The Last Embrace Read online

  Mrs. Croggan unfolded the telegram and read the block letters aloud.

  KITTY MISSING SINCE OCT 7 STOP CONCERN MOUNTING STOP PLEASE ADVISE BY PHONE TR-75041 STOP SIGNED LOUISE DOBBS STOP WILCOX BOARDINGHOUSE FOR YOUNG LADIES STOP HOLLYWOOD

  Joseph’s mother looked suddenly fragile, and much older. She placed the telegram on the coffee table and smoothed it with shaking fingers.

  “After Joseph, I couldn’t bear…Dear God, let her be okay. It would be too much…” Eyes brimming with pain and bewilderment, she shook her head. “I just don’t understand. Doreen told one roommate she had a date that night. She told another girl she had a film shoot.”

  “A date with whom?”

  “Nobody knew.”

  “What picture was she filming? Where was the shoot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lily leaned back in her chair and sighed. “What studio was it?”

  “I forgot to ask. I wasn’t thinking right.” Mrs. Croggan shuddered. “Oh, why did I ever let her go? She has no idea what people can be like. She’s too trusting. It’s not like she’s crisscrossed the world and seen the depravities that people are capable of.” Mrs. Croggan clasped a dish towel in her hand, twisting until her fingers turned white.

  “Not like you, Lily,” she said. “You have been out in the world.”

  Lily wanted to point out that Doreen had been out in the world for five years.

  “You grew up in Los Angeles and know your way around,” Mrs. Croggan said thoughtfully. “You could track her down. Joseph always said how smart you were. How clever at your job.”

  “Please, Mrs. Croggan. I was a file clerk.”

  Back in 1944, when she’d joined the Office of Strategic Services, Lily had been warned that her work was classified top secret. She was not to speak of it. Ever. She was to take the stories to her grave. “OSS is an undercover organization authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” a steely-eyed lieutenant in Washington had told her. “We are anonymous. If people ask what you do here, tell ’em you’re a file clerk. Nobody’s interested enough in file clerks to ask questions.”

  Mrs. Croggan’s lower lip trembled. “You loved my son, Lily, and this is his sister. He’d want you to do this. Besides, Joseph once suggested…he gave me the impression…” Mrs. Croggan’s voice dropped and she glanced nervously behind her. “Joseph said the two of you had ways to find things out. Special training and such.”

  Lily hid her surprise. She’d taken an oath and intended to keep it. Clearly Joseph hadn’t felt the same.

  “Maybe he did, but I just filed and typed,” Lily said, falling back on her cover story. “Do you really think they’d let girls parachute behind enemy lines? Carry secret messages and do surveillance?”

  Mrs. Croggan gave her an odd look and Lily realized she’d said too much.

  “Joseph loved you,” the older woman said stubbornly, “and that’s enough for me.”

  Lily’s heart went out to this widow, who’d already lost one child. She wanted to ask why Mrs. Croggan didn’t go herself, but she knew. Joseph’s mother was a small-town homemaker wary of big cities—she’d once gotten hopelessly lost in Wichita. She was cowed by authority, suspicious of strangers, and yet ultimately too trusting. In a big chaotic city like Los Angeles, she’d be taken advantage of and lose her bearings and her nerve. And if real trouble had befallen Doreen…

  “I do worry about you getting sucked into all that intrigue and danger,” Mrs. Croggan said. “You’ll have to stay away from Errol Flynn. I’ve read all about his wicked ways in Confidential magazine.”

  Lily laughed. Hollywood was a playground compared to what she’d been through. She’d had so many aliases that sometimes she’d forgotten who the real Lily was. But the thought of going back to L.A. made her uneasy. She hadn’t kept in touch with any of her school friends, was estranged from what distant family remained. There was nothing there for her.

  “I can handle myself,” she said.

  “I know you can. And I’d be ever so grateful if you’d check on Doreen.”

  Joseph’s words echoed in her head. You’re going to love my sister. I can’t wait for you to meet her. And in her mind, she saw not glamour-puss grown-up Kitty, but a fierce kid of twelve, nursing a wounded bird.

  “I’ll go for a couple of days, Mrs. Croggan. But then I really have to get to New York.”

  “Oh, Lily, thank you,” Mrs. Croggan said, clasping her in a hug. “I know you’ll find her.”

  She left the next day.

  Lily made her way back to her train cabin and sat down. Brown smog lay like a shroud over the San Gabriel Valley. Signs sprouting from bare fields where farms had recently stood signaled the new westward expansion: MOVE IN WITH NO MONEY DOWN; ALL MOD CONS; PERFECT FOR YOUR GROWING FAMILY.

  In Pasadena, a number of people got off and the train entered the final leg. When Lily saw the old East Side neighborhood of Boyle Heights, she thought she was back in Europe. Entire city blocks had been reduced to rubble. Along the alluvial plains east of downtown where vineyards planted by European immigrants had once sprawled, bulldozers were grading highways of dirt. Concrete pillars soared into the sky, steel rods protruding like carrot tops. From them hung Lilliputian figures that hammered, building the new American autobahns. At least the tall white spire of City Hall still stood—L.A.’s fusty dowager, the tallest game in town, surrounded by her constellation of courthouses, movie palaces, and department stores.

  With a jerk and a hiss, the train arrived at Union Station. A porter got her luggage and Lily marveled at the cacophony of voices echoing in the huge vaulted rooms—the staccato of Brooklyn, the twang of Oklahoma, the broad vowels of the Upper Midwest, the singsong of Spanish. She noticed the watchful silence of others—gaunt émigrés clad in rough black clothes; an Asian family carrying parcels wrapped in twine, marching single file.

  There were babies and toddlers everywhere, sleeping in prams, holding tight to their mothers’ hands, riding like General MacArthur astride luggage carts. Lily felt a tightness in her chest. Joseph had wanted a family. She felt his absence most acutely at times like this, alone amid the crush of rejoicing relatives.

  “Will it be a taxi for you, miss?” the porter asked. He was old and black, smart in his livery, and spoke with the liquid warmth of the South.

  Lily nodded. She had $150 in crumpled bills that Mrs. Croggan had given her plus the $290 she’d cashed from her paychecks. She could afford to splurge.

  Another train pulled in and an ash-blond creature in dangly earrings and a satin gown got off, clutching the arm of a man dressed for a night at the Mocambo. People crowded around. Lily saw a flash, heard cameras pop as newsmen shouted. Wincing, she ducked. That was the last thing she needed right now, to show up in a newspaper photo. She wasn’t anxious to broadcast her return to prying eyes, had hoped to slip in and out unnoticed. The last five years had taught her that these tiniest unforeseen details could scupper an entire operation.

  The couple swept into a limousine. Well, if she was going to track down a missing starlet, she might as well get used to the local fauna. As fans dispersed, Lily asked a schoolgirl who the woman was.

  The girl presented her autograph book. To Betsy, the scrawled signature read, with love from Gene Tierney.

  Unfazed, the porter carried her suitcase past the jacarandas and palms to a waiting taxi. Lily tipped him, wondering if fifty cents was too much. She had no idea anymore.

  “Where to, miss?” said the driver, a small wiry man.

  Lily wanted to find a hotel and freshen up. With any luck, Doreen had come home and Lily could get right back on the train to New York.

  But what if Doreen was still missing? Lily imagined tracking Joseph’s sister down to some producer’s yacht or Beverly Hills hideaway. Maybe she didn’t want to be found. Lily thrust away darker possibilities. This was L.A., her childhood home, not some bombed-out European city teeming with war criminals, political intrigue, and refugees.

  Sudden
ly Lily felt a keen desire to see the house where she’d grown up.

  “Please take me to Mar Vista,” she told the cabbie.

  The driver adjusted his hat and they took off.

  Los Angeles was clean and prosperous, bristling with brawny energy and determination. Its downtown streets bore no signs of bombs or bullets. The people were tall and well fed, everyone driving big shiny cars. Many wore dark shades like movie stars to ward off sunlight so bright it hurt her eyes.

  “Your first visit?” the cabbie asked.

  “I grew up here.”

  The cabbie had his elbow out the window, his arm tanned a chestnut brown.

  “It’s just that you have a foreign look about you.”

  Lily gave a rueful smile. “I’ve been living in Europe for five years.”

  “We’re letting too many of those people in, you ask me. The war’s over now, they should all go back home.”

  Lily wondered if Los Angeles had become more provincial in her absence or if she had grown more cosmopolitan.

  The cab passed Echo Park Lake. Lily knew he was taking her the long way, but she didn’t care. The rows of palm trees saluting the sky, the fountains jetting up, the merrymakers in paddleboats making a circuit as the sun reflected off the water—she’d missed this. A tent was pitched on the grass. Lily saw a man carrying a plate of food duck inside the flap. Two more tents sprang into view, then a cluster.

  “Is that a Boy Scout campout?”

  The cabbie laughed. “You have been gone awhile. Those are servicemen. Waiting for housing the government promised.”

  “They live in the park?” Lily was horrified.

  The cabbie gave a dismissive wave. “Just for a coupla days. It’s a protest. But there’re thousands like ’em in Quonset huts and trailers, even tents on the beach.”

  “Goodness.”

  Lily was relieved to see that the Art Deco observatory still nestled into the hills of Griffith Park, a familiar white landmark amid the sun-scorched brush. Then the Hollywood sign came into view. Lily felt a rush of dismay. The H had collapsed and the last four letters that used to lean drunkenly were gone altogether, a discarded relic in a city where history was as malleable as movie sets.

  The cab turned south, then west onto Wilshire. Above her, a billboard for Sunbeam electric mixers showed a mother serving cookies to her children in a sparkly kitchen. Lily felt she’d emerged from a drab black-and-white world into Technicolor where everything was both familiar and oddly foreign.

  Soon they were in Hancock Park, the bastion of old moneyed Los Angeles where her wealthy relatives lived. The Ainsworths. She’d never met them. Her grandfather Clement Ainsworth had disowned his beautiful daughter for marrying an immigrant musician instead of one of the society boys he’d handpicked for her.

  A year later, Lily’s mother had died giving birth to her and her father’s grief had only hardened the estrangement. Lily didn’t care; she was devoted to her gentle, cultured father, who spoke five languages and eked out a living with piano lessons and odd studio jobs. When he developed heart disease twelve years later, it might have gone badly for Lily if her mother’s sister Sylvia Ainsworth hadn’t materialized on their doorstep. After living in Europe most of her life, she’d returned home as Hitler consolidated power and promised Lily’s dying father to provide her with a home.

  Lily clung like a limpet to her sophisticated new aunt, embracing her exuberance, sense of humor, and conviction that anything was possible if one aimed high and wore good shoes. After high school, Lily enrolled at Vassar College because it was Sylvia’s alma mater. Then, when she was nineteen, her beloved aunt had died. Desperate to stay in school—the only home she had left—Lily used Aunt Sylvia’s inheritance to finish college and keep pace with a clique of privileged new friends. When the money ran out, she learned stenography and worked secretarial jobs, spinning elaborate lies about a hectic social life to mask the true state of her finances. It couldn’t have gone on indefinitely, but already Lily was cultivating a gift for dissembling.

  By that time, World War II was raging. When a Vassar professor learned she could take dictation at two hundred words a minute and spoke French and German, he recommended her to the new Office of Strategic Services. The OSS recruiter was delighted to learn she had no family and could go anywhere the job required. Soon after graduation in 1944, she made a final trip to Los Angeles to close out accounts, then took the train to Washington and reported for duty.

  To her surprise, Lily enjoyed learning how to shadow people, use firearms, steam open letters, and crack safes. She took to the rough-and-tumble of OSS life, the tours of duty in Athens, Berlin, and Berne, even meeting the great spymaster Allen Dulles himself. There was a swashbuckling feel to the work that she thrilled to, a Great Cause to sacrifice for, and she grew used to bivouacking in a crumbling castle outside Cologne one month, a requisitioned apartment in Marburg the next. She was good at getting people to confide in her, knew when to shut up and listen, could ferret out sensitive information with a smile. She thrived on the male attention, swore and told jokes and blew smoke rings with the best of her colleagues, and no one ever suspected that she occasionally locked herself in the women’s room and sobbed, overwhelmed by all that she’d seen. In time, Lily learned to anesthetize her fears with booze and calm her night terrors in the arms of Joseph Croggan. In his unassailable midwestern decency, thousands of miles and an ocean from home, she thought she’d found a refuge and a new life. Instead, here she was, alone, adrift, and feeling ancient in her bones at twenty-six, back in L.A., a place she thought she’d left behind forever.

  At Centinela, the cab turned and Lily gripped the seat and cried out. Her old block was gone. A bulldozer lumbered, grading the dirt where houses had once stood. At the edge of the lima bean fields where farmers had planted a windbreak of eucalyptus trees fifty years earlier, men with chain saws were hard at work. The denuded trunks lay like piles of bones.

  Lily swallowed hard.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she said, pulling out Doreen’s address. “Hollywood, please.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The taxi pulled up to a two-story Spanish-style house set back from the street. The architect had supplied whimsical touches—leaded-glass windows, balconies, a high turret. Above the front door, an ornamental iron sign read WILCOX BOARDINGHOUSE FOR YOUNG LADIES.

  In the big unkempt garden, Lily saw fruit trees, bougainvilleas, giant birds-of-paradise with prehistoric orange and blue beaks, a pink hibiscus that had grown into a tree. Ivy wound around sycamore trunks like garlands and velvety blue morning glory vines climbed a trellis. Accustomed to the grays of northern Europe, where winter had already taken hold, Lily found the color intoxicating.

  “Here we are.”

  The cabbie turned, revealing a scar from mouth to ear. Lily blanched and he grinned, making the dead purple flesh pucker unpleasantly. “Okinawa,” he said, catching her stare. “But at least I made it home, which is more than some of my buddies.”

  “Y-yes,” Lily stuttered, and tipped him a dollar.

  “Bring young ladies here from time to time,” he said, depositing her suitcase. “Actresses, every one. But it’s an okay joint. Unlike some a them.” He tipped his hat. “Good luck in Hollywood,” he said, getting back into his car. “I’ll look for you on the silver screen.”

  Don’t bother, she wanted to call, annoyed that the cabbie had mistaken her for another starlet in the making. But he was already gone.

  Lily walked up the flagstone steps, feeling the grounds stir, rustling and twittering in welcome. The familiar odor of sage hit her, perfumed and almost smoky. The smell of hiking trails and chaparral lashing her bare legs, the hot sun of her childhood.

  Lily rapped the iron knocker three times against the heavy oak door. With a creak it swung open, revealing a middle-aged woman with hair pulled into a bun. She was rangy and long-limbed, with an unruly bosom that strained the seams of her pale yellow dress. A smell of perspiration and bleach ca
me from her.

  “What can I do for you?” the woman said, the grit of Oklahoma thick on her tongue. Her eyes dropped to Kitty’s feet, spied the suitcase. “We don’t have any rooms to let right now, though we…” Wiping her hands on her apron, the woman tilted her head. “We may have an opening at the end of the month.”

  “Oh,” said Lily. “That’s not why…I mean…I’m a friend of the Croggan family. From Illinois…My name’s Lily Kessler. I’ve come to…” Lily’s eyes darted away. “So does that mean Doreen’s still missing?”

  The woman stood, silhouetted in the doorway. Lily wondered why she didn’t invite her in. Her mind was clogged with cobwebs, sticky and sluggish after her long journey, and it troubled her that she couldn’t make out the woman’s face in the house’s shadows, where dim rooms receded into dusk, though it was high noon outside.

  The woman pursed her lips. “You mean Kitty.”

  Relieved, Lily nodded and launched into how Mrs. Croggan had sent her out to check on Doreen and make sure she was okay.

  “Kitty isn’t here.”

  “But has she come back?”

  “No, she hasn’t.” The woman’s voice was flat, without inflection.

  Lily felt a growing anxiety. The longer Doreen stayed missing, the worse the odds grew.

  “In that case, perhaps I might speak with you and the boarders?”

  The woman studied her.

  “Her mother sent me,” Lily repeated. “I’ve come all the way from Illinois.”

  The woman shifted, the floorboards creaking beneath her.

  “The police…” Lily began, and the words appeared to have a magical effect.

  “I suppose you might.” The woman opened the door wider. “I’m Mrs. Potter, the landlady. Won’t you come inside?”

  She led Lily into the front parlor. Lily put her suitcase down and sat at the edge of a red sofa. A battered Steinway covered in knickknacks stood against the far wall. The coffee table held a Sears Roebuck catalogue, two well-thumbed Movie Screen magazines, and a chipped ceramic ashtray pilfered from Earl Carroll’s nightclub.