Then one day, quite unexpectedly, Jarrett took me away from the house. We gave reporters the slip by running off in a boat across Lake Worth to a place where a friend had a car waiting for us. On the mainland side, we drove south, and I was aware of Florida blooming lushly all around us. There were even more blossoms and flowering vines and shrubs than before in a riot of tropical growth. Jacaranda, breathtakingly blue, azaleas of all shades, bougainvillea more colorful than ever.
In Boynton Beach we had lunch at Bernard’s, a building of white stucco and red tiles that was a Mizner creation. In the dining room I sat in a wicker chair that spread behind me like a great open fan, and looked out through surrounding glass upon a jungle garden, gone wild with undergrowth and twisted banyan trees.
I felt almost happy to be away from the house and alone with Jarrett, and because he had wanted to bring me here. Yet at the same time I was uneasy. I could never be sure of what lay behind anything Jarrett did. For the moment he seemed almost relaxed and I began to relax a little too, postponing the time of reckoning that might lie ahead.
The wild tangle beyond our table had once been the famous Rainbow Tropical Gardens, he told me, where rare palms and plants had been gathered for visitors to enjoy. Gretchen had said once that she would bring me here “sometime.”
Sometime! There was never enough time. It could be too late so quickly. I looked into what had once been an orderly garden and shivered at its dark, mysterious depths.
Jarrett reached across the table, and I put my hand in his. For the living there was still time. Time to take hold, to keep the days from being wasted. His warm clasp told me what I wanted to know. Perhaps Jarrett too was aware of hours speeding away with our lives.
We went outside then and followed a curving white wall roofed in red tiles. At a place where an arched wooden gate with great iron hinges opened into the wild garden, we went through. The days were growing hotter now, but here in this tangle of uncontrolled underbrush and plant life, a shadowy coolness welcomed us. We were in a quiet and secret place, and we sat together upon a fallen log.
“We’ve needed to talk,” he said. “But Poinciana constrains me, and I haven’t known how to begin. I don’t really know now. I wanted to get you away from the house and have a little time with you first. Something pleasant to remember. Sharon, I’ve listened to Pam’s tape.”
I put out my hand. “You needn’t talk unless you want to. I can understand.”
He went on. “In these last days I’ve been thinking a great deal about truth—whatever that is. Sometimes it seems a hopeless abstract, impossible to grasp and hold on to. Maybe meaning something different to everyone who looks at it. Perhaps even dangerous to touch. Yet somehow one has to try. The lie can be even more damaging.”
He paused as if waiting for some response from me. I had little to offer that was comforting, but I tried.
“My father used to tell me again and again that nothing is as it seems,” I said. “I don’t think he believed in truth as something in itself. It was always the lies of others that he thought about and feared, and he tried to make me distrustful. But I’ve never wanted to live that way. I want something I can believe in, even if I have to get hurt by believing.”
“You’re finding your own way, and it’s a good way, Sharon. My trouble is that I’ve lost myself in a jungle as wild as this little counterpart where we’re sitting. I know now that it wasn’t good enough to believe in a kind of truth, if I couldn’t live it. Oh, I had a dozen noble excuses. I’ve given you some of them. The good of the many! That always sounds laudable. But it can mean the beginning of the lies. If I hadn’t gone down that road of deceiving myself as well as everyone else, Pam might be alive today. The good of the many might have been taken care of if I’d stood up to Ross and told him off. And I might have saved Pam. My own confusion doesn’t excuse me.”
Again there was that waiting pause, and I spoke into it, smiling faintly in memory. “Once when I went to school for a little while in Chicago, I had a teacher—an older man who was a devotee of H. L. Mencken. He had a favorite quotation that I liked so much that I memorized it. And I can still quote.
“‘I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than a slave. And I believe it is better to know than be ignorant.’”
I was relieved to see Jarrett smile too. “Yes, I know that one, and I’ve always liked it. Truth can be a pretty hazardous commodity, but it doesn’t breed the same kind of dangers that the lies breed. It is better to know. I’m glad you didn’t follow your kinder instincts and hold that tape back from me, Sharon.”
“I wanted to,” I said.
He put an arm about me, and for a little while no more words were needed between us. They could wait until Jarrett had come through his own dark passageway.
We returned to our borrowed car and I felt closer to him on the drive back to the boat than ever before. The return trip across the lake was companionable, and I think his anguish had lessened a little because of talking it out. We crossed the lawn together, and then Jarrett turned in the direction of his office, while I went into the inner court where I’d sat in the rain that terrible day.
The table and two chairs were occupied: Allegra and Myra sat in the shade, finishing plates of cheesecake. Allegra smiled at me vaguely, and I knew this wasn’t one of her better days.
“There’s enough for you, Mrs. Logan,” Myra said. “I made it myself last night. But now I see Mr. Nichols is back, so I’d better scoot before he misses me.”
She jumped up and gave me a quick little nod, beckoning me to the nearest doorway.
“She’s way out of it, poor lady,” Myra said when we were alone. “Miss Inness was just here trying to find out if Mrs. Logan saw anything in the tower that day. Imagine tormenting her like that! That woman ought to stay away from her.”
Myra waved her arms indignantly and rushed off in her abrupt way. I returned to the courtyard and sat down at the table. Allegra looked at me with a modicum of the rational in her eyes, and I wondered if she sometimes dissembled, to serve her own purposes.
“Brett just came to say goodbye,” she told me. “Of course, with Gretchen gone, she feels she must move out of Poinciana. I said I didn’t think you’d mind if she stayed, but she didn’t agree with me.”
“I’m afraid she’s right,” I admitted. “It will be more comfortable with her gone. And now there’s really no need for her to stay. Did she try to ask you anything else when she was here?”
Allegra looked unhappy, confused. “All that about the tower, you mean? I don’t know what she was getting at. I told her about taking out my beautiful gowns and dressing up. That’s all I can remember. Except that I danced in the ballroom, and you found me there.”
Her bright eyes were candid, guileless. I couldn’t believe she was dissembling. A door had closed firmly somewhere in her mind, and if there was more she had no wish to remember it. The very fact was a relief. If ever she remembered something more, she might be in very real danger.
“I’d better tell Brett goodbye,” I said. “Will you be all right if I leave you here?”
“Of course. I’ll finish this delicious cheesecake. Coxie will come for me after a while, since she knows where I am.”
I went upstairs to the wing that Gretchen and Vasily had occupied, and into which Brett had moved. It was not that I ever wanted to see her again, but that there were some untied threads left dangling that I still wanted to pick up.
The door to her room stood open, and I looked in to find her packing.
“Hello,” she said. “Come in, do. I was about to go look you up. I’ve decided to return to the apartment over my shop in town. Everyone’s leaving the house, I gather. You’re going to have a big place to rattle around in alone. Do you mind if I come to see Allegra occasionally, while she’s still here?”
“Of course not. But what do you mean—everyone’s leaving?”
“Vasily too. Hadn’t you heard?” She
paused in packing her toilet case and regarded me thoughtfully. “Perhaps there are a few more things you ought to know. I don’t suppose anyone else will tell you—if anyone even knows. You remember that bang-up argument Vasily and Gretchen were having that last day?”
I nodded.
“I know what it was about. In fact, I knew the cause earlier. I met Vasily one day down by the beach. He wanted to talk to me without being seen. He wanted to urge my silence. I told him what he had to do—that he had no other choice. But he wouldn’t listen. Or perhaps he didn’t know how to handle this himself. I tried to tell him that I thought Gretchen knew and that he’d better talk to her, reassure her, if he could. Before it was too late. I told him that again the night Ross died, and Vasily and I found ourselves camping out in Allegra’s cottage, not trusting each other. I expect you’ve noticed his state of mind lately. He was scared then, and I think he still is.”
I had noticed that he seemed to be under some strain, but I had set his distraught condition down to his grief over Gretchen’s death. Though he had seemed more devastated than I might have expected him to be.
“What was it that he should have told her?”
Brett gave up her efforts at packing and dropped into a chair. “His big problem is that his ex-wife has turned up over in West Palm Beach, and he’s been seeing her there. I suspect there’s still some sort of attachment between them. Gretchen guessed that he was seeing another woman, only he never told her who it was. She might have understood better if he had. Instead he admitted it to me.”
I remembered that time when Gretchen had come to Ross’s room. There had been a moment when I thought she was about to tell me something, and then had held back. Was this the unhappy secret she’d been carrying? I could feel all the more angry with Vasily now.
“Why should Vasily tell you?” I asked.
“I think he couldn’t handle it himself, and I suppose in a way I was in a neutral camp. He’s turned to me on other occasions when he felt the world was closing in.”
This was quite possible, I thought. Brett was intelligent and worldly wise, and she had few scruples that would make Vasily uneasy.
“Is this matter of the ex-wife one of the things Ross tracked down?” I asked.
“He knew about the wife, of course. She called herself Elberta Sheldon when she was an actress in London. But I don’t know if she was here when Ross was alive. Anyway, Gretchen started to go through her father’s files to find out about this.”
“Will Vasily go back to his first wife now?”
“Maybe you’d better ask him,” she said, and got up to close her last suitcase with an air of finality. “I’ll be leaving now, just as soon as Albert comes for my bags. You don’t mind if he drives me into town? Then he can help me at the other end. I’ll send for my car later.”
We didn’t shake hands. There was a strange moment when we looked at each other across the room. A moment in which there was a certain wary appraisal, each of the other. Then I acted on an impulse and took from my handbag the little mermaid netsuke that Gretchen had been holding when she fell from the tower.
“You remember this?” I said.
She recognized it at once. “Yes, of course. Allegra’s favorite. The one she was always picking up because she said it was hers.”
“Gretchen had it in her hand when she fell from the tower,” I said.
Color seemed to drain from Brett’s face and she sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed. “Then Gretchen did see Allegra that day in the belvedere! Allegra must have stolen the mermaid again, and then Gretchen took it from her. So Allegra knew very well that Gretchen was there and that she’d climbed to the upper room.”
“Does it matter now?” I asked.
Brett answered me almost absently, and with indirection. “I remember Allegra the way she used to be when I first came to this house. She was the only one who was really kind to me. She knew all about Ross and she knew what he would do to me. She was more like a mother to me than my own mother ever was. In the end, she was the only one I could care about in this terrible place. And she was fond of me too. So of course it matters!” Brett gave me a suddenly baleful look. “I wouldn’t want to see any further unhappiness come to Allegra.”
“No one but Jarrett knows about the mermaid,” I said. “And he thought it best not to mention it.”
She nodded in a way that dismissed me, and I went off, leaving her to finish with her suitcases.
From the hallway I could hear sounds coming from Gretchen’s rooms, where Vasily too was preparing to leave. I went to the door of the parlor and looked in. He had set open bags around the room and was carrying out clothes from the bedroom to stuff into them. Through the open door I could see the bed piled with the suits and coats that Gretchen must have bought for him. Standing there silently, waiting to be noticed, I could see how wild and agitated he looked. Not at all the easy, confident man I had first seen in this house.
“You’re leaving?” I asked after a moment.
He started and looked around at me, then made an effort to recover himself. “Ah—Sharon. I would have come to tell you, of course. It is necessary to get away from this house with all its terrible memories. I can’t stay here another night.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“France, perhaps. Paris. Perhaps the Greek isles.” He almost smiled. “Strange to think that I can now go wherever I wish, do as I please. Now that it’s too late.”
“You’ll be taking your former wife with you?”
That really startled him. “Who told you that?”
“I’ve just been talking to Brett,” I said.
He seemed to relax a little, as though this somehow reassured him. “Brett, of course. But that lady doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does. I tried to persuade her of that the time when we met in the tunnel and you discovered us so inopportunely.”
“But your ex-wife is in West Palm Beach?”
“If you must know—yes. I am hoping to get out of the country before she knows I am gone. She hasn’t been making my life easy. So I hope you will not send out any spies. Though, now that Gretchen is gone, there isn’t much she can do.”
I went on conversationally, wondering if I was on the track of something. “Gretchen admitted to me once that you’d probably married her for her money. Not hard to guess. Was that true?”
He didn’t seem to mind my frankness. “In a way, yes. But there was more to it than that. Gretchen was a—a very special person. She—needed what I had to give her. With her there was something—something—oh, God!” He flung himself into a chair and buried his face in his hands. “If only she could have believed in herself a little more! If only she had not tried to punish and torment me for what I could never help!”
“I think,” I said, “that you mustn’t leave Poinciana right away, Vasily. In fact, if you try to leave, I will ask Jarrett to have you stopped. You must stay here a little while longer.”
There was something like terror in the look he gave me. “No, no, Sharon! Don’t ask this of me.”
“We need your help,” I went on. “If you should leave now we might never know who was in the tower with Gretchen before she died. I don’t think it was an accident, Vasily. I believe that Gretchen was pushed through that railing to fall to her death. Just as I was pushed on the stairs that time by the same person.”
Vasily had grown up in a culture that was not afraid of tears and emotion, and now he was weeping helplessly.
For a moment longer I stood staring at him. At any moment he would look up and see what was in my face. I had said too much, and I couldn’t stay here a moment longer. Everything was beginning to fall into place now.
“Just don’t leave the house yet, Vasily,” I said softly, and went away from him, hurrying toward the stairs, hurrying to Jarrett’s office.
Myra was at her desk typing, making up for lost time. She looked up in surprise as I rushed past her and through the open door to confront Jarrett.
“I know what happened to Gretchen!” I cried. “She was threatening to change her will because Vasily had been seeing his former wife in West Palm Beach. He wouldn’t have divorced her, but she might’ve divorced him. So he must’ve followed Gretchen up to the tower. He must have fought with her there. Maybe he never meant to have it happen, but it was Vasily who threw her against the railing so that she fell through to her death.”
“Whoa!” Jarrett said. “Wait—calm down a bit, Sharon.”
I wouldn’t be stopped. “There’s no time to be calm! He’s getting ready to leave right now. He’s planning to leave the country! He’s going to get away if we don’t stop him.”
“This is all supposition, Sharon. Even if you’re right, we can’t rush in and act on a conclusion you’re jumping to.”
That stopped me for only an instant. “Never mind that! Allegra knows. She knows very well who went up to the tower with Gretchen, and she’s trying to shut the whole thing away so she won’t have to face it. We must get her to talk. Now!”
Jarrett shook his head at me sadly. “You’re going off half cocked. If you tackle Allegra in that state, you’ll probably shock her into hiding forever. Wait until you cool down, Sharon.”
All my life I had been trained to be calm and cool and let nothing disturb me. Now all the bars were down, and I was out and free. Cool judicial thinking would let Vasily get away. If Jarrett wouldn’t help me, I would have to do this myself.
Again I ran past an astonished Myra and down those endless corridors, up the stairs, and into Allegra’s suite. Coxie was putting her to bed when I flew through the door.
“I want to talk to her,” I told the nurse. “Just leave us alone for a little while.”
Reluctantly, Coxie left and I turned to the bed. Allegra watched me with sudden alarm in her eyes, and I brought my voice down, forcing myself to speak quietly.
“You must help us now,” I said. “For Gretchen’s sake, you must help us.”
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