“…the person who made her vanish,” said Evelyn Ashby, her thin hand gripping my arm. “Carol, that man is Harold Voss Junior. His father was my mother studio chief. The night she disappeared, she had told me she was meeting Harold Senior after the premiere. She wore this dress. And she was never seen again.” The ballroom hummed around us with crystal and music and the polite laughter of the very rich. I stood in my five dollar gown, under a chandelier the size of a small car, and I looked across the room at the silver haired man who was chatting with my husband. He was laughing at something Greg had said.
I had bought that dress on a Tuesday, at the Goodwill on Maple Street, from a rack of faded cardigans. The label was handwritten, in an old and elegant script: Madame Renée, Beverly Hills, 1961. The silk was the color of champagne, with tiny seed pearls at the neckline, and when I held it up to the light, it seemed to glow. Greg had laughed at it, of course. He laughs at most things I do. But I had put it on at home and looked in the mirror and felt, for the first time in years, as if I had found something that was meant for me.
Evelyn was eighty four, small and straight backed, in a gray silk suit, and her eyes were a startling pale green. She asked me to follow her to a quiet alcove behind a velvet curtain, where a waiter was refilling a tray of champagne. “Please,” she said. “Show me the collar.” I turned it inside out. There, stitched in gold thread, were two letters, V.A., and beneath them, in a different thread, the number 14. Evelyn drew a long, unsteady breath. “That is my mother measurement card,” she said. “She was the only actress at the studio who insisted on embroidering her own.”
A thrift store gown, a woman in her eighties, and a small embroidered initial hidden inside the collar.
She lifted the hem and ran her fingers along a seam I had never noticed. A tiny pocket was stitched into the lining, flat as a leaf, and inside it was a small folded square of yellowed paper. My hands began to shake. Evelyn unfolded it with the delicacy of a surgeon. In faded blue ink, in a hurried slanting hand, someone had written: If anything happens to me, Harold Voss has the reel. It is in the vault at the Pacific Savings, box 212. Tell Evie I love her. Evelyn made a sound I will never forget. It was half a sob and half a laugh.
For sixty two years she had wondered. She told me, standing there between the curtain and the wall, how her mother had been a rising star, how the studio had paid for her house and her car and her name, and how she had begun to protest. Vivian Ashby had refused to sign a new contract. She had threatened to speak to a reporter about the way the studio treated young women. Two weeks later she was gone. The police said she had run off with a lover. The studio said she was ill. Evelyn had grown up in a house full of whispers and unanswered questions, raised by an aunt in Pasadena.
I did what seemed right. I took out my phone and called the one person I trusted most, my niece Danielle, who works for the district attorney. She answered on the second ring. I explained, in a low voice, what I had found. There was a short silence. Then she said, “Aunt Carol, do not let that dress out of your sight. I am calling a detective I know. Stay where there are people.” I looked up. Across the ballroom, Harold Voss Junior had stopped laughing. He was staring straight at us, his glass halfway to his lips, and his face had turned the color of candle wax.
He crossed the room quickly, smiling, his hand extended. “Evelyn,” he said. “How wonderful to see you. I have heard so much about your charity work.” Evelyn did not take his hand. “Harold,” she said coolly, “your father had a reel. It was in box 212 at the Pacific Savings. Did he leave it to you?” The smile fell. For a moment he looked like an old man in a rented tuxedo. “I have no idea what you mean,” he said, and then he turned and walked quickly toward the exit, and a man in a dark suit I had not noticed before stepped out from the wall to follow him.
Greg found me twenty minutes later, standing alone by the dessert table, still holding the little note. “Carol,” he said. “What is happening? Everyone is whispering.” I told him. I watched his face move from confusion to disbelief to a kind of dawning respect. “That old thrift store dress,” he said slowly. “The one I laughed at?” I nodded. He looked down at his shoes and cleared his throat. “I think I owe you an apology,” he said. I smiled. “You owe me a lot of things,” I said. “We will start with that one.”
The reel was found in the vault that Monday morning. It was a short film, four minutes long, and it showed Harold Voss Senior with a man the police later identified as a studio fixer. They were arguing about a payment. They were talking about Vivian. It did not provide every answer, but it opened a case that had been closed since 1962, and the detectives promised Evelyn they would pursue it to the end. When she called to tell me, her voice was bright and young. “Carol,” she said, “my mother is finally being heard.”
I refused the two hundred thousand dollars. I gave Evelyn the dress, and I asked her to hang it in the lobby of the new film museum, behind glass, with a small card. She did. It reads: Vivian Ashby, 1932 to 1962, worn on the last night she was seen. Found at a thrift store for five dollars. I visit it sometimes, on quiet afternoons, and I stand there and look at the silk glowing in the soft light. Greg comes with me now, holding my hand. He does not laugh anymore. He only looks, and nods, and says, quietly, “You always did have an eye.”