Ross Macdonald - The Wycherly Woman

Blue City

The Dark Tunnel

Trouble Follows Me

The Three Roads

The Moving Target

The Drowning Pool

The Way Some People Die

The Ivory Grin

Meet Me at the Morgue

Find a Victim

The Name is Archer

The Barbarous Coast

The Doomsters

The Galton Case

The Ferguson Affair

The Wycherly Woman

The Zebra-Striped Hearse

The Chill

Black Money

The Far Side of the Dollar

The Goodbye Look

The Underground Man

Sleeping Beauty

The Blue Hammer

FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION,
MARCH 1998

Copyright 1961 by Ross Macdonald
Copyright renewed 1989 by The Margaret Millar Survivors Trust

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1961.

A condensed version of this novel was first published in Cosmopolitan under the title Take My Daughter Home.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Macdonald, Ross, 1915
The Wycherly woman / Ross Macdonald.
p. cm.(Vintage crime/Black Lizard)
eISBN: 978-0-307-77317-3
I. Title. II. Series.
PR6068.0827W93 1998
813.52dc21 97-50178

Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

v3.1

to Dorothy Olding

C OMING OVER THE PASS you can see the whole valley spread out below. On a clear morning, when it lies broad and colored under a white sky, with the mountains standing far back on either side, you can imagine its the promised land.

Maybe it is for a few. But for every air-conditioned ranch-house with its swimming pool and private landing strip, there are dozens of tin-sided shacks and broken-down trailers where the lost tribes of the migrant workers live. And when you leave the irrigated areas you find yourself in gray desert where nobody lives at all. Only the oil derricks grow there, an abstract forest casting no shade. The steady pumps at their bases nod their heads like clockwork animals.

Meadow Farms lay on the edge of this rich and ugly desert. From a distance it was a typical lost valley city thrown down helter-skelter at the foot of barren-looking mountains and garnished with a little alkali dust. When I drove into it past the euphoric sign at the city limits, Fastest-Growing City in the Valley, I could see some differences. The main street was clean and freshly paved; the buildings along it included substantial new ones, and others going up; the people on the street had a hustling, prosperous look.

I stopped at a downtown corner for gas and information. When the leather-faced attendant had filled the tank of my car, I asked him the way to Homer Wycherlys house. He pointed along the main street to the outskirts where oil tanks gleamed like stacks of minted silver in the sun:

Straight on through town, you cant miss it. Its the big stone house on the side of the hill. I heard Mr. Wycherly just got back last night.

Back from where?

He took one of them luxury cruises to Australia and the South Seas. Been gone over two months. Myself, I got enough South Seas when I was in the Marines. You a friend of his?

I never met him.

I know him well, knew his old man before him. He gave me and my car a quick once-over. It wasnt a recent model, and neither was I. If youre selling, dont waste your time on Mr. Wycherly. Hes a hard man to sell to.

Maybe Ill buy something from him.

The man grinned. You just did. Im one of the outlets for Wycherly gas. That will be four-forty.

I paid him and drove out of town past the silver tanks and a cracking station whose Disney towers smelled faintly of rotten eggs. The house stood high above the road at the top of a winding private drive. Its stone face was forbidding, like a castle built to dominate a countryside. From the old-fashioned verandah I could look down into the town and out across the valley.

A big man with wavy brown hair and a stomach answered the door. His hair was too uniformly brown for a man of his age: he probably had it dyed. He had a strong nose and a weak chin and a sort of in-between mouth. He wore imported-looking tweeds buttoned over his stomach. On his face he wore a home-grown expression of dismay.

Im Homer Wycherly. You must be Mr. Archer.

I acknowledged that I was. His expression didnt change much; it crinkled a bit around the mouth and eyes. It was the smile of a man who wanted to be liked and hadnt always been.

You made good time from Los Angeles. I wasnt expecting you so soon.

I started out before dawn. You said on the phone the matter was urgent.

Very urgent indeed. But do come in. He led me along a dim hallway under old deer heads into a sitting room, keeping up a stream of half-apologetic chatter: Im afraid I cant offer anything much in the way of hospitality. Ive just reopened the house, there isnt a servant in the place. The fact is, I didnt intend to come back here at all. I only did so on the off-chance that Phoebe might have come home. He sniffed. But Phoebe hasnt.

The sitting room had the closed musty atmosphere of a Victorian parlor. Some of the furniture was sheeted; the heavy drapes were closed against the morning. Wycherly turned on an overhead light, looked around at the effect with disapproval, and went to the windows. I was struck by the violent way he jerked at the draw-cord of the drapes. Like a man hanging a cat.

Sunlight poured in, migrating across the room to a small picture on the wall above the marble fireplace. Composed of blobs and splashes of raw color, it was one of those paintings which are either very advanced or very backward, I never can tell which. Wycherly looked at the painting as if it was a Rorschach test, and he had failed it.

Some of my wifes work. He added to himself. Im going to have it taken down.

Is your wife the one whos missing?

Heavens, no. Its Phoebe. My only daughter. Sit down, Mr. Archer, let me explain the situation, if I can. He subsided into a chair and waved me into another. I found out yesterday when I returned to this countryIve been on a cruiseI found out that Phoebe had dropped out of school away back in November. No one seems to have seen her since that time. Naturally Im worried sick.

What school?

Boulder Beach College. Youve got to get her back for me, Mr. Archer. A girl of her tender years, with her protected upbringing

How old is she?

Twenty-one, but shes a complete innocent.