Eighteen

He savored the implications of that for a moment before insecurities besieged him. “Maybe you’d hate it anyway.”

“I couldn’t.”

It was the last time they talked about the manuscript for three days. At the end of those three days, he mailed it to an agent, called his father to say he’d found other work, packed up his belongings and moved in with Ellie.

The agent called back, took him on as a client, and sold the book within a week. Bill was already at work on his second novel. The first one was a critically acclaimed but modest success. The second spent twenty-five weeks on the bestseller list. When Bill got his first royalty check, he asked Ellie to marry him.

She gently but firmly refused. She also refused after books three, four and five-all bestsellers.

Today, as he finished the chapter he was working on, he wondered if she would ever tell him why. Ellie could be very obstinate, he knew. If she didn’t want to give him a straight answer, she would make up something so bizarre and absurd that he would know to stop asking.

“There was a clause in my parent’s will,” she said once. “If I marry before my fiftieth birthday, the house must be turned into an ostrich farm.”

“And the courts accepted this?” he played along.

“Absolutely. The trust funds would go to ostriches and Mir would be very unhappy with you for putting an end to her healthy allowance.”

“Your parents would have left Miriam a pauper?”

“She thinks she’s a pauper on what I give her now.”

“A pauper? On ten thousand dollars a month?”

“Pin money for Mir. We grew up rich, remember?”

“Hard to forget. Why not give it all to Miriam and live on my money instead?”

She frowned. “I’d be dependent on you.”

“So what? I was dependent on you when I first lived here.”

“For about four months. And you had your own money, you just didn’t need any of it. Do you want to be married for more than four months?”

“Of course.”

“So now you see why we can’t be married at all.”

He didn’t, but he resigned himself to the situation. She probably would never tell him why she wouldn’t marry him, or why she allowed Miriam, who often upset her, to come to the house on a regular basis to plead for more money.

“Where’s Harry?” Miriam demanded when Bill answered the doorbell.

“On the phone,” Bill explained as he took her coat. “He’s placing ads for a cook and housekeeper.”

“Not again,” Miriam said.

“The last ones managed to stay on for about six weeks,” Bill said easily.

Miriam turned her most charming smile upon him. She was gorgeous, Bill thought, not for the first time. A redhead with china blue eyes and a figure that didn’t need all that custom tailoring to show it off. What was she, he wondered? A walking ice sculpture, perhaps? But he discarded that image. After all, sooner or later, ice melted.

“I don’t know why you stay with her, Bill,” Miriam purred, misreading his attention.

Bill heard a door open in a hallway above them.

“If you’re here for a favor,” he said in a low voice, “you’re not being very kind to your benefactor.”

Miriam stood frowning, waiting until she heard the door close again. Still, she whispered when she said, “Even you must admit that she drives the entire household to distraction.”

“Yes,” he said, thinking back to the night he met Ellie. “But distraction isn’t always such a bad place to go.”

“She’s crazy,” Miriam said scornfully. “And a liar!”

“She’s neither. What brings you by this afternoon?” They were halfway up the stairs now, and although Bill thought Ellie was probably past being injured by Miriam’s remarks, he didn’t know how much longer his own patience would last.

Miriam pointed one perfectly-shaped red fingernail at him. “How can you say she’s not a liar? She once told you Harry was her father.”

“She knew I wouldn’t believe it. She never tells me any lie she thinks I might believe. Come on, she’s waiting.”

Bill had heard Ellie cross into one of the upstairs staging rooms. This meant, he knew, that she had staged some clues for him, placed objects about the room intended to remind him of specific Hitchcock movies. It was an extension of the old game they played, and one of the reasons that housekeepers didn’t last long. The last one left after finding a ma

Ellie, knowing Miriam hated the game, always had one ready when her sister came to visit.

Wearing a pair of jeans with holes in the knees, Ellie was sitting cross-legged on top of large mahogany table, passing a needle and thread through colored miniature marshmallows to make a necklace. She smiled as she moved the needle through a green marshmallow.

“How much this time?” she asked without looking up.

“Ellie, darling! So good to see you.”

Ellie glanced at Bill. “Too many Bette Davis movies.” She chose a pink marshmallow next.

“What on earth are you doing? And why are you wearing those horrid clothes?”

“Shhh!” Ellie said, now reaching for a yellow marshmallow.

Bill was looking around the room. As usual in a game, there were many oddball objects and antiques in the room. The trick was find the clues among the objects. “How many all together?”

“Three,” Ellie answered.

“Oh! This stupid game. I might have known,” Miriam grumbled.

He saw the toy windmill first.

“Foreign Correspondent,” he said.

“One down, two to go,” Ellie laughed. “How much money this time, Mir?”

“I didn’t come here to ask for money,” Miriam said, sitting down.

Bill looked over at her in surprise, then went back to the game.

Searching through the bric-a-brac that covered a low set of shelves, he soon found the next clue: three small plaster of Paris sculptures of hands and wrists. A man’s hand and a woman’s hand were handcuffed together; another male hand, missing the part of its little finger, stood next to the handcuffed set. “The Thirty-Nine Steps.”

“Bravo, Bill. Of course you came here for money, Mir. You always do.”

“Not this time.”

“What then?” Ellie asked, watching as Bill picked up a music box from a small dressing table.

“I want to move back home.”

Ellie stopped stringing marshmallows. Bill set the music box down.

Don’t give in, Ellie, he prayed silently.

“No,” Ellie said, and went back to work on her necklace. Bill’s sigh of relief was audible.

“Ellie, please. I’m your sister.”

“I’ll buy you a place to live.”

“I want to live here.”

“Why?”

“It’s in the will. I can live here if I want to.”

Ellie looked up. “We had an agreement.”

Miriam glanced nervously toward Bill, then said, “It’s my home, too, you know. You’ve allowed a perfect stranger to live here. Well, I don’t deserve any less.”

“Why do you want to come back, Mir? You haven’t lived here in years.”

“I think it’s time we grew closer as sisters, that’s all.”

Ellie only laughed at that. Bill was heartened by the laughter. Ellie was protective of Miriam, held a soft spot for her despite her abuses. But if that sister plea didn’t get through to her, maybe there was a chance…

“Look, you’ve been living up here in grand style,” Miriam said petulantly, “and I just want to enjoy a bit of it myself.”

Bill saw Ellie’s mood shifting, saw her glancing over at him. He felt awkwardness pulling ahead of his curiosity by a nose. He decided to leave this discussion to the sisters. It was Ellie’s house, after all. She could do as she liked. He started to edge out of the room, but Ellie said, “This concerns you, too, Bill. Don’t leave.”

He wasn’t put off by what others might have taken to be a commanding tone. In seven years, he had never heard the word “please” come out of her mouth. Although he thought of few things as certain when it came to Ellie, one certainty was that she rarely asked anything of others. Knowing this, he treated any request as if there were an implied “please.”