Sleeping Beauty

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Book: Read Sleeping Beauty for Free Online
Authors: Ross MacDonald
after all. It was grooved by time and trouble, like my own. He turned away from me as if he didn’t want to be known or remembered.
    I pressed Joyce’s doorbell. She must have been waiting on the other side of the door, because she flung it open immediately. She opened her arms and said:
    “Honey?”
    She was a nice-looking woman, but everything about her was a trifle blurred. Her soft hair was blurred by the light behind it, her eyes were blurred by doubt, her figure by excess flesh.
    “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you honey. I thought you were someone else.”
    “I don’t mind.”
    “But it’s so embarrassing.”
    “Not to me.” I told her my name. “Tom Russo called you about me.”
    “Of course. Come in, Mr. Archer.”
    She led me into her living room. It was filled with heavy old furniture and what looked like the mementos of not very successful trips: a battered conch shell, a polished slab of redwood inscribed with verse, a liter stein bearing the Hofbrau emblem—disconnected memories that failed to add up to a life.
    We sat side by side on a black leather settee. My presence continued to make her uncomfortable. She edged away from me and pulled her skirt down over her plump pink knees. “I don’t know what I can do to help. I haven’t seen Laurel for at least a week.”
    “I understood that she’d been staying with you.”
    “She did for a few days. But last week she went to stay with her grandmother. Have you talked to Sylvia Lennox?”
    “Not yet.”
    “You should. She’s very fond of Laurel, and she probably knows her better than anybody. Laurel’s her only grandchild.”
    “Where does Sylvia Lennox live?”
    “On the beach at Pacific Point, not too far from Laurel’s parents.”
    “But Laurel chooses to stay with her grandmother?”
    “Part of the time, anyway. Laurel isn’t too wildly crazy about her parents. And she’s been quite a headache to
them.”
    “I gather you’ve known Laurel a long time.”
    “Practically ever since I can remember. We went to the same school together, starting with the first grade.”
    “What school was that?”
    “River Valley. It’s a private school in El Rancho. That’s where her grandmother Sylvia used to live, before she left her husband.”
    “I gathered there was some kind of split-up in the family.”
    “There certainly is. Sylvia moved out on her husband, and another woman—a much younger woman—moved in. It’s terribly hard on Laurel to see her grandparents dissolving their marriage. She’s fond of them both, and they’re both fond of her, which puts her very much in the middle. The rest of the family think the old man’s crazy to take up with a younger woman at his age. But they don’t dare to say so, of course.”
    “Because he owns the oil company.”
    She nodded. “Laurel’s father and mother have spent practically their whole lives waiting to inherit.”
    “Has Laurel?”
    “Not really. She doesn’t care about the money. She isn’t a self-seeking person. Maybe she’d be better off if she were.”
    “What kind of a person is she? That isn’t clear.”
    “It depends on who you’re talking to. She was never a very happy girl, and she wasn’t very popular with her teachers. You know how teachers are. They get a down on somebody and after that they blame her for everything that goes wrong.”
    “What sort of thing went wrong?”
    “Nothing very much, in the early days. Talking in class, refusing to do her work—little things like that. Sometimes she played hooky.”
    “What about the later days?”
    “Things got worse. I don’t want to talk about it, really. I’d be giving you the wrong impression of Laurel. She had a realsweetness underneath it all, and she was a serious girl, too, and a good friend. We used to have these long talks; that was really the basis of our friendship. And we used to have some pretty good laughs together.”
    “You’re putting all this in the past tense, Miss

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