Free What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by Henry Farrell

Bracing herself with her right leg, the one that still contained some slight glimmering of life, she managed slowly to raise herself just up a bit and out of the chair.Craning to see, she peered down into the garden below. It was deserted. The house, at the far end of the garden, was still closed; the blinds were still drawn on the French doors. With a faint sigh of impatience, Blanche let herself back into her chair.
    The fear and panic which had kept her awake through most of the night had begun to be dimmed with the coming of the small, still hours of the morning. Exhaustion notwithstanding, as the grip of fear had begun to relax its hold upon her mind and body, she had begun to think and reason more clearly. She had seen that even without the telephone there was still a way to summon assistance.
    No sooner had the idea come to her than she had gotten a pad of note paper and a pencil and gone to work.
    Mrs. Bates
(she had written in a wide, agitated scrawl)
This is from your neighbor, Blanche Hudson. I am forced to ask your help in a very serious matter. For reasons I cannot explain in this note, I am not able to use my telephone. As I need desperately to reach my doctor, I am asking you to call him for me. His name is Dr. Warren Shelby, and his office number is OL 6–
5541.
Please ask him to come here to my home to see me as quickly as possible. Tell him not to call beforehand but just to come. Please do this for me. It is a matter of life and death.
    She had signed the note with her initials and then added a postscript:
Please do not, under any circumstances, disturb my sister about this matter.
    When she had finished it, she had folded it over carefully and put it in the right-hand pocket of her robe, where it would be handy when she needed it. Almost immediately afterward, with the relief of having put into progress a plan that she was confident would work, she finally dozed off.
    And then she dreamed.
    In her dream she had been a little girl again, five or six years old, and she had been walking with her mother along a deserted stretch of beach in the late afternoon. As they walked, the wavesreached toward them from across the sloping sand, rolling up and up, falling, crashing, growing darker as the minutes passed, with approaching dusk. A soft mist had risen from the water and was beginning to drift up toward the row of small wooden summer cottages on the rise. Little Blanche clung tightly to her mother’s hand, for the way ahead was blurred by her own tears.
    Actually it had been a fragment from the past, less dreamed than remembered, for once long ago it had been a part of something that had really happened.
    It had all begun earlier that afternoon, out on the porch where Jane and her father were practicing.
    The daily practice period was religiously maintained in order to keep Jane “in shape,” even during her month of holiday, and to prepare new material for the fall bookings. It took place between the hours of two and four and was held out on the porch, according to their father’s explanation, so that Jane might take full advantage of the healthful salt air. If, at the same time, a large number of onlookers was attracted from the ranks of the casual visitors on the beach, and from the tenants of the adjacent cottages, neither he nor Jane seemed especially to mind.
    During these sessions, Blanche, chubby and tanned in her sagging blue-and-white-striped bathing suit, was permitted to attend, but only as one of the spectators. Her designated place was at the side of the porch, far to the right and close behind her father’s chair from which he provided Jane’s musical accompaniment on a magnificent five-string banjo. It was firmly understood that Jane’s work period was to be regarded always with respect and solemn sobriety; Blanche was suffered to remain and watch only on the strict admonition that she was to be absolutely silent. It was also understood that any interference would result in instantaneous