Malice in Wonderland Page 8

  “You’ve got the wrong car. I heard the alarm. Black Caddy with a lemon top. Does that bus of mine—”

  “Save it. You heard the call Duggan had them keep sending out on the regular broadcast channels. The general he put through on the police bands called for a red Pontiac convertible, which is just what you’ve got. That firecracker blazed a trail two yards wide, and we were just laying off until you stopped.”

  “I kept looking back—”

  “Sure you did. So did that helicopter up there. Two-way radio communication, Jackson. Field glasses. They even spotted your storage job of the girl in the trunk.”

  * * * *

  The midday siesta-hour sun blazed down on Black’s, and Miss Fernandez applied another pat of eau de cologne to Mrs. Spang’s fevered brow. If only, if only, Mrs. Spang begged in silent prayer, they would come back alive. Then everything, the whole great big beautiful world, would be peaches and cream.

  She already had the major outlines for the wedding planned. St. Thomas’s, of course, with a reception in the Waldorf-Astoria. Naturally there must be a wait, a decent interval between Mrs. Dean’s shocking death and the divine event, but the time would not be wasted. During it Mrs. Spang planned to embrace dear Ernest within the same wise, gentle coils with which she had hog-tied dear Jenny. Yes, generously, self-sacrificially, she would assume the tender leadership once held by the dear boy’s dead mother. Always having his best interests at heart. And his dough.

  “You are being awfully good to me,” she said to Miss Fernandez. “To stand by like this during these terrible hours of anxiety.”

  “We are all children of God, madame. Even the bad ones of us.”

  “You can’t mean that literally. Not Bert Jackson.”

  “Even he.”

  Mrs. Spang was saved from replying to this outrageous nonsense by Duggan, who came in and said, “It’s all right. I’ve just had word. The sheriff’s patrol is bringing them in. All safe. All done.”

  Later, in a charming restaurant back of Halcyon, away from people and places where they would be recognized, Miss Fernandez entertained Mrs. Spang and her daughter and a revived Ernest at dinner.

  It was a pleasant meal, candle-lit, and served on a screened veranda overlooking a garden lush with flora of the semi-tropics. One incident would always remain, Miss Fernandez knew, happy in her thoughts.

  Mrs. Spang, during the baked pompano, said incisively to Ernest, “I have decided that about two months would be proper.”

  “For what, Mrs. Spang?”

  “To show respect for your dear mother. An elaborate wedding before then would be in bad taste. After the ceremony, I thought we could take an extended tour. Possibly Brazil and the Argentine. You are not to worry about a thing, dear Ernest.”

  Ernest looked at her thoughtfully.

  “I’m not, Mrs. Spang.”

  “As long as there is a breath left in me I shall try to make up for your loss.”

  “We appreciate that, Mrs. Spang. Both Jenny and I. But I’m afraid there won’t be too many opportunities.”

  A chilly hand seemed to stroke Mrs. Spang’s aging spine.

  “Opportunities? I simply don’t understand?”

  “We will wait until the inquest and the funeral are over, Jenny and I. Then we think a quiet church wedding, after which were motoring West until the trial comes. We’ll be planning where we care to live. Jenny and I, Mrs. Spang. Naturally we will arrange to have you settled wherever you may wish.”

  Miss Fernandez signaled their waiter to pour more champagne.

  “I shall advance a toast.” She raised her glass. She looked at Ernest with fond, relieved eyes and said, “Good friend—to your coming of age.”

  MALICE IN WONDERLAND

  When Alice Wickershield was a little girl of nine and still believed in all the childhood wonderlands with their fantasy inhabitants, she was given a birthday party by an old woman whom she firmly considered to be a witch.

  Alice frequently remarked to her best friend, Elsie Grunwald, “The tip of Mrs. Fleury’s nose almost touches her chin, and that is a sign.”

  Elsie, who was of a similar age but completely disillusioned as to the fey, would answer practically, “That is because she hates wearing false teeth.”

  There the matter would drop until some later event would again bring Mrs. Fleury under scrutiny. Naturally, Mrs. Fleury being the hostess, the birthday party brought the subject of her cabalistic specialty into focus once more.

  Alice lived with her father (her mother was dead) in a house of Early Boom design in the town of Halcyon, on the Florida coast to the north of Miami. Their neighbors on the west were the Grunwalds, whose only child Elsie was Alice’s best friend; and on the other side was the sorceress with her old-fashioned, galleried home appropriately shrouded in dank grounds of somber tropical plantings.

  The birthday party was in late June and, as school was over for the season, the festivities were able to get under way shortly after the noon hour with a series of mildly competitive games under the palm and ficus trees that smothered the grounds with their shade. It was at the conclusion of the games and the distribution of prizes, with each of the children miraculously having won one, that luncheon was served in the patio, and Mrs. Fleury’s witchery meshed into gear and determined, eleven years later, the question of Alice’s fate.

  Dessert for the luncheon was a delicious treat put up especially for Mrs. Fleury by a local company. It consisted of ice cream tropical fish of various flavors and colors, with each mold resting artistically on a foamy wave of spun sugar. At the side of each plate with its chill confection was a cracker bonbon, or snapper, that went bang when its ends were sharply pulled, and hid a strip of paper on which was printed a motto that was presumed to shed a prophetic light on the puller’s future.

  “Children,” Mrs. Fleury said, “I am going to command a test for your powers of self-control—Jefferson Hollingsworth, put down that cracker bonbon until you hear what I have to say.”

  “This is it,” whispered Alice to Elsie. “Look at her chin.”

  Mrs. Fleury waited until Jefferson Hollingsworth, a handsome youngster with liquid, chestnut eyes, reluctantly replaced his snapper beside a frozen version of a pistachio-and-raspberry carp.

  “I am going to ask that each little guest take his or her cracker bonbon home and that you do not tear it open until some moment of the most desperate nature may come to you during your lifetimes. As you know, the crackers conceal a printed motto, and it is my wish for you—and for Alice in particular because it is her birthday anniversary—that the message conveyed in the motto shall guide you during this future crisis of either joy or sorrow to do the right, the happy thing.”

  “She is asking one hell of a lot from kids,” Harold Grunwald said to his wife Sidonia after Elsie had returned from the party and reported the odd incident. “I’d say the old bat has lost her marbles.”

  “Well”—Sidonia laughed—“it was too much for Elsie, and where that child gets her I.Q. from I wouldn’t know. She produced a logical enough crisis out of a hat.”

  “She gets her I.Q. from me. At her age I had mastered the Morse code in preparation for becoming an international spy, and last month I merely mentioned the fact and Elsie picked out Mata Hari as her dream career in womanhood and can already send six words a minute in Morse. She uses her pal Alice as a receiving set.”

  “So that’s why they’ve been tapping on things and looking remote.”

  “It is. And what’s this about a logical crisis?”

  “Simply that Elsie opened her cracker bonbon before she even set foot here in the house. She claimed the rich food at the party made her feel critically bilious, so she ripped out the motto.”

  “And what was the prophetic suggestion? Citrate of magnesia?”

  “No, it was a rather horrid quotation from Shakespeare: Open, locks, Whoever knocks!”

  “What’s so horrible in that?”

  Sidonia, who was tons more intel
lectual than her husband (she had majored in English at Barry College), said, “It doesn’t give the entire quotation. It’s simply taken out of context.”

  “Put it back in again.”

  “It goes, By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, Whoever knocks!”

  Mr. Grunwald, becoming bored with the matter and wanting to get on with the do-it-yourself parakeet cage he was making, said, “All that superstitious rubbish is silly.”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know, Hal. Sometimes I wonder.”

  Two weeks later Elsie, while presumably stitching up a ball costume for her favorite doll in the seclusion of the Grunwalds’ allamanda-draped gazebo, totally disappeared.

  * * * *

  With the exception of Alice, all the children had followed Elsie’s impulse and torn open their favors. They had read the time-weary little mottoes, been momentarily captivated by the tissue-paper hats, the modest souvenirs, and then had thrown the whole works into a wastebasket and out of their minds.

  Not Alice.

  Because she still believed in the wondrous, Alice had put her cracker bonbon in her treasure chest—a cardboard shoe box fancifully pasted over with Christmas wrappings—along with her diary, a dried toadstool highly favored as a parasol by elves, and sundry other articles of enduring sentiment.

  It was only natural that, being Elsie’s most intimate companion, Alice should have been questioned more patiently and closely than any of the other children after Elsie had “gone away”—that phrase being considered by their elders as most suitable to cover the desperately serious reality. Alice bore the questioning stoically and only broke down once, when she asked Mrs. Grunwald whether she might keep the doll’s ball gown that Elsie had been sewing on in the gazebo to remember Elsie by.

  “But Elsie is coming back, dear,” Sidonia said, restraining by the greatest will power her own tears of torture and doubt.

  “No, she isn’t, Mrs. Grunwald. She was put under a spell by Mrs. Fleury, and that’s the end of her.”

  “A spell, Alice?” Sidonia repeated as her eyes narrowed speculatively, as though herein might lie some clue, however preposterous, to the fate of her lost child. “What do you mean by a spell, dear?”

  “Mrs. Fleury is a witch, and Elsie disobeyed her express command by opening her cracker bonbon on such a silly excuse. A stomach-ache is not a crisis.”

  Alice left the interview, taking with her the doll’s unfinished ball gown, with its needle and length of unused thread still stuck in lemonade-colored satin. She wrapped the dress around her own cracker bonbon, as both seemed to be linked in their special magical field, and returned them to the treasure chest where they were to lie fallow in their diablerie for many years to come.

  When Hal Grunwald came home that night after a harrowing day spent with the police, the sheriff’s deputies, and the road patrols, all of whom were searching for Elsie during this second day of her disappearance, Sidonia told him what Alice had said about Mrs. Fleury being a witch, and he hit the ceiling.

  He then collapsed dog-tired into a chair and held his hot head in his hands and said, “Oh my God, Sid, you could listen to childish drivel while we’re moving heaven and earth to find her.”

  “I’d listen to any sort of drivel if I thought it would do any good. After all, Hal, what do we know about Mrs. Fleury?”

  “We know what she has told us.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean about our life here. The friends we make come from all over the country and we don’t know a thing about them except what they tell us themselves.”

  Sidonia, who had been holding her control by superhuman effort during the past two tragical days and nights, grew hysterical and her voice broke in odd high notes.

  “We exercise more judgment about our servants than we do about our friends,” she went on with those shrillish overtones. “We check servants, look up references—why, they even have police cards of identity. But our friends? We let our children associate with them and we don’t know what they are. Mrs. Fleury? From Cleveland, she says, widowed—her husband left her well off—and we smile and swallow it. She might be a mass poisoner for all we know. Alice claims she’s a witch, and you laugh. Well, a child’s judgment might be better than our judgment. A child’s eyes see things clearly, not through a fog of polite social conventions.”

  “Sid, knock it off, will you? We’re both carrying all the traffic will bear without getting sidetracked into black magic.”

  The ransom note came that night.

  With the vivid imagination of childhood Alice arranged all the fragments of overheard talks between her father and his friends into a factual whole. A ransom had been demanded, fifty thousand dollars had been paid, and Elsie still had not returned home.

  “She can’t,” Alice said to Sidonia when they met by chance at the hibiscus border that divided the Wickershield and Grunwald properties. “She can’t come back because she’s dead.”

  “Darling, don’t say it. Oh, don’t even think it.” Sidonia plunged through the hedge and, getting down on her knees, gripped Alice’s hands so hard that the bones felt all together. “You must tell me—I am begging this of you, Alice—isn’t there something you know? Something real?”

  “Witches are real.”

  Sidonia looked at the child searchingly, half convinced in the torture-ridden uncertainties of her cracking mind that the fateful motto just might have had something to do with their loss.

  “You really believe that, Alice, don’t you?”

  “It’s dangerous not to.”

  “Then destroy it. Burn your cracker bonbon. Get it now and burn it up.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it isn’t time.”

  So intense is the power of public opinion that Mrs. Fleury began feeling it on all sides—to the extent that she concluded the only answer lay in selling her place and leaving Halcyon.

  The children beleaguered her from a safe distance with cries of witch-witch-witch, and the elders forming her circle of friends were electrically artificial in their greetings and perfunctory smiles.

  Even the police thoroughly checked her whereabouts during the hour when Elsie had been sewing by herself in the gazebo. They handled the inquiry discreetly, of course, and no mention was made of it officially, but the fact was shortly general knowledge that Mrs. Fleury had an ironclad alibi. She had been undergoing the rack of a hair and facial treatment at the shop of Halcyon’s best and most talkative beautician.

  In Alice’s opinion this absolute alibi was futile for a witch, they being a breed notoriously famous for their astral ability to be in two different places at the same time, and she announced as much to the other children, who promptly stepped up their campaign of torment instead of dropping it.

  Mrs. Fleury was unable to fight back, any more than she could have fought the invisible vapors from a swamp with her bare fists. Fortunately she found a ready buyer for her home in Dr. Jessup Hollingsworth, whose adopted son Jefferson had had to be cautioned at the birthday party against a premature snapping of his cracker bonbon.

  Since coming to Halcyon over a year ago, Dr. Hollingsworth had been living with Jeff in the sterile splendor of a beach hotel.

  The doctor had reached the age of retirement and wanted to settle down.

  “I want roots,” he said to Haidee Glosser in her real estate office in town. “Not so much for myself as for Jefferson. My wife’s tragic death made it impossible to continue living in our former home in New York.”

  “I understand,” Miss Glosser murmured with sympathy while mentally pocketing a fat commission for the Fleury estate.

  Within less than a week the deal was closed. Mrs. Fleury moved to the west coast and settled in St. Petersburg, which was, so far as east coast Floridians were concerned, as far away as Siberia. And Alice acquired a new best friend.

  She and young Jeff Hollingsworth were classmates in elementary school, it was
true, but there had been none of the special affinity that goes with a friendship on a next-door basis once the initial ice of propinquity is melted—and at the age of nine the thaw comes fast.

  “How do you like being adopted?” Alice asked during the preliminaries.

  “There’s not much feeling about it,” Jeff said.

  “What happened to your adopted mother?”

  “Foster mother.”

  “Foster. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. She was killed by a hit-and-run driver right after my adoption papers went through. I only remember her looks.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Like anybody.”

  “What are you going to be, Jeff, when you grow up?”

  “A botanist.”

  “Why?”

  “Because plants and trees and flowers are important. They can be like people, only nicer. I’ve got leaves and specimens of about almost everything around here. Each one is dried and labeled from where I found it.”

  “Have you ever met any elves while you were gathering them?”

  “No.”

  “Do you believe in them, Jeff?”

  “Maybe.”

  * * * *

  Inevitably, as the years of childhood and the ensuing teens dreamed by, Alice and Jeff drew more seriously toward each other in their affections, and only Sidonia Grunwald, of the people who knew them, tried to put a damper on the intimacy.

  Sidonia had never given up, nor would she, no matter how earnestly Hal begged her to resign herself to the inevitable. Elsie was gone but they, he said, were left and had their lives together to be lived.

  “She isn’t gone,” Sidonia would say with a kind of fierceness. “She’s someplace.”

  Yes, Hal would think in his own emptiness, Elsie was someplace all right, and a stomach-wrenching vision would come to him of their darling’s small bones lying unshriven in some secret desolation of the Everglades or under the water of rockpits or of hyacinth-smothered canals, year after lonely year in their whitening.

  “I can’t get it out of my head,” Sidonia would say wildly, “that that place, that that woman had something to do with it.”