Tangled Webb (17 page)

She's so sure I'm going to do it—stick my head right in the lion's mouth. Well,
I'm
not sure. Not yet.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 25

I can't stand it any longer. The tension around this house has even percolated down to Preston—he's been as cranky as a
soaking-wet bee the whole morning. It's no way to live. I'd rather be struck dead over the phone.

So I walked up to the 7-Eleven half an hour ago and dialed Blanche's number and prayed she wouldn't be home. But of course she was. I said, “This is Marianne.”

There was a brief silence, which sounded to me like a grim setting of her jaw.
“Well
, Marianne,” she said in exactly the sort of voice I expected. “I've been hoping you'd call. To finish what you started. To answer my questions.”

“Yes. I—if I can.”

“You
must
answer them. You
must
, do you hear me? Where is my nephew? How do you know about him? What do you know about his mother?”

“I know all about everything,” I said, hoping I really did know all of it now, that there weren't any little bits and pieces Kelsey hadn't bothered to mention—or was scared to mention. “Sh-Sharonlee told me.”

Another tiny pause. “I see,” Blanche said. Her voice had gone all sort of stiff and wooden. As if she hated it that I knew all about her sister. Well, I didn't blame her. After a minute she said, “Sharonlee's here, then. In Portland. What has she done with Robert?”

“He's perfectly safe.”

“I'll be the judge of that! Tell me where he
is.
”

“Ms. Mitchell—I want to. But I can't. Yet. I was thinking maybe we ought to—talk.”

“I've been thinking
you
ought to. The sooner the better.”

“I mean—like—in person. Maybe today.” I figured it was talking on the phone that bugged me. I like to
see
people when I say things to them. Not just guess how they feel.

“All right. Where?” Blanche said.

“Well—I thought—the mall?”

“Where in the mall?”

My mind scrambled wildly around the mall, searching for privacy. “Maybe Grover Brothers' fourth floor? The offices'll be closed on Sunday, and there's a bench—”

“Yes. Now you be there. Two o'clock.”

“Okay.”

I expected her to say “And be on
time,
” but she only hung up. So I did, too, and pushed out of the phone booth and went back home. It was only eleven o'clock then. By now it's twelve, and I'm already so jittery I can hardly write. I don't know what I'll be like by two.

SUNDAY EVENING

Well, it's over. Everything's over. No, actually nothing's really
over
. But it all feels different since I went to meet Blanche.

She wasn't wearing her red jacket, but once I saw her sitting there on the bench outside the fourth floor offices I remembered her eyebrows, and her square, solid shape. And her expression—a sort of set-jawed I-dare-you-to-make-me-smile look.

“You're Marianne?” she demanded. I admitted it and sat down, and she looked me over grimly. “Marianne—Jackson, wasn't it? From Northeast Stark. Yes. How old are you, Marianne?”

“Tw—well, nearly thirteen.”

She nodded as if I had confirmed her worst fears, and took charge of the conversation. “All right. We're here to talk about my nephew, Robert Shelby. To begin with you can tell me where he is.”

I took a long breath and said, “Miss—I mean, Ms.—Mitchell, that's just what I
can't
do. Yet.”

“What do you mean,
yet?”

“Until I know how you feel about—what's happened.”

“How I
feel
about it?” She stared at me. “You
did
say you know the whole story?”

“Yes, I—”

“Well, how do you think I feel? Out of the blue I get this phone call from the FBI saying my baby nephew—eighteen months old!—has vanished from the face of the earth and what do I know about it? And do you think they believed me when I said ‘nothing'? For weeks I had them phoning at all hours, crawling all over my apartment, going through my things, questioning me about my job, my ‘confederates,' my—”

“They suspected
you?
” I gasped. “But—”

“Yes, ‘but'!
But
where was Sharonlee, hadn't she vanished, too, at just the same time? Don't think I didn't point
that
out. But they couldn't find
her
to pester. It was easier to figure the two of us were in cahoots. ‘She's just a teenager,' they said. ‘She couldn't have worked it all alone.' Not much! It's my opinion teenagers can work any scam they have a mind to work.” She paused and shot me a
look
. “And they do it every day. But try telling that to a cop when he's made his mind up.”

I was beginning to understand why Blanche had a chip on her shoulder about Kelsey—and I wished I hadn't said “thirteen.”

“Months of worry, I've had,” she added, sort of glum and brooding, almost to herself. “Worry about the baby, about that silly girl, about my sister left on her own—”

I said, “Ms. Mitchell, she's not a silly girl. Honest. Not anymore.”

“She is unforgivably silly. To do such a thing without telling a living soul. Without coming to me—when I was right
here
, in the same town.”

“Maybe she thought you were in Seattle,” I said feebly.

“I was transferred. She could've found me through the firm. She didn't try.”

“Well, if she'd told anybody what she was going to do they'd have stopped her going! And Robert would still be with his mother. Being neglected, and treated mean, and—”

Blanche put me in my place with an automatic glare, but then she looked away, and just stared across the big, Sunday-afternoon-empty fourth floor a minute, in a way that made me feel sorry for her. It was her own sister we were talking about, after all. “Ruth did notice he was gone,” she said bitterly. “A day or two later. When she ran out of booze. She created a big scene, which she's very good at, and got the police in. But she couldn't give them a bit of help. She went back to the bottle.”

It sounded so bleak and awful I couldn't think of a thing to say. But there was something I had to know, and the only way to find out was to ask. I said, “Is she—still—?”

“No, the authorities stepped in. A neighbor found her about two weeks ago, passed out on the front walk. She's in a state institution, drying out.”

Institution! It was all getting worse and worse. “Do you think she'll stay—dried out?”

“I doubt it,” Blanche said flatly. “But there's always the hope. Unless she kills herself first.” She turned and gave me a look that bored a hole through me. “Marianne, where is that child?
Tell
me. I have got to get him into some good foster home until proper—”

“He's already got a good home,” I said.

She just waited, glaring the hole bigger, while I swallowed and tried to get some spit back into my mouth. The time had come. I said, “They live at my house—both of them.
Sharonlee's married to my daddy.”

I don't know what she'd expected, but it wasn't that. She looked at me all over again, with wide, startled eyes, and for once forgot to scowl. “Sharonlee's
married?
To somebody old enough to be your father?”

“Well, that's not so very old,” I said defensively. She made it sound like my fault.

She just stared at me a minute, blinking now and then. I could almost see things sort of rearranging themselves in her mind. Before she could pull herself together and reset them in their old concrete, I swallowed and plunged into my big speech, the one I'd been planning and silently rehearsing for the past three hours.

“Ms. Mitchell, we're a nice, good family.
Much
better for P—Robert than any foster people because Sharonlee's right there with him. We live in a perfectly nice house—although it's kind of old and needs painting, only we couldn't afford it this year—on a real
safe
dead-end street.” I was looking directly into her eyes so she'd see how truthful I was being and wouldn't interrupt me until I got it all said. I told her Robert had his own little swing in the backyard and his own room, even though it was kind of small, and then I mentioned about the genuine Mexican-tile floor in the kitchen and the almost-new refrigerator, and that Daddy was going to have a new roof put on next year. “And the living room curtains—well, I guess they're sort of worn, they're pretty old, but actually you hardly notice, because—”

“Marianne,” Blanche said. She waited until I sort of refocused on her whole face instead of the pupils of her eyes. Then she said, “I don't think Robert would really care about the living room curtains.”

“Yes, well,” I mumbled. Was she laughing at me? I studied her, feeling sort of suspicious, but I couldn't tell. At least she wasn't scowling. I took another breath and forged ahead into Part Two, looking just past her ear this time so I wouldn't be distracted. “Now about Daddy. He is a very responsible man. He has his own business.” I went ahead telling about his business and about how he never had any debts except like house payments and car payments and that he didn't believe in credit cards, which was why we couldn't have a new television—and, well, everything
responsible
I could think of. “Besides, he's a really—he's just really
neat,
” I finished helplessly. “I mean, as a person. You can
talk
to him. Nearly always,” I added, because I wanted to be
strictly
honest.

I cut my eyes around to see how she was taking it. I could have sworn she had a sort of quirk at the corners of her mouth, as if she was amused. But I'd never seen her smile, so it was hard to be sure. All she said was, “I'm sure your father is beyond reproach.” Then she added, “Does he know you're here?”

She would. I said, “Well, not exactly. Well, not at all.”

“How does he feel about all this?”

I told her. About him wanting everything out in the open to make it legal. About Kelsey dragging her feet. And about me, caught in the middle.

“I see. So what was your plan? In coming to talk to me?”

I thought it ought to be plain enough by now, but I spelled it out for her: to find out if she was going to make trouble. I didn't say
that
, of course. I said “object.”

“Object! To what sounds like a fairy-tale ending?”

I couldn't tell whether that was sarcasm or not. “Well—I never exactly said—”

“No, you didn't. But Sharonlee married—to a mature, responsible man—presents an entirely different picture from the
one I've had of a flighty teenager on the run with a kidnapped baby. What I need to do, Marianne, is talk to them.”

“Yes. Oh, yes! That would be g-great! That would just be—” I was practically stuttering, everything was suddenly turning out so well.

“Good. Will you arrange it with Mr. Jackson?”

That stopped me dead. “With who?”

“Your
father
. Didn't you tell me your name was Jackson?”

“Oh. Well.” I had to swallow again, then once more. “That was when I—didn't dare let on . . . Actually my daddy's name is Charles Webb.”

“Charles Webb,” Blanche repeated slowly, eyeing me. “Then you are Marianne—”

“Juniper,” I said guiltily. Best to be honest about everything now.

“Marianne
Juniper?
” said Blanche.

It was really getting awfully difficult to meet her eye. “Juniper
Webb,
” I said.

She leaned against the back of the bench and looked me over again while she absorbed all that. “All right, Juniper Webb,” she said finally. “Tell Mr. and Mrs. Charles Webb I'd like very much to talk to them—perhaps at his lawyer's offices.”

“Oh. Well—I will, but—to tell you the truth I don't know whether Kelsey'll go near a lawyer. She's so scared of—”

Blanche sat up straight. “Kelsey? Kay Morgan? Is she here? I thought she'd moved to Australia!”

Gulp
. I said hurriedly, “Oh, yes, yes, she did! I don't mean her. I—you see—that is—well, Sh-Sharonlee sort of borrowed her name. In Portland she hasn't been Sharonlee Shelby. She's been—uh—Kelsey Morgan Blockman. Webb.”

Blanche's eyes had narrowed to shiny black slits, aimed at
me. I took a breath and added, “Actually there's quite a few things I haven't—mentioned yet. I was
going
to, but—”

“Maybe you'd better mention them right now.”

I thought I'd better, too—and fast. So I told her all about how Kelsey had rescued Preston—though I made sure to call them Sharonlee and Robert. I explained how carefully she'd thought everything out, how brave she'd been, how well she'd brought it off—the purse, the dyed hair, the labels, and all.

Well, Blanche listened. Deadpan again—I couldn't tell what she was thinking—but at least she was paying attention. Once she said,
“Sharonlee
did that? I wouldn't have thought her capable of thinking that far ahead.”

“I told you. She isn't like what you think.”

She wasn't really convinced, but I had a feeling her mind was less slammed shut about Kelsey's abilities. She waited till she was sure I'd finished, then said, “Have I heard it all now? All the missing bits?”

“All I know.”

Without the slightest change in tone she said, “And now can you tell me one good reason, Marianne—or Juniper or whatever your name is—why I should believe a word you say?”