Skeleton Key (2 page)

In addition to
The Marble Forest
(1951), a serial novel that included a chapter by Boucher, Offord published three more books.
Enchanted August
(1956), is a work of young-adult fiction set at Ashland, Oregon's famed Shakespeare Festival, which Offord attended frequently, along with her daughter Judy, who may have been the inspiration for the protagonist and who acted with the company as a child.
The Girl in the Belfry
(1957), is a true crime account co-written with Joseph Henry Jackson. Her final novel,
Walking Shadow
, also set at Ashland, continues her series but with a focus shift: the main character is Barby, all grown up and now a costume assistant on a summer production of that famous “Scottish play,”
Macbeth
.

Despite being the nominal heroine, Barby is more of an Eve Arden character, resigned to playing second fiddle to the beautiful, mysterious Margaret Lenox. Winsome, red-headed, and blazingly talented, Meg attracts many but keeps most at a distance. Might it have something to do with a recently discovered corpse back in Berkeley? The tenuous connection puzzles Barby enough to call in the cavalry, i.e. her stepfather Todd, still plying his trade in crime writing and still capable of deducing the truth, even after several missteps of misdirection. The solution is a surprise, but what elevates
Walking Shadow
to Offord's most accomplished novel is her utter familiarity with Shakespearean drama, the politicking of summer stock, and her love of it all. Theatrical settings have a special place in mystery fiction, inspiring a number of novels by classic writers like Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Edmund Crispin, and more recent works by Joyce Harrington, Pat Carlson, and Jane Dentinger, and the “Scottish Play” has been a particular favorite.

After
Walking Shadow
, Offord stopped publishing novels. “Every mystery story published in the U.S. was mailed to our house,” says Offord's daughter, “and she read each one, at least enough of it to decide if it was something she wanted to review. I think that as she got older, a lot of her writing energy went to the reviewing. I think she felt that she'd accomplished what she set out to do in the novel form.”

But she didn't abandon fiction or creative writing altogether. In addition to her perch at the SF
Chronicle
, Offord published short stories and poems, most notably “Memoirs of a Mystery Critic” in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
, a wonderful rhyming verse that catalogs the many, many plot and character tropes of crime novels and closes:

By now, for these plots
I could fill in the dots
With one hand behind me
And a blindfold to blind me.
And yet I keep reading them,
Greedily needing them.
Don't think of them,
Just keep on printing them!

Offord was also active within the world of Sherlock Holmes fans, most notably as the first female member vested into the Baker Street Irregulars, the premier fan club for all things Holmes, Watson, and their creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. New members are given special nicknames, and Offord's was “The Old Russian Woman,” a hat tip to
Murder on Russian Hill
. But Offord never attended a BSI event. Those were in New York, and she stayed on the West Coast. The other contributing factor? She was the sole female Irregular (it would be another 20 years before another woman was invested into the club). “I don't believe in forcing my way into a group that is all-male and has kept to itself,” Offord explained in a 1984 interview with the
Times-News
. “I wouldn't want a male trying to force his way into a group I belonged to if it were all-female.”

In 1988 Offord and her husband, Harold, moved to Ashland, Oregon to be closer to their daughter, who had become a choreographer for the Shakespeare Festival. In doing so Offord became a year-round resident of the place she immortalized in
Walking Shadow
. She died, at age eighty-five, on April 24, 1991. (Harold passed away the following year.) Her life was clearly one of love, laughter, and literature, where words on the page carried tremendous meaning, as an author, a critic, or a play-goer. Lenore Glen Offord deserves the much wider audience that these new reissues will undoubtedly bring, a contemporary audience certain to enjoy her novels.

—Sarah Weinman

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE STREET SIGN
appeared first, like a ship's mast coming over the horizon.
Grettry Road
, it read, in black letters on a strip of yellow-painted tin. The larger sign below it came into view next, line by line: NOT A—THROUGH—STREET.

The young woman toiling up the hill took in the whole unencouraging message, paused, looked at the steep slope behind her and spoke aloud, indignantly. “My pals!” she said, presumably referring to the city fathers, who might have let her know earlier.

A few more steps, however, brought her to the crest, and the fathers were exonerated. Avenida Drive continued to the right along the edge of a canyon, and the blind street curved downward to the left. Best of all, beneath the signs at the intersection was a convenient flat rock. The young woman made for it and sat down, panting.

She was footsore and warm and on the verge of discouragement. The miniature briefcase she carried was full of magazine-subscription blanks, and as Georgine Wyeth knew too well, they all remained obstinately true to their name. Again she spoke aloud, bitterly; but this time to herself. “You!” she said. “You couldn't sell water to a desert tank corps.”

This was undeserved. There had been other June days as warm and lazy as this one, on which housewives had answered their doorbells and listened to her sales talk, and sometimes even fallen for the Magnificent Combination Offer, or the Three Year Subscription for the Price of Two. Today, a sudden wave of sales resistance had nearly overwhelmed her.

Oh, well
, thought Georgine philosophically,
probably like everything else it could be blamed on the war
. In a season when Japanese forces roosted on the Aleutian Islands, and when the ocean outside the Golden Gate was muffled in a fog-bank supposed by many Bay residents to be solidly packed with enemy aircraft carriers, a slight sense of impermanence might well be felt. She squinted her blue eyes against the glare, and looked at the western horizon. There was the notorious fog-bank. You had a fine view of it from this perch.

The view also comprised the soaring towers of San Francisco, two bridges and a number of islands, and almost all the cities on the east side of the Bay. Across the canyon to Georgine's left squatted the red dome of the Cyclotron building, and far below it lay the campus, blocked out in fawn and green, tile-red and white, like a section of modernistic linoleum. Georgine surveyed the miles that were spread soft-colored and glittering within her vision, and thoughtfully nodded. She had lived in Berkeley long enough to realize the paramount importance of this view in the minds of hill-dwellers. It explained the existence of the isolated group of houses that was called Grettry Road.

A faint wind was stirring, gratefully cool on her face and neck. She took off her old Panama hat and ruffled the short brown curls of a war bob, and sighed in relaxation. Her round curly head looked like a girl's, and so did the slim figure in the blue cotton suit and saddle oxfords, but her face was more mature. It was a bit too thin and anxious-looking for her twenty-seven years.

One glance at Georgine Wyeth left you with no more than a vaguely pleasant impression. A second proved unexpectedly rewarding; those who troubled to take it saw her eyes and thought “lonely”; her mouth, and thought “sweet”; and then this increasingly sentimental gaze, having reached her chin, was brought up with a round turn. The set and tilt of the jaw spoke of stubbornness and humor, and more than hinted at a peppery though short-lived temper.

Little by little, as at the moment she sat resting with her attractive legs stretched out before her, her face lost its anxious determination and took on a look of soulful thought. She was wondering if she'd ever get used to cotton stockings. This important question occupied the forefront of her mind; another part was lazily deliberating whether to go home now or to ring just a few more doorbells. The short blind street to her left seemed a poor prospect for sales. It was too quiet, half asleep under the summer sunlight; more than likely nobody was at home.

From the Campanile, far below, drifted the notes of a chime: three o'clock. By sun time, of course, it was only two; mid-afternoon, that little zero hour when the shadows forget to change, when a woman alone in the house becomes suddenly aware of a dripping tap, the tick of a branch against the window. The air was full of the sleepy shrilling and humming of insects. Somewhere across the canyon eucalyptus leaves were burning, and their aromatic smoke, sweeter than incense to Californian nostrils, came floating across the hill. Georgine sat on, dreamily inert. Gradually all conscious thought left her mind, until it felt clean and empty as a house ready for new tenants.

She heard it then for the first time: that thin little thread of music, lonely as a shepherd's pipe on the quiet air. It wasn't mechanical music, for the reedy notes wavered a little on the run in the fourth bar, and stopped and were repeated. So, there was somebody at home in Grettry Road. She found herself wondering what odd sort of person would play Schubert's
The Trout
on a mouth-organ.

It caught the imagination, somehow; mental adventures like this were distinctly to her taste, which was lucky, since as a mother and wage-earner she could hardly afford to seek any other kind. Maybe, she thought, it would be worthwhile to try that street after all.

Georgine Wyeth stood up, looked at the sign that said NOT A THROUGH STREET, and shrugged. Then, quite willingly, as if enchanted by the tune of the Pied Piper, she stepped into Grettry Road.

There was no telling how far away the music had been when she heard it. She rang first at the two well-built, unpretentious houses that faced each other across the mouth of the street. The doorbells burred unheeded in their quiet depths. Nobody seemed to be at home.

From her resting-place the larger part of the road had been out of sight, curving away behind a high outcrop of rock that took up most of the eastern side. She left the porch of the first house on the west and went downhill, scuffing through the dry sickle-shaped leaves that carpeted a vacant lot shaded by a fine stand of eucalyptus. At the outer curve of this lot she paused, looking down the steep slope of Grettry Road, which could be seen in its entirety from this point alone. At the far end, where the road flattened and widened, a low white-painted fence kept cars from plunging into the canyon. There was only one house on the east side, three-quarters of the way down; but on the west there were four.

Three of them were small, differing so aggressively in detail and ornament as to make it obvious that the same hand had built them all. Their front walks, on three descending levels, led straight onto the street—there were neither curbs nor sidewalks—and their narrow side yards were separated only by thin straggles of hedge. They had a comic look, like white puppies peering over the edges of adjacent stair-steps. Presumably their lower floors were built down into the first slope of the ravine.

The door of the highest one stood ajar, and Georgine could hear someone moving about inside, just out of sight. She rang the bell; its tubular chime sounded so close to her ear that it made her jump.

Whoever was walking around that inner room completely ignored the sound. The footsteps were quick but sounded heavy enough to be a man's. She found herself peering through the screen in an effort to see him. She rang again, and waited; waited a full two minutes.

She stood frowning at the screen for a moment, and then retreated rather slowly to the street and stood gazing up and down its empty length. The technique of ignoring agents had certainly been brought to a fine point in these hills; the residents might as well come out and kick you downstairs!

She was irritated, and found herself rather fostering her annoyance. For a moment there she'd had a decidedly queer feeling,
As if
, thought Georgine,
I'd died and didn't know it, and everyone looked right through me
.

Well, there were other houses. She walked fifty feet downhill and tried the next one. Surely someone ought to answer here, for as she came up a door closed audibly in the depths of the house; but nobody came, and she could not even hear the doorbell.

How quiet this street was! There was no sound now except that of her rubber-shod feet, and its padded echo from the rock wall. Generally in mid-afternoon you'd expect to hear children playing, but there could scarcely be any living in this remote, steep dead-end. The silence gave it a sleeping-beauty quality, for the breeze had dropped and the striped shadows of eucalyptus lay motionless on the buckling asphalt of the pavement. She still hadn't found a sign of her mouth-organ player. The music had stopped just before she entered the road, and now it seemed as if she'd never heard it.

She turned her head suddenly, catching in the tail of her eye a movement in one of the upper houses, as if a curtain had been twitched aside and as hastily dropped into place. So that was it; she must have
agent
written all over her, somehow, and the people along this street were playing possum. She'd done that herself in the past. The realization gave her an obscure sense of relief.

At the lowest of the triplet-houses the bell gave off that indefinable echo that tells you the place is empty. Georgine's lower lip folded softly over the upper, and she glanced about her once more. If she had any sense, she'd go home now, but honor must be satisfied. She compromised by not crossing the street; there was only one more house on this side, the big one at the end, and she would probably draw a blank there, too. If not—she prepared to hand out a sales talk that would fairly batter the listener into acceptance.