The Golden Unicorn

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “Wait—let me look around a little, in case whoever lives here sends us away.”

  I walked toward the sharp angle of the veranda to the side stretch that overlooked the water, and came to a halt. A woman sat with her back to us—a woman in a wheelchair. She must not have heard our footsteps on the bare boards, because she did not turn her head. I could see by her profile that she was old—perhaps near eighty, with hair gone completely white, and cut short for convenience, though neatly brushed. Her features had been honed by the years so that nose and forehead and chin were bony and clearly etched, their lines unsoftened by the flesh of youth. She sat wrapped in a voluminous gray shawl, staring out at the water.

  Evan stood back, letting me do as I chose, now that I was here. I stepped around to be within the line of pale blue eyes, and spoke to her gently.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Courtney Marsh, and I’ve been visiting the Rhodes in East Hampton. I believe my mother, Alice Kemble, lived in this house at one time and I wanted to see it before I go back to New York.”

  Her gaze remained fixed on some distant horizon and she made no response. Was she blind, deaf? I glanced back at Evan, questioning.

  “I’d better ring the bell,” he said.

  But I had to know, and while he went to the door, I bent to the old woman in the chair, putting my hand lightly on her arm. “Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

  Her look did not quicken and she gave no sign that she could feel my touch or hear my words. A sense of something like fright was creeping through me. Not because of her disability, whatever it might be, but because I’d begun to sense some dark aura, something that I knew was going to shock me deeply when I understood it.

  In response to Evan’s ring, a plump woman in a nurse’s uniform opened the door, to regard him in surprise.

  “I’m Evan Faulkner,” he introduced himself. “And this is Courtney Marsh. We’re from The Shingles. We were in the area and thought we’d like to stop in and see how Mrs. Kemble is doing.”

  “Of course,” the woman said. “I’m Miss Dickson, her nurse.” She came out to us and spoke softly to the old woman. “Now then, Anabel, do you think maybe you could give the young lady a nice smile.”

  I put my hand on the veranda rail to steady myself. Anabel! Anabel Kemble—for whom I had been named, my grandmother.

  “It’s one of her bad days,” Miss Dickson said. “If I’d known you were coming I’d have tried to get her ready. But usually only her daughter, Miss Nan Kemble, comes to see her.” The nurse turned the wheelchair so that the old woman was forced to face me, though she did not seem aware of us in any way.

  I dropped on my knees and took her thin hands in mine, pressing them gently. “I would have come sooner if I’d realized you were here. You are my grandmother Anabel. Can you understand that? I’m your daughter Alice’s daughter. I’m your grandchild.”

  Something in my words seemed to penetrate the distance in which she lived because she began to turn her head slightly from side to side, thought it trembled as she turned it.

  “No,” she said, and the word was so faint I could hardly hear it. “Baby—baby.”

  I pressed her hands. “Not any longer. I’m grown up now, Grandmother.”

  Weakly she tried to draw her hands from mine, rejecting me, but I didn’t let them go. Miss Dickson looked thoroughly startled when I looked up at her.

  “How long has she been like this?” I asked.

  “I don’t know exactly. For close to twenty-five years, I suppose. I haven’t been with her all that time—just the last three years. She’s very good, you know. Sometimes she seems to listen to me. And she eats quite nicely. Not very much—but she does eat.”

  I could feel the tears on my cheeks. All the emotion that would not come before was rushing through me now. Anabel! For the first time I understood about the name, but it was too late because she could not see or recognize me. Alice had named a boat for her mother, named her baby for her. Used the name in a story. She and this feeble woman in the wheelchair had once been close.

  Down the veranda there were sounds, and I saw that Judith had not been able to remain in the car. She and the two men were coming up the steps and across worn boards to where I knelt before the wheelchair. Looking up into the old lady’s face, I saw exactly what happened. Something stirred faintly in her eyes, and thin, wrinkled lips moved as if to whisper. Her fingers moved like a fluttering bird in mine and I pressed them reassuringly.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Nothing will hurt you. Nothing will ever hurt you again.” It was strange that I should sense it so clearly—sense how deeply she had been hurt.

  But it was not my face she could see, or my hands she could feel. All her attention was focused on the three who stood in a frozen tableau down the porch. Again fragile lips moved and this time there was a whisper of sound and I bent to catch it.

  “No! Wicked, wicked!” she whispered and then sighed as though the effort to speak was too much for her. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the cushions in her chair.

  Miss Dickson came to her at once. “She’s not used to visitors, Miss Marsh. I think you’d better go now.” She bent above her charge. “There, there, dear. Everything is all right. No one is going to disturb you.”

  Judith turned and fled down the steps and Herndon went after her. John stayed a moment longer, regarding the old woman with a certain sad interest, before he too followed the others.

  I had no further desire to walk the beach where my mother had died, or to enter the house that had known her presence. Evan saw my face and came to take my arm.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the nurse, and then led me down the steps and back to the car.

  Judith stood beside it, waiting for me, and she was angry now—angry with me. “You see what you’ve done? That poor thing deserves to be left alone. We never come to see her because the sight of us only seems to upset her. She is worse now—worse than ever. If you must know, Courtney, one reason I decided we must come along on this trip, if Evan brought you, was because I didn’t want you to come to this house and see such an unhappy sight. It was better for you not to know. I think I must blame you, Evan.”

  Her indignation left him unruffled. “Maybe it’s become necessary for Courtney to know anything that remains to be known about her family. Perhaps she even needs to be shocked a little, and jarred back into real life.”

  He opened the car door abruptly and I got into the front seat, feeling thoroughly shaken, and with tears still wet on my cheeks. The others sat in back again, with Judith murmuring, and Herndon trying to calm her, while John remained quiet.

  When we were on our way, I spoke to Evan. “What did you mean about my being jarred back to reality?”

  He looked straight ahead as he drove. “I mean that you’re right in thinking that there’s nothing for you here, Courtney. You knew the parents who brought you up—remember them. They’re the real ones who cared about you. Not this family you’ve tumbled into with all its strains and self-guilt. You’ll go back to New York now and forget us all. That’s where reality lies.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, that’s what I must do.”

  The drive back to East Hampton seemed quicker than the trip out, in spite of the accompanying silence. I felt a little sick, and frightened as well. “Wicked,” she had said. But she had stared at all three of them, and which one she meant I couldn’t tell—or even if she meant all three. It didn’t matter. There was nothing I could do about anything now.

  There were cars parked in front of Nan’s shop when we went through the gates—Saturday would be her best day. Though I wished I could talk to her once more, I suspected that it was better not to, better to leave without telling her of our relationship, or letting her know I had seen Anabel Kemble, who was her mother and Alice’s. There was no point in opening up something which could not be continued, a
nd which could mean nothing at this late date.

  My bags were packed and waiting for me up in my room. There was nothing more I needed to do. We all got out of the car rather stiffly, as though we’d been on a far longer journey than to Montauk, and Herndon took Judith into the house at once. I had a feeling that she would not come out of it again for a long time. John climbed the steps with me as I ran ahead of Evan.

  “I’m sorry, Courtney. If I’d known what was going to happen, I might have warned you. But we never thought it would be necessary for you to know about her. Her life is over, and it could only hurt you to see her. Nan gives her the best of care and sees her often, but there’s nothing the rest of us can do. Herndon has always provided for her.”

  I held out my hand. “I’ll say good-bye now. I wish—I wish I could have met you sooner.”

  The old mockery was in his eyes, and I wondered if he mocked himself most of all. He pressed my hand lightly and then let it go.

  “I almost wish that too, Courtney,” he said. “Almost. Probably it was too late a long time ago. Good-bye, Courtney.”

  This time I didn’t try to kiss his cheek, and he made no move toward me. A wide, aching gulf yawned between us, but at last I could feel the ache.

  Evan had a few things to do before he would be ready for the trip to New York, he told me, and asked if I could kill a half hour before we left. I assured him that I could easily, and let them all go past me into the house. I wanted to be under that roof for as little time left me as possible, and I walked instead around to the terrace above the beach and descended wooden steps to the sand for the last time. Mists were gathering once more over the water, and fog made strange patterns of familiar objects. The figurehead from the Hesther wore a wispy veil, through which her weatherbeaten face stared out at me. So veiled, she looked like some ghostly being, and I fled from her down to the water’s edge. “

  The beach lay smooth and clean and undisturbed, except for foaming waves that lapped at my feet. Clusters of shells had been cast up here and there, and far ahead I could see a clump of seaweed flung upon the sand. There was no wind to drive the mists away and I walked with my hands thrust into my jacket pockets in the afternoon chill.

  What lay about me hardly claimed my attention, because Anabel Kemble’s face was so clearly etched in my memory, with its sharpened bone structure and honed planes. I was glad she had Nan to care for her. Regardless of how much they might spend, I would have hated to see her in the sole care of the Rhodes.

  I passed two of the beach houses that glowered upon me over their dunes before I noticed that footprints had materialized suddenly in my path—indentations in damp sand, some of them already filling with water. They moved ahead of me along the beach, evidence that someone must have walked along dry sand above, leaving no trace, until descending to the brown sand at the water’s edge, where marks would remain until washed out by the tide. I could see no one ahead of me, and there were no returning prints, but something small had been tossed upon the beach a few steps farther along and I walked toward it and looked down.

  A bisque doll’s head lay wigless on the sand, its eyes closed, as though it slept gently to the murmur of the waves.

  So Stacia had come here for her “sea burial,” I thought, and walked on, wondering if these were her footprints. If I saw her ahead, I would turn and go back at once. But mist concealed the distance and the stretch ahead was empty until I came upon the next little face on the sand, and then two more heads, and a few feet later a fifth.

  Though the air was still, I felt a cold twinge of something close to horror.

  From my first sight of one of these heads painted on a canvas by Judith Rhodes, I had been uneasy about them. A sense of the eerie that I couldn’t shake off had possessed me. There had always seemed something monstrous about Stacia’s destruction of the dolls—almost as though she had destroyed something living, and this feeling of horror grew in me as I came upon head after head lying along the beach. Once I stopped to pick one up and found it wet and encrusted with salt and sand, as though it had lain in deeper water before being rolled onto the beach.

  Had she tried to throw them into the ocean, and had the sea rejected them and tossed them back on the sand? How long had they been here? It had been yesterday that I had seen her with the box. And whose footsteps were these that seemed to follow the line of heads? They must be recent because tides would have washed them out since yesterday.

  I dropped upon one knee and stared closely at a footprint. It had not been made by a bare foot, but by someone wearing shoes. Either by a man’s shoes, or the flat-heeled sport shoes that might be worn by a woman—perhaps even by sandals. Long and rather narrow—a small foot for a man, perhaps a little large for a woman? I wasn’t sure. As I knelt there a curling froth of white lace swept higher up the beach wetting my slacks and my own shoes.

  The tide was coming in. I looked back at the marks on the sand and found them only a little smaller than these prints. In a little while mine and those of whoever had passed this way would be gone. Some of the heads would roll out to sea again, perhaps to roll back later.

  I must hurry. Something lay ahead that I must know about. I must find out how many dolls’ heads had been strewn along the beach.

  The big patch of light brown seaweed was close now and I ran on to see if more heads had been caught in its wet meshes. Fog, which had grown thin, seemed to close in suddenly around me, so that when I looked back, startled, I could no longer see The Shingles. In fact, I couldn’t see the nearest beach house. The beach was safe enough when it was visible to all—but not with fog shutting out the world. And not with Stacia perhaps ahead of me walking the sand, and lost to my sight in mist. Nevertheless, I went on.

  She was there ahead of me, but no longer walking. I paused beside the clump of seaweed and looked down, feeling my stomach churn. It was not seaweed, but the old tan raincoat Stacia sometimes wore, and she was still wearing it. She lay face down, her blond fluff of hair wet and filled with shiny grains—encrusted as the dolls’ heads were. All of her was wet and strewn with sand and very still. Her bare legs and feet protruded below the wet hem of the coat.

  I bent and touched her—and knew. She was cold and unbreathing, and she had not died in the last few hours. The footprints did not match her small, bare feet, and they must have been made earlier this afternoon. They stopped at this point, moved about a little, then mounted the damp edge of sand and vanished into dry. Someone knew. Someone else had stood here looking down upon her, and had raised no outcry.

  Desperately I cast around for help, or for danger—if it existed—but if it was there it hid in the fog. That was when I saw the carton of dolls’ heads nearby on drier sand, with only a few of the heads left in it.

  Frantically, I began to run—back along the beach, avoiding the footprints, avoiding the heads, lest I step on one and be thrown. I was gasping for breath when I climbed the dune below Hesther and met that wise, calm gaze that was long accustomed to storm and death at sea.

  Only then did I catch my breath enough to scream for someone to come.

  16

  Evan reached me first as I climbed to the terrace, and Herndon and John came out of the house after him. The Ashers looked from windows at the far end, and then William Asher rushed outside, with Helen behind him. There was no Judith. I was vaguely aware of all this while Evan shook me out of hysteria and into coherent speech. The moment he understood me he ran down to the beach and disappeared in fog, with John and Herndon after him.

  Asher seemed even more shaken than his younger wife, who stood trembling with a hand clasped over her mouth.

  Somehow, I began to pull myself together. Evan’s shaking had whipped me back to my senses and I remembered something.

  “The footprints!” I shouted after them. “You mustn’t destroy the footprints!” I ran to the top of the steps, but the men were already gone from sight in the
mist along the water’s edge, and I knew my warning was too late. The three would run along the firm sand, and whatever those prints might mean was already being lost.

  “I—I’ll call the doctor, Miss Marsh,” Asher said, managing to rouse himself from his own state of shock.

  “Yes—and call the police,” I told him.

  He gave me a gray look and went into the house, still visibly shaken. His wife looked after him anxiously.

  “He’s been sick since early this afternoon,” she said. “He ought to be in bed.”

  I had no time to sympathize over William Asher. “Make a big pot of coffee,” I directed. “Make it right away.”

  She made an effort to collect herself and we started toward the house together. Now I could hear the dog. I didn’t know where they had put his kennel, but Tudor was howling mournfully in the distance—almost like a human crying.

  “They’re supposed to howl before a death,” I said as we walked into the living room, and Helen threw me a quick, frightened look.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I won’t go to pieces again. It’s just that I can’t focus—I can’t believe.”

  She hurried toward the kitchen and I stood for a moment before the fire that had been built against the damp mists of late afternoon. Flames crackled as cheerily as though death did not exist, but Stacia would never run along the beach again, never warm her hands at this fire or any other, never laugh mockingly ever again. Drowned? Drowned like Alice? But she hadn’t been swimming in that cold water, and she hadn’t been wearing a bathing suit.

  Where was Judith? Someone must tell her. Or did she already know? My screaming must have reached every cranny of the house—even into the attic.

  It was necessary to hold onto the railing as I climbed the stairs because I found that my knees were not to be trusted. My mind was leaping from thought to thought, and my stomach still had a tendency to quiver, but my shaky knees were the worst because they hampered movement. Nevertheless, I climbed the attic stairs to Judith’s studio and knocked on the door.