Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

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