The Wycherly Woman Read Online Free Page A

She twisted her mouth around. “ ‘The punitive attitudes of the familial group’—how does that sound?”
    “Lousy. I hate sociological jargon. But I didn’t come here to talk to you about that, Miss Lang. Mr. Wycherly asked me to come and see you.”
    Her mouth formed a round O, and then pronounced it. A grey clayey color showed itself under her skin. It made her look years older.
    “It’s no wonder I can’t concentrate my mind,” she said. “When you think of that silly girl going off by herself. I haven’t thought of anything else,
really
, for two months. I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, imagining what’s happened.”
    “What do you imagine happened?”
    “Terrible things. The things you think about in the middle of the night. Like in that Eliot play about Sweeney Agonistes.” She grimaced. “I had to read it for English 31. ‘Everybody’s got to do a girl in.’ ”
    She looked up at me as if I was Sweeney himself, about to do her in. Disentangling her legs from the chair she trotted across the room, a small bouncing white and blue blob. She flung herself on a studio couch where she ended up immobile, back against the wall, knees up, chin on her knees, watching me over them. Her eyes reflected the lamplight like new dimes.
    I turned the chair around and sat down with my back to the lamp: “Do you have any reason to think she was done in?”
    “No,” she said in a squeaky voice. “It’s just what I’m afraid of. Mrs. Doncaster and everybody else thinks Phoebe went away deliberately. I thought so too for a while. But now I think she meant to come back. I’m practically sure of it.”
    “What makes you sure?”
    “A lot of things. She only took her overnight bag, with enough clothes for the weekend.”
    “Did she plan to stay in San Francisco for the weekend?”
    “I think so. She told me she’d see me Monday, anyway. She had a nine o’clock class on Monday morning, and she was planning to be there. She mentioned it.”
    “Did she confide in you, Miss Lang?”
    She nodded her head. Its movement was restricted by her knees. Her eyes changed from silver to black in the changing reflection of the lamplight, and back again to silver.
    “I didn’t know Phoebe long,” she said, “just since she moved here in September. But we got close in a hurry. She was—she’s a good head, and she helped me with some of my courses. She was a senior”—the past tense kept slipping in—“and I’m only a sophomore. Besides, we had some of the same experiences in our background.”
    “What experiences?”
    “Parent trouble. I won’t go into mine—it’s between me and them—but Phoebe had a ghastly family background, perfectly ghastly. Her mother and father didn’t get along, and finally they got divorced, last summer I think it was. Phoebe felt pretty bitter about the divorce. She felt she had no home to go home to, you know?”
    “Whose side was she on, in the divorce?”
    “Her father’s. Apparently her mother took him for a lot of money. But she blamed both of them, for acting like children.” She caught herself up short. “There’s that blame idea again—maybe you have something, Mister—? I don’t think you told me your name.”
    I told her my name. “Did she talk about her mother very much?”
    “No, she hardly even mentioned her.”
    “Did she ever hear from her mother?”
    “Not that I know of. I doubt it.”
    “Did she know where her mother lives, at the present time?”
    “If she did, she never told me.”
    “So there’s no indication that she may be with her mother?”
    “It doesn’t seem very likely. She had a real down on her mother. She had good reason.”
    “Did she ever discuss the reason with you?”
    “Not right out.” Dolly screwed up her mouth again, as if she was searching for the right words. “She hinted around about it. I remember one night, when we were talking in the dark, she told me about some letters that came to her house.