“Well—I will have, after I’ve worked a week. I’ve enough to rent the room—I think.”
“You’d better catch a cab and come on down here for a short conference.”
“First I’m going to get that room, before somebody else does. Then I’ll have to go out to your house to fetch the camel-bag. After that I’ll stop by.”
“I’ll be using the time to adjust,” said Uncle Frosty, sighing.
3
The door at 1234 College Street had one of those bells that grind out a quavering ring when you twist a knob. The woman who answered it was stooped and iron-gray, with a frame too big for her sagging flesh. Her eyes and eyebrows were still dark, and she looked up at me sideways from under them and just waited, without a word.
At first I was wordless, too, but as I was starting a nervous swallow, I discovered my gum and chewed instead. “I saw the sign. About the room for rent,” I said.
“Thirty-two fifty. Forty with board.”
Another inscrutable type. I said, “Think I could see it?”
The woman opened the door just enough for me to get in, then started along the dim, long hall. There were closed doors to right and left; the only light came from thick beveled-glass panels at either side of the front door, and from one yellowish wall bracket with a fluted-glass shade that may once have been a gaslight. The whole place was haunted by the frail but persistent ghosts of Cabbage Past, Cabbage Present, and Cabbage Yet to Come.
There were stairs at the back of the hall, facing the front door, but the woman went past them and along an even darker passage to a door near the back of the house. She fished a bunch of keys out of her sweater pocket and presently threw the door open.
For a minute I just stared. Then I walked into the middle of the room, still staring, and said—remembering just in time to remain expressionless—“Seems nice enough.”
“It’s got a private bath,” the woman remarked.
She needn’t have bothered with all the salesmanship. I nodded and said I’d take it.
“Full board or just the room?”
“Well, I’ll be working at the café down the street, and I’m supposed to eat lunch and dinner there, so I guess—”
The woman gave a resigned nod, then added grudgingly, “You can make your breakfast on the plate there. Last tenant did.”
She jerked her head toward a little electric hot plate just visible behind a cretonne-covered folding screen near the bathroom door. I wondered if the last tenant really had been Mrs. Dunningham. There was no way to know.
“That’ll be a week in advance,” said the woman.
Nothing of the little old chatty, impractical widow-woman type about this landlady. I’d probably heard my last word out of her, except a bulletin about when next week’s rent would be due. I counted out money with a silent prayer that I had enough, found I could keep one dollar and two cents for my very own, and handed the rest to her.
As she took it, she said, “Your regular rent day’ll be Mondays.” Then she put the money in her pocket and surprised me. “Towels and bedding are furnished. There’s a mailbox on the corner. Grocery store up the street. Laundromat around the block. Pay phone’s in the hall. My room’s t’other side of the kitchen and up the back stair, if you want anything. Here’s your key. I’m Mrs. Jackson.”
Dazzled by this spate of words, I answered automatically, “How do you do. I’m—” I stopped, then hurried on. “My name’s Smith.”
“Will you be moving in today?”
“Mm-hm. I’ll have to fetch my bag. It’s at”—where was it, where was it?— “the bus station.”
She was starting to leave, but she hesitated, turning to look at me with her dark eyes peering up sideways under her dark eyebrows, and there was actually a kind of little smile on her face—though it looked a bit creaky from disuse. “From out of town?” she asked.
I told her Morton Center, Idaho, which I seemed to be stuck with, adding that I felt real lucky to get a job my first day in the city.
“I used to live in a small town myself,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Blue Falls, Wyoming.”
“Well,” I said, somewhat inadequately, but I couldn’t think just how I was supposed to react to this news. Mrs. Jackson was already heading toward the hall again, apparently not caring whether I reacted or not.
I closed the door behind her, hoping I could remember all these bits of information I kept having to improvise. And I had to settle on a first name. But what? I’d already told Mr. Bruce Georgetta. Deciding I’d think about that little problem later, I turned to explore my room—which might have been Mrs. Elizabeth Dunningham’s.
Clearly, it was somebody’s besides Mrs. Jackson’s, whose personality struck me as more akin to the decor of the front hall. However, this room had the natural advantage of three big windows, two at the back and one at the side. They let the light in, and the old-fashioned white ruffled curtains and buttery yellow wallpaper reflected it; the whole room looked full of sunshine even on a gray day, like today. Most of the furniture was the sort secondhand shops are full of, but painted white like the woodwork, it was unobtrusive. The things one noticed were a wonderful old carved highboy, rich and dark against the yellow walls, and a fourposter walnut bed, and the bands of color formed by books under the side window, and a cuckoo clock, the third dark, rich, carved object in the room.
I happen to love cuckoo clocks—a gemütlich taste my dad finds incomprehensible. I’d had one in my room at Madame Fourchet’s all the years I was there, and still missed it; I don’t know anything with a better sense of humor than a cuckoo clock. I hoped this one would still run. The weights were off its chains, but I spotted them lying on the sill of one of the wide back windows. When I walked over to get them, I was caught by the view outside. There was a garden—a striking contrast to the concrete and traffic lights on the street, for it was green and countrified, with lilacs and a tall tree or two, and rosebushes planted in a stiff rectangle in the middle where a person could get at them to spray and prune. There was a gardener or somebody in a battered old hat and chinos working around them now. The area was actually four gardens in one, including those on either side of Mrs. Jackson’s and the one behind, which belonged to a house facing on the next street. Obviously, my unknown neighbors were an uncommonly chummy group.
The gardener or whoever it was straightened up and started toward my window, dragging a length of hose. He was a dark, youngish man, with a hard-jawed, sallow face and a certain kind of somber black eyes—heavy-lidded, with sparse lashes and brows—that reminded me exactly of something, only I couldn’t think what. Renaissance paintings—that was it. All those Madonnas and Medicis and people. I’d just identified it when I realized that the reason I was having such a fine leisurely look at his eye structure was that he’d stopped to light a cigarette and was staring straight at me. I quit staring straight at him and stepped back from the window, first snatching the weights so I could wind the clock.
It was working fine. I’d no sooner weighted the first chain and pulled it up than the cuckoo popped out to inform me shrilly that it was thirteen o’clock, though the hands pointed to half after four and my watch said ten past two. That cheered me immediately—not that I needed cheering—and for a bit I kept him busy popping out, yelling, popping in, and slamming his door, while I moved the hands around where they should be. By the time I’d finished, the cuckoo had corrected his arithmetic, so I set the little pendulum going and went to wash my hands before starting for Uncle Frosty’s house. The gardener had lost interest in my window; he was walking down the length of the lawn toward the house that faced the other street, where a woman in a pink apron was doing something to a flower bed.
The bathroom startled me by being enormous—a desert of white-tiled waste space guaranteed to give a good architect hysterics. A high, dignified tub with claw feet stood at one end of the grand vista, a washbowl as im
portant-looking as an altar at the other. Two small, thin towels hung midway between, unreachable from either one. I washed my hands, gazing fascinated at my new self in the glass, then remembered that the afternoon was getting on and tore myself away. As I passed the window this time, the gardener was talking to the woman in the pink apron—and they were both staring my way.
It gave me an odd feeling for a moment. I wondered if the Neighborhood Cooperative Society was already hoping for another rich old lady to fleece. If so, I was going to be a disappointment.
4
When I walked into the law offices of Milligan, Frost and Turnbull at about three-fifteen, carrying the camel-bag, Uncle Frosty was in the outer office talking to Miss Jensen. He glanced up, stared, then wordlessly led the way into his private office, closing the door after us.
“Holy smoke,” he said in tones of genuine awe.
I was delighted. “Do you see now why I feel perfectly safe?”
“Safe?” He seemed to be weighing the word in his mind, examining it as curiously as he was examining me.
“Secure. Relaxed. Free.”
“But why should just looking different make you feel all those pretty profound things?”
“It isn’t just looks.” I gave him a sample of Georgetta’s flat vowels and overdone r’s and underdone t’s. “It feels a bit like Halloween. Nobody knows it’s you under that Indian suit, so you can go ahead and soap the windows.”
“You mean you have some nefarious plan in mind?”
“No, just a holiday from Shan Lightley. Can’t you see, Uncle Frosty? When I don’t look or sound like myself, I needn’t feel like myself either. I’ve told two people I’m from Morton Center, Idaho. If I don’t know what to say to somebody, I just chew my gum.”
“Morton Center, Idaho,” Uncle Frosty repeated as if fascinated. “What else do you know about Georgetta Einszweiler Smith?”
“Not much. I’m just making it up as I go along. She sold ribbons at a five-and-dime. Her boss went bankrupt and then died. I suppose I’ll have to invent a family, eventually.”
Uncle Frosty studied me a moment, then drew a long breath and shook his head.
“What’s the matter?” I demanded.
“I’m only wondering if you may have saddled yourself with a sort of Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Isn’t all this going to be pretty hard to sustain all summer long? And control? Once you get acquainted and involved with people—”
“I’m not going to get involved with anybody.”
“No man is an island,” he remarked. However, he didn’t argue or voice any more doubts or give me any sound advice, which is one thing I love about Uncle Frosty. He just tacitly turned my summer over to me and began to ask about practical matters, such as what he was supposed to do with the allowance checks Dad would be sending, and whether Miss Smith would have a bank account, and how I felt about accepting a small avuncular cash advance, in case I might like to eat before payday.
“Yes, I’ll take it. Oregon banks stay open till five, don’t they? I’ll go open an account right now—I want to buy a new suitcase anyhow.”
“What’s the matter with that one?”
“The camel-bag? My word, it looks too—Egyptian. Besides, I can’t get those bits of hotel stickers off. Georgetta has never been out of Morton Center, I feel sure.”
The bank was just downstairs, and in the next block I found a cut-rate luggage place, at which I spent a minimum of time and money in exchange for a suitcase emblazoned with my new initials in stamped silver. On the way back to the office, I saw a newsstand, and after a moment’s careful consideration of Georgetta’s character, I bought two movie magazines and a copy of Hair Glamor to strew around my room for atmosphere.
All this time the little voice I had shushed an hour ago was chattering away at me again. I really did try to ignore it, although maybe not very hard. But while I was transferring my odd collection of belongings to the new suitcase—which at second glance proved to be made of plastic-coated cardboard—it started talking right out loud.
“Uncle Frosty,” it said. “What will your sleuth be doing, exactly, after he takes over the spider web? I know he’ll be getting information, but how will he go about it? Is it all something madly technical and abstruse that requires years of experience and that sort of thing?”
Uncle Frosty, who had been swiveling gently in his chair, studying me, said, “Oh, no, he’ll chiefly just keep his eyes and ears open, I expect. And get on friendly terms with the legatees, so that he can slide a couple of wily questions into the conversation now and then.”
“I see,” I said. And the little voice added recklessly, “Well, why couldn’t I do that?”
“You? Oh, you can, of course. We already agreed that if the web jiggles promisingly during your three weeks—”
“I don’t mean that. I mean why can’t I be your sleuth? All summer?”
Uncle Frosty blinked.
I hurried on. “Unless there’s more to it than you say. It doesn’t sound complicated. And there I’ll be, all established in the room, with a perfect camouflage and a perfect reason for being there—in fact, taking that waitress job was really an inspired notion, don’t you think so? I’ve even met one of the legatees already—Mr. Bruce—though I must say I didn’t find out much about him. But on the other hand, I hadn’t much chance—I’m sure to do better when—”
“Hold on just one moment. Let me get my breath and think about this,” said Uncle Frosty. I held on—in fact, held my breath—while he presumably got his and sat reflecting. Finally, he said, “Well, all right. No reason why you shouldn’t try.”
“Really? My word, do you mean it?”
“I guess so,” Uncle Frosty said as if listening to his own words in mild surprise. “If it doesn’t work out, we can always revert to the old plan. I’ll give you three weeks’ trial, how’s that?”
“Fair enough!”
“Then we’ll call that loan your sleuth salary for three weeks.”
“Oh, I don’t want pay!”
“A professional wouldn’t call that pay,” Uncle Frosty said with a grin. “But I warn you, I expect results. I’ve got to find out if I’ve a legal leg to stand on in this case.”
“Yes.” I swallowed. “Of course, I’m not quite certain I’d know a legal leg if I saw one.”
“You will when I’ve briefed you, which I’ll do as soon as you’ve quit messing with those bags.” I hastily stuffed the last items into my new suitcase, snapped the catches, and sat down. “All right, pay attention,” he said. “I’m about to give you a five-minute law course. There are only two ways I can break this will, if it’s breakable. One is to prove the absence of testamentary capacity in Mrs. Dunningham. The other is to prove there was undue influence on her.”
“Undue influence means the plot?”
“Yes—if there was one. But I think the weakest spot in that will is the fact that she didn’t even mention her daughter’s name. If you ever plan to disinherit your children, Shan, be sure you remember to call them by name as you do it—that proves that at least you know you’ve got them.”
I promised. “Is that testamentary capacity?”
“That’s half of it—‘recognizing the natural objects of your bounty’ is the legal term. The other half is ‘knowledge of your property’—which means being reasonably clear as to whether you have five dollars or five million to give away.”
“Surely she was clear about that!”
“Well, it’s hard to tell. Remember the bequest to that fellow to go fishing? It’s actually worded, ‘I leave the rest’ to what’s his name ‘to go fishing.’ Sounds as if she thought she were disposing of a few odd dollars. It turned out to be ten thousand. You could go fishing at the South Pole on that.”
“Still, it’s possible the South Pole’s what she had in mind, is that it? In which case she’d have know
n she meant ten thousand and had knowledge of her property, and the will’s good?”
“Right. So what Georgetta must find out for me is whether Mrs. Dunningham ever mentioned her daughter after she left San Francisco, whether she was noticeably vague about money, and whether it was her own idea or somebody else’s to leave all those peculiar bequests to people. You can’t read minds, but you can probably spot a slip if those legatees make one.” Uncle Frosty stood up and came around his desk. “Think you’ve got it straight?”
“Yes, quite. That’s all?” I asked in surprise.
“That’s all. School’s out.”
“Well. At least the law course was a snap. Though I’ve still to prove Georgetta’s a good snoop. Do you want your reports in invisible ink? And how soon?”
“There’s no hurry. I can’t get this suit onto a docket before fall. Let’s see—Mona and I are going to Mexico in August. Come see me the last of July. Unless you get bored with this and want to call it quits after three weeks.”
“I won’t want to. I’ve been less bored today than any time this last three years!”
“Well—fine,” Uncle Frosty said, just a shade uneasily, I thought. He reached to open the door for me, but hesitated with his hand on the knob, looking from the new suitcase to the new me. “You know, I always liked Shan Lightley pretty well,” he remarked. “I trust you won’t forget her altogether.”
“I wish I could. But don’t worry.”
“Oh, I’m not worrying—I guess.” He smiled, dropped a quick kiss on my cheek, and opened the door. “Well, good luck, Miss Smith. If you find out anything of real interest about your neighbors, sneak out to a phone booth and let me know.”
But the first consideration, I reflected as I walked to the bus stop, was to prevent the neighbors from finding out anything of real interest about me. Remember, I warned myself, you’re not Shan Lightley, from this moment. You don’t know any lawyers or any foreign correspondents, you’ve only seen Rosaleen O’Leary in films, you’ve never been near Europe, you don’t speak a single language except American English—and by the way, that lorry’s a truck, and films are movies, and a hoarding’s a billboard, and petrol is gas, and remember to say “OK” a lot, and “pleased to meet you,” and—