Letter of intent, p.1
Letter of Intent, page 1
THE WOMAN IN ROOM 218 TOOK THE HARMLESS-LOOKING WHITE ENVELOPE FROM THE BELLBOY AND OPENED IT WITH ONLY MECHANICAL INTEREST. THEN, STUPID WITH SHOCK, SHE READ THE PRINTED, UNSIGNED MESSAGE: “I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS. IF YOU DON’T CALL OFF THE WEDDING, I WILL.”
SURELY, THE WOMAN THOUGHT, SHE COULD IDENTIFY WHO...? AND SHE COULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
BUT WHO WAS THE BRIDE? WHO HAD THREATENED HER? AND WHAT WAS CELIA’S ROLE IN THIS? CELIA, WHO WAS AS SLEEKLY STRIKING AS A LEOPARD—AND AS DANGEROUS. SHE HAD BEEN A HEAVY, DOWDY, INARTICULATE GIRL OF EIGHTEEN WHEN SHE HAD LEFT THE TENEMENT IN A NEW ENGLAND SLUM TO WORK FOR THE RICH, PLEASANT STEVENSONS. IF IT HAD NOT BEEN FOR AN UNFORTUNATE EPISODE WITH THE STEVENSONS’ SON, SHE WOULD NEVER HAVE BECOME OLD MR. TOMLINSON’S HOUSEKEEPER. HERE, BEHIND A MASK OF INNOCENCE, SHE MANEUVERED THE FIRST SHOCKING TRAGEDY THAT WAS TO START HER ON THE PRECARIOUS CLIMB TO A WORLD SHE WAS DETERMINED TO ENTER, A WORLD SHE HAD KNOWN ONLY AS AN OUTSIDER.
LETTER OF INTENT IS A CHILLING PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA ABOUT A WOMAN, DRIVEN BY AMBITION, WHO WOULD USE ANY WEAPON AGAINST HER ADVERSARIES. THE TENSION MOUNTS UNTIL THE ACTION REACHES AN UNEXPECTED SHATTERING CLIMAX.
Copyright © 1971 by Ursula Curtiss
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-396-06356-X
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-145394
THE harmless-looking white envelope with her name and room number printed on it in pencil was delivered by a bellboy at six o’clock on that cold January evening. He was a new and very conscientious bellboy, and volunteered that the envelope had just been discovered at the desk; he didn’t think it could have been there long.
The woman in 218 opened it with only mechanical interest, because the two little flourishes with which her name had been underlined did not, so far, carry either mockery or menace. Face grown stupid with shock as the years fell away, she read the brief printed message: “I’ve been waiting for this. If you don’t call off the wedding, I will.”
There was no signature; her world was to be blown to pieces by a gloved hand. No, she thought, almost crystal with rage. No.
It was a convulsive reaction that made her tear the envelope and the single sheet of paper into small pieces and burn them in the generous bedside ashtray before she flushed them away. Then, automatically, she wiped the smoky glass until it shone again. The very activity, the fact of having sent this dreadful thing into permanent oblivion, helped to slow her racing heart and collect her wits.
A warning implied a grace period. Surely, if she thought hard enough, she could identify who . . . ?
And do something about it. Tonight.
One
MRS. JAMES STEVENSON was a woman of poise and experience, and did not at all dread the breaking-in of a new young maid; if anything, she felt it a challenge. “You’ll be Celia,” she said briskly, welcoming the girl on a dark and dripping winter morning. “Goodness, you’re wet! If you had called half an hour ago Mr. Stevenson could have met you at the station.”
There was no response in the rather square face under the heavily braided pale-blonde hair, although the word “wet” seemed to have registered; the girl began to unbutton her brown coat with uncertain fingers.
“That’s it,” said Mrs. Stevenson encouragingly, making a lightning assessment of the figure that emerged. Tall, big-boned, obviously healthy; probably younger than the eighteen she was purported to be. Her apparent bewilderment must be a language difficulty, compounded by Mrs. Stevenson’s English accent, because there was nothing slow about the dark eyes—indeed, they were making an almost disconcerting assessment in return.
The impression of—was intelligence the proper word?— was quickly borne out. Celia, whose consonant-laden last name Mrs. Stevenson never mastered, was an apt and even anxious pupil. Within a week she had breakfast on the table exactly as the Stevensons liked it, in three weeks she could serve dinner without an air of painful concentration. And, an attribute her employer found rarer than rubies, she did not break things. Her hands were so deft and sure that for the first time in years Mrs. Stevenson relinquished the care of the Coalport china and the good wine glasses.
The weeks became months, and Celia still did not demand extra time off or complain because there was no television set in her room. Mrs. Stevenson might almost have thought her too good to be true if she were not matter-of-factly aware that the working conditions were pleasant; in fact, she never had to seek the offices of employment agencies, as maids who departed because of marital or other family problems always had a relative to volunteer. As an employer, she herself was firm but good-tempered, and took a genuine interest in the well-being of anyone who worked for her. For most of the time, although their married daughter came for an occasional visit with her children, and their son was periodically home from college, the household consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson and a very well-behaved French poodle.
For her part, Celia was more than content. The fact of a bedroom not shared with two younger sisters was a luxury in itself, and for a long time she was amazed that there were never any shouted quarrels, let alone physical abuse, under the Stevenson roof; for the first few days she supposed that her employers were simply not speaking to each other. Far from resenting Mrs. Stevenson’s brisk suggestions as to her appearance, she seized upon them. She did not even mind parting with a good deal of her heavy hair, and she stopped eating potatoes and bread and attacked raw carrots and apples.
Most of all, hardly aware that she did so, she observed. She took meticulous note of Mrs. Stevenson’s smallest behavior—at the telephone, with guests, giving instructions to the weekly cleaning-woman—and when her employers entertained, usually at cocktails, she discovered how the little napkins and the toothpicks from tiny hot sausages were dealt with. It took her months to sort out the baffling occasions upon which even women rose to their feet, but she gathered quickly that to linger on a doorstep, chatting instead of taking a crisp departure, was one of the blacker social sins.
When young Hugh Stevenson came home from college for the summer, Celia’s education grew much wider. Then the house was full of people hardly older than she, all of whom seemed to possess sports cars. The boys she dismissed, even though she caught an occasional and interested raised eyebrow between them; it was on the girls that she trained her attention. Like a naturalist confronted with a new species, she studied the way they walked and sat and maneuvered themselves into coats held for them; their make-up, or largely lack of it that year; their clothes.
It was the clothes that sent up the first faint smoke-signal.
As the product of a large and poor family, Celia had learned, perforce, how to make primitive alterations on handed-down garments. When she had been with the Stevensons for a year and a half, she asked Mrs. Stevenson to teach her to sew. There was a machine, seldom used, in the daughter’s bedroom, and Mrs. Stevenson was pleased at this evidence of enterprise. Celia took well to instruction—her neat-handedness had never been more to the fore—and made first a pillow slip, then a cotton shift from a pattern, then, recklessly, a dress from a length of beautiful avocado-gold brocade. It was almost as simple in’ line as the shift, and the seams were dubious, but in it Celia was someone else. She was One of Those Girls.
She never went home on her day off now, but sent a terse few dollars a week instead. Home was an ugly husk she had shed, a place full of noise and hungrily outstretched hands. In the town she was not a maid but a girl lunching in a restaurant while she practiced Mrs. Stevenson’s manners, a languid afternoon shopper who rarely bought anything but basked in the attention of salespeople. Occasionally, because it seemed an improving thing to do, she went and sat in a small, green, tree-shadowed park, looking as though she were enjoying nature, before she returned to the Stevensons’, fixed herself a small salad in the kitchen, and went upstairs to her room.
On a day in late August, newly slim in her avocado dress, she turned out of the park and was seized about the waist from behind. A male voice deep with laughter said, “Aha! Going to stand me up, were you?” and a kiss landed on the side of her throat before she whirled and stared at the aghast and reddening face of Hugh Stevenson.
“Celia. I’m so sorry, I thought you were . . . It must be the dress. I was meeting someone here, and I could have sworn . . . Did I scare you to death?”
They had an audience: a gleeful child, a zestfully attentive old man, a sympathetically smiling couple with a cocker spaniel on a leash. Celia said primly that it was quite all right and walked away, her throat still blazing from that unexpected contact.
But it was not all right. The smiling couple obviously knew the Stevensons. Celia was dismayed but not altogether surprised when, a calculated week later, Mrs. Stevenson said with brisk pleasantness, ‘I’ll hate to lose you, Celia, but a friend of mine is ill and in need of someone competent to help out . . .”
Two
CELIA did not like the Strykers at all. The wife was a vain and silly hypochondriac who felt that back rubs were the routine duty of a maid; the husband, a florid fifty, was given to standing too close and remaining lodged in doorways so that it was necessary to press past him.
Although their menage was on the surface more opulent than the Stevensons’—there was an unfriendly cook—it was full of little meannesses. There was margarine instead of butter for the servants, and a narrow eye was kept on Mr. Strykers imported marmalade. As Mrs. Stryker lived in fear that her handsome rugs would fade, heavy draperies were drawn at the offending hours of the morning and afternoon, plunging the house into a funereal gloom.
Nor was all marital harmony. The Strykers, perhaps because of his wandering eye and her imaginary illnesses, kept up a constant low-level bickering which was far more wearing than an occasional explosive scene. Celia discovered that she was the fourth new maid in less than a year.
Almost any situation could be turned to advantage, and she made up her mind at once to become indispensable to this querulous pair. She frequently told Mrs. Stryker that she looked tired, at which the invalid would snatch up a mirror and regard herself with morose satisfaction; and on one occasion in the pantry, when Mr. Stryker’s hand ventured too close, she fixed him with a long stare of such grimness that the incident was not repeated. At the end of six months, when she had them both lulled into a sense of security, she boldly demanded, and got, a raise.
She had been at the Strykers’ a year when something happened which gave a subtle shape to the future: one of the women guests, a Mrs. Caswell, slipped out to the kitchen after dinner and to the accompaniment of nervous backward glances, offered to better whatever the salary was here. Celia said decorously that she was satisfied with her present situation—which she was, with her employers more or less in the palm of her hand—but something she did not recognize as a feeling of power filled her. Before she went to bed, she took a long appraising look at herself.
The rather heavy girl with faltering English who had arrived at Mrs. Stevenson’s kitchen door in a soggy and shapeless coat was gone. Only her shoulders remained broad: hard work, plus an avoidance of starches, had trimmed her waist and hips and legs. In her now-fluent speech, the brand-new words she had learned from Mrs. Stevenson retained their original crisp English accent; she knew that this was piquant, because she had heard it remarked upon, and preserved it with care.
She would never be pretty—her bones were too big for that—but her pale hair had grown back quite a bit from its scissoring, and Mrs. Stryker had not the temerity to demand that she have it cut. If she were to wear it in a chignon, or a French twist . . . She turned her face this way and that before the mirror, gazing slantingly at herself out of the dark eyes that were set a little too flush, giving them a peculiarly liquid look.
She remembered Hugh Stevenson’s mistake, and for the first time it became translated into something of significance.
Celia did not regret having refused Mrs. Caswell, but she was not quite the same after that. She had never before been much interested in the actual preparation of food; now she watched with care, and presently mastered, the creation of the baked clams and delicate cheese puffs for which the Strykers’ cook was fabled. She listened with sharpened awareness to the kitchen consultations before parties: Mrs. Stryker had the mysterious knack of providing an amplitude with no tired, and tiresome, slices and spoonfuls to be resurrected and disguised with considerable time and labor the next day. It was possibly her only virtue.
Celia no longer squandered her afternoons off by pretending to shop, but spent time in the library poring over books on etiquette, gourmet cooking, wines. She had learned at the Stevensons’ that there were occasions for red wine and white, but as this was not her decision she had never bothered to differentiate. Now she did, and committed the shapes of the various glasses to memory.
Perhaps her heightened consciousness of herself as a person rather than a maid played a part in what happened soon after she had received a second raise almost without effort; the Strykers, in their bemusement at having a servant who appeared to be permanent, were subservient themselves. At any rate, on a weekend when there were house guests and Celia was straightening one of the bedrooms, its occupant, a black-haired young woman, entered without warning, strolled to a window, and lit a cigarette in an unhurried way.
“I’ll come back, ma’am,” said Celia, preparing to withdraw, but the girl said easily, “Oh, no, that’s all right, I just want to get a scarf.”
She fished a glowing square of silk from a suitcase, but she didn’t go. She said in a conversational tone, “Have you been here long, Celia?”
For a moment Celia thought she meant here in this room, but then she realized that the scarf was an excuse and the clear, odd-colored gaze openly appraising. “About a year and a half, ma’am.”
“That’s a record,” said the girl, smiling. “Don’t worry, I’m a relative of Mrs. Stryker’s—by marriage anyway. What I’m getting at is that you seem so very . . . competent that I wonder if you’ve ever considered a somewhat different kind of job?”
Celia kept her lashes down over a flare of excitement. “That would depend on the circumstances,” she said carefully. “I know this house very well, ma’am, and I think Mrs. Stryker is satisfied with my work.”
“She is, very, but it seems to me that you’re wasting your abilities here. What I had in mind,” said the girl bluntly, “is a very old uncle of mine who lives alone and needs someone to manage his house in other ways than meals and so on.” She gestured with the hand that held the cigarette. “Someone to keep pests away—the doctor doesn’t want him tired—and provide dinner now and then for a few old friends, and remind him to take his medicine. Things like that. There’d be only light cleaning involved, a woman comes in twice a week. I ought to warn you that he’s rather difficult—well, he’s eighty-odd—but the pay is quite good and a lot of your time would be your own.”
There was a catch somewhere, thought Celia shrewdly. Plums like this did not fall into the hands of maids with only three years’ experience. The girl, misinterpreting her silence, said hastily, “He’s not an invalid, if that’s what you’re worried about, and in any case his doctor lives quite close by.”
“Here in Connecticut?”
“No, in New Jersey. Oh, I see, your family are here,” said the girl a little doubtfully, and Celia nodded. She had not seen her family for two years, but the mere fact of their existence might make a bargaining point if matters should ever come to that. “Well . . . think it over, anyway, and let me know. An interview couldn’t do any harm,” said the girl in a startlingly exact echo of Celia’s own thoughts.
A week later, on her day off, Celia presented herself at the tall narrow front of 4 Stedman Circle in Cherryville, New Jersey.
She had dressed with care for what she knew might be a turning point in her life. She wore a simple white blouse with an old but still-good gray suit which Mrs. Stevenson had given her; it made her look older, and the wide sweep of her shoulders saved it from complete dowdiness. Black calf pumps; black handbag that looked like calf but wasn’t. On the train, her gloved hands lay quietly in her lap although her heart was beating as it had the first time she had served eight people at dinner.
She had decided, with the New Jersey flats streaming past the window, that the old man was—what did they call it? Senile?—or semibedridden, in spite of what the girl had said, or downright crazy. It was Celia’s view that elderly people with money went crazy more readily than people without—or perhaps could afford to stay out of padded cells longer. There was certainly something very odd about the whole thing, and it was entirely possible that Hester Cannon, the black-haired niece, would not even be there as arranged to make introductions.
But in the meantime Celia was traveling farther than she ever had in her life, and she was aware that her fellow passengers would have been surprised to learn that she was a maid inspecting a new job on her day off. The knowledge gave her a feeling of standing on the edge of some enormous discovery; it was like a vast extension of Hugh Stevenson’s blundering kiss.
. . . And here was 4 Stedman Circle, resembling a house from which the other half had been lopped away. Railed steps going up, primly potted shrubs on either side of the door—and then, in response to her finger on the bell, Mrs. Cannon.
“Celia. I’m glad you could come.” Voice a little crisper, a little less cordial than in the bedroom at the Strykers’: Celia had been expecting this, and the swift up-and-down inspection, and was not taken aback. “Come in, won’t you, and meet my uncle, Mr. Tomlinson.”
It was a very old-fashioned house, conveying an instant impression of camphor-scented velvet; there was even a bay window with ferns and rubber plants. The man who sat in a wing chair with its back to the light, and who rose courteously to greet Celia, was equally old-fashioned: pink and silver-haired and fragile-looking, complete with vest and starched collar.
