar, and it grew more familiar as I studied it. Under the thick flesh which the boy had worn like a mask, I thought I could make out the facial structure of the broad-shouldered man I had seen at Blanche’s last night, and again at Sandhill Lake this afternoon. Both the boy and the man had the eyes of an angry dreamer.

The woman came up behind me, so close that I could feel the movement of her breath in the still air:

“Is Harold involved in this present mess?”

“He may be.”

“You can speak frankly,” she said. “I’m on Laurel’s side, whatever you may think. The split in the family isn’t of my making.”

“I assumed you were on her side. Anybody in his right mind would want to get her back.”

“Are Harold and Laurel together, Mr. Archer?”

“I don’t know. They may be.”

“Does that mean that the kidnapping—the alleged kidnapping—is a put-up job, as it was the other time?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But events never repeat themselves exactly, especially in crime. There are too many variables, and
the world has changed in the last fifteen years. It’s a good deal more dangerous. Harold may be, too.”

“Did he shoot Jack?”

“Someone who looked like him did.”

“You’re hedging, aren’t you?”

“I saw the man who shot Jack from a long way off. I can’t be sure of the identification on the basis of that and a fifteen-year-old picture.” I closed the book and gave it back to her.

“Don’t you want to know where his mother lives?”

“That was going to be my next question.”

“Her house is on Lorenzo Drive.” She took me to the front door and pointed across the valley. “It’s a pink stucco house standing by itself on a knoll. I think the poor woman lives there alone. There are quite a few lonely women in this place. They move out here with their husbands and think they’ll be taken care of forever and ever. But then something happens and the whole illusion breaks down.”

Her voice was full of feeling; she might have been talking about herself. I couldn’t tell if she was a hard woman who had moments of softness, or a soft woman who could be hard on occasion. It wasn’t easy to tell, about any woman.

I thanked her for her trouble and went out to the Cadillac. William Lennox was sitting behind the wheel out of sight of the front door, where Connie Hapgood lingered. He had changed his dude clothes for a dark suit and a homburg in which he looked very old and formal, like somebody getting ready for a funeral.

He regarded me truculently, but I got the impression that a light breeze would blow him over and that any kind of blow, physical or mental, would shatter him.

“I want you to drive me into town,” he said. “Somebody has to pick up the pieces, and it looks as if I’m elected. Jack’s out of the picture, and Ben Somerville isn’t worth the powder to blow him to hell. He’s a born loser. He started out by blowing up his ship and he’s ending up by blowing up my oil business.”