The Golden Unicorn

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Something I’d not thought of until now occurred to me, and when she turned the knob, I stepped to the doorway behind her. Asher lay on the bed, still clothed, with a blanket thrown over him, his face a bit green and worry showing in his eyes.

  “I brought you some tea, William,” his wife said and set the tray beside the bed.

  He had seen me at the door and he paid no attention to Helen. “I’m sorry, Miss Marsh,” he said. “Please tell them I’ll be all right. I know they need me now. I’m just under the weather after what happened today.”

  “May I come in?” I asked, and Helen nodded reluctantly.

  Asher’s shoes lay on the floor beside the bed and I picked one up and turned it over. Grains of sand clung to the narrow sole.

  “You were down on the beach today, weren’t you?” I said. “Down there earlier? Did you find her, Asher? Were those your prints I saw on the sand?”

  A long shudder went through him. He closed his eyes and turned his face away from me.

  “Please, Miss—” Helen began, but I pushed past her to lean over the man on the bed.

  “I don’t think you had anything to do with it,” I said. “The footprints I saw on the sand must have been made long after she was dead, or they’d have been washed away. Maybe it’s better if you tell me what happened.”

  He gave in—perhaps caved in would be closer to the term—and spoke without turning his head. “Miss Stacia didn’t come down for breakfast and Helen said she wasn’t in her room this morning when she went to make it up. So when lunchtime came I went along the beach to see if I could find her anywhere. She often liked a morning run. First I saw all those dolls’ heads, and then—I found her.” His agitation grew and Helen bent over him anxiously.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked.

  “I was—frightened. I thought they might think that I—I mean, after all, she was dead and there wasn’t anything I could do. I just—wanted somebody else to find her.”

  As Nan had wanted someone else to find the condition of Stacia’s room. Thus delaying the inevitable. Was that what it was all about—postponing the moment when the things that had happened were officially “discovered”? Why?

  “No one will blame you,” I told him. “But I think Mr. Faulkner had better know about this. Will you talk to him if I send him up here later?”

  “I’ll talk to him,” he said, and expelled a long sigh of something like relief.

  “Drink your tea now,” his wife insisted and held the cup toward him.

  As I went softly from the room, he was propped against his pillows sipping tea.

  It was a long while, however, before I could send Evan up to Asher’s room. The police kept him all too busy, and I didn’t want to present Asher’s role to them unless Evan thought it necessary. Evan was taking charge, rather than Herndon, the capable businessman, whose only concern now seemed to be for his wife.

  It was evening, after dinner, before Evan could be told, and he went upstairs at once to Asher’s room. I waited in my own room for him to come out, and when he did he spoke to me briefly.

  “There’s no real point in involving the old man,” he said. “She was dead long before he found her, and he seems to be afraid of something.”

  “Everyone’s afraid of something,” I said. “Or of someone. I think I am too.”

  Evan gave me a dark look and went away. That lovely moment out at Montauk seemed never to have been.

  In the days that followed I continued to ponder that fearful “someone.” Perhaps if it wasn’t active fear, it was a desire to protect the Rhodes name again, as old Lawrence himself had taught William Asher to protect it. He was one of the family too.

  In any case, nothing specific came out in the next few days. Stacia’s funeral was a sad affair, with few people from outside the house attending, though she had lived in East Hampton all her life. She had never been one for close friendships, and except for a few former school friends, those who came did so mainly out of respect for Evan and Herndon.

  The police were ubiquitous, of course, during those days. It was found that Stacia had indeed died by drowning, but no one could explain how it could have happened. The odd set of footprints I’d seen had been obliterated when the three men had first run down the beach, mingling their own and mine in a mass of trodden sand. It didn’t even matter that the rising tide soon washed away all traces of our passing. Asher was questioned, but only in a general way. No one guessed that he had found her first, and the fact really did not matter.

  Stacia’s room, with its strewn possessions, was shortly discovered, but no one admitted knowing anything about that either, nor did anyone suggest what the searcher might have been looking for.

  And there were a few new developments.

  One thing shortly emerged when the police talked to me. They had to be told my identity, and since I was instructed not to leave East Hampton, I had to remain at The Shingles while everything spilled out into the papers. Of course there were phone calls from New York—from my friends, and from the office. Jim Healy called me and wanted to talk, when I had no heart for talking. And he relayed the request that I write up the whole affair for the magazine. I reminded him that I was no longer employed and couldn’t be commandeered to write anything. My idea of returning to the office had evaporated along the way.

  A small matter that hardly attracted my attention at the time was the radio news that the hurricane that had been creeping up the coast had blown out to sea, to be dissipated in the Atlantic. Long Island breathed more easily for the moment, but the season was not over, though I didn’t know then of the new “disturbance” that was stirring down in the Caribbean.

  It can seem very strange when one looks in retrospect upon a pattern of disaster, to see that there was a time when two separate lines of activity had not yet converged, and when it would have been possible to escape that convergence.

  Or would it have been? Was I not already fixed to my point in time when I must move inevitably toward what lay ahead? There is no way of knowing what might have happened if I had deliberately chosen another course. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of hurricanes. I didn’t dream of those lines that were so surely converging.

  17

  During those days that moved toward September’s end, nothing at all surfaced to give us the answer to Stacia’s death. If it had been murder—as the police suspected—there was no evidence to take to a grand jury. The investigation continued somewhat futilely and I was requested, courteously enough, to remain in East Hampton.

  Besides, there was now a string of Rhodes’ lawyers, trust lawyers, that I had to see, with Herndon supervising. I moved through all the discussions and arrangements in a dazed state, sometimes talking without being able to remember later what I had said. Papers were signed because I was told to sign them. Only now and then did my old self burst from its cocoon for a brief protest, but older, wiser heads always quieted me and explained methods by which I could do as I desired—if I must really be so foolish. But not right away. The movement of the law was ponderously slow. I did manage to sign over The Shingles to Herndon Rhodes, and he was quietly grateful to me for that, and insisted upon payment. Gradually I began to accept the fact that I was going to be a very rich woman. A rich woman who had nothing at all that she wanted.

  More than once I reached for my old solace of writing, but when I tried to think about Judith Rhodes as an artist, all I knew of her as a woman got in the way and halted my borrowed typewriter, confused my thinking. I saw little of her during that time, and Herndon told me she was feeling ill and keeping to her room.

  There was a difference in Herndon that was noticeable, mainly through his change in dress. The little touches of colorful flamboyance that had never seemed to match his personality were gone. No more plaid vests or startling ties livened his dress. He wore dark gray often, and the effect was so subdued that once,
when Judith was with us, she remarked on it.

  “Mourning is out of style,” she said. “It’s possible to grieve without turning to sackcloth. You look so drab, darling.”

  We had been sitting in the living room after dinner, and Herndon set down his glass of Drambuie, gave his wife a long, sober look, and walked out of the room.

  “Oh, dear!” Judith said lightly. “I’ve offended him. He used to let me pick out his vests and ties, but lately he doesn’t wear my choices any more.”

  Because he was being himself for a change? I wondered. Being his own man? I had never thought him naturally a bird of bright plumage. But it was a matter of small consequence and I didn’t puzzle over it for long.

  Both Herndon and John were about the house as usual at this time, with Herndon going off to his string of banks, John disappearing into his own pursuits. I held them off when they might have made any gesture of friendship toward me, since I could trust no one, and was only marking time until I could escape from this house for good. I didn’t visit Nan again and she never came to The Shingles after that first tragic day. I was related to them all by blood, except for Judith and Evan, and I wanted nothing to do with any of them.

  Evan I was trying not to think of at all, though I didn’t group him with those who belonged to the house. I saw him only as a driven man in whom Stacia’s death had brought about a terrible change. I caught him looking at me darkly in odd moments, but he spoke to me only when others were present—as though he were afraid I might bring up that past moment between us when he had spoken tentatively of love. He had returned to his work at the lab, and was gone for most of each day. I began to rise late because I dreaded early morning, so I never saw him at breakfast, and at the painful dinner meal there was little of light conversation.

  One afternoon I talked by chance to John, and he spoke to me almost wistfully. The day was gray, with a feeling of imminent storm in the air, and I was sitting in the sand near Hesther, who by this time seemed my friend. I no longer walked the beach because it was a haunted place for me, but I had to get outside some of the time. John must have seen me from the house because he came out to drop down on the sand beside me. I had nothing to say to him, any more than I had to any of the others. It didn’t matter that he was my father. I knew now that the chasm between us was not likely to be bridged. Yet this time, unexpectedly, he reached for my hand and held it lightly in his own.

  “There’s no need for you to look so driven, Courtney. This will all be over soon. They can’t hold you here much longer. Then you can escape to any sort of life you choose to make for yourself. What do you think it will be?”

  I could only shake my head. “I’ve always wanted to write. Not just for a magazine, but on my own. Books. Only now not even that interests me.”

  “It will,” he said. “It will come back to you.”

  I turned my head and looked straight into his eyes. “Who killed her, John?”

  His smile was sad. “If I knew, would I tell you? Isn’t it better not to know? Not even to guess?”

  “That’s pretty cynical. Are you sanctioning murder? Are you going so far that—”

  “Don’t,” he said quietly. “Perhaps I cared about her more than her mother and father ever did, but now we must think of the living.”

  “And protect whoever killed her?” I cried.

  “Can you forgive her for the things she did to you?”

  “Perhaps she never meant any serious harm. She told me that she expected me to escape each time—that she only wanted to frighten me. If she had wanted to kill me, there would have been more point to what she did. But there was no point in what happened to her either. You all knew that the house was coming to me and that I didn’t want it. There was no reason for anyone to kill her.”

  He let that go. “I came down here to talk about you. It won’t be long before they let you leave, and this may be our last chance.”

  Last chance for what? I wondered hopelessly. He still held my hand with that light touch that told me he was ready to release it at the slightest rejection from me. I wanted to return the slight pressure of his fingers, but there was no will in me. Not now, not yet, and I wondered if there ever would be. I could neither accept nor reject—my hand lay like an inanimate thing in his, and perhaps that in itself was rejection, for after a moment he drew his own away, and I felt an unexpected pang of hurt for him.

  “What about you and Evan?” he asked. “Judith thought there was something promising there, and she knew Stacia no longer loved him.”

  This was a matter I couldn’t talk about with anyone. It was something I hadn’t been able to face even in the silence of my own mind. I only knew that Evan too was driven by demons and that he had no time for me now. What had barely begun was already over—destroyed by Stacia as surely as though she still lived.

  John knew by my silence that I would offer no confidences and he spoke with that odd wistfulness.

  “I hope you’ll find happiness, Courtney. Don’t follow any will-o’-the-wisps.”

  I had no answer for that and I stood up. “I’m going back to the house,” I said, and left him there on the sand, giving him no opportunity to talk about whatever he had wanted to discuss with me. Was I running away because I was more afraid than ever of emotional involvement with anyone—even my father? Was that what was really wrong with me? I had thought for a little while with Evan that everything would change, but the only change seemed to be in a deepening of pain for me if I let myself feel. To love there must be need—the need of two people. Evan needed no one, and I was desperately afraid to need anyone. It was far safer to go on being numb and unable to feel.

  From my window upstairs I looked out to see John still sitting there, staring out at the water, the weathered face of the figurehead watching him calmly from nearby. He looked unutterably sad and lost—and I knew that I had added to whatever pain he was feeling. Like Judith, John too wore a façade against the world. With him it was a shield of gaiety and gallantry, laced with cynicism to conceal the core of deep unhappiness. It was a façade I might have penetrated—but now there would be no more time.

  That same day Herndon came home early from work and sought me out. “Come for a walk with me,” he said.

  I was weary of trust affairs, but I lacked the will to refuse. He took me, not to the beach, where neither of us wanted to walk, but along the empty driveway that lay between The Ditty Box and The Shingles. There had been another early frost, and the trees were turning in earnest now, flashing patches of red and yellow, with russet leaves drifting to the ground. It felt like rain, and there was a wind rising.

  “I’ve wanted to talk with you, Courtney.”

  His tone was both kind and a little sad as we walked together, but my old resistance was rising and I didn’t want any more of his manipulation.

  “It seems to me we’ve done nothing but talk in the last week or two,” I told him.

  “I know. I do know that you hate all this, but you need to come out of your apathy, Courtney.”

  “Apathy?” I almost laughed. “How does hatred for something and apathy go together?”

  “You hate what’s happening, but you’re drifting.”

  “Because I don’t care,” I said. “I’ve stopped caring about anything. Nothing seems to matter any more.”

  “Evan matters,” he said.

  I looked in surprise at the man who walked beside me, and saw to my distress how much older he had grown since Stacia’s death. Perhaps I’d never given enough thought to Herndon, who had been more of a victim in all that had happened over the years than anyone else. I remembered that once Stacia had told me that he was the best of them all. And now he had spoken so strangely to me of Evan. Nevertheless, I resisted.

  “He’s not my affair,” I said.

  “He’s very much your affair, and I’m fond of Evan. I don’t want to see him hurt.
Not again.”

  “Hurt—Evan? What are you talking about?”

  “Let your heart tell you,” Herndon said.

  No right words would come to me. So often I seemed to have guessed wrong about Herndon, putting him down in my mind for the singleness of his devotion to Judith, not crediting him enough with sensitivity toward others.

  “I don’t think Evan needs anyone,” I told him.

  Quite gently Herndon took my hand and slipped it through the crook of his arm, patting it lightly. “Let’s talk about you, Courtney. You are my niece, you know, though I can’t very well ask you to think of that, since in your eyes I’ve had to stand for everything you disapprove. I must seem hard and distant to you, but that’s not what I want to be. Perhaps there’s still affection to give in this unhappy family.”

  I felt the sudden warmth of tears behind my eyes, unexpectedly touched by his words. How strange to have a gentle sense of affection come to me from this surprising source.

  “Thank you,” I said and let my fingers press lightly against his arm.

  Perhaps there might have been more, but we both heard the car coming behind us and stepped aside on the road. To my surprise it was the Mercedes and Judith was at the wheel. I’d hardly seen her since Stacia’s death, but she looked strong and purposeful now as she leaned toward us in the open window, braking the car.

  “Will you come with me, Herndon?” she asked. “I’ve an errand to do, and I need you.”

  He asked no questions of this woman who almost never had errands away from the house, but gave me an apologetic look.

  “I’m sorry, Courtney. We’ll talk again.” He went around the car and got into the seat beside Judith.

  I stood back to let them pass and she gave me a brief, triumphant look that said everything. She must have seen us when we left the house together. Perhaps he had even tried to talk to her about me. In any case, Judith Rhodes would never for one moment allow a sharing of her husband’s affection and interest. Not with Stacia, not with me. And whatever Judith wanted, Herndon gave—and always would.