Domino

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “I remember perfectly well,” Persis said. “I remember that odd tasting glass of milk Edna brought up to me.”

  “Milk?” Gail said.

  “Yes, of course. Edna had been told to bring it up.”

  “I didn’t order any milk for you. Not this time.” But she knew she had lost. We were all staring at her, and she gave me a single savage look and then whirled out of the room. I could hear her running up the stairs.

  “Let her go and report to Ingram,” Persis said. “I’ll be glad to have her out of the house. She was a mistake from the first, Caleb.”

  Caleb said nothing, and there was no telling what he might be thinking.

  “Laurie,” Persis said, “sit here beside me and we’ll get started.”

  I sat on the sofa beside her with my pen poised, but she found it difficult at first because the fogs of unnatural sleep still clouded her mind. Spells of drowsiness still interfered. Belle fed her more soup and coffee, and finally she began to state what she wanted, so that I could set it down. Jon appeared before she had finished her slow sentences, and he stood in the doorway listening, until Caleb beckoned him in. Once or twice she turned to Caleb for assistance in the wording, and he helped her stiffly. How could he be happy about a will that was taking a great deal away from him? And how lonely Persis Morgan must have been to feel that Caleb was the only friend to whom she could entrust her fortune.

  When it was done at last, and Belle and Jon had witnessed her signature, she looked around the parlor with an air of growing satisfaction.

  “I feel better now. It’s time I came to life again. Laurie, we must talk.”

  “Yes,” I said. “There’s a lot to tell you. I haven’t had any chance until now. This morning I went into the back parlor, and everything returned to me. I know what I did, and I know what you did to save us all from the consequences.”

  “This isn’t the time,” Caleb began, but she waved him to silence.

  “Go on, Laurie,” she said.

  I threw Jon a quick look and found him watching me, his expression kind, encouraging. I stumbled on.

  “Grandmother, I think I came upon Noah’s bones in the mine this morning. That’s another long story. I went searching for Red, and found him where he’d been tied up inside the mine. Someone locked me in, but Jon came looking for me and rescued me. But before he came I found those bones in the mine.”

  “That’s enough, Laurie,” Caleb said. “You shouldn’t be telling Mrs. Morgan all this now.” He looked rather white about the mouth, and his eyes didn’t meet mine.

  Persis was quiet, lost in her own thoughts, and I didn’t try to go on. After a moment she seemed to rouse herself and sat a little higher against the sofa pillows.

  “Bones in the mine?” she questioned. “But they could belong to anyone at all. Any unfortunate. There’s no reason to think that Noah—”

  “Certainly not,” Caleb broke in. “More than one man was lost in that mine in the old days.”

  Gail surprised us all by speaking from the doorway. I didn’t know how long she’d been there, listening.

  “Bones in the Old Desolate? How fascinating! Perhaps Mr. Ingram will be interested to learn about those bones, Laurie. Especially since he told us that Noah Armand was an old friend of his. I know he’s interested in the mystery of that disappearance.”

  Persis looked at her with the haughty air she could summon on occasion. “I expected you to be upstairs packing, Miss Cullen. You can go back to your employer now.”

  Gail smiled at her brightly. “Maybe I’ll do just that. And you can count on my being out of this house as quickly as I can go. Caleb, will you take me over to the hotel with my things?”

  “I’ll take you,” Jon said, and followed her out of the room.

  “Finish your soup,” Belle ordered, and Persis looked up, smiling.

  “I’m glad you’re here. Will you stay with me now?”

  For a moment Belle seemed undecided, reluctant, and then she gave in. “I’ll stay for a while. But I think you should get back to your bed now. You’ve been up long enough.”

  Persis nodded agreement. “Yes. I want to be quiet. I need to be alone to think. Caleb, will you put this will away safely, please? It will serve until your office draws up a proper one. Why don’t you start working on a draft for me now?”

  Caleb took the paper, bowing to her wishes. I could understand why he had been against my coming here from the first. Although he would still be remembered generously, a fortune had just gone out of his hands. And more than that. I recalled what Persis had told me about Caleb Hawes always being a projection of what others had thought he should be. Perhaps for once real power had been within his grasp, only to be snatched away because of my coming to Jasper.

  When he looked at me openly for the first time since I’d entered the room, I saw a blaze in his eyes that shocked me. But it was quickly veiled as he and Belle went to help Persis up the stairs.

  I ran ahead to smooth out her bed and plump the pillows. When she lay back against them, with the comforter pulled over her, she reached for my hand and held it tightly.

  “One more thing, Laurie. While I still have the strength. Go downstairs and fetch that box with the deringer in it. Bring it to me. Now.”

  Caleb started to object, but she dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “Go and work on my will. Let me be.”

  He hesitated in the doorway, and for once I thought he might refuse to do as she directed.

  She spoke to him sharply. “No more plotting, no more schemes. I’ll do what I must do.”

  He bowed slightly and went out of the room, his shoulders held stiffly, the tension inside him almost visible.

  “What do you mean by plotting and schemes?” I asked when he was gone.

  “Oh, don’t think I haven’t guessed how much he’s counted on my will to free him from the bondage he’s lived under most of his life. I know he has schemed to influence me.”

  Her words made me uneasy. “Yet you put your temporary will right into his hands? You trusted him with it?”

  “In his own way he’s loyal to me. His scheming won’t carry him far enough to destroy what I’ve trusted to him. He might cut himself out entirely that way. But enough about Caleb. Go and get me that box, Laurie.”

  I stood uncertainly beside her bed. The thought of doing what she asked filled me with dismay. I had no wish ever to touch that fateful box again.

  “Better get it for her,” Belle said. “I’ll stay right here with your grandmother.”

  Moved by a will that was stronger than any of ours, I went downstairs. At the door of the back parlor I paused with my hand on the knob. I had never wanted to step into this room again, yet now I must.

  When I pushed open the door and walked in, I found that nothing had been changed or touched. No one had closed the heavy draperies that I’d flung open. This afternoon no sun poured in the windows, and the lights were still burning as I had left them. As I looked about the room thunder went reverberating along the peaks and a spate of rain streaked the glass.

  This room must be cleaned now, I thought. Perhaps refurnished. Its ghosts must be laid and old tragedy thrown off. But old tragedy was still new to me, and I felt a little sick as I followed my own footsteps through the dust to the rosewood table. When I touched the lid of the flat mahogany box, my skin seemed to shrink. Yet no reverberations ran through me. All that was over. My dread was different now—it grew out of knowledge of my own act. I was able to pick up the box and take it out of the room.

  Gail was coming down the stairs, with Jon behind her, carrying her bags. She had packed her belongings in haste, and was ready to leave.

  Jon went to the door. “Wait here,” he told her, “and I’ll bring the jeep around. It’s started to rain.” He looked at the box in my hands. “You’ll be fine, Laurie,” he said, and went outside. Strangely, I knew I would be.

  Gail sat down on one of her bags and regarded me mockingly. “I wish you luck. I’ll b
e glad to move on to another patient.”

  “Are you going back to Denver?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  There seemed nothing more to say, and I didn’t want to go on making idle conversation. I started past her up the stairs.

  “You’ve been terribly foolish, you know,” she said, looking up at me. “You had a lot when you came here. Now what do you have? Only the knowledge of what you’ve done, of what you really are. How are you going to live with that for the rest of your life?”

  “I’ve already begun to live with it,” I said, and hurried away from the tormenting sound of her voice.

  At my grandmother’s door I braced myself before entering the room.

  She was still sitting up against her pillows, with only a bedside lamp holding away the gray afternoon. Draperies had been left open upon rain-swept mountains, and Persis was staring out through streaming panes. Belle watched as I carried the box to a table, and as I set it down Persis glanced at it briefly, then looked away. She, too, must find it hard to face what this box held, but she permitted herself no weakness.

  “We will open it together,” she said. And then, irrelevantly, perhaps postponing the moment, she asked, “Do you like the rain, Laurie?”

  “Mostly I’m used to city rain,” I told her. “Suburban rain. A storm seems more threatening here.”

  She went on, musing almost absently, “I’ve always loved storms in the mountains. They’re much too tame down below. Rain can drive and blow with real fury up here, and it takes sturdy building to stand against the storms year after year. And sturdy men and women.”

  The first spate had turned into slanting sheets of water flung against the glass of every window, so that the closed room whispered with rain and wind sounds. Lightning flashed and a clap of thunder followed quickly, reverberating. I could imagine every gully, every canyon running with water, sweeping down in its sudden, dangerous course.

  Belle motioned me toward a chair near the bed. “I’m not all that crazy about storms, so I think I’ll stay awhile before I go after my things. Laurie, let me wipe off that box before you open it.”

  I was grateful for her solid presence, even though whatever came now must lie between my grandmother and me. At best Belle belonged in the real world. Her very presence made nightmare unreal.

  When the smudged dust had been wiped from the lid, Persis reached out to touch one of the brass clasps, but she didn’t release it.

  “Open it, Laurie.”

  I tried not to hesitate. This time I knew how the clasps worked, and I raised the lid upon the single small gun within. Its silver mounting shone dully in the muted light, and though I no longer feared the flash of silver, I drew my hand back quickly.

  “Deringers always came in pairs,” Persis said. “There were two of these originally, and they had a history.”

  In spite of the graceful silver decorations the small gun seemed ugly, blunt-nosed, chopped off. I still couldn’t look at it without shivering.

  “Hand it to me,” she said.

  I had wanted never to touch that bit of murderous metal again, but her tone of voice was not to be disobeyed. I lifted the deringer from the box by its stubby barrel and gave it to her, butt first, surprised, now that I was paying attention, to find it so light in my hand.

  She took it firmly, clearly familiar with the feel of it in her own hand. Yet I knew this was costing her something too. What she held lay at the heart of all she had tried to close away in that room downstairs. Why she was putting us both through this ordeal, I didn’t know, and I could only wait.

  “This is a .41,” she said. “That’s a fairly large caliber for so small a gun. It can fire only one shot. That’s why there were always two in a set. Malcolm Tremayne bought the real thing, as you can see. Henry Deringer’s own markings are on it, and that pineapple design he used for the finial ornament is his as well. Of course his name is on the plate, too. Look.”

  I made myself read the lettering.

  DERINGER PHILADELPHIa

  “Just one r in his name,” Persis pointed out. “They didn’t add another r until counterfeits and imitations became common. By that time ‘derringer’ was a generic term for this type of pistol. This one is a muzzle-loader because Henry Deringer was stubborn about switching to the breech-loader for this particular gun.”

  Such history meant little to me, even though I listened. I only knew that this was the weapon that had killed my father. A weapon that I had fired. I began to feel a little sick, and Belle noticed, going quickly to bring me a glass of water.

  “Drink this,” she said. “Did you know that deringers were the guns the forty-niners carried? Along with their short-handled spades and their washing pans. A gun like that took up so little room, but it could be devastating at close range.”

  I knew all about that.

  Persis was watching me. “They were handy for gamblers, as well as prostitutes and bartenders. Southern ladies used to hide them in their bodices for protection when they went riding in lonely places. But better handguns came in and they went out of style. My father was proud of his pair. The original trim was German silver, but he had additional decoration put on over the iron. Silver from the Old Desolate. That’s why this one is so extensively silvered. They weren’t made of steel, you know. Iron barrels were used. The steel imitations were often better guns, but this was one of those rare early ones. When I was small, Father still carried them both loaded for quick use, because, like the rest of the West, Jasper saw some rough times in the early days.”

  Her voice droned on—almost a monotone—and at last I understood what she was doing. She was giving this small gun historic life apart from me. It and its twin had existed and been used before I was born. They had been carried by my great-grandfather, Malcolm Tremayne. This pistol in itself was no more than a curiosity now—lifeless and harmless. Slowly I began to relax. I could stop shuddering at the sight of it now. I might as well shudder at the sight of my own two hands—which were no longer the hands of a frightened child.

  Now I could even remember an old engraving I had seen—a representation of John Wilkes Booth in the box behind Lincoln, firing a strange-looking pistol. I’d always thought the artist must have been faulty in his drawing, but a deringer was just such a tiny gun as that.

  “What became of the other one?” I asked.

  “I’ve never known,” Persis said, and I thought again of my suspicion that she might have fired one of those guns herself, killing Noah Armand. I had to know.

  “Those bones I found in the tunnel—” I began.

  There was wry understanding in her eyes. “No, Laurie. They don’t belong to Noah, and I didn’t shoot him, though I might have wanted to. I’m afraid they date from a long-ago escapade of my father’s. No one ever told me outright, since I was a child when it happened. But he was supposed to have shot a man who probably deserved it in the lights of that day. The body was undoubtedly hidden in that old tunnel Dominoes dug into the mountain. A tunnel that was conveniently allowed to be lost after that. Those bones you found, Laurie, were probably his victim’s. I only wish they could belong to Noah Armand.”

  She closed her eyes and Belle moved quickly to her side. Relief washed through me in a tide that left me a little giddy. It was better to have Noah alive and still dangerous than to believe that my grandmother had killed him.

  But for now I’d had enough of guns.

  “Let’s clean out the back parlor soon,” I urged. “Let’s get rid of all the ghosts and make it into a new room.”

  Persis heard the relief in my voice, and she opened her eyes and smiled at me. For just an instant I glimpsed the handsome woman she must have been in her prime. For that moment of sudden intensity it was as though age had evaporated and she and I were the same. Years meant nothing to the inner youth that had never left her. She held out her hand to me and I took it with a new recognition.

  “When will you start?” she asked me.

  “Perhaps tomorrow
morning. Could Edna help me? You’ve never seen so much dust, so many cobwebs!”

  “Let it wait a little. Tomorrow morning I want Mark Ingram to come to see me, and I want you here. I’m ready to talk to him now. Will you tell him for me, Belle, when you go for your things?”

  “I’ll tell him. And I expect he’ll come running. But he won’t give up, you know. Not just because of the signing of a new will. He knows how to harass and threaten. He’ll go right on trying to drive you out. And Laurie too. I must say I was surprised, though, when Hillary Lange turned things around and wouldn’t let Mark pack Laurie off to New York. He had to swallow that. Of course if she marries Hillary and they stay, perhaps you’ll have another soldier for your army, Mrs. Morgan.”

  “I’m not going to marry him,” I said. “I’m not going to marry anyone.”

  “Just testing,” Belle said, and grinned at me. “Sure, I’ll tell Mark you want to see him, Mrs. Morgan. And then I may be out of a job. He’s not too pleased with me as it is.”

  “You’ll come back here to work,” Persis said. “You don’t have to be loyal to that man forever. I need you now.”

  “I don’t have to be loyal to him at all. It’s just that old habit dies hard. Maybe for him too. Maybe there’s still a tie between us. Maybe he’s even fond of me—in his way. But could be it will do him good if I make a break on my own. Soon as this storm’s over, I’ll go have a talk with him. Though not for a while, I think. Laurie, you’re looking frazzled. Why don’t you put that gun back where it belongs and go lie down in your room for a while? I’ll stay with your grandmother.”

  Suddenly I knew how tired I was. And besides, there were so many things I needed to be alone to think about, to begin to digest.

  When I’d put the deringer back in its box beside the empty mold that should have held its twin, I bent to kiss Persis’ cheek and caught the scent of verbena. She was really coming to life, consenting to a touch of vanity. I loved her for it.

  When I went downstairs I moved with a lighter step, for all my weariness. The back parlor still made me uneasy, but I was not afraid of it anymore. I returned the box to its table and finally, I could rest in this house and feel wholly safe.