She stopped twisting her skirt and twisted her fingers instead. “I haven’t done her any harm, though she’s not an appealing child. Except when she dances. I’ve gone on helping her there.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“I haven’t been able to learn anything that really matters. You’re closer to all of them. It’s possible you might find out the truth and really help Jilly.”
“Has anyone told you who I am?”
Her look was blank and I went on. “Twelve years ago I was married to Stephen Asche.”
That seemed to shock her. “Then you’re—but that’s crazy! I mean crazy that Julian would bring you here. Of course I never knew the first Mrs. Asche’s name, so I didn’t make the connection. This changes everything. It’s all so strange—the threads of the tapestry.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know that Luther was Larry Asche’s protégé”? He and Julian and Larry were all friends in the old days when Luther was quite young. But I guess Larry found out something about Luther and dropped him for a while. Luther was trying to manage a reconciliation when Larry died. Of course Everett never cared about ethics one way or another.”
Carla had said all she meant to and she rose with a certain dignity and started down the stairs. At the bottom she looked up at me.
“Jilly is hiding something. She’s badly frightened, but she won’t talk about what terrifies her. Sometimes her fear makes me afraid. Perhaps you’d better be on guard too.”
She hurried off toward the rooms she shared with Jilly, and I was left alone on the dim stairway. As Carla had said, fear could be contagious, and now I ran along the empty hallway, avoiding shadows, and closed my door firmly behind me.
10
The next morning I woke up early, not rested, but too wide awake to stay in bed. After the storm the day was unexpectedly balmy—Indian summer—and I went downstairs to find Vivian setting a breakfast table out on the deck.
She smiled in greeting. “Good morning, Lynn. Will you join us? I’ve always loved having breakfast out here on bright mornings. This may be our last chance before winter.” She sounded determinedly cheerful, but she was probably remembering that she and Julian might not be here for much longer.
The storm had left leaves all over the deck, and I took a push broom and shoved wet brown layers under the railing off into space.
Julian, Vivian said, was inside making his special yogurt pancakes. When they were ready, the three of us sat down to pancakes, maple syrup, and a platter of crisp bacon. Now I could tell them what had happened last night, but when I began, Vivian stopped me.
“Please, Lynn. Not now. None of this is our concern anymore, if we’re to leave, and you’ll only make us unhappy.”
I wondered if she had given up hope that Meryl might still persuade Everett to change his mind.
Julian nodded at me. “I’d like to hear, but later. Vivian is right—let’s enjoy ourselves now. For whatever time is left.”
He sounded fatalistic again, and I hated that. I hadn’t given up yet, though I wasn’t sure what my next action might be.
Since each layer of deck was set back from the one below, we could sit in the warming sun that touched our mountain. Beyond us the wide valley still lay in shadow, sunrise lighting only the high peaks as though a spotlight shone upon them. Gradually sun would creep down the slopes, but for now the highlighting was spectacular, touching the ridges to shining cinnamon.
In spite of his wish to postpone the unpleasant, Julian lapsed into discussion of the problem nearest him, perhaps not altogether fatalistic, after all.
“I’ve been trying to call Oriana, but so far I haven’t reached her. You’re right, Lynn, that she should know what is happening here, though I haven’t much confidence in what she might do.”
“Perhaps you could follow up with Stephen today,” I suggested, and added ruefully, “I’ve upset him enough so he might be ready to listen.”
Julian agreed absently, but I felt that he put little hope in Stephen.
In the end, it was Meryl who destroyed our peaceful moments by driving onto the gravel and parking below our deck. Vivian invited her to come up, and in a moment she joined us, looking disheveled, as though she’d thrown on jeans and sweater without much care and had left her hair unbrushed.
“Jilly’s gone again!” she cried the moment she reached us. “Last night I thought she was pretty quiet, and she wouldn’t open up to me about why she’d run away. However, she seemed willing enough to stay overnight and let me bring her here this morning. But when I got up fairly early and went into her room, she was gone. She left me a note—here it is.”
Meryl handed Julian the note and dropped into a chair he’d brought for her. When Vivian poured coffee, she drank it while she watched Julian.
He read the note aloud. “‘Dear Aunt Meryl: I can’t stay. There is something I have to do. Something I have to remember. I’ll be all right—don’t worry. Jilly.’”
“Of course I’m worried,” Meryl said. “Who knows what car she might get into this time if she hitchhikes? She was lucky to have a neighbor pick her up yesterday, though the woman told me Jilly didn’t want to come to the farm, so she let her drive around with her on errands for a while. Jilly had some other place in mind she wanted to visit, but she wouldn’t say where.”
“I think it’s time to call the county police,” Julian said, and went inside to phone.
That was the obvious course, but another possibility came to mind, though I didn’t want to tell anyone else, in case I failed altogether.
When I could get away, I walked around the lower deck to Stephen’s rooms and knocked on the glass. Paul came to the door and stared at me coldly, not inviting me in. I suspected that his attitude toward me grew out of instructions from Everett, who didn’t want me here. When I told him I wanted to talk with Stephen he shook his head.
“You’ve upset him enough—you and Carla. He’s still asleep, and you’re not going to disturb him. Why don’t you tell me what you want with him?”
His bulk blocked the door, and I suspected that he wouldn’t hesitate to use force if I tried to push my way in.
“I’ll come back later,” I told him and went toward the far end of the house. I knew there were access doors everywhere, so I simply went through to the opposite deck and found my way around to Stephen’s bedroom. The door was open and he was lying in bed staring at nothing.
I didn’t want to attract Paul by tapping again, so I stepped into the room and put a finger to my lips when Stephen saw me.
“Please!” I formed the word silently.
He showed no surprise and watched me with the same indifference I’d seen before. Last night I’d managed to push through it, and perhaps I could manage that again. I went to sit on the edge of a chair near his bed. I didn’t want to look at him and remember—but I didn’t dare look away. Not if I was to make any sort of plea that would reach him. Unhappily, what I saw—what I remembered all too well—was the look of red hair against a white pillow. If I reached out, my fingers would know that crispness. My head would know the hollow of his shoulder. Such thoughts made me angry with myself.
“Jilly’s run away again,” I told him abruptly.
He stared at the ceiling and said nothing. I wanted to shake him into awareness, into any emotion that would encompass something besides himself.
“Jilly left a note for Meryl,” I went on. “It said there was something she had to do—something she needed to remember.”
“So?” There was nothing more than rejection in the word.
“You’re her father! You might know where she’s gone.”
He closed his eyes and there was no way to tell whether my words had registered in any way. Perhaps I’d simply been dismissed. Paul came into the room, furious at finding me there. In another moment he would haul me out of my chair and push me unceremoniously to the door. In fact, his hand was reaching out when Stephen spoke.
&nbs
p; “Don’t touch her,” he said. There was a whiplash under the words, and Paul stopped in surprise. He’d become used to being a bully, I suspected, but for this moment he was no longer in charge, and the fact seemed to shock him.
“Have you any idea where Jilly might have gone?” I repeated to Stephen. “If you can even guess, tell me, and I’ll look for her.”
He spoke to Paul. “Get me my clothes and help me dress. Wait outside, Lynn.”
I walked into his living quarters—his prison. A huge blowup of Oriana in one of her East Indian dances made a stage of one wall. I looked away quickly. Most of the room had been turned to Stephen’s needs. A large table with a padded top would be used for massage and exercise. A stereo and television offered means of killing the hours spent here. Books stood piled on a table, with more in rows of shelves against one wall. The floor was bare of rugs, and I saw a pair of crutches in one corner. So Paul must get Stephen up on his feet some of the time.
In spite of Paul’s objections, Stephen had managed to get dressed, and in a few moments he wheeled himself out of the bedroom. In morning light I could see dark circles under his eyes, hollows that touched his cheeks, and the unsmiling set of his mouth. He was nothing like the man I remembered in appearance, and the look of him broke my heart.
Paul came with him, still resentful and ready to interfere, but Stephen ignored him. “Do you have a car?” he said to me.
“Yes, it’s parked down on the road.”
“Paul, get me down there and into the front seat of her car. I won’t be able to use the wheelchair, so just put my crutches in the backseat. Lynn, go put on a jacket. We may be outside where it’s cold and windy.”
This was the old Stephen, who could take charge and make things happen. I hurried upstairs for my bag and short coat. I even put Julian’s bit of turquoise into my pocket, and then went down to where Stephen sat in the passenger seat of my car, talking to Paul.
Paul was making a last attempt to object. “Look, Stephen, maybe I’d better call Everett before—”
“No,” Stephen said. “No complications. Lynn will get me to where I want to go, and we’ll see if Jilly is there. That’s all.”
“But you’ll need me when you get wherever you’re going,” Paul protested. “She isn’t strong enough to get you in and out of a car!”
“We’ll manage,” Stephen told him grimly. “You can tell Julian we’ve gone to look for Jilly. Never mind where. And don’t bother Everett. Okay, Lynn—let’s go.”
As we drove off, Paul stood looking after us helplessly, and if it hadn’t been for our mission, I’d have felt a small sense of triumph. Paul might have a lot to account for, as I was beginning to learn.
Stephen gave me directions, and I followed them silently. Not until we’d covered a few miles did I glance at him. He looked white about the mouth—perhaps in pain. That was not anything I could handle, and I kept my eyes on the road and my emotions in check.
After a few more miles of silence, I managed a question. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a building site,” he said, the words so low I could hardly hear them. “A place I called White Moon.”
There seemed a warning in the way he spoke the name, and I knew I mustn’t comment.
“We’re going to where you were hurt?”
“Yes. If Jilly’s trying to remember, that’s where she might go.”
“Have you been there since the accident?”
His answer was a shake of the head, and I wondered if there would be something he might remember in that place.
At his signal, I drove off the main highway, following the curve of another wooded mountain, climbing now. Others had built on these heights, and we passed two or three luxurious homes, none of them as beautiful and imaginative as the house Stephen had built for himself. And for Oriana. I must never forget that.
“I thought you didn’t like condominiums,” I said as the road lifted toward the highest point, still far above, turning upward now in hairpin curves.
“I let Everett talk me into it,” he admitted. “I expected to build for people who wanted to feel they were living in individual homes. And I think I did a pretty good job in my planning in that direction. The mountaintop site that the developer—Luther Kersten—chose was spectacular. So I went along, until I found out what he was really pulling.”
“He was your father’s protégé in the beginning?”
“Yes. That’s one reason why I went along. I didn’t know that Dad had had a falling out with him.” He stopped abruptly, perhaps having said more than he intended.
Oak trees, their leaves flaming, lined the road, and as we neared the highest ridge, they took on stunted, tortured shapes, bent grotesquely by the winds that could blow up here.
“We can get pretty close,” Stephen said. “Here’s the road they built to bring up materials. To your right.”
It was a rough dirt road and we bumped over its washboard surface, overgrown now with creepers and weeds. Gravel had been dumped at intervals to control the mud, but most of the road had washed away, and last night’s rain left bad stretches. The car still managed to climb until we reached the place where the road ended. I braked to a stop where I could see the scattered remains of the building project between the road and the cliff’s far edge.
For a few moments Stephen sat looking out across the cleared area in silence. I didn’t believe he was thinking of Jilly just then, and I sat very still, waiting to be told what to do. Certainly she wasn’t visible anywhere up here, though there were plenty of places to hide, and she might have taken cover when she heard us drive up. The whole place looked like a pile of old ruins, rather than an unfinished building project. Nature had taken over with weeds and vines that had thrived lushly during the summer. Poison ivy, beautiful in its fall red, crawled around the base of trees.
“Only the underground rooms that drop down the mountain were completed,” Stephen said. “The building on top had just begun. Do you want to look around?”
“Of course,” I said and got out of the car.
He stopped me as I started off. “Wait. I still know this place better than you. Hand me my crutches.”
I wanted to protest, to tell him I would be careful, but the tightness in his voice warned me not to interfere. I reached into the backseat and drew out the pair of metal crutches with handgrips halfway down. He opened the door for himself and was able to swing his feet out of the car and onto the ground. There he sat for a moment, considering.
I had no idea of how best I might help him. If he fell up here it would be disastrous, as I wouldn’t have the strength to get him back into the car. He must be perfectly aware of this himself, yet still grimly bent on what he meant to do. At least he had a purpose for the moment, and even disaster might be better than the lethargy I’d seen before.
“Help pull me up,” he said. “Don’t worry—I won’t be a dead weight.”
He held onto one crutch and hooked his free arm around mine. It took my best strength, but I dug in my heels and got him onto his feet. When I’d put the other crutch under his arm, he was able to stand alone and to take a few steps forward, though one leg dragged. Perspiration stood out on his forehead, and the strain was so evident that it scared me. Yet I didn’t dare interfere. I knew the last thing Stephen wanted was to have me witness his helpless condition, and I ached for all the wounding that had been done to him—and that he must have done to himself. To go in an instant from the strong, confident, even arrogant man he’d been—accustomed to admiration and respect—into nothing at all! Into an object to be ministered to! Yet I would never have expected him to give up as completely as he seemed to have done. I recalled Meryl’s words—that when everything came too easily, maybe we lacked the strength to deal with disaster.
Now, however, if he could stand with the aid of crutches, then perhaps more was possible. I wondered again about Paul Woolf and how much he really helped Stephen.
However, I couldn’t think about that now
. All that mattered was whether I could deal with whatever was going to happen.
“If you’ll tell me where to look, Stephen, I’ll see if I can find her. There’s no use calling her—if she’s here and wanted us to know, she’d have come out by now.”
He didn’t answer, but swung himself ahead of me across rough ground strewn with boards and other building debris. Red mud showed where grass and weeds hadn’t taken over, and the whole area was treacherous underfoot. He placed his crutches carefully, moving his good leg, dragging the bad one. At least there seemed to be no paralysis. I walked beside him, ready to help if anything went wrong.
To our left, boards lay across what appeared to be a pit in the top floor level, and he skirted this warily. I knew without asking that he must have fallen in that very spot. Drawn by some horrid fascination, I went to where the boards lay, and saw that one of them had been pulled aside to show the dark opening that dropped away into unseen depths. For an instant I felt vertigo, as though I were falling—as Stephen had done.
“Careful,” he said behind me, and I righted myself. Now I could see that a ladder had been placed in the opening, reaching from the floor below to where I stood.
“She could have climbed down this ladder,” I said.
“Stay away from that!” Stephen ordered.
I knelt just above the top rung, paying no attention, and called into the depths. “Jilly! Jilly—are you down there?”
No voice answered me, but there was a faint rustling sound from far below. Perhaps some small animal who made this place its home?
“There’s something down there,” I said. “It might be Jilly. Don’t worry—I can get down the ladder.”
“If you fall,” he told me, “I can’t help you. Or myself. And there’ll be no one likely to find us quickly up here.”
“This was where you wanted to come. We’re here now, and I have to try. I will be careful. It’s what you would do if you could, isn’t it?”
There was no answer to that. I felt him watching, hating his own helplessness as I knelt at the top. I reached backward with one foot, feeling for the first rung of the ladder. It seemed firmly propped, and it hadn’t been here long enough for the wood to rot. I set my weight onto the rung and started down. As I lowered myself inch by inch, I tested each step before I gave it my weight.
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