The heat of the sun had begun to decrease and a hint of mist in the air had turned the mountains to violet. Ethel loved to watch the mountains. They changed from hour to hour. In the morning they were grey, and at noon they were green with streaks of brown, and now, just before evening, they seemed to be shrouded in layers of violet-colored chiffon.
Her glance fell on the lathhouse. It stood empty, abandoned by the sun and the trysting lovers. But from some place directly behind it, a thin column of smoke twisted skyward like the magic rope of an Indian conjuror.
Ethel’s first notion was that Murphy and Ortega were still there, and that Willett, with his perverse talent for doing the wrong thing, might go out into the garden and find them. With a sigh that was half-anger and half-envy, Ethel put down the skillet she had just taken out of the cupboard, and for the second time that afternoon headed in the direction of the lathhouse to give Murphy warning.
This time she had no lines prepared. No lines were necessary. Ortega was lying on his back on the grass behind the lathhouse, spread-eagled, eyes closed, mouth half-open. Cigarette butts were strewn all around him, one of them still smoldering.
For one terrible moment Ethel thought he was dead, and her legs felt so weak that she staggered and almost fell on top of him. Regaining her balance, she looked at him more closely and saw the gentle rise and fall of his chest under the gaudy red and blue shirt.
Her voice was high and uncertain. “Ortega? Are you asleep?”
Ortega stirred and smiled slightly.
“You’d better wake up? You’d just better?”
With a sudden unexpected movement Ortega’s arm reached out and his left hand grabbed her ankle, and held it, not tightly or cruelly, but in a soft caress. She meant to scream but she felt suffocated, as if Ortega’s hand was around her throat instead of her ankle. She had no breath, no strength, no will.
“No,” she whispered. “Stop. Help. Please.”
Ortega murmured something that she couldn’t understand.
“What? What did you say?”
She leaned over so that she could hear him better, and then she saw that he was still asleep. His embrace, his words, were not for her.
“Get up,” she said harshly. “Get up, you.”
She kicked free of his hand, the toe of her shoe cracking against his wrist bone. Ortega flung himself over on his side with a cry of pain. Groggily, still dazed from sleep, he got up, first to his knees and then to his feet. His flannel slacks were wrinkled, and stained with grass. Around his eyes there were dirt marks like the marks on the face of a child who had wiped away tears with a grubby hand.
He looked first, not at Ethel, but at the sun that was slowly falling toward the sea.
“She never came,” he said. “Ada never came.”
By nine o’clock that night, when Frank arrived home from San Francisco, at least twenty people knew that Ada Murphy had disappeared.
15
By nine-thirty Greer himself was on the job, tired, irritable, and inclined to dismiss the whole episode. He would have dismissed it, at least for the night, if it hadn’t been for Ortega’s insistence.
The fluorescent lights in Greer’s office seemed to have dissolved Ortega’s tan and made his face look chalky.
“She never came,” he said. “Last night when I took her home, she told me to meet her at one-thirty this afternoon in the garden. We were going to go down to the harbor and rent a boat. She’s crazy about boats, always wanted to walk along the wharf or out to the end of the breakwater.”
The words struck a chord in Greer’s mind, and it took him only a moment to put the chord in its place. Rose French had walked along the breakwater several days before her death, according to Mrs. Cushman’s report. Many other people walked there, too, but in Rose’s case it was unusual because she professed to hate the sea, and she certainly hated exercise. Mrs. Cushman’s assumption was logical and Greer agreed with her: that Rose had gone to the breakwater not to admire the wonders of nature or walk off a pound or two, but to meet someone.
Greer looked at Ortega with renewed interest. It was quite possible that Dalloway and Frank had been on the wrong track, and that the connection Rose had with the Goodfield family was not with the Goodfields themselves but with Murphy. He said, “Did you ever accompany Murphy to the breakwater?”
“Yes sir, three times.”
“Did she meet anyone down there?”
“No sir. Ada’s a stranger in town. She didn’t know anyone except the Goodfields and me.”
“Where did she come from?”
“Los Angeles. She had very good references. She showed them to me one day.”
“Do you remember any of the names of her employers?”
“No sir. I just looked at the references to please Ada.”
“You and Murphy were going around together — that right?”
“We’re going to be married when... when she comes back.”
“You’re just a boy, aren’t you?”
“I’m nineteen,” Ortega said stubbornly. “Ada is — she’s a little bit older.”
Ada, Greer knew, was a hell of a lot older. Aloud he said, “Look, young fellow, I’m no specialist in these affairs but I know Ada Murphy. She’s no ordinary servant. She’s pretty sharp, she’s been to college and probably quite a few other places where they don’t give degrees. You’re fighting out of your class.”
“I’ve been hearing talk like that all my life. It never changed my mind.”
“Has it occurred to you that Murphy couldn’t face giving you the brushoff in person, so she just lit out to avoid trouble?”
“Ada would never do that.”
“You can’t tell. She might have got fed up suddenly with her job or you or life in general and decided to take a bus down to L.A.”
“She didn’t take a bus,” Ortega said with quiet intensity. “All her clothes are still in her room.”
It was true. The small closet in Murphy’s bedroom — which was at the rear of the house behind the kitchen — was crammed with dresses and uniforms and odds and ends of underwear. In contrast to Murphy’s neat appearance, her private habits were slovenly. She seemed to have used the closet as a catchall; anything she’d wanted out of sight, she’d tossed into the closet. Once the door was opened, it couldn’t be closed again.
The room was furnished, not with leftovers from other rooms like many domestics’ quarters, but with matched maple furniture and chintz drapes that duplicated the design on the bedspread, and a small cherry-red loveseat.
On the loveseat, looking very pale against the brilliant red, sat Ethel. There was no doubt that she was extremely disturbed. She’d discarded her graceful floating movements and vague airs as a snake discards its old skin. Peeled down to her essentials, Ethel presented a different picture to Greer. She wasn’t either feeble-minded, as he’d thought at first, or sluggish.
She addressed Greer in a voice sharpened by anxiety. “Well? What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know.” He indicated the bulging closet with a jab of his thumb. “I don’t see how you can be sure nothing is missing, with that mess.”
“Because Willett’s mother saw her leave. She’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and happened to glance out the window. Murphy was just going down the front walk. She had no suitcase or anything, not even a coat. She just... just walked away.”
“What was she wearing?”
“One of her ordinary cotton dresses, a turquoise-colored chambray.”
“Had there been any disagreement between Murphy and you, or Murphy and Mr. Goodfield?”