Columbella

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “Those also,” Alex agreed. “But first the police. We don’t know how this happened and it’s better to have everything in the clear.”

  He had turned on the torch again, and I saw by its indirect illumination the look that passed between husband and wife. A look that seemed both searching and defensive, as though each probed what the other might be thinking, yet by mutual agreement did not speak.

  Edith reached out almost absently to touch the splintered rail. When she held up her fingers there was a dusting of wood powder upon them.

  “The rail was rotten,” she said. “There are always termites. Anyone who leaned against it could have gone through.”

  Alex started for the house and we followed him along the narrow pathway.

  Where was King now? I wondered. And what was I to say when someone asked me why I had gone down to the woods? If only Leila would stay in her room, say nothing—at least until I’d had time to talk to Maud. Or to King.

  As we reached the terrace and started up the steps Edith suddenly took my arm and I realized that she was trembling in reaction and shock. When we reached the main hall Alex went directly to the phone while Edith stood in the center of the room, plucking at her fingers, a strange look of growing realization in her eyes.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Catherine is dead.” And then, as though the truth was at last coming home to her, “My sister Catherine is dead.”

  I did not like the tinge of yellow in her skin, or the way in which she almost savored the words she spoke. I moved away, looking about the room. Dishes and food had long since been cleared off, but the tables still wore their lace cloths, and down the center of each lay red blossoms, curling at the edges, turning brown—hibiscus, bougainvillea, flamboyant clusters, all wilting and ugly, where they had been so lovely last night.

  “Someone must tell Mother,” Edith said, making an effort to pull herself together. “And Leila.”

  I spoke quickly. “Let the child sleep. There will be time enough to break this to her in the morning.”

  As soon as I could I would get upstairs to Leila, I thought. And then what? The girl would never be silent once she knew what had happened to Catherine. Yet all my guilty thoughts were moving in one direction—blindly to the protection of Kingdon Drew. If he had played any part in this, then he would return and say so. No other action would be possible for a man like King. But if he had indeed flung Catherine to her death—then was I not to blame, as Leila had claimed? Had I not, by my very presence and actions, my response to him, driven King to some final, dreadful action? If that was so, then I must help him in any way I could, until he was ready to speak. He would not run away—this I knew.

  Edith put up a finger to still the twitching of her left eyelid. “Very well,” she said. “But Mother must be told now. She’ll know what to do. She’ll take charge. I—I can’t cope with anything like this.”

  At the far end of the hall I could hear Alex on the phone, explaining, giving what details he could, speaking in an even, colorless tone. As I stood listening a phrase began to repeat itself in my mind, and the haunting fragment of a tune.

  Up on the island, bright in the sun,

  Columbella’s golden days be done.

  They were done indeed, as the song had promised. I looked at brown poinciana petals and shivered. Catherine was gone, but the evil she had created was very much here and present and we would not I thought be free of it—perhaps never in our lives.

  15

  Maud Hampden looked white and ill when she came downstairs, but she rallied to meet the demands of the moment, and Edith leaned upon her mother’s greater strength. Alex had mixed himself a stiff drink and I sensed that he was keeping himself in hand and, as always, on guard. How he felt about Catherine I did not know, and behind the screen of his neat, glossy beard he betrayed nothing of whatever emotion he might be feeling.

  No one needed me for anything and I pushed a chair into a shadowy corner near the door to the terrace and sat there watching. There had been no sign of Leila, no sound from her room, and I glanced fearfully at the stairs from time to time, ready to move in her direction if she appeared, still postponing the moment when I must go up to her room. Once Leila knew that Catherine was dead, there would be the problem of keeping her quiet until King could appear and speak for himself. Maud, I thought, might help me in this effort—but there was no chance to speak with her alone.

  I could do nothing except watch—and wait for King to come home. Someone said that his car was still in the garage. Indeed, all the cars were there. The servants were up and moving about by now, wide-eyed and fearful, whispering among themselves. Maud had a good many orders to give, as though she knew it was best for everyone to be occupied. But she had forgotten me. I was an outsider, and I had nothing to do but think.

  The police officer—a Captain Osborn—was a gentle-­mannered, courteous, dark-skinned man with an air of quiet authority and a slightly formal way of speaking. Accompanied by the doctor and the ambulance men from the hospital, he went off to the garden.

  After a long interval they brought Catherine to the house and laid her upon the couch on the lower gallery. When the doctor had completed his examination she was covered with a sheet and Noreen was left, weeping, to guard her, while the others came inside.

  The doctor told Maud and the police officer that Mrs. Drew must have leaned against the rail and gone through to roll down the catchment. She had struck both her face and the back of her head as she fell, and rolled with force against the rock that stopped her full descent to the bottom. Either of these blows might have fractured her skull and killed her. Only an autopsy would tell.

  Further arrangements were being made as to where to take her, and Captain Osborn was asking courteous but probing questions in order to reconstruct what had happened. I was almost the first to be questioned—having sounded the alarm—and I was asked how I happened to go down to the clearing at such a time, and while it was raining.

  I could only plead the silly whim of a female who was excited after a party and could not sleep. I never minded rain, I told him—which was true enough—and I wanted to see what a tropical island was like after a shower. I managed to keep Leila and King out of my account, and that was all I cared about at the moment. Probably a good many people with much less to conceal than I had silly reasons for silly behavior, and Captain Osborn accepted my explanation gently and went on to the more important matter of King’s whereabouts.

  It was at this point that King himself walked into the house, to look about in apparent astonishment at the lights and activity, at the group of people gathered in the living area. Once he had stepped into the room, I had eyes for no one else, and I saw the dazed expression he wore when Captain Osborn told him of Catherine’s death. It was as if, like Edith, he could not believe in it—and there was something here I could not understand.

  Nothing was said of angry voices or a possible quarrel between King and Catherine. If others in the house besides Leila had heard, or if they guessed what had happened, they were not saying. The probing was apparently aimed toward searching out a cause of accident, and everyone lent himself to this theory—Maud, Alex, even Edith in the little she said. The family, I suspected, had closed in a solid front to protect one of their own, if that should be necessary.

  About King, I could not tell. I had thought he might well come striding into the house to admit his part in what had happened at once, and explain exactly what had occurred. He had done nothing of the kind—and this I did not understand. Across the room, Alex stood a little apart, watching King with a fixed, conjectural stare that I did not like, and I wished King would see and answer it. But his air of daze and disbelief continued, and he offered nothing.

  “Then it is your custom, Mr. Drew,” Captain Osborn was saying in his quiet, formal manner, “to take the night air in long walks along the mountaintop after the sun has set?
Thus it is natural that you were not about the premises when this sad thing occurred?”

  “I walk a lot at night,” King said.

  Maud came to stand beside him and she put a hand on his arm. “It was an accident, my dear. A dreadful accident. That was Catherine’s favorite spot for mooning. We all know she loved to haunt that place at night. The rail had rotted and it broke under her weight. This is a terrible thing and how we are to bear with it I don’t know. But we must try. You must try.”

  This seemed a false note and I looked at her in surprise. Maud would be realist enough to know that once the shock of sudden death was over, everyone might come to live quite comfortably without Catherine. Everyone except Leila. I wondered at her words until it came to me that if King had been about to say anything more, Maud had checked him surely and effectively. What she had done reminded me of the look Edith and Alex had exchanged down in the clearing. There seemed indeed a strengthening of family solidarity in evidence. Yet I could not believe that King was the man to lean upon such protection. If Leila had told the truth about what she had seen and heard, then there did not seem any reason for King’s dazed disbelief. I was right in keeping still, I thought. I must talk to Leila again, question her more carefully when she was less excited.

  The time element seemed to baffle the captain. King had said he did not remember when he had left the house, and I was vague about the hour when I had started my sleepless roaming. In like manner, no one seemed to know when Catherine had gone outside and down through the tropical garden. Her red dress was soaking wet, but there had been several showers, and she might have been outdoors for a time before the accident. One thing seemed certain—she had been found shortly after her death and could not have lain for long on the steep catchment with rain streaming over her, washing away all stains of blood. This I could have corroborated myself. Very few minutes had elapsed from the time when Leila had seen her mother and father quarreling, and the time when I had rushed down to the clearing.

  Through all the talk and questioning I continued to sit in my chair near the terrace door, struggling futilely with the puzzle that King’s behavior raised in my mind, and wondering with some apprehension what could be keeping Leila so quiet upstairs.

  It was there Noreen found me. She appeared suddenly outside the doorway and cast a frightened look at the group centering about the captain. When she discovered me close at hand she spoke urgently.

  “Missy, missy—come to me,”

  I knew the vernacular by now—“to” for “with”—and her tone of alarm brought me quickly from my chair.

  She made a frightened gesture as I hurried out the door and I saw at once what had alarmed her.

  Beside the couch where Catherine lay, stood Leila, a cotton plaid robe tied over her night clothes. Apparently she had come down the back stairs. She had flung aside the sheet which covered her mother and was staring down at the slender body in its flame-colored dress, staring at wet, loose-flung hair, and the cruelly bruised face. I noted absently that no golden columbella hung from its chain upon Catherine’s breast, and that there was a bruise upon her bare arm, where King had grasped it earlier that evening, to swing her away from me. A bruise that was a precursor of so much worse to come? At the same hands? I wondered miserably.

  But it was the girl who held my attention now. Leila stood frozen with shock, and her pain seemed my own. I spoke her name, but though she must have heard me, she did not look away from her mother’s face.

  “That dog down the hill was barking tonight,” she said. “The island people say a dog is a prophet.”

  Noreen made a soft, frightened moan, and I gestured her to go back to the house and leave us alone. Then I moved quickly to pull the sheet into place, covering that cruelly wounded face from view. I heard my own voice speaking almost without volition, repeating the words I had heard Maud say.

  “It was an accident, Leila dear. An accident. She fell through the railing down at the lookout point.”

  Leila flung me a quick, scornful glance, and then cried out in terror. “Look—look!”

  I looked and saw the spreading scarlet stain upon the white sheet, while my own breath almost stopped in horror. Then I understood.

  “It’s the red dye from her dress,” I said. “Those ruffles are staining the sheet.”

  Leila began to shiver uncontrollably, but when I would have put an arm about her to draw her away, she snatched herself from my grasp.

  “It’s my fault!” she cried. “It’s my fault that Cathy is dead! I should have stopped him. But I ran back to the house—I talked to you! How could I have told you, when I know you wanted her dead! I should have known you’d do nothing to help her!”

  Her words shocked and alarmed me. I dared not let them pass. There was no time for gentle sympathy now and I took her by the shoulders and shook her as hard as I could.

  “Stop it!” I cried. “You’ve got to come to your senses. You mustn’t say such things. Whether you like it or not, you’ll have to grow up now and be a woman.”

  Her brown eyes that I had seen so warmly affectionate, stared at me with hatred, but her body went limp in my hands and something of her reckless fury died away.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “There’s a policeman in the house questioning your father. So far he doesn’t know there was a quarrel between your father and mother—if there really was. If you rush in there mindlessly without thinking of the consequences, you may do your father irrevocable harm.”

  She caught at just one word. “A policeman? Then I’ll go talk to him now. I’ll tell him—”

  “Tell him what?” I broke in. “That you saw your father fling Catherine down the catchment? Is that what you saw?”

  She stared at me in sudden silence, hating me, fighting me with all her will. Then she turned away, no longer shivering, and walked with quiet dignity through the open door into the big lighted room. I went with her despairingly.

  King was the first to see her. He stopped in the middle of whatever he was saying to Captain Osborn, and took a step toward his daughter, put out his hand. She ignored him as if she did not know he was there, and went directly into her grandmother’s arms.

  “Oh, Gran!” she whispered. “Gran, help me! Help me!”

  The old woman held the girl to her, and each seemed to lean upon the other, their cheeks together, their tears mingling. It was the doctor who came to take charge, drawing Leila gently from the old lady’s arms.

  “Let’s get her upstairs,” he said to Edith, who came stiffly to help.

  Leila reached out to her grandmother. “Gran—I want to talk to you. Please, Gran!”

  But Maud Hampden had dropped into a nearby chair, able to bear no more. “Tomorrow, darling,” she said weakly, her cheeks still wet with tears she had not shed till now. “Tomorrow we’ll talk. This isn’t the time now.”

  Edith took the girl by the arm, and at her aunt’s cold touch Leila straightened and walked toward the stairs beside the doctor. She went straight past her father, not looking at him, not speaking.

  Maud remembered me then. “Please go with her, Jessica. Help her.”

  “She doesn’t want me now,” I said. “It’s better if I stay away from her for a little while,” and I slipped away to my shadowed chair near the door.

  With an effort Maud pulled herself to her feet “I can’t bear any more tragedy tonight. I’ve used myself up. Captain Osborn, do you mind if I go to my room?”

  Clearly the police officer knew Maud Hampden of old and would ask nothing beyond her strength at so difficult a time. He said good night with quiet consideration and let her go.

  King had stood watching his daughter go upstairs with Edith and the doctor, the same bewilderment in his eyes that I had seen earlier. Now he too spoke to Catherine’s mother, rousing himself.

  “I’ll see to whatever needs to be done, Maud dear. Don’t worry
about anything—I’ll manage.”

  Gradually the room emptied. Alex went unobtrusively away. He had said little during the questioning, merely stating that he had remained in his study long after the party was over, and had no idea when Catherine might have come downstairs.

  When Catherine’s body had been taken away, the doctor left, and so did Captain Osborn, after mentioning something about an inquest to King. At last only King and I were left. I sat in my corner, waiting, though I was not altogether sure for what. I knew only that I could not go back to my room until I had spoken to him.

  At length King saw me there and came to draw me to my feet. “Go to bed,” he said gently. “There’s nothing more to be done now. Tomorrow Leila will need all the help you can give her.”

  Remembering how thoroughly Leila had blamed and rejected me, I did not know whether this was so. Now I had to seize my chance to speak to King, even though speaking meant to hurt him more where Leila was concerned.

  “There’s something you have to know,” I said hastily, blurting out the words, sparing him nothing. “Leila heard you quarreling with Catherine. She went down to the clearing and saw you with her there. She was frightened and ran away, but she believes that her mother died on the catchment because of—you.”

  “So that’s the reason,” he said heavily, and I knew he was remembering how Leila had walked past his outstretched hand, not choosing to see him.

  “Tomorrow you can tell her the truth!” Again I was blurting out words. “You can make her understand that it was only a quarrel—that you weren’t to blame for Catherine’s fall.” I waited eagerly for his agreement, longing for reassurance.

  His look seemed suddenly cold. “I am probably responsible enough for what happened,” he said. “It’s quite possible that she died at my hands.”

  I could only echo his words in bewilderment. “‘Probably responsible’? ‘Possible that she died’? What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure what happened,” he told me curtly, and went off to the kitchen to give final orders to the servants and send them back to bed.