Poinciana

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Myra considered. “Only the locked safe. She wasn’t able to look into that because Mr. Nichols wasn’t here to give her the combination. You could ask him about that.”

  It seemed the logical place, and perhaps if Jarrett had been through it, he hadn’t recognized the manuscript package for what it was.

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “There’s not much point in searching where Mrs. Karl has already looked. I’ll get Mr. Nichols to open the safe for me later.”

  I thanked her and went into the long corridor. At the far end, one of the maids scuttled out of sight, still restrained by the rules of invisibility Ross had laid down. Mrs. Broderick would probably see to it that they were adhered to, and would allow no slackening.

  Were the things I was doing merely a marking of time because I hadn’t come to grips with a real purpose for my life? Was I keeping busy with mere intrigue, while larger issues escaped me?

  But even if this were true, I couldn’t deal with anything larger now. Keeping busy at something was all I could manage. So a visit to the tower rooms next would be as good to do as anything else.

  Not because I expected to find any answers there, but because those rooms might tell me something further about Gretchen, and perhaps about Allegra herself. I hadn’t been up to the belvedere since my first uncomfortable encounter there with Gretchen and Vasily.

  Once more I climbed the circular iron stairs, holding on to the curving rail. The steps were wedge-shaped and difficult, and I wondered that Allegra had wanted to use these rooms for herself. However, she had been agile and athletic enough, even into her fifties and sixties. The clippings I’d seen had told me that.

  The lower room that she had called her “nap” room was one I hadn’t explored, and I stepped off the stairs and stood looking about its square expanse. Blinds were closed, the furniture still shrouded. Again, as in the room above, there were windows all around, though more wall space had been allowed here. There was no outside balcony at this level.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the shuttered light, I saw that an elegant French armoire had been placed across one corner. I remembered the time when I’d stood in the ballroom downstairs and wondered if any of Allegra’s gowns from her earlier days had been preserved. Perhaps this was one place to look.

  Double doors pulled outward as I turned the handles, swinging wide to emit an odor of mothballs and faded sachet. The big armoire was hung solid with covered dresses. The plastic protection they wore belonged to a later day than the dresses themselves, and I could see them through the transparency. How beautiful they were—all ball gowns, apparently, and of every imaginable style. Nothing must ever have been given away that she had worn to a party. I lifted a hanger from the rack and held up a long, slim frock of midnight blue satin, trimmed with crystal bugle beads. It rustled softly, as if stirring from a long sleep. Its décolletage was low, front and back, and there was a tiny train that she must have picked up by its wrist cord when she was dancing. How Allegra must have glittered as she moved, holding every eye.

  I heard my own sigh as I replaced the dress among its sisters. Strange that these things should remain in all their perfection, while the woman who had worn them aged and faded. Another time, I would come here to examine every gown in the armoire. Perhaps I would even ask Allegra about their stories. “A long time ago” was a time she would remember more easily than yesterday.

  I closed the doors softly, so as not to disturb old ghosts, and climbed the stairs to the top of the tower.

  There seemed little change in this upper room since the last time I had seen it. If Gretchen still used it for her studio, however, there was no evidence, though the two contrasting photos of Ross still hung on the wall near the desk. I felt a pang as I studied them again.

  How sure—how almost sure—I’d been on that innocent day when I’d first seen them that Ross’s true character was revealed in the dynamic picture in which he moved toward the camera with a confident smile, exuding the power and vibrant spirit I had known him to possess. Now, I could look at the second picture and remember all too well that the darker side of him had existed too, and perhaps been in ascendancy here at Poinciana. That far more dangerous side. Yet in the end the danger had ricocheted back to him.

  A clang of metal from the stairs startled me. Someone had stepped onto the iron wedges and was coming up. An instinctive reluctance to be found here sent me to the balcony door. I pulled it open and stepped into the wind, closing it after me. I wasn’t sure why I’d moved so swiftly and fearfully, except that I had once been pushed down a flight of stairs, and that nothing since then had caused me to feel safe and secure in this house. I wanted to know who climbed those stairs before I made my presence known.

  The climber paused at the floor below, but only for a moment, and then came on to the upper room. I moved around the narrow wooden balcony that followed the square turns of the tower, and found a window where I could watch around the edge, with a minimum likelihood of being seen.

  Vasily Karl’s fair head emerged from the stair opening, and he stepped into the studio room and stood looking about. Looking for what? Had Gretchen sent him here on a search for her father’s manuscript? But surely Ross would never have brought it to the belvedere.

  As I watched Vasily standing there, studying the room, I still thought that some search must be in his mind. But his next move showed clearly that he knew what he was looking for, and where it was hidden. He went to a wicker chair and lifted out the chintz-covered cushion. Reaching beneath it for something, he found whatever it was and dropped it quickly into his jacket pocket. In a moment he would be gone again, down the stairs.

  Vasily didn’t frighten me. Though perhaps he should have. I ran around the balcony, not bothering to be quiet, so that he heard me coming and turned to stare at the door as I entered the tower room.

  “Hello, Vasily,” I said.

  For once I had taken him by surprise. Accustomed as he must have been to difficult situations in which he had lived by his wits and clever deceptions, he was able to think of nothing to say or do in the face of my sudden appearance. Only after a long pause did he recover and smile at me brightly.

  “Are you up here admiring the view, Sharon?”

  “I’m not sure why I’m here,” I said. “ESP, perhaps. Something pulled me to the tower. And I was right, wasn’t I? I had reason to come here.”

  His shrug was as easy and comfortable as though he had not been taken by surprise a moment before. “Oh, well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. I told Gretchen that her idea was foolish, and that you would have to know sooner or later.”

  He went to the desk and opened a bottom drawer. From it he drew a large red folder and placed it on top of the desk. I knew what it was without the slightest doubt.

  “How did Ross’s manuscript come to be here?” I asked.

  Again the careless shrug. “Let’s not go into that. Isn’t it enough that it has been recovered?”

  “Does Gretchen know it was here?”

  “Of course. She put it in that drawer herself.”

  “In order to make a stir? In order to upset me?”

  “Sit down for a moment,” he said, suddenly grave as he motioned me into the chair where the cushion had been replaced. “It will be just as well not to confront my wife with this, Sharon. Sometimes her moods aren’t altogether rational, and it’s not wise to disturb her unnecessarily. This is a difficult time for her, as it must be for you. I’ve been wanting to assure you that I will do everything possible to persuade Gretchen to leave Poinciana. I would like to travel abroad with her. There are so many places in Europe that we could see together, and I hope to convince her that this would be a good thing to do right now. It would also help to heal her loss.”

  “You mean you’ll try to persuade her to give up Poinciana?”

  “Not exactly. She needn’t live in the house to fight this will, if that becomes her desire. Neither does she need to outwait you here. I suspect
that you may find that you don’t want to live in this mausoleum of a place alone. Everyone will be leaving, you know. And will you enjoy being its custodian all alone? Especially during the summer. This isn’t a house that can be air-conditioned, except for a few rooms.”

  “Allegra and Charles Logan sometimes spent their summers here without air conditioning.”

  “I don’t want to argue with you. I shall try to persuade Gretchen that if we all leave, and that will include Brett and Allegra—whatever must be done about her—then some of the servants will give notice, and you will find that you have no wish to stay here, no matter what selfish thing Ross may have asked of you.”

  He seemed strangely eager to convince me, and he had grown less mockingly assured. There was almost an urgency of need in him to persuade me.

  “It isn’t just that you want me out so that Gretchen will inherit Poinciana, is it?” I asked.

  His usually easy manner evaporated. I had never seen him so grave. “No, it is not. For your own sake, Sharon, you are better away.”

  “But why, Vasily? Tell me why?”

  “There have already been attempts to injure and torment you. Isn’t that enough reason? Do you believe in primitive force, Sharon?”

  This was a surprising turn. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I’m not being esoteric. I have come to believe that there are contrasting natures in all of us. One is the primitive side that we learn to suppress as children, and it must be kept suppressed, or it can become a primitive force for destruction. As happens in some people.”

  I glanced at Gretchen’s photograph of Ross. “My father used to say it in a different way—that things are seldom what they seem.”

  “Exactly. Have you felt this force in yourself at times, Sharon?”

  “I don’t think so.” There had been occasions when I was with Ross … but I had hardly turned primitive.

  “I have felt this in myself,” he went on, “and sometimes it has frightened me.”

  That was what I had begun to sense in Vasily—that he was frightened—and the very fact alarmed me.

  “I’d like to leave this house right now,” I told him. “But there are certain things I must know first, and I mean to stay and find them out.”

  “Don’t stay,” he pleaded. “Don’t try to find out.” He hesitated and then went on, still deeply in earnest. “There are times in a life when one may be caught in a net of one’s own weaving. The strands are there to hold you, and there is no way to cut yourself free. So move now, Sharon. Get away before the deadly strands tighten.”

  As he was caught in his marriage to Gretchen? I wondered. But all this about primitive forces and deadly strands grew a little too melodramatic. Vasily was skilled to perfection in building the sensational, and I must not be convinced by his efforts. I began to relax a little.

  When he picked up the manuscript and turned toward the stairs, I held out my hand. “I’ll take that folder, please.”

  He gave it to me, though I sensed his reluctance. There was a new eagerness in him to escape my company, and I could easily guess why. He had said all he wished to say, and he didn’t want me to pick up on something he wanted to conceal. I picked up on it.

  “What was it you retrieved from this chair?” I asked him.

  His stiff smile seemed to warn me that I was going too far. “Let’s say that is my own small secret. You must not push too far, Sharon. You are still young and somewhat heedless—as I used to be. Now I count safety as a virtue in itself, and I value it greatly. I recommend that you do the same. You have lost your powerful protector, and you must remember that.”

  I watched as he gave me a mocking salute and disappeared down the turning stairs. There had been absolutely nothing I could do or say in the face of his veiled warnings. If I’d demanded to see what he had taken from the chair and dropped into his pocket, he might either have laughed at me, or become angry. For the first time it occurred to me that I would not like to see Vasily Karl angry. Not that he had seemed in the least enraged. He had been more fearful than angry, and the knowledge that something was frightening him was rather terrifying in itself. He might deal in melodrama, but I couldn’t dismiss what he said because of that.

  The folder was in my hands, and I opened it and looked inside. The pages Ross had finished were there, as were the photographs and invoices. Had Gretchen really been the one to bring these things to the tower room? I couldn’t be sure that Vasily had told me the truth about anything he had said. His reluctance to have me mention this meeting to his wife seemed to suggest that he had not told me the entire truth.

  At least, with the manuscript in hand again, I knew what I must do before anything else happened. I must go downstairs immediately and check every item on the netsuke shelves against the records I held in my hands.

  Chapter 15

  I worked meticulously, systematically, and I was now familiar enough with many of the individual netsuke so that I could find them to check against the records. Two that were missing showed up quickly. Vasily had been right in his first wry suggestion that these records might have been hidden so that subsequent thefts would not be discovered. But surely Gretchen—oh, the very thought was ridiculous.

  The missing items this time were a carp with a baby turtle in its mouth—in itself an amusing reversal of nature, since snapping turtles were more likely to bother the fish—and a Daruma, who was described as reading and chuckling over an erotic “pillow book” when he should have been doing his religious meditations. Both items were signed and were valuable in themselves. But only to the extent of a few thousand dollars.

  Either or both would have been small enough to hide beneath the cushion of a chair, and later slipped into a jacket pocket if Vasily had wanted to carry them away.

  Yet I could hardly accuse Vasily of the theft, or even be sure that the netsuke, like the manuscript, had been hidden in the tower room. It would seem a good place for such concealment, since Gretchen never allowed the maids to come up there to clean, and apparently she had seen little of those rooms herself in recent days.

  But who was the thief? Perhaps this was just another trick of Gretchen’s to give her an excuse to keep me off balance. Or it could be that Vasily was stealing for his own profit. Gretchen, being her father’s daughter, might very well be keeping him on a short leash. The strands of that net he had mentioned?

  A deep, unreasoned conviction was growing in me that some missing element existed in all this. If I could uncover the one connecting link, everything else would fall into place and be tied together—from Ross’s death, to the alarm-setting, to the hiding of the manuscript. Even to the fact that two valuable netsuke were missing. Also, as Vasily had reminded me, there were those hands that had pushed me down a flight of stairs—an intent that might have killed me. To say nothing of the harmless, yet utterly disturbing trick with a rotting coconut. All were connected, and I must somehow learn in what way.

  Earlier, I’d wondered if I had been simply busying myself with intrigue to avoid meeting larger issues head on. Now I was growing certain that everything was part of that larger issue that still escaped me, and with which I must eventually come face to face. When I knew the answer to this and this, then the dark human motives, the primitive force that Vasily had spoken of, would be revealed. Only then would I see clearly where danger lay, and I could only pray that my knowledge wouldn’t come too late. That was the awful part—not knowing the face of my enemy, or from what direction the next attack might come.

  In the meantime, I had better keep busy if I wasn’t to be shaken into flight. One problem now was how to protect the netsuke collection from further raids. But even if they were removed from their shelves and locked away, there was still the rest of Poinciana—an enormous collection of far more valuable items, many of them small enough to be easily pilfered. When the will was settled, perhaps I could return the netsuke collection to Japan as Ross had mentioned doing. But there was little I could do now about all
these treasures except to try to be as watchful as possible.

  A certain rebellion and resentment began to stir in me. This was a dreadful way to live! To be constantly in fear that valuable possessions would be stolen was to be owned by those possessions—and that was not for me. The house should be turned into a museum, and be supported and guarded as such, however much of Ross’s wealth this might cost. Once I had thought nothing could be more marvelous than to live in such a place—my own private museum. I didn’t think so any longer. There were treasures here and they should be seen, appreciated, not kept selfishly private as Ross had wanted to keep them. He had wanted me to stay here, to restore, to give myself to Poinciana. And that was something I had no intention of doing.

  Nevertheless, until the house and its property were clearly in my hands, there was little I could do. It might even be that the pilfering lay within the family, and that would be very hard to deal with.

  One thing I knew. For the moment, I’d had enough of Poinciana and all it contained. Except for the funeral, I hadn’t been outside the gate for days. Perhaps I could even think more clearly if I got away for a while. Tonight at dinner I could pour everything out into Jarrett’s sensible ears, but I didn’t know where he was right now.

  I went upstairs and changed into something suitable for town. When I was ready in beige linen and brown pumps, with a touch of coral at neck and ears, I went downstairs and asked for the car and Albert.

  I was told that Mrs. Karl had already taken the Rolls, with Albert to drive her, and had gone into town to view her exhibit of pictures in the library. Would I care to drive myself? There was, of course, a choice of cars.

  There was no reason why I shouldn’t drive myself. I accepted a white Ferrari that Vasily sometimes used. It would do as well as any, and perhaps it would be an advantage to catch Gretchen away from the house. I too would visit the exhibit at the library.