Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  Her voice was vibrant with a different kind of passion.

  “I can’t help myself—there’s nothing I can do. But it’s not because I love you or because I’m afraid of you. It’s Mary, and Harry. I’m not going to let you destroy them. That’s why I’m bargaining with you—not for myself. I could see you dead and be happier than I’ve ever been in all my life. And listen to me carefully, Roy. If you get out and stay out, I won’t give you up. If you make one move to leave this place before you go for good, I’ll . . . I’ll tell Harry, and he’ll report you. He wouldn’t hesitate the way I have. He wouldn’t care what happened to any of us. I’m telling you you’ve got me so far but no farther. I’m like a cornered rat and I’ll turn if I have to. You’re not going off this place and you’re not to use the phone. And she’s not coming here—I mean that too, Roy. Now go—they’ll be coming. I hear the car. Quickly! Not that way . . . here, through her room.”

  We were simply caught. It’s hard now to communicate the acute dismay, and horror isn’t too much to say, I think, of the silent message that passed between the two of us standing there. We were too close to the door to get away. We couldn’t even get into the bathroom without the sound of the door giving us away. Mary’s hand on my arm was cold as ice, as my heart was, knowing how silently and swiftly the man could move. In that brief fraction of an instant he could be just outside the door. And then we were given an instant to use. It was Mary who was aware of it in a flash as his voice came, nearer, terribly nearer it seemed to me, and so concentrated with its quiet menace that I’m not sure I’d have had strength to move if it hadn’t been for her.

  “Just one thing more, Alice . . .”

  We didn’t hear what it was. We slipped with a speed and silence born of awful necessity across the mat-carpeted floor and out onto the lanai. Suddenly, just as I thought we were going to make the corner, Mary drew her breath in with a sharp gasp. Her body went taut as a bowstring for an instant, and before I knew what she was doing she was gone, running—running back the way we’d come. I stared after her with a kind of incredulous terror. She was at the entrance to my room again, and inside. I waited, mute with dismay. It wasn’t more than a second, but it was interminable, before she was out again, running back, white-faced. In her hand was my bag. I’d left it on the bed, not even seeing it.

  “Quick!” she whispered.

  We went faster than that along the lanai to the front of the house. At the end of the living room she stopped and leaned against the wall, her eyes closed for an instant. When she put her hand out to give me my bag it was trembling.

  “That man is a murderer,” she whispered. “He . . . he’d have seen it. He’d have known.”

  We went on till we were at the lanai entrance to her room. I made for the bamboo chaise longue. My knees were too shaky to hold me up any longer.

  “No!” she whispered urgently. “Here.”

  I was conscious of the bathing suit in her hand for the first time. She held it out.

  “Put it on in my bathroom, quick, and let’s get out. We’ll say you stopped here and didn’t go to your room. And I’ll sit down.”

  She managed to laugh, though it didn’t sound the way it was supposed to, sank down in a chair and put her feet up on the ottoman. She let her head fall back and closed her eyes for an instant, but she was getting up as I closed the bathroom door. It seemed a little crazy to me to be madly scrambling into an open midriff bathing suit when I was freezing cold and so shaken I couldn’t figure out which was top and which wasn’t, but I did it. I was acutely aware that her going back then to get my bag had taken more courage than I would have had, even for myself. I was profoundly grateful to her, realizing what I would have felt, going back and finding it, and from then on waiting, and not knowing. It was bad enough as it was.

  When I came out I saw her across the hall standing by a window. She motioned me to come. Through the screen of leafy shrubs we could see the main entrance to the house. Alice was there, looking from our muddy shoes to Kumumato beside her. The car was in the drive. He had obviously been in the process of taking my bags in when she came out. It was equally obvious that they were discussing our present whereabouts.

  “She’s asking where we are,” Mary said.

  She was probably doing a lot more than that, I thought, but I didn’t say so. It was a little difficult to know whether to tell Mary her precious Kumumato was part and parcel of the whole thing or not. Then, all of a sudden, she said:

  “He’s in on it too.”

  She said it quietly, without any surprise or special emphasis.

  “—I can tell from here.”

  How she could, except that her mother was looking back toward her wing and mine and Kumumato was shaking his head, I didn’t know, but as she was right it didn’t matter very much.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  She stood there, a slim brown mermaid figure in the briefest possible swimming suit, barefooted, her yellow hair tied in an old maid’s knot on the top of her head, her face still pale but calm and completely unrevealing. Her mother was turning to come back into the house, and Kumumato was reaching down for our muddy shoes.

  She looked around at me. “We’d better go out. Are you game?”

  I wasn’t, frankly, but she’d been game enough to go back after my bag.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  “Okay, let’s go. We’ll go around the lanai and I’ll chatter. Maybe she won’t want to see us either. Why do you suppose Kumumato said she wasn’t home?”

  I’d been wondering about that myself, but I didn’t have any idea. It seemed foolish on the face of it, though he wouldn’t have any reason to think she wouldn’t be able to hear us clattering around.

  “I know,” Mary said. “We’ll go down this way.”

  She opened a door just before the living-room angle, and we went down a narrow staircase. The service quarters were there and a passage led out onto a tiled strip the width of the lanai above it. There was a small vegetable garden that became lawn and flower garden in front of the living room. A Japanese woman in a gray kimono pulled up to her knees, a big coconut straw hat on her head, was bending over the lettuce heads. She didn’t look up as we passed.

  “That’s the cook, Kumumato’s wife,” Mary said. “She was a picture bride.”

  Then she started to chatter. She chattered about the flowers and the dark oriental grass that grew in little hummocks because the roots bunched up under it and you couldn’t keep it level. To all visible intents she’d forgotten Uncle Roy existed, while I was listening not to her at all but for her mother’s footsteps to come out onto the lanai above us. But they didn’t come. We were in the pool, Mary as much at home as a slim silver fish and me lumbering around in comparison, when Alice Cather came out. She called to us gaily and waved her hand. We swam around, and only some minutes later, when we were resting a moment on the broad rim of the pool on the far side did Mary try to speak.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said, very quietly. “I don’t even know what to think. It can’t be what it looks like. It can’t.”

  She looked back and up at the rambling house. We could see past the lanai with its pale-gold bamboo chairs and bright-covered cushions into the silvery quiet shadows of the living rooms. It was too civilized and gracious to be a storm center of anything dark and menacing.

  “It just can’t be,” she said.

  I didn’t know what she thought it couldn’t be. I had no way of telling what kind of meaning what Roy Cather said to her mother was having to her.

  “Grace,” she said. “—You don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

  I shook my head. She looked back into the deep cleft where the ravine narrowed and the overflow from the pool made a waterfall far down to join the white ribbon of the stream at the bottom, between the great black moss-stained rocks.

  “Do you suppose she’s fixing the cottage for . . . him?”

  I shook my head again. I didn’t kn
ow anything—and perhaps the less both of us knew the better off we’d be.

  She was silent for a moment. Then she slipped down into the crystal water, and I followed her across and out on the grassy terrace under the bank.

  The steps to the garden level were a little way from us, but she went along the way the captain and I had gone the evening before. Across the ravine the trees against which I’d seen the apparition that had become all too solid flesh were soft and lovely in the full glow of the afternoon sun streaming in from beyond the edge of the ocean. I was trying to see the face again as I’d seen it in the dusk, and hear the redbird’s call, low and now sinister. He must have thought I was Alice Cather, it came to me suddenly, to risk calling and showing himself. And it flashed through my mind then that he must have been closer still to the house to recognize her in my doorway rolling down the curtain, thinking probably it was a signal she was giving him instead of a barrier to close him out from my sight.

  We were now almost to the air-raid shelter. Mary was talking, about what I’ve no idea, but I was acutely conscious suddenly of the quick pressure of her bare wet arm linked in mine.

  “Look,” she said brightly. “—The sun on the kukui trees. They’re the ones with the light green leaves.”

  She was pointing with her free hand out across the ravine, her arm in mine still warning me with its pressure.

  “They always make it look like spring, and when the shower trees are in bloom it’s lovely.”

  I knew then why she wanted me to seem to be looking in the other direction, up toward the sunlit mountain wall. We were just in front of the solid redwood door of the shelter, with its elaborate iron lock and hinges. It was tightly closed, but above it one of the long sprays of orchids had been caught and was held, its petals still crisp and fresh, where the door had closed on it. She must have been seeing in her mind, as I did in mine, the silent figure crouching in the dark behind it, listening to us pass. Only she wouldn’t see, as I did, the hand creep back and the long naked blade it held, tense and motionless.

  She looked at me, a little pale again, her lips compressed, a startled expression in her eyes. We turned up the steps to the garden level. She was silent the rest of the way back to her room.

  Inside she said, “I don’t know what to do, Grace. I just don’t know. I wish I could talk to her, but I wouldn’t dare. She mustn’t know we know—not till we know what to do.”

  Her eyes were bright with sudden tears welling up. “How horrible for her! She must be almost out of her mind, Grace. I feel so dreadfully sorry for her!”

  She blinked the tears back quickly.

  “And I don’t know what to do,” she repeated, slowly. “The . . . the man back there . . . He’s dreadfully wicked. He’s horrible, Grace. I . . . I know who he is. And he hates us all, frightfully. They’ve lived in terror of him for years.—And it’s all my fault, I was the one who made her come back. I raised hell till she had to. I wish we’d stayed away!”

  “Well, you didn’t, angel,” I said practically. “There’s no use wishing. It won’t help, will it?”

  She shook her head. “And I’ve got to do something, and I don’t know what . . . and it frightens me. I can’t tell you why it does, Grace.”

  She got up and stood for a moment, listening.

  “We’ve got to hurry. You’ll stick by me, won’t you . . . I mean, until we know?”

  I had a kind of fatalistic sinking of the heart, to say the least. Understanding nothing at all, I would stick . . . because I was fairly tightly stuck already, it seemed to me. All I could hope for was that I’d get out without a knife in my back or my throat or wherever. If I weren’t just so far from home, I thought. It was all very well for Alice Cather to keep me there under the pretense that I was a secret weapon, of some sort unknown to me, but it did make me unpleasantly vulnerable.

  9

  A LONG SHAFT OF SUNLIGHT STREAMING IN from the garden, slanting across the tree tops in the valley below us, slanted more sharply and disappeared. I was aware of it with a kind of sick feeling of acute dismay. If I could ever have commanded the sun to stop in its diurnal course, that is the moment I would have done it. The idea of night falling and leaving us remote and isolated in the dense blackout of the brooding mountains was as terrifying as if it had already happened.

  Mary came over to me and put her hand on my arm.

  “Don’t be frightened, Grace. He won’t hurt you. It’s only us. But I . . . I’ll bet you wish Colonel Primrose was here, don’t you? And why haven’t you ever married him . . . or is that not any of my business?”

  “Chiefly because he’s never asked me to marry him,” I said. It was an automatic answer that I’m so used to making, because I’m so often asked whether it’s anybody’s business, that I didn’t have to think. I was trying to think if I did really wish he was there, or was truly thankful he wasn’t. In a sense, both. For myself I’d have been delighted. He could have told me what to do. For the girl standing there straight and wide-eyed and pale, in an agony of conflicting doubts and loyalties and with a very real terror in her heart, I was glad he wasn’t. She wanted a little time . . . or a little time at any rate was what her mother, apparently, was trying so desperately to play for. I really couldn’t think whether I wanted Colonel Primrose there or not, with his black X-Ray eyes that see through subterfuge at once and his uncompromising ruthlessness that wouldn’t hesitate one instant if necessary to ruin the Cathers or any one else.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I went into the bathroom and got my clothes.

  “I’ll go around and use my own shower,” I said, and started for the lanai. I turned back as Mary called me. She came quickly over.

  “Listen, Grace—I’ve got to tell you.”

  Her face had the look of a person’s who’d been thinking deeply and determined to come squarely to grips with an unpleasant fact.

  “I’ve been telling you a lie, sort of . . . and I mustn’t. The man back there is my Uncle Roy. I told you about him. I don’t know how he got here now, or why he’s here, but I know one thing—he shouldn’t be. He doesn’t live in Java, Grace. He lives in Japan. And he was there two months ago. I know he was. There was a broadcast somebody sent to us. He said he’d come, but . . . we thought it was just him trying to get us in trouble.”

  Her face was very pale, but her words were clear and distinct and orderly.

  “I’m not supposed to know any of this. I . . . found out, because Mother was frantic. I couldn’t believe it. It isn’t possible. But it’s true, Grace. He has no right to be here—it’s . . . terribly wrong. I ought to go and tell my father. You ought to go and call the . . . the Army. And I won’t try to stop you. But Grace . . . if you could wait, just till tomorrow morning? If you don’t, we’re ruined . . . Mother and Dad, I mean. I don’t care about myself. But they’ve never done anything disloyal, to anybody, and it’s not right for them to suffer. I’m not asking you to betray anybody. I’ll watch tonight. Watch him, and . . . Kumumato.”

  She stopped for a moment.

  “Just till morning, Grace. Something is bound to happen.”

  I didn’t know what to say or do.

  “Will you, Grace? There’s nothing he can do tonight. He can’t get out of the shelter. I’ll lock it. Please, Grace—will you?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know. I’ll have to see.”

  We heard a gay voice calling. “—Darling?”

  Mary’s hands clenched tightly and she caught her breath. Alice Cather was coming along the inside hall.

  “Hurry,” she whispered. She gave me a little shove onto the lanai. I heard her voice behind me, casual and light-hearted. “Yes, Mother.—We had a divine swim . . .”

  I went quickly along to my room. My bags were unpacked and my clothes neatly pressed and hung up in the closet. I took a shower and got dressed. I went out on the lanai and came back in again a dozen times, I guess. I did everything I could to delay my final going out into the
long silver wood-panelled dining room. I tried to think and I tried not to think. It was the clear and simple truth that my duty was what Mary had said it was, of course. I ought to go and call up G2 at once. There was no doubt of that, none in the least.

  And every time I made up my mind that that was what I would do, and do at once, Mary Cather’s white face and her wide imploring eyes and the touch of her hand on my arm came back to me, and I could see her barring my way to the door, begging one night’s grace for her mother and father. And I could hear Alice Cather again, passionately protective as she’d been the night before, or frantic but determined as she’d been in the afternoon, making up a whole fabric of falsehood as a stopgap against the tide of disaster rising around her.

  I stopped for the twentieth time, I suppose, in front of the dressing table, and picked up my comb to do my hair over again. I still didn’t know what I was going to do. A light tap on the door made me start sharply. I didn’t want to face Alice Cather then, not in the least, but I knew I had to.

  “Come in,” I called.

  It wasn’t Alice. It was Kumumato, his face impressive and quite without any expression that I could read. He bowed a little, or ducked his head a little rather.

  “The telephone, madam,” he said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak. I suppose I expected him to use pidgin English, but he didn’t. “This way, if you’d like me to show you, madam.”

  I pulled myself hastily together and started to follow him. The door of Alice Cather’s sitting room was partly open, and I heard her voice, so different that it was hardly recognizable as the one I’d listened to earlier.

  “. . . sure you wouldn’t mind, Harry,” she was saying, cool and light and completely assured again. “It seemed such a shame to have the cottage just standing . . .”

  I was out of earshot then, but it was enough. And Mary was right. As she’d predicted, the guests had arrived before supper. I wondered, as I followed Kumumato’s stocky figure along the passage. I wondered whether it was just Aunt Norah she was trying to keep out, or whether the old business of safety in numbers wasn’t involved. The more people there were around, the less freedom of action there’d be for the gentleman in the air-raid shelter. It struck me suddenly as rather pathetic, the frail and futile defenses she was using to enforce her end of the grim bargain she’d made. It was like using the ribbon from a hand-painted box of candy to tie up the gate against a rising devastating flood . . . or saying, “Look, there are some people in the house by the road, so you can’t go out” to a man-eating tiger who could slip silent and unseen through the jungle growth of the ravine. I felt very sorry for her, some way.