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  Cirak’s Daughter

  Charlotte MacLeod

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For Louise

  WHO’S WHO IN FILMS

  CIRAK (Ši’răk) JASON PETER

  B. Rakovnik, Czechoslovakia, Feb. 11, 1919. Only son of Vanos & Anna Cirak. Fled to U.S. to escape Nazi persecution. Rose to sudden fame through award-winning documentary, The Refugees, filmed with borrowed equipment and financed by working at odd jobs. Subsequent films included Soldier Boy (1948), Backhand (1952), Even So (1958), Crooked Mile (1965). None achieved success of earliest work. M. Marion Estes Plummer, member of a prominent eastern family, June 1, 1959. One dau. Jennifer Maria, b. Oct. 29, 1961. Present residence unknown.

  1

  “You’d better start watching your diet. I see trouble with the gall bladder.”

  The woman in the too-tight, too-frilly red satin dress looked at her new neighbor with something close to fear on her pudgy, pasty face. “I’m due to go in for gall bladder surgery a week from Monday,” she gasped.

  Jenny Cirak gave the woman an I-told-you-so nod and reached for the hand somebody else was eagerly stretching out to her. Gall bladder problems would always be a safe prediction for overweight, middle-aged blondes who’d spent the evening stuffing themselves with chocolates and salted nuts. Jenny’d learned a lot more than she cared to know about women’s ailments from her always-complaining female relatives and their hypochondriac friends.

  She should have known better than to start this palm-reading act. She’d never done it before, except to amuse the kids at school and once for a church bazaar. She wouldn’t have thought of it now if she hadn’t been faced with a roomful of strangers all older than she, all wanting to ask personal questions because a newcomer to Meldrum was a big event.

  Actually, Jenny hadn’t reckoned on being the star attraction when she’d accepted Sue Giles’s invitation to a neighborhood get-together. Even saying yes to Sue had taken some courage. It had seemed perfectly obvious then that she’d never have been asked if the Gileses had realized she wasn’t Miss Jennifer Plummer, sophisticate, but Jenny Cirak, nineteen and scared stiff.

  It was because she believed that, that she was trying to look thirtyish, which wasn’t easy for someone who stood exactly five feet tall and weighed a hundred and two pounds if she ate enough jelly doughnuts. She was nervous about her disguise tonight. The sallow makeup and the elaborately curled black wig worked, but the slinky purple cocktail dress didn’t. It wasn’t glamorous and sexy as she’d thought when she bought it, just a typical teenager’s mistake. She might manage better if she didn’t try so hard.

  In fact, the whole masquerade wasn’t turning out as she’d hoped. Back home, battling for her right to come, she’d thought she was embarking on a great adventure. So far, it had been one long anxiety attack.

  The fight with her relatives had been mostly force of habit. Ever since Jenny could remember, whenever she’d tried to make a plan for herself, she’d had to defend it tooth and nail—with Aunt Martha scolding, Uncle Fred bellowing, her mother wringing her hands and wailing that she couldn’t cope, as if anybody needed to be told. Usually Jenny had been forced to back down, but this time she’d known in advance that she couldn’t lose. Jenny didn’t have to take anything from anybody, now that she’d inherited Jason Cirak’s fortune.

  How odd it had felt to be suddenly an heiress; she, Jenny Plummer Cirak, who’d practically crawled on her knees to Uncle Fred for school lunch money. How odd to own an entire house, although a very small one, when she’d had to share her mother’s bedroom at Uncle Fred’s. How utterly incredible that her wealth had come from the father who’d dumped his wife and child on his in-laws when Jenny was only two years old and never come back to claim them.

  Strangest yet was the fact that Jason Cirak, bohemian, cosmopolite, and famous motion picture director, should have met his end in Meldrum. Whatever had he been doing in this sleepy corner of Rhode Island, tiniest of all the fifty states?

  Granted, Cirak was a has-been. The documentary film that had rocketed him to fame years before Jenny was born didn’t even get shown on late-late television any more, and few could recall a single title of his subsequent pictures.

  The money he’d made, and there had been a lot of it, had been flung high, wide, and handsome across three continents. At least the Plummers had assumed Jason must be throwing his wealth around. He’d never spared any for the wife and child he’d so carelessly acquired and so soon discarded on his frenetic journey through life. He’d known the Plummers were rich and respectable, so Marion and the baby would not starve; and he’d taken advantage of that fact just as he appeared to have taken advantage of everything and everybody he’d ever run across.

  After his last box-office disaster, Cirak had slid out of sight. For years the family hadn’t known whether he was dead, in jail, or sponging on some new sucker. Consequently, the lawyer’s letter had come as a terrible shock.

  “Where did the money come from?” Uncle Fred had roared. “That’s what I want to know.”

  That was what all the Plummers wanted to know. Either Jason had been holding out on Marion all those years, while her brother thought he was too broke to sue for nonsupport, or else he’d been up to something.

  If so, what? Had he involved the family in a crooked deal by wishing off his ill-gotten gains on Jenny? And why Jenny? Why not Marion, who was still his lawfully wedded and never divorced wife? Why not Fred with Martha, who’d raised his brat for him?

  Jenny had endured the ranting and raving for five days before it dawned on her that she didn’t have to stand it any more. Then she’d gone, all on her own without telling anybody, to the lawyer’s office. When she came back, she had a brand-new checkbook in her purse and a compact car on order. That was the boldest thing she’d ever done in her life. Naturally, Uncle Fred had hit the ceiling when he found out.

  “Are you out of your mind? You don’t know anything about handling money.”

  Jenny had stuck to her guns. “I know a little more now than I would have if I’d depended on you to teach me. I’m going to Meldrum as soon as I can get my car on the road. I’ll stay in my house there until I find out what my father was doing and where he got the money he left me.”

  “Ridiculous! You can’t go tearing off by yourself like that.”

  “Why not? I passed my driver education and got my license two years ago. I have plenty of cash. Mr. Delorio the lawyer says I’m old enough to do as I please. And if you give me a hard time, I’m to let him know, so you’d better not try to stop me.”

  Uncle Fred wasn’t about to buck a lawyer. He had to content himself with snarling, “That’s the thanks I get,” and stalking off to sulk in his den.

  Her mother had dealt with the situation in her usual way, by bursting into tears. “At least let Aunt Martha go with you,” she’d pleaded. “I’d go myself, but I’m simply not up to it.” Marion never was.

  “No, Mother,” Jenny had insisted. “Aunt Martha doesn’t want to go, and I don’t want her. If I go trooping down there with all my relatives, I’ll never find out anything. I’m better off alone.”

  Surprisingly, Aunt Martha herself had agreed. “Oh, let her go and make a fool of herself if she wants to. We can’t stop her anyway, and I ce
rtainly don’t want her lolling around here playing the fine lady and expecting to be waited on hand and foot.”

  That was a dig at Marion, who cried all the harder and said so.

  “Oh, turn off the waterworks, Marion. Jenny can write and let us know how she’s making out. No sense in running up long-distance phone bills, even if she has money to throw around on a wild goose chase.”

  Jenny had dropped her mother a note last night, saying that she’d gotten here safely, that the house was reasonably comfortable, that Meldrum seemed like a pretty quiet little place, and that there was a Congregational Church on the next corner. These facts ought to satisfy the Plummers that she wasn’t trapped in some den of vice, not that they were really much concerned.

  She knew why Aunt Martha had backed her up about coming here alone. Aunt Martha had always resented Jenny’s presence in the house and would have grabbed almost any excuse to get rid of her. On the other hand, Aunt Martha had also wanted to keep on Jenny’s good side in case the inheritance turned out to be legitimate. She and Uncle Fred respected money, even if it had come from Jason Cirak, and even if they’d had a hard time getting Mr. Delorio and the other lawyers to admit it had.

  The Plummers didn’t seem to be greatly interested in the circumstances that puzzled Jenny most: that Jason Cirak had been living in Meldrum under the name James Cox, and that he’d made his bequest to his daughter through a devious rigmarole of trust funds so that the identities of the donor and the legatee wouldn’t have to be revealed to the general public. Uncle Fred had simply concluded, with a twinge of envy he hadn’t quite managed to hide, that Jason had found a smart way to dodge taxes.

  Whatever the reason for her father’s cloak-and-dagger life and will, Jenny was grateful now for the screen it gave her. She’d never known any James Cox, and she could say so in all sincerity. Anyway, why should she suspect his motive when she was doing her utmost to conceal her own identity for a perfectly innocent reason?

  She wished she could have chosen a different name, but she’d had to remain Jennifer Plummer because it was on the driver’s license she’d no doubt have to show sometime for identification. Should anybody question the Cirak part, she was going to say she’d been divorced and gone back to using her maiden name, though she hoped she’d never have to tell such a barefaced lie.

  As to what she was doing in Meldrum, Jenny had decided to pretend she was an author in search of a quiet place to write. That was only half a lie. Jenny did like to write, and the role should be easy to sustain. Everybody knew authors were odd creatures who lived in strange places and never really did any work, but slopped around in bathrobes drinking quarts of coffee. If anybody came to the door, she could start pecking frantically at her typewriter and pretend she’d been at it for hours. That was no problem. It was the detective work that mightn’t be such a breeze.

  Jenny was finding the going sticky right now. The new hand that had been thrust under her nose was hairy on the back, moist on the palm, overly padded on the mounts, and making playful grabs at her fingers.

  “I’m glad I’m not married to you,” she blurted out because she was too annoyed to be tactful. “Your wife must have a heck of a time keeping her eye on you.”

  Somebody guffawed. “Look out, Greg! She’s got your number. Hey, Jenny, you’re not getting to read my palm. I wouldn’t risk it.”

  “Are you a professional palmist?” somebody else was asking.

  “Oh, no,” Jenny mumbled. “I just do it for fun.”

  Of which she wasn’t having much right now. Little did they know that she seldom even remembered which line was supposed to represent the heart and which the head. She went by her general impressions, the subjects’ reactions to what she told them, and that overdeveloped intuition the Plummers always referred to with nervous loathing as the Cirak streak in her.

  So Grabby-Fingers here was Greg. She ought to be making an effort to remember names and faces. She’d be running into these people at the supermarket and whatnot, no doubt. Snubbing one of them would be a marvelous way to turn the entire pack against her and keep them from telling her what she’d come to find out.

  They’d know her, no fear of that. Catching sight of her reflection in the Gileses’ gilt-edged mirror, Jenny was aghast to see what she’d turned herself into. That mass of fake black hair on her head, combined with the flashy purple dress and the over-lavish makeup, had deepened her ivory complexion to dull gold and her dark brown eyes to coal black. She looked exactly like the sort of woman she’d seen through dingy storefront windows, beckoning from behind signs that read, “Madame Zara. Sees all, tells all.” No wonder they were taking her for a professional fortune-teller. What else were they thinking about her?

  Jenny felt sick to her stomach, but she didn’t dare get up and leave. The damage was already done; might as well stick it out to the bitter end. She stammered a few less inflammatory remarks to Greg, then turned to her next customer.

  At least she wasn’t likely to put her foot in it here. This was a lady’s hand: fragile, thin-skinned, blue-veined, freighted with diamond rings in old-fashioned settings. It could only belong to Mrs. Firbelle, who owned the handsome, pillar-fronted estate to which Jenny’s little remodeled carriage house had once belonged.

  “I’m sure you don’t see much of a future for me, Miss Plummer.” Mrs. Firbelle’s laugh was a silvery tinkle, like her voice. “At my age, a woman has only a past, and I’m afraid mine hasn’t been a particularly exciting one.”

  Jenny traced the lines in the palm with her own index finger. That always helped her to get the feel of the personality, though she couldn’t have explained why.

  “No,” she contradicted. “Your life is far from over.” That was a safe enough guess. Mrs. Firbelle couldn’t be much over sixty-five and obviously took excellent care of herself.

  “You’re in good health except for a touch of arthritis.” The skin was clear and the bumps at the finger joints hardly noticeable.

  “You react strongly to beauty.” That gown she had on was a work of art, at any rate.

  “Your life has been a happy one in many ways,” or should have been, in that lovely home with plenty of money to run it as she pleased.

  “But you have known great sorrow.” Any woman was bound to have suffered some tragedy or other at her age, unless she’d lived under a glass bell all these years.

  “The loss of a loved one.” A slight contraction of the slender fingers told Jenny she was on target. Mrs. Firbelle’s husband had been dead for many years, Sue Giles had told her, so that wouldn’t have been the death she was still mourning. A more recent bereavement, then?

  “I think you’ve had more than one tragedy in your life. Perhaps not too long ago, something happened that hit you harder than you’ve let anyone know.” Diamonds and silver brocade hardly suggested mourning, but the entire hand was rigid now.

  “Mama” interrupted a thinnish brunette in a blue linen shift, “shall I bring you a glass of sherry?”

  “Not just now, Pamela. I’m having my fortune told.” Mrs. Firbelle’s tone made subtle fun of the young palmist. “Well, Miss Plummer, is that all you have to tell me?”

  The barb went in, the Cirak streak came out. “No, it isn’t.”

  Jenny bent closer to the tissue-paper palm. That queer little red mark on the so-called life line couldn’t possibly have any meaning, of course, but she could not prevent herself from speaking.

  “There’s danger around you. I don’t think it’s an accident. I think there’s someone who’s plotting to—oh, I don’t know what it means, but the danger is near you. I can feel it!”

  Whatever had possessed her? Jenny dropped the hand because her own was trembling with fear and shame. Mrs. Firbelle only laughed.

  “The gipsy’s warning. How dramatic. Thank you so much, Miss Plummer. Pamela, I’ll have that sherry now, please.”

  2

  “Why did you try to scare Mrs. Firbelle?”

  A tall redhead she’d hear
d them call Larry was scowling down at Jenny from behind a silly handlebar mustache. She scowled back.

  “I wasn’t trying to scare her. I tell what I see, that’s all.”

  “Sure you do. Can I get you a drink?”

  “No, thanks. I have to go home.” All Jenny wanted now was to get out of there before she made a fool of herself again. “There’s so much to do, getting settled,” she half-apologized, to save face.

  “Hey, Jenny, can’t it wait till tomorrow? You’re not running out on us so early?”

  That was Greg, the man with the sweaty palm. He had it wrapped around her elbow now. Jenny wished he didn’t. Aside from the fact that she hated being pawed, she had a hunch Greg was Pamela’s husband. That would make him Marguerite Firbelle’s son-in-law. Letting him make a pass at her in front of the neighbors would really put the frosting on the cake. Jenny panicked and tried to pull away.

  Surprisingly, Larry came to her rescue. “I got here first, Greg. She hasn’t read my palm yet. How about it, Miss Plummer?”

  Greg shrugged, pasted a good-sport grin to his handsome but jowly face, and melted into the crowd.

  “I’m not reading any more palms tonight,” said Jenny. “Anyway, you don’t really want me to.”

  Larry only shrugged.

  “Then I’ll ask you to excuse me. I must find Mrs. Giles to say good night.”

  “Sue’s in the kitchen laying out a spread she’s spent the past three days getting ready, and she’ll hate you forever if you don’t stay to eat it.”

  “But I’ve been eating ever since I got here,” Jenny protested. “I’ve never seen so much food in my life.”

  “You must find our native customs too quaint for words. What brought you to Meldrum, anyway?”

  “I came here because the people are so charming and friendly,” she snapped. Then she turned her back on him and began talking to one of the plump and curious matrons she’d been trying all evening to dodge.