A Change of Heart

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

Girzel Graeme looked on her father as the embodiment of all that was wise and good. But now her father lay in a hospital hovering between life and death, and the evil that struck him down reached out to claim his daughter.

What terrifying secret did her father's past conceal? What horrifying act could he have committed? And what nameless danger threatened his daughter as she followed the lure of a fabulous jewel into a labyrinth of deceit, on the trail of a mysterious man who could save her faith in her father - or destroy both it and her.

Release date: March 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

Only a devout Freudian who really believed that all liking is love and all love is sexual could have seen anything perverse in the school friendship of Lee and Laurie.

Unfortunately in our century every boys’ school has at least one devout Freudian on its teaching staff.

The friendship began innocently enough. Lee chanced to see Laurie’s full name in the inscription his grandmother wrote on the flyleaf of a book she gave him at Christmas.

To my dearest and only grandson, Percival Leicester Laurence.

Lee swore he would never tell anyone that the “P” in P. L. Laurence stood for Percival.

Also he confessed that his own name was a diminutive for Parmalee, and Laurie swore he would never tell anybody that.

At first perhaps the boys needed each other more than they liked each other. Laurie was good at mathematics, Lee at languages, so they could tutor one another, strictly forbidden and all the
more agreeable for that reason.

Laurie had all the self-confidence of a boy whose father was a trustee of the school, Lee all the shyness of a boy at school on a scholarship. It was Laurie who got them into scrapes and Lee who
talked them out of scrapes. Laurie was an extrovert Californian, a natural leader, who needed someone to look up to him. Lee was an inhibited Yankee, a natural follower, in search of a hero.

Perhaps such opposites attract because each represents to the other a side of his nature that he has repressed, what he might have been, or what he would have liked to be, and so each finds
completion in the other.

The house Freudian at Saint Hubert’s that year was not interested in such complexities. He put his own inevitably simple construction on the friendship, exulting in that happy sense of
recognition and achievement we all feel when we see a theory confirmed in fact.

He at once marked down the boys as his lawful prey. It was his duty, a most congenial duty, to harass them with peculiar questions and invent a thousand and one pretexts for keeping them
apart.

They never guessed the motive behind his maneuvering. Lee was only thirteen, Laurie only fourteen, and the year was 1936. In those days Sade and Masoch were still perverts rather than martyrs,
Oscar Wilde was a writer rather than a pioneer, and movies were built around love scenes rather than rape scenes. No one had ever heard of LSD.

Failure to catch the pair in a compromising situation did nothing to dampen the hunting instinct of the house Freudian. He fell back on his Master’s assumption that when homosexuality is
not patent, it must be latent, and so will bear watching. Like all moralists he had a touch of the voyeur in his nature.

All this accomplished only one thing: he drove the friendship underground.

Laurie discovered a defective latch on a French window in the library of their house which made it possible for them to sneak outdoors together when everyone else was asleep. No longer able to
see each other openly by day, they took to meeting secretly by night. Their friendship became a conspiracy and so more emotional than it had been before.

This might have brought about the very perversion the house Freudian thought he wished to avoid if these particular boys had not been “late bloomers.” Their intellectual precocity
was deceptive. It came from listening to grown-up talk at the family dinner table. Sexually they were still the children of a sheltered environment.

The house Freudian found this confusing, and possibly a little disappointing.

The boys, happily unaware of the whole business, went out every night when it was not raining to roam the school grounds from midnight till nearly dawn. At Saint Hubert’s any form of
freedom was adventure and any form of privacy a privilege. Just being able to wander barefoot on fresh, spring grass, shivering a little in cotton pajamas, and saying whatever came into their
heads, was a delight.

There was added joy when a younger boy, waking and looking out the window, saw two moonlit figures in white glide toward the great copper beech on the front lawn and vanish. He told everybody
that the school was haunted by two boys who were doubtless killed by a master years ago.

The copper beech was their secret hiding place, a huge tent formed by high branches bending so low that their tips touched the ground. Behind these leafy curtains, the boys felt snug and safe.
No one could see them there, yet they could see out and keep watch over the long stretch of lawn to the front door.

One night, just before the end of spring term, Laurie spat out a blade of grass he had been chewing and said:

“I’m going to miss you when we leave this place.”

“Maybe we can go to the same college.”

“I’ll probably have to go somewhere in California. You’ll go here in the East.”

“We’ll still see each other.”

“Will we? People drift apart as they get older. They change.”

“Couldn’t we both change in the same way so we’d still like each other?”

“You mean couldn’t we both turn into stuffed shirts?”

“Do we have to be stuffed shirts just because we’re old? Why can’t we always be the way we are now and always be friends?”

“Did you ever know anyone old who was not a stuffed shirt?”

“I guess not.” Lee sighed. “Do you suppose they change so slowly they don’t even realize what’s happening to them until it’s too late?”

“Probably.”

“So when we’re old we won’t even mind being stuffed shirts? And we won’t want to do things like this any more?”

“Like what?”

“Like sneaking around at night and letting other people think we’re ghosts.”

“You may not want to do things like this when you’re old, but I will, no matter how old I am,” insisted Laurie.

Lee shook his head. “I’ll probably be like my parents. They won’t ever take chances. My father turned down the chance of a job in Japan a year ago, because he thought it was
too risky for a man with a family. As for my mother, I can’t make her drive ten miles over the speed limit though everybody else does and she knows that.”

“I wonder when the dry rot sets in.”

“Around fifty.” To Lee, at thirteen, fifty seemed as remote as Everest.

Laurie was nearly a year older. Perhaps that made a difference. “I’m not going to be like your parents, ever, and neither are you. We aren’t going to change and we are going to
be friends at fifty just as we are now.”

“By the time we’re fifty, you probably won’t even remember saying that.”

“Then let’s put it in writing. My father says you can’t wriggle out of things you put in writing.”

“What’ll we write?”

“That we are never going to change and that we are always going to be friends.”

“How will we know we haven’t changed?”

“We’ll have to prove it to ourselves and to each other.”

“But how?”

“By doing just what we’re doing tonight when we’re fifty.”

“How can we sneak out of school when we’re no longer in school?”

“We can’t, but we can sneak in.”

“What for?”

“To prove we haven’t changed. Listen. I’ve got a great idea. We’ll make a date to meet on your fiftieth birthday.”

“Why my birthday?”

“Because it’s the one day in the year when we’re both the same age. Your birthday is the fifth of June and mine is the sixth, but I’m a year older, so on your birthday
each year we’re the same age for just twenty-four hours. That’s a day we should always spend together.”

Lee, always slow at arithmetic, took a moment to sort this out, but Laurie’s imagination had already taken fire at the idea of a special reunion on the one day in their whole lives when
they would both be fifty.

“We’ll come back here and sneak into this school instead of sneaking out of it. We’ll scare the living daylights out of everybody. They’ll all think we’re ghosts or
spies or something. That little snot, Billy Wharton, really did think we were ghosts the other night.”

“I can see a reason people might think we were ghosts. This is an old school. But what would a spy want in a school?”

“Trying to chicken out?”

“Of course not.”

“Will you take a solemn oath that you’ll haunt this school with me on the night when we’re both fifty and put that oath in writing?”

“I’ll pledge my life, my fortune and my sacred honor.”

“Okay, it’s a date. The year will be . . . let’s see . . . nineteen seventy-two.”

Lee shivered.

“Someone walking over your grave?”

“No, just cold.”

“Where shall we meet?”

“The clock at Grand Central?”

“That’s for babies meeting teachers when they’re going off to school for the first time. Men of fifty meet in bars.”

“What bar would you suggest?”

“When my father’s in New York, he sometimes meets people at the Small Bar in the Crane Club.”

“Suppose there isn’t any Crane Club then?”

“Nonsense! There’ll always be a Crane Club. We’ll order martinis made with dry sherry.”

In the darkness, under the great tree, they had not noticed the changing sky. Suddenly Lee saw the change through a gap in the branches.

“No green in it, no lavender, just blue and bright.”

“That’s the sun shining before it rises.”

“I never saw a blue like that before. The word azure must have been invented for it.”

“Azure . . .” repeated Laurie. “I never thought much about words until I met you, but now I do. It’s catching.”

A bird uttered a trio of high, clear notes, falling from a great height in slow cadence.

“We’d better run,” said Laurie. “The sun’s coming up.”

They fled across the lawn, feeling stripped and vulnerable as darkness waned.

They got as far as the head of the big stairway, when a door opened. They froze as they recognized Justin Carew.

He was a cousin of Lee’s, tall and radiantly blond, a senior and the hero of the school. Not because of scholastic achievement. At examination time Justin seemed content, with a
gentleman’s C, but in all sports he reached top rank without apparent effort.

His natural grace made the most difficult feats look easy. Like Nijinsky, he did not leap higher than others, but he came down more slowly as if he had learned the secret of controlling
gravity.

Lee was not a boy to presume upon the accident of blood relationship. He worshipped this dazzling cousin from afar, uneasily aware that their mothers were not friends because there had been some
trouble over a will long ago.

Whenever Justin smiled, his blue eyes caught light like a steel blade in the sun, but he was not smiling now. He was the Day of Judgment in an immaculate, dark dressing gown.

“What are you doing here?”

Though Lee was the one who usually talked them out of scrapes he was tongue-tied in the presence of Cousin Justin.

“We’ve been outdoors,” quavered Laurie.

“So I see.” Justin was looking at their dirty, bare feet. “Why?”

“Bird watching,” improvised Laurie recklessly.

“And what birds did you watch?”

“There weren’t a lot, but there was one that shouted pretty loud a moment ago. Didn’t you hear?”

“No, and I don’t believe a word of it. Cut along to bed. If I catch you two little warts bird watching again, you’ll be sorry.”

The boys scuttled down the corridor before Justin could have time to change his mind about letting them get away with this.

“He was pretty decent,” whispered Lee.

“Yeah, but did you notice one funny thing? The door he came out of wasn’t the door to his own room. That was John Haverhill’s room.”

“So what? They’re friends, and seniors can do anything they like. We don’t even have rooms of our own.”

Laurie eased the door to their dormitory open. He had already oiled the hinges.

When it came to putting their pledges to each other in writing, Lee and Laurie tried to think of material symbols for the sacred and binding nature of their solemn pact.

Like most of us, they identified the sacred with the archaic.

Lee had read that medieval treaties were written on parchment.

The best the village drugstore could provide was a wretched, modern substitute called “parchment paper.” They had to make do with that for, as Laurie pointed out, it was not
practical to slaughter sheep at a school like Saint Hubert’s.

The drugstore could not provide a quill pen, but it did produce an old-fashioned steel pen, black sealing wax, a candle, and matches.

“What about ink?” asked Lee.

“Ink?” Laurie was scornful. “It must be written in our own blood, of course. Lucky I’ve got a sharp knife.”

On the last night of the term, under the mothering beech tree, they sawed away at their own fingers by the light of the candle they would use to melt the wax. Perhaps the knife was not as sharp
as Laurie had thought, perhaps they were fighting a deep-rooted aversion to wounding themselves. Anyway it took quite a little time to produce enough blood.

Even then the blood did not make good ink. It had a tendency to clot and clog the pen. On paper it turned dark red, almost brown, instead of the romantic flame-color they expected.

There was so much difficulty they had to reduce the text of the pact to the fewest words they could use without sacrificing its legalistic phrasing.

There were two copies, one for Lee, written in Laurie’s blood and signed by Laurie, one for Laurie written in Lee’s blood and signed by Lee.

When the signing ceremony was over, Lee read his copy aloud in a stately monotone:

“I, P. L. Laurence, do hereby solemnly swear eternal friendship with Lee Graeme and pledge myself to meet the aforesaid Lee Graeme on his fiftieth birthday, June 5th, 1972, in the
Small Bar of the Crane Club, in the City of New York, and to proceed with the aforesaid Lee Graeme to Saint Hubert’s School, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in order to trespass and
commit a nuisance thereby establishing that I have not become a stuffed shirt just because I am fifty.

“(signed)

“P. L. Laurence,
“Saint Hubert’s School,

“May 21st 1936.”

The two pieces of parchment were rolled into scrolls and sealed with thumb prints pressed into warm, melted wax.

Lee had thoughtfully provided Band-aids and iodine. While they were binding up their wounds, Laurie said:

“I really mean this, Lee. I shall be at the Crane Club that evening. Don’t let me down.”

The sudden vision of a doddering old Laurie of fifty waiting for a Lee who never came touched Lee’s heart.

“Don’t you worry. I’ll be there no matter what happens.”

“We’ll need a password,” said Laurie. “We might not recognize each other after all those years. Something unusual. Something no one else would say to either of us by
chance.”

“Then it would better be French,” said Lee. “I know. My father went to the Foch funeral in Paris. He saw these words in raised letters on the wheels of the seventy-fives:
Un canon bien tenu en vaut deux.”

“What does it mean?”

“Stupid! After all the help I’ve given you with your French, you don’t even know what that means? One gun well-kept is worth two. Think you can remember?”

“Un canon bien tenu vaut deux.”

“Not just vaut deux, for Pete’s sake! En vaut deux. You must learn not to think in English when you’re speaking French.”

The winter before the invasion of Normandy New York was a garrison town. For the second time in a century files of uniformed soldiers marched down Seventh Avenue. Even on Fifth
there were more men in uniform than out of it.

This was the greatest port of embarkation in the great. . .