The Golden Unicorn

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  With a faint pang of loss, I watched the Mercedes disappear down the curving drive in the direction of the gatehouse. Under other circumstances I might have found a more understanding relationship than I had ever expected between my father’s brother and me. But Judith would always command him, and Judith was, in her own way, as greedy as Lawrence Rhodes had ever been.

  I walked back to the house alone, sadness breaking through my apathy. But I was not yet through with these unexpected and intimate “talks.” There was still another to come.

  The next day was Saturday, though I had forgotten the day of the week until after lunch when I went idly down the hall to the library, to find Evan there, working on the last of his records. Before I could escape, he looked up and saw me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t interrupt.”

  He rose from his chair. “Come in, Courtney. Come and sit down.”

  There was nothing kindly in his tone, and his words commanded me without sympathy. I sat obediently in the chair he pulled out for me and looked at my hands on the table, because I couldn’t meet the dark anger in his eyes. Why should he be angry with me, and why should I sit here and listen? But I stayed on in silence while he talked.

  “I’ve made up my mind about you several times over,” he told me, “and each time you’ve turned out to be someone else. Now I don’t know you at all. You’ve changed into a zombie.”

  I concentrated on a hangnail that seemed to be starting on one finger. He sat down beside me.

  “You’re letting this whole tangled Rhodes tragedy destroy you,” he said.

  Somehow I managed to speak. “I’m not the one who’s been destroyed.”

  He ignored that. “What has happened to you? There are things you could accomplish here in the time that is left.”

  “What things? There’s nothing here for me.”

  “You could reach out to those of your own blood—those who have been hurt. You could even reach out to John, if you wanted to. Perhaps John needs you more than you think.”

  “No one needs me,” I said dully. “And I don’t need anyone here.”

  “That has become obvious. What has changed you, Courtney? When you came here you were warm and alive and eager. What has taken all the life out of you?”

  “It went out of me when I stood on the beach and looked down at Stacia,” I said. “I didn’t like her, and she tried to injure me and injure others too, but she didn’t deserve what happened. And now I find I belong to a family that has been trained to such closeness, such self-protection, that murder is being hidden. Who is it? My father? My uncle? My aunt? They’re all guilty because each of them is protecting the other—and I can’t bear it.”

  All this poured out of me in a surprising flow, since I hadn’t consciously thought about what I was saying. But there was still more that I couldn’t pour out. Somewhere I seemed to have lost my chance with Evan through Stacia’s death.

  His tone gentled when he spoke again. “Yes—I feel that way too. I can’t rest. I can’t sleep nights until this thing is cleared up. I can’t be my own man until then. I owe this to Stacia. She believed that someone had killed Alice and I think she was pursuing that trail in her own willful way. If she discovered the truth, perhaps that’s what brought about her own death. She was fearless, always. She would face anyone. So now a double murderer must be exposed.”

  “Have you said this to the police?”

  “I can’t go to them with surmises, and there’s no direction in which I can point a finger. The worst of it is that the Rhodes are all close to me and have been for years. Closer, perhaps, than Stacia had become. Yet what happened the other time when Alice died is being repeated—the secrecy, the concealment. And that can’t go on.”

  At least this was the way I felt too, though I could take no action about it.

  “Do you think they all know who killed Stacia?”

  “I can’t tell. They’ve been trained all their lives—trained by old Lawrence himself—to close ranks and protect their own. Even Nan Kemble hasn’t escaped his brush.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve seen that. I feel sick about being related to such a family.”

  He went on as though he mused aloud. “If there were anything—any small thing to go on . . .”

  I remembered something and felt suddenly more alert. “Perhaps there is. That last day I heard Stacia in her room, quarreling with someone. I heard raised voices, but only hers came through. I couldn’t even identify the other as a man or a woman, and I couldn’t hear the words. I went away as quickly as I could. But I think she had made someone very angry.”

  “That’s not good enough unless you can identify the other voice,” Evan said.

  “I can’t.” I felt listless again. “And I suppose I don’t even care very much any more. I’m drifting, and I don’t know how to get back to land.”

  He hardly seemed to hear me, and he wasn’t looking at me now. It was Stacia’s dead face that haunted him, as it haunted me. “I have to blame myself for a great deal. She was very young when I married her. Seventeen. Very gay and young and beautiful.”

  Since her death he could be more generous to her, and something in me hardened. “There were already the dolls.”

  “But I should have been old enough and wise enough to change her. I should have tried harder. I should have—”

  “Do people ever change?” I asked flatly.

  This time he looked at me. “Perhaps not. I would have needed to change too—and that was something I couldn’t manage. Can’t manage. Just as you can’t manage to be anything else but what you are, Courtney. So go back to New York as soon as you can, and take up your life again. Be a writer, be a success at what you’re doing on the magazine. Don’t let this money affect you.”

  “I don’t have any money that I haven’t earned,” I told him. “I’m going to set up trusts, or funds, or whatever—where they’re needed. I don’t want any of it. Not Rhodes’ money.”

  He was staring at me. “I guess I’ve been away from what’s been going on. You must be frightening Herndon. Maybe it’s all right if you don’t change, Courtney—once you snap out of this apathy.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not.” It was as though I had begun to come to life a little, as though chips of ice were falling away. “I don’t think I believe in my own question when I ask if people ever change. We have to change, don’t we? We have to grow—or die. Stacia died—perhaps because she couldn’t change. And I want to live, really. As soon as all this quiets down, I’ll get back to my book. I’ll close my apartment in New York, and go away to write it.” Plans I didn’t even know about were being made as I spoke, and an enormous relief was sweeping through me.

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know yet. Not East Hampton.”

  “Why don’t you try Montauk? It’s quiet out there—at the end of the world.”

  I couldn’t look at him. There was never any telling how much or how little he meant. And I didn’t want only a little. That was why I was afraid to feel—because I would want too much.

  “I suppose some sort of investigation about you has been made,” he said. “So that it’s settled that you really are Anabel Rhodes?”

  “Yes—there’s no escape for me there. The lawyer’s files in New York have been opened. Someone has even dug up my Swiss birth certificate and there are prints to identify me. I was born to Alice and John Rhodes. It’s all down in black and white—the whole record that ties me to the Rhodes.”

  “But it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  His words startled me. “What do you mean?”

  “Blood doesn’t matter all that much. Oh, there are genes, of course—but you grew up in a different environment and Lawrence Rhodes has never laid a finger of his influence on you. You were lucky enough to escape this house before it could affect you in an
y way.”

  I sat quietly, considering. Had all that longing for my own blood family, for a mother and father and grandparents—had all that been purely emotional, now to be cast off? Was I to be free of all the dreaming at last? But when I closed my eyes, John’s face was there—a man lost to himself long ago, and there was a new yearning in me to reach him, perhaps even to claim him as my father, to have him turn to me as his daughter. Could this feeling be the beginning of real affection? Not something to come in a blinding flash, but to grow between a father and daughter who had never known each other until now?

  “Blood matters,” I said. “It still matters.”

  The look he’d turned upon me had warmed. “Remember about Montauk,” he said.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak as I rose and started across the room. He came with me, and before I reached the door his hand was on my arm.

  “You said you would come—when the time was right. Is this the time?”

  That desperate something inside me was struggling to flee—out of fright, out of feared pain, warning me that not to feel was to be safe, not to feel was to avoid future wounding. And all the while a warming, trembling tide of emotion was rising in me, and would not be denied.

  I went into his arms and for a moment he held me close, with his cheek against my hair. Then he tilted my chin with one finger and looked at me—as though he must know the very shape of my face, the color of my eyes, the trembling of my lips—and his very look was a caress. When he kissed me the old fears died. I knew who I was now, I knew what I wanted. I knew that running away from love would bring me nothing, even though staying meant the risk I had always been afraid to take. Now I had the courage and the will to meet life as I wanted to meet it.

  When he raised his head it meant a denial of rising hunger in us both, but he held me at arm’s length for a moment.

  “That’s only a beginning,” he told me, and I heard the promise in his words.

  “I know,” I said. “I understand. There is still the matter of Stacia to be settled. And no one left but you to do it.”

  “Yes. An old debt to pay. Too late.”

  “Be careful then. I’ll come to Montauk,” I told him and went out of the room.

  I was alive now, and awake to my very fingertips. Life lay ahead of me. I had a book to write, a fortune to get rid of, and a man to love. But first I must escape from this house. That was the first step along my new road, and it must be made at once.

  It was already afternoon, but there was still time to push toward the thing I must do. I went to the telephone in the hall and dialed a number. One of the officers at the station answered and I told him what I wanted. He went away and conferred, and then I heard the police chief’s voice in my ear.

  “It’s all right, Miss Marsh. You can leave anytime you want to. We’re not going to hold any of you in East Hampton any longer.”

  I think I must have given a small whoop of relief when I hung up, because John came out of the living room to look at me questioningly.

  “We’re free!” I told him. “I can leave and I’m going back to New York as soon as I can get away.”

  His smile was not a happy one. “Good for you, Courtney. Though I’ll miss you here. You’re lucky to have something to return to.”

  “I haven’t, really,” I said. “I need to start all over and do the things I had in mind before I ever came to East Hampton. But at least I can go back and close my apartment, get rid of all my encumbrances.”

  “I envy you. Perhaps I’ll take a fling down to the Bahamas for a while. It will be something to do.”

  I still wanted to reach out to him, but he was not inviting me now. Nevertheless, since my talk with Evan, I knew there was no need for our separation to be permanent.

  “I’d like to see you again,” I said. “This needn’t be good-bye.”

  He hesitated, his look softening a little. “I don’t know if that would be wise, Courtney. I’d only disappoint you.”

  “How could you, if I’m not asking anything? John, the Anabel is such a beautiful boat. There ought to be more like her.”

  “That’s what I mean.” His tone was dry. “In the same breath that you tell me you ask nothing—you ask a very great deal. Run along, Courtney—and be happy.”

  He disappeared into the living room, and I had a feeling that our parting words had been spoken, that I wouldn’t see him again, unless I made some special effort. And I might do that—sometime in the future. I couldn’t ache with loss any more, because now there was Evan. Now there was hope.

  When I’d climbed the stairs, instead of going into my room to pack, I followed the second flight up to the attic. Judith was at her easel when I reached the studio and she looked as though she had been working feverishly for some time. Though her long hair was pinned back, a few strands had come loose and hung across her cheeks—limp strands. Her yellow smock was smeared and her fingers stained, her eyes a little glazed when she looked at me.

  “I came to say good-bye,” I told her. “The police aren’t restricting us any more.”

  She shook her head, like a swimmer coming out of water, and I repeated the words. This time she surfaced to the world away from her canvas, her look questioning.

  “You sound glad, Courtney.”

  “I’m practically delirious. I want to get started on my own life.”

  With her palette hooked over her thumb and her paintbrush in hand, she took a few steps toward me, almost conciliatory.

  “We’ve given you a bad time, haven’t we? And I’m sorry. Herndon’s been scolding me. Anyway, it’s better if you never write that piece about me. I didn’t want it in the first place.”

  “Oh, but I am going to write about you. I think I can now. And not just for an article in a magazine. I want to do a book. I want to collect the interviews I’ve written and add some new ones to make a book out of the whole. Yours will be my first new one.”

  She continued to look at me, her face calm in the old way, and expressionless. I didn’t think she cared in the least whether I wrote about her or not, or whether I succeeded in doing a book. In a moment, after this small gesture toward me, she would return to her own imaginary world and it would be hard to draw her out again.

  “I was talking to Evan a little while ago,” I said, “about people changing. Have you been changed at all, Judith? I mean by all that has happened here?”

  The attic was still, except for a spatter of rain against high dormer windows. The storm I had not thought about at all was beginning.

  She nodded gravely. “Yes, I’ve changed. I can be quiet now. I can work.”

  “But that’s the way you were before. That’s not a change—it’s a retreat.”

  “It’s a marvelous, wonderful, blessed change!” she cried, and I heard a lilt in her voice—a lifting that I’d never heard before. The brightness of her smile startled me.

  I must have looked shocked, because she shook her head in reproach. “Don’t be so conventional, Courtney. Don’t condemn me because I can’t feel anything but relief to know that Stacia is gone and that she’ll never trouble us again. She has damaged all our lives, including Evan’s, and she would have damaged yours. But now I can work again. Perhaps I can feel free for the first time in years. Nothing more that is dreadful is going to happen. Everything will be all right now.”

  I turned my back and walked toward the door, feeling somehow sickened, and sorry to have this new glimpse of Judith Rhodes.

  “Wait,” she called after me. “You must understand why I took the action I did. If you’d grown up here, you might have been in danger. Don’t you see that?”

  “What action? What danger?”

  She started to speak and then shrugged. “Perhaps it’s better if you never know. But before you leave, you must look at what I’m painting. You’ll need to write about the direction toward portra
iture that I may be taking.”

  It would probably upset me further, I knew, to go back and look at this new canvas, but I was drawn in spite of myself, and I moved to a spot not too close to her from which I could view the easel.

  “You see?” she said. “Perhaps I have a talent for portraiture, after all. Perhaps I don’t need to paint beaches any more.”

  The head on the canvas was indeed a portrait—and not this time the floating head of a doll. She had painted Stacia in a likeness immediately recognizable, yet with something added. In faintly-to-be-discerned structure behind the beauty of blue eyes and perfect features showed the underlying skull, the hollow sockets, the fleshless lips, in an eerie, shadowed counterpoint to the whole.

  I must have gasped, for Judith, who had been lost in admiration for her own work, glanced at me and smiled benignly.

  “It’s been good therapy for me to paint that, Courtney. She was my child, but blood doesn’t always tell, you know. I don’t think I alone am to blame for what she became. I won’t go on painting like this, of course, but it was something I needed to say about her—death beneath life. I’d like to paint you, Courtney. Won’t you stay and pose for me?”

  I fled down the room and out the door, clattered on the stairs in my haste to be away from the sight of her and the sight of that terrible portrait. This time I ran directly to my room and pulled out my bags from the closet, flung my clothes in a heap on the bed, and began feverishly to pack. I no longer wanted to know—anything. I wanted only to effect my escape from The Shingles and everything it stood for. It didn’t matter if I had no chance to say good-bye to Herndon, or even Evan. Herndon I might write to, and Evan I would see again. We both knew that.

  So with the rain slashing ever more loudly against my windows, and the sound of a muffled roar from the sea, I tossed my clothes helter-skelter into my suitcase. Driving to New York in a rainstorm would be unpleasant, but it would have to be done, and my arm was only a little tender now.

  The suitcase was filled sooner than it should have been because of the haste of my packing. I removed the remaining contents of drawers and bathroom shelves, to dump everything on my bed. Then I unzipped my flight bag and began to thrust into it bottles and jars, toothbrush and cosmetic case, working with an almost frenzied haste. However, when I tried to shove my comb and brush into a side pocket of the case, they stuck because something was already there. Impatiently, I jerked out a wad of paper, dropped it into the wastebasket, and returned to my packing.