Free The Wycherly Woman by Ross MacDonald Page A

for the last two months. The house is up for sale.”
    “I didn’t know that. Are you sure?”
    “I was over there an hour or so ago. A sleazy character caught me trying to climb the wall and pulled a gun on me.” I described the man in the bow tie. “Do you know who he is? He claimed to be in charge of the property.”
    Trevor shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know the man. And I haven’t the slightest idea where Catherine’s gone to.”
    “Do you know people she knows?”
    “Not on the Peninsula. I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Archer. We didn’t and don’t move in the same circles as Catherine Wycherly. It was a matter of choice, on our part.”
    “What circles does she move in?”
    “A downward spiral, I’m afraid. But I won’t repeat gossip.”
    “I wish you would.”
    “No. I owe that much to Catherine. Or to myself.” His broad cheeks colored faintly, and the brightness of his eyes intensified. He said with the irresistible smoothness of a steam roller: “We’re getting rather far afield from the subject of my niece, and it’s not getting any earlier. Tell me, what can I do to help?”
    “You might talk to the local police. If I go to them cold I’ll get no action. Also, there’s the danger of publicity. Wycherly is dead set against publicity. But you could probably make a confidential inquiry, and get them rolling in a quiet way.”
    “By all means. Tomorrow morning.”
    “Tonight would be better.”
    “All right.” Sick or not, Trevor showed the serviceability of a powerful man who didn’t have to prove anything to himself. “What precise form should this inquiry take?”
    “I’ll leave that to you. The authorities in the entire San Francisco area should be on the lookout for her. Also they should check their backlog of unidentified bodies going back to early November.”
    Trevor’s face lost its remaining color. “You said they usually turn up alive.”
    “They usually do. But we have to rule out the other possibilities. Do you have any pictures of her?”
    “I took some last summer when she was staying with us. I’ll get them.”
    He rose vigorously. The movement showed no trace of effort unless you were watching his eyes. The brightness in them dimmed down like a lamp-flame for an instant.
    Trevor came back five minutes later with a sheaf of colored pictures in his hand. He sat down and dealt them to me one at a time. Phoebe smiled brightly among camellias in a white summer dress. She swung a tennis racquet in yellow linen. She sat and stood and reclined on beige sand beside an indigo sea. Some of the pictures had sea cliffs in the background.
    The girl was almost beautiful in a poignant way of her own. Not beautiful enough, though; they never are. In the beach shots particularly, her smile was incandescent with self-consciousness. She thrust her sharp small breasts towards the voyeur eye of the color camera, agonized by the effort to be really beautiful for it.
    Trevor was studying my face when I looked up.
    “She’s a valuable girl,” he said. “A fine deep girl who has had a hard growing up. She deserved better parents than she got.”
    “She seems to be personally valuable to you.”
    “I love her like a daughter. We have no children of our own, and I should have kept in closer touch with her. But there’s no use crying over spilt milk.”
    “These pictures were taken last summer?”
    “Yes. I have earlier ones, of course, going all the way back to infancy. I tried to pick out the ones that look most like her present self. Phoebe’s slimmed down since her teens.”
    “Did she spend the summer with you?”
    “Just a few days of it, actually, a few days in August. We have a beach cottage near Medicine Stone, and she was supposed to stay longer. But she and my wife were tense witheach other for some reason. She left by unspoken mutual agreement. Which didn’t include me.”
    “Do you recall a boy she met in Medicine Stone? Good-looking college boy with