Evil Friendship (14 page)

But with a certain snap to his movement, he lifted the receiver.

He said, “The number?” realizing that his voice was edged with panic.

“Why, 3636,” came laughed back at him.

He hesitated, then he called the number.

“Dr. Edlin’s office. Good morning.”

He said, “One moment please.” He sat back, muffling the receiver with his large square hand. “All right,” he said. “All right.”

There was no answer from the hallway.

He repeated himself, then left the phone on the leather seat and went through to the hallway. The door was open, and down at the end of the front walk was the girl, going away.

Craig went back and put the phone’s arm in its cradle. And so it was over; he had called her bluff…. He needed a stiff drink.

• • •

The swimming pool produced a hollow echo. It said
… “about your note to Rush.”
Miss Nicky stood in her worn blue knit swimsuit with the baggy green man’s sweater over it, holding the pole with the hooked end that she used when she was teaching here. Class had just ended. Beyond her, in the room off the pool, showers hissed, and there was the familiar hilarity of girls dressing, and the slight steamy fog with the raw smell of chlorine.

Before her, the girl with the long black hair waited for her to say something, a slight tilt to her lips, her eyes fastened on Miss Nicky’s face.

The girl spoke again. “You, and all of you here, have sat back and let Miss Pierce-Morgan accuse me of a
signicant relationship.
What about
you,
Miss Nicky?”

“Rush gave you this?” the woman asked very softly, looking down at the blue water in the pool and not at the girl.

“I borrowed it a while ago from Rush, when I visited her. Rush must be very sentimental. Had a special place for your love letters, a special little old leather box on top her bureau.”

Miss Nicky said, “All right, Martha. What are your plans then?”

“I’d like a loan.”

“You’d
what?”

“I’d like to borrow twenty pounds. You have it. You go abroad almost every other summer.”

“Do you know this can mean your expulsion, Martha? If I report this, do you know what it can mean?”

“To me, or to you? As for me, I
detest
Chillam!”

“i know,” Miss Nicky said. “I know you do.”

“You needn’t worry about my wanting
more
than twenty, about my coming back again and again, the way blackmailers do in the movies. I won’t tap any source too heavily. I know not to force my luck.”

Miss Nicky looked at the girl. She could think of nothing to say, or of too many things, really — pointless explanations, excuses, pleas; none of those would even dent this girl.

Martha said: “My mother and father are getting a divorce. They’re taking me to America. I won’t be back at Chillam next year anyway. I wonder if
you
will be.”

Not to return to Chillam? To go back and live with her mother? It would mean that…. And how often had Miss Nicky paused in the yard between Old House and Gate Dorm at night, and watched the school lights dot out one by one, in students’ rooms, and felt safe here at Chillam. She loved the looks of Weerdale, with the bluffs circling it as though to buttress it and close it in from the outside world. She loved the narrow ancient roads and back streets known as the Lanes, and the open, thyme-scented fields that bordered on the beach and the changing sea.

And the school itself — the large group of yellow buildings, brightened by white colonnades and fresh-colored green ivy, resting on the terraced hillside with the woods behind it — this was a haven as well.

Oddly, as she stood there before the girl, she remembered how conscious she always became of her body when she was away from Chillam, how outlandishly overgrown and clumsy she felt at times, as though she were a huge, bungling misfit, conspicuous and obnoxious. She always felt like sitting on her long, big hands, as though she were sort of a freak child who had mistakenly grown too rapidly into a woman’s size.

She had fought herself so strenuously since college.

There was the day of her graduation from the small women’s teachers’ college, where she had majored in physical education; where she had been known as “sweat socks.” At the graduation exercises, when the class history was read, someone had written an entry in the ”
Will We Ever Forget”
section:

Someone sitting beside her in the auditorium had laughed and poked her in the ribs with her elbow and whispered, “That’s yours, Nicky. Some sadists wrote that, didn’t they!”

When she received the post at Chillam, she had been proud and filled with resolutions about
that
sort of thing. And she hadn’t faltered, not for seven long years. Then Rush came along — young, cocksure, knowing, knowing everything and saying so, with her sideways looks and raised eyebrow, and following her about after sessions, leaning across her desk and saying things like, “I’ve got a crush on you and you know it. It’s why you avoid me, isn’t it?”

Until it happened — too suddenly, before she could realize that an eventuality like the one she was facing now was probable. Poor, silly, ingenuous, insecure, dear old Rush had kept the note, kept it for years, while they had simply felt the warm knowledge between them that they had brought a halt to something impossible and, in view of the way both of them loved Chillam, disrespectful. She had kept the note.

“Well,” Martha Kent said, “we can’t stand here all day in the swimming pool, can we?”

“Will you return it to me then?” Miss Nicky asked.

Late that afternoon, Martha Kent and Mary Drew Edlin met again down on the beach, under the boardwalk. They walked along, picking up pebbles and discarding them while they chatted, Martha flushed with success, Mary Drew slightly sullen.

“But it doesn’t matter, Druid,” Martha said. It was only a first try.”

“Yours too.”

“Men are more difficult, I think. They don’t scare so easily.”

“Was she really terribly scared?”

“Petrified. Now I wish I hadn’t been so silly as to return that mushy letter to her. I could have gotten another twenty!”

“Moly, do you think I could steal something in a store, and then sell it?”

Martha laughed. “That
would
be fun! We could go together!”

“Anyway,” Mary Drew frowned, “I pinched three shillings from Father’s jacket this morning. He never counts his change. There it was.”

“Oh, we’ll make out all right. And I know Mother will let you live with us once you get there. She must! She’s always favored you, rather.”

“What about Roddy?”

“He’ll have to agree. After all, there you’ll be. Besides, after what we saw those two up to, they’re getting off easily, I’d say.”

Mary Drew threw a pebble into the waves. “Over there, of course, we’ll make barrels with our novels. Live like queens.”

“I’m going to
demand
that I choose who plays my characters in the movies. I’m going to have that written into my contract,” Martha said. “Oh, look,” bending over, “this is a lovely stone, isn’t it? It’s heavy, but look how smooth.”

She ran her palm across its surface, then her fingertips, smiling. “Isn’t it lovely, Druid?”

But Mary Drew was still brooding. She said, “There’s just one thing we forget. That’s Mother.”

“Oh, well, we’ll simply leave a note explaining everything. What can she do? She knows my mother would take excellent care of you.”

“I don’t know that she knows that,” said Mary Drew. “She’s awfully critical of your mother, particularly since she’s found out about the divorce. I think she might very well come after me.”

“Do touch this stone, Druid.”

Mary Drew put her hand across its surface. “Nice…. But I do worry about Mother. She’s a terrible obstacle.”

“Druid, it’s egg-shaped, do you see! Perfectly egg-shaped. Oh, I think it’s the Druid’s egg!”

“Something ought to be done about Mother, Moly.”

“I guess so,” Martha said, “but let’s worry about raising the funds first. And Druid, let’s keep the Druid’s egg, shall we? What can we do with it?”

“Let’s use it to murder Mother,” Mary Drew said.

The two girls looked at one another — Martha, holding the stone in her hands, the sea splashing in the background, the bobbing blue and red lights of the boardwalk above them.

“Would it be large enough to kill her?” Martha asked.

J
UNE 8, 1956

Detective Randolph watched the girl in the yellow robe as she twisted the belt of the robe, her eyes lowered now from his.

He repeated his questions: “Do you remember the night near Trumpet Head, Mary Drew?”

“How do you know about it?” she said. “Father tell you?”

“No, Mary Drew. I read about it.”

“I see,” she said, “in my diary. Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Detective Randolph answered. He shifted his weight in the beaded chair, in the living room of the Kent house, and waited a moment, watching the girl’s face, waiting to see some break of emotion. But there was none. The features remained blank, unrevealing.

Then he said flatly, “You are suspected of having murdered your mother. You need not say anything. Anything you do say will be taken down in writing, and may be used as evidence.”

Still there was no expression on Mary Drew Edlin’s face. She did not meet his glance, but kept her eyes lowered to the robe’s belt, which she was twisting in her fingers.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked. “This morning when I got up,” the girl began in a dull tone, “the phone rang …”

J
UNE 8, 1956

“Furthermore,” Henry Edlin was saying as he wiped egg from the side of his mouth with a corner of his napkin, “we won’t have to buy expensive costumes. After all, Mrs. Miniver wore much the same thing you wear every day, and I’d only need — ”

“Do you want to get the phone?” his wife interrupted.

Mr. Edlin started to push himself away from the breakfast table, but heard his daughter’s feet above him in the hallway as she rushed for the extension. He shrugged. “It’s always for her anyway.”

“We have time enough to think about it,” his wife answered.

“My dear, the ball is next Wednesday! This coming Wednesday!”

“Very well, very well. We’ll talk about it at lunch.”

“We’ll win. I know we’ll win,” he said.

“I’m going for the outing this afternoon,” Mrs. Edlin said. “I do hope everything goes along as well as it has been.”

“They still write to each other. I saw one in yesterday’s mail from her.” He gulped his coffee and pulled his napkin from his shirt collar, tossing it on top his plate. “Fitzgill the tailor is coming in this afternoon for a fitting on his caps. I could ask him to estimate the price for a Yankee Doodle suit. Wouldn’t have to be terribly elaborate, at all.”

“I don’t see how people’d
know
I was Mrs. Miniver. There’s no costume for me or anything. Am I to wear a sign?”

He sighed and shoved his chair away from the table. “You
look
like her. That’s how they’d know! The competition isn’t being judged on the costumes — it’s the imagination that counts. After all, in 1942 those two American movies were the — ”

“All right! Heavens, Henry, I
know
all that!”

“Well then, so long as the tailor is going to be in the chair this afternoon, why shouldn’t I go ahead and inquire about his fitting my costume?”

“But don’t commit yourself, Henry,” she said.

“What
is
the matter, Louisa?”

“After all, Tony
is
ringing up tonight. I thought we could ask his advice.”

Henry Edlin said, “I see.” “Well, don’t pout!”

“Tony isn’t even going to be
present
at the Masque Ball!”

“Still, he’s awfully amusing with things of that sort.”

“I dare say,” said Henry Edlin.

He walked into the hallway and took his newspaper from the tray, folded it and placed it under his arm. His wife followed him. She was wearing a melon-shaded crinkle-fabric wrapper, her hair still in the thin net that set the wave each night, her bare feet in mules. She said, “It doesn’t bother me that they write every day. Not any more.”

“It never should have!”

“You brought it up,” she said.

“Merely to point out things aren’t any different than they ever were! Mary Drew still has a terrible case of hero-worship toward Martha. There’s no denying that. But it wasn’t as involved as your Dr. Mannerheim said. What nonsense!”

Louisa Edlin stood before the mirror in the hallway, removing the net from her hair, and fluffing the reddish strands with her fingers. “Just because Dr. Mannerheim is a woman — ”

“No,
not
just because she’s a woman!” he said. “Because as I’ve contended right along, Louisa, these psychiatrists spend a few years longer at school on their behinds and come out telling everyone they’re crazy! What if I told everyone their teeth were rotten!”

“Here, darling,” handing him three letters, “mail these on your way.”

“Right.” He leaned to kiss her forehead. “Have a good morning!”

“And Henry, do remember the calamine at the druggist’s?”

He waved as he went out the door, and Mrs. Edlin wandered back toward the kitchen aimlessly, humming a little of “The Morning Dew Waltz” to herself. Then she saw Mary Drew by the staircase.

“Whatever are you doing, darling?”

The girl looked startled. “Nothing.”

“Was that Martha who just called?”

“Yes. She’ll come for lunch.”

“Fine. Would you like an egg, dear?”

“I don’t mind,” the girl said.

While her mother fried the egg in the worn black pan on the stove, Mary Drew sat at the small, square, enamel-top table.

“Martha must be excited about her trip,” her mother said.

“Awfully.”

“Does she take to Mr. Sawyer, dear!” “Fairly well.”

“Those things are always too bad.”

“She’s glad to be going to America. She’s going to sell her novel there. They pay terribly high.”

“What’s her novel about, dear?”

“She
was
writing about these two characters, Lord Love-Lost, and Lady Heart-Robbed. They were rather symbolic, allegorical, really. But she isn’t bothering with
them
any more. We both decided they were mushy types. Now we’re both writing about the same characters. Raynor and Gretchen.”

Her mother said, “How nice.”

“The plot is dreadfully complicated. Murder and all sorts of things involved.”

“Dreadful!” her mother said. “Should I break the yoke, dear?”

“Yes. Over and hard.”

“I don’t see how your father can bear the yoke streaming across his plate in the morning,” Mrs. Edlin sighed, “but he absolutely relishes it. Tony’s the same way.”

“Did you find Tony’s bank yet?”

“No! Isn’t it odd! When he calls up this evening, I’m going to ask him if he didn’t mistakenly pack it, though I can’t imagine him packing it. He’s always left it right there on his bureau.”

“Was there much in it?”

“About fourteen pounds, I’d guess. He’s added to it for years.” She turned the heat off on the stove and reached for a plate. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “both your father and I suspect Mrs. Mullins.”

“Mrs.
Mullins?”

“I know, it sounds preposterous. But after all, she
is
here twice a week, completely on her own, and your father tells me he’s missed change he’s left about, on his bureau and in the brass tray in the hallway, and even in the pockets of his suits!” Mrs. Edlin placed the plate before her daughter. “There you are, darling.” “Thanks, Mother.”

“You don’t mind if I run along upstairs, do you? I’ve got an awfully lot to do before our outing.”

“Go ahead, Mother,” Mary Drew Edlin said.

She sat at the table gulping her egg until she heard her mother moving about upstairs. Then she picked up her glass of milk and hurried to the phone in the hallway. She sipped the milk slowly as she called the Kent house and waited to hear Martha’s voice answering.

“Hello, Moly,” she said. “Listen, we’d better stick to our original plan and take her to Southwark. I don’t think the stairs would kill her. I just checked on it.” She paused a moment listening, sipping the milk; then she said, “Oh, I thought of that, too. I agree, there’s no sense naming Stoke. It might be his day off, or something equally gruesome. Better just to say we didn’t see anyone, we just heard her screaming,” pausing again to sip more and listen more; and, “just drop the blue stone in the path. I’ll say, ‘What’s that,’ and when she bends to see, I’ll club her with our egg.” She gave a giggle, “Oh,
I know,
Moly, I’m just tingling! What? … Carry it in your drawstring bag. Will it be too weighed down?” She set the empty milk glass on the table. “Yes,” she said, “I agree. Well, V for Victory, and all that! And say, Moly — God bless America!”

She hung up smiling.

Then she walked through the kitchen back to the staircase. She stood at the bottom and cupped her hand to her mouth, then shouted, “Mother darling, can I do anything to help you?”