Tangled Webb (11 page)

“You
could
? How?”

“Take the bus downtown to the Social Security office and ask 'em.”

“Oh.” For some reason, simple solutions never occur to me. “But would they tell you? Wouldn't they think
you
were planning to do it, and call a cop or something?”

“I'll say I'm writing a mystery novel,” Pete said with his big, slow grin.

We just fooled around the rest of the morning, and I caught him up on kids he remembered, and he told me about Kansas City. We got a Coke at the 7-Eleven, then he had to go back to his yard work, and I came home to clean my room.

I think I like Pete just as well as I did in the second grade. Besides, he's taller than me. Lots.

MONDAY, JULY 29, EVENING

Well, we found out who our woman is. It took us
all day
, practically.

Alison and I got to the mall about as soon as it opened, and Pete met us on the fourth floor. We went right over to the beauty shop and I went in and asked for Edna. She was there—a kind of plumpish middle-aged woman with a cast in one eye and a tired expression. I gave my little speech about my mother's old friend whose name I'd forgotten—trying to look Edna straight in the eye so she'd see how trustworthy I was, which was hard because I couldn't tell which eye to look straight into.

She said, “Red jacket. Thursday, you say?” She sounded as if she didn't want to bother to remember that far back.

“And heavy eyebrows,” I prodded encouragingly. I told her somebody had thought it might be the sales rep she'd talked to that day, and she said, “Oh. Blanche. She was here, yes. I believe she did have on a red jacket. And her eyebrows
definitely
need shaping,” she added severely.

Of course I got all excited, and said, “Blanche who?”

“Hm? Oh, my goodness, I don't know her other name. ‘Blanche' is all I ever heard. She works for Fairhair Products, over on the east side. Now, if you'll excuse me, honey, I've got quite a day ahead of me. . . .”

Well, I did, too, though I didn't know it yet. I said, “Thanks,” and rushed out to tell Alison and Pete we had at least one name and a way to find out more. “Don't you think if we phoned Fairhair Products and asked for Blanche they'd probably know who we meant?” I said.

Alison said, “Why, sure!” and Pete said, “Maybe,” adding that it depended on how big an outfit Fairhair Products was, and how many Blanches they had working for them.

“They couldn't have more than one,” Alison told him.
“Nobody's
named Blanche. Come on, we'll phone at my house, my mom'll be at the office all day.”

So we all went over to her apartment and settled down by the living room phone, which was immediately handed to
me
.

I grumbled, but it
is
my stepmom and my problem. So I said, “Okay, but you have to tell me what to say.”

“Just ask to speak to Blanche,” Alison said with this carefree shrug.

“What if they ask who's calling?”

“Tell 'em you're a relative just passing through town.”

“Then when
she
comes on the phone I say I was just kidding? I better stick to the old-friend-of-my-mother story. After all, she really might be a friend of my mother.”

“Or an enemy,” Pete said—of course. When I gave him a
look
he added, “Never mind, she can't bite you through the phone. Go ahead and dial.”

I did. I knew I'd have to play it by ear anyhow. After a couple of rings, during which I could feel my heart going
bang, bang
, and sort of hoped nobody would answer, there was a receiver-lifting racket on the other end, and a smarmy female voice said, “Thank you for calling Fairhair Products, may I help you?” I said, “Uh, yes, could I speak to Blanche, please?” The voice asked, “Blanche Mitchell?” and I said, “Um, I think so. Have you got more than one Blanche working there?”

It was a mistake to be honest. A second too late, I realized Pete was flapping his hands and Alison was shaking her head and mouthing,
“No, no, no.”
Well, why hadn't
they
phoned, then?

The smarmy voice had gone chilly. It said, “Who's calling, please?” I gave her my old-friend-of-my-mother routine and she finally said, “I'll check.” I rolled my eyes at my so-called friends while she went off somewhere, and Alison hissed, “You shouldn't have said that!” and I hissed back, “You didn't
say
I shouldn't!” and the voice came back to announce—smugly, I thought—that it was Blanche's day off.

I said, “Oh, then I'll phone her at home. Could you give me her number, please? Or just the address.”

Well, I thought that was pretty quick thinking, but the voice took on ten more degrees of frost and said, “Sorry, I can't give out that sort of information.”

I said desperately, “I just want to
talk
to her a minute. I'm not going to—”

“Sorry. It's
entirely
against company rules.” She hung up.

Sorry, my eye. I hung up, too, and said, “She won't tell me. We could look in the phone book, though.”

“Did she give you the last name?” Alison demanded.

“Mitchell.” That didn't sound quite right. “Or was it Mitchum?”

“Jun-i-purrrrr!”
Alison wailed.

Pete said, “Let's try Mitchell,” and pulled the phone book onto his bony knees. Well, there wasn't a Blanche Mitchell listed in the Portland book. We tried Blanche Mitchum. Nothing. I said, “Try the suburbs—those pages with the dark edges.” No luck. “Then maybe she's
Mrs
. Mitchell, and it's listed in her husband's name!” But Alison just wailed again and said, “If it is, we're sunk! There's dozens and dozens of Mitchells with dozens of initials. We'll never—”

“Haven't you got a county phone book?” Pete interrupted. Alison shut up in mid-wail and dug in the phone-table drawer, and we all huddled over the county book. At last—there it was. “B. Mitchell,” in a town ten miles from where we sat. A man answered on the third ring, but when I asked him breathlessly if there was anybody named Blanche living there he said no, this was Bart Mitchell's residence.

I pushed the county book off my lap. It was only half as
thick as the Portland book but seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Pete was already thumbing through the big book again. “We
looked
there!' I reminded him crossly.

“Not for
initials
containing a B,” he said. “Sometimes single women don't like to be listed under a female name.”

I phoned every one he found. I wasn't even nervous by this time. And on the fifth try—P. B. Mitchell—
bingo
. The voice was a woman's, rather hard and abrupt. It said, “Yes, my name's Blanche. Paula Blanche. Who's calling?”

Well,
yipes
, who was? We hadn't made any plans at all for what I'd say if we actually got her. My heart began imitating a bongo drum again and I had to gasp for my next breath. I said, “Uh—well—this is—I'm the person you saw on the escalator at Grover Brothers' one day—it was maybe two weeks ago”—I stopped to swallow—“or more, and my friend was with me, and we had a stroller with a—a little boy in it, and some unwrapped sandals—we were going down and you were going up, and you . . . That is, I thought you sort of called out something to us, and—”

“Oh. I remember,” she said. Well, thank goodness. I finally got a good deep breath from clear down in my innards and started to relax a little. But
then
she said, in this abrupt way she had, “What about it?”

“Well, I—I—I—” Oh, murder, what was I supposed to say now? I fell back on the truth. I managed a sort of garbled explanation about the sandals and the receipt and all, and how I'd first thought she'd said “robbers.” No response. So I went on, “Then later I thought maybe you said ‘Robert.' ” I gave her a chance to say something, but she didn't. “And I wondered—which it was,” I finished. I'd shot my bolt.

After what seemed about an hour and was probably ten seconds, she said, “Who is this? What's your name?”

Truth was no good this time. All I could think of was Pete's warning to be careful, to find out
all
about this before we went blowing any whistles on anybody. I said, “Marianne.” I don't know where it came from, it just popped out.

“Marianne who?” she demanded.

“Jackson. I live on Northeast Stark.” There must be a Jackson listed on Northeast Stark. Maybe even a Marianne.

“Tell me, Marianne, how did you get my name and telephone number?”

Well, I told her. I didn't know what else to do. But then I said again, “All I want to know is—if you said ‘robbers' or ‘Robert.' I—I made a bet with my friend.”

There was quite a pause, then she said, “Okay, I'll settle your bet. But I want to tell you something first, Marianne. I don't like people tracking me down. It's an invasion of privacy. Especially when there's no good reason, and it's nothing to do with me.”

“I'm sorry,” I quavered.

“All right. I said ‘Robert.' I thought that child was my nephew.” She took a long breath that carried plainly over the wire. “But I was mistaken. Now, don't call me again.”

The phone rattled in my ear.

“Wait, wait!” I yelled. “How do you know you were mistaken? How could you tell?”

But she had hung up.

TUESDAY, JULY 30

I've been thinking and thinking—we all have, Alison and Pete and I—trying to get more out of that phone conversation than there really was in it. I wish Blanche had been the chatty type. Only maybe it wouldn't have helped a bit, just scattered more words for us to sift through and pick up and peer at and toss aside again, like people going through the confetti after a parade, hoping to spot at least one diamond.

What bugs me is the question she hung up on. One minute she was sure Preston was her nephew—sure enough to yell “Robert!” right out in public. Half a minute later she's off the escalator, out of sight, and never even tried to get another look at us. So what happened during that half-minute to make her certain she was wrong?

Another thing—this bugs us all, though it was Pete who brought it up, this morning when we were sitting in a row on a park bench, hashing it out once more. Why, if she thought Preston was her nephew, was she so dumbfounded?

“Maybe she hadn't seen him for a year or two,” Alison offered.

“A year or two ago he'd have been wearing a bonnet and
waving a rattle,” I pointed out. “She'd never have recognized him at all.”

“Okay, then maybe he lives somewhere else and she was surprised to see him
here.”

“Surprised, maybe,” Pete said. “But not
thunderstruck
. The way Juniper tells it, she was thunderstruck.”

“She was!” I insisted. “As if she'd seen a ghost or something.”

“Hey, could that be it?” Alison exclaimed. “Her nephew's dead! Preston looks like him, and just for a minute, before she really thought . . . Then of course she
did
think, and. . . .”

It was the best theory we could come up with. It does fit the facts. It explains all Blanche's reactions. But I don't believe it.

I keep thinking, what if Preston
is
her nephew, but she's got her own reasons for not admitting it—to me, to anybody—until she's ready. So when is she going to be ready? What is she hoping will happen? What is she
planning
to happen?

I don't like it. But it would explain a lot about the way she talked to me. The way she warned me off.

I haven't said a word about this to Pete and Alison. I don't want to get them started, they'd wind up scaring me to death. Because if Preston is Blanche's nephew, then Blanche is Kelsey's sister—or Tim Blockman's. Kelsey knows her. And goes white at the thought of her. Which leads us right back to
did he drown or did she kill him
.

I don't want to think any more about it.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 31

I just read yesterday's entry over and it sounds
paranoid
. I think Alison and Pete and I need to go see a silly movie or hike
twenty miles for a picnic or clean out the garage or something. All we ever do lately is sit around inventing spooky fiction about some stranger we saw once on an escalator.

The plain truth is probably that Paula Blanche Mitchell is no relation to Preston or Kelsey or anybody else and she just made a dumb mistake.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 2

I'm going to baby-sit tonight while Daddy and Kelsey go out to dinner and a performance of
The Cherry Orchard
. Margo played Madame Ranevsky in that, the October after I turned eight. It was the last play she did. I don't really care if I ever see it in my life again. But we've been mentioning “the play” off and on the last few days and Preston's picked up on it, of course, and pipes, “Wanna go play” in a sort of anxious voice whenever he thinks about it. He can always tell if Kelsey's planning to go somewhere without him. He's a real mama's boy.

No, he isn't, though. That's funny. I never thought about it, but when Kelsey's just here, at home, he doesn't cling to her or tag around behind her or anything. It's only when she leaves him to go somewhere. Seems like that makes him feel unsafe or something. I wonder why. She never sneaks off without telling him—that's something you ought
never
to do to little kids, even if they throw tantrums trying to make you stay. That's what Margo always said. Seems to me Kelsey bends over backward to be truthful with Preston.

Anyhow, it'll be my job to calm him down when she and Daddy leave, and I've thought of a neat way to do it. I'm going to tell him
we're
going to have a play. That is, we are if I can
find that box of costumes and stuff Margo used to dress me up in. I guess it's still up in the storeroom somewhere. Unless Daddy threw it out. I don't think he would, without telling me.