Domino

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  I put one grimy hand against the doorjamb beside me and steadied myself. The need to run to Hillary had evaporated, but at least I had been spared any blanking out this time. I was all right again. If Gail had unlocked that door for me, it had been done in malice and I would not let her see the effect the room had had on me.

  “Do we meet the fire-breathing old dragon this morning?” Hillary asked, coming toward me. Then his look changed. I couldn’t fool him, I never could. People were the raw material of his trade, and he looked at them more searchingly than most. He pulled me into his arms and held me.

  “Easy now, Laurie. If you’ve begun to remember, let it all come through. Give it space—let it come!”

  I pushed away from him. “No! Not yet. That room is a terrible place. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He let me go. “All right. Don’t upset yourself. I won’t ask questions until you feel like talking. Gail tells me we can ride over to the mountain this morning, if you like. It might be a good idea, honey. You can get out into the air and shake off the cobwebs.”

  Cobwebs! Literally they had been there in that room—hundreds of them, thick and gray, and somehow evil.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’d like that. Anything to get away, to escape the nearness of that room.”

  “Then let’s go down to the stable and saddle up,” Gail said cheerfully. “You do look a bit pale, Laurie. Some of our Colorado sunshine will do you good.”

  “I’ll clean up and change to jeans,” I told her, and moved out of Hillary’s arms, resisting his concern that I’d wanted so desperately a moment before. Whatever it was had passed, and I felt braced again and ready to go on, even though a little numb. Later when we were alone, I would tell Hillary everything. But I couldn’t talk now in front of Gail Cullen. That she was curious was clear, but I didn’t mean to satisfy her curiosity.

  I ran upstairs and changed quickly into jeans and low boots, pulled on my suede jacket. I mustn’t think of that room now. Perhaps there was only one person I could really talk about it with. Persis Morgan.

  When I was dressed I started for the top of the stairs and then hesitated. This morning an effort had been made to discourage me from seeing Persis, and I felt uneasy about her. I wondered if she really hadn’t wanted me to come to her.

  Downstairs Gail was still talking with Hillary and I could hear their voices. I ran quickly up to Persis’ room.

  The door stood open and I went in. Her breakfast tray rested on a table near her bed, food untouched, coffee cooling. Persis lay with her eyes closed, and her breathing was deep and regular. On the far side of the bed Caleb sat in lonely vigil, his head bent and a hand shielding his eyes.

  I spoke to him softly. “Is she all right?”

  He looked up, startled, then rose to his feet. “She’s asleep. Miss Cullen gave her a sedative.”

  “Does she have a doctor who sees her regularly? Does he approve of Miss Cullen?”

  His expression told me that I was interfering. “Certainly she has a doctor. It was he who recommended Miss Cullen. Believe me, it’s very difficult to find a nurse who will stay in Jasper. We’re fortunate to have her here.”

  I wanted to remark that much of the time he didn’t seem to like or approve of the nurse, but I asked a question instead.

  “Why did she want to come here?”

  “She was looking for private work, and she asked Dr. Burton if he knew of a place. We were desperate for capable help after Belle Durant left. Belle isn’t a nurse, but she had all the other qualifications.”

  “Belle Durant worked here?” This was surprising news.

  Clearly Caleb had endured enough of my questioning. “Please. Another time. We mustn’t disturb her.”

  I didn’t think the woman on the bed could be easily disturbed. Her almost colorless lashes lay on her cheeks, and when her eyes were closed there seemed no life in her face. I could easily believe, looking at her, that she might be slowly giving up her grasp on living. Guilt was suddenly sharp in my mind. Had she given up entirely after talking with me? But there was nothing I could do for her right now, and I must see Domino. The very fact that both Caleb and Persis had tried to discourage me from going there made it all the more important for me to see it for myself.

  “I’m going to ride up the valley with Hillary and Gail Cullen,” I told Caleb, and went quickly out of the room, lest he protest again.

  They were waiting for me downstairs, and I took Jon’s borrowed sweater from the rack to return it to him.

  When we reached the barn I found Red tied up and eager for release, though Jon wasn’t about. A young boy who helped him around the place and answered to Gail’s summons of “Sam!” came to assist with the saddling.

  I hung Jon’s sweater on a hook and asked if it was all right for Red to run loose. Sam said, “It’s okay when the gates aren’t being used,” and I let him free.

  Gail was looking over the horses. “Jon has taken Sundance, apparently. You’d have liked him, Mr. Lange. Plenty of spirit, but a good disposition. Anyway, you can ride North Star—he’ll do fine. Baby Doe should be right for you, Laurie. I don’t suppose you’ve ridden all that much since you left the ranch.”

  I felt more than a little resentful of her easy familiarity. She seemed altogether too much at home on my grandmother’s property.

  Baby Doe, with her name rooted in Colorado history, was a gentle chestnut creature who took to me at once, and I felt no need to explain to Gail that I had always ridden. I stroked her nose and talked to her for a moment. Then I swung into the western saddle, with its high pommel that I’d always liked.

  With assurance Gail turned Silver King, the handsome palomino she’d chosen, and started up the valley.

  Red followed us to the gate, where Sam held him back and closed it after us. At first we rode three abreast up the wide valley, with Old Desolate rising straight ahead and lesser mountains following on either side, their slopes thickly wooded. These were the trees that would go if Ingram had his way.

  Before long I began to drop back a little because I wanted no intrusion on this spell of mountains and rocky meadow. Something was pulling me, as it had ever since I’d determined to return to Colorado. Not the back parlor I had stepped into a little while ago, or the past that I must still discover. Something else—something that waited, knowing I would come. Strange and compelling, this feeling in me.

  All about, wild flowers grew abundantly, clear to the edge of the pine forest. Their names came back to me out of memory, and a man’s voice seemed to be repeating them to me. There was wild yellow parsley and mountain lupine—the bluebonnet of these higher elevations. And of course the lovely lavender and white Colorado columbine. Beside us a stream ran part of the way before it took a downhill course where the mountains parted. In the open fields, strewn with rocks, grew tall blue aspen daisies, and I seemed to remember them with their narrow lavender petals and yellow hearts. I let Baby Doe drop still farther behind the other two so that I could savor everything I saw and breathe deeply of this heady mountain air.

  Every color seemed intensified in the clear light, so that beauty grew almost too painfully sharp to bear. Some of this I remembered dimly—riding up the valley through meadow and woods, with that glorious mountain coming always closer, pulling me toward its height.

  Along a rocky shoulder as we began the ascent grew a stand of tall spruce trees. Now Gail rode ahead, leading the way on her golden, silver-maned beauty, and Hillary dropped back just behind me. I was glad for single file. I wanted only to see and feel, and not talk to anyone. For a little while this was surcease, and Hillary seemed to understand my need, not intruding upon me.

  Ahead, over the shoulder of the mountain, the trees opened and the ground grew more rocky and barren, partly because of the mines and the debris they always left behind. In this high place we could see forever, and I reined Baby Doe to a halt. This was what I loved best—to find a high place where I could be above the world. Beyond Old Desolate th
e snow peaks of the Divide were visible, and mountain ranges seemed to move away endlessly against every horizon. Closer in I could look back toward the ranch, where Persis Morgan’s stern-visaged house stood high and proud. Beyond it the cluster of buildings that was Jasper stood out, with mountain summits leaning over them. But up here I could forget a closed room of cobwebs and terror. For a little while I could forget.

  Gail called back to us. “A little higher up you can see the Gore range. Do you want to go up?”

  I hesitated, drawn as always to the heights. But now there was another pull that was greater.

  “Not today,” I said. All I wanted now was to reach Domino.

  As we came into the open, rounding the mountain, the ruins of the old mine became visible—a few tumbled buildings rotting away, an overturned ore car, rusting tracks. Perhaps the “gallows frame” that marked the top of a mine shaft and provided the hoist had once stood up there. My father had told me its nickname.

  My father. Again memory had stirred. But how could I remember?

  I prodded Baby Doe with my heels and rode up beside Gail, words tumbling out in sudden urgency. “You said my father died in Morgan House. Has anyone told you when he died? Do you know how old I was when it happened?”

  She turned in her saddle and looked at me coolly from eyes that held no sympathy. I would never have expected this woman’s vocation to be nursing.

  “I believe that you were eight when he died,” she said sweetly.

  “Then it must have happened just before my mother and I left Jasper. Not when I was a baby, as I’ve been told. How did he die? If you know, please tell me.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to know. In any case Mrs. Morgan has asked us not to talk to you about any of this. So you’ll have to let it go until she’s ready to tell you. But at least I can tell you where he died. It was in the gloomy rear parlor of Morgan House. That’s probably why the room upset you so much this morning. Because you remember his dying there.”

  Hillary had caught up with us, and he rode between Gail and me, putting a stop to her words. “That’s enough for now. We didn’t come out here to talk about Persis Morgan and her house. Let’s forget it!” He reached out and touched my arm. “Over there must be the Old Desolate mine that belonged to your great-grandfathers. So now let’s go down and look at Domino.”

  Gail turned away, clearly piqued, and I could only be grateful to Hillary for thwarting her. She had wanted to hurt me. I had felt this in her all along, and I thought again of the funeral wreath that had been hung on my door. Leaving it for me would seem entirely in character for Gail Cullen. But why? Was I only imagining, as I could do so easily, or was she being prompted to this malice? Did someone else stand behind her?

  I tried to shake off such disturbing thoughts as we rode on until we came fully over the mountain. Below us lay Domino—the remains of what was left of it straggling through a gulch between steep mountainsides. At the sight a flood of warm, unexpected emotion flowed through me.

  This time I didn’t want to be led, but pressed Baby Doe’s flanks and urged her ahead to where I had a clear view of what remained down there—bones picked almost clean by dusty winds. How utterly lonely and abandoned the little mining camp seemed, its few ancient wooden buildings left to weather into dry and tumbled sticks. Long ago someone had built here hopefully, raising a town out of a dream. A dream that had died when the last man moved away. All through the mountains of the West such ghostly remnants of mining camps had crumbled into dust—lost history, never to be recovered.

  Among the broken remnants one structure seemed to have been built with a certain arrogance and pride that had stood against the years and the gales. It boasted two floors, with a gable centered over long front windows where panes of glass shone in the sun. Surely the only glass remaining in Domino! Indeed, the only window frames. I had seen this house before, I knew, and it held no terror for me, but only happy promise.

  “There’ll be a watchman down there,” Gail said. “But he knows me by now.”

  “A watchman in this empty place?”

  “You’d be surprised at the way these old sticks of towns have been carried away. What the storms and the deep snows haven’t destroyed the tourists pick up. Mr. Ingram is trying to save what’s left. Not that we’re exactly on the beaten path for tourists, but they can stray into the wilds. Mr. Ingram owns most of it now—except for that house built by Malcolm Tremayne.”

  My own history seemed to be waiting for me, and I pressed Baby Doe with my knees, urging her down the hillside.

  VIII

  Gail rode down with me, and Hillary came just behind.

  “Mrs. Morgan sees to it that her house is kept in repair,” she said. “Though it seems silly to bother.”

  “It doesn’t sound practical to keep up anything around here,” Hillary agreed.

  I descended the steep stony trail, not wanting to listen to either of them. Never in my life had I been able to sense anything of family ties. My mother and her sister had been orphaned and raised by an elderly second cousin, who had also lacked ties. Of my mother’s family only Aunt Ruth was left. But now these lonely, decaying remnants of a town so long forgotten reached out to speak to me. My great-grandmother had come here as a bride with her handsome young Englishman, Malcolm Tremayne. A man who had once shot an enemy with a silver-mounted deringer—perhaps in the streets of this very town.

  Even such deeds had a glamorous ring when once removed into the pages of history, and I was already excusing Malcolm for whatever he might have done—because he belonged to me. The book I had read last night had told me how beautiful they both were—my great-grandparents—and suddenly I wanted to see pictures of them. Because of those two I existed, and I wanted to reach back into the past and touch them. With a deep new longing I wanted to know my father’s face. What pictures my mother had kept were only snapshots, and mostly she had hidden them from me because they were part of the silence she kept. But surely Grandmother Persis would have photographs. She would have pictures of him when he was a little boy, and then as a young man, before he married my mother. All this I must see before I went away and they were lost to me forever.

  Strangely, the thought of such an exploration into the past no longer alarmed me. Perhaps because it moved into a safer, more distant time than when I was eight years old and my father died in the rear parlor of my grandmother’s house. Domino drew me. I had a kinship with its very dust. Besides, I wanted to know why Caleb Hawes and Persis Morgan had not wanted me here.

  As Baby Doe picked her way downward around the slabs of gray rock and past piles of mine tailings that tumbled down the hillside, I studied the ruins below. Only a handful of wreckage straggled along the single street. Here and there, with siding flapping in the wind, could be seen the remains of a brave false front. Mostly siding was splintered, shingles gone, roofs caved in. A lopsided sign that announced SALOON led nowhere, and in some places only a debris-filled indentation in the ground showed where a house had stood. Perhaps even this much would not have been left if there had not been some effort over the years to keep it from blowing away entirely. Now, however, the abandonment was clear, except for the house where my great-grandparents had lived.

  Just then something moved in my line of vision—something down there among the desiccated bones. I tried to focus more sharply, but it was gone at once, whatever it had been. Some animal, perhaps, foraging in the empty place. Or the watchman Gail had mentioned.

  We were silent as our horses carried us down the trail, to come out at last at the end of the street farthest from the Tremayne house. A steep hill guarded Domino on one side, while on the other rose the lower flank of Old Desolate. When we halted, the silence seemed intense. The wracked mountainside above had once been denuded of trees, and new growth had sprung up sparsely. Weeds and grass and wild flowers had taken over where they could, burying ruins under a more kindly mantling. There had never been any paving here.

  Then, as one of our
horses whinnied, a furious barking began and a large police dog rushed to stand in the weed-stubbled road, his bared teeth threatening us. At once a man emerged from a small shack and stood in our path.

  “Good morning, Tully,” Gail said. “This is Miss Morgan and Mr. Lange from New York. Do you want to call off your dog?”

  The watchman had long been baked by mountain winds and sun, and he was far from young. His hair and beard were grizzled, the blue of his eyes faded, but he was capable of a lively interest, and it seemed to be directed at me. He called the dog to him and snapped on a chain. Then, holding back the animal in its attempts to leap toward us, he addressed me quizzically.

  “I know your gran’maw. Knew her when she was a tyke, living right here in Domino. You don’t look like you’re the same stock. Not tough enough.”

  “I’m a city girl,” I said, and smiled at him.

  He shook his head. “Times’re changin’. It’s no good for nobody.” He touched a finger to his temple and disappeared into his shack, taking the dog with him.

  “I shouldn’t think he’d make much of a watchman,” Hillary commented.

  “How many men do you think would be willing to camp here?” Gail asked. “He’s an old-timer, so he’s willing to stay on. Maybe he even does a little prospecting out of old habit or searches for lost mines. I’ve heard Mr. Ingram say he’ll do well enough for now.” She urged Silver King along what had once been a street, speaking over her shoulder. “Mr. Ingram says that Domino will make an ideal spot for a ski lodge.”

  I rode after her. “I hope he never builds it.”

  “We won’t let him!” Hillary said with sudden heat, and I gave him a grateful look.

  Somewhere ahead a horse neighed, and Gail looked around sharply. “There’s someone here.”

  So I hadn’t imagined that movement I’d seen.

  She trotted toward the one house that stood out intact among all the ruins, and as she reached it and dismounted, Hillary and I joined her. A big gray stood tethered to a post at the side of the house.