The Winter People

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Trent heard me out. “I suppose you’ve told them about this?”

  “Yes, of course. But no one has admitted to seeing the scarf. They don’t believe me. Except Nomi, perhaps.”

  “You couldn’t recognize the voice you heard?”

  “No—not really. The cry was shouted and distorted with echoes besides. I couldn’t place it. It might have been a man or a woman. And how can you remember a shout when it has stopped sounding? It’s not like remembering a face.”

  “I don’t like this,” Trent said. “I don’t like the smell of it. Whoever called to Glynis, whoever took away the scarf, may be worrying that you will remember and come to a conclusion about him.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve thought of that. But whoever it was is safe enough because I haven’t the faintest notion of who it might be. Anyone could have gone along the high path while I was traveling the shore. They all move faster than I do outdoors, and the woods are thick there. We would never have seen each other. But how can I go away, leaving the others to blame me, to think I’m responsible for Glynis’s death? If the removal of the scarf was deliberate, then we’re talking about—murder.”

  “You and Keith,” Trent said dryly.

  “What do you mean? What has Keith to do with this?”

  “Nothing, except that he has asked a question that’s hard to answer. Glynis knew that springs feed that part of the lake. It’s the first place to thaw and the last to freeze. She knew that her mother drowned there. So why would she go there to skate? She must have known it wasn’t safe after the warmer weather we’d had. The swamp area thaws and so does the stream, so that water flows under the ice to start melting it from beneath. When this is helped along by the springs in that section, you get ice that isn’t safe for skating, even though it looks firm enough on the surface. Even if she took you there, she would never have gone near the center herself. So Keith has asked the question of why she went out there, how she happened to fall through.”

  I stared at him in the light from the dash. “Do you mean he blames me? Does he think?—”

  “He thinks you might have acted on impulse. He thinks there wasn’t any scarf.”

  “But that’s dreadful,” I said. “And you? Do you believe—?”

  He answered me roughly. “Don’t be an idiot! I know Glynis. I can guess why she took you there, even though you’ve made no accusation yourself.”

  There was relief in my sigh. Trent knew. I could talk to Trent.

  “Yes,” I said. “She wanted me to go through the ice. But she trapped herself instead. Only I can’t tell them that—even if it would do any good.”

  “Then you must go away soon. You can’t stay in that house with someone feeling edgy about what you know.”

  From the veranda Glen’s voice called to me. “Dina? Where are you, Dina?”

  “I’ll have to go in,” I said. “Come with me.”

  Trent came to open my door and helped me out into the snow. We went up to the house together.

  Glen spoke curtly to Trent. “Colton’s waiting for you. He’d like to talk to you alone.”

  The moment Trent had gone into the drawing room, Glen whirled on me. “Why were you out there with him? What do you have to talk to him about?”

  I answered quietly. “That’s nothing I want to discuss,” I said, and started past him up the stairs.

  He came after me at once. “Dina—don’t make an enemy of me. I want to believe in you. I want to love you—just as I did in New York.”

  I paused on the stairs and faced him. He stood one step below me, and I remembered the look of his bright chestnut hair as it swept back from his forehead, just as I had first seen it that day in the museum—and as I had seen hair like it so recently—wet and floating from Glynis’s head as she lay in the water and broken ice.

  “What is it you don’t believe about me?” I asked.

  He flinched from the direct question. I could credit him with that at least. He did not want to believe the worst of me.

  “Never mind. I want you to have nothing to do with Trent McIntyre. I don’t trust him.”

  “I trust him,” I said. “I trust him more than I do anyone at High Towers. And that includes my husband.”

  Something darkened in Glen’s eyes as he came up the stairs with me. But on the upper floor he began to plead again.

  “Dina—I need you to help me. I’m going to try what Colton suggests. Will you pose for me again? Will you let me do you in wood?”

  So this was why he wanted to love me, trust me—for the sake of his art. So that he could use me to save himself, as he had used me before. Posing for him was the last thing I wanted to do, yet I could not refuse. I did not want him to touch me, or make love to me. I did not want him to pretend liking for me, when I knew there was none. But I could not refuse to help him in his work.

  “All right,” I said wearily. “I’ll pose for you tomorrow.”

  “Not tomorrow—tonight! Tonight while it’s still the old year. I want to be working when the new year comes in. Don’t you see, Dina—if I can begin again, then—”

  He did not go on because he had seen by my face that I would do as he wished. There was no need for persuasion that went against the grain. He caught my hand and drew me quickly into the bedroom, began to take the pins from my hair as the old excitement kindled in him. I stood very still under his hands and let him do what he wished. With all my heart I tried not to remember. The man I remembered was gone. I must not think of him again. I must not recall that day in the museum. One did not suffer heartbreak over what was purely imaginary.

  As he pulled the last strand from its restraining braid, he took a handful of pins to cast them toward the bed, but in the act of flinging them down he stopped and stared.

  “Look!” he cried. “Look—there by your pillow!”

  I looked and saw the gleaming yellow ball resting on my bed—another witch ball.

  Glen caught me by the wrist. “Why did you put it there? What are you trying to do?”

  “I didn’t put it there,” I told him.

  He flung my hand from him and went to the bed, picked up the ball and held it up to the light—as though he would look into it and see something I could not see, wrench from it some secret it had to tell.

  “She used to say that sometimes she could see what was going to happen when she looked into one of her witch balls,” he said. “If only she would come back to help me now. If only she would get me through this time of missing her! She had more magic in her than I ever did. I wonder if she could—”

  “Don’t talk like that!” I cried. “The dead don’t come back to guide the living.”

  “Not even when they die by violence and leave something unfinished?” he said, staring at me.

  Here it was again—the same thing Keith thought, and the others might be thinking. Except for one—the one who knew.

  “If there was violence, I didn’t intend it,” I said. “I’ve told you the truth—that I tried to save her.”

  He held the glass ball wonderingly up to the light and turned it so that it winked its great yellow eye at him, while iridescent lights flashed across the surface.

  “Perhaps it’s a sign,” he said. “Perhaps—”

  I held out my hand. “Give it to me. I’ll put it back in her room.” I did not like to think of which one of them had brought it here—to upset Glen, or perhaps solely to upset me.

  He snatched it out of my reach. “No! Its being here in this room means something. I don’t know what, as yet. But it points to something I need to know. So let it watch me while I work. Perhaps it will help me to begin again.” I have never known a more dreadful New Year’s Eve. We went up to the attic and Glen carried the yellow witch ball with him and set it upon a shelf. Nomi was there, helping to fix a comfortable place for Keith to sleep. The cot had been set up in Glynis’s studio space and Nomi had found a chair and an old stand that he could use as a bureau for his things. Keith was doing as she direc
ted, but rather in a daze, as though he had moved too fast to catch up with what he was about. He had already placed the framed picture of the burning inn upon his mother’s easel.

  Glen paid no attention to them, and when Nomi left the attic she went past us softly in order not to distract Glen from what he was doing, though she raised an eyebrow in surprise to find me willing to pose again. When she had gone, Keith sat on his cot, his hands hanging limply between his knees, watching us with a fixed, entranced look that made me uneasy. I must find a chance to talk to the boy soon. I must try to persuade him out of his unhappy notion.

  Glen had uncovered the block of reddish wood that now occupied his turntable. I saw that when he had worked with Glynis, he had done much of the preparatory work of cutting away superfluous wood with saw and ax, and was ready to get down to the shaping of the head. He faced me as he wished, walked around me several times, tipping my chin, bowing my head—then decided.

  “I want you to look up and out,” he said. “Up at something far above you—high on the top of Gray Rocks. Then your hair will float back on whatever breeze is blowing. Perhaps I’ll use an electric fan so I can get the effect of hair blowing backwards on a wind.”

  But when he returned to the wood he was clearly dissatisfied. “Your hair is too pale,” he said. “Glynis’s hair was exactly the right shade for this wood—a rich mahogany shade. But no matter. I’ll try for texture and get my lights into it by the use of planes and angles.”

  He went to work with what seemed to be new assurance and I sat very still, watching him work. He did not seem to mind my watching him now. Indeed, I sometimes felt as though I were not really there as a person, and that he saw my hair as an abstract element suspended before him, independent of the girl who wore it.

  Because he had often talked to me before, while he was working on the alabaster head, I knew something of what he would do this time. Wood carving—while the texture and the dangers of splitting wood were different—was sculpture, like any other. Glen was modern in the way he worked. He would not put every fold in a piece of drapery, or every lock in a woman’s hair. But as he had told me, a sculptor had to know what was there before he could leave anything out. Now he was working quickly, expertly with mallet and chisel and gouge, trying for the planes that would give him highlights, for the suggestion of something that was silky and airy, yet without the use of intricate detail.

  It was not going well. I could tell by his face, by the way he struck mallet on chisel, almost resentfully. I understood this too. The vision in the artist’s mind could be a shining dream, and when reality would not match the vision, the artist suffered.

  I grew stiff and tired in my chair, and my throat muscles ached. Once, to rest myself, I turned my head to find Keith staring at me fixedly. He still sat on the edge of the cot, his hands hanging limply, and stared at something he obviously did not like. I tried to smile at him, but he glowered back and his fixed look did not waver. When I turned my eyes from him, I saw the yellow witch ball staring as steadily as he from the shelf where Glen had placed it.

  “Stop fidgeting,” Glen said. “Get up and move about, if you must. It doesn’t matter. I’m not getting what I want. I’m forcing it without really caring. It’s the wrong face beneath the hair.”

  He said it callously, but I was not hurt. I did not care that it was not my face he longed to see. I stood up and stretched. Across the attic a clock ticked loudly, and I wondered what time it was. Would there by any whistles and bells to be heard here in the country? And even if there were, would we hear them up here in the attic?

  “Is it the New Year yet?” I asked Keith.

  He growled something and looked at the watch on his wrist.

  “Not yet!” Glen cried. “It mustn’t be. I’m not ready for it yet. I haven’t caught what I want in the wood. Get back into place, Dina. I’ve got to go on. If I can catch something before twelve o’clock, I’ll be all right. If I can’t, I’m done for.”

  He glanced up at the yellow glass sphere on the shelf and returned to work. This time he turned me away from him, in profile, and I could not see what he was doing. But at least I knew that he was working eagerly now, though what he carved escaped me.

  When it was midnight, Nomi and Colton climbed the stairs, bringing us drinks to toast the coming year. The moment he heard them Glen flung down his tools and snatched up a cloth to fling over the block of wood.

  “It’s coming!” he told Colton triumphantly. “I’ve left off struggling with the hair. I’ve caught a suggestion of it, I think, but I’d rather work on the face. Faces always mean more to me—and I’m catching it this time—catching something better than I ever did in stone.”

  Colton was curious, but he would allow Glen his privacy until the work had advanced far enough so that a “showing” could be permitted. He was pleased, hopeful. There was, after all, something to toast for the New Year, and we all joined in, touching our glasses at the rims, toasting the same thing—the only thing we could toast—the success of Glen’s new work.

  Keith watched us moodily, drinking the hot chocolate Nomi had made for him, and undoubtedly hating the fact that he was still suspended between the state of being half boy and half adult.

  The occasion was hardly festive, and we did not stay up long after we had finished our drinks. Colton and Nomi went downstairs first, and Glen followed, calling to me to come along. But before I left the attic, Keith dived from his cot and caught me by the arm. For just a moment I was afraid of him. He had moved so suddenly, and he looked so wild and lost and miserable. But he was still a boy who needed help, no matter what he thought of me, and I stayed on in the darkened attic.

  “You’d better look at Glen’s work!” he whispered to me. “I can see what he’s begun to do. You’d better look at it and watch out.”

  I did not know what he meant, and I would not look. If Glen was working well, I would not interfere or pry. Even if he put Glynis’s face into this carving, I would not care. Let him do as he pleased. For me it did not matter. I wished him well, but he could no longer touch me.

  I wonder if it would have made any difference if I had looked? I’m not sure that I would have recognized the dreadful thing that had begun to happen inside Glen, even if I had removed the covering from that mahogany head. I would not have believed it then. I would have been shocked, but not frightened.

  13

  Glen’s work progressed from day to day and I had a sense of history repeating itself. But it was an eerie feeling that did not bode well for the future. He drove himself for long hours, and when he worked I must be there—though I hardly knew why. Often he would not look at me twice in an hour, though I sat as he posed me, always facing away from the head he was carving, so that I could not see it. I could glimpse Glen’s face in the mirror sometimes, but I could not see his work.

  Sometimes he talked as his hands moved, but more to himself than to me, and often the words were not reassuring because he spoke about the alabaster head and all it had meant to him—all that had been destroyed with its shattering. There seemed to be a growing, continuing resentment in him that he had to release in words that he wanted me to hear. This posing was not a happy time for me.

  He took so long that I felt he must have finished the head many times over—yet still he worked, refining, improving, while the pile of shavings grew about him and I wondered if there was anything left of the wood. One could cut too deeply into stone or wood—one could destroy.

  The weather grew bitterly cold, dropping below zero. Occasionally there was snow, snow that lasted, with no thaws to melt it away. It was no longer the soft snow of the cities, easily walked through. Instead, it froze to a hard slippery crust that offered no purchase to the feet and made any walking off the cleared driveway a hazard.

  Keith had gone back to school after the holidays and we saw him only in the late afternoon and early evening. He lived his own secret life, never truly fitting in with his relatives. His grandfather made a few desul
tory gestures in the boy’s direction, but his heart was not in it. This boy did not bear his name. Colton was, I felt, marking time. Now that Glen was creatively busy, he wanted to stay long enough to view his son’s new work. Then he would be on his way. His lecture tour through Britain had been postponed till February and he would be off again early next month. One thing he wanted to accomplish before he left was the sale of the land on the other side of the lake to Pandora McIntyre. Glynis, apparently, had been the chief obstacle to his selling of the land, and now that she was gone, Glen did not seem to care what happened to Gray Rocks Lake. I suspected that he would leave High Towers himself as soon as his present work was done. What would happen to me then, I did not know. There had to be some ending between us, since no beginning again would ever be possible. But I put off leaving, put off speaking the words that would cause our final sundering until Glen’s work was safely finished. Mostly I existed numbly in a vacuum. I did not want to think of Trent.

  Periodically one of Glynis’s witch balls would appear somewhere in my room—but no one in the house would ever confess to moving them about. Each time I took the glass object back to Glynis’s room and put it with its sisters in the basket which held them. This was an annoying trick, an attempt to disturb me, but nothing more. Who was behind it, I did not know.

  Once when Nomi and I drove to the cemetery we found Colton standing in the bitter cold, looking down at the snow-covered mound with a new marble headstone, beside the grave of Elizabeth Chandler. When I saw Colton ahead of us there, I tried to persuade Nomi to turn back, but she was never a retreating sort of person, and we made our way through snowy aisles and stood in silence beside him. He gave us a single blind look, and then turned away, his feelings hidden as always.

  Nomi laid the holly wreath she had brought upon the grave. A wreath of green leaves, with the red berries carefully clipped away. Because there was now no color in Glynis’s world, Nomi said, and we must not mock her.

  We stood in silence for a few moments before the headstone Glen had carved so lovingly with the single inscription: GLYNIS, but if we prayed, I think it was not for the woman who lay there.