Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  “And what are you going to do about it?”

  Swede looked at her steadily, his eyes hardening. Mary looked at her too.

  “It’s . . . nice to know, Corinne,” she said gently. “It’s nice to know there . . . there wasn’t any malice in it. She didn’t mean to hurt us, ourselves.”

  The color rose sharply in Corinne’s glowing peach-bloom cheeks. Malice was all too plainly written in every line of her body. The dark fire shot out of her blazing brilliant eyes.

  “—I tell you,” she said. “I don’t like you, sister. I hate your straw-colored yellow hair, and your washed-out blue eyes and——”

  “Come, come, sister,” Tommy said easily. “If you don’t mind your manners there’s a little band of brothers going to break your bloody neck——”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Swede said. He’d moved into Dave’s role, and Dave seemed to have retired. He was sitting in his corner, looking with fixed eyes into the fireplace in front of him.

  “You’ve said your say, Corinne,” Swede said. “Be careful you don’t say too much.”

  It was amazing to me that the girl could stand there, so sure of herself, so unaffected by the waves of something more inexorable than fury that spread out toward her. Hatred was not it either, or contempt. It was too involved and too . . . cold-blooded for any single word I know.

  The telephone was ringing through the door in the servants’ quarters. We heard it without paying attention till Kumumato came in.

  “Excuse me, please. The phone is for you, Mrs. Farrell. This way, if you please.”

  But Corinne had turned on him, curiously enough. She broke into a rapid burst of words, highly voluble and excited. I saw Mary’s eyes widen and her lips part. And Kumumato began to jabber too, as excitedly as Corinne. He broke off abruptly and said in English, “The telephone is waiting, Mrs. Farrell.”

  She slammed the door behind her.

  “Well, what did they say?” Tommy asked. He calmly poured himself a large amount of Scotch. “Do you know, Mary?”

  Mary didn’t speak for a moment, and when she did it was a little unsteadily. “I . . . used to know a little Japanese. She . . . she was just telling him what she thinks of us. And he was telling her to be careful.”

  Tommy raised his glass.

  “Here’s to us just the same. It’s a nice night out. Swede, why don’t you and Mary take a walk. Dave and me and Grace will go and get stinko. Want to, Grace—do you good?”

  I shook my head, a little reluctantly.

  Swede and Mary looked at each other, and she shook her head, smiling. He took hold of her hand. “Come on, just for a minute. We’ve got to talk to each other. Please!”

  They went out. Tommy put his head down on his folded arms on the bar for an instant. “Cripes,” he said. He raised his head, drained his glass and put it down. “Come on, David,” he said. “We’ve got a job to do.”

  I was alone there when Corinne came back. She’d been gone a long time, at least for an ordinary telephone conversation, it seemed to me. I also thought the peach-bloom looked a little faded. Her face was a compact tight little mask out of which her eyes shone, bright and sultry hot. She looked around the all but empty room.

  “Where is Swede?”

  “He and Mary have gone for a walk,” I said.

  She started toward the terrace, stopped abruptly and stood for a moment, and came back.

  “They can’t frighten me,” she said. “I am not leaving here. I am staying. If my father is dead, they killed him.”

  I looked at her quickly. It was information newly come by, and I wondered where she’d got it. I’d been told not to say anything, and Kumumato would have been told the same.

  “And it doesn’t matter whether he is dead or not. They don’t dare put me out. You’ll see. I’ll fix them. If I’d only known earlier what fun I could have had. And old Norah up there, trying to buy me off. Ha, ha.”

  “Look,” I said. “Why don’t you release Swede? You don’t love him any more than he does you?”

  She looked at me, smiling ever so faintly.

  “Love him? No. I don’t even like him. He feels sorry for me—I think so. Ha! He so sorry for poor little Corinne. He’s a big fool.”

  “I think so too,” a voice said.

  Swede was standing there by the terrace opening. His face was white and lined with cold fury.

  “You couldn’t be more right,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, Grace. I’m going up to see the Cathers.”

  The girl got up quickly, her face a pasty yellow.

  “You be careful, Swede. You be careful what you say.”

  “If I were you I’d go to bed,” Swede said quietly.

  He went up the stairs. She stood for all the world like a sleek jungle cat momentarily at bay. Then she relaxed and shrugged.

  “No,” she said. “He wouldn’t dare. They are fools. They would rather keep on telling lies to each other. I think so.”

  Kumumato came in from the service quarters. He went to the bar and began gathering up the glasses. Corinne spoke to him. She interrupted herself at once.

  “Do you speak Japanese, Mrs. Latham?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  She smiled at me and went on talking.

  I said good night and started upstairs. Instead I went out onto the terrace. Mary was there, sitting on the top of the steps leading down to the terrace where the shelter was, looking vacantly off into the woods beyond the ravine. I sat down beside her.

  “He’s going to marry her,” she said after a while. “I don’t think he ought to—not for the reason he’s doing it. He doesn’t know I know it—but I do. That’s what Corinne was telling Kumumato. He’s an Intelligence agent. She told him she knew that, that was why she is safe up here. Then she told him what her father had told her. That’s when he interrupted her. It’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “Not very,” I said.

  “It is, in a way—Swede marrying her because he loves me. Oh, I hate her. I never thought I’d hate her, or anybody. But I could kill her. What right has she to ruin everybody’s life this way?”

  “You’d better come along and go to bed, angel,” I said. “Tomorrow everything’ll look different.”

  Any other time—and it was on the tip of my tongue right then—I’d have said, “We’ll get hold of Colonel Primrose.” But he’d already washed his hands of these affairs. “—Purely personal . . . none of the Army’s business.” I wondered suddenly. Swede’s commanding officer could stop his marriage to Corinne. He couldn’t, however, I thought immediately, stop Corinne.

  Above us on the lanai I was dimly aware of quiet unhurried voices talking in the dark. I looked up. Outlined in the soft glow of light from inside the house was Swede’s large bulky figure, bulkier because Alice Cather was on one side of him and Harry on the other. Norah Bronson was there by her brother, and the four of them were talking earnestly. Their voices stopped. Corinne was coming out of the game room, a single white-clad figure on the bare green stage made by the rectangle of light from the open wall of the room behind her.

  She stood perfectly still a moment. Whether she was aware of the audience she had in the dark periphery I have no idea. She stood motionless for a long time, and then raised both arms, stretching them up to that inverted bowl we call the sky. Then she laughed, a liquid silver peal of laughter, long and lingering, and eerie beyond words. It stopped as abruptly as it had begun. She let her arms drop to her sides and turned. She did a slow melting hula movement, raising her butterfly hands again, moving her hips gracefully, back into the game room . . . leaving her stage still lighted, but as silent, and as silent all around it, as if the lights had been switched off, leaving it in total blackness. And no audience was ever as silent as the one she’d left just then.

  I went to bed. Mary went out on the lanai and sat down in the bamboo chaise longue. I picked up a book, but I’d never felt less like reading and I put it down. I switched off the light and left her sit
ting there in the dark. When I went to sleep she was still there. She wasn’t, however, when I woke up, and her bed next to mine was still smooth and unrumpled.

  I didn’t know at first what had waked me, but I was as clearly and completely awake as if I’d not been asleep at all. I looked at the clock. It was nearly half-past two. The hurried tick-tick-tick racing the seconds along was perfectly audible in the dense blanket of silence lying heavily all around it. I listened intently. Other sounds seeped up—the muted drip-drip of the shower head behind the closed door of the bathroom, the far-off sound of the water tumbling along the bottom of the ravine, the wind softly stirring somewhere in the trees . . . and my own heart, beating with a suddenly vague but paradoxically acute anxiety.

  I put the covers back and got up. I remember wondering, absurdly, who it was who said “I should of stood in bed,” and whether they weren’t the famous last words of somebody. Though they hardly applied, because in nothing flat all hell broke loose in the house there in the hills.

  21

  WHEN I SAY ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE I MEAN some one started to scream, and kept on. It was a woman, and it was more of a shriek than a scream. It echoed, high-pitched and terrible, through the walls, hitting the side of the mountain and bounding back again, lingering on even after it was cut abruptly off at the source, reverberating through the new and sudden silence. They must have heard that scream at Kaneohe Bay and as far up as Kuhuku, or perhaps in Molokai and Maui. It was unbearably blood-curdling and terrifying—and that it was Corinne was as clear in my mind as daylight. And suddenly everybody was running. I was running and there were running feet all over the place.

  I still didn’t know what had waked me. It wasn’t the scream, because I’d been out of bed then for minutes . . . it seemed, and it must have been at least one. But it didn’t seem to matter much, and I ran along the shadowy lanai, turned the corner and came to a stop that nearly threw me off balance. Some one was there near me, in the living room. I couldn’t tell whether coming out or going in, because whoever it was was standing there, motionless. Then a white blur materialized.

  “Alice!” I gasped. “What is it?”

  She moved back without answering, almost stealthily, as if trying to get away without speaking.

  “Alice!”

  “Sssh!” she said. “I . . . I don’t know. It must be down there. Go on and see. I’ll come in just a minute.”

  She disappeared into the living room. I still didn’t know whether she’d come that way or the other . . . from where Corinne had screamed and where it was quiet, dreadfully quiet, now.

  I went on, around the corner of the living room. The service door was open and a path of light shining out of it cut sharply across the lanai. Huddled in the stairway, clutching in abject terror at each other, were the two little Japanese maids and their grandmother, Kumumato’s wife. I hurried on toward the next path of softer, dimmer light that came out from Mary’s room. Then I slowed down and stopped, and caught hold of the redwood rail.

  The voice I heard, low and insistent, was Harry Cather’s.

  “—Be quiet, Norah. For God’s sake be quiet.”

  I stood there, getting my breath, listening.

  “Call the police, Kumumato. Don’t touch anything. Just call the police . . . and do it, don’t stand there like a damned idiot.”

  I knew then that it wasn’t Corinne who had screamed. It was Norah Bronson. And I knew what it was that had waked me. It wasn’t intuition that told me that. It was the smell of cordite. It was coming in faint but unmistakable swirls out of the room, dissolving in the cool mountain air. It was a shot that had waked me. The scream came after.

  “Be quiet, Norah,” Harry Cather said again.

  I moved closer where I could see inside but not be seen myself unless they looked, and they would hardly bother to look just then. I saw the bed first. Just for an instant, before I looked away, I saw the bed, and I saw Corinne. I saw the monstrous stain where her throat had been. It was moving, alive and liquid and horrible. Her face above it was strangely gray, and above that the shiny black rim of her hair was grotesquely smooth and undisturbed. I looked away quickly, but I could still see it, and the others there, with a dreadful reality: Norah Bronson, Harry Cather, and Kumumato.

  Harry Cather, his face white, his great brown eyes all that was alive in it, was gripping his sister’s arm, trying to make her stop shaking and stop the strange noises in her throat. Kumumato was all shrunk together, as if the terror of it was too much. He had a blue kimono pulled around his shoulders above his pajama trousers, and as he went unsteadily to the door he looked almost as if he were crying, his head bent and shaking.

  “—Use the study phone, keep the rest of them out of here,” Harry Cather said. When Kumumato had left he turned quickly to his sister. He seemed thinner and straighter than ever, his eyes brilliant and burning.

  “Give it to me, Norah!” he said. “For God’s sake, what were you thinking of?”

  Her hand, concealed in the folds of her print dress, moved out. It held an automatic revolver, small, ugly, glittering, blue-black. His hand closed on it quickly.

  “I only came to frighten her—that’s all, Harry! I only came to frighten her. I was going to——”

  He cut her off sharply. “Hand me the quilt. Now get out of here. Go in the living room. Pull yourself together. Get a drink. And quit shaking . . .”

  He turned to the door. Alice Cather was there, in a yellow satin negligee, her hair rumpled, all her makeup washed off. She was obviously just out of bed.

  “Get out of here, Alice,” Harry said roughly. He barred her way so she could not see that bed, even with the silk quilt covering the silent figure on it. “Take Norah to the living room, and be quiet, both of you. I’ll be there in a minute.—The police are coming.”

  He pushed Norah out and closed the door on the two of them. Then he stood there perfectly still for a moment, looking over at the bed and the figure on it under the quilt. His eyes moved quickly around the room, and he turned and went out.

  I stood there too sick to move, my knees like heavy water. The room in front of me, now that Harry Cather had gone too, was terribly silent, and terribly empty. On the floor between the bed and the threshold of the lanai, Corinne’s big red handbag was lying, part open, its contents spilling out of it. A small gold compact, open, and the pink feather puff, stained brown with face powder, had fallen out onto the mat. A newspaper lay on the floor, open as if she’d been reading it and had thrown it aside. There was a large blotch of blood on it. Her suitcase against the wall by the bathroom door was pulled crazily half off the luggage rack . . . as if, I thought, Norah Bronson had been rummaging through it before the girl woke up.—But chiefly there was that monstrous red stain, creeping up, with dreadful accusing fingers, through the silk cover they’d put over her . . . as though to say, You can’t hide me—not with all the pink silk in the world you can’t hide me. I’m murder . . . murder most foul. It was dyeing the glossy sheen a sickening reddish-brown.

  There was a whisper behind me on the terrace. I started violently and turned. It was Mary. Her face was a white blur in the shadow. Beyond her light was coming through the door where the two maids and Kumumato’s wife had huddled. They were gone now. There was light in the living room, streaming in pale segments where the walls were open onto the lanai. I looked at Mary. It was all very strange. My mind was like a crazy album of pictures that I was seeing all at the same time. Corinne . . . Harry’s hand taking the gun from Norah. The bag, the paper with blood on it on the floor. And Mary. There was something very wrong about Mary. It came slowly into my mind that there was, but not what it was, until, down in the rectangle of light from the living room, I saw Alice Cather come out unsteadily and move over to the rail.

  I looked at Mary again. She was dressed for bed too. She had on pajamas and a white bath-towel robe that came to her knees, tied around the waist with a green cord. Her hair was touselled as if she’d been in bed. But she hadn�
��t. I could still see the unrumpled sheets and the chair with the robe and pajamas neatly folded over it.

  “Is it true . . . what Kumumato said? She’s dead?”

  I nodded. Suddenly there was a sound of racing motors, cars coming. The yellow sweep of headlights slanted over the trees in the gully where the orchids were.

  “Come, Grace,” she whispered. “Come quickly—it’s the police.”

  It was a new picture on top of the others, not blotting them out, leaving them clear as before through the startling clarity of this one superimposed. The living room flooded with light, the police—civilian police, brown-skinned, handsome, their uniforms sharply differentiating them from the lighter khaki of the men there from the Army’s Criminal Intelligence. They were in the room, suddenly taking charge, stationed at the doors, herding us together, all of us, while around we could hear the tread of rapid feet, sharp commands given. We were all here. Harry Cather, lean and very tall in his pongee dressing gown. Norah Bronson rigidly erect in her chair and very pale, still in one of her old nondescript print dresses. Alice Cather sitting over on the lime-green and chartreuse yellow couch where the captain had sat the Sunday evening I arrived . . . ages and ages ago, it seemed. Her face and her hands in her lap were the color of the couch, only grayer-green. Her head was bent forward, her eyes closed. Kumumato had changed from the blue kimono and put on his white house jacket, starched and perfect above his pajamas. He stood by the door, his face pale, the beads of sweat standing out on his forehead.

  The front door opened and Tommy and Dave came in. Tommy’s red head was as wet as if they’d pulled him out of the shower, and his shirt was wet. So was Dave’s. Behind them was Swede, his stubborn rugged jaw pale and set. He looked quickly over at Mary. She took a step toward him.