I had overlooked what it was like to be a Logan at this time. As I drove through the gate, photographers and reporters swarmed upon me, hurling questions, snapping their camera shutters. I had seen such assaults on television news programs, but this was the real thing. Away from the protection of the house, I had to roll up my windows, and try to drive without running anyone down.
For days I had scarcely looked at the newspapers, and I hadn’t realized what I should have taken for granted—that the world was fascinated by Ross Logan, his death, his family, and that repercussions would take a long while to die down.
Until this moment, no one had been able to get near me. Now I was uncomfortably aware that cars were following me into town and that I would be surrounded again the moment I left the Ferrari. Better to join them than fight them! When I came to a place where I could stop on the narrow boulevard without blocking traffic, I pulled off and waited. A car squealed behind me, and a woman got out and came running up to the window of my car. She was young and eager, and I rolled it down and smiled at her.
“Would you like to act as my guide?” I asked. “I’m going into town to see Mrs. Karl’s exhibit of photographs. If you mean to follow me anyway, you might as well go on ahead and show me where the library is.”
She agreed cheerfully. “Sure. If you’ll answer some questions for me at the other end.”
“I’ll try,” I promised.
She grinned in the direction of two other cars that had slowed behind us, and got into her battered Chevy. When she drove around me, touching her horn, I followed, and the rest of the entourage fell in behind.
Oddly enough, away from Poinciana, I didn’t mind so much. These people were doing their job, and after all I was one of the reading public who had followed with interest what happened to the world’s celebrated. Except that I couldn’t see myself existing in that category, even after my marriage to Ross Logan.
We drove into the center of Palm Beach to Four Arts Plaza, and parked. My guide whipped out of her car and came to slip into the front seat of mine.
Strangely, I felt more relaxed than I had in days, as, notebook and pencil in hand, she began her questions. I tried to keep my wits about me, and remember what everything would sound like in print.
For the most part, her questions were straightforward enough. What were my plans? Would I stay on in Poinciana, or leave and allow Mr. Logan’s daughter to inherit? (So news of the will was common property?) How did I feel to be one of the world’s wealthiest women? What would I do with my time?
I asked a question or two of my own. My inquisitioner’s name was Meg, and she worked for the woman’s page of a Florida paper.
It was my own feelings about what was happening to me that most interested her. In most cases I had to answer with an I-don’t-know. I really hadn’t thought about being wealthy. I hadn’t had time to get used to it. I hadn’t thought about a lot of things, apparently.
How did I feel about my husband’s daughter? I told her cautiously that we hadn’t had time to become well acquainted, but that I admired her work in photography, and was interested in seeing her exhibit at the library. No, of course there was no antagonism between us. Already I was discovering that one lied glibly to the press. Not until I asked to be let off from any further questions did she put the one that most upset me.
“How do you feel about the rumors that your husband’s death was not due to a heart attack?”
After the first shock, I tried to answer carefully. “I haven’t heard any such rumors. You have only to check with his doctor.”
“Oh, we have. But there seem to be unanswered questions about just what brought on the heart attack.”
I mananged to keep myself in hand. “I was there, and there is nothing more to know.”
The girl beside me recognized that her interview was at an end.
“You’ll enjoy the library,” she said. “An interesting building. It’s not a public library, you know. Local residents support it. Don’t you love those bronze jaguars on either side of the steps?”
“I’ll go in now,” I said.
“Thanks a lot for letting me talk with you,” she told me, and returned to her Chevy. I could hope that she would be reasonably kind in whatever she wrote.
There were more reporters waiting, having followed me here, but I hurried through and went up the wide steps between the two prowling animals. I had a quick glimpse of a white stone building—Quattrocento Italian in style—and then I was through the arches of the red-tiled portico.
The interior was cool after bright sunlight, and I stopped to look up at the stunning portrait that hung over the desk. It was a painting of a seated woman, her white hair partly hidden by black lace, her eyes of arresting intensity. A remarkable face.
The librarian behind the desk greeted me as I came in. “Good morning, Mrs. Logan. If you’re looking for Mrs. Karl, she’s already here.”
I supposed that my picture must have appeared in papers across the country, and I had to get used to being recognized.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ve come to see her photographs.”
“They’ve been hung upstairs in the children’s room, where we have more wall space,” she said, and directed me.
I took the elevator up and found the big room with its bright book jackets, low tables and small chairs. It was empty when I walked in, except for Gretchen, who stood looking up at a matted photograph she had taken of her husband.
The photo seemed extremely posed, yet, knowing Vasily, I suspected that she had caught him quite off guard. He fell naturally into poses. In the black-and-white full-length, he leaned against the trunk of a coco palm on the grounds of Poinciana. A familiar glimpse of the belvedere identified the setting. His blond head rested against the trunk, his arms were folded, and one foot crossed over the other. The collar of his white shirt was open at the throat to reveal a gold coin he wore on a chain—a gift from Gretchen. He seemed completely relaxed and unaware of any camera nearby, his expression one I’d seen before—the look of a man who accepted life as it came, and was entertained by it. The face of a romantic, an adventurer. The Thief of Baghdad, I thought to myself. That was where Vasily belonged—in the Arabian Nights. But this was a dangerous look for a modern man to wear.
“You’ve caught him very well,” I said softly to Gretchen.
She whirled to stare at me, quick anger rising in her eyes.
“Please,” I said. “A truce. I only want to talk with you. We’re really on the same side, but you never give us a chance to find this out.”
From beneath the fall of short hair, her look was one of hostility. She said, “We can’t talk here. But come along, and we’ll find a place.”
She led the way to a narrow room with a table and chairs placed near an end window. Books lined the shelves, and Gretchen waved a casual hand at them as we entered.
“This was the personal collection of the architectural books that belonged to Addison Mizner. He’s the man who gave Palm Beach its Spanish-Mediterranean look.” She sat down at the table. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“I have the netsuke manuscript,” I said, sitting opposite her.
Her look of surprise seemed real. “Where did you find it?”
“Oddly enough, it was in the upper room of the belvedere, in a drawer of your grandmother’s desk. I thought you might have put it there.”
“Of course I didn’t!” Again her outrage seemed sincere, but before she could further vent her indignation, I went on.
“I took it down to the Japanese room and started checking. I haven’t finished, but I’ve found two netsuke missing. I suppose that’s why these records were hidden. So there would be a delay in our discovering a theft.”
Her first angry flush had died away, leaving her pale. So much for Vasily’s veracity in telling me that it was Gretchen who had hidden the manuscript.
“How did you happen to look in the belvedere?” she asked.
“You’d looke
d everywhere else,” I said. “Though I didn’t really go up there for the purpose of searching for the manuscript. I stopped to look at an armoire full of Allegra’s gowns, and then I went upstairs and—and found the folder with Ross’s papers and your photos.” I would keep Vasily out of it for now.
Gretchen was silent, still pale. And frightened? Yet with a different fear from that I’d sensed in her husband. He had been afraid of something or someone. There had been an awareness, a direction about his fear that I had sensed distinctly. Perhaps a fear of his wife. Gretchen was afraid without knowing why. Or perhaps she was afraid to know why.
“How much do you trust your mother?” I asked bluntly. I wanted to ask how well she could trust Vasily, but I didn’t dare.
For once, she took no offense. “I can trust her as long as her interest coincides with mine.” An old bitterness sounded in the words.
“I’m not making accusations,” I said, “but I can’t help wondering. Just this morning Jarrett’s son, Keith, told me that it was Brett who set off the alarm that night.”
This time I hadn’t surprised her. She reached across the small table and grasped me tightly by the wrist. “Don’t think whatever it is you’re thinking. Brett’s okay.”
So she knew. So it was true. “I’m not able to conclude much of anything,” I told her. “That’s the trouble. Perhaps none of it matters now anyway. These things aren’t what is real—old grudges, suspicions. It’s our lives now that matter. What I am going to do, and whether you’re happy in your life. Are you, Gretchen?”
“Of course I’m happy! Except for what’s happened to my father, more than I’ve ever been. Vasily wants us to go on a trip through Europe, until after things are settled. I think perhaps I will. There’s so much he wants to show me over there, and we need to get away from Poinciana for a while. Until it can belong to us. As it will, Sharon. As it has to!”
“Of course it has to,” I agreed. “That’s what I’d like you to understand. I don’t want any part of it. Your father was angry with you when he changed his will. But he would probably have changed it back if there’d been time. I only wish he had.”
She was staring at me again, in disbelief. “But I thought—”
“You didn’t think, Gretchen. You only made accusations and jumped to false conclusions. I can understand that you never wanted your father to marry me. I know my coming couldn’t have been more unwelcome. But that’s over now. I don’t want Poinciana for myself. But I’d like to see it preserved and protected, as your grandmother and your father would wish. So I’ll stay for now. Especially if you’re going away. Later you can decide what you want to do, and how you mean to take over. Besides, with Allegra back in the house, someone has to stay around.”
“Allegra? Back in the house? But how—”
“Your mother brought her there. Brett moved her upstairs with most of her things this morning, and she went to bed in her old room. But I’m not sure she’s happy about the move. Brett said you wanted it, and so did she, and I think she acted out of good intent. Only it was too fast for your grandmother to realize what was happening. It must have been a shock to be suddenly uprooted like that.”
“Brett!” Again Gretchen put bitterness into her voice. “She never even consulted me.”
This was the moment for attack. There was something I could probably settle now. “I’d rather not have your mother stay in the house,” I said. “She has told me she plans to move in.”
I could sense the quick rising of resistance to me that was second nature to Gretchen, and I hurried on.
“I don’t believe you want her there either. It’s not necessary to spite me any more.”
She made a sudden switch to a new attack of her own. “Did you ever really love my father, Sharon?”
Reasonable words were hard to find, and I answered with an indirection. “Do you remember those two photographs you took of him—the ones that I saw in the tower room? I was in love with the man in one of those pictures. I could never have loved the other one, but I didn’t know he existed until I came to Poinciana. Which one was real? Perhaps I was only in love with a man I imagined. Perhaps Ross and I were both cheated. I wonder if women always marry imaginary heroes.”
“I didn’t! I know everything about Vasily. The bad things and the good, and I know how much I love him.” She spoke the words defiantly, as though she slapped some sort of challenge down between us.
“Could he have taken the netsuke that are missing?” I asked.
“Of course he could have. It would be very like him. But I don’t know whether he did or not. I’ll find out. Is that all you wanted to talk about?”
“For now,” I said. The feeling of depression and helplessness was returning. Perhaps I had wanted more from a meeting with Gretchen than was possible. Not information, not answers, but a lessening of the strain between us. And there I’d failed.
She went to shelves that lined one side of the room and took down a volume, riffling through its pages. “Maurice Fatio. He was the architect who designed this building, and he had a hand in Poinciana too. Though Grandmother Allegra went through a score of architects trying to incorporate her own ideas. That’s why it’s such a hodgepodge.”
But it wasn’t architects that concerned her now. “I still can’t believe he’s gone,” she said as she returned the book to its place. “I still think of things I want to tell my father, share with him. Even argue with him about. At first I was just numb. But now feeling is beginning to come back, and I don’t know how I can bear it.”
“I know,” I said. “I keep expecting him to come through a door at any moment. It’s always that way for a while, I suppose. I still feel as though I ought to write my parents a letter, and I still wait for one from them. Perhaps it’s a sense of unreality that helps us to get through until we can handle what has happened.”
“Too many deaths,” Gretchen said. “You’ve suffered too many deaths, haven’t you, Sharon? Just the same—for me—there’s a kind of relief as well. I don’t have to fight him any longer. I don’t have to worry about that terrible bargain he made with Vasily. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t miss him at every turn. It’s strange how mixed up emotions can be.” She broke off and stared at me. “Do you ever feel relief, Sharon?”
The tone of her voice had changed to one of challenge, and I knew she would never allow me what she felt herself. Whatever I said now, she would deride.
Without answering, I picked up my handbag and started for the door.
“Sharon?” she said more gently, and I turned to see that she looked almost contrite. “Listen—I know a little courtyard off Worth, where we can sit at a small table outdoors and have sandwiches and coffee. Will you come with me? I don’t want to be alone right now.”
Surprised as I was, I didn’t hesitate. “I’d like that,” I said.
We went downstairs together, and out the door between the guardian jaguars—to be greeted by the clicking of cameras. The throng had grown.
“Smile at them,” Gretchen said between her teeth.
Albert came quickly from the Rolls to assist us, but Gretchen told him she would come with me and he could take the big car home. We were followed to the Ferrari, but Gretchen took it all in her stride and put on a good face. She got behind the wheel as her right, and I gave her the key.
“You might as well grin and bear it,” she told me as we drove off. “Anybody with the Logan name is news all the time. But more so than ever now. You and I, especially. Just look at them cheerfully, or you’ll find scowling pictures of yourself plastered across every newspaper you pick up.”
“All I can manage is to look blank,” I said. “I can’t get used to any of this. It was never as bad with Ysobel.”
“Then you’d better toughen up,” she told me.
When we reached Worth Avenue she found a space between a Lincoln Continental and a pickup truck—the latter a sign of democracy moving in. We followed an arcade to a sunny courtyard, where umbrellas
shaded small round tables.
Once an enterprising photographer popped in to snap a picture before he was banished by a waitress, but for the most part our lunch together was a green oasis in the dry and lonely desert in which I seemed to be lost. There was a relaxing of defenses at last, almost an approach to friendliness between us for a little while. I was to remember this hour we spent together—Ross’s daughter and I. I was to remember it later in the face of all the dreadful things that were to come.
During the meal we talked at first about neither Ross nor Vasily. Gretchen spoke of her grandmother as she remembered her from the past. She told me some of the stories about her that had taken on the quality of legend. Once when Allegra was young and given to laughing at the proprieties, she had ridden a horse rudely among the tables of the Coconut Grove at the august Royal Poinciana Hotel.
“It really was a coconut grove and outdoors then,” Gretchen said. “So it wasn’t like riding under a roof. I wish I could have seen her. She used to tell me about the Royal Poinciana. Flagler built it way back in the 1890’s, and he painted it lemon yellow, the way he did everything. It was the largest wooden building in the world, and the grandest of the grand hotels. But then people began to build what they called ‘cottages’ in Palm Beach. The Royal Poinciana was damaged in a hurricane, and finally torn down in 1936. All ancient history.”
“At least Palm Beach still has the Breakers.”
“Yes, and it’s pretty grand. It burned down on three occasions, but every time it rose from the ashes, so that it has become a landmark, with those big white towers on the ocean. The Breakers was Flagler’s baby too, in the beginning. One of these days I must take you to Whitehall. That was his home, you know. It’s a beautiful museum now, with the rooms all intact.”
How pleasant it was to be peaceful, to talk about ordinary things, to rest emotionally. I think Gretchen felt it too and that these moments were as welcome to her as they were to me.
The sense of peace lasted all the way back to Poinciana, and that was the end of it. Susan Broderick, home from her morning classes, waited for us as we came in.
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