Poinciana

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  I could almost see the curtains come down as she retreated, escaping once more from what she dared not face.

  I reached for one frail hand. “Please, Allegra. Don’t go away from me now. I know what happened in the tower. I know Vasily went up there and fought with his wife. You saw it all, didn’t you? You know what happened. You mustn’t run away from it any longer, no matter how much Gretchen’s death hurts you. Help us, Allegra!”

  She stared at me with a total lack of comprehension. Jarrett was right. In my need for haste, I had frightened her into retreat. Though I knew it was hopeless, I stayed a little while longer, trying to talk to her, struggling to break through those protective barriers she had raised. But it was no use, and I knew it. In the end I gave up and returned to the hall.

  I was on my way to my room when Vasily appeared around a far corner and came walking toward me. I didn’t like the strange look in his eyes.

  “You’ve been talking to Allegra?” he said. “So what has she told you?”

  I shook my head, trying to hide my sudden fear. “Nothing. She doesn’t remember anything.”

  He still looked frightened, and in a man as unstable as Vasily, that was dangerous. Yet he spoke to me quietly enough.

  “Sharon, you don’t understand. There is nothing you can do now. I want to go away quietly, while there is still time. You must permit me that.”

  He took another step toward me, his eyes very bright, and I backed away, flat against the corridor wall. At that moment, from somewhere downstairs, I could hear Myra calling me. I knew Jarrett had sent her after me, and blessed him for it. Vasily turned, momentarily distracted, and I felt the panel move behind me. I stepped backward as it swiveled, and I let it close upon darkness. With a frantic hand I fumbled for the switch that would light my way of escape to the ballroom.

  Lights came on down the long passageway, and I moved toward the stairs, trying to make no sound behind this secret wall, uncertain of whether Vasily knew that the passage existed. I’d reached the top of the hidden stairway when I heard the panel in the corridor behind me open again, and when I turned to look, I knew I had lost. Vasily stepped in and swung the door closed behind him.

  I gave up trying to be quiet, and shouted for Myra, praying that she would know about this way to the ballroom and that she would hear me. The rickety railing broke under my hand as I stumbled down the stairs. I recovered my footing and ran for the turn in the passageway, while walls seemed to press in upon me.

  But clearly, Vasily knew the passage well, and he was coming after me. I heard nothing from Myra. Perhaps she had gone for help. Or more likely, she hadn’t heard my cry at all. It took only seconds for Vasily to reach me, and I felt his wiry strength as he swung me around. “No, no, Sharon! You must not run from me. I would never hurt you.”

  I knew better than to believe him. I knew everything now.

  “It was you all along!” I cried. “You thought I was a danger because you were afraid I would recognize you, give you away. That I’d spoil your plans to get your hands on Gretchen’s money, and then go back to your first wife. You wanted to frighten me away from Poinciana, didn’t you?”

  “No, no! No one meant to push you on the stairs. You were there at the wrong moment. It became necessary.”

  It was all becoming horribly clear. “You were behind that child’s trick with the coconut! And the two notes! The one left for Ross and the one I found in my room! It was you, Vasily! Gretchen suspected, didn’t she? And tried to protect you.”

  “No, no—I never thought—”

  “You’ve been cruel—utterly cruel! How did you kill Gretchen?”

  He caught me by the shoulders, shaking me hard. “Stop it, Sharon!”

  I squirmed desperately in his grasp and managed to break his hold. Blindly, I ran toward the ballroom and the way out. But the door was so far away—so far! And he was coming after me again with a wild strength moving him.

  Then at the far end the concealed door opened and a shadow filled the slit. Rescue was coming, after all! I cried out, and ran toward the opening. It closed again, and in the wall lighting I could see Myra coming toward me.

  “Help me!” I called to her. “Help me to get out!”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s all right, Vasily. We’ve got her cornered now. I think you’d better tell her everything.”

  Behind me, Vasily made a strange choking sound. I stood where I was, stunned with disbelief. What had Myra to do with anything?

  “Oh, so you don’t want to tell her?” she ran on, sounding almost pleased. “Then perhaps I had better do it for you.”

  I could see her clearly down the passageway, and there was a change in her that was astonishing. Her very look, her manner was different. She was a woman far more arresting than the Myra I knew.

  She spoke with a self-assurance I’d never seen in her before. “I’m his wife, Sharon. I’m his real wife. Oh, we were officially divorced, of course, because we worked out this fine plan between us. Gretchen used to come into Vasily’s gallery in London as a customer, and he had only to play up to her, win her—marry her! Then when enough of the money was in his hands, he would get a divorce and he and I would be together again with everything we’d never had before.”

  “Don’t, Myra,” Vasily said.

  I’d had it right, and I’d had it all wrong.

  She ran on again, paying no attention. “I rather liked you, Sharon. We had good visits together, didn’t we? It was too bad about that time on the stairs. But I was afraid of what you might do to our plan. You were beginning to remember who Vasily was. So I tried to warn you to go away. I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I made it up to you afterwards, didn’t I? Though I was laughing inside over the way you trusted me. Nothing more would have happened to you, if you hadn’t turned into a real threat with all your poking and snooping. I used to watch you, Sharon—so many times when you never knew I was about. Why didn’t you understand when I left that coconut for you, and that note? Of course I left the one for Ross, hoping it would make him change his mind about Vasily. And it gave me the idea for the one to you. Why didn’t you get out while you could?”

  The whole chilling picture of someone completely amoral was coming clear. This was the most dangerous kind of evil—never to recognize the truth about oneself. Vasily had understood and suffered over his own villainy. But Myra had played without conscience the role of a friendly, well-meaning woman—all the while appallingly bent upon her own venal purposes. I had seen only the character an actress had developed, mannerisms, attitudes, and all. Perhaps the best role Elberta Sheldon had ever played.

  “Let her go,” Vasily said. “You know I never intended any of this.”

  “Yes—you were always the weak one. You’d have let Gretchen get away with changing her will, divorcing you, fixing it so that in the end we’d have nothing. You found the netsuke under the cushion in the tower, where I hid them, and you made me return them both times. And the Lautrec paintings, when I could have sold them through people I know. Though at least you tried to protect me by hiding those manuscript pages, so what was missing couldn’t be checked. I was pleased about that.”

  There was anger and grief in Vasily’s voice. “You’ve lost, Myra! You must give up now.”

  “Because you thought you’d fallen in love with your temporary wife? Don’t be foolish! I knew you would always come back to me. You had to come back, didn’t you?”

  “No! I told you it was over when you played that idiotic prank and got yourself a job as Jarrett’s secretary. I told you you couldn’t work in this house!”

  “But I did, didn’t I? I fooled them all! What fun I had playing that character. Though in a way, she is part of me. And you kept coming to see me over in town.”

  “To persuade you to leave. To keep you from any more scheming acts. I wasn’t playing your game any more.”

  “It’s not a game you could stop playing, Vasily. Yet only today you’ve tried to run away—without
letting me know. How very foolish of you! Now you’ve brought us to this. We can’t let Sharon go. You see that, don’t you? Look what I have here.”

  She was holding something up, and Vasily cried out with a despair that shook me even more.

  “It’s Sharon’s own husband’s gun,” Myra pointed out. “That nice little automatic he kept in his desk. How appropriate if Sharon commits suicide with it because she is grieving so for her beloved husband—and mother and father. It’s all been too much for her. You can see that. But it must be done very convincingly, Vasily.”

  He moved then. I felt myself thrust against the wall as he plunged toward the woman who had been his wife. They were struggling together down near the ballroom entrance when the gun went off. Its cracking echoes seemed to reverberate forever in that narrow passageway. And then there was only a terrible silence.

  Until the sobbing began.

  Following the shot by moments came a distant shouting and the clatter of running feet. Everything resounded through the thin walls of Allegra’s secret passage, until the door opened once more at the ballroom end, and this time it was Jarrett who came through.

  “Sharon?” he called. “Sharon, are you there?”

  I moved toward him with a greater relief than I’d ever felt in my life. Slipping past Vasily and Myra, not sure which one of them sobbed, I flung myself into Jarrett’s arms. For a moment he held me, making sure I was unharmed. But others were crowding the narrow doorway now, and he set me aside, moving past me toward the place where Vasily crouched, holding Myra in his arms. Now I knew that it was he who wept, and I could see that Myra was bleeding.

  Chapter 20

  The immediate excitement is over. I can sit beside Jarrett on his deck above the lake and talk with him almost calmly. Myra has been taken to a hospital, where she will recover from the flesh wound inflicted when Vasily struggled with her for Ross’s gun. The police have been questioning them, and the whole miserable story is out.

  There can be no escaping the horror ahead that will keep everything painfully public for a long while. Myra will be tried for Gretchen’s murder, but Jarrett believes that Vasily, for all his original intent, has done nothing legally criminal, and he certainly saved my life. All along he had been trying to stop his former wife from carrying out the plan she had launched them into. They were two adventurers, and perhaps that was her greatest appeal for him. Yet I think Gretchen was not wholly cheated by Vasily in their marriage.

  Brett had managed to leave the house before everything exploded. She and Gretchen had been coming close to the truth, but neither had suspected that Vasily’s former wife, Myra Ritter Karl, alias the actress Elberta Sheldon, had installed herself so impudently right under their noses at Poinciana.

  When Jarrett had left for the hospital, along with the police, I had gone upstairs to see Allegra. She had heard the shot and it had brought her out of bed in trembling fright. I helped Coxie to quiet her, and then we sat together in her little gray and red parlor, while I told her everything. And at last she talked to me.

  The sound waves of that shot shattering their way through Poinciana seemed to have broken through her defenses. That she had seen her granddaughter fall from the tower had nearly destroyed her sanity. Perhaps would have, if she hadn’t been able to retreat into her own refuge. She had known Gretchen was in the tower, because her granddaughter had stopped to see what she was doing, had discovered that she had the Sleeping Mermaid again, and had taken it for safekeeping.

  Yet Allegra had never known who was in the tower with Gretchen that day. She had been engrossed in examining her lovely gowns, lost in her memories, her fantasies, and she hadn’t seen Myra climb the stairs. However, she had been standing near a window, holding a dress up to the light, when Gretchen had fallen past the glass. She had heard her scream, heard the crash of her fall—and the shock and horror had been too much for her to bear. She had fled into the past, dressing herself in a favorite gown and going by way of her secret passage to dance in the ballroom—where I had found her.

  After that, she had drifted in and out, between past and present. Whenever the present came too close and threatened her with terror and collapse, she ran from it, saving herself. But she could have told us nothing useful anyway.

  A few tumultuous days have passed, and now for this little while we can sit on the deck outside Jarrett’s cottage, watching the brilliance of a Florida sunset. The poinciana tree is green now with plumy leafage, and I feel a deep sorrow because Gretchen will never see it again. Or Ross.

  Jarrett and I are making our plans quietly, because we know now that there is never enough time. We will be married as soon as possible. When we can leave Poinciana, we will take Keith and Allegra with us to some suburb of New York or Washington, where we can find a smaller house, and live the sort of lives that will better suit us all.

  Though I know we will return. Allegra must have her say about what will be done with Poinciana. She too wants it to be shared with those who come to visit in the future. Perhaps as Flagler’s beautiful Whitehall is being shared.

  But for now—for this little while—I am content to sit beside Jarrett, my hand warm in his, while Keith and Brewster play on the lawn nearby, rolling coconuts. I am content to experience these last peaceful moments at Poinciana.

  We can never forget what has happened here, but there are good new memories to be made, and so much lies ahead for all of us.

  Acknowledgments

  With special thanks to my sister- and brother-in-law, Mabel and Lloyd Houvenagle, for making my life so much more pleasant, and for driving me around Florida.

  My thanks as well to Leone King; to Helen McKinney of the Library, Society of the Four Arts; and to Elyse Strickland of the Doubleday Bookshop, all of whom helped me with my Palm Beach background.

  A Biography of Phyllis A. Whitney

  Phyllis Ayame Whitney (1903–2008) was a prolific author of seventy-six adult and children’s novels. Over fifty million copies of her books were sold worldwide during the course of her sixty-year writing career, establishing her as one of the most successful mystery and romantic suspense writers of the twentieth century. Whitney’s dedication to the craft and quality of writing earned her three lifetime achievement awards and the title “The Queen of the American Gothics.”

  Whitney was born in Yokohama, Japan, on September 9, 1903, to American parents, Mary Lillian (Lilly) Mandeville and Charles (Charlie) Whitney. Charles worked for an American shipping line. When Whitney was a child, her family moved to Manila in the Philippines, and eventually settled in Hankow, China.

  Whitney began writing stories as a teenager but focused most of her artistic attention on her other passion: dance. When her father passed away in China in 1918, Whitney and her mother took a ten-day journey across the Pacific Ocean to America, and they settled in Berkley, California. Later they moved to San Antonio, Texas. Lilly continued to be an avid supporter of Whitney’s dancing, creating beautiful costumes for her performances. While in high school, her mother passed away, and Whitney moved in with her aunt in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from high school in 1924, Whitney turned her attention to writing, nabbing her first major publication in the Chicago Daily News. She made a small income from writing stories at the start of her career, and would eventually go on to publish around one hundred short stories in pulp magazines by the 1930s.

  In 1925, Whitney married George A. Garner, and nine years later gave birth to their daughter, Georgia. During this time, she also worked in the children’s room in the Chicago Public Library (1942–1946) and at the Philadelphia Inquirer (1947–1948).

  After the release of her first novel, A Place for Ann (1941), a career story for girls, Whitney turned her eye toward publishing full-time, taking a job as the children’s book editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and releasing three more novels in the next three years, including A Star for Ginny. She also began teaching juvenile fiction writing courses at Northwestern University. Whitney began her career writin
g young adult novels and first found success in the adult market with the 1943 publication of Red Is for Murder, also known by the alternative title The Red Carnelian.

  In 1946, Whitney moved to Staten Island, New York, and taught juvenile fiction writing at New York University. She divorced in 1948 and married her second husband, Lovell F. Jahnke, in 1950. They lived on Staten Island for twenty years before relocating to Northern New Jersey. Whitney traveled around the world, visiting every single setting of her novels, with the exception of Newport, Rhode Island, due to a health emergency. She would exhaustively research the land, culture, and history, making it a custom to write from the viewpoint of an American visiting these exotic locations for the first time. She imbued the cultural, physical, and emotional facets of each country to transport her readers to places they’ve never been.

  Whitney wrote one to two books a year with grand commercial success, and by the mid-1960s, she had published thirty-seven novels. She had reached international acclaim, leading Time magazine to hail her as “one of the best genre writers.” Her work was especially popular in Britain and throughout Europe.

  Whitney won the Edgar Award for Mystery of the Haunted Pool (1961) and Mystery of the Hidden Hand (1964), and was shortlisted three more times for Secret of the Tiger’s Eye (1962), Secret of the Missing Footprint (1971), and Mystery of the Scowling Boy (1974). She received three lifetime achievement awards: the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1985, the Agatha in 1989, and the lifetime achievement award from the Society of Midland Authors in 1995.

  Whitney continued writing throughout the rest of her life, still traveling to the locations for each of her novels until she was ninety-four years old. She released her final novel, the touching and thrilling Amethyst Dreams, in 1997. Whitney was working on her autobiography at the time of her passing at the age of 104. She left behind a vibrant catalog of seventy-six titles that continue to inspire, setting an unparalleled precedent for mystery writing.