Secrecy (27 page)

“It’s not just me,” she said now, “it’s my father. He’s so changed. He’s defeated, and trying hard not to show it. The last ten years or more have been nothing but a downhill slide.”

“I’m sorry,” Roger said.

“Well, I’m sorry you’ve come all this way on a wild-goose chase.”

“Charlotte, I wanted to come. It was my idea, not yours. And I’m glad I came.”

She looked at him. “You really are a friend,” she said gratefully.

“I want you to think so. Now, do you know what you’re going to do? You’re going to pull over and let me take the wheel. You’re exhausted.”

“I’m not,” she protested, but the protest itself sounded weak, and after a little more urging from Roger they changed places.

The car hummed down the highway. She laid her head back on the seat. After a while, as air rushing through the half-opened window cooled her face and whirred in her ears, she began to feel drowsy.

“Close your eyes,” Roger said. “Don’t fight it.”

When a few minutes had gone by, she sensed that he was looking at her, and opened her eyes.

“That braid’s in your way,” he said. “Don’t you undo it at night?”

“Of course.”

“Then undo it now and be comfortable.”

“Good idea. I will.” For some unknown reason it
amused her to play the part of the obedient child before him.

They were in the outskirts of Boston when she awoke. It was already dark. But when they stopped at a lighted intersection, Roger’s face was clearly visible. Lean, perhaps too lean, the nose aquiline and perhaps too prominent, the expression very serious, it had a singular masculine grace. And for a moment, before she was entirely awake, before anxieties came flooding back, she had a curious revelation, there in the snug shelter of the car, that the world could be, in spite of all, a serene and solid place.

I
n Kingsley some days later a critical discussion was in its final hour.

“So,” Bill said, “our lawyer is as sure as you can ever be that Justice Niles is about to make us, the owners, the chief responsible party. That’s where we stand. The town fathers are sick of getting nowhere with the tenant, but if they go directly to us under the federal Clean Water Act, they can obtain an order for us to cease any more waste deposits. And the only way we can force our tenants to cease is to sue them. Simple, isn’t it? Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Oh, the law!” he cried. “The logic of the law!”

Evening had entered into the somber room where they sat, unheeding the growing darkness. Claudia rose and, turning on the lamps, scattered brilliant circles on the floor. The three were talked out and tired.

“Simple,” Cliff repeated. “A fine of twenty-five
thousand dollars a day for every day we fail to comply.”

“We’re dead,” Bill said, throwing up his hands. “Dead, that’s all.”

“Didn’t you say that the top man is in town?” Claudia asked timidly.

Cliff answered, “So I heard. But nobody knows for sure. And you couldn’t get to him, anyway, if you did know. And if you did get to him, what would you say? Appeal to his sense of honor, for God’s sake? So what’s the difference?”

And again, silence fell. From outdoors the monotonous stream of summer sounds, the chirp and rattle of crickets and locusts, merged into the silence.

Bill spoke again. “It all ties in with another thing I heard. I’m putting jigsaw pieces together. We’ll be pushed into bankruptcy and Premier will buy the property for pennies. They’ll clean it up—what’s a couple of million to them?—and be more careful about keeping it clean afterward.”

“Do you think they’d want it that badly?” asked Cliff.

“Why not? Where, at that rate, could they buy any cheaper?”

Claudia’s voice came unexpectedly out of the shadowed corner where she sat. “They’ll never buy it. Those people never do. They leave when their lease is up and move on because, as you are seeing, tenants are not ultimately liable for violating environmental laws. Owners are.”

Both men looked at her with surprise.

“I’ve read about it.”

Bill got up and went to the window, stood there for a minute, then, walking to a pair of photographs on the library table, stood there looking at them.

“My parents left so much for me to build on,” he said without turning his back, so that it seemed as if he were talking to the photographs. “And I have nothing for Charlotte. I’m not talking just about money either.”

Cliff, obviously moved, spoke gently. “Charlotte will have a good life, Bill. She has her work, and if I’m not mistaken, she has a very fine young man in love with her too.”

Claudia smiled. “You saw that, Cliff?”

“Of course. It was obvious.”

“She hasn’t said a word to me,” Bill said, facing them, “but if that’s true, it can only deepen my grief. Now, in her time of joy, that—after everything—she so deserves, all I can give her is my ruination. And on that note I’m going home to bed.”

Big Bill, thought Claudia, the strong one. It was like watching a great tree axed and falling.

Claudia stared into the bathroom mirror. She was thinking that she had been prettier when her face was pink and rounder. Then, she had had the wholesome, very feminine appearance of a mature, healthy countrywoman, not much concerned with fashion. This morning, quite perversely, she seemed younger than before, almost girlish; her cheeks had grown paler and thinner than she had realized, so that her blue eyes had become darker and larger. There was a
certain greater interest and fashionable glamour in her sharpened features.

She had to laugh at herself. Glamorous Claudia! An oxymoron if ever there was one! Especially of late she had these fleeting, odd sensations of precarious balance that caused her to grasp banisters or suddenly sit down for a minute while weeding the flower beds.

Today, however, she was energized. It was while lying awake last night after that miserable session in the library with Cliff and Bill that she had made up her mind. She knew exactly what she was going to do, and now she must dress the part, must look smart and confident. Those people had no respect for weakness.

In early fall black-and-white was the way to go. She had learned such things from Charlotte, who had unmistakably been taught them by her mother—poor Elena, as Claudia always mentally referred to her. The dress was simple. Her hair, still bright and fair, was pulled back to display the handsome gold earrings that Cliff had bought on their trip to Asia—best not think of
that
right now! They, her wristwatch, and the diamond ring that had belonged to Cliff’s mother were enough. Less was always more.

As she drove downhill toward the riverfront, her heart began to do startling leaps; pulses seemed to beat in her ears and weaken her wrists. But these things, given the circumstances, were only to be expected.

She parked the car and, moving carefully in her high heels over the potholes in the broken walkway,
entered the wide front door above which the letters
DAW S ND CO P NY
were still barely discernible. In the lobby a young man wearing a business suit was talking to a man in work clothes.

For only an instant Claudia hesitated. Then, addressing the man in the business suit, she took her gamble, or perhaps as she thought about it later, she was obeying a strong hunch.

“I’ve come to see Joey V.,” she said.

Both men looked her up and down. Indeed, she was not the usual visitor to that place. The one in the business suit took his time to reply.

“Who are you and what do you want?”

His hesitation and his surliness told her that Joey V. was in the building.

“Tell him that I’m Claudia Marple, and I need to talk to him. That’s all,” she said firmly.

“Wait here.”

She watched him climb what had once been a graceful flight of steps to the second-floor offices. The ceiling was high; it would be easy to push someone down from the head of the stairs, and he would never survive to tell about it. Such things have happened.… She was thinking this when the surly fellow came back and directed her.

“You can go up. It’s on the left.”

She was almost out of breath when she reached the top. But straightening her posture, she walked in to where, in what must have been either Bill’s or Cliff’s private office, Joey V. was seated behind a large, finely carved desk, chipped raw in spots and covered with a disorderly pile of papers.

“Well, well,” he said, not rising. “Claudia Marple. Long time no see.”

“And no doubt you never expected to see me again.”

“I wondered where you went.”

His twisted, humorless smile hid his teeth; incongruously in that dour face a dimple formed in each cheek.

“Well, I went as far as I could without ending in the Atlantic Ocean. You could have found me easily enough.”

“Who needed you? It wasn’t worth the effort.”

Although she had not been invited to sit down, she sat. After more than twenty-five years since their last brief encounter, it was natural for these two people to appraise each other. What Claudia saw was a man still easily recognizable. He was thicker, and his hairline had receded halfway across his skull; his diamond cuff links indicated that he had risen in life, but his almond-shaped eyes were unforgettable, without luster, alert, and cold.

No, he—or rather, they—had definitely not needed her. After Marple’s death—ever since then she had come to think of her husband as “Marple”—when, to her unspeakable horror, she learned for the first time what his business had really been and who his associates really were, the only thing these people had most needed from her was her silence. Oh, wouldn’t it have been highly inconvenient for them, to say the least, if she had stood up in the courtroom and testified that she, walking down the back street on her way to Marple’s office that late afternoon,
had seen who it was who had come running out of the building and fled down the alley!

She believed that she really would have stood up in that courtroom and spoken the truth if there had been no child to care for. She would have taken her very slim chance, yes, she would, not because she was so extraordinarily brave—she was not—or because she was suicidal. She was not that either. She had just been so outraged at having been deceived, as a wife, by Marple, and as a citizen, by men like Joey V., that she would have been prepared to take any risk that would bring them to punishment. But she had been the mother of Ted, her rascally, bright little boy, her Ted. And they, who had been well aware of what she knew—although she had been careful not to reveal to them that knowledge—had also been aware that she would keep silent.

“There was a thing in some rag I read at the barber’s about a kid named Marple that they’re looking for. I kind of wondered whether he might be yours.”

“He is.”

“Tough,” said Joey V. He nodded, contemplating Claudia with an expression almost sympathetic. “Yeah. Very tough. Just took a powder. Left the country?”

“They think—they’re pretty sure—he’s someplace in Southeast Asia.”

He took a cigar, bit the end, and frowned. He was interested. “Who’s ‘they’?” he demanded.

“The FBI.”

“FBI, for Chrissake! There are people—say, you want me to see what I can do?”

“How? Have you gotten as big as all that?”

“Yeah, I’m big. I run a lot of things, and the world’s a small place. Haven’t you heard?” He made a little flourish with his cigar.

She had read, had felt a compulsion to read, and learned a good deal over the years about Marple’s “business.” You had only to read the newspapers. It was quite clear to her that the rescue of Ted must come from legitimate agencies.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll let things stay as they are. But there is something else you can do for me, if you will.”

“Yeah? What?” he said, glancing at a letter in front of him. He had lost interest. “What do you want?”

“It’s not exactly for me. It’s my husband, Cliff Dawes.”

“Dawes? That’s you? You married Dawes? You did pretty well for yourself,” he said, regaining interest.

“Not at all, if it’s money that you mean. But if you mean the man, yes, I couldn’t have done better. I’d go on my knees from here to Timbuktu for him. I love him.” And feeling a sharp catch in her throat, or perhaps it was in her chest, she stopped.

“I was talking about when you married him. They’re on the skids, now. I know that.”

Hesitating until the catch should go, she replied, “Yes, and they don’t deserve to be.”

“ ‘Deserve,’ ” he mocked. “Who deserves? You get what you can grab.”

“People don’t always grab what’s available to them,” she said.

His quick eyes shot toward Claudia’s. The astonishing computer inside his head had read another sense, a possibility, in her words. It was never too late, after all, to reopen a murder case.

“Hey, Claudia, are you threatening me maybe?”

Meeting his eyes without blinking, she replied with a question. “Do I look that stupid?”

She had a chilling thought: Possibly he thinks that because we so desperately need money, I plan to make some bumbling threat, some inept attempt at blackmail. It is never
too late to reopen a criminal case
. If that is what he is thinking, he will make his prompt response right here, right now.…

And so, with an appealing smile, she repeated her question. “Do I look that stupid?”

Joey V. considered. His hard scrutiny went slowly from her patent leather pumps to the top of her head. “Nah,” he said. “What you look like is a Sunday school teacher. Yeah, Marple always went for broads like you.”

“I still am a Sunday school teacher.”

“Marple used to show off about you. You two were a queer pair, a crazy match, only you never knew it.”

“Not until I went through his papers after he—died. But that’s over with. I don’t know anything, and if I ever did, I don’t remember it.”

“That’s good, that’s very good.”

The room was stuffy, her hands were sweating,
and it seemed hard to breathe. So she took a deep breath and raised her voice.

“I never expected to be asking you for anything. Could I have dreamed that we would ever come in contact? But here we are, and I don’t need to tell you what’s going on in this town because you know it better than I do.”