The Wycherly Woman Read Free Page A

name?”
    “It’s Dolly Lang. I talked on the phone to both her and the landlady. They’re a pair of typical addlepated females who couldn’t seem to grasp the realities—”
    “Landlady’s name?”
    “I never did get it. No doubt you’ll find her on the premises. The address in Boulder Beach is 221 Oceano Avenue. I understand it’s near the campus. And while you’re out that way, you’ll probably want to talk to some of the people on campus who knew Phoebe—her teachers and advisers. I presume you’ll be going over to Boulder Beach today, there’s a good road through the mountains …”
    He went on talking in a slightly frantic rhythm. I waited for him to run down. He was one of the managing sort who are better at telling other people what to do than doing anything for themselves.
    I said when he had finished: “Why don’t you talk to the college people yourself? You’d probably get further with them than I could.”
    “But I wasn’t planning to go over there today.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t drive. I detest driving. I simply don’t trust myself to do all the right things.”
    “I don’t trust anybody else to do them.”
    There was a silence between us, with a kind of stuffy intimacy involved in it. I realized dimly that we might just have exchanged our outlooks on life.
    “Ride along with me if you like,” I said.

chapter
2
    B OULDER B EACH C OLLEGE stood on the edge of the resort town that gave it its name, in a green belt between some housing tracts and the intractable sea. It was one of those sudden institutions of learning that had been springing up all over California to handle the products of the wartime copulation explosion. Its buildings were stone and glass, so geometric and so spanking new that they hadn’t begun to merge with the landscape. The palms and other plantings around them appeared artificial; they fluttered like ladies’ fans in the fresh breeze from the sea.
    Even the young people sitting around on the grass or sauntering with their books from building to building, didn’t look indigenous to me. They looked like extras assembled on a set for a college musical with a peasant subplot.
    A very young man who resembled Robinson Crusoe directed us to the administration building. I left Homer Wycherly standing on the steps in front of it, goggling around with a lost expression on his face.
    I’d have laid odds that he was a lost man in almost any environment. On our way over from the valley, he’d told me something about himself and his family. He and his sister Helen were the third generation of the old valley family which had founded Meadow Farms: the town stood on his grandfather’s original homestead. The old man’s pioneer energies had dwindled in his descendants, though Wycherly didn’tput it that way to me. His grandfather had made a farm out of semi-desert; his father had struck oil and incorporated; Homer was nominal head of the corporation, but most of its business was done in the San Francisco office, which was managed by Helen’s husband, Carl Trevor. When I stopped the car in front of Phoebe’s apartment, I made a note of Trevor’s name and address for future reference. He lived on the Peninsula in Woodside.
    Oceano Avenue was a realtor’s dream or a city-planner’s nightmare. Apartment houses were stacked like upended boxes along its slope; new buildings were going up in the vacant lots. The street had a heady air of profits and slums in the making.
    221 had a discreet sign painted on a board: Oceano Palms. It was a three-storied stucco building girdled by tiers of balconies on which the individual apartments opened. I knocked on the door of number one.
    It opened slightly. A woman with iron-gray hair looked out at me as if she was expecting bill-collectors.
    “Are you the landlady, ma’am?”
    “I’m the manager of these apartments,” she said in a tone of correction. “We’re all filled up for the spring semester.”
    “I’m not looking