To Perish in Penzance (8 page)

If Mrs. Crosby had seemed ill when we first met her, she looked like death itself now. She was sitting up in the big four-poster bed, very small and somehow naked without her wig. Her scalp was thinly covered with gray down. It would have to grow a lot to be a crew cut. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks pale as wax. In a pair of faded pajamas, she looked more like an old man than a woman. Her hands, fretting at the bedclothes, seemed almost transparent.

She cried out the moment she saw me.

“Mrs. Martin! Do you know what's happened? No one will tell me what's happened, only that Lexa's dead!”

“Now, Mrs. Crosby, you don't want to upset yourself—” The young policewoman tried to soothe, but Mrs. Crosby's voice rose in fury.

“Go away! Get out! I don't want you! I want someone who will tell me something!”

WPC Danner was really very young. She looked uncertain.

“I think she really does need to talk,” I said quietly. “Would you be disobeying orders if you were to wait in the hall?”

She bit her lip. “I'm meant to stay here and try to help.”

“Could you stay in the bathroom, then, with the door open? I promise I'll be careful.”

The policewoman shrugged. “I'm not here as a police spy or anything of that sort, you know. We simply try to stay with bereaved families as long as we're needed. Please don't upset her, if you can help it.” She removed herself, and I pulled a chair up to Mrs. Crosby's bedside.

“Now. What do you want to know? I promise I'll tell you the truth, but you must stop me if you begin to feel worse.”

“I'll never feel anything but worse. It doesn't matter. Do you know what happened to Lexa?”

I took a deep breath. “I only know that we found her, my husband and I, in a sea cave at a place called Prussia Cove, not far from Penzance.”

“No! Not that!” Her hands clenched; tears rolled down the waxen cheeks. She made no effort to stem the flow, or to control her sobs. I hadn't expected quite this reaction. She had already been told of Lexa's death. Maybe she hadn't fully taken it in, since apparently no one had given her any details. I waited for her to regain control of herself. This was no time for meaningless consolation. When she began to sniffle, I handed her a tissue.

“But I don't understand,” she said when she could speak, and there was a peculiar intensity in her voice. She raised herself on one elbow and stared at me out of those pitiful eyes. “Why was she there? It's miles from anywhere, isn't it? Why was she there, of all places?”

“I don't know, Mrs. Crosby. No one knows, yet. But—you sound as if you know the place. I thought you were a stranger to Penzance.”

She sank back to her pillow. “I am, but yes, I know the place. I've never been there, but I know about it.” Her hands clenched again. “I'm not Lexa's real mother, you know. Her real mother died in that cave over thirty years ago.”

Her mother!

No wonder Alan had been seeing ghosts. That unknown girl in the cave so many years ago …

“But—but I thought Lexa was in her twenties.”

“She looks—she looked much younger than she was. She was thirty-three. She was only a few months old when her mother died. In 1968, that was.”

I took a deep breath. “If you're up to it, Mrs. Crosby, I'd like to hear the story. It may be very important.”

Mrs. Crosby settled herself. A little color came to her face. “It's a sad story, but it brought me Lexa, and that's been nothing but good. Until now.”

She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and began.

“Her name really is Alexis Adams. I mean, it's not an assumed name. Her mother, Elizabeth Adams, was my best friend. I was older than she was, but when she first moved to London in 1966 I was advertising for a flatmate. She answered the advert, moved in, and we hit it off from the first.

“She was young, and always wilder than I had ever been. I was almost thirty then, and she was only just twenty I had a steady job, nothing glamorous, just working as a secretary, but I was independent and living in London, happy enough to do my job and have a little fun at weekends, go to the cinema, go dancing with friends, that sort of thing. I never had any real boyfriends, just couldn't seem to find someone who really appealed to me. It was a silly sort of time, the sixties, and I was always serious-minded. I never much cared for rock music and I thought drugs were a waste of money.

“Betty Adams—she was always called Betty—she was different. She was quite bright, but she never could seem to stick to a job. Both her parents had died, and she had no other family. I don't know if they'd been strict, her parents, I mean, and she was off the leash for the first time, or what, but she couldn't seem to settle down. She flitted about from one thing to another, but she never caused me any worry over the rent. She never brought boyfriends back to the flat, either, though she had plenty of them, I knew. Sometimes she tried to arrange dates for me, but they never seemed to work out. She played about with drugs a bit, too, I knew, but not much, and again, never at the flat. She knew I wanted nothing to do with that sort of thing.

“You might think I'd have been jealous, or disapproving, or whatever, but I never was.”

I had been thinking that very thing. I looked at Mrs. Crosby closely, but she seemed to be telling the truth. “You would have had reason, it seems to me. How did you avoid those feelings?”

“Partly, I suppose, because she never flaunted her success with men. She took it for granted. She was very pretty. Well, you've seen Lexa. Betty wasn't quite as beautiful, but if you could see her now, you'd take the two for sisters, they're that much alike. Betty's hair was nicer than Lexa's really, so blond it was almost white, and ironed smooth as satin, the way girls used to do then.

“There was another reason why I got along so well with Betty, though. She was always so gay—I mean in the old sense—that she brought sunshine into the place. You might say I was one of those people who was born middle-aged, but she was gay and giddy and carefree, and fun, at least on the surface. Underneath, though, there was something else. It was as though she was running from one job to another, one boy to another, trying to find something and never able to. There was a sadness, a kind of longing—no, I can't put a name to it, but it was there, and it made me put up with her when she was annoying. Maybe it was because she had no mother. I was almost a mother to her, though I wasn't all that much older. We were very close.”

She dabbed at her eyes and coughed. I poured a glass of water from the bottle of Evian that stood on the bedside table, and Mrs. Crosby took a sip.

“Now, I don't want you getting funny ideas. We weren't lovers. Betty was definitely a man's girl, and I was, too, or would have been if there'd been any men about that I could fancy. We were friends, and more than friends, almost sisters, or mother and daughter, as I said.

“Then Betty got pregnant.”

Mrs. Crosby paused. “It happened in June. She'd been to Penzance for a few days with some friends, just having a good time, and a few weeks later she realized.

“It could have been a disaster. In those days that sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen, and it could have sent her into a tailspin, but it had just the opposite effect. It steadied her, seemed to give her a purpose in life. She cut out all the drugs the moment she suspected, stopped smoking and drinking, got a better job, started saving her money. We began to buy baby things, get the flat ready. She'd offered to find another place, but I told her I'd love having a baby about.

“It was the truth, too. When Alexis came, she was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I'd more or less given up hope of ever marrying and having babies of my own, and here I was with the most beautiful baby there ever was and caring for her almost as if she were mine.

“Betty left her job for a few weeks to look after Lexa, but of course she had to start working again soon, and then things were harder. Good care for the baby was expensive, and Betty was very choosy. She wasn't going to let just anyone mind her child. I thought she was quite right, too, but once she'd paid that bill, there wasn't enough money left over to pay her share of the expenses. It began to be a worry. We thought about finding a smaller flat, or getting someone else in to share, but neither alternative was very attractive.”

Mrs. Crosby stopped talking, coughed, drank some more water.

“Stop if you're tired,” I said. “You look as though you need some rest, and it must be hard for you to talk about all this.”

“No, I need to talk about it. It's only that I'll never forgive myself for what happened next. If I'd managed better, somehow, Betty would never have died.”

I
DREW
in my breath. Should Alan be here? Was I about to learn what had happened on that stormy night in 1968?

It took Mrs. Crosby a few minutes to compose herself. Whatever was coming, it wasn't easy for her to talk about.

“I blame myself, you see. I was worried about the money, and I let Betty see it. If I hadn't fretted so, she might never have gone.”

“She went to Penzance,” I prompted.

Mrs. Crosby nodded. “She'd made up her mind she had to ask Lexa's father for money.”

“Who was the father?” I asked, scarcely daring to breathe.

“She would never tell me. She didn't know him well, I know that. It was just a weekend fling; there'd been a party where everyone was smoking pot, and things went a little too far. To tell the truth, I don't think she even remembered him all that clearly. She'd never have thought about him again if it hadn't been for Lexa.”

“Didn't she tell you anything about him at all?”

“Only that he was the sort you'd never think would have anything to do with drugs. She'd giggle when she said that. I got the idea he was a very respectable type, maybe even someone important.”

“And that was all she said.”

“That was all. But when the money started getting scarce, she got it into her head that she'd take Lexa to show to him, and ask him for some help.

“Well, I argued with her. He didn't even know about the baby; Betty'd never wanted to tell him. She said he didn't matter to her and why should he know? I think she was afraid he might want to marry her, and she didn't want that, even when things were so hard. I told her he wouldn't like it if she suddenly turned up with a baby and claimed it was his, and finally I persuaded her to leave Lexa with me.”

“You must always have been grateful for that.”

“Yes, at least I did that right, if nothing else. I tried and tried to tell her to write to him first, not just appear and make demands, but she said she didn't know his address. Anyway, she said, he'd find it harder to say no to her in person.”

She sighed, a long, shuddering sigh that broke my heart. Her gaze turned inward. She was remembering, I knew, remembering the long wait for Betty to return, the worry, finally the newspaper stories of the girl in the cave, the terror …

I didn't want to make her live through that again. I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Crosby,” I said gently, “I know the next part. I may know more than you do. You see, my husband was the investigating officer on that case. All his life he's worried because he never solved it, never even knew who the victim was. Why did you not report Betty missing?”

I knew the question would hurt her, but it had to be asked, though I thought I knew the answer.

“I was afraid,” she said, after a long pause. “Not for myself, for Lexa. I'd got the idea, you see, that the man Betty'd gone to see was someone important, influential. And if he'd—well, if Betty's death hadn't been an accident, what might he do about Lexa? Would he want her, try to take her away from me? Or would he try to—to do something to her, too? I couldn't take the risk.”

Years of worry for Alan, years of agonizing over what he'd thought was a failure, and all because a woman had been afraid. I took a deep breath. “Why were you so sure it was Betty? I know you didn't think she'd just run away, but you said she was a bit giddy.”

“Not anymore, she wasn't. If I've made her sound irresponsible, I haven't told the story properly. She liked to have fun, and she'd made some mistakes, but she had her head on straight, and she adored Lexa. She would never have run off and left her baby. That wasn't what made me sure, though.”

She paused for another sip of water.

“I gave her those beads. There were pictures of them in the papers. The police could never trace them, because they were old. Carved cinnabar, they were. They'd been my mother's, back in her flapper days. I restrung them myself and gave them to Betty. She loved bright colors. There was no way I wouldn't recognize them, even in a newspaper photo. I knew it was Betty from the moment I saw those beads.”

There was so much I wanted to say, but I could find no way to say any of it. There was no point in berating this grieving woman for what she had left undone so many years before.

She could see what was in my mind, though. People often can, with me. I'm no good at hiding my feelings.

“And don't you think I've carried that burden all these years? Don't you think I know they might have caught the man if I'd told what I knew? Over and over I've asked myself if I did the right thing.

“But I couldn't risk it, don't you see? I couldn't bear to lose Lexa. She was only four months old, and so precious! She was the only baby I'd ever have, and I loved her as much as Betty had. I couldn't lose her!”

And now you have lost her, I thought. That might not have happened if you'd gone to the police when Betty died.

But I didn't need to say that, either. The pain of it was etched in Mrs. Crosby's face forever.

I left her shortly after that, promising to come back later and check on her. I had let her talk too long, about things that were too painful. I didn't know if I had done more harm than good, but I knew that I had to tell Alan what I'd learned, and that it might not be easy.