Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  “Well, they’re going to see another one right now,” Mary said blithely. “We won’t be a minute, Mother, and you oughtn’t to encourage them to drink anyway. It wrecks their livers. We’ll be right back.”

  I saw there was only one thing Alice Cather could do. It was impossible to forbid them to go, and yet she couldn’t let them go in there where I knew Roy Cather was waiting.

  “All right, then, dear,” she said. “But please don’t go into the shelter tonight. I’ve got a lot of things stuck in there. You can show them that tomorrow.”

  “Okay, dear,” Mary said.

  The impulse in Alice Cather to repeat it and insist she be taken seriously must have been as great then as the impulse to go along to see she was obeyed. She took a step or two toward the hall, and caught herself. She went quietly back and sat down.

  “Do hurry, then, won’t you, darling?”

  Mary switched the pool lights on from the panel in the game room where the bamboo bar was, downstairs. It flooded the whole garden and stretched out over the ravine to the high light green of the kukui trees against which I’d seen the disembodied face the night before. I could see it again, more sinister in its meaning now it was crouching, not disembodied, close to us just under the green lawn in front of us. He would have seen the light too, and be waiting.

  “Just a second,” Mary said. She ran across the room and opened the door into the service quarters. “I’ll be right with you.”

  As she closed the door Dave Boyer turned quickly. “—What happened to Swede?”

  Tommy shook his head.

  “No soap.” He shook his head again. “Didn’t work, David. He’s not staying. Let’s give up. It’s his hell. Let him write his ticket there and back. It’s what he’s going to do anyway.”

  He was keeping one eye on the door, waiting for Mary to come back.

  Dave Boyer grinned lopsidedly. “Oh, yeah?”

  “There you go,” Tommy said airily, but he reddened to the roots of his hair. “Dawson, the man nobody understands. Ah, Fate! Ah, Life! Ah . . . Mary!”

  She was back, a little breathless, closing the door quickly behind her as if she was afraid something was at her heels. The bright spots burned in her cheeks again.

  “Come along—we will be late,” she said.

  What had happened and was happening I didn’t know, but we’d no sooner got out onto the grass than I heard the door open and Kumumato come out into the game room. For anybody busily getting dinner up to the dining room floor he seemed to have an amazing lot of time to waste. He came on over to the tiled terrace just outside the room, not apparently concerned with us but where he could see us, certainly. I thought Mary hadn’t heard him. She gave no indication of it until we’d crossed the lawn to the stairs going down, not those by the pool but the other ones, to the house side of the air-raid shelter. Tommy was at her side and Dave was with me, that odd grin still hovering in the neighborhood of his dark eyes. He shook his head, nodding at him.

  “What a guy,” he said.

  Tommy Dawson was pointing to a monkey-pod tree, asking Mary if it was an elm. We were just at the top of the stone steps. Mary turned around.

  “Oh Kumumato san,” she called across to the man on the terrace. “Please go to Dad’s study and get me that book on trees for Lieutenant Dawson. It’s on the table by the window. Bring it to me here, please.”

  She smiled over at him, but it was a very surface smile, and I could see a determined gleam in her eyes. She’d known all the time Kumumato was there and she must have been wondering how she was going to get rid of him. Why, I didn’t at the moment quite know. And it seemed to me for some reason that the Japanese house man was equally determined not to go. He hesitated very plainly, and Tommy Dawson, about as much interested in trees as in books, came hastily to his aid.

  “Oh, don’t bother on my account——”

  “Not at all,” Mary said quickly. “If you’re interested . . . Hurry, please, Kumumato—we’ll wait.”

  I thought his position was curiously not unlike Alice Cather’s: he simply couldn’t refuse, much as he apparently wanted to. He stood there, however, for another full instant, his face entirely impassive and expressionless, before he said, “Yes, miss,” and went.

  11

  “THE ORCHIDS ARE LOVELY DOWN HERE,” Mary said, starting along the minute he was out of sight.

  I glanced up at the lanai. It was Alice Cather I was looking for, wondering if her self-control would extend to the point of not letting herself come out up there and watch us too, or if she was depending on Kumumato down below. Whichever it was, she wasn’t in sight. Even in the dim glow cast on the lanai from within the house or reflected up from the flood light on the garden, the bulky figure watching us couldn’t be mistaken for hers.

  It was Swede Ellicott. He was still up there where I’d left him, but he wasn’t looking makai any longer. He was looking mauka, though not at the mountains. He turned and stood watching us as we went down the steps.

  “—He hasn’t gone, after all,” I thought.

  “—It used to break my heart, on the Mainland,” Mary was saying brightly, “when somebody would send me one of those awful sickish lavender cataleyas. They cost so much, and nobody ever looks at one out here. Now here’s a cataleya that’s a beauty.”

  She went along the grass to the bank, near the air-raid shelter door—so dangerously near that my heart missed a beat, I’m sure—and reached up. She held up a great lovely bloom, its fringed petals white shading to pale lemon.

  “But it’s these I love.” She went a step closer to that redwood door and broke off a cluster of waxen white flowers that looked like a couple of dozen butterfly forms, their wings spread to take off.

  “—And this is the shelter we’re not to go in,” she said very coolly. She raised her voice a little. My eyes were glued to that door. It was closed tight. The spray of orchids caught in the top of it when it was closed the last time was still there, not as fresh as it had been, the mangled petals drooping.

  “Let’s just take a quick look-see,” Tommy Dawson said.

  She looked around at him with a quick smile. “Later maybe,” she said. And then so quickly and accurately that I was unaware what she was doing until she did it, she thrust a key into the wrought-iron lock and turned it. A bolt clicked home.

  She moved on as calmly as if she’d just turned the key on a recalcitrant kitten in the pantry cupboard. Only her arm trembling a little as she put it through mine while we were walking along toward the pool indicated she knew it wasn’t any kitten but a man-eating tiger. And I suppose she was wondering what to do from then out. I was, certainly. Roy Cather was locked up for the moment, but moments have a grim way of being awfully fleeting. It was hard to believe that a man who wouldn’t stick at what Uncle Roy must have gone through to get across the Pacific Ocean—coming from where he did—would be stymied very long by an ornamental wrought-iron door lock. It was even more disturbing too, because he now knew, of course, that Mary at least knew he was there.

  “—This is the pool,” Mary said calmly. “You can come down the path from the cottage.” She pointed back the way we’d come and around her mother’s wing. “Come any time you want to.”

  “This is swell,” Tommy said. “What time do you go in?”

  “Any time you’d like.”

  She smiled at him and started up the steps to the garden level. She still had hold of my arm. As we got to the top Kumumato was coming through the service quarters door into the game room with a large volume in his hand.

  Mary laughed.

  “There you are, Tommy. You won’t have time to swim.”

  She took her arm out of mine. “Come on, Grace, we’ve got to hurry.”

  When she took hold of my hand I thought it was to draw me along faster. When she let go of it I had in it not a key to the air-raid shelter, I had two keys. She was putting both hands out for the book.

  “—Thank you,” she said.

 
I don’t know enough about orientals to know what Kumumato was thinking. So far as I could see he wasn’t thinking anything. He handed her the book. Then, instead of going back the way he’d come, he stopped inside the game room.

  “Are you through with the lights, Miss Mary?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He clicked the wall switch. The pool and garden disappeared in a blur of velvety black. He waited until we went up the stairs, and switched off the game-room lights too. At the top of the stairs I opened the bag I was carrying looped around my wrist and slipped the two keys into it.

  Alice Cather put down the evening paper as we came into the living room. She wasn’t distrait or anxious any longer. She’d cleared one frantic hurdle . . . or none of us would be there as cheerfully as we were, I imagine she was thinking as she looked up at us.

  “Swede couldn’t stay for dinner,” she said pleasantly. “He had an engagement in town. If the rest of you are ready . . .”

  Neither Tommy nor Dave looked at the other. Mary’s face was as orientally blank in its way as Kumumato’s had been in its. I was not at the moment interested either in Swede or in dinner. It was myself as Keeper of the Keys that I was concerned about. I was rather more than afraid that Mary’s collecting them up in her wing and in that brief sortie into the service quarters was as transparent now to me as her thrusting them into my hands had no doubt been to Kumumato. It was just more of the naïve attempt, it seemed to me, to catch a killer shark with a net made of spider web . . . and probably equally futile unless we could somehow keep it in status quo until Colonel Primrose got there.

  I was wishing desperately, as we sat down, that he’d hurry. The phone ringing just then seemed almost an answer to a prayer. I was sure it was him. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t anybody.

  “—The wrong number, madam,” Kumumato said, coming back.

  It rang twice more before dinner and once while we were having coffee on the lanai. Each time it was the wrong number, Kumumato said. The last time Alice Cather frowned slightly.

  “If it rings again, I’ll answer it, Kumumato,” she said.

  But it didn’t ring again, and about ten o’clock, when Harry Cather went to it to make a call himself it was dead.

  “Those silly girls,” he said patiently.

  He shook his head.

  “They’re always talking to their boy friends and leaving the switch off.”

  He went to the service door and opened it. “Kumu——,” he began, and stopped. The house man was there. Mary glanced quickly at me and at the bag in my lap. If the man had been eavesdropping, however, it had been a waste of time, unless the good-natured wrangle about whether Tommy was playing bridge or poker was of any value to him.

  “The phone is off somewhere,” Harry Cather said. “Ask the girls to be more careful.”

  The idea of the two little maids who padded softly around the table in their white stocking feet and blue kimonos having a private life and giggling to their boy friends over the phone was a little startling. They looked so much like dolls I suppose I’d thought of them as automatons. I could see them now giggling and ducking off, probably when Kumumato appeared, in their haste disrupting the communications system of the entire house. Colonel Primrose, however, might have tried to call. I glanced at my watch. It was too late for him to come now, I thought unhappily, as Tommy and Dave were getting up to go. Alice Cather was doing nothing to detain them. I didn’t want them to go at all. I felt very much as I had when the sun was making his final bow at the curtain of the day. It meant we’d be alone. And I’d have to go back to that open-work room of mine. In any case, lock or no lock Roy Cather was much too close. I took a tight hold for a moment on the keys in my bag, knowing all the time I had no real faith in them.

  It was Tommy’s idea that we walk up to the cottage with them. I suppose my instant acquiescence was another frail attempt at a delaying action. Mary’s reason for deciding it would be fun if her mother went along too might have been two-sided, but Alice’s rather surprising agreement—so they could show them the back path to the pool, she said—seemed nothing more than a desire to get them home as quickly as she could. When we started, the light bouncing along the white coral ribbon of the lane under the bank didn’t help a great deal. I kept hearing the pad of jungle feet creeping behind us in the dark . . . in spite of the keys. My heart contracted with sickening panic at every bend in the road. It was a terrific relief when we were in the cottage at last and the lights were on.

  “—Disorderly beggars, your guests.”

  Tommy looked at the bags open on the floor through the door of the bedroom. At least two of them were. The third marked with Swede Ellicott’s initials was neatly strapped up and sitting over by the front door of the small living room. Tommy and Dave glanced at it and away quickly. In the fireplace was a scattered litter of wadded-up sheets of blue writing paper from the desk in the corner. If Swede had been there in person, packing up or sitting, chewing the end of his pen, trying to write a note or explanation, apology, farewell or whatever, it couldn’t have been clearer. There was no finished note on the desk or the mantel, however, and the bag at the door seemed to say that he’d tried to go but couldn’t. If any one of us saw it and it was what they had come to see, nobody said so.

  “I think you’ll be comfortable,” Alice Cather said. “You can have breakfast at the pool, or cook it here yourselves if you’d rather.”

  She held out her hand. “We must go now, and you’re not coming with us. You’re staying here and going to bed. Come along, you two. We’ll go back the front way.”

  That was a terrific relief too. I didn’t want to do that lane again. At the end of the path we turned and waved to the two tall lean figures outlined against the light from the living room.—They, I thought suddenly, were in for the night.

  Alice put the flashlight on for us to see our way in to the drive. Mary stopped abruptly, looking toward the gate.

  “Who’s that, Mother?”

  It was so black under the wide fringe of jungle growth of trees there in the rain-drenched woods that it was hardly possible to see at all.

  “It looked like a car, when your light was on. Here—let me have it.”

  She took the flash from her mother’s hand and pressed it on. At the end of the misty triangle of light spreading toward the gate was a black coupé, its headlights staring like two blind white eyes as they picked up and reflected our light back to us.

  “It’s probably just somebody parked,” Alice said. “We ought to lock the gates at night.”

  “But there’s nobody in it.” Mary still held the car centered in the frail beam.

  “I know, darling,” her mother said patiently. “I wouldn’t investigate, if I were you. Come on.”

  The girl turned reluctantly.

  “I wish we had some dogs,” she said. “I don’t see why Kumumato’s so dead set against them. They wouldn’t hurt the orchids . . .”

  Her voice trailed off as if, I thought, she’d already answered that and was only going on mechanically. It must have been an old controversy, as her mother didn’t bother to answer. We went on in silence.

  It seemed strange to me, thinking it over, that it was Mary and not her mother who was uneasy about that empty car. If Mary was so convinced her prisoner was locked up . . . Alice Cather had made it one of the conditions of her “bargain” that Roy Cather would not try to leave the place until he left for good and all. It seemed odd that she thought she could trust him, and that she wasn’t instantly alarmed at the sight of a car so close to his hideout. But she wasn’t in the least, apparently. And I still had those keys in my bag.

  12

  IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN THE GIFT of premonition that both Mary and her mother seemed to think they’d imbibed from the Island’s atmosphere of brooding mystery, a sort of Hawaiian contagion, would have been useful, that was it right then as we were on our way back to the house. It may be that Mary’s uneasiness was something of the kind, and
that her mother’s practical realism dissolved it, as practical realism has a way of doing to premonitions generally. Anyway, I’ve often wondered what they would have thought—or I would have thought—if Mary had thrown the beam of the light over under the spreading monkey-pod tree just then and seen Corinne Farrell stop at Swede Ellicott’s side, breathlessly, her hand on his arm, waiting for us to pass and go on into the house. I’ve wondered what we would have thought, guessing as we no doubt would have done correctly then, that his bag at the door was far from a sign of indecision . . . that it was just waiting there fully packed, to be picked up and put in Corinne Farrell’s car at the gate. It was a second escape for Mary from seeing them together. I’m not sure if I’d been aware of it myself I wouldn’t have had a premonition of my own. Blind chance might save her once, but it could only be Fate saving her a second time . . . and not because of kindness, but because the blow preparing and waiting in the rather grim stage we were treading wasn’t ready yet in all its devastating fullness. It was like Corinne and Swede just then, invisible in the dark periphery of the path toward home.

  I don’t remember that I’ve ever wanted less to go to any room than I did to go to mine that night, or known less how to get around it. There was no getting around it, in fact. The lights in the living room were off and the place settled for the night. Harry Cather had gone to his study, and Kumumato was in there with him, leaning over the desk. They were going over accounts, I imagined. We’d seen them through the leaves as we came into the courtyard.

  “Good night, Mary.” Her mother dismissed her with a light kiss. Alice and I were left alone—me still with the keys. There’d been no chance for Mary to take them or for me to try to decide what was best to do with them.

  At the end of the passage Alice opened my door and switched on the lights for me.

  “Good night, Grace.”