''A string of bureaucratic minds propped up by their business suits looking at you in blank incomprehension has got to be one of the world's most depressing sights," he was saying. He shook his head and laughed. "I wouldn't have wanted to be selling that bunch a building design, Peaceable Woman. One of them actually wanted to know if we were sure Cat Bite River was a salmon spawning ground, and not just a place where there were a lot of salmon." He took the glass of scotch she offered and drank deep.
You had to laugh, and Smith did. "What did you say to that?"
"I told him we'd been sure of that for several centuries. He wondered if a scientific study had ever been done." A grim note crept into his voice.
"And?" she prompted.
"I told him the kind of science he was talking about was white man's science, and we had better deal in Indian science because white man's science was destroying the world."
"Oh, boy," said Smith faintly. She took a sip of her own drink. "Have you had time to regret that yet?"
"Not yet." He lifted his glass and looked at the amber liquid in the ray of sunshine slanting though the porthole above his head. "The battle's lost, Peaceable Woman. We might as well get our licks in where we can." He flung himself into a corner of the settee as though the cares of the world were slowly falling off his shoulders and took another pull of the scotch. "I needed that." He smiled at her so companionably that just for a moment she wished their marriage were real, and she could look forward to a lifetime of this. "Thanks for coming."
That reminded her. "Johnny," she said urgently. "My father...my father hired private detectives. They tailed you to your car on Monday morning. He's got your name now. He told me this afternoon. I...he said he's going to pass it on to the police."
Johnny swore softly and sat up. "What did you tell him?"
"I...I insinuated that we were casual lovers and called him a racist."
"Did it work?"
"I don't know. My father doesn't bluster much. He seems convinced you have some kind of hold over me."
Johnny grunted. "Women really aren't much better off than Indians when it comes to being considered intelligent enough to run their own destinies, are they?"
She laughed. "Not much, I guess."
"Well, Peaceable Woman, what are we going to do?"
"I thought...should we just announce that we're married?"
A grimace of something like pain flashed across his face. "No," he said. "No, I…what good would it do?"
She felt a quick anguish and wondered fleetingly what it would be like to be the woman who meant more to him than the hold his tortured history had over him.
And no room for regret....The words of her own song came into her head, and suddenly she sat bolt upright and slapped her glass down.
"Lew!" she exclaimed, looking at her watch. "I've got to go—I'll be late!"
The grim lines around his mouth were suddenly more pronounced.
"Do you have to?" he asked, but she was suddenly excited with what was ahead of her, and she did not notice. She pulled Mel's business card out of her back pocket and looked at the address he had scrawled on the back.
"My God, I'll never make it!" she exclaimed. "We have to talk," she said to Johnny. "We've got to decide what to do. Call me or something. Bye!"
She went lightly up the companionway and over the lifeline without looking back; and it wasn't till she was nearly at her car that she heard his question in her head. "Do you have to?" Smith stopped and put a hand up to her mouth in dismay. What had he meant by that? Did he want her to...?
Smith whirled. She didn't have to go, and if Johnny wanted her to stay, she didn't want to go.
But as she started at a run back down the dock, she saw that she was too late. Outcast had already cast off. It was motoring out into the bay, mast glinting in the setting sun. He hadn't even stowed the fenders.
She told herself she had been mistaken in the tone of his question, that he had meant nothing by it but common politeness. Then she resolutely turned her mind to business.
She would not be very late. The address wasn't more than fifteen minutes away in the light traffic she was encountering now. Smith thought of the song that was in her glove compartment, and a shiver of anticipation ran down her spine.
She had never collaborated with a musician before, unless you counted the boy up at Paper Creek. She had no idea what to expect. Would Mel prove to have chosen well? Would they get on? Would he want her to change a lot of her lyrics?
It was the sort of excitement she could not recall ever having felt for the lumber industry. The sense of challenge was heady—she was going to make something out of nothing.
The apartment building where Lew had his studio was a small four-story yellow stucco box near English Bay that had a very neat garden and pleasant airy atmosphere. The inner door was open, so Smith walked through without pushing the buzzer. She was ten minutes late—Lew would be expecting her.
He was on the fourth floor, and as she walked down the hall she heard the faint sound of a piano that got louder as she neared the door.
There was no pause in the music when she knocked. "It's open," called a male voice, and she pushed open the door with the sense that this now was the Rubicon. She was really and truly changing her life from this point on.
The first thing she saw was the black baby grand across a wide, businesslike working studio. The second thing she saw was the face of the man playing it. She gasped in astonishment.
"Luther!" she exclaimed blankly, as the name came to her from the other side of ten long years.
Lew was the boy up at Paper Creek.
Twenty-seven
"Hi there, Shee." Luther grinned at her, his eyes kind but much more worldly-wise than when she had seen him last. "Long time no see." His hands brought a delicate trill from the piano and then stopped.
She crossed the room to him, smiling. "Did you know it was me?"
"I figured there could only be one Shulamith in Vancouver, if not in Canada."
"Well, I didn't know it was you. What a shock!" It wasn't embarrassing, though it might have been. Lew had obviously long since put the episode with her father behind him.
"A shock for me, too," said Lew, leading her to a sofa. "Smith, Mel called you. Where did you get a name like that?"
"What do you mean? In the camps they always called me Smith!" she protested.
"The hell they did. We used to call you Shee."
"Oh, that's right—it started later, in Dog's Ear, maybe. I know I was using it by my first year of university."
"Where you gave in and studied forestry, if what they've been saying about you in the papers lately is true."
"Yeah, you were there that summer I was deciding...."
"Bad choice, girl. You should have stuck with poetry." He smiled, taking the sting out of it.
"You've obviously never looked back."
Lew laughed. "I've looked back quite a few times, but not lately."
"Mel told me a few of your songs. Congratulations. I'm only surprised I've never heard your name attached to them."
"It can be that way," he said, as though he welcomed anonymity.
Suddenly it was as comfortable and easy as it had been ten years ago. Lew Brady poured drinks, and they chatted, and after a while he took the pages of the song from her and moved to the piano, and she leaned on it as he tinkled out a couple of notes, and they talked some more.
"A ballad, mmm?" Lew said.
"I had a sort of tuneless something in the back of my head while I was writing it, Lew," Smith said. "It's...okay, here it is. 'We didn't wait to fall in love,'" she sang, giving him rhythm without much melody, as she had for Mel. "'We loved and then we met...'"
His brown straight hair, parted at the side, flopped untidily over his forehead, and though his face was not handsome his deep blue eyes twinkled with humour, and that was very attractive. If her father had not acted like a madman that summer.... "So wake me up to say goodbye, 'cause now it's ov
er.'"
She finished and grinned at him. "What do you think?"
He laughed. "Stop looking at me as if I were a doctor going to save your baby's life!" he protested. He ran his hands up the keys in a preparatory trill. "All right," he said, "We obviously want something with some sexual teeth in it. We want a flattened fifth or two."
He began to pick out a melody with one hand, then his left hand joined in with some dark chords. "So wake me up to say goodbye...up to say good...so wake me up to say goodbye...'cause now it's o-ver....' Bridge," he announced after a moment, breaking into a haunting series of chords that somehow brought Johnny's face before her. Her heart clenched, and tears she had never shed burned at the back of her eyes.
Lew stopped playing suddenly and slapped his ear. Smith blinked at him. "Pencil!" he demanded, patting his other ear futilely, then pointed. "Over there on the coffee table."
She fetched it and he took it from her and began to make squiggles on the paper with one hand, while still picking out chords with the other.
"Okay, now, Smith—do I have to call you Smith?—I think we need a repeat of your chorus here...listen...." He began to sing, "'Now all that's left is how to end, How to begin...' You see the shape here? Can we have another go with the chorus between these two?"
Entranced, her mind whirling with the rightness of the music, she moved around to sit beside him on the piano bench.
"Yes," she said, "I see that. 'So wake me up to say goodbye 'cause now it's over. I feel it in my heart and in your eyes...' How about...'Another place, another time, another...' what?" Smith muttered. She tried again. "'Another place, a better time, a different...season!' Give me your pencil a minute!" She scribbled the line as she spoke. "'But now...it's over, and...we have to say Goodbye.' Does that work?"
Lew was nodding his head as he played under her. "Yup. Getting there," he said.
***
"Let's call Mel!" Smith said excitedly. The song was finished. Lew had been totally inspired, and the music he had put her poem to was fabulous—haunting, aching and sexy in about equal parts. She was feeling intoxicated, as if the creative process were a potent wine. "I want him to hear it!"
Lew looked at his watch and said dryly, "If Mel is awake at this hour, it's usually because he's entertaining a lady. If he's not awake...."
"Two o'clock!" Smith looked at her watch in amazement. She shook her arm and held the watch to her ear. "Two o'clock in the morning? But we can't have been working so long!"
"What can I get you to drink?" asked Lew, getting to his feet.
"I guess one more coffee for the road can't hurt."
She must have drunk a dozen cups already tonight—at this rate she wouldn't fall asleep till noon. But she was too excited and energized to say goodnight just yet.
"Just like old times," Lew said as they sank onto the sofa, she with coffee, he with a scotch and soda. "That was quite a summer."
"Oh—Paper Creek," Smith said ruefully. "How humiliating it all was! You must have been just...outraged. I was so ashamed of my father! You know, I could hardly bear to go out on a date for ages after that. I totally wiped your name from my memory, which I guess is why I was so surprised tonight. I called you 'the boy up at Paper Creek.' And I never told anyone about it."
"Except one person?" suggested Lew.
She laughed. "Yes—just recently. How did you know?"
"You said you'd called me the boy up at Paper Creek. You must have been telling someone."
"Yes," she said, remembering how telling Johnny about that long-ago humiliation had taken the sting out of the memories.
Lew said, "I couldn't believe that summer that you were actually considering a career in your father's business, and I was more than surprised later when I learned from the paper that you had gone into that world. You seemed very unsuited to it."
"Did I?" No one had ever told her that.
"Well, you had a tendency to be tough and defensive, and I thought how much tougher and more defensive you'd have to be to survive in that industry, and what a pity it would be if you did." He touched a lock of hair back from her forehead. "But you didn't get tougher. You got softer. More vulnerable."
"I did, though," she said sadly. "I got a lot tougher. I had to have a skin so thick I—" she grimaced and broke off. "I hated every minute of it. It was like being in solitary confinement. I didn't even know how tough I was."
Lew stroked another lock of hair and moved closer along the sofa. "Well, you don't look tough anymore. You look soft and very female." He bent his head, and it was obvious he meant to kiss her. "So what caused the change?"
She couldn't let him kiss her. She didn't know why, because Lew was sensitive and intelligent, and she liked him a lot. But his lips on hers, his hands on her body, would be a betrayal of something.
"I...I fell in love," she said.
He went still. "Hmmm," he said, absorbing it. "Recently?"
"Very recently." She didn't know why she was saying it, except that she had to stop him from kissing her—but certainly not for Johnny's sake.
"And you are still smitten?"
Of course she wasn't. It had all been a dream from the beginning. "Yes, very much," she said.
It wasn't that she didn't like Lew, she did like him—so why couldn't she let him kiss her? Why was she lying to keep him away, as though even a simple kiss would be sacrilege?
Lew sat back with a rueful smile and picked up his drink.
"There's always someone coming between us, Shee. Do you think I'll ever get my chance with you?"
Of course he would. Lew was a gorgeous, sensitive man any woman would count herself lucky to know. As soon as she got over this thing with Johnny, she'd be....
"I'm sorry," she heard herself say softly. "I'm married, Lew. We got married secretly last week."
Lew's head snapped back with surprise. "Is that where you were? Why—don't tell me you had to elope to escape daddy's vigilant eye?"
With belated caution she said, "No, well—it was rather sudden. We didn't exactly plan on....My father didn't know anything about it."
"And where's your husband now? You're not living with him, or the papers would have said so."
"No...we...Daddy's heart...."
Lew got up and strolled over to the piano and, his glass tucked in against his chest, he bent to read from the heavily annotated paper still propped up there.
"'So wake me up to say goodbye, 'cause now it's over....We'll whisper 'maybe' to ourselves, then say goodbye."
His eyes found hers across the room. "Daddy's heart be damned," he commented softly. "What went wrong, Shee?" And it was as though he was an old friend and really wanted to know.
"Nothing. I can't explain it. It was just—" She squeezed her eyes tight as hot tears burned her. Her heart was suddenly hurting in her breast, as though...as though it really had been broken the morning after her wedding, when Johnny Winterhawk looked at her as if she were a stranger and said My God, what have I done?
"It was just one of those things," she said.
***
"I'm quitting," she finally told her father the next day. "Did Rolly mention? I don't want to be in the business anymore."
"What?"
Rolly hadn't mentioned. "Sorry. I meant to tell you as soon as I told Rolly, but things got in the way. I thought maybe he'd have broken it to you."
"You're quitting St. John? Completely?"
"I have a new career. I'm going to write. I'm going to be a poet and songwriter."
He stared at her fiercely for a moment from under frowning brows.
"Hell!" he exploded. "What did the bastards do to you, girl? You love your work. You love St. John Forest Products as much as I do."
"No," she corrected gently. "I love you, Daddy. And you love St. John Forest Products. So to please you, I did, too. But literature—poetry was always my real love, I'm sure you remember that."
"I remember you've wanted to follow in my footsteps ever since you were sixteen. I n
ever forced you. I told you at the time it would be a tough occupation for a girl."
"Did you?" she smiled sadly. "I guess I thought you wanted me to be tough. Different from other girls."
Her father's eyes kindled. "Well, you were different. You were as smart as a whip. You still are." His voice held pride, and she recognized it for the first time. She wondered why she had never heard that note in his voice before. Her father's voice at fault, or her own ears?
"Do you remember my first summer up at Paper Creek?" she asked.
"You were too young, but you insisted on going," he said, and she wondered how the past could be so confused in memory.
"You wanted me to go." But feeling that, had she insisted on going, hoping to please him? "Do you remember the day you flew up in a helicopter and took Luther Brady back with you?"
Her father shook his head. "Brady? Was he the camp superintendent?"
"He was a university student working for the summer—a boy I was friends with."
He wrinkled his brow at a faint memory. "He was bothering you—somebody called down and told me some kid was bothering you."
"And you never troubled to ask me for the facts. No, he wasn't bothering me. He was my friend. You humiliated us both very publicly, and then you left me there alone for the rest of the summer to face all the men who'd seen it happen. I was afraid to look at a boy after that."
Her father was watching her as though he knew his world was going to crumble, but he said nothing.
"You used to tell me not to date any of your employees because they'd only be looking for a way in by marrying me," she accused him. "I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought no one could ever love me for myself. Is that true?"
"No," said her father. He looked shaken.
"Did you ever love me?"
"My God, don't you know it?" He was whiter than he had been after his heart attack, if that was possible.
For an answer, she only looked at him.
"You and your mother are the only two people in the world I've ever loved," he said hoarsely. "Of course I love you! I've loved you since the day you were born. I'll love you till the day I die."
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