The Doomsters by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online

Carl was a big wheel in those days. He barely knew I existed. I kept hoping, though.” She paused, and added softly: “I’m still hoping.”
    I stopped for a red light, and turned right onto the highway which paralleled the waterfront. Gas fumes mixed with the odors of fish and underwater oil wells. To my left, beyond a row of motels and seafood restaurants, the sea lay low and flat and solid like blue tiling, swept clean and polished. Some white triangular sails stood upright on it.
    We passed a small-boat harbor, gleaming white on blue, and a long pier draped with fishermen. Everything was as pretty as a postcard. The trouble with you, I said to myself: you’re always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. Written in invisible ink, in blood, in tears, with a black border around them, with postage due, unsigned, or signed with a thumbprint.
    Turning right again at the foot of the main street, we passed through an area of third-rate hotels, bars, pool halls. Stunned by sun and sherry, unemployed field hands and rumdums paraded like zombies on the noon pavements. A Mexican movie house marked the upper limits of the lower depths. Above it were stores and banks and office buildings, sidewalks bright with tourists, or natives who dressed like tourists.
    The residential belt had widened since I’d been in Purissima last, and it was still spreading. New streets and housing tracts were climbing the coastal ridge and pushing up the canyons. The main street became a country blacktop which wound up over the ridge. On its far side a valley opened, broad and floored with rich irrigation green. A dozen miles across it, the green made inlets between the foothills and lapped at the bases of the mountains.
    The girl beside me stirred. “You can see the house from here. It’s off the road to the right, in the middle of the valley.”
    I made out a sprawling tile-roofed building floating low like a heavy red raft in the ridged green. As we went downhill, the house sank out of sight.
    “I used to live in that house,” Mildred said. “I promised myself I’d never go back to it. A building can soak up emotions, you know, so that after a while it has the same emotions as the people who live in it. They’re in the cracks in the walls, the smokestains on the ceiling, the smells in the kitchen.”
    I suspected that she was dramatizing a little: there was some of her mother in her after all: but I kept still, hoping she’d go on talking.
    “Greed and hate and snobbery,” she said. “Everyone who lived in that house became greedy and hateful and snobbish. Except Carl. It’s no wonder he couldn’t take it.He’s so completely different from the others.” She turned toward me, the leather creaking under her. “I know what you’re thinking—that Carl is crazy, or he was, and I’m twisting the facts around to suit myself. I’m not, though. Carl is good. It’s often the very best people who crack up. And when he cracked, it was family pressure that did it to him.”
    “I gathered that, from what he said to me.”
    “Did he tell you about Jerry—constantly taunting him, trying to make him mad, then running to his father with tales of the trouble Carl made?”
    “Why did he do that?”
    “Greed,” she said. “The well-known Hallman greed. Jerry wanted control of the ranch. Carl was due to inherit half of it. Jerry did everything he could to ruin Carl with his father, and Zinnie did, too. They were the ones who were really responsible for that last big quarrel, before the Senator died. Did Carl tell you about that?”
    “Not very much.”
    “Well, Jerry and Zinnie started it. They got Carl talking about the Japanese, how much the family owed them for their land—I admit that Carl was hipped on the subject, but Jerry encouraged him to go on and on until he was really raving. I tried to stop it, but nobody listened to me. When Carl was completely wound up, Jerry went to the Senator and asked him to