Snowfire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “What can I do?”

  His smile was almost wistful. “I’m not really sure. Perhaps I’m trying to feel my way. What if you came up here for a few nights? We have plenty of room. If you were here, and she wanted you—oh, I’m putting it badly, too abruptly.”

  This was alarming. I had no knowledge in depth of a child in Adria’s condition, any more than Shan or Julian had. I could only offer sympathy growing out of my own experience. Sympathy and perhaps an instinctive way with children. I seemed to have won Adria’s respect and at times her liking.

  “What can we lose by trying this?” he pressed me. “I can always turn to doctors or psychiatrists later. A little loving common sense might be the best recipe. Something Shan and I seem to lack. We love her well enough, but eventually we do the wrong things, and she responds to us in the wrong way. A lot of the time she pushes away our love and—” again he broke off, though by his expression he might have added, “—and my anguish.”

  “What about your sister?” I said. “Won’t she resent my coming here?”

  “I’ve told her I was going to talk to you about this. She’ll do as I wish.”

  Though not willingly, I was ready to wager. But I wouldn’t think about Shan. The memory of Adria on the slopes yesterday returned to me—of Adria as she could be, contrasting with the drooping, nightmare-haunted child I had seen just now at the door. If only I could help her—

  “Give me a moment to think,” I said.

  He moved away from me, and I could almost feel the intensity of the pressure he had put upon me lift. The vision of Adria faded a little, and suddenly I remembered all too vividly who I was and why I was here. I remembered Stuart held in a jail, and the road I must take to release him—not on bail, but entirely free, cleared. There was no question as to whether or not I would accept this request of Julian’s. I might not like living in this house under a pretense that could be exposed at any time. I hated the pretenses increasingly for themselves. It was more natural for me to be honest and direct, yet from day to day I was being drawn into a deepening well of subterfuge. I didn’t like what I was becoming.

  It was fortunate that my interest in Adria, my growing fondness for her at least gave me an honest reason for being here. As far as the child was concerned, I would do whatever it was within my power to do. There was no deceit there, and probably no harm would come of it, unless Julian put me furiously out of the house in spite of Adria’s need.

  He stood beside the bookcases, watching me, and he seemed to think I needed more urging.

  “If you need an excuse for coming, you can probably tutor her. We’ve had to keep her out of school this term because of her disturbed state. Though if you can help her, perhaps she’ll be able to join her class after the first of the year. You needn’t keep on at the lodge unless you want to. Clay can find someone else.”

  There was a long silence between us. I knew I must say yes, yet I hesitated.

  “You came to me this morning for something else, didn’t you?” he said at last. “Would you like to tell me what it is?”

  I stared out the window, and against the far background of the woods something stirred. Emory Ault stood watching the house, as though he waited for me. His gaze was directed straight at me, and I knew he could see me sitting there near the window. Yes, I had come here for a purpose. I had come to talk to Julian about that stone-throwing incident yesterday. And now I could say nothing. Because if he went angrily to Emory, the old man would tell him everything. I didn’t understand why he had kept silent so far, any more than I understood why Clay kept silent. But if Emory was pushed, he would tell Julian, and I would be stopped, regardless of Adria. I snatched at the first thing that came into my mind as a substitution.

  “It’s only a small thing,” I said. “But it’s begun to worry me. Twice when I’ve gone back to my room at the lodge, your cat, Cinnabar, has been shut into my room. Clay doesn’t know how he gets there—and it makes be uneasy.”

  Julian seemed to relax. “That’s the sort of trick Shan likes to play. I don’t know why she should—unless she’s simply jealous of you because Adria appears to like you. That’s quite possible, you know. I’ll speak to her about it. When can you come, Linda? I’m sure a room can be made ready for you at once.”

  I hadn’t said I was coming, but he seemed to need no answer. He knew I’d made my decision.

  “There’s one thing,” I said.

  “Yes? Anything you like.”

  “You mentioned a bargain. You’ve said I must never mention Stuart Parrish. I don’t like that.”

  He stared at me “Why, Linda? Why should you care about Stuart Parrish?”

  “He’s part of the very atmosphere of this house,” I said. “What is he like? What do you make of him?”

  He came to stand close to me again. “Have you known him at some time? Is he a friend of yours?”

  The danger was very close. “He’s not a friend,” I said. “You’ve found me sympathetic toward Adria. I suppose I have feelings about other people too. Sometimes people I don’t even know. If I’m to understand what troubles Adria, I must understand what really happened here. Isn’t it your wife’s death that’s behind everything? What if Stuart Parrish never pushed that chair, and neither did Adria? What if the person who did push it is still around? Couldn’t that be part of what’s affecting Adria? Something in the very atmosphere!”

  He paced the room again—a man confined by the walls of a house, liberated only on the mountain. At his desk he paused and picked up the note he had been writing me, tore it across several times and dropped the pieces in a wastebasket. Then he sat down in the desk chair and stared at me across the room.

  “You want to know about Stuart Parrish. All right—I’ll tell you. I’ve often thought that if Lucifer could ski, that would be Stuart. I don’t mean Satan, and all that fallen angel bit. I mean Lucifer the morning star. He used to be called the bringer of light, I believe. I’ve always seen Stuart that way.”

  Yes, I thought. Yes, that was Stuart. Lighting up his world with his own magnificence—radiantly alive.

  “He was made for the slopes,” Julian went on. “I knew it the first time I saw him. He was better at the very start than I ever was. He had a lot to learn, but he learned quickly and easily. I told him I could teach him, and he was eager for the chance to learn. I turned him over to Emory Ault part of the time, because Emory’s a great teacher. Emory could have been a champion if he hadn’t smashed himself up. He turned me into a skier and it broke his heart when I had to stop. I think he felt it more that he did his own accident. He seemed to feel there was no sense in what happened to me, as there would have been if I’d been hurt skiing. An unexpected icy patch on a road, a sign that children had defaced—there was no excuse he could accept for my being hurt in a car accident. So when Stuart Parrish came along, he gave Emory a third chance to hit the top. The only trouble was that he never liked Stuart.”

  Julian stopped for so long that I thought he might not go on. I sat very still and waited. His tone softened when he finally continued, as though he remembered someone he had loved and lost.

  “Stuart was like the young brother I never had. There was a real affection between us. But I wanted to turn him into the best for his own sake—not just because I wanted to recapture vicariously my own successes, as Shan thinks. I’d outgrown that. I wanted it because Stuart was so good, so beautiful on skis—so made to be a champion. And he had something few athletes have. He was absolutely without fear. Nothing ever psyched him out before a race. He was up there at the starting gate with no knots in his stomach and ready to go. In the beginning I worried about that. Because if you’re not a bit scared the adrenalin may not flow when you need it. But his worked all right. He wanted to win and everything keyed him up to that point. I don’t think there’s much doubt but what he would have won the Nationals in a year, and be in the Olympics in two.”

  I thought of Stuart sitting in that miserable jail, all his hopes b
roken, tossed aside. I might not like championship skiing, but I’d wanted Stuart to have what he’d longed for, worked toward.

  “Then why aren’t you helping him now?” I said. “Why aren’t you getting him out of that jail for good?”

  He seemed not to hear me. When he spoke again there was a depth of anger in his voice that startled and frightened me.

  “You wanted to know what Stuart Parrish was like. I’m telling you. He was all the things it takes to make a champion. And that means he was single-minded and ruthless and selfish.”

  I made no sound, but I turned in my chair, struggling to stifle the wild indignation that rose in me.

  Julian went on. “I never met any of his family. He kept me away from them and he never talked about them much. I gather than his father and stepmother spoiled him when they were alive. I believe there was a sister too, and I suspect that his ruining lies partly at her door. He was beautiful and young and supremely confident. He thought he could have anything he wanted because his family had always given him everything from the time he was a baby.”

  It was all I could do to check my own anger, hold back my denials.

  “Oh, I didn’t mind about his girls,” Julian said. “He had his pick of snow bunnies and I suspect he gave them a bad time. But they were young—they had to learn. It was when it came to Margot that I couldn’t take any more. She told me he was making a play for her.”

  “In a wheelchair!”

  He winced painfully. “You didn’t know her.” There was hurt in the simple words. “She was as fascinating and attractive as ever, even though I’d destroyed her. And she wasn’t completely paralyzed, in spite of her injured back. She chose the wheelchair rather than to live in braces. She was still alive, she could feel. She was my wife.”

  “She—she told you this? About Stuart, I mean?”

  “Emory told me first. He knew what was going on, when I didn’t. When I questioned Margot she admitted it, though she didn’t want to. She knew how I felt about Stuart and what I could do for him. But she had to tell me what he was up to, once Emory had spoken out. So it’s possible he killed her by way of punishment. He knew I was ready to throw him out, and he had to get even with her. Did you know that the guardrail the chair went through had been tampered with ahead of time?”

  I stared at him.

  “No, of course you wouldn’t know. It had been sawed through and then nailed loosely together. Someone planned to send that chair down the ramp, Linda!”

  Hope and reassurance swept back. Stuart might be capable of acting on angry impulse, but a plan for murder was not in his character.

  “Why didn’t you tell all this to the police when Emory accused Stuart in the beginning?” I asked.

  “How could I? How could I be sure, no matter what Emory said, that it had really been Stuart? Margot may not have been entirely blameless. She never forgave me for the accident that crippled her, and—” He hesitated. “On the other hand, there is Adria, who may have pushed that chair herself;”

  It was hard to control my impatience. “Couldn’t you have found out the truth from Stuart?”

  “He’d have lied, if it suited him. With such pressure on, I couldn’t believe anything he might have told me. All I could do was try to stay neutral and give him a chance to defend himself. When they let him go for lack of evidence, there was no need to speak out. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. If it weren’t for Adria, I’d be glad to believe him innocent. When I learned that Emory had chosen to tell the police something more, I came home. What it is, I don’t know as yet. So far Emory won’t talk to me about it. Now the thing must take its course. If Stuart’s innocent, it will come out I don’t want Margot’s name brought in, as it would be if I had to go on the stand as a witness. And I don’t want Adria harassed.”

  “Isn’t a man’s life more important than—than anyone’s name?”

  “Perhaps not this man’s,” Julian said. “If he’s guilty, perhaps others need to be protected.”

  “I think you’re unfeeling, dreadful!” I gasped out the words.

  He left the desk and went to stand before Margot’s picture on the wall. It was one of those taken on some ski slope—a gay, triumphant figure against snowy mountains.

  “Well—I’ve told you,” he said, and his voice had turned hard. “With the result that you think I’m unfeeling. Not that what you think of me is important. But I’m not sure what good all this will do you with Adria. For whatever it’s worth, however, there’s my picture of Stuart Parrish.”

  I knew how worthless such a picture was, and I was no longer sure that I could come to this house to try to help Adria. How could I bear to be under the same roof with Julian McCabe when he felt as he did about my brother? For a few moments I sat unmoving, and he let me be.

  The shrillness of a woman’s scream reached us from the direction of the stairs. For an instant we froze where we were. Then Julian ran through the door and across the hall, and I followed him. At the foot of the steeply turning tower stairs Shan lay in a crumpled heap. Clinging to the railing a few steps above her was Adria, her blue eyes wide with horror.

  Julian knelt beside his sister. “What happened? How did you fall?”

  “I—I don’t know. She pushed me—and I fell.”

  Adria cried out above her. “I didn’t push her. I didn’t—I didn’t!”

  Shan made an effort to sit up and her gaze turned toward the circling stairs. “Not you, darling. Margot. It was Margot who pushed me.”

  My eyes were drawn eerily upward to where the stairs spiraled out of sight. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted and my skin went prickling cold. Padding with dignity from one step to the next as he came down, Cinnabar moved toward us around the bend, his tail aloft and twitching, his fur ruffled as though something in the atmosphere had touched him, readying him to fight.

  Adria cried out and pressed herself against the rail, hiding her face in the crook of her arm. I left Julian to minister to his sister and went up to her. This time I didn’t hesitate to put my arms around her and she turned to hide her face against my shoulder, sobbing wildly.

  Her slight body was light as feathers in my arms—yet not like feathers because there was life to it. I could feel the throbbing of her heart against my own heart, the fever of her skin against my own skin. Black strands of her hair touched my forehead, and they were wet with the sweat of fear. The suffering and fright of a child was like no other suffering. It had an intensity that thrust cruelly deep, and could leave a mark that would damage for all the years to come.

  I knew now that I had no choice. I would come to Graystones, and not only because of my brother. I held the child close in my arms and tried to comfort her.

  VIII

  Shan had fallen only a few steps. She was not badly hurt, but she was shaken by her own imaginings, and she would listen to no reassurance from Julian. He finally picked her up in his arms and carried her upstairs. The big orange cat stood in his path and Julian went precariously around the animal, leaving it to bar my path and Adria’s.

  I turned from the child and touched the cat with my toe to prod it out of the way. It lashed at my ankle with claws that stung and then sprang down the remaining steps and disappeared into the hall. Adria’s face was hidden against my shoulder, so she didn’t see.

  “Come,” I said to her gently. “Your aunt’s all right, I think, but let’s go and find out. Sometimes she imagines things, you know. There’s no need to be frightened.”

  Her small pale face looked haunted when she raised it from my shoulder and looked around. “She—she’s gone?” she quavered, and I knew she didn’t mean Shan.

  “He is gone,” I said firmly. “That cat is beginning to be a nuisance. Come along, Adria. Let’s go see about Shan.”

  She clung to my hand with a trust that left me shaken—for how could I fulfill it?—and came with me to the second floor. We went at once to Shan’s room, where Julian had laid her on the bed.

  It was the r
oom of a wood sprite, I thought, remembering that Clay had called her a dryad. Forest trees climbed their own hill on the wallpaper, and thin green curtains let a verdant light into the room. Through the gauze veil at the windows I looked out upon dead beeches, the curtains tinging them with green. Even the spread Shan lay upon was the color of moss, and the carpet the dun brown of dead leaves. Here there were no snow pictures on the walls, but only one lovely water color of a deer standing among autumn trees, his white tail a flag as he turned to flee.

  Shan lay on the bed moaning softly, while Julian stood helplessly beside her.

  “Winter’s here now,” she murmured. “Ice and snow and death. And the wind! How I hate the wind when it blows around the mountain! There’ll never be another spring. I’ll be the next one to go. I know that now. She’ll see to it.”

  Julian sat on the bed beside her and took her hands in his to still their fluttering. “Listen to me, Shan. You’ve got to get over these wild ideas about a cat. I won’t have him in the house if he’s going to disturb you like this. No one pushed you. You caught one of your slippery sandals on a stair rung and fell. Cinnabar was up on the second-floor level when you slipped;”

  Shan raised long pale lashes and looked at him piteously. “You mustn’t send Cinnabar away. It would all be worse then.”

  Julian looked at Adria and me in the doorway and beckoned to his daughter. “Come and tell Shan what happened. You must have seen her fall.”

  The child drew me with her into the room, never for a moment letting go of my hand. “She—she just slipped and fell.”

  “And Cinnabar was upstairs, wasn’t he?” her father persisted.

  Adria nodded vaguely, but there was a veiled look in her eyes.

  Shan paid no attention. As Adria clung to me, Shan clung to her brother for comfort and reassurance, even while she thrust away all comforting words.