Malice in Wonderland Page 9

  “I wish you’d stop poking around over there. I know you do at night, and apart from the fact that I’m sure it annoys Dr. Hollingsworth, it just isn’t healthy, Sid.”

  “You can’t be healthy with an empty heart.”

  This fixed idea formed the basis for Sidonia’s corroding reaction to the romance between young Jeff and Alice, whom she feverishly loved because there seemed to cling to the girl a lingering association with her lost Elsie. Actually, Sidonia was a little deranged on the subject, feeling herself constantly drawn to the old Fleury grounds (she never thought of it as the Hollingsworth place), and it was true, as Hal said, that she would steal over there and search around beneath its dank canopies, especially when the moon was full.

  She had convinced herself of the half-demented syllogism that the grounds were under a curse, therefore Jeff and his foster father, since they lived within the influence of the grounds’ baleful star, were also accursed. Sidonia wanted no part of this disastrous magic to rub off on Alice, not even through the medium of young love.

  The college years brought no hiatus in the serious intentions between Alice and Jeff. She went to Barry in Miami Shores, and he attended the University of Miami in nearby Coral Gables. There Jeff delved deeply into the structure, physiology, and distribution of the members of the vegetable kingdom, with an ultimate aim of specializing in plant morphology. With this broadened knowledge Jeff, among later interests, had carefully emended his boyhood collection of specimens, which were still methodically kept on file in a small laboratory he had equipped at home.

  Rather because she wanted to be near him than from any curiosity about botany, Alice would often stay with Jeff in the laboratory while he worked, and one day when he was reclassifying some specimens of his childhood collection her interest was caught by a closely set cluster of fine, slender branches.

  “It looks like a little broom, Jeff.”

  “It should. It’s hexenbesen, more commonly known as witches’-broom.”

  The name aroused stirrings of many years ago.

  “Did you find it here? When Mrs. Fleury owned the place?”

  “Not actually.”

  He had picked it up, Jeff told her, from his foster father’s bedroom floor in the beach hotel they had been staying at. He imagined it must have fallen from a cuff of Dr. Hollingsworth’s trousers when he had taken them off the night before.

  “I remember asking him about it. It’s an unusual find, and I wanted to trace its source. It’s an outgrowth caused by a plant parasite or fungus.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Trace its source?”

  “Not until after we’d moved here.”

  Dr. Hollingsworth had told Jeff, when questioned, that he probably picked it up while looking over the grounds with the real estate agent just before purchasing them.

  “I finally located it,” Jeff said, “after we had moved in and I’d remembered that witches’-brooms sometimes appear on ferns—low enough to be caught in a cuff.”

  “So it did come from here. Funny.”

  “Why funny?”

  “Don’t you remember our thinking old Mrs. Fleury was a witch? At least I certainly did.”

  “All kids think crazy stuff.”

  “I know it and I realize now what a little fool I was about it. I’d like to see Mrs. Fleury again and tell her I’m sorry for having caused her to be pestered, for making her give up her home, really. Jeff—I wonder if she’s still alive.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just a feeling. A funny feeling, Jeff.”

  They were to be married shortly after graduation, and Mr. Wickershield, Alice’s father, finally persuaded Sidonia (in her self-assumed role of proxy mother to Alice) to handle all the intricate arrangements for the wedding.

  “I still feel,” Sidonia said to Hal after she had reluctantly given way to Mr. Wickershield’s urging, “that the marriage would be a mistake. It’s—it’s sinister. Malign.”

  “Oh please, Sid!”

  Hal had grown stout and comfortable, and instead of continuing to be sympathetic he was getting irritated with what he thought of as Sidonia’s perpetual mania and her occasional Ophelia-like nocturnal driftings around the old Fleury grounds. He had loved their lost Elsie with all his heart and he still loved her memory, but grief cannot live forever. If it did, he thought philosophically, all life on earth would die.

  Dr. Hollingsworth, in his role of foster father, arranged the bachelor dinner for Jeff at a beach club of correct distinction—the groom’s gift for the best man and the ushers being platinum cuff links from Tiffany, the food and wines compatible—and Jeff, whose familiarity with champagne was on only a nodding basis, got socked straight into left field. Unfortunately he remained on his feet, his talk intelligible, and his good night to the doorman who brought his car sounded (as the doorman later testified) all right. Otherwise, a taxi or a lift would have been firmly suggested.

  A milkman, making his delivery shortly after sunup to the rear of Dr. Hollingsworth’s house, found Sidonia crumpled under the hibiscus that edged the driveway to the garage. He was not a man to panic, thanks to Korea, and having determined that she was still alive, he roused the household. All, that is, but Jeff, who was still sprawled, fully dressed, across his bed in stuporous sleep.

  * * * *

  …In the news of local interest (a Fort Lauderdale newscaster announced) the Halcyon police report an alleged drunk-driving accident on the grounds of Dr. Jessup Hollingsworth, formerly the old Fleury estate. The victim is a Mrs. Grunwald, a neighbor whose daughter Elsie was kidnapped a decade ago and presumably killed by her abductor after a ransom of fifty thousand dollars had been paid. The old kidnapping case remains unsolved. According to her husband and her close friends, this tragedy continued to prey on Mrs. Grunwald and caused her to take walks at night around the Hollingsworth grounds, which, they say, she associated in some fashion with her child’s disappearance. The police theorize that she was on such an excursion last night when Dr. Hollingsworth’s adopted son Jefferson drove home from a bachelor dinner in a drunken condition and struck Mrs. Grunwald. James Cray, 2714 Northeast Hempstead Court, who delivers the morning milk, found her lying under an hibiscus hedge where she had been flung by the impact. She is now at Memorial, and her condition is pronounced critical…

  * * * *

  The world came to an end, but Alice did not break down. With Jeff released under a five-thousand-dollar bail bond, with Sidonia’s life suspended by a thread above the valley of death, Alice would make Jeff sit out the foreboding hours with her in the privacy of the Grunwalds’ allamanda-draped gazebo, where they were reasonably sheltered from the press and even from their friends. When evening fell, each would go home to face the night with such courage as could be summoned.

  “I don’t suppose,” Alice’s father said to her, cupping the mouthpiece of a telephone, on the second night following the accident, “that you would care to talk with her? She’s peculiarly persistent.”

  “Who, Papa?”

  “That woman who used to live next to us. You remember, a Mrs. Fleury. She’s calling from St. Petersburg.”

  Almost as though some extrasensory impulse were forcing her steps, Alice moved toward the phone.

  “Alice, dear child,” Mrs. Fleury’s (again) familiar voice came from the receiver, “I have been reading all about it, and you will think me a silly old woman, but I felt compelled to telephone. I want to ask you just one question.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Fleury?”

  “Call me a superstitious old fool if you wish—I remember how you were childishly positive I was a witch”—Mrs. Fleury paused to give a forgiving, paperish little laugh—“and perhaps I am one, because while I was reading about your fiancé’s critical predicament, the most singular, almost clairvoyant vision popped into my mind. It made me feel exactly like one of the weird sisters, and I simply leaped on my witch’s broom and flew to call you up. Now, tell m
e, Alice, do you remember the birthday party?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Fleury.”

  “Do you recall the cracker bonbons and my nonsensically mysterious instructions about them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, do you by the wildest chance still have yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it still unopened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then open it now.”

  And the wire went dead.

  * * * *

  Alice left her father still standing near the telephone, with Mr. Wickershield silently wondering just what the call had been all about in order to have affected his daughter in such an odd manner.

  “I swear to you, Hal,” he told Harold Grunwald afterward, “she positively drifted from the room as if she’d been put under a spell…

  The cardboard treasure chest, with its Christmas wrappings of holly, gold, and stars, had for years been lying undisturbed in the bottom drawer of a dresser in Alice’s room.

  Alice got it out and put it on a desk where the shaft from a metal cone-shaded lamp made startling the colors’ holiday brilliance. With a reluctance that combined the fear ever present when brushing the unnatural and with a hope that she did not dare feel too strongly because of the impossible qualities that surrounded it, she took out the cracker bonbon in its covering of the doll’s ball gown and pushed the treasure chest aside.

  Then in her sudden eagerness Alice felt a finger pricked by the needle which was still caught in what had been Elsie’s last stitch, and a drop of blood stained a pea-sized circle of red on the lemonade-colored satin of the little dress. Alice removed the dress and with no further ado took both ends of the cracker bonbon and pulled them sharply apart. The report, to her now more adult ears, produced but a trivial effect.

  With a scissors she slit the white paper cover and, discarding a gay red paper hat and a miniature metal fire engine, she came at last to the strip of paper on which the motto was printed. An ugly wave of disappointment engulfed Alice as she read it. She had been expecting something truly prophetic—like Elsie’s open, locks, Whoever knocks! which, she later had learned, had been out of its dire context.

  The motto dropped from her fingers and came to rest on the ball gown beside the needle. She had hoped so much, Alice now admitted to herself—she had been hoping all along with her desperate heart for some sign—and now all her hopes had come to this childlike ending of—of—

  Her eyes darted from the motto to the blood drop, to the needle, to the line of stitches, in the last one of which the needle had been left. Clear under the cone-shafted light they were visible in their good, straight line. There was only one thing the matter with it, Alice decided critically. The line ran diagonally across the front panel of the gown and therefore, from a dressmaker’s point of view, not only served no purpose but was the act of a seamstress gone suddenly mad.

  Never would Elsie, as Alice remembered her lost, best friend, with her fine capabilities in so many of the childhood arts, have been guilty of such botchery. Unless it were purposely done. And rarely had anything ever been done by Elsie that had lacked purpose.

  Alice’s pulse quickened as a ripple of strange excitement caught her brain, and she examined more closely the misplaced line of stitching. Not only was the line misplaced, but the stitches themselves were uneven in their spacing—another unthinkable thing for Elsie to have done.

  Unless, again, it was purposely done.

  So steeped was Alice in the flood made by the years rolled back that Elsie became real—with their best-friends tie and all their secrets of shattering importance and their fearless preparations for facing the entrancing vistas of adult life to come. Yes, Alice remembered, their last projected career had been to become Mata Hari, with all her fascinating background of international intrigue.

  And for which they had both learned the Morse code.

  Her eyes flew to the line of unevenly spaced stitches. Dots and dashes, sewn in chartreuse thread on lemonade-colored satin. The pencil in her fingers automatically put the letters down on the spread-open white paper wrapper of the cracker bonbon. DRHOLCRZYHLPM—then nothing more.

  So intense, so feverish was Alice’s excitement that little meant anything to her but that here was Elsie’s last message on earth, and that within it undoubtedly lay a clue to her disappearance and, according to Mrs. Fleury, an agency of help in Jeff’s and Alice’s present deadly crisis.

  Taking the ball gown with her and leaving the rest of the magical properties on the desk, with her heart going suffocatingly in hopeful thumps, Alice ran from her room and out of the house with no thought in her head other than to find and tell Jeff.

  A lamp was lighted on the lower front gallery of the old Fleury house, and Dr. Hollingsworth was seated beside it in a wicker chair. He was smoking a cigar and reading.

  “Alice, dear girl!” he said as she rushed up the steps and paused breathless before him. His professional training took a clinical look at her eyes, at the tremor in her fingers that held, as if with an ague, the edge of a piece of satin. “You have had a shock.”

  “Yes, Doctor—this.”

  “It looks like—it’s a doll’s dress, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the one Elsie was sewing on in the gazebo just before she disappeared.”

  “Elsie? Oh, of course—the little Grunwald girl.”

  “I must show it to Jeff.”

  “But why?”

  “There is a message stitched on it in Morse code. We had both learned the code together. It’s Elsie’s last message, Doctor.”

  “Amazing!”

  Alice took the gown from his fingers and said, “I’ll go right in, if you don’t mind, and tell Jeff.”

  “He isn’t home.”

  Delay was a blow.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No. Jeff has been taking long walks these nights. Alone. Trying to knock himself out physically so that he can get some sleep. Alice, sit down. Since you can’t tell Jeff, tell me.”

  This Alice did, from the birthday party down to the call from Mrs. Fleury and the motto and the stitches in Morse.

  “What was your father’s reaction? Is he getting in touch with the sheriff?”

  “He knows nothing about it. It hit me so hard, Doctor, that I simply raced over here to tell Jeff. If I had met Papa on the way out I’d naturally have told him, but I didn’t.”

  “What did the message say, Alice?”

  “I haven’t decoded it yet because I’m waiting to do it with Jeff. I’m certain it will give us a clue to Elsie’s kidnapping, and I know this sounds fantastic, but I honestly believe that Mrs. Fleury is right and that it will help Jeff, too. Do you think I’m being sentimentally impossible, Doctor?”

  “Not that you feel that way, no. As I recall it, you were firmly convinced that Mrs. Fleury was a witch. I’d simply say that your subconscious was getting in a few old licks.”

  “I’m almost ready to believe in her sorcery again, Doctor. Take her telephoning, the cracker bonbon, and the motto—she even spoke of a witch’s broom—oh, it’s not only Mrs. Fleury herself, it’s the whole atmosphere of this place where she lived.”

  “Witch’s broom?”

  “Yes. Witches’-broom is a growth that looks like a little broom. Of course you don’t remember, but you caught some in the cuff of your trousers when you were looking over the grounds here with the real estate agent, and Jeff found it on the floor of your bedroom in the beach hotel.”

  “Yes, now I do remember him asking me about it and I remember that when we moved in here he located the spot it came from. A clump of ferns. Serpent ferns, I think he called them.”

  “Do you remember where they are?”

  “I believe so, in a general way. They’re back quite a distance in this tropical jungle. Why?”

  “I want to go there. Could we go there, Doctor? Now? While we’re waiting for Jeff?”

  “I suppose we could. But why?”

  “I
don’t know why. This is crazy, but it’s almost as if Mrs. Fleury were urging me to.”

  Dr. Hollingsworth looked at Alice judicially, as if he were trying to determine a proper course of therapy for her evident emotional state.

  “You are overstrung, Alice. The walk might be good for you at that.”

  “Then you’ll show me?”

  “I’ll get a flashlight,” Dr. Hollingsworth said.

  * * * *

  Mr. Wickershield had been in the library, selecting a book for a quiet hour’s reading, when he was conscious, as he thought, of a screen door slamming. Alice? Scarcely. Alice did not allow screen doors to slam. Still, that phone call from Mrs. Fleury had—just what had it done? Sort of knocked her for a loop, he decided.

  Mr. Wickershield left the library and rapped on Alice’s door, then went inside. She wasn’t there. The only light on was the desk lamp with its cone of brilliance from the metal shade. Inescapably his attention was drawn to the doll and to the flattened wrapper of the cracker bonbon. He went to the desk and sat down. Clearly, vividly, as though it were today, recognition came, and he recalled the whole grim episode of the birthday party, the kidnapping of Elsie, and that child of nine who had believed in the wondrous and was now his grown-up daughter Alice.

  Something was missing. Of course—the doll dress that Elsie had been sewing and in which Alice had wrapped the cracker bonbon. Had she taken it with her when, judging from the screen-door slam, she had pelted from the house? To show Jeff? Most likely.

  The end of the motto strip was exposed beneath the cracker bonbon wrapper, and he pulled it out. He read it. Thoughtfully he read it again.

  Mr. Wickershield had served in Army Intelligence during the war, and his brain was experienced in appraisal and deduction well beyond that of an untrained man. Alice had found some clue in the doll’s dress to Elsie’s disappearance and had rushed over to discuss it with Jeff—that line of deduction was almost obvious.

  He then recalled the children’s plunge into Morse code, so the connection between the motto and some probable stitching on the doll dress and the penciled letters on the paper wrapper suggested itself at once.