Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

No sooner had Sybil Blake escaped from the man who called himself Starr, running up Buena Vista Boulevard to Santa Clara, up Santa Clara to Meridian, and so to home, than she began to consider that Mr. Starr’s offer was, if preposterous, very tempting. She had never modeled of course, but, in art class at the high school, some of her classmates had modeled, fully clothed, just sitting or standing about in ordinary poses, and she and others had sketched them, or tried to — it was really not so easy as it might seem, sketching the lineaments of the human figure; it was still more difficult, sketching an individual’s face. But modeling, in itself, was effortless, once you overcame the embarrassment of being stared at. It was, you might argue, a morally neutral activity.

What had Mr. Starr said — Only here, in the park. In full daylight.

I’m true to my word!

And Sybil needed money, for she was saving for college; she was hoping too to attend a summer music institute at U.C. Santa Barbara. (She was a voice student, and she’d been encouraged by her choir director at the high school to get good professional training.) Her Aunt Lora Dell Blake, with whom she lived, and had lived since the age of two years eight months, was willing to pay her way — was determined to pay her way — but Sybil felt uneasy about accepting money from Aunt Lora, who worked as a physical therapist at a medical facility in Glencoe, and whose salary, at the top of the pay structure available to her as a state employee, was still modest by California standards. Sybil reasoned that her Aunt Lora Dell could not be expected to support her forever.

A long time ago, Sybil had lost her parents, both of them together, in one single cataclysmic hour, when she’d been too young to comprehend what Death was, or was said to be. They had died in a boating accident on Lake Champlain, Sybil’s mother at the age of twenty-six, Sybil’s father at the age of thirty-one, very attractive young people, a “popular couple” as Aunt Lora spoke of them, choosing her words with care, and saying very little more. For why ask,

Aunt Lora seemed to be warning Sybil, — you will only make yourself cry. As soon as she could manage the move, and as soon as Sybil was placed permanently in her care, Aunt Lora had come to California, to this sun-washed coastal town midway between Santa Monica and Santa Barbara. Glencoe was less conspicuously affluent than either of these towns, but, with its palm-lined streets, its sunny placidity, and its openness to the ocean, it was the very antithesis, as Aunt Lora said, of Wellington, Vermont, where the Blakes had lived for generations. (After their move to California, Lora Dell Blake had formally adopted Sybil as her child: thus Sybil’s name was Blake, as her mother’s had been. If asked what her father’s name had been, Sybil would have had to think before recalling, dimly, “Conte.”) Aunt Lora spoke so negatively of New England in general and Vermont in particular, Sybil felt no nostalgia for it; she had no sentimental desire to visit her birthplace, not even to see her parents’ graves. From Aunt Lora’s stories, Sybil had the idea that Vermont was damp and cold twelve months of the year, and frigidly, impossibly cold in winter; its wooded mountains were unlike the beautiful snow-capped mountains of the West, and cast shadows upon its small, cramped, depopulated, and impoverished old towns. Aunt Lora, a transplanted New Englander, was vehement in her praise of California — “With the Pacific Ocean to the west,” she said, “it’s like a room with one wall missing. Your instinct is to look out, not back; and it’s a good instinct.”

Lora Dell Blake was the sort of person who delivers statements with an air of inviting contradiction. But, tall, rangy, restless, belligerent, she was not the sort of person most people wanted to contradict.

Indeed, Aunt Lora had never encouraged Sybil to ask questions about her dead parents, or about the tragic accident that had killed them; if she had photographs, snapshots, mementos of life back in Wellington, Vermont, they were safely hidden away, and Sybil had not seen them. “It would just be too painful,” she told Sybil, “—for us both.” The remark was both a plea and a warning.

Of course, Sybil avoided the subject.

She prepared carefully chosen words, should anyone happen to ask her why she was living with her aunt, and not her parents; or, at least, one of her parents. But — this was Southern California, and very few of Sybil’s classmates were living with the set of parents with whom they’d begun. No one asked.

An orphan? — I’m not an orphan, Sybil would say. I was never an orphan because my Aunt Lora was always there.

I was two years old when it happened, the accident.