Snowfire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  I went closer, where I could examine the rail carefully. It was made from a peeled log and there was a new, un-weathered section of wood repairing the place which had broken through. As I stood there, shivering, I could picture that day. I could see the chair catapulting down the ramp into the rail—and Margot flung from the chair to her death in the rock-strewn stream below. All was still around me and horror was very close. Because my brother was involved, I was involved. I could feel what had happened through my own senses.

  But my mind was still working. I put out a tentative hand and pushed at the rail. It was sturdy and strong. It must have taken a tremendous blow to break through it when the wheelchair had struck. There was something wrong, something I did not understand.

  For another moment or two as I stood there trying to fathom what troubled me, the silence remained serene around me. And then without warning tumult broke out.

  I heard a car on the far side of the house and the sounding of a horn, heard the car come to a halt on the driveway. As I listened, startled, car doors slammed and a child’s voice cried out a greeting, followed by a man’s deeper tones. The front door of the house must have been opened by the caretaker, for there were more greetings, and echoing sounds from inside. The child’s voice came again—that would be Adria, of course. And that high, somehow eerie laughter would belong to Shan, Julian’s sister. She was eerie enough, I’d gathered from Stuart.

  The McCabes were home.

  I considered my position. Certainly I didn’t want to be found here. Yet I knew footprints marked my course up the drive, and the new arrivals would be aware that someone had come this way. Someone who had no business here. While I was wondering about a possible retreat, even flight, the back, door opened and slammed shut. Someone ran down the steps and came around the house toward me. I turned to face Julian McCabe.

  Stuart had already made him seem larger than life to me, and he was just as Stuart had described him. I saw for the first time that finely chiseled head with its thick black hair, prematurely gray-streaked. Even on the ski slopes he went bareheaded, except when he raced, Stuart had told me. I saw the deep-set eyes, intensely, startlingly blue, with squint lines at the corners which came from sun and snow glare. He had a skier’s tan, so there must have been skiing in Maine. His nose was straight, his chin emphatic, his mouth pressed into a tight line that boded no good as he came toward me. All my resentment of Julian McCabe, my feeling that I could never forgive him taking over Stuart’s life with such disastrous results, rose to close my throat and freeze me in my tracks.

  “You’re from the lodge?” he said, his manner bluntly questioning.

  With an effort I managed to answer him. “I’m Linda Earle. Mr. Davidson is trying me out this week as hostess at the lodge.”

  I half expected him to pounce upon my name, but he did not. It meant nothing to him. Stuart’s caution in never talking about me, since I detested his skiing and might interfere, had paid off.

  “I see.” His disapproval of my trespassing was apparent, and I wondered if he would order Clay to fire me before I’d started work. But he seemed to swallow his distaste for a blundering visitor and strove for a semblance of courtesy. “I am Julian McCabe. We saw your footprints leading toward the house, so I came to investigate.”

  He was very tall beside me, and exceedingly forbidding.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” I said, trying to sound lightly ingenuous. “I’ve heard about Graystones all my life. I wanted to see what it was like.”

  “And now that you’ve seen it?” The question was dry.

  I stopped trying to be ingenuous—it didn’t suit me. “It looks—haunted. I think it frightens me.” My own words frightened me. They were the worst I could have spoken.

  He moved past me. “Then perhaps you’d better return to the lodge, where you’ll be safe. I’ll show you the short cut. Clay should have warned you that we’re off bounds for the lodge. We’ve found it necessary to be—inhospitable.”

  I couldn’t let him blame Clay. “He warned me, but I—”

  “You were curious, of course,” the dry voice went on. “If you’ll come this way.”

  He walked me toward that fatal corner where the wheelchair had gone down the ramp. I could see the windows of Margot’s room, with the door to the small balcony, and the ramp, snow-covered now, leading rather steeply to the ground. I swallowed hard and tried not to stare. I was being summarily rushed off the property, and certainly I wouldn’t be invited back. Yet I could think of nothing I could say or do to change his course.

  The man beside me gave a sudden exclamation, staring at the balcony above us. When I looked in the same direction, I saw that the door to Margot’s room stood open, and a little girl with long flowing hair as black as her father’s was coming through the door. She still wore her red coat and snow pants, and ahead of her she pushed a wheelchair. My breath caught in my throat.

  Her father seemed to freeze into shocked stillness as the child wheeled the light metal chair to the head of the ramp. Then she came around it and seated herself carefully on the green cushion. She was absorbed in her own actions and she didn’t notice us watching near the foot of the ramp. Her thin hands reached toward the wheels of the chair and she began to propel herself slowly and deliberately toward the beginning of the slant.

  Julian came to life and shouted at her. “Adria, stop! Stay where you are! Don’t move!”

  The child’s hands froze on the wheels, and her blue eyes, so like her father’s, stared at us unseeingly. Her face was a mask of terrible fright. She was like a child made of ice. I had seen a small boy in just such a state only last year when I had worked for a time as a volunteer in a hospital ward for disturbed children.

  Julian started toward the ramp and I knew he was going to frighten her more. I didn’t hesitate to put my hand on his arm.

  “Please,” I said. “Let me.”

  Before he could object, I went past him up the ramp. The child did not see me because her fixed stare allowed her to see nothing of her real surroundings. All her attention was focused on some inner terror that was more real to her than anything else. I went down on my knees in the snow and put myself directly into the line of her blank gaze. Softly I began to talk to her. Below the ramp Julian did not move.

  “Adria, listen to me. I want to tell you something. I was fourteen years old when my mother died, Adria. I can remember it very well. I can remember how much it hurt me and how lonely I was. I missed her terribly and I cried a lot. You’re feeling that too now. That’s because you’ve just come home to this house where it happened. Other people feel the same thing, you know. It’s all right to cry, if you want to. My mother died when I was a few years older than you are. You won’t believe it, but everything gets better after a while. It really does. It hardly hurts at all now, but I remember how I felt then.”

  My words came out in a sort of crooning. What I said didn’t matter so long as the same idea was repeated over and over. Perhaps I could reach her, and perhaps I couldn’t—but I had to try.

  I had been careful not to startle her too soon with my touch, but touching was important, and now I rested my fingers lightly on the back of her hand. When she did not draw it away, I lifted her hand and pressed her fingers around my own. All the while I murmured to her, summoning her back to what was real and hurtful—the things she must face eventually—not escaping them, not pretending there was nothing to cry about so that all this misery dammed itself up inside.

  When I saw the tears well up in her eyes and felt the pressure of her fingers, I sighed with relief. I didn’t know her well enough to put my arms about her yet. I did not dare trespass on her personal privacy, but I went on talking to her.

  “That’s fine, Adria. Sometimes it feels better when we cry. It lets all that frozen lump inside melt away.”

  She was looking at me now with those great, swimming eyes, seeing me—and still she did not reject me.

  “Everybody says I—I mustn’t cry,”
she faltered.

  “But of course you must. Go ahead. You can cry and hold onto my hand at the same time. Do you have a handkerchief?”

  She shook her head and sniffed loudly. The tears were streaming and it was all I could do to keep from pulling her into my arms and cradling her in her desperation of grief. I could never bear to see a hurt child. But I must move carefully, even though she accepted me for the moment. It was her father who should have come to take her in his arms, but he did not move to touch her, though he had come up the ramp a little way. I held out my hand to him and whispered, “Handkerchief, please.”

  He gave me a large white square and I handed it to Adria. She blew her small nose, wiped her eyes, and sobbed with abandon. In a moment or two I think she would have stopped because it is surprisingly hard to keep up a continuous weeping. But there was a sudden rush of color and sound from inside Margot’s room.

  A woman came through the door. Fortunately, Stuart had prepared me for Julian’s unearthly sister. She was dressed in blue velvet pants and something like a violet chiffon poncho that overhung them in points. The chiffon made her seem to float, and she drifted like a cloud down upon Adria, her long fair hair, straight and shimmering, floating like the rest of her. She had gray-green eyes that seemed to drift here and there with their gaze, without any particular focus.

  “Darling, darling!” she cried to Adria in her soft, rich voice, and went down on blue velvet knees to envelop Adria in possessive arms. “You mustn’t cry like that, darling. You mustn’t think about terrible things. You’ll make yourself ill. Come away from that horrid chair. Come away inside, Adria—come with Shan.”

  Adria let this vision in blue and violet lift her from the chair and carry her away from my touch. I doubt that Shan even saw Julian and me. She was all hovering mother as she took the child inside, and we could hear her pleading with her not to cry, until the door closed behind them.

  I got up to dust snow from my knees, and found that I was shaking as I turned my attention to Adria’s father. My trembling was not because of him, but because I’d suffered with the child and been wrenched by Shan’s interference.

  “That sort of thing will have her right back where she was!” I said angrily.

  Then I realized that he looked quite dreadful. His mouth was drawn with pain, and he looked shaken, destroyed. For the first time I considered what the sight of Adria in that chair of Margot’s might have done to him. I didn’t like him, but I had to recognize suffering.

  “Are you all right?” I asked uneasily.

  By an effort he seemed to gain a grip on himself and he regarded me with cold animosity. “Are you going to minister to me now?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’ve had a shock. But I think you can take care of yourself better than your daughter can.”

  He turned on me with suppressed fury. “Do you think you were doing her any good—reminding her of everything she ought to forget, encouraging her to weakness and weeping?”

  “She’s only a child!” I cried, equally furious. “But she has as much right to her pain as anyone else. I can’t think of anything more insulting than to tell someone who is suffering that he’s not in pain and he must cheer up and forget all about it. Let her feel it. Let her weep it out, instead of hiding it away to fester!”

  We stared at each other angrily, and after a moment he spoke out his scorn.

  “You seem to take a lot upon yourself.” There was a cruel cut to his words—perhaps, I thought with a flash of insight, because he could not bear to have anyone see him with his guard down. “You seem to be a sensation seeker, a ministering angel and a child psychologist. Anything else?”

  Feeling suddenly limp, I realized there was no use in being angry with him. No matter how I felt, he was as hurt as the child.

  “Perhaps I’m just another human,” I said quietly. “Perhaps I am curious, like other humans. And perhaps I can remember what it’s like to be very young and have something hurting me. I can still remember how painful it is to be a child.” It could be painful to be an adult too, but I didn’t remind him of that.

  He took a deep breath, as if he too were starting down a slope. “I suppose I should be grateful to you for getting my daughter past a bad moment. But you don’t really understand. You see, Adria thinks she is the one who caused her mother’s death. She thinks she is the one who pushed her chair down this ramp.”

  I stared at him, shocked, while confused possibilities stirred through my mind. If this was true, it might mean—why, it might mean exoneration for my brother. It could also mean the destruction of that desperate child.

  “It can’t be true,” I said.

  “Of course it’s not true!” he told me roughly. “The difficulty is to get Adria to believe that it isn’t true.”

  For the first time there was something wrong about his tone, something false, and I realized with some sixth sense that Julian McCabe did not believe his own words of denial. He spoke aloud to convince himself of something he feared quite dreadfully was true.

  My eyes fixed themselves speculatively upon the wheelchair—that innocent mass of metal and cloth that had no concern with death because it was only an inanimate instrument. Apparently it had not even been damaged in the rush down the ramp which had killed Margot.

  “Why don’t you get rid of that thing?” I said.

  He looked as if I had slapped him, and I realized again that his pain was not only for the child. He had suffered loss as well as she.

  I started past him down the ramp. “I’m terribly sorry for saying the wrong things. I know I shouldn’t be here. I only wanted to—to look at the house. I’ll go back to the lodge now. You needn’t bother—I can find my way.”

  “Wait,” he said, and came after me. “Since you wanted to see the house—why not see it?”

  “I have. I walked around it before you came. I’ve looked at the tower and—”

  “Come along and I’ll show you what it’s like inside. I don’t really mind showing it off to someone’s who’s interested.” His manner had softened toward me, though his eyes were still bleak.

  I understood a little. Or thought I did. He was trying to make it up to me for the contemptuous words he had spoken. At another place, in another time, I might have walked away from him because I had never liked anything I’d heard about Julian McCabe, and I liked nothing I had seen about him so far. But I was not here for myself. I was here for Stuart. And I had to know the truth about that wheelchair.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’d like very much to see Graystones from inside.”

  III

  He took me in by way of the front door. We stepped across an enclosed porch into a large square hall, sparsely furnished and dark, since it boasted no windows. It was a utilitarian entryway, with a tiled floor where ski boots would do no harm. There was a clothes rack hung with outdoor things, and skis and poles and boots were set all about. The elegance of the house did not begin here.

  A door on the right led to the enclosed tower stairs, while on the left there was an entry to the library. Ahead lay the great drawing room that Stuart had told me about, and Julian McCabe gestured toward it.

  The first impact of the room was something Stuart had not prepared me for. This was not because of anything it contained, but because of the view offered by bulging bay windows down the length of the room. The tall windows, from which dark garnet draperies were drawn back, made a dramatic framing for the dead beech trees I had seen outside. Thus framed, they were far more striking than when I’d seen them with the ravine at their feet and the forest around. Beyond the glass they twisted fearsome limbs to the sky, while the little stream seethed past gray roots. Behind rose the bleak winter mountain, banked with snow.

  Suddenly I knew what had killed those trees. It was fire—and I stood stricken. Before my eyes flames seemed to leap aloft, enveloping gray limbs with a dreadful, searing heat. I knew what fire was like. How could I ever forget? How could I not be mesmerized?


  I sensed Julian watching me as I walked away from him down the room and stood looking out at those gray, angular limbs, somehow primitive in their agony, as if the memory of fire remained in their writhing. The wildness touched me with terror. There was terror in the agony of the trees, and yet it was different from the gray terror of the house because of my memory of fire. I responded to a force that I did not altogether understand.

  Julian had followed me down the room and stood beside me. I had to speak.

  “It shocks the senses,” I said.

  For the first time he gave me the grave smile that lighted his thin, rather ascetic face, and touched the blue intensity of his eyes.

  “The trees burned when I was no more than eight. Afterwards, Father kept them there. He was rather a fierce person—my father—and he liked the picture they made. My mother hated it. She said the trees frightened her and when she was in this room she insisted that the draperies be closed.”

  I could sympathize with his mother. It took me a moment to trust my voice. “It’s a view that might be hard to live with. Who wants to face grim reality all the time? Though I suppose there’s a testing in it. Is that why I feel it so strongly? As if I’d been challenged in some way?”

  “A testing?” He repeated the word doubtfully. “How can it test you when it’s static? It disturbs, yes—perhaps because it’s a reminder of destruction. But it takes life to do any testing.”

  Yet the sight of those trees tested me in some curious way that I could not explain. It said to me, “Do you dare to do what you’ve come for, when this is the inevitable end?” I shivered and turned my back on the view. Julian’s testing would have been on the ski slopes. I knew about that. This was different.