Season of Storm

by Alexandra Sellers

  "I thought you stopped loving me when Maman died," Smith said. "I thought you hated me. I've always thought you blamed me for her death."

  "Why would I hate you?" he whispered. "Why would you think it?"

  "You never spoke to me, Daddy. I thought you blamed me because she'd died and I was still alive. You never even told me she was dead. It was Madame Stubelski, from downstairs, who told me."

  "Ma pauvre enfant!" She could hear the stream of French as though Tante Marie were behind her now. "Ta mere, ta mere! Ah! Ah!" She could have cried now the tears she had not known how to cry then.

  "You never said anything to me about it. You sat in your corner in front of your easel for days and days and you never moved, never said a word. Without Tante Marie I'd have starved.

  "Then one day you painted thick smears over the canvas and stood up and went out. I looked at the canvas after you left. It was a painting of mother and me. I could still see bits of mother's face under the smears, but my face was completely blotted out. And then we left Paris and came here and everything changed."

  She was crying now. A flood of tears poured unchecked from her eyes and bathed her face.

  "I didn't know," her father said. "Forgive me. I didn't know how to do it. I was lost. I didn't know my own name."

  Smith turned her face away. "I loved Maman, too. But you never said one kind word to me. We could have comforted each other, shared the pain. When you chose to bear it alone, I had to do the same. I was too young, Daddy, I was too young to bear it alone."

  "Yes, I see."

  "I've told Rolly that I won't be going back to work. I'm telling you that I want to sell off my shares as soon as possible. And I'll be moving out. I'm going to buy a place in the city. I don't know how long that'll take. Depending on when you come home from the hospital, you may have to make arrangements for a nurse."

  "I won't need a nurse," Cord St. John said.

  "All right. I've hired a housekeeper."

  "Do you intend to sever all relations with me?" her father asked gruffly.

  "No, Daddy," she said tiredly. "I just intend to start living my own life."

  "I love you," he said. "I thought you knew it. I thought I showed you. I'm sorry, Shulamith."

  "All right," was all she could say.

  Twenty-eight

  "What do you want?" Smith demanded irritably. "I told you I wasn't going to answer any more questions!"

  Staff Sergeant Podborski looked at her coldly. "I am a police officer investigating a crime," he said.

  "What crime? There hasn't been any crime."

  "Extortion," Podborski said doggedly.

  "Staff Sergeant Podborski," she said in measured tones, as though she were having to communicate with a rather dim child, "I don't know if you've looked lately, but nothing has been extorted from anyone in this business."

  "Conspiracy to extort is a crime whether the plot succeeds or not."

  "What?"

  "For example, if I you ran off with some of your Injun friends in a fake kidnapping, to try to make your father surrender his lawful rights to some timber, that would be criminal even if your father didn't cave in. See?"

  She stared at him speechlessly.

  "We wouldn't bother charging your friends with kidnapping in that case." He had not shifted from the negligent posture, leaning in the doorway, but his hard, cold voice belied it. "Of course, Miss St. John, if you had been forced to go along with it against your will, that would be a different thing altogether. That would be abduction and conspiracy and a few other things, too. And if it turned out you were raped, why the jury would understand your reasons for not telling us the truth right away. And the judge would put those boys away for ten years with no parole."

  Smith was shaking. "I've said all I'm going to say. Please—"

  "You wouldn't pull down anything like ten years, of course. Maybe only five, or two. You might even get a suspended sentence. Mind you, some people don't like the idea of having a criminal record—"

  "Please leave," she said coldly.

  But Staff Sergeant Podborski made an agile move that prevented her from closing the door, gestured to his silent comrade and said, "Would you have a look at this and tell me if you recognize it?" and rippling out in front of her eyes was the brilliant dragon robe.

  "What have you done to it?" she shrieked. The beautiful blue silk was creased and torn, and a great smear of black grease defaced the dragon.

  "I'm afraid someone dropped it in the bottom of the boat, and we stepped on it a bit before we noticed," he said in ironic apology, and she knew the defacing had been deliberate.

  "This is priceless. This is a work of art," she said, touching the robe with helpless, loving fingers. "Can't you see the workmanship? What you've done is criminal!" she choked.

  "Is it yours?"

  "No, it's not mine. If it were, I'd sue you blind."

  "Where have you seen it before?"

  She froze, her hand on the robe. "I haven't seen it before," she said stupidly, not thinking of the consequences, thinking only that they must not connect her to Johnny.

  "But the last time you saw it, it was in good condition," Staff Sergeant Podborski suggested softly.

  "Pardon me?"

  He winked at her, but not kindly. "Think it over," he said. "A woman can always change her mind."

  And then he was gone.

  ***

  It was the height of stupidity to go to the island. The police might be watching it or her or both. But she couldn't stop herself. She had to see Johnny, to warn him....

  Smith rented a speedboat from a marina. The boat was small and fast, the journey over in less than half the time it took under sail. Outcast was moored at the end of the dock, and she slipped around the other side and docked beside the black speedboat. She smiled at the sight of the navy-and-gold-trimmed yacht, its white finish gleaming pink in the sunset. There were more happy memories than ugly ones connected with the sight of it. Even if it had been a fool's paradise, she had experienced total joy on board the Outcast.

  She ran up the pathway through the trees and stopped when she came to the rock staircase. The house was beautiful and peaceful, and she came on it with the same sense of surprised discovery as the first time. Soft light spilled out a few of the windows, and the waterfall made its soft hushing noises.

  She waited what seemed a very long time for Johnny to answer her ring, long enough for her to become impatient and then worried. And then at last the door opened and light streamed out around his dark figure.

  She had been so full of speech, but suddenly she was tongue-tied, standing and gazing at him in helpless need.

  Johnny Winterhawk made a startled noise and drew her inside, wordlessly shutting the door. Even this small touch comforted her, and when he took her in his arms she clung to him and knew for the first time why she had come here. She had not come to warn him. She had come so that he would take her in his arms and kiss her as deeply and tormentedly as he was kissing her now.

  "Johnny," she whispered urgently, when he let her go. He turned and, holding her hand, led her quickly up through the house. "Johnny, they know—"

  "Yes," he said. "What did they tell you?"

  "They've got the robe—the dragon robe!" she cried.

  "Have they?" he said as though the information was of only distant interest. "They've—"

  Her scream cut him off. At the door of his study she stood frozen in shock, while Johnny picked through the debris and made his way to the phone.

  His study was destroyed. Every drawer of the four filing cabinets had been smashed or pried open and every one emptied. All around them were piles of papers, books, newspaper clippings, file folders, all in a mess that looked like a garbage dump. The drawers of his desk had been taken out and dumped helter-skelter. The bookshelves were empty behind the mountain of books they had held. A lamp was on its side on the floor, smashed. The handwoven carpet lay twisted against the window, over two broken plants. Other pla
nts had been uprooted, as though someone had been looking for something hidden in the soil, and lay dying on the floor. Three framed Indian prints had been taken off the walls and set on the floor, one of them so violently that an ugly crack ran from corner to corner of the glass. A ritual mask lay facedown in a mound of plant soil.

  Johnny stood across the room, the telephone in his hands, trying to raise the operator. Smith hadn't moved, couldn't move, after her first shocked scream.

  "Who did it?" she whispered through dry lips. She would forever afterward be ashamed that her first thought was not of vandals, but of his friends among the Chopa, who had wanted to hold her for ransom.

  Johnny Winterhawk held the phone to his ear and laughed mirthlessly. "Who did it?" he repeated. "Who do you think did it? The same ones who took the dragon robe. The same ones who've arrested Wilfred Tall Tree and are holding him I don't know where."

  She couldn't take it in, not all at once. She had to reject some of it, to pretend, just for a few saving minutes, that she did not know what she knew. Wilf. A powerful sense of disquiet cloaked her when she thought of him, and before she was even fully aware of it she heard herself say "We've got to get him back!"

  "Hal?" Johnny said into the phone. "Sorry to get you at home, but I'm going to need some help.... "

  Smith began to pick her way around the destruction, wanting to do something to put it to rights, helpless in the face of so much destruction.

  "Writ of habeas corpus," Johnny said on the phone, and she guessed that Hal was a lawyer. Gingerly she bent to pick one of the drawers out of the rubble, then became aware that Johnny was shaking his head at her. He covered the mouthpiece and said quietly, "Photographs," and gestured to her to come to him.

  She went gratefully to his side, as though he was the only light to guide her in a hostile universe. She felt stunned and shaken and threatened. It was too much to accept, too much to believe that this should be happening in her country. In that way Johnny was luckier than she, she thought: he had started out with no illusions.

  "Hang on a sec," said Johnny into the phone. "What's the name of the one who came to see you?" he asked her, and she knew what he meant.

  "Staff Sergeant Podborski," she said. Johnny repeated the name into the phone.

  "Oh, and Sergeant Rice! He was first."

  "The preliminary investigation was handled by a Sergeant Rice," said Johnny, and after a few more words he hung up.

  "What's happening?" she asked.

  "I've been calling the local lockups," he told her, "but no one is willing to admit to any knowledge of his whereabouts. Hal can't get a writ of habeas corpus till the courts open in the morning."

  "We've got to leave him in there all night?" she gasped, and a black dread crept into her mind. "We can't, Johnny, we can't!"

  He looked bleak. "We haven't much choice. We could add prison break to the list of our crimes if we could find out which lockup, Peaceable Woman." He tried to smile. "But unless Hal can find that staff sergeant—and we don't know for sure that he was the arresting officer—we won't know where he is till morning."

  "Why didn't Wilf phone?" Smith demanded suddenly. "He's allowed a phone call—who would he have called?"

  When he looked at her now the look in his eyes was pity. "He may not have been allowed one phone call," he said softly. "That's a right Canadians only think they have."

  "What?" she whispered. "What"

  "Canada has it by tradition, not by right. The police are not necessarily bound by tradition. Wilf would have called me—either here or at the office—and at the very least left a message with the answering service. So we're assuming that they want to interrogate him first. He'll probably be allowed a call later tonight."

  She repeated helplessly, "We can't leave him there."

  "We can't do anything till Hal calls back," Johnny pointed out. "I'm going to take some pictures of this stuff. Can you get us something to drink?"

  "All right," she said, but as soon as she stepped away from him she felt the sense of menace multiply a thousand fold and stepped back to his side. "I'm sorry," she said, "I don't know what it is, but I don't want to be alone."

  "All right," he said, and together they went to the kitchen to make coffee, and together to his bedroom to find his camera, and back to the study. There were signs of search everywhere in the house, but nowhere was the damage so extensive as in the study, almost as though whoever had searched the study had been venting a personal hostility.

  Involuntarily Smith thought of the ruined dragon robe, but she did not tell Johnny about it. He had had enough for one day, she thought. She had never found out who had originally owned the robe. Suppose he had loved the woman as dearly as he had once thought he loved Smith? Suppose it was his only memento? She would tell him later; she would warn him before he saw it—but not tonight.

  With a detached efficiency, he took the pictures of the destruction in his study and they had begun to put it back together again when the phone rang.

  She stared intently at Johnny as he listened to the voice at the other end. "Hal," he mouthed at her, and then he said yes a few times, and then, "Okay, Hal, thanks," and then he hung up.

  "Neither Podborski nor Rice is available. He's left messages for them to call him. He suggests we sit tight until we hear."

  "Can't we do something? Can't we go looking for him?" Smith asked. The nameless horror was still there in the back of her mind, filling her with disquiet.

  "If they're keeping him under wraps till they've questioned him we won't find him, according to Hal."

  "They can't do this!" she exploded. "They can't do it! This isn't a police state!"

  "Isn't it?" asked Johnny softly.

  Until this moment her sense of disquiet had been all on Wilf's account. Now, for the first time she thought of what it would mean for Johnny and herself. "Johnny," she said slowly. "What will Wilf say to them?" Johnny shrugged, as though he had long ago considered the question and tossed it aside. "That depends on what the interrogation is like."

  They worked in the study together for an hour, exchanging only the odd comment or question and answer. There was never a suggestion that Smith should go home; it seemed right that she should be there.

  Yet her sense of disquiet continued to grow till it was almost intolerable, flooding her brain till it drowned out every other thought.

  When she couldn't stand it any longer she set down the scissors she had been using on one of the broken plants and turned to Johnny.

  "I can't wait anymore!" she said huskily. "He's in trouble. He needs us. We've got to find him, Johnny!" Johnny nodded and without comment stood up from the pile of papers he had been sorting through; and she knew that he felt the same disquiet.

  She crossed to his side. "I came in a speedboat," she said.

  The phone rang, and Johnny reached out and snatched the receiver off the hook. "Hal?" he said into the mouthpiece, and then held it away from his ear so Smith could hear, too.

  "Okay, Johnny, I just got the word. Apparently he was arrested, and he was put in one of the local lockups for the night, but now he's been taken to the Royal Georgia Hospital. They're saying he collapsed in his cell, but just between you and me it sounds as though the interrogation got a bit rigorous, and the old man wasn't up to it. Just between you and me, mind. Lawyers aren't supposed to slander the police."

  Twenty-nine

  It was too late to visit, the hospital insisted, and in any case Wilfred Tall Tree was unconscious. He had suffered a sudden drop in blood pressure and might have a ruptured spleen. He should not be disturbed now, and of course he would live through the night....

  They went to bed, in Johnny's big bed high above the ocean, but they did not make love. She lay in his arms, and they held each other and comforted each other, and spoke and thought of Wilf, who had been a friend of his grandfather's long ago on the reserve.

  "Why did they take you off the reserve, Johnny?" Shulamith asked.

  He grunted. "It
was the fashion in social services then."

  "The fashion?"

  "The idea then was to break all the child's natural bonds to blood and place, and then somehow he would thrive and grow up free from the problems of his background."

  "Jesus," she breathed. "How old were you?"

  "Eight. It wasn't just Indian children. It was happening all over. Remember that at the same time as I was taken from my mother, in Britain they were shipping kids to Australia and the good life, telling them their parents and siblings were dead. Most of them were treated like slaves when they got there. All kinds of children were taken from their parents, when what was really needed was a bit of support for the family."

  "Where did they take you?"

  "I was at residential school for a while, and when my mother died I was put in a foster home. "

  "So you never saw your mother or grandfather again?"

  "I was allowed to visit the reserve when my mother died. And a couple of other times."

  "That's grotesque! That's just sick!"

  "The year I graduated from college," he said, "I went back to Eagle's Nest to visit my grandfather. He was a very old man then, one of the elders of the tribe." Johnny paused to breathe, and she knew it was an unfamiliar thing, to be telling someone this story. How much had it hurt him, kept inside all these years?

  "I was proud of myself. I'd made it in the white world, and he was the only member of my family left. I went to tell him. He invited me in. He had a little two-room hut on the reserve, no plumbing, no amenities. And I sat there telling him about my successes. He heard me out, he listened to all my—" Johnny broke off, lifted an arm and rubbed his scalp.

  "He didn't say anything till I'd finished. Then he just looked at me, and he asked if I had done it all as an Indian or as a white man." The pain was nearly a shriek threading his words, a counterpoint of strident anguish under the deep quiet voice. "Then he told me what I'd done, from his point of view. I had sold my birthright, traded away my heritage for acceptance into the society that was destroying my people."