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for me to do. Please don't try to look for me again, this time I'm gone for good."
"Baby, if this is really you . . . you tell me not to look for you? How can you call me up like this and say
a thing like that?"
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"You always said you wanted me to have a happy life someday. So now I'm going to be able to have a
happy life. So let me alone."
Miller stood beside Mary where she sat in a kitchen chair. He was slowly bending over her, getting his
ear closer and closer to the phone in her hand; and meanwhile his eyes squinted, as if he strained to see
something in the far distance. Thorn waited motionless in the kitchen doorway, and he also was listening
very carefully.
Mary was starting to recover from her first shock. "Listen, if thisis Helen speaking . . . if this is Helen, tell
me who was killed? Whose body did I stumble over in the dark?"
"There was a girl you didn't know about in the house that night. A girl named Annie, just a runaway from
somewhere, she didn't count. Only Uncle Del knew that she was there, and he was killed too . . . but
Mary, I don't want to talk about all that any more. I've found someone who I thought was lost to me
forever. We're going to do real things, and it's all going to be okay. He's going to put me in real movies.
Someday."
"Real movies? What do you mean, you've found someone? Who? Where are you? Helen, this can't be
you."
"It's me, Mary. Remember what you once told me, about something you said you'd never told another
soul? About you and your boyfriend in Idaho? Want me to play that back to you now?"
"Oh my God." Mary turned still more pale. "My God, it is you, baby."
"Not your goddambaby." The distant voice turned petulant. Still a poor contact somewhere in the wires
distorted it. "Just let me alone, please. Oh, Mary, I'm going to be so happy."
Mr. Thorn, listening, had doubts.
"Helen? Tell me where you are?"
"Goodbye, Mary." It was a lament, a ghost's farewell.
"No, Helen. Wait. Where are you? Helen?"
A click; what connection there had been was gone. Mary talked into nothingness for a few seconds, and
jiggled the switch at her end of the line. After that she could only hang up too.
Then she lifted a dreamer's face to the two men. "You heard her. It was her. What do we do now?"
Miller appeared unconvinced. "It did sort of sound like her voice," he admitted. "Not that I ever talked
to her that much, but . . ." He had to pause to clear his throat. "If that really was her, if Helen's really still
alive, do you know what that means? That masterpiece that Ellison Seabright just paid for is really still her
property. In the legal sense, I mean," he hastened to add when Mary looked at him.
"Even if Seabright has paid for it?" Thorn asked.
"Absolutely. No question about it. There'd be a devil of a legal and financial mess to untangle. But the
painting would have to be held in trust for Helen, as per Delaunay's will. Assuminghe's really dead.
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Wow," added the lawyer, looking at Thorn. "And the painting was on that plane."
"The matter of the missing plane," said Thorn, "is now perhaps explained."
Miller nodded slowly. "If Helen is still alive, and Seabright somehow found out about it, he'd then have a
good motive to get the painting out of the way. Maybe sell it secretly; there are collectors who would
buy."
Mary for once was not delighted to discuss villainy. She slumped in the kitchen chair, not looking like her
usual self. "Rob, shall we call in the police and tell them about the call? How are we even going to start
looking for her if we don't do that?"
"Indeed," put in Thorn, "how are we to start looking in any case, whether the police are notified or not?"
"Then you advise against calling them?" Miller was fumbling nervously for his pipe.
"My advice is that we first take thought: What exactly can we tell the authorities, and what will they
believe? All three of us heard someone on the phone, but which of us can swear convincingly that it was
Helen? Certainly not I, who never heard Miss Seabright's voice."
Miller, having found his pipe, held it in his hand forgotten. "I did a few times. But I couldn't honestly
say. Mary?"
Mary had her face down in her hands now. "Maybe . . . I don't know. Maybe it could have been
someone else. I saw Helen lying on the floor in the Seabright house, dead. All shot to pieces."
Thorn asked: "You recognized the victim's face?"
"Her mouth was almost gone, her lower jaw. I never realized till then that guns did things like that. Her
hair . . . it looked like Helen's hair. I assumed it was Helen. Everybody did. It never entered my mind that
it might not be her, because I never had any idea that there could have been another girl in the house.
`Annie.' Whoever it was on the phone just now said `Annie.' Did you hear?"
Thorn and Miller both signed agreement. Mary went on: "It's crazy. I don't know any Annie, and I don't
believe there could have been another girl. Dressed in Helen's robe?"
Thorn prodded: "But is it not possible? Some runaway, perhaps, being given shelter? That only Helen
and her uncle knew about?"
Mary hesitated. "Delaunay would'vetold me, if he'd been doing that. Let me think about it. It's not
absolutely impossible, I suppose."
Miller was now inspecting his pipe as if it were some interesting alien artifact. "Assume we went to the
authorities with this phone call, and could get them to halfway believe us. Then ordinarily, you know, a
court order could possibly be obtained, the body in question could be exhumed, a certain identification
made. Fingerprints, dental records, and so on. But Helen if she was the girl who was short was
cremated."
"That's right," murmured Mary. "It was the family tradition." Rotating her head as if to ease weary neck
muscles, she looked at the men. She seemed now to have pulled herself essentially together. "But oh,
this is awful the more I think about it, the more I feel sure that it must have been Helen on the phone
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just now. That dead girl in the house . . . shecould have been someone else, although I don't know who.
But the girl on the phone mentioned something, a thing that happened to me in Idaho." Mary sighed and
looked at Miller as if asking to be forgiven. "Something that I know I've never talked about to anyone but
Helen."
"But that Helen might have talked about," said Thorn.
"Well . . ."
Thorn went on: "The girl on the phone said `he' would try to kill her again if she came back."
Neither of the others wanted to comment. There was a short pause. Then Miller said: "She whoever it
was said something else that I thought was strange. About being put into `real movies,' if I heard it
right."
"You did," said Thorn. "And mentioned reunion with someone she had thought `lost forever.' Who had
Helen lost forever, Mary?"
Mary did not reply at once. Miller had put away his pipe and was massaging the back of her neck, her
shoulders. She leaned back in the chair, yielding to the motion. "I don't know," she murmured at last.
"She's run off . . . it'll be a rerun of last time, I'm afraid."
Thorn asked patiently: "What happened last time?"
She looked up at him, her head bobbing with the rhythm of the continuing massage. "Helen ran away and
got as far as Chicago. Some jerk there had her acting in porn movies. She wasn't basically like that at
all." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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