Who's Calling?

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The engagement of Archie, a young doctor, to night club artiste Frieda evokes ghostly phenomena when Archie takes Frieda to visit his mother near Washington.

Untraceable phone calls, vandalism - and a murder - all happen before Dr Basil Willing, psychologist-sleuth, takes over and solves the mystery.

Release date: October 14, 2013

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

Persons this Mystery is about—

FRIEDA FREY,

fair and young and delicately carnal, sings in the Hot Spot night club. She looks eighteen, is twenty, and sings very worldly songs in a deep contralto voice. Her gray eyes,
provocative figure and golden beauty completely enchant

ARCHIE CRANFORD,

a young medical student with a brilliant future in his grasp. He has a hard, thin, intellectual face which nobody except his mother considers handsome, and he is headed toward
psychiatry till his engagement to Frieda puts other ideas into his head.

EVE CRANFORD,

Archie’s mother, is attractive and charming and in her late forties. People never suspect her age unless they are perceptive enough to recognize maturity in the skeptical arch
of her brows. Widowed during World War I, she has supported herself and financed her son’s education by writing very light fiction.

MARK LINDSAY,

United States Senator, retains a semblance of his former impressive good looks though his age is beginning to show. Mark’s greatest political asset is his genius for
procrastination and compromise. Torn between his inner convictions and his role as the People’s Pal, he remains a Senator mainly to please his wife,

JULIA LINDSAY,

who inherited a fortune from her father. She is small and swarthy and ambitious. Everybody knows that she is the real Senator, and it is even rumored that she writes
Mark’s speeches. She goes through life with the speed and precision of a pneumatic drill, and when she hasn’t anything else to do she knits fluffy sweaters for the children of her
acquaintance.

TED LINDSAY,

Mark and Julia’s young son, has his father’s blue eyes and his mother’s black lashes. He is a grave little chap with an ingenious imagination and the ability to
invent his own playmates.

ELLIS BLOUNT,

niece of the Lindsays, is nineteen, slight, demure, attractive as a young sapling. She is very self-sufficient for her age, except that she is hopelessly in love with Archie
Cranford.

CHALKLEY WINCHESTER,

one of Eve Cranford’s numerous cousins, has a slight lisp and more than a slight interest in his personal comfort. A full-blown egoist, he has lived in Italy for many years and
it is rumored that he is a conspicuous figure in Continental society. He travels with a custom-built car and a valet named

ERNESTO,

a young Italian with the grace and innocence of an animal. He is a former heavyweight boxer and carries on his person an arsenal of varied weapons. As Chalkley Winchester’s
valet and bodyguard, he earns more money and takes fewer blows than he did in his career as a boxer.

DOCTOR BASIL WILLING,

tall and lean and thoughtful-looking, has a slow grace of gait and gesture and a slightly ironical manner. A noted psychologist and criminologist, he is psychiatric consultant to the
district attorney for New York and to the F.B.I.

CAPTAIN BERKELEY,

of the state police, is a very affable official with a talent for getting things done in a hurry and for questioning with a thoroughness that totally exhausts his prey. He has a great
respect for Dr. Willing, though somewhat suspect of psychiatry and all the phenomena connected therewith.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 8:00 A.M.

The telephone rang. Frieda looked up from the suitcase she was packing. She was not expecting a call. None of her friends knew she was in town.

Stripes of sun and shadow from Venetian blinds fell across a blond hardwood floor and white walls paneled with satin brocade the pale color of peach ice cream. It matched Frieda’s fair
flesh tones as precisely as her face powder and made the whole room look like Frieda herself—fair, young, and delicately carnal. Traffic noises were coming through the windows from Park
Avenue fourteen floors below, but within the room there was silence.

Then the telephone pealed again, rude and insistent as a school bell or an alarm clock.

Frieda crossed the sun-striped floor, trailing a negligée of flesh-tinted lace that looked too mature for her. The telephone rang a third time as she lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” Her voice was carefully contralto, but her enunciation was careless.

A nasal voice answered her: “Is that Miss Frieda Frey?”

“Yes.” She didn’t recognize the voice. She couldn’t even tell whether it was a man’s or a woman’s. Perhaps the connection was bad. “Who’s calling,
please?” She spoke impatiently.

“Can’t you guess?” There was a sly, teasing note in the voice now.

Frieda sighed. She was in no mood for guessing games. She was leaving for Willow Spring in half an hour and she had hardly begun to pack. “Is it Archie?”

“No.”

Frieda was piqued. This must be someone she knew, because her number was not in the telephone book. She ran through a list of night-club companions. “Hilda? Johnny? George?”

“No.” Something like a titter came over the wire. It sounded mischievous.

“Well, I give up,” said Frieda. “I’ve had three guesses and more. You’ll have to tell me.”

“Have to? I think not.” The titter was insolent this time. The mischief had turned into malice. “It doesn’t matter who I am as long as I give you my message. I
didn’t call up just to discuss the high price of putty in New Orleans.”

Frieda’s gray eyes widened with sudden doubt. “You are someone I know—aren’t you?”

The titter became a chuckle. “What do you think?”

Frieda stared at the white-enameled telephone as if it had come to life in her hand. “What do you want?” She forgot her voice was supposed to be contralto.

“To warn you.”

“Warn me?” Her lips shaped the words but she had no breath to give them life.

The answer came clear and hard. “Don’t go to Willow Spring. You are not wanted there.”

Frieda gasped.

The voice went on evenly: “That surprises you, doesn’t it? You can’t imagine Frieda Frey not being wanted anywhere, can you?”

“How dare you speak to me like that!” Fear and anger seemed to shake the words out of Frieda. “Do you expect me to take this seriously when I don’t even know who you
are?”

“You’d better take it seriously—for your own sake.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m not going to tell you. But if you should be foolish enough to go to Willow Spring, you will see me there.”

“How will I know you?”

“You won’t know me. But I shall know you. I shall be watching you when you least expect it. Each time you are introduced to a new face, you will wonder: Is this the one?
Each time you hear a new voice, you will ask yourself: Have I heard this voice before? But you will never be quite sure. And, after a while, you will begin to be afraid. All sorts of
unpleasant things happen to people who go where they are not wanted.”

“But—”

There was a sudden click. The connection was broken.

Frieda sat still. A warm rose-red crept into her cheeks. She jiggled the receiver until she got the apartment-hotel operator.

“Yes, Miss Frey?”

“Was that a long-distance call?”

“No.”

“Did the—the person ask for me by name?”

“No, he asked for the number of your apartment.”

“Are you sure it was a man?”

“Why, don’t you know who called you, Miss Frey?”

Frieda hesitated. Then: “It was a wrong number. Did it sound like a man’s voice to you?”

“Well, now you mention it, I can’t be sure. The phone sort of changes voices sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

Frieda replaced the telephone in its cradle. Whoever had called knew she was going to Willow Spring. None of her friends knew except Archie, who was taking her there.

Except Archie. . . .

Frieda reached for the telephone again. “Please get me University 4-6230.”

“Yes, Miss Frey. Just a minute.”

Frieda listened to the faint buzzing that came over the wire. At last there was a click. “Dr. Cranford, please.”

A sleepy voice spoke uncertainly: “H-Hello?”

“Archie, aren’t you up yet?”

“Darling, I was just getting up—honestly!”

Frieda wasn’t listening to his words. She was listening to his voice. Could such a young, frank, masculine voice ever be made to sound that sly, epicene chuckle she had heard a few moments
ago?

“Archie, have you told anyone in New York that I’m going to Willow Spring?”

“No. Why?”

“How many people down there know I’m coming?”

“Mother knows. And the Lindsays—we’re going to a dance there tonight. And Ellis Blount. She lives with them. She’s Mark Lindsay’s niece.”

“Just those four?”

“I suppose so. Mother wants to keep things quiet until our engagement’s announced. But why?”

Again Frieda ignored the question.

“What are they like?”

Archie laughed. “Darling, don’t get stage fright! I know you’ll like them and they’re sure to like you. We’ve been neighbors for years and our parents and
grandparents were neighbors before us. We’re all cousins of one sort or another—third and fourth cousins once removed and so on. When we give ‘cousin parties’ we invite half
the countryside and the outsiders don’t like it.”

“But what are they like, as people?” persisted Frieda.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m not much of a hand at describing people.”

The stripes of sun and shadow from the Venetian blinds had moved with the motion of the earth like the shadow on a sundial. Now a bar of light fell across the toe of Frieda’s flesh-colored
sandal. The shining satin held her eyes hypnotically, as she put her last question.

“Are they the sort of people who would be likely to play practical jokes?”

“Good Lord, no!” Archie was surprised. “Mother is—well, she just wouldn’t. When you see her, you’ll know why. Mark Lindsay is a United States Senator whose
office is practically hereditary in that neck of the woods. Julia Lindsay is the perfect wife and knows it. They say she writes his speeches for him.”

“And the niece—what’s her name? Blount?”

“Ellis Blount? I knew her when she was in pig-tails. We were both forbidden to read the funny papers, so we used to read them together in secret. We kept them in a clearing in the woods.
We used to build fires there because we were forbidden to play with matches.”

“She sounds—mischievous,” mused Frieda.

“She’s not particularly mischievous now. She’s the most self-sufficient girl I know. Greases her own car and curries her own horse. She’s good fun, but practical joking
wouldn’t be her idea of fun. And the Lindsays take themselves too seriously for that sort of thing. Willow Spring is the last place in the world where you need be afraid of a hot foot or an
apple-pie bed. Whatever made you think of it?”

“I just wondered.”

“But why—”

Frieda interrupted. “I hope your mother will like me.”

“Of course she will!”

“She hasn’t written me or—or anything. And mothers-in-law never do like the girls their sons marry.”

“My mother isn’t like that. Why, she’s always wanted me to marry. She just hasn’t had time to write you. She’s pretty busy. But when she sees you—”

Frieda cut him short. “Darling, do you know it’s nearly nine o’clock? I must finish packing if you’re going to call for me in half an hour! . . . Of course I love you!
Now hurry up and bring the car around.”

Her voice sounded carefree. But her eyes were wide and withdrawn, looking inward at some mental image that frightened her.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 3:00 P.M.

Willow Spring was too far north to be Southern and too far south to be Northern. There was no railway station and no village—just a post office and a cluster of old homesteads and farms
buried in the heart of a woods. Though it was within an hour’s drive of the national capital it seemed like a social cyst attached to the body politic only by one tenuous thread of membrane,
the easygoing, amateurish county government.

In the last twenty years some of the homesteads had been purchased by wandering artists, coupon clippers, retired admirals and Assistant Secretaries of State who liked the proximity to
Washington. But the community was still dominated by descendants of the earlier landowners—Cranfords, Lindsays, Blounts and Winchesters, interbred almost as intricately as fruit flies in a
biological laboratory.

Eve Cranford, born Lindsay, lived in the old Cranford house at the end of Further Lane. A widow of World War I with an only son and no money, she made her living by writing. Her first effort was
a satirical sketch of one thousand words that took three months to write and brought her a check for twenty-five dollars. Eve was not good at arithmetic, but even she realized that a hundred
dollars a year would not pay taxes on Further Lane, to say nothing of the grocery bill. Eve never wrote another satirical sketch. Instead she produced romances of seventy-five thousand words that
brought her an income of several thousands a year and took only one month to write, for in writing as in biology the humbler the species the briefer the period of gestation. Such effusions as
Love Conquers All and The Girl Who Cared were neither pretty nor art, but they paid the taxes and the grocery bill and sent her son Archie through college and medical school. They
were reviewed under the heading Light Fiction, and the reviewer usually contented himself with summarizing the story and remarking that a peculiar species of humanity known as “Eve
Cranford readers” would doubtless enjoy the book but it would be poison to anyone with an I.Q. higher than minus zero. As the years passed even Eve’s best friends got tired of joking
about her life of shame and quoting the more purple patches at parties she attended. The year that Hollywood made Hearts Aflame into a B picture, Eve was able to tell Archie that it would
be all right after all if he insisted on choosing the medical specialty that requires the longest and most expensive training—psychiatry.

In her late forties, Eve had more vitality than many of her juniors. She was so long-legged and carried her height so well that she could still dress like a woman of thirty. Her only concession
to gray hairs was a lighter shade of lipstick. People never suspected her age unless they were perceptive enough to recognize maturity in the tired droop of her eyelids and the skeptical arch of
her brows.

This afternoon Eve was writing in the herb garden at Further Lane. The day was cool enough for a tweed jacket, but warm enough to sit outdoors bareheaded. A garden umbrella kept the sun off her
typewriter. A breeze brought her the fragrance of sun-cooked thyme and stirred bronze leaves fallen from the Virginia creeper that shaded the porch. A black spaniel puppy was chasing the leaves and
shaking them in his teeth as if they were rats. Her look of weary, tolerant disillusion was intensified as her eyes followed the words she was typing:

“But—” Miranda lifted tear-bright eyes. “I could not marry you against the wishes of your family!”

“My darling!” Derek’s strong arms closed about her frail shoulders. “What right have they to decide anything for us? They are old, withered, hidebound by narrow,
outworn traditions. The future is ours. We are young, strong, free and we love each other. Our love is . . .

There was a creak from the rusty hinges of the screen door leading to the vine-shaded porch. An elderly Negress in a white apron and a lilac chambray dress came down the steps.

“What is it, Clarissa?”

Clarissa showed all her white teeth as she held out a card tray. “Lettuh from Mistuh Archie.”

Clarissa stood waiting to hear the news. She had helped bring up Archie.

Eve’s face grew pensive as she read.

“Bad news, Mis’ Eve?”

“No. No, of course not.” Eve lifted her eyes to the autumn woods beyond the garden. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for several days,
Clarissa.”

“Yassum?”

“Mr. Archie’s engaged to be married.” Eve’s voice was toneless.

“Dat’s whut Ah calls good news!” cried Clarissa enthusiastically. “ ’Cose Ah knowed it wuz comin’, but de las’ few weeks Ah done thought he’d
neveh get around to axin’ her! He’s dat slow an’ she—well, Miss Ellis always wuz kinda shy and—”

“He’s not engaged to Miss Ellis,” said Eve, hastily. “He’s marrying a Miss Frey—Frieda Frey.”

“Oh . . .” Clarissa was astounded. “Some young lady from Baltimo’?”

“No, she’s from New York.”

“N’Yawk.” Samarkand could not have seemed more alien to Clarissa. She ventured a more personal question. “Yo’ all know her, Mis’ Eve?”

“No, I don’t know her.” Eve avoided Clarissa’s eyes. “He’s bringing her down here this evening. You’d better get the south room ready for Miss
Frey.”

“Yassum.” Clarissa withdrew disapprovingly.

The spaniel waddled forward to sniff the letter. Eve lifted it out of his reach and read it again.

Dear Mother,

I’m glad it suits you to have Frieda next Friday. I want you to meet her as soon as possible and this date suits her better than any other. We’re motoring down together and I
suppose we’ll get there by six o’clock.

I’ve been thinking a lot about your letter. You’re quite right—I can’t make Frieda really happy and secure if I marry her while I’m still messing around with
postgraduate work in psychiatry. But I don’t want to be engaged for a year or so and I don’t want Frieda to go on singing in that foul night club. There’s no knowing what might
happen to either of us before I could qualify as a psychiatrist. The only thing to do is to chuck psychiatry and start right in as a G.P. Then we can be married this fall. Frieda says she feels
sure I can get a good hospital connection in New York and make lots of money right away. Of course that would mean my living in New York permanently and it might be hard for us to keep up the
Willow Spring house at the same time. But you don’t want to stick there forever, do you? How would you like to have an apartment of your own in New York? Well, we can talk it all over when
we see you Friday. Don’t you think you ought to have written Frieda a little note or something? I want you to like her. I know she’ll like you.

Love,

Archie

Eve felt something wet on her face. She raised finger tips to her cheek. Only then did she realize she was crying. Angrily she brushed the tears away. Though the heroines of her romances burst
into tears on the slightest provocation, Eve had not cried since Archie’s father was killed at Belleau Wood.

With sudden decision she rose, stuffed Archie’s letter in the pocket of her jacket, and took the path through the woods to the Lindsays’.

“Go home, Tar!” she said to the black spaniel.

Promptly he trotted after her. Archie had once described Tar Baby as a “problem puppy.”

II

The original Lindsay house had burned down in the sixties. When Julia Middleton married Mark Lindsay she disliked the house built in the seventies which Mark had inherited, so they imported a
French architect to build a new house on . . .