Snowfire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “Can you sit up, Linda? Drink this—it will do you good.”

  Once more I drank hot, reviving fluid, and life seemed to flow back into my veins. Shan was muttering too, crossly, though her pique did not seem directed entirely at me.

  “Men can be ridiculous. Those two! Because snow is nothing to them, and they know every inch of these grounds, Julian sent Emory off with the utmost confidence to bring you here. And look what happened.”

  I found my voice. “He left me. Emory left me out there in the snow. I didn’t run away from him. He ran away from me. He was angry with me, and—he abandoned me.”

  Julian, returning to the room, heard my words. His blue eyes, which so often seemed intense with extremes of emotion, turned cold, all tenderness gone from them as he spoke to me sharply.

  “Emory never lies to me. I don’t know why you should, Linda. Nor do I know why you should dash off into a blizzard, running away from someone who wanted to get you to safety. Why should Emory be angry with you—or you with him?”

  Shan said nothing, looking a little sly.

  Hopelessness swept over me again. I could not tell him why without revealing who I was. And if Emory had not yet done that, then I mustn’t. Not yet. There were no reasons I could offer, other than the truth—that Emory hated me because I was Stuart’s sister and he felt I somehow threatened Graystones, perhaps threatened Julian, and he would stop at nothing to thwart me. Yet he had not told Julian my identity.

  “You’re making this all up, of course,” Julian said. “You behave foolishly for some unfathomable reason, and then you make excuses to blame someone else. Typically female.”

  He strode angrily about the room, not looking at me now, as though he could barely contain his dislike for me. I drank hot tea and let weak tears trickle down my cheeks. His words overwhelmed me, smothered me, bore down upon me like weights of lead. I was too weak to be angry, to deny. A strange, unfamiliar longing filled me—a longing to be comforted tenderly, as a child might be. To be held in Julian’s arms and protected—as he had seemed to protect me for a little while. Always in my life I had been the protector—and even in my weak state I knew the foolishness of such a wish, and I wept because it was foolish.

  Shan nodded and smiled at me, almost as though she approved of my weeping. “Julian always manages to have emotional women around him. Women who make things up out of their imaginations, and then weep when they’re caught in their own stories. Like Margot. Like me. He gets very disgusted with us.”

  Her words brought me to life. I handed her the teacup and sat up, beginning to feel a strengthening anger myself. “I haven’t lied to anyone! And I shan’t cry.” I dashed the trickle of tears away and stood up, wobbling a little. “If nobody minds, I’m very tired, and I’m going up to bed. I’ll look in on Adria on the way. I promised her I would.”

  “She’s asleep,” Shan said. “She doesn’t need you. You really needn’t have been such a heroine, coming here in a storm like this. It’s ridiculous.”

  I wanted to drop Julian’s dressing gown on the floor as if the very touch of it was repugnant, but I’d have lacked dignity striding off in my long johns, so I kept it about me as I went out of the room. The unfamiliar darkness of the hall halted me at once, and Shan came running after me with a candle set under a storm chimney.

  “Do you want me to help you upstairs?”

  “No, thank you,” I said and took the candle from her.

  The tower was freezing cold and reminded me of the terror of the blizzard. Drafts swept around me, and if it hadn’t been for the glass chimney my candle would have blown out. Picturesque these stairs might be—but practical, no. Shadows climbed with me as I went up the wedged, curving steps, and I was aware of snow flung wildly against dark panes.

  At the second-floor level another candle, glass shielded, had been set on a small table, so the landing was not entirely dark. I stepped through the door into the upper hall, my shadow running ahead of me as I’d crossed the glow of lamplight.

  Adria’s door was ajar and I opened it further to look in. As Shan had said, she lay sleeping quietly. Not even that clanging bell had wakened her. I could just see her by candlelight, one hand under her cheek, her lips parted with soft breathing. How charming she looked in her sleep, and how exquisite the longing in me to take a sleeping child in my arms.

  As soon as I reached my room, I took off Julian’s wine-colored gown that had about it a scent reminding me of pine needles and wood smoke, and put on my own belted robe. I carried the gown to the door of Julian’s bedroom and hung it over the knob.

  It was then I remembered Clay’s manuscript in the pocket of my parka. I hoped it had survived the snow soaking. I had better rescue it before anything happened to it. I felt stronger now and I went swiftly downstairs in my slippers and into the hall where my wet things were hanging. The library door was still open, and I got the envelope quickly, hoping to escape before anyone looked out and saw me, and more words had to be exchanged. I was in no mood to read the story now, even if there had been any lights, but I would pick it up later. Before I turned away, however, the sound of Shan’s voice reached me and froze me where I stood.

  “She’s got to go, Julian. I won’t have her here. As you can see, she’s a liar, and that’s not good for Adria. She keys the child up, excites her too much. I could hardly get Adria to sleep tonight, because she was worrying about the fact that Linda would have to come back to the house through the snow.”

  Julian spoke more quietly. “I’m not sure but what it’s a good thing for Adria to have someone new to worry about and concern herself with. If she comes to like Linda it’s one step away from the past.”

  From my place near the clothes rack I could see Shan, but not Julian. She stood with her back to me, and her gauzy robe hung draped from her arms as she raised them, like a priestess invoking some spell.

  “There can’t be any stepping away from the past, Julian. It’s here—all around us. Graystones is alive with it. Those who die violently never sleep.”

  “Stop that!” Julian cried, and I heard the anguish in his tone, overlaid by anger.

  “We keep them alive in our minds,” Shan went on, paying no attention. “We can’t let them rest because we’re haunted—haunted by our own guilt and our own fears. All of us.”

  Julian said nothing, but he must have taken a step toward his sister, for she ran suddenly out of the room, her draperies floating about her as she vanished through the door to the stairs. She had not seen me where I stood in the shadowy corner near the clothes rack, and for a moment longer I did not stir. Then I moved cautiously opposite the library door and looked in.

  Julian sat with his head in his hands, not stirring. Everything about him spoke of despair and defeat. This was Julian McCabe, who was afraid of nothing. Julian McCabe, whom the slopes had never defeated in the days when he had challenged them. I wanted to go and kneel beside him, to put my arms around him, offer him comfort and support in his dreadful trouble—whatever it was. The longing seemed part of my arms, my very body.

  I made no move. The impulse was treachery, of course—a betraying of everything that was important to me. On the wall behind Julian hung a framed photograph of two skiers. One was Julian. The other’s bright gilt head shone in the sun and his gay young face was lifted toward the picture-taker. It was my brother, Stuart, standing there beside Julian McCabe. He seemed to look directly into my eyes across the room—challenging me. But I didn’t need to be challenged by Stuart.

  I fled up the stairs through the wailing of wind and the rattling of panes, and hurried to the haven of my room. It was quieter there, though very cold, with the furnace off for several hours. To some extent the tall maimed beeches held away the storm. Its full fury crashed against the opposite side of the house. Quickly I undressed for bed, blew out my candle and got between cold sheets, to lie shivering until the natural warmth of my body took away the chill.

  XI

  I fell asleep more quickly
than I would have expected. My experience in the blizzard had exhausted me enough to counteract emotions and thoughts that might have kept me tossing. Once I awakened and lay for a little while listening to the sounds of the unabated storm. We would be thoroughly snowed in by morning. I reached a hand into biting cold and pressed the switch of the bed lamp. Nothing happened. The wires might be down a long time, with crews unable to work in the fury of such a storm.

  My flashlight was within reach and I turned it upon the dial of my travel clock. Two in the morning. At least the house was silent. Adria had been troubled by no nightmare. Everything was still, the rooms of the house encased in stone walls that held off the storm. Even the natural creakings of an old house could hardly be heard against the sound and fury outdoors. But my bed was warm now, sleep-inducing.

  I dozed, slept, wakened—to an awareness that my door which I’d closed when I came to bed was standing open. How I could distinguish between the darkness of my room and the farther darkness of the hall I didn’t know. But all my instincts told me that the door had opened and that someone stood there staring at me through the velvety dark.

  I thought wildly of Emory, creeping back to the house, which he could surely enter at will, and coming to finish what he had tried to do to me tonight. Or it could be Shan, who harbored some threat of her own toward me. My heart thudded and my mouth was dry, but somehow I managed a whisper.

  “Who is there?”

  At once there was a rustle and something hurtled across the room to my bed. “Oh, Linda!” Adria spoke in a hushed tone. “I’m glad you’re awake. Linda, can I get in bed with you? I’m so cold and so frightened!”

  I flung back the covers with immense relief and let the small cold body slip between the sheets and snuggle close to me. I held my arms about her and let my own warmth encase her until the shivering stopped.

  “You can sleep here for the rest of the night if you like,” I told her softly.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back from the lodge. I didn’t want you to come out in the storm, really—but I needed you so.”

  It was consoling to be needed. There was hardly anyone to need me now. Only Stuart—in jail. And he wouldn’t need me, once he was out again. Not as he’d needed me as a little boy. I had been busy and active, and I’d dwelt as little as possible on the loneliness of not being needed. But holding Adria close to me, I too found warmth and comfort.

  “I’m here,” I said reassuringly. “What frightened you, darling?”

  “The dream. Oh, it didn’t come, really. If it had I’d have behaved in that awful way and screamed so that I’d have wakened everyone. I never mean to do that. It just—happens. Only sometimes I can tell when I’m going into the dream, and sometimes I can wake up and stop it. It’s like walking down a long corridor. Everything’s bright in the beginning and there are windows on both sides. But the windows come to an end and as I walk along, the corridor turns into a dark tunnel. I know there’s blackness and horrible things I can’t see at the end. And when I get there, the dream will begin.”

  How well I knew what a dream of this sort was like.

  She began to shiver again and I held her to the warmth of my own body, stroking the damp hair back from her small face, feeling in my arms the frailty of her bones, and the soft, child’s breath on my cheek. She hadn’t gone to Shan. She had come to me—and I was touched, filled with an enormous loving.

  “I couldn’t go to Shan,” she whispered, reading my mind. “She’d fuss over me, even though she’d take me into her bed. She’d tell me not to talk about it. She’d tell me to forget.”

  “And your father?” I said. “What does he do?”

  “He gets worried and upset. I think I frighten him sometimes, and he shouts for Shan and doesn’t know what to do. He didn’t used to be like that. A long time ago he used to just pick me up and love me and make everything feel better. But he doesn’t love me any more. He—he’s afraid of me.”

  I pressed my fingers over her lips. “No—no, you must never believe that. It’s good to say such things to me if you feel like it. Saying them helps to get rid of them. But they aren’t true and you don’t have to believe in them. You can tell me about the dream though, if you want to. I’d like to know.”

  For a little while she lay still in my arms, breathing quickly, lightly. Then she began to speak in a low, soft voice—sometimes so softly that I could hardly hear her words.

  “At the end of the tunnel is my mother’s room—with the balcony outside. She’s sitting there in her wheelchair in the doorway, just ready to push herself toward the ramp that goes down to the ground. I’m there with her. She’s wearing the blue pants with the white daisies on them that she liked, and a frilly white blouse. And she’s angry, angry, angry. I don’t know about what. When I come into the room to ask her something, she’s angry with me. She tells me not to bother her, not to come whining around trying to get my way. She says my father spoils me and she’s sick of it. She’s sick of everything.”

  The light whispering voice paused, and I put a question very gently so as not to destroy her mood.

  “What did you ask your mother that day that made her angry??”

  “I don’t even remember. She was already angry. It wasn’t anything important. If I’d known how she felt I wouldn’t have gone near her. Sometimes we just had to leave her alone. But she was awfully angry, and she wasn’t being fair—so I got angry too. I—I put my hands on the grips at the back of her chair.”

  I waited and she went on.

  “I said, ‘If I wanted to I could push your chair. I could push your chair and it would go right down that ramp and make you fall out.’

  “So she said, ‘Go ahead and push.’ Then she said I was my father’s child. And she said I couldn’t push her chair because the brakes were on. ‘Go away and leave me alone!’ she said. ‘I never did like children, really.’”

  Again there was silence, and once more I tightened my arms about the small body. “She was probably cross and didn’t mean what she was saying.”

  “I know. Later on I wouldn’t have really minded her saying that because I know she loved me sometimes. And she wanted me to do lots of things for her that she couldn’t do herself. But right then I was angry. I pushed her chair as hard as I could—and then I ran out of the room.”

  “But the brakes were on,” I said.

  “If they’d truly been on how could the chair have gone down the ramp?”

  I let that go. “What happened next? Where did you go? Did you run right up the stairs and meet Shan coming down?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so. But I’m not sure. It’s all terribly mixed up. I think I stayed in the drawing room. I remember looking out a window at the beech trees.”

  “And you heard your mother screaming?”

  Adria hesitated, as if she tried to sort everything out in order, and there was a wondering note in her voice when she answered.

  “No—I don’t think so. Not right away. I could see something moving in the window, but I didn’t know what it was.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Like—maybe like a ghost. I told Shan about that, and she said it was Margot’s spirit rushing through the air.”

  I swallowed the indignant objection I wanted to make. “How could it be—when she hadn’t screamed yet? She hadn’t gone down the ramp—and you were far away in the drawing room.”

  “I—don’t know. I—I can’t ever figure it all out. She did scream, you know. But I’m not sure when. Anyway, I heard her, and I ran away and went to the tower door. And Shan was there on the bottom step. She told me to go upstairs and stay there. And then she went to the drawing-room window that was nearest Margot’s balcony and looked out.”

  “And what did she see?”

  “She never told me. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She says I must forget it all. Nobody will let me talk about it. When the police came I was upstairs in bed. Shan said I was sick and I must stay there. They neve
r knew about my pushing the chair. I never got to talk to them at all. When I told her I wanted to talk about it, she said I was all mixed up and I wasn’t making any sense or remembering things right. So after that I began to feel more mixed up than ever. I never could be sure of everything that happened. Sometimes it seems to me as though it was one way—sometimes another.”

  “When you went to see your mother, how did you go into her room? I mean, what door did you use?”

  “From the library,” Adria said readily. “First I was there talking to Clay and Stuart Parrish.”

  “The door wasn’t locked.”

  “No—of course not. I went through it.”

  “Afterwards did you see Clay or Stuart?”

  “I saw Stuart. He went out the front door while I was talking to Shan. She sent me upstairs and I went in my room and shut the door. I remember I was awfully afraid. I kept on hearing her scream—inside my head. And I knew it was because I’d pushed her chair.”

  “But it wasn’t, Adria dear. You weren’t anywhere near her chair when it was really pushed. If it was pushed.”

  She hardly seemed to hear me. “A long time afterwards, Shan came upstairs and told me my mother was dead. She was very upset and she was shaking a lot. So was I. We—we cried together. She said it was terrible for my father. And she asked me what had happened when I was with my mother, and what I saw afterwards. But when I tried to explain everything, she hushed me and said it was all over and I must forget all about it. She said they thought Stuart Parrish had pushed the chair. But afterward the sheriff let him go, and then I began to see that it was really me. My father got upset when I tried to tell him, and afterward he couldn’t like me any more. But he took Shan and me away, and we went up to Maine to stay with some old friends. He never talked about what happened, and we skied a lot when the snow came. But everything was different. And then that thing came out in the paper about Stuart being arrested and my father said we had to go home. I guess my father hoped it was Stuart, so it wouldn’t be me. But when I tried to tell him it wasn’t Stuart, he wouldn’t listen. And now the bad dreams have come again. I have them nearly every night.”