There was a pause in which no one did anything. Then Mary sprang forward. In a moment she was holding the phone pressed against her disheveled hair. "Who is this? If this is supposed to be some kind of a joke, it isn't . . ."
A feminine voice at the other end of the connection had begun to answer. It was a quiet voice, and its tones were mottled and distorted by an imperfect connection somewhere, and at first Mr. Thorn could not make out the words. But Mary could, and they had an immediate effect. Her face lost color, and her hand holding the receiver slumped a little. "What?" she asked weakly.
The voice at the other end made itself louder. Now both men standing by in the kitchen could hear it well enough to distinguish words. "Mary, this isn't any joke. It's me. I can't come back now, it's too dangerous. Anyway, I don't really want to. Everything's fine for me the way things are. But I wanted to talk to you. You're my best friend, Mary." Mr. Thorn, listening hard, thought there was a certain dazed quality in the voice; a disconnection from present reality, as if it might be reciting lines learned for a play.
"Helen? What do you mean, dangerous?" Mary's own voice now sounded no less dazed.
"Why? Where are you?"
"You know why, Mary, if I come back he's going to try to kill me again. Look, I wanted to tell you, Mary, I'm sorry about running away again, after all your work with me and all. But there was nothing else 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?"
"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 this is 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 boy friend 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 goddam baby." 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. Assuming he's really dead. 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've told 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 shot—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 just now: That dead girl in the house . . . she could 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."
"I see. And do you think that this jerk, as you call him, is the long-lost lover she has now rejoined?"
"Oh no. Not him, never. She doesn't hate herself that much. But she did talk to me about someone else she met on the road, a boy who meant something to her. She told me his name was Pat. I don't know if he was involved in the porn factory thing or not, but she must have known him at about the same time."
"Pat was a runaway too?"
Mary thought. "I got the impression from Helen that he was older, a little older anyway. Not a runaway any more, an independent adult. No, independent is not the right word for what adults are like when they've grown up that way, on the road. I've seen a bunch of them. Lost, usually. Isolated. That's what they tend to be like when they manage to grow up at all."
Miller said: "Come to think of it, I do seem to remember hearing Helen once mention someone called Pat. With a kind of wistful look in her eye."
"O'Grandison, that was his last name!" Mary had suddenly come up with it. "Oh, Rob, that must have been Helen on the phone. Oh, my poor baby. I remember now. She used to say Pat had talked to her about making good films, wishing he could help make them, something like that."
And here, unexpected by either man, came tears. Miller, still rubbing Mary's neck tenderly, tried to react lightly. "Mother Mary," he joked.
"Don't laugh at me."
"I'm not." He squeezed her neck muscles firmly again and looked at Thorn. "What do you think?"
"I think," said Thorn, "that in the matter of making vile films in Chicago, and in the matter of this Mr. O'Grandison, I may be able to learn something. I repeat that I am not an official investigator of any kind, but in the course of an active life one forms connections."