Case of the Footloose Doll (2 page)

Fern Driscoll turned and looked at her, her eyebrows raised in silent interrogation.

Mildred Crest, speeding up after the boulevard stop, at first said nothing, then feeling she might be taking undue advantage of the other’s misery, turned to her abruptly.

“That’s the main north—and—south road from San Diego to San Bernardino, then to Bishop and Reno. Want to get out?” 

Fern Driscoll shook her head. “It’s night. I’d prefer to go with you wherever you’re going. If I do have to get out, I’d prefer to wait at a gasoline station where I can size up the people.”

“I’ve told you I’m not going anywhere,” Mildred said.

“That’s good enough for me,” Fern said.

“I live back there,” Mildred ventures, “at Oceanside. I may decide to go back.”

“Oceanside? Where’s that?” Fern asked.

“On the coast road.”

Fern said, “I’m a stranger in these parts. I arrived in San Diego late this afternoon, left within an hour. A nice—looking young man turned out to be a wolf. I was glad to get out of his car. I walked a mile before I came to the gasoline station.”

“You live in California?”

“No.”

“In the West?”

“No. I’m just a foot-loose doll.”

Silence settled between them. Not a relaxed silence of companionship and understanding, but a tense, uneasy silence.

Abruptly the young woman said bitterly, “I’ve made a mess of my life.”

“Who hasn’t?” Mildred commented.

Fern Driscoll shook her head. “You’re just down in the dumps temporarily. You’ve had a jolt. You haven’t burned your bridges. I’ve burned my bridges.”

“I’d like to trade places with you,” Mildred said.

“Sight unseen?” the other asked.

Mildred nodded. Again there was a period of silence, then the other said, “Don’t tempt me. It couldn’t be done, but—well, it’s an idea.” They came to Pala. 

“Where does that road go?” Fern asked. 

“Palomar Mountain,” Mildred said. “That’s where the big, two-hundred-inch telescope is.”

She turned to the left.

“And this?” the hitchhiker asked.

“I don’t know for certain,” Mildred confessed. “I think it winds around and comes back to Highway 395.”

Mildred gave her attention to piloting the car.

The road ran level for a while, then started climbing, and finally became a winding mountain grade.

On a sharp curve the lights penciled across the shoulder of the road and then were blotted out by the black void of a deep canyon.

Mildred heard the other girl’s voice saying, “Wouldn’t it be fine just to plunge into that blackness? Then nothing could ever catch up with us. We’d leave it all behind. Look, Mildred, are you game to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Drive off the road?”

“Heavens, no!” Mildred said. “You might be maimed, crippled for life. That wouldn’t solve anything. That wouldn’t—”

Mildred suddenly felt Fern Driscoll lunge against her. Strong hands grappled with the wheel and gave it a twist. Mildred was caught by surprise. She threw her weight against the wheel, fighting to bring the car back onto the road.

Fern Driscoll gave a shrill, hysterical laugh, braced herself and ripped the wheel from Mildred’s grasp.

In that last brief second, when the car seemed to hesitate, Mildred looked out into a terrifying black abyss. Then she felt the front of the car dip sharply downward. Her ears heard a grinding crash of steel on rocks, then she felt herself lifted into the air, felt the car turning over. Above all she could hear that wild, demoniacal laughter, the shrill cacophony of insane hysteria.

The car hit solidly, throwing Mildred against the steering wheel. Then the car rolled on in a crazy zigzag pattern. For a moment it was right side up. Then it keeled over sharply. Mildred heard a thud, like the sound of a ripe melon being smashed with an ax, then the scraping of metal. With a jolt the car came to a stop.

Mildred had a subconscious realization of groping for the ignition switch and then turning the headlights off, of lying there in the darkness, listening to the gurgle of water from the radiator, the trickling of oil from the crankcase. Then there was a permeating odor; the smell of raw gasoline seeping into the car.

Mildred tried the door. The car was all but upside down, the door was hopelessly jammed. But the window on her side had been lowered. By squirming and twisting she was finally able to extricate herself. The gurgling noises ceased. The quiet of the night descended around them. Overhead the stars were steady.

“Fern,” Mildred said. “Fern, are you all right?” There was no answer.

Mildred leaned over and looked down into the car. It was dark and she could not see much.

She felt for her purse and finally found it. There was a book of matches in the purse.

She scraped a match into flame.

She looked, and knew panic and nausea.

The hitchhiker had evidently got the door partially open and had been about halfway out when the car struck that last huge rock.

Mildred shook out the match, threw it away from her, leaned against the side of the wrecked car, and felt as though the last of her strength had drained out of her.

A car went by on the road high above them. Mildred screamed for help and her voice was swallowed up in the silent darkness as a speck of ink is absorbed by blotting paper.

The car whined onward, never pausing for so much as a moment in its snarling progress up the hill.

With a desperate effort Mildred pulled herself together and took stock of the situation. She had been badly shaken. There were one or two very sore places, but no bones were broken. She could feel her heart pounding, but her mind was beginning to function clearly.

She would have to scramble back up to the road, and stop some motorist. There would be authorities to notify.

She looked down at the dark shape of the girl and for a moment found herself wishing that the situation could have been reversed and that—The idea struck Mildred with the force of a blow.

After all, why not?

Mildred could take Fern Driscoll’s purse. There would be some identification in it. She could leave her own purse. The thing that had once been the other girl’s head would now furnish no means of identification.

Of course, Mildred thought calmly and coolly, there was the question of fingerprints. Would anyone have those, or would they take the prints of a corpse?

What if they did?

Mildred could try it. If it appeared the body was taken for that of Mildred Crest, Mildred could simply keep quiet. Otherwise she could come forward and state that she had found herself wandering around in a dazed condition, not knowing who she was. She knew that such things happened—retrograde amnesia, they called it.

She leaned down in the wreck, looking for Fern’s purse. She found it and considered the problem of transferring what money there was in her own purse. If they found her purse without money—Well, why not? It was money for which she had worked hard. She certainly needed all the money she could get . . . Swiftly she decided to take all the folding money from her purse.

Calmly competent now, her nausea overcome, Mildred made the change.

Again she struck a match as she leaned over to drop her purse by the steering post. The match flared up and burned her fingers. She dropped it, jerking back her hand with an exclamation of pain.

For the tenth part of a second there was a little flame, then a sudden flare of oil brilliance. As the gasoline ignited, Mildred had only time to jump back in horror before the rear end of the car became a blazing inferno.

Mildred clutched Fern Driscoll’s purse, scrambled down the canyon out of the way of the flames. She heard tires scream on the road above as a speeding car skidded to a stop.

Mildred scrambled down the last few feet of the steep embankment, came to a rock—strewn stream bed, followed that blindly downhill, the fire lighting her way so she could see where she was going and avoid the branches which would have torn her clothes.

What followed was a nightmare compounded of many nightmares.

There was the difficult terrain to be negotiated. As she put distance between herself and the wreck, the light from the fire was abruptly shut off by a jutting promontory. Finally she was stumbling along in darkness.

When she heard the sudden whir of a rattlesnake, it was impossible to place the noise in the darkness. Mildred knew it was only a few feet away, and the whirring was the dry, ominous rustle of death.

Mildred jumped wildly into the darkness, stumbled over a rock, fell face down in a bush, then extricated herself in the haste of blind panic and ran.After a while, she heard sirens, saw a red glow indicating that the fire of the car had set off a brush fire. She heard fire—fighting apparatus, then finally found a place where she could scramble up to the road.

There were several cars standing there above the wreck. A man with a badge and flashlight was blocking all traffic. People were milling around in confusion.

Mildred picked a kindly—looking old couple, hastily straightened her clothes and smoothed her hair, and went up to them. “May I ride with you?” she asked. “I got out to look at the fire and my family turned back toward Pala. If I can only get to a phone—”

“Oh, but they’ll miss you and come back,” the woman said.

“I’m afraid not,” Mildred observed, finding that her mind had powers of extemporaneous deceit which she hadn’t realized. “You see, I was asleep in the back seat all covered up with a blanket and my head on a pillow. They stopped the car and went up to look. I woke up, got out and they must have returned and passed me in the darkness. They think I’m still asleep on the back seat and won’t know the difference until they get home.”

“Where’s home?” the woman asked.

“San Diego.”

“Well, we’re going the other way, to Riverside. Perhaps you’d better notify—”

“Oh, that will be quite all right,” Mildred said. “I’ll go to Riverside with you and then I can phone my folks. If they aren’t home yet, I’ll telephone the neighbor. I have friends in Riverside.” So Mildred had gone to Riverside. Then a bus had taken her into Los Angeles. She registered at a downtown hotel as F. Driscoll.

It was late that night when Mildred surveyed the contents of Fern Driscoll’s oversized purse. It was then that she began to appreciate her predicament.

In a neat, compact bundle with heavy elastic bands she found forty, crisp, new hundred—dollar bills. In addition, there were some two hundred dollars in fives, tens and twenties. There was a driver’s license giving Fern Driscoll’s residence as Lansing, Michigan. There was a social security card, lipstick, a handkerchief, a compact, and there was a bundle of letters tightly tied up with waxed thread.

Mildred hesitated a moment, then untied the thread, looked through some of the letters. They were love letters signed by the name “Forrie.” They were most affectionate, but they also indicated a family conflict, a father who was putting pressure to bear on his son to make him “come to his senses.”

The letters only emphasized Mildred’s own heartache. She did little more than skim through them, then tied them again into a compact bundle.

Mildred thought back to the dark eyes smoldering with emotion, the slightly sullen obstinacy of the beautiful features, the impulsive manner in which Fern had acted. Mildred realized that the hitchhiker could have done almost anything on sudden impulse. She was the type to act in haste, to repent, if at all, at leisure. On hysterical impulse, the girl had sent the car plunging down the canyon. Then at the last moment had regretted her impulse to destroy herself and had tried to escape.

However, there was no use trying to recall the past. Mildred found herself face to face with reality. Didn’t the death of Fern Driscoll, tragic as it had been, give her the longed—for chance of escape from all that lay behind her at Oceanside? Mildred sat there thinking for a long time before she finally went to bed.

So Mildred Crest became Fern Driscoll. She changed the color of her hair, and adopted dark glasses.

Mildred knew that with her secretarial ability she could land jobs without the slightest difficulty. It would, of course, be necessary to work out a story that would account for a lack of references. But Mildred felt certain that once she was given a test she would have little difficulty in finding work, references or no references.

The money in the purse bothered her. There was too much of it. She decided to hold this money as a sort of trust until she found out more about the girl whose identity she was borrowing.

The newspaper stories were exactly what Mildred had expected. The Oceanside paper carried quite a story. Mildred Crest, popular secretary of a local manufacturer, had been instantly killed in an automobile accident.

In some way the driver had lost control, the car had gone over the grade on the Pala highway. The unfortunate girl had apparently been half—in and half—out of a right—hand automobile door when it struck against a huge rock near the bottom of the canyon. Afterward, the car had caught fire and the body had been partially burned before prompt action on the part of a passing motorist, who had a fire extinguisher in his car, had put out the blaze. The flames had started a brush fire which had not been extinguished until some two hours later.

Mildred studied the newspaper accounts and decided she was safe.

Within twenty—four hours she had a job with the Consolidated Sales and Distribution Company under the name of Fern Driscoll, and within forty-eight hours felt herself well established.

Then almost immediately came the crushing blow.

Authorities were not “entirely satisfied.” There had been a coroner’s inquest. While much of the car had been consumed by fire, by a strange freak Mildred Crest’s purse had not been consumed. The contents were quite recognizable. There were no bills in the purse, only change.

Authorities, moreover, found tracks indicating that someone had left the car after the wreck. Examination showed that the headlight and ignition switches had been turned off. Police felt it was quite possible that someone had crawled out of the window of the door on the driver’s side of the car. There was to be a post-mortem examination of the burned body.