Columbella

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “Stop worrying about everything,” Maud said, not unkindly. “Take one thing at a time.”

  When I asked Maud if there was anything I could do to help, the old lady glanced in Leila’s direction and shook her head. I went upstairs to my room, knowing that I had better phone Aunt Janet soon, before she started calling me.

  But for the moment I wanted only to sit quietly alone and try to figure out some course of action. What Leila had said about the murex shell might be wholly farfetched, or it might lead somewhere—I didn’t know which. The one thing I was sure of was that her wild accusation about King seizing the shell and striking Catherine with it was anything but true. In fact, he had told me her hands were empty when he found her in the clearing.

  What was it that kept eluding me? There seemed some discrepancy in these stories that I could not put my finger on, but which kept worrying me.

  Then, as I sat there staring about my small room as though it had something to tell me, I felt again the same disturbing awareness of objects misplaced that I had experienced only yesterday.

  The closet door was ajar, though I had not left it open. When I looked inside I saw that my suitcase had been moved, and I pulled it out to find that the few things I had left in it had been stirred about. The third drawer of the bureau had been searched as well, just as the top two had been yesterday. This time, however, the searching appeared to have gone more frantically and hurriedly, as though the searcher had grown desperate and taken less care to cover traces. This time it could not have been Catherine.

  What could I possibly be suspected of hiding? Why should anyone bother with my possessions?

  During the next few days these unanswered questions kept returning to trouble me, even though there was so much else to occupy my attention.

  All the immediate aftermath of tragedy had to be lived through—the inquest, with its verdict of accidental death, the funeral and its attendant strains. Hampden and Drew friends rallied around, and I saw again many of the people who had watched Catherine dance on the terrace the night of the party. St. Thomas was a small island and gossip buzzed, as Aunt Janet took pains to tell me. The Hampden and Drew names made headlines throughout the Caribbean as well as locally.

  The inquest brought out nothing of note. The wooden rail in the clearing was indeed termite-ridden. Catherine Drew had been known to roam about at night when the mood prompted her. The fact that King too was abroad that night seemed of no significance to the investigators, since he was, presumably, in another place, and there appeared to be no reason to doubt his word. The family showed a solid front and nothing was said of the quarrel which had occurred between King and Catherine immediately before her death.

  During the proceedings King was so morose, so short-spoken, that I was afraid he would bring too much attention to himself and arouse antagonisms that could hurt him badly. But he was well liked in the community and everyone seemed willing to consider that he had suffered a tragic loss and must therefore be forgiven his behavior.

  At last, quite suddenly, everything was over and we could be quiet again in our own uneasy way, though I felt sure there was no one at Hampden House who believed that trouble was really behind us.

  Through those anxious days I was at least able to hold to one comforting thing. Leila did not blurt out her story to anyone who might have used it against King. Perhaps between us, Maud and I had helped to keep her silent, even to arouse some doubts and hesitation in her. But we had only to look at the girl’s tragic young face to know how dreadfully torn she was between the anguished loss she felt for her mother, and the old love for her father that she could not quite throw off, even though she might wish to. Her silence could not go on forever—something would crack. And before that time there must be a better answer to give her than the one she believed was the truth. At least she did not need to appear at the inquest, though after it was over she began to show a strange, unstable side that I found alarming. Now and then it reminded me all too vividly of Catherine.

  During this time the same question kept tugging at the edge of my consciousness that had troubled me from the beginning. I kept feeling that there was some one obvious thing that I knew and which would give me a clearer view of the truth, if only I could put my finger on it. But always the thought evaded me and slipped away tantalizingly.

  I might not have remained at the house, had it not been for Maud. She still insisted that Leila needed me and I knew that she was right, however much the girl resisted me. Edith wanted me gone, and so did King, who seemed grimly determined that there should be not so much as a look between us. Though I wept at times when I was alone, I knew that he wanted to raise a bulwark against the moment when he would speak out about what had happened the night of Catherine’s death—whether or not he was to blame. He was determined to bring every shred of truth to light where his own actions were concerned and only awaited Leila’s recovery from shock, hoping that he could keep her from permanent hurt and let the wound heal a little that was now so raw. More than ever he seemed to me a man doomed—and I could not bear it.

  A week after Catherine’s death I awakened one morning to hear hurricane talk coming through on my radio more insistently than ever. Precedent had it that these islands were no longer on the main hurricane path, but even the flick of a hurricane’s skirts is not to be trifled with, and Virgin Island radios were tuned to frequent weather reports during the hurricane season.

  The announcement that morning concerned Hurricane Katy, not too far out in the Atlantic, and moving this way. Warnings were being flashed that the Virgin Islands were in her uncertain path and we had better brace ourselves for a blow. Katy. I didn’t like the name. It reminded me of Catherine, who had been a dangerous hurricane in her own right.

  When I got up that morning the day was bright blue and gold, with only the usual puffs of cloud over the green hills of St. Thomas, and no storm threat on the visible horizon. There was only a stillness in the air, and a greater sense of heat than was usual on our mountaintop.

  For once all the family breakfasted together, although our meals had become a time of uneasiness and tension. Increasingly I had the sense of something that moved secretly beneath the surface, worrying, fretting, perhaps eating itself up with fear of the small slip that could mean quick exposure.

  In my mind Helen’s voice whispered the old refrain: “Fanciful!” But I realized with a deepening gratitude to Kingdon Drew how faint that voice had grown. Certainly it did not make me throw off my present uneasiness. Every day I grew more sure that fear walked in our midst, though I had no inkling of where this feeling came from.

  At breakfast that morning I played the grim game of trying to figure out the source of this mounting sense of tension, but since each one of us had legitimate sources of worry, it seemed hopeless to seek for hidden causes besides. Maud was concerned lest either Leila or King should blurt word of the quarrel, of which the police were still unaware.

  In Maud’s mind there seemed no longer any sense of the morality of the situation. She had accepted the fact that Catherine’s death was accidental, and she opposed King’s going to the police to stir everything up, as she said, “needlessly.” King and Leila, of course, had their own obviously sharp anxieties and I shared them almost as intensely. Edith followed her mother’s lead and looked anxiously at both King and his daughter, and here I felt was a woman who harbored private dreads of her own. Now and then I caught her looking at Alex almost fearfully, even though Catherine was gone, and his attention could no longer drift in that direction. Alex seemed the least worried of us all, but as always he remained a puzzle to me, and while I felt sure that he had been the man on the beach with Catherine, I still did not know what their relationship had really been. Certainly she had not played up to him as openly as she had to Steve O’Neill.

  While we breakfasted that morning I found myself remembering the first time when I had sat at this table with the ot
hers, and Catherine had been among us. Now our places had been shifted to omit one plate, but it still seemed that each of us felt her restless presence. That morning I could almost see her lifting the murex shell to her ear, and catch her high, silvery laughter as she pretended to hear voices speaking to her from the shell. So far the murex had not turned up, although I had looked for it more carefully myself. Leila still dreaded the clearing and would not go near it.

  And then, quite suddenly, during the meal—as though my inner mind had been pondering the problem and working its way toward a possible answer—I thought of a place where the shell might be bidden.

  When breakfast was over and we left the table I lingered downstairs idly, watching where the others of the household went when they left the table. The day was Saturday and King did not leave for his downtown office but retired to the room he used at the house for his work. Leila vanished into Alex’s study, where I knew she had been drawing pictures again, though she had not shown me her efforts. Saturday was as good a tourist day as any for Alex’s shop, but that morning he did not leave for town but stretched out in a deck chair on the terrace for a smoke. Maud and Edith had gone upstairs together.

  Of course I could not know for certain that any of the four would remain where they were, but this was my chance and I took it without hesitation. I let myself unnoticed out the door to the front driveway and slipped behind the hibiscus hedge, following the path to the Danish kitchen which Edith Stair used for the preparation of shells.

  The door stood ajar, though a glance through one of the low windows told me no one was there. I went in and stood looking eagerly about. Now I had a theory to go on. If Leila was right and the murex shell had indeed been used as a weapon—though not by King—perhaps the person who had used it in the clearing had spirited it away to place it in the most innocuous place possible: here among the shells where Edith worked.

  A quick glance told me that the box of sand in which I had built castles was still here, though it did not seem as deep as it had been, and it was no longer damp. The last box of shells Steve O’Neill had delivered to Catherine was also there, looking rather like the box I had seen at Caprice, though I could not be sure. Edith seemed to have done little work in preparing this batch for shipment, there being undoubtedly too much else on her mind.

  The rest of the room, too, seemed the same. Shells lay on the window ledges or waited for sorting and labeling on open shelves. How easy it would be to set the murex among them and remove it from suspicion. But though I searched the shelf of larger shells, where it would be most inconspicuous, I did not find it there. Already I had used up several minutes, and there was no telling when those at the house might leave their posts and wander in this direction—particularly whichever one might have a guilty conscience. I began to move quickly, nervously in my seeking.

  For the first time I noticed that on each side of the wide brick chimney that housed the oven, there was a closed door. Storage space, I supposed, and went to one of them and pulled it open to look inside. A closet, large enough to step into, had been fitted into the space. Shelves reached to the ceiling and there was room for tall mops and brooms besides, but the shelves held only bottles of preserving alcohol, brushes, cleaners—the sort of supplies Edith used in her work. There were no shells.

  I backed out, shutting the door. As I did so I heard a sound. Startled, I turned my head in time to see the twin door on the other side of the chimney closing by a hair’s breadth. Someone was in there! Someone who had peered through the crack, watching me, closing the door as I came out the opposite side. There had been no more than a whisper of sound, the faintest movement, yet I was sure.

  My first impulse was to run from the place—to escape while I could. But if I ran I would never know who had hidden in the closet, never know who among us kept a secret that made it necessary to hide.

  I looked about for help. On either side of the room sunshine poured through open windows, and the scent of stephanotis was sweet on the air. The house, after all, was very near. Alex was outdoors and would hear me if I shouted. I had only to scream and help would come.

  I faced the closed door. “Who’s there?” I called, edging nearer the outer door and my own line of escape.

  For a long moment nothing happened, and I wondered if my bluff was about to be called. I had no confidence in my ability to walk to that door and pull it open. There was danger here—the very smell of it was in the air.

  Before I could take my next step the door of the second closet banged open and an apparition rushed out in my direction. I had only a glimpse of a tall figure completely enveloped in a hooded robe. Then rough hands pushed me out of the way with a force that flung me backward so that I fell, banging my head against the bricks of the oven.

  For a few moments I sat on the floor with my head ringing painfully, my vision spinning, and in my ears the sound of footsteps running away. When the spinning stopped, I pulled myself up and stood shakily on my feet. My eyes began to clear and I could see the open door of the second closet—where there had been plenty of room for someone to hide. Gingerly I felt the tender place at the back of my head where I had bumped it, but my hair had protected me and there was only surface soreness.

  The room had nothing more to tell me. The shell I’d looked for wasn’t here—but now my apprehensions were confirmed. I was on the trail of someone who could not afford discovery. And at the thought a new alarm went through me. The hood of that concealing robe had kept me from glimpsing a face, but could the one who wore it be sure of that? What if there was doubt as to whether I had recognized the wearer?

  Shaky though I was, I started back to the house, wanting only to escape this place that now seemed dangerously isolated. This was no longer a fanciful matter. Another person was now obviously involved in our troubles.

  As I came from behind the hibiscus hedge I stumbled over the beach robe, which lay on the ground at my feet. Picking it up, I shook it out wonderingly. My assailant had been wrapped in the Arab burnoose that Catherine had affected for beach wear and that King said she had worn that night in the clearing. As I held it in my hands I could catch the faint but still permeating odor of water lily, with which she had liked to saturate her clothes.

  At the moment I was hardly able to think in clear, logical terms. I was merely feeling. Something had started moving toward the light, and I knew that I held in my hands—in this robe—the answer to something important. An answer, perhaps, to that tantalizing question which had troubled me ever since I had talked to King that morning in the clearing.

  I did not want to be seen holding the robe in my hands, and I hurried toward the house, hoping I would meet no one. The living area was empty, but as I walked its length Noreen came down the stairs and saw me. She cried out softly, gesturing toward the robe in my hands, murmuring the word “jumbies.”

  I stopped to question her. “What do you mean, Noreen? What has this beach robe to do with jumbies?”

  Her words came too fast for me to translate, since excitement always sent her into a torrent of Calypso talk, but I managed to catch something about Mrs. Drew appearing on the terrace in this very robe—after her death—and I gathered that in Noreen’s eyes some sort of haunting was going on.

  When the girl ran off, apparently not wanting to be near the robe, I went to hang it on the rack near the terrace door. There was some answer here, though the pieces would not yet fall into place.

  I turned to see Edith coming out of the dining room.

  Her gaze rested at once upon the robe in my hands. “What are you doing with that?”

  I answered indirectly. “I found it just now outside on the walk. I thought it belonged on the rack here.”

  “Not any more!” Edith said and came to take it from my hands. “There’s no point in keeping Catherine’s things around as reminders.”

  She went toward the stairs with the robe over her arm and I had t
he feeling that she was the logical person to have hidden it away in her workroom in the first place.

  When she had gone I went out on the terrace, to find Alex still in his deck chair, smoking his pipe. He sat up as I appeared.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Leila,” he said.

  The lump on the back of my head hurt a little and it was difficult to appear calm and unruffled, but I dropped into a chair and waited for him to continue.

  “Have you looked at the sort of thing she has been drawing lately?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “She hasn’t wanted to show me.”

  “Then look anyway,” he went on. “I don’t like this new trend. It’s morbid.”

  More than anything else just then I needed to talk to King, but I did not want to make straight for his office while Alex sat watching me. It was necessary to move with seeming innocence and openness, and not like a woman who had discovered something vital.

  “I’ll go and look at her drawings now,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  He gave me his usual sardonic smile and I hurried into the house. The study door was ajar and when I looked inside I found Maud Hampden there ahead of me. Leila sat at the worktable, a pencil in her hand, a drawing block before her. This morning she wore tight navy-blue pants that had belonged to Catherine, combined with a white blouse of her own. Somehow I did not like to see her wearing Catherine’s clothes.

  Her grandmother stood nearby, looking down at Leila’s bent head. I had never seen a more sorrowful expression than Maud’s in that unguarded moment. When she saw me she gestured silently toward the drawings scattered across the table before Leila.

  From a shelf a radio was relating the progress of Hurricane Katy in its continuing southwesterly direction, and the broadcast was the only sound in the room.

  Leila must have seen Maud’s gesture, for she looked around at me, and at once a look of challenge came into her eyes. “Have you ever been in a hurricane, Jessica?”