“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, feeling contrary. “Magnus and his father seem to have a basically good relationship. Keir must have done a fine job in replacing Magnus’ mother, and I imagine you helped too.”
“That was all a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now. I suppose the real thing that disturbs us all is that Ariel did exactly what you are doing. She came to Magnus and posed for him, let him fall in love with her. And then Floris died. You can’t blame us for feeling uncomfortable—even fearful—when you follow in your sister’s steps.”
“I’m hardly following in her steps,” I said tartly. “That’s the last thing I’d be willing to do.”
She patted my arm as we walked along, soothing my indignation. The mare snuffled after us, nudging Irene gently with her nose once in a while. I hadn’t thought about riding horses here, though I knew there were stables. Riding wasn’t something I’d done a great deal of, but I could manage, and perhaps it would be a good way to get around—on the back of one of the quieter horses. I said as much to Irene and she nodded absently.
“Of course. One of the men down at the stable will fix you up. And I can lend you riding things, if you like.”
“My own slacks will do fine,” I said, and glanced at the woman walking beside me, taller than I, and still slender and younger-looking than I knew her age to be. I would have liked to be closer to Brendon’s mother than I was.
We got back to the hotel for the lunch hour, and this time I couldn’t very well hide away and wait for the others to eat without me. There was nothing for it but to face Brendon again, even though pain returned at the very thought, and I went into the dining room reluctantly.
13
It was as difficult a meal as I feared. Irene promptly told where she had found me, and Brendon’s silence was hard to endure. He seemed no longer interested in what I did. Since I had opposed him and gone my own way, he had withdrawn himself even more, and it was as though he had told me to do as I pleased and that he no longer cared what happened to me. Only I couldn’t believe that was true. I had the feeling that he cared more than he wanted to admit, and I longed to find a way to reach him.
Loring talked about the hotel, but no one joined in or paid much attention until he suddenly startled us.
“I understand that Jenny is considering going to the police,” he said.
We all stared at him then, but it was Naomi’s vehemence that broke the silence.
“No! She can’t do that! We can’t allow Laurel Mountain to be dragged down in a murk of scandal. I suppose that’s what Jenny would like to manage, but you’ll stop it, won’t you, Brendon?”
“It’s difficult to stop Jenny from anything she chooses to do,” Brendon said. “How do you suggest we go about this, Naomi? Or perhaps Jenny has something to offer in her own defense.”
Now the four of them looked at me, waiting, while I stared at my plate and tried to find words to make them understand. Perhaps to make me understand, as well.
“I can’t bear it that you’re all trying to use Ariel as a scapegoat for someone else’s crime. Something dangerous is happening and the police should be the ones to solve it. No matter what the cost is to Laurel.”
Brendon looked at me directly, coldly. “I have said I would handle this, Jenny. You’ll have to be satisfied with that.”
I started to tell him that I could no longer wait for him to take some vague action, but an interruption stopped me. The headwaiter had come to our table and stood at my elbow.
“Mrs. McClain, word has just come from the, desk that there is someone waiting to see you.”
I looked up in surprise. “Who is it?”
“He didn’t give his name, Mrs. McClain, but he’s from New York. He asks you please to finish your lunch and then allow him to speak with you.”
I pushed my dessert aside. “I’m finished now. If you’ll excuse me—” I rose from the table, both puzzled and anxious. What had happened in New York that someone had been sent here to find me?
One of the clerks at the desk pointed the visitor out to me, where he sat alone in a shadowed corner. This section of the lobby was empty at the moment and as I crossed it the man saw me coming and rose to his feet with a familiar expression of shock.
“You look so much like her,” he said. “Forgive me. If I didn’t know—”
He had turned toward the light and I recognized him at once, though I had never met him. This was Maurice Kiov, whose present fame Ariel had helped to make by choosing him as a favorite partner. In person he was as impressive as upon the stage—a little overpowering in his virility that further exploded the myth that all male ballet dancers were homosexuals. Dancing with Ariel, he had made her seem all the more fragile and feminine.
I gave him my hand. “I know who you are, Mr. Kiov. I’ve seen you dance with my sister.”
He was young—in his early twenties—and his eyes had a dark life of their own beneath heavily marked brows. His nose was beautifully Greek, his full lips sensitive. Black hair grew long at the back and very thick, drawn into points before his ears. His clothes were casual—a white turtleneck under a sport jacket, and well-cut gray trousers.
He had danced with Ariel the night she had died. A benefit performance. They’d done the Bluebird pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty, one of the most renowned duets in classical ballet. I hadn’t attended that night—I’d been off in New Jersey—but I had seen Kiov dance with her other times, and I knew how marvelous he was, how supercharged on a stage. He was a danseur noble who deserved the name, and he had twice the stamina of an athlete, to make everything look so easy.
“I apologize,” he said, taking my offered hand. “I didn’t want to send in my name—to spread it around that I am here.”
“I understand. The library is empty—we can talk there, and you can tell me why you’ve come.”
He watched me uneasily, moving with a dancer’s grace at my side, and I knew he couldn’t help but see Ariel in me.
“I’m not like her at all,” I assured him when we’d found a place near a window.
He nodded that beautiful head—like the head from a Donatello frieze. “I know. No one could be. Along with many others, I was in love with her. Though only as a dancer, I think. I could never approach her as a woman—not until that last night.”
“How did you find me?”
“I went to your mother. But I couldn’t talk to her. I—” He made a helpless gesture that I understood well enough. When it came to Ariel, Mother could be difficult indeed to talk to.
“So she gave you my name and told you where I was?”
“Yes. I hope you don’t mind. There’s so little to say, really, and yet the matter has been troubling me all these months since Ariel died. I’ve been out of the country, you know. I couldn’t even attend her funeral because I was in Australia before I learned what had happened that night after I’d danced with her for the last time. The next morning I was on my way out of the country, so I didn’t know. And then there was nothing I could put into a letter.”
He was becoming agitated, feeling deeply some guilt of his own, and suffering her loss all over again.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” I said. “Please tell me.”
“My tour has lasted until this week. As soon as I reached New York, I went to see your mother.”
“I understand.” He looked so miserable that I reached out and touched his hand gently. “It’s all right, you know. Whatever it is, you’re not to blame.”
“No, I suppose not. But again and again I’ve wondered if there might have been something I could have done or said that night—something that might have helped. After the performance, when the theater was empty, I found her in her street clothes standing on the empty stage. When I went out where the spotlights had moved earlier, she clung to me and cried a little. She believed that she had danced badly—though that wasn’t possible for Ariel Vaughn. She was sad and lost and without her usual confidence, so that she turned to me as though I we
re a younger brother.”
His dark eyes clouded and his voice broke on the last word.
“I suppose I never loved her as I would a woman. More as an enchantment—something to worship from afar, even though I knew her weight and the feeling of her body in my arms. The first time I was allowed to dance with her, it seemed like a miracle. It was hard to believe that she was flesh and blood.”
“What did she tell you that night?”
It was clearly difficult for him to bring himself to talk about it, though it was for that purpose he had come here.
“I took her a few blocks from the theater to a little coffee shop, and we sat in a booth and drank coffee and she talked to me. About this place, mainly—Laurel Mountain. There was a woman who died here under tragic circumstances—a woman named Florence?”
“Floris,” I said. “Yes.”
“Ariel stood on a rock that fell and killed this woman. She told me that. I think she was not to blame, but what happened had haunted her. She told me she had stood on this boulder and talked to the woman who was in the crevice below. The stone had moved a little beneath her, but she had paid no attention at first. The woman called to her that a man from the hotel had told her someone was hurt in this rocky place, and this woman—Floris—had come here to help this person. But there was no one there. So she wanted Ariel to go back to the hotel and check with this man.”
“Did she mention the man’s name?”
“I believe it was—Grant?”
“That’s possible. Then what happened?”
“Ariel tried to move to the edge of the rock, so as to see the woman below and talk to her better, but the rock began to teeter, and she had to leap free. She began to cry when she told me—because what happened was so horrible. Perhaps if she hadn’t moved to the edge of the rock, it wouldn’t have rolled. But her weight started it and there was nothing she could do. She told me she would never cease to hear the last scream of the woman who was trapped down there. This—Floris—was someone she didn’t like, but she suffered a great deal over her death.”
The sigh I expelled was a long one. “Thank you for coming to tell me, Maurice Kiov. There have been some who have hinted that my sister meant to harm Floris Devin, though I’ve never believed this. Now you’ve given me the proof to the contrary that I need. I don’t think there’ll be any necessity, but if events should require it, would you be willing to tell all this to the police?”
“Of course. I would do anything possible to help you. But there is a little more. Something else she told me that night.”
I waited and he moved a hand across his face as though to control his own emotion.
“After the rock fell, she stood frozen for a few moments, hearing the roar and crash, and the echo of that scream. Then she became aware that someone was watching her from below the rock. She often had moments of almost superawareness, and because of this feeling, she looked down—and she saw a face. It disappeared at once, and she heard someone run off through the brush out of sight. Then she rushed back to the hotel to tell everyone what had happened.”
“Did she tell you who it was she saw near the rock?”
He must have caught the anxiety in my voice because he shook his head regretfully. “I have a feeling that she knew this person’s identity, but she wouldn’t tell me. Whoever it was must have been aware of her recognition before running away. I believe that it was someone important to her. She told me she was sure that the rock had been undermined so it would fall. She had been shown some snapshots.”
“She was protecting someone, you think?”
“That’s possible. I don’t know. She blamed herself for what happened, though she had no real guilt. She spoke to me too of old age and the short life of a dancer. Ariel couldn’t bear the thought of becoming ugly and old, of giving her life to teaching others, or of marrying and living in the shadow of her husband. The spotlight was her life. Sometimes I too feel that way, but I believe I am tougher, less vulnerable. If I must, I can do other things besides dance, and I will do them successfully. The discipline of any talent can be used in other ways.”
I smiled at him. “I think you will be successful, whatever you try. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for coming here to tell me these things.”
He rose and made me the courtly bow that was completely natural to him. I’d seen him bow like that on a stage.
“I thank you, Mrs. McClain. My mind is relieved now. I can sleep again without seeing her face demanding something of me.”
“How did you come here?” I asked.
“By car. I will be driving back to New York.”
“Would you wait just a few moments longer? Would you be willing to tell these things to my husband?”
There was a moment’s hesitation, and I wondered what Ariel had told him about Brendon. Then he nodded agreement and I hurried back toward the dining room. Brendon was coming down the stairs from the second floor and I told him hurriedly about my visitor and asked if he would come and listen to what Maurice Kiov had to say. He agreed at once and we returned to the library, where the dancer waited for us.
Kiov was a shade less friendly with Brendon than he had been with me, and I had to believe that Ariel had said something about Brendon that had stayed in his memory. Nevertheless, he gave the same account again, and Brendon listened soberly, questioning now and then, though he got nothing more from the story than I had gotten. The dancer had told us both everything he knew.
We escorted him to the door and saw him to his car. Once more, the sky looked black and threatening and I hoped he would escape a storm on his drive home.
“What do you make of his story?” I asked Brendon as we turned back to the lobby together.
“That you were right to believe in her, and I was wrong to doubt her. If Loring sent Floris into the Lair, he has some accounting to do himself. Do you want to come with me to talk to him?”
I said I did and we went together to Loring’s office. He was alone when we walked in and Brendon stood beside his desk. Perhaps we looked a bit like executioners, because Loring looked up at us with a startled expression.
“Sit down,” he said. “Sit down and tell me the news. I can see by your faces that it’s bad.”
“No,” I said. “It’s very good. It’s good enough to convince both of us that whoever caused Floris’ death, it wasn’t Ariel.”
He raised his eyebrows mockingly and waited for us to sit down. Then he said, “Well, go on.”
Brendon told him, almost word for word, pausing when he came to the mention of Loring’s name.
“So you were the mysterious party who sent Floris into the Lair that day to rescue a mythical injured woman?” Brendon said.
A flush had come into Loring’s face, but he was more angry than disconcerted. “So what if I was?”
“You might have explained this sooner,” Brendon pointed out.
“And get myself caught up in possible ramifications? No thank you. It wasn’t essential anyway. Since I wasn’t the one to originate the myth.”
We stared at him and Brendon said, “Then who was?”
“Someone phoned me that morning and said there was a woman in there with a broken ankle and we’d better get her out. I phoned Floris to get down there fast, since, as you know, she used to do most of our nursing-care jobs. And in the meantime I went out to see if I could locate Keir or one of the rangers to go in and get the woman out.”
“Who phoned you?” Brendon asked.
“I don’t know. The voice sounded hoarse, like someone with a bad cold, and I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The identity didn’t seem to matter just then, when the important thing was to get the woman rescued. By that time, of course, the rock had fallen on Floris. What else did Ariel tell this dancer?”
Before Brendon could continue, Naomi burst into the office, her pointed little face bright with excitement.
“Do you know who was just here in this hotel?” she cried. “I saw him out th
ere getting into a car. I saw him with my own eyes. It was Maurice Kiov. Here at Laurel Mountain!”
“Are we supposed to be thrilled?” Loring asked.
“If you knew anything about ballet, you would be. Next to Nureyev and Baryshnikov, he’s the greatest male dancer in the world. Ariel used to tell me how magnificent he is! I would have given anything to meet him. Why was he here?”
We all looked at each other, and Brendon got up to give Naomi his chair. “You might as well hear this too,” he said and began the story all over again. This time there were no interruptions and he was able to get to the last part about a face Ariel thought she had seen and would not identify.
Naomi listened in frozen silence, as though Ariel herself might have been speaking.
“Who was it?” Brendon asked Loring. “Do you know?”
“Of course not. I haven’t the faintest.”
I glanced at Naomi, and her look slid away from mine, though she said nothing. “Who do you think it was?” I asked her.
Her bright look flitted about the room, never touching our faces, never meeting our eyes. “Why, it must have been Loring,” she said. “You were out there looking around, weren’t you? So who else would it be?”
“I can think of several people,” he told her. “So it might be a good idea not to make accusations until you’re sure.”
I broke into this interchange impatiently. “In any case, the important thing to come out of this is the fact that Ariel never meant the rock to fall. When you call in the police you’ll have to make all this clear to them.”
“I’m not sure there’s all that much to make clear,” Loring said. “In talking to Kiov, of course Ariel would have put the best possible light on whatever happened. But there’s still no proof she wasn’t guilty.”
“I think there is,” Brendon said quietly.
“You never could see any harm in your ballet dancer!” Loring spoke scornfully. “But as things stand now, it’s this man—woman?—who was there among the rocks who matters. If he isn’t mythical too.”
The Stone Bull Page 23