The Stone Bull

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “Who told you?” he demanded.

  “First a guest at the hotel. Then Naomi told me more. I found her in a room at the hotel playing Ariel’s music and crying.”

  “That miserable little creature!” His scorn toward Naomi seemed as enormous as everything else about him, but unjustified.

  “Ariel charmed her,” I said. “And anyone Ariel charmed had to love her. It’s always been that way.”

  “Except for you.” Eyes as deeply green as the pines behind him continued to challenge me.

  “I loved her,” I said. “I loved her and hated her, and I didn’t always know which was which. You loved her too, didn’t you?”

  “And sometimes I hated her,” he said simply.

  I bent to examine the headstone more closely. No lettering had been engraved upon it as yet.

  “Do you do much of this sort of work now?” I asked.

  “Only when it’s needed here at Laurel.”

  I understood. This was a stone for Floris’ grave.

  “Someone has told me that you used to work for your wife’s father.”

  “I did for a time. Every sculptor ought to work in a stonemason’s yard for experience. We need to know something about the qualities of different stones before we try, as sculptors say, to open up the stone.”

  I moved toward the crude shelter that had been built to protect his machinery and tools, and to store some of his work. A few smaller stone beasts crowded the area in various stages of completion, but the thing that drew me stood on a rude bench in a corner of the shed. Glaring out from the shadows was a curiously mad face carved in some reddish stone. The teeth were bared, the eyes stared wildly and a nubby horn grew from the forehead. It was difficult to say whether the thing was man or beast, and the sight of it—evidence of a demented imagination—disturbed me. It was a face out of nightmare.

  Behind me, Magnus started toward the cabin, picking up a lumberjack’s shirt and pulling it on as he moved. “We can’t stand talking out here, and it’s possible that we do have something to say to each other. So come inside.”

  I cast a last uneasy glance at that personification of evil in stone, and followed him obediently, having no wish to be picked up again like a sack of potatoes and carried indoors.

  The big room was still gloomy, its overhanging roof shutting out direct sunlight, though the Indian rugs glowed in soft warmth on floor and walls. At the far end the huge grate was black with burned-out logs and the iron pot hung empty.

  “Coffee?” he said. “I’ve got some top milk this morning.”

  I shuddered faintly at the thought of that dollop of honey, and said, “Black, please,” just in time. He poured from the graniteware pot as delicately as a lady with a china tea set, and I took the mug he proffered and moved about the room, seeing more than I had on my previous visit. Today I could feel less at a loss, more on top of what was happening. At least Loring had given me that. There was no point in moving cautiously now, however, since there were things I wanted to say to this man, wanted to know, and I had better get on with it. I might frighten him off by being direct, but at the same time I felt that directness was a part of his own character.

  “I’ve been talking to Loring,” I said, stopping before a shelf where handsome pieces of small sculpture had been placed. Apparently Magnus didn’t always work larger than life. “He says there are whispers about my sister. He told me she was standing on that rock before it fell.”

  I avoided looking at him, but I had a sense of waiting silence behind me—a wary, almost animal silence, like that of a wild thing startled. When I turned slowly, I saw that he had spilled the coffee he was pouring for himself, but he paid no attention to a brown puddle on the table—his whole focus of attention on me, waiting for whatever came next.

  “Ariel would never have killed anyone,” I said. “She would take what she wanted and never worry about consequences, but she wouldn’t kill because she never wanted anything that much. I think it must take great passion, great fury, to kill someone.”

  Outdoors Magnus’ voice could rise to a shout that seemed to come in a roar from his chest, but now he spoke softly, almost gently.

  “She had passion. She could be angry.”

  “Only on a stage,” I told him. “That was all she lived for—her dancing. She wanted adulation, onstage and off—and she commanded it easily.”

  “You do hate her, don’t you?”

  “Not anymore. There were times in the past when I did. But not hating her doesn’t mean that I can’t see her clearly, or that I can’t love her as well. What did Loring mean when he used the word ‘whispering’?”

  “Hadn’t you better ask him?”

  “But you would know, and you must see that I must confront whoever believes such things about my sister.”

  “I’m not exactly on a close relationship with those who run the hotel. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “The police appear to be interested again. They’ve received an anonymous call. I can’t stand by and see the case reopened.”

  Finally Magnus moved, picking up a cloth to wipe the spilled coffee, pouring himself another cup. When he’d drunk a swallow that must have scalded, he set the mug down and came toward me across the room.

  “I wonder if you knew her at all? She might even have married me, if Floris hadn’t stood in the way.”

  “Never! She wanted her dancing first. Always.”

  “Not during those last weeks. Not while she stayed here under this roof.”

  “Why didn’t she stay at the hotel?”

  “Maybe you’d better ask Brendon that.”

  But Brendon didn’t come into this, and I pushed his words quickly aside.

  “I’ve got to find a way to disprove whatever is being said.”

  “I’ve forgiven Ariel. Why can’t you?”

  Strange words. I didn’t know what they meant, and it didn’t matter.

  “I’ll find a way,” I promised.

  “Then I wish you luck. However, isn’t that a dangerous undertaking?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you think that rock was deliberately prepared to roll, and if Ariel didn’t set it up to fall—then who did? If you disprove one thing, then mustn’t you prove another?”

  Somehow I had been so bent on my concern for clearing Ariel from suspicion that I hadn’t come to the point of wondering who might have acted against Floris if my sister hadn’t. This was a thought too uncomfortable to consider—that a murderer might still be here at Laurel Mountain, believing himself safe.

  My attention focused on a wall shelf before me as I sought distraction, and I began to study the lovely sculpture in marble, nearly life-size, of a young boy’s head. What a far cry from that horrid redstone head I’d seen in Magnus’ outdoor shelter.

  “Did you do this?” I asked. “It’s exquisite.”

  “My son. He died a few years ago—when he was five.”

  I sensed a father’s grief in the simple statement. “I’m sorry,” I said, and then sighed. “How inadequate that word always sounds. People have been saying they’re sorry to me ever since Ariel died, until I’ve begun to hate sympathy. Death is so—unmendable. It leaves so much shattering behind.”

  He said nothing and I moved on to look at another object on the shelf. This was something that had been cast in bronze, but I couldn’t make out from the oddly twisted shape exactly what it was until I picked the heavy thing up in my hands. It had once been a dancing figure, perhaps ten inches high—a girl in tutu and toe shoes, posed in a ballet attitude with one arm curved above her head. There its beauty ended. Something had been used to smash the delicate head and face into an unrecognizable scarred surface. I turned to Magnus in horror and held up the figure.

  “What happened to this?”

  “Floris destroyed it,” he said. His tone was without emotion, his own passion controlled, yet I knew by his eyes that something barely hidden seethed beneath the quiet surface.

 
; After a moment he went on. “Ariel never hated anyone. She created beauty and love. Floris could hate. Hatred was her best creation. And she was destructive as well. If it had been Ariel who had died beneath that rock, no one would have looked far for evidence of murder.”

  “But it was the other way around!” I cried. “And what you say is true. My sister never hated anyone.”

  “If you are going to live in this place,” Magnus said, “you had better let the whole thing alone. You can’t help Ariel now.”

  “Oh yes I can!” I heard my own vehemence and it surprised me as I hurried on. “If the police come back into it, if they point to what happened as murder and Ariel is blamed, it will all spill into the papers. It will ruin everything she was, everything she did, and it would break my mother’s heart.”

  “Tell me about her death,” he said. “I only knew of it through the papers. Did she really kill herself?”

  I set the smashed figure down and went to sit in a chair near the cold hearth. “I don’t think she meant to. I think she only wanted to worry us because she was unhappy. She phoned me to come to her, and I didn’t. Perhaps if anyone is to blame, I am. She didn’t take enough pills to matter, but the combination with alcohol killed her. I could have been there and I wasn’t.” I could hear my own voice rising. “Even Naomi would have gone to her if she could. I could have and I didn’t. So that’s why I have to clear her name now, if something untrue is really being said about her. I owe this much to my sister.”

  He was staring at me strangely down the room, and when he spoke his words took me by surprise. “Will you pose for me, Jenny Vaughn?”

  I could only gape at him in astonishment. Particularly since he had called me by my maiden name.

  “I might model you in clay—though it’s not my favorite medium. Just your head. Then I could cast it in bronze again and repair that figure. It’s the only thing I ever did of her.”

  How strange an immediate emotional reaction can be when it wells up out of old unconscious pain, without restraint, without calculation—suddenly there, revealing you to yourself. It happened now—old bitter rage against Ariel springing into being again. Because once more it was she who mattered. I was nothing. I was only a reflection of something so beautiful, so beyond me, so out of reach, except in a surface resemblance that I couldn’t help.

  He saw my reaction at once. “Don’t be angry, Jenny. Why should you be?”

  And of course I was not angry the moment reason thrust back that sudden rush of devastating emotion. But in that instant of self-revelation, I understood what it might mean to destroy. Only it had been Floris who was destroyed—not Ariel, who might have asked for her own destruction over and over again.

  “Of course I’ll pose for you,” I said.

  He smiled at me—that dazzling white smile that parted the red beard, and his look was gentle, understanding.

  “Thank you.”

  I finished my coffee and stood up. “Is there anything at all you can tell me that might help? Was there anyone besides Ariel who might have hated your wife, been angry with her?”

  “I hated her,” he said. “And I suppose she hated me. It should have been ended between us long ago.”

  “I don’t think you’re a murderer either,” I told him.

  “I could be.”

  There was something deadly in his voice, and I remembered that extraordinarily evil face I had seen out in his workshed. From what inner rage or anger had that head been created?

  “I’d better go back now,” I told him. “Do you mind if I visit your stone bull again on the way down?”

  “Of course not.” Once more he was smiling. “I’m over my first shock at seeing you there. Come along and I’ll go with you.”

  He went ahead down the path through the woods from one clearing to the other. The bull waited for us in all his magnificence, and I could sense again the gathering of power in great muscles as he prepared to charge.

  “How did you do him?” I said. “Did you have a live model?”

  “There used to be a bull down at the hotel farm. I guess I made him angry a few times, just so I could get him to charge, while I went over the fence. I made sketches—dozens of sketches. And I studied photographs, of course.”

  I walked over to place my hand on stone that had warmed in the sun, and I could almost feel the pulsing of all that power and force beneath the hump of muscle in his neck. It was just below that muscle that a sword would find the vulnerable place and thrust through to the heart.

  “He’s not a farm bull,” I said. “He’s right out of a bullring in Spain.”

  “That’s what I intended. That’s why he stands in a ring—if only of grass. I’ve seen bullfights in Madrid, and I wanted to show my bull triumphant.”

  I hadn’t known how close Magnus had come to me, and I had no inkling of what was about to happen until I was picked up suddenly in massive hands, raised in the air and set asprawl on that great stone back. Gasping, I struggled for my balance and drew up one knee, letting my other leg hang down the great beast’s side while I clung to his hump of neck.

  Magnus stood back and looked at me while I fought for my balance—emotional as well as physical.

  “I’d like to make a smaller figure of the bull—with you on his back. Just the way she used to pose there,” Magnus said. “Oh, not in slacks, of course. Maybe you could find some sort of flowing dress—”

  I didn’t bother to get down by way of stepping stones—I simply hurled myself off that stone back and landed on my hands and knees on the grass. I had never felt so furious.

  “I will not pose for you!” I cried. “I’m not my sister—so you can stop imagining that I am.”

  His roar of derisive laughter split the silence of the woods. “No—you’re not your sister in the least. She never made an ungraceful movement in her life.”

  I stood up, brushing grass from my hands and knees, and tried to walk with some dignity toward the path I’d taken up from the road yesterday. Behind me I heard no further laughter, and he said nothing as I went. When I reached the trees I couldn’t resist looking back. He stood beside the stone bull, one hand resting on its flank. He had already forgotten me, as he would never forget her.

  I ran down the path, and when I came out on the road I followed it until I saw another trail leading off from it, dropping toward the lake. There were always signs nailed to trees, and every path, every trail had a name. This one took me steeply down over rough ground until I came out on the way I’d taken yesterday with Brendon—the path that ran above the Lair. Once more great boulders tumbled below me, as though some giant hand had arrested them in full motion. Now I could pick out the place where the falling rock had killed Floris.

  For me there seemed a morbid fascination about this spot, and I stood staring down upon it for a long while. Then, inescapably drawn, I left the path and went across to the space of bare indented earth from which the boulder had fallen. Standing there, I could look straight down into the chasm where a woman had died. Rock walls were sheer, and the pit at the bottom wide enough for the chunk of stone now plugging the way that had once led through it. She would have been hemmed in, perhaps unable to escape quickly, even when she heard the rock coming.

  The hand that grasped my shoulder so startled me that, if I hadn’t been jerked back from the edge, I might have fallen. As it was, I stumbled over rough rock and had to right myself with a wrench. It was not Magnus this time, but his father. Keir Devin stood beside me, his tanned hand on my shoulder.

  “You shouldn’t go so close to the edge,” he warned. “You gave me a scare. A scare in more ways than one.”

  “And you gave me a scare,” I told him indignantly. “I nearly jumped out of my skin.”

  He paid no attention to that, his gray eyes, not unlike his son’s in their lively expression, regarding me strangely. “You look so much like her that you made me think I was seeing things. She used to sit right there for an hour at a time, just looking out at the
lake and the Mountain House, or watching people go through the Lair down below.”

  They all remembered her so vividly, I thought, and I found myself remembering too—out loud.

  “Yes, I can recall times when she was like that. Times when she could be absolutely still. But it wasn’t in character for her. Her work was all movement, after all, and it never ceased. No matter how all-out she’d danced at a performance at night, there was always a class to take early the next morning. She was never let off. So sometimes she tried to let everything go and she’d be very still, trying to renew herself. Sometimes she’d run away, and not even our mother knew where she’d gone. She never told us that she came here.”

  He joined me in reminiscence. “I picked her up in my truck one day when she’d twisted her foot on a rock—just as you did. I found her sitting in one of those gazebos down there, crying. I told her she’d better call her home if the hurt was bad. But she wouldn’t. She didn’t want anyone to know where she was, and I don’t think she was crying about a hurt foot.”

  “No, she wouldn’t be. I’ve known her to dance with broken bones in her feet—ballet dancers do sometimes. They always live with pain. It all looks so graceful and light, but there’s a lot of physical suffering. It’s part of their lives and they don’t cry about it.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not natural—what they do. Anyway, it would have been better if she’d never come here.”

  I could only agree. But there was something I wanted to know and I asked a direct question.

  “Who told you I knew she was here?”

  “I saw Loring a little while ago. He asked me to keep an eye out for you because you were pretty upset about learning that your sister had come to Laurel. But it’s okay, you know. You’re nothing like her.”

  From him, it seemed a compliment, and I tried to smile.

  “Your son wants me to pose for him, the way Ariel did,” I told him. “Do you think I should?”

  “No.” The word was curt. “Stay away from Magnus.”