Poinciana

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “That’s my good girl,” Vasily approved.

  I sat stiffly in the chair Jarrett indicated, and looked around. It was clear that Allegra Logan had done no decorating here. The room had been made comfortable enough with white wicker furniture and grass green rugs. The pictures on the walls were undistinguished, and it was as impersonal as a hotel room. Two doors led off from it, and both were closed.

  The nurse—“Coxie,” as Gretchen called her—was introduced to me by Jarrett Nichols. She was probably in her mid-fifties, with determinedly curled brown hair, and a short white uniform that showed too much of a sturdy pair of legs. If it were necessary, she would be capable of restraining her patient physically. At the moment a worried frown creased her forehead and she kept pressing her lips together, as though the talk had upset her. When I sat down she gave me a look of sharp appraisal, and then didn’t glance at me again.

  “Perhaps I’d better explain what this is all about,” Jarrett said. “First, though, may I ask if Ross knows that you’re here?”

  I felt myself flushing. “I came on my own. I asked if I could meet Allegra Logan. I didn’t know she was still alive until this morning. But he told me to stay away from her cottage. So I came.”

  Jarrett looked faintly surprised, which pleased me in a contrary way. Gretchen merely grunted. Vasily was smiling again, enjoying himself.

  “If Ross doesn’t wish it, perhaps it wasn’t very wise of you to come,” Jarrett said.

  I didn’t want to discuss my small rebellion with any of them. In fact, I hadn’t really analyzed my own motives, though I’d given myself excuses for coming.

  “I’m here,” I said curtly, and he accepted that with a nod of his red head.

  “To explain,” he went on, “Ross feels that his mother can no longer be cared for suitably here. He has several people looking into good nursing homes that take only a few privileged patients, and where she would be treated well.”

  “If they send her away, she’ll die,” Gretchen said flatly.

  “She will do that before long in any case,” Vasily reminded her.

  “The point is,” Jarrett said, “that Mrs. Logan puts herself into unnecessarily dangerous positions. She has become cunning about escaping from Miss Cox, who certainly can’t stay awake all night to watch her. Ross is reluctant to bring in another special nurse. After all, Coxie has been with the family for years and isn’t given to talking outside.”

  The nurse ducked her head in quick agreement.

  Jarrett continued, speaking directly to Gretchen now. “Last week your grandmother nearly slipped into the lake on one of her midnight ramblings. If I hadn’t been sleepless and out there myself, she might have fallen in and drowned.”

  “She can be watched better right here,” Gretchen protested. “Dad’s got to be made to understand that.”

  I surprised myself by speaking. “Are you in favor of putting her away?” I asked Jarrett.

  “I don’t like your phrasing,” he said. “I’m neither in favor of, nor against it. I’m trying to find a reasonable solution.”

  “He’s in favor of,” Gretchen said. “And I’m against. I won’t have this done to Gran. She hasn’t earned such treatment from us. And I know my mother will help on this.” She threw me a quick, defiant look.

  “I don’t think there is anything Brett can do,” Jarrett said.

  “But there’s plenty you could do. My father listens to you.”

  I thought of the missing netsuke that Allegra might have taken, but said nothing. I wanted to add no further coals to this kindling fire.

  “Does Mrs. Logan herself know about this?” I asked. “Why isn’t she present at this conference?”

  The white cap on Coxie’s head moved from side to side in denial. “She’s altogether out of it most of the time, poor lady.”

  “Then why,” Vasily asked, “does it matter where she is? Perhaps it would be more interesting for her with people around, things she might do?”

  Gretchen’s small, sturdy person seemed to take on a look of disapproval. “Gran is Poinciana. Take it away from her and she’ll know, all right. She’ll just stop breathing. Jarrett, you’ve got to make my father see!”

  Jarrett walked to a window to stare out at slanting coco palms, and Gretchen turned to me.

  “What do you think? Even though you’ve only been here so short a time, you must have an opinion. Where do you stand?”

  I couldn’t decide how to answer her. “I’m not sure. How can I be, when I’ve never even seen Allegra Logan?”

  “Then why not see her?” Jarrett turned from the window and went to open the nearest door. “Come here,” he said to me.

  I was beginning to wish I’d never come. I’d been seeking a fantasy. I had wanted to find, somehow, a hint of the Allegra who had created Poinciana. I didn’t want to see the wreckage age had made of her. But there was no escape now. He beckoned me, and I walked to the door of the adjoining bedroom and looked in.

  A small, frail woman in a dark green robe sat in a rocker beside a window. She didn’t look around as Jarrett spoke to her, and I could see only a coil of white hair piled on her head—much as she’d worn it in younger photographs. From the back, she looked shrunken and fragile as a doll. I closed my eyes.

  “Please don’t disturb her,” I said, and knew that I sounded angry. I was angry. Angry at life for destroying a legend, for ending like this. Ysobel would always be young and beautiful, but perhaps Allegra Logan had lived too long.

  The woman heard my voice and turned her head. “Oh, you’ve brought me a visitor?”

  Jarrett drew me into the room. “Mrs. Logan, this is Sharon, Ross’s new wife. You remember—he told you that he had married again. She admires Poinciana and wants to meet you.”

  There was a certain elegance of bearing about her as she sat waiting for my approach. An air of authority in the way she held her head, and in the entirely calm look she turned upon me. I had been wrongs—she was still beautiful. Neither the lines of age nor the falling away of flesh could destroy good bone structure and the fine carving of temple and cheek and chin. The hand she held out to me bore the stigmata of age, but there was grace in her gesture, and the welcome of a woman who had spent a great many years in the role of accomplished hostess.

  I went to her and took her hand, holding it in mine like a small bird. Then it tightened in a grasp that still carried strength behind it, as though she sensed support in me and clung to it.

  “Mr. Nichols is right about how I feel toward Poinciana,” I said. “Ross has been showing me through the house, and it’s so beautiful. So much that was creative and imaginative has gone into it. I’ve wanted very much to meet you.”

  Thin lips moved in a faint smile. “I’m glad you approve, since you’re going to live there. Ross might have brought you himself to meet me. I hope you will be as happy in our house as I have been. What did Jarrett say your name is?”

  “Sharon,” I told her. “I was Sharon Hollis before I married Ross.”

  “Sharon Hollis. How very strange. I thought your name was Brett.” She shook her head in gentle confusion and sighed. “You must come to see me again. I want to know all about you.”

  “I will come,” I promised. Then I spoke softly to Jarrett. “Is there a way out? I don’t want to go back through the other room.”

  He led me to a door that opened upon an entryway at the back of the cottage, and came with me when I left. By the time we were in warm sunshine again, my anger was ready for release.

  “Why can’t she live in her own house, her own rooms? Why can’t she be among all the things that belong to her? She doesn’t deserve to be banished like this!”

  He must have known that I was close to angry tears, but he walked beside me without comment. When we were well away from the cottage, he paused beside a huge banyan tree that I recognized from one of Gretchen’s photographs, studying me thoughtfully. I was intensely aware of his long, solemn face beneath red hair that blew untidily in
the breeze, of gray eyes that were cool, and a mouth that could be unexpectedly tender. A man of power. One to be feared if he set himself against me.

  “You had better ask Ross your questions,” he said.

  I didn’t try to hide my indignation. “Everyone puts me off! Ross said his mother was completely mad, that she had to be restrained. But it’s only old age she suffers from. She’s gentle and helpless.”

  “Not gentle. She was never that. And probably not as helpless as you might think.”

  “She only seems confused. So why must she stay in that horrid little place? Why can’t she be brought back to the house? Perhaps something can be arranged.”

  “You’d better ask Ross,” he said, and turned away from me.

  I caught his arm, surprising both of us. “No! Oh, I will ask him—believe me, I will! But I want you to tell me too. I want everyone at Poinciana who knows her to tell me why she has to live like a prisoner. What harm can it do if she wants to wander about a house that she built and will always belong to?”

  He was watching me, and his eyes were no longer cool. “You are a surprise! Ross isn’t going to like this, you know. He doesn’t care for anyone to disobey his orders, and he doesn’t like explosive women.”

  I faltered, caught up in my own astonishment at the way I’d behaved. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get angry. I don’t usually. I—” I floundered to a stop and found tissues in a pocket to wipe my sudden tears. This was the second time I’d wept today. Once for Ysobel, once for Allegra Logan. And perhaps both times for myself. What was happening to me? Where were my disguises? Had I already shattered my crystal case?

  “Let’s walk down to the water,” Jarrett said. “I’d better tell you a few things.”

  I walked beside him toward the lake. On the way my toe kicked something that I thought was a croquet ball, but when I stopped to look down, I found it was a half-grown coconut. Perhaps because it gave me time to delay, I picked it up. The shell had no shaggy coat, but was smooth in texture and slightly tapering at one end. I carried it with me and moved on, never guessing that someone besides Jarrett was watching me even then.

  “A souvenir,” I said. “I’ll take it back to my room.”

  “If you want to. But it will rot, you know, and the ants will come.”

  At least I carried it with me to the bench beside the lake, where I sat down. Jarrett stood beside me, with one foot on the low stone wall that held the water from the land.

  “How long has Mrs. Logan lived in that cottage?” I asked.

  “Several years. I’ve lost track. She’s accustomed to it now. And some of the time she doesn’t really know where she is, so it can’t matter to her all that much.”

  “I think it does,” I said, beginning to heat up again. “I agree with Gretchen. Somewhere in her mind she knows.”

  Jarrett sat down beside me. “Don’t go overboard, Sharon.” It was the first time he hadn’t called me “Mrs. Logan,” and I felt reproved, as though I’d been a child. “It may be that Ross is right and she would be happier among others close to her own age. And in a place that offered more to interest her, take her attention. She’s being bored to death now.”

  “She wouldn’t be bored at the house among her own things. Tell me why she was put there?”

  He was watching a sailboat skim along the lake, its course smooth as a flying bird’s. For a moment I thought he would once more sidestep my question. Then he spoke quietly, evenly, without emotion.

  “She tried to kill Ross one night, and she very nearly succeeded.”

  I could only stare at him. “That little, frail woman? A man in Ross’s superb condition?”

  “A gun can be effective, no matter what hand holds it. He still carries the scar of the wound on his upper arm.”

  I had seen the scar and asked about it, but Ross had brushed aside my question.

  “But why?” I pleaded. “Why would she do a thing like that?”

  “Perhaps because she isn’t always in her right mind. Isn’t that a good enough answer? Isn’t that a good enough reason for her being moved to the cottage? Of course, no weapons are ever left unlocked any more, though Ross keeps a gun in his desk and one in his bedroom upstairs.”

  “Why guns?”

  He repeated his usual refrain. “Ask Ross. Anyway, there have been other times when Allegra escaped Coxie and came to the house. Though I don’t think she has ever again wanted to kill him. Allegra always cared a great deal about her son.”

  We sat in silence for a little while, and Jarrett stared across Lake Worth at the skyline of West Palm Beach. His profile had a cold, carved look. He often seemed a stone man, I thought. Yet not always. I knew so little about him, about what he did for Ross Logan, and why he served him with such deep loyalty. If that was what it was. It was difficult to be sure of anything with a man like Jarrett Nichols.

  He stood up abruptly. “I must get back to the house.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” I said.

  He nodded remotely and strode off among the coco palms. From another part of the grounds a small figure came running. Jarrett stopped and waited until his son reached him and they walked on together. There seemed a difference in the man as he turned his interest upon the boy—certainly a loosening of tension around his shoulders, a bending of that stiff neck. How would he behave toward a woman he liked? I wondered. That he disliked and distrusted me had been clear from the first, so I would probably never know.

  Soon Ross would be coming home, and I must tell him what I had done, what I now knew about his mother. And I must tell him as well about the two missing netsuke. Later on, there was still the night to be faced. None of these thoughts raised my spirits, and I too was staring fixedly at the shimmering pane of water that reached to the city on the opposite shore, when I heard someone beside me and looked up at Gretchen Karl.

  She dropped onto the far end of the bench and I glanced around to see Vasily walking toward the house alone.

  “Well?” Gretchen challenged. “Now that you’ve seen my grandmother, do you think she should be sent off to some horrible institution?”

  “I don’t think your father will pick a horrible place, do you?”

  “You were talking to Jarrett. Did he tell you what happened? What Gran tried to do?”

  “Yes, he told me. But not the reason.”

  “I was the reason. And my mother. The hideous things he has tried to do to my mother! I hope someone pays him back sometime. I really do!”

  In a gesture that I wasn’t aware of until after I’d made it, I crossed my arms and hugged myself—as if in protection from all the ugly things that were being hurled at me in too brief a space of time.

  Gretchen snorted in wry amusement. “After a while you’ll start rocking yourself the way my grandmother sometimes does. The way they do in madhouses. I’m tempted to often enough myself. Or was until I met Vasily. Poinciana is a place to drive anyone mad. Because of my father. Only because of my father!”

  She jumped up and started off toward the house, then stopped and turned around. I was still watching her in dismay.

  “Will you come with me to town tomorrow? Just tell Dad you have to shop on the Avenue and we’ll go in for lunch. Can you do that?”

  Her about-face was surprising, but I would accept anything that might bring me closer to Ross’s daughter. “Of course,” I said. That Gretchen left me bewildered didn’t matter. She was one of the more important problems to be faced at Poinciana. Much as I wanted to help Allegra, her life was mainly behind her, while Gretchen’s lay ahead—equally threatened by Ross. He had already shown how much he detested Vasily, and I suspected that it was only a matter of time before he used his power to interfere with his daughter’s marriage.

  I was not ready to look closely yet at my own relationship to Ross. I was still holding that time away, but if I could make friends with his daughter, I wanted to try.

  The afternoon was nearly gone, and after a time I started reluctantly bac
k to the house. The bald coconut I’d picked up stayed behind me on the bench.

  Mrs. Broderick must have seen me from a window, for she came to meet me. “Mr. Logan has telephoned,” she said. “He will not be home for dinner, Mrs. Logan. He has been detained.”

  I thought with distaste of sitting alone in the dining room. “May I have a tray brought to my room, Mrs. Broderick? Not a full dinner. And perhaps earlier than the usual dinner hour?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Logan.” She gave me a regal bow of convoluted blond coils and went away.

  I walked around one end of the house to enter the beautiful red and white foyer, and my footsteps echoed on marble. Somehow a lonely sound. More than ever I began to feel the emptiness of Poinciana. It was as though no one lived within its walls. Now and then I glimpsed a maid or a workman, but they were like shadows, fleeing from my approach.

  I went slowly up the beautiful floating staircase and down branching corridors to my room. There I closed the long shutters and lay on the bed. As long as I was awake, I would be aware of time ticking along toward the hour I dreaded. It was better to lose myself in sleep than try to solve all the problems I had stumbled into that were churning through my mind. I shut my eyes and tried not to see Allegra Logan’s face. Or Gretchen’s. Tried not to remember the portrait of Ysobel. I wanted to see only darkness and emptiness. I had not yet begun what was to become a struggle for my very life.

  Chapter 6

  A tap on my door brought me awake, and I sat up on the bed. A young maid in a gray and white uniform came in, carrying a tray.

  “Mrs. Broderick said you would like something to eat early, madam.”

  “Thank you. You can put the tray on that table near the window, and I’ll open the shutters.”

  But she was well trained and wouldn’t allow that. Quickly and efficiently, she managed tray, table, and shutters. Then drew up a chair for me.

  “Will there be anything else, madam?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Tell me your name.”

  She was a pretty young thing, brown-haired, with dark, intelligent eyes. “Susan,” she told me.