Lost Island

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “Oh, all right,” Floria answered, with an edge to her voice. “I’ll keep still for now. But you’d better leave the boy alone, Lacey. If you start making over him—” She broke off and turned away.

  So one woman who threatened had been exchanged for another! It would seem that Floria meant to pick up where her sister had left off. But I could not worry about this now. I could only think of the ordeal that faced Giles in his bedroom upstairs, and of the suffering Richard must face at too young an age.

  We did not hear Aunt Amalie as she came to the head of the stairs, and when I looked up and saw her there I was shocked. She looked frail and white and ill as she clung to the post, holding her rose-colored robe about her.

  “Mother!” Floria cried. “You shouldn’t be up! You belong in bed.”

  Aunt Amalie paid no attention. “Where is Charles?”

  “He’s gone for a walk,” Paul said. “Just down the drive. Do you want me to get him for you?”

  She drew a hand across her sleep-drugged eyes and tried to thrust back her shoulders in the old courageous way. “Never mind. Is Giles up yet?”

  “He’s with Richard in his room,” Floria said. “He’s telling the boy about Elise.”

  For a moment I thought Aunt Amalie would run along the hall toward Giles’s room. Then she put a hand on the newel post and steadied herself.

  “I mustn’t,” she said. “I must leave them alone. This is a task for his father to face.”

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t all be here when they come out of Giles’s room,” I said. “We shouldn’t stand here as if we were waiting to see what happens, waiting to see how he takes it.”

  Aunt Amalie looked down at me sadly. “You’re quite right, Lacey. I’ll come downstairs and perhaps Vinnie will give me a cup of coffee.”

  But she had no more than set her foot on the top step when the door of Giles’s room opened and the boy and his father came into the hall. Richard walked ahead and Giles came after him. The boy’s face was strangely blank, perhaps with shock or disbelief. He did not seem to see us, but walked past the head of the stairs. I thought he would go by Aunt Amalie without being aware that she was there. Giles looked worse than Richard did. His face was drawn, his eyes sick with pain.

  It was Aunt Amalie who broke first. She ran to Richard and went down on her knees before him, her rosy gown flowing about her as she took him into her arms.

  “It’s all right to cry,” she said. “Don’t look like that! Let go, darling. Let go and let the tears come.”

  He thrust himself back from her with the touching dignity of the young. “I shan’t cry,” he said. “I’m going to go and get dressed now. After breakfast I am going into Malvern to see her.”

  Aunt Amalie sank back on her heels and covered her face with her hands. Richard paused to touch her lightly on one shoulder.

  “It’s all right if you cry,” he said kindly, and went across the hallway to his room.

  Tears were burning my own eyelids and I blinked them back. Floria ran to her mother and put an arm about her, drew her to her feet.

  “Come along, dear. Come downstairs and I’ll get you that coffee.”

  Aunt Amalie looked past her to Giles. “How did he take it? Why is he so stony cold?”

  “I don’t know.” Giles shook his head unhappily. “He seems to be holding back something that troubles him. He listened to me with all his attention, and no show of emotion at all. Perhaps he’s too shocked to understand what has happened.”

  Floria and her mother came down the stairs, and Paul went with them into the dining room. I left my post at the foot of the stairs and wandered into the library, where I could be alone. I felt shaken and inwardly torn. Richard must mourn for a mother who was not truly his mother, and I who was a mother by right of birth could not go to him as Aunt Amalie had done and try to comfort him. If he rejected her as his grandmother, how much more readily he would reject me. I could not even go upstairs and talk to Giles as I wanted so much to do.

  In the library I dropped into Charles’s big lounge chair and stared blankly at the painting of marsh fires burning. Outdoors birds were singing in the oleander bushes and the island was being reborn freshly beneath the early morning sun. But a new day brought no lessening of pain. Elise’s death had ended her restless life, but it had ended nothing else. There was still the threat of Floria’s words hanging over me. There was the threat Hadley Rikers had made against Giles. If there had been physical violence in the form of the unexpected thrust of an arm, or a blow in the darkness, then injury to Elise had been intended. If that stone in the wall had been deliberately loosened, then the injury must have been meant for me. In either case, the person who had done the harm was alive and very much among us.

  Charles came into the room so quietly that I did not see him until he went to Giles’s desk. Nor did he notice me in the dark shadow of the corner chair. He opened a drawer and stood looking down at something it contained. Tentatively, he reached in a hand as if he meant to take some object from the drawer. Then he closed it and stepped back. He saw me then, though he gave no start of surprise.

  “Hello, Lacey. You look as though you’ve had very little sleep. Perhaps breakfast will help a little. Vinnie says it’s nearly ready.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  He regarded me calmly. “It’s natural to feel that way. But we must all eat to keep up our strength. There are difficult days ahead. For the sake of the outside world, we will have to play a role, however false. There are only two of us who will really grieve.”

  “Aunt Amalie,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And who else?”

  “Paul, of course,” he told me. “Didn’t you feel it in him this morning when we met outside the house? Though he’s trying to hide his feelings so that Floria won’t guess. But she knows, naturally. Amalie is worried about Floria.”

  “And about Richard,” I said, and told him of what had happened, and of the boy’s curiously blank reaction.

  “It will work out in time,” Charles assured me. “Floria’s our trouble spot now. But don’t worry, my dear. In spite of the wild things she says, Amalie will control her. If only Amalie doesn’t give way under the strain. If she’s downstairs, I’ll look for her.”

  Instead of going into the house, however, he went out upon the veranda by way of a French door. As soon as I was alone in the library I moved to Giles’s desk and opened the drawer.

  The gun lay half covered by a sheaf of papers, black and compact and deadly. I knew nothing about guns, but I felt about them somewhat the way I felt about snakes. It was not unusual for a weapon of this sort to be kept in a locked drawer in as lonely a place as Sea Oaks, but it filled me with a strange dread. It was as though the object in the drawer had the power to coil and strike out at me like a snake.

  “I thought I heard Charles in here,” said Aunt Amalie’s voice from the doorway behind me.

  “He went out on the veranda looking for you,” I told her.

  Aunt Amalie saw the gun. She reached past me to shut the drawer, and then looked about for the key.

  “It’s dangerous to leave it like that,” she said. “You never know with a child about. I must ask Giles to keep the drawer locked. It’s unlike him to forget.”

  “Are you feeling better?” I asked.

  “I must feel better. There’s so much to do. I’ll go find Charles now. Do have some breakfast, Lacey.”

  She sounded brittle with tension and I knew that only her courage, her will, kept her going. It came to me that she was worried about more than Elise’s death. She was worried about someone in this house who was close to her.

  When she hurried out of the room, I followed more slowly.

  13

  Several days had gone by. Days of gray skies and a good deal of rain. Fortunately, the weather had cleared up in time for the funeral. All had gone smoothly, in so far as there had been no breakdowns, no explosions, no sudden outbursts of accusation. The p
olice were long out of the affair. Hadley Rikers did not come to the funeral, and he had not been seen again about the island. Floria held her tongue. Charles was properly grave, yet I felt that a slight smile sometimes hovered at the corners of his lips. Of us all, only Charles seemed to hold the conviction that, granted healing time, all would be well.

  Aunt Amalie managed to keep herself going, and at the proscribed hour Elise was put to rest in the small island cemetery which had superseded the old burying ground. All her wild restlessness lay forever quieted beneath a leaning pine tree, and at Sea Oaks and The Bitterns the effort to continue life in a new pattern had begun.

  Richard remained the same strange little boy he had become after Elise’s death, and there seemed nothing anyone could do for him. He was oddly polite to all of us, and there were no wild escapades. Yet I had the sense that some struggle went on within him. It was all wrong, of course. He should have let whatever he was feeling come through. He should have mourned openly for the woman he believed was his mother. Aunt Amalie did her best to break through the barrier Richard held against us all, but he avoided her, slipped away from her whenever it was possible. Neither she nor his father had been able to penetrate his new, strange guard. The same cold blankness with which he had greeted the news of Elise’s death lay upon him, and he chose to go off by himself a great deal of the time, refusing any offer of company or comradeship. If anything, he was coolest of all toward his father.

  I knew that the time had come for me to go home to New York. There could be no point in my staying longer. The rain was over, and this sunny Saturday afternoon I was in my room packing. I had not yet told Aunt Amalie that I planned to leave the next day. Nor had I told Giles. Aunt Amalie would no longer try to hold me here, I felt sure. And between Giles and me there was an artificial restraint put upon us by Elise’s death. Time must pass. A great deal of time must pass before we could turn to each other. And during that time the problem of Richard must be solved. The boy could not go on like this. A breaking point would come. Perhaps it would be better if I was away from Sea Oaks when it happened. Better for me—since I could do nothing but stand by and watch.

  I had just folded a sweater listlessly and laid it in my suitcase, when a raised voice reached me from beyond my door—Floria shouting in anger. There was no response that I could hear on the part of another person.

  I went to the door and opened it.

  “Oh, how could you, how could you! You’re a wicked boy!” Floria’s voice came from her sister’s room, and this time I heard an answer.

  “She’s gone,” Richard said, his tone so soft and deadly that it chilled me. “She’s gone, and these things should be gone too.”

  I ran down the hall to Elise’s room and looked inside. Both Floria and Richard were on their hands and knees beside a great box of snapshots, photographs and papers that had spilled out all over the floor. Richard held a long pair of shears in one hand, and as I stepped into the room he snatched up a photograph of Elise and slashed it in two with the flashing blades.

  Floria reached out to twist the scissors from his hand, and shook him angrily by one shoulder. The boy’s face was white as he stumbled to his feet and stood looking at her.

  “Don’t do that,” he said in the same low, deadly tone. “Don’t touch me like that, or maybe you’ll be dead too.”

  Floria glared at him. “What you’ve got coming to you is a good spanking, and if your father or grandmother won’t give it to you, then one of these days I will. You’ve no business destroying your mother’s things. It’s wicked of you!”

  Richard returned her look insolently. “Why should you care? You didn’t like her, did you? I should think you’d be glad I’m doing this.”

  His words must have taken her by surprise, for her face worked strangely, and I knew Richard had touched a point of new sensitivity in her. Perhaps there was a sense of guilt in Floria because of her feelings about her sister when she was alive. Perhaps that accounted for her over-reaction now.

  An impasse had been reached between them. Richard broke it with another darting gesture, and came up from the box with a second photograph in his hand.

  “Don’t!” I said. “Richard, don’t!”

  My presence surprised him so that he hesitated, and Floria wrested the picture from him. For an instant I thought he might fly at her as she had done with him, then the gloom of despair seemed to come over him and he stood back from the wreckage on the floor, all the passion gone from him, and the dreadful blank look in place again.

  I went directly to him and took him by the hand. “Come outside with me,” I said. “Come for a walk with me.”

  “Good!” Floria cried. “Get him out of my sight while I put this mess of stuff back together again. He’s only cut up a few things. I’ll pack the rest away. But this isn’t to be passed up lightly. His father will have to do something about it.”

  Richard’s hand lay limply in mine, yet when I gave it a slight tug, he came with me. He would not stop of his own accord, but he was willing to be stopped from his destructive course by someone else. This was the time to talk to him.

  We went downstairs in silence and saw no one on the way. I kept a firm hold on Richard’s hand, lest he dart away from me, but he gave no sign of interest in making any sort of move. He came with me docilely, his face blank of all emotion.

  “Let’s go over near the marsh,” I said. “Let’s get away from the house.”

  He spoke only once on the way across the burying ground toward the open land near The Bitterns.

  “I won’t let him spank me,” he said.

  “Perhaps he won’t want to, once he understands why you were cutting up Elise’s pictures.”

  We reached the grassy bank just above where the marsh began and I sat on the grass and drew Richard down beside me.

  “This is a good place to come to when you’re feeling stormy,” I said. “Remember the time you found me here?”

  “I don’t feel stormy,” he told me. “I don’t feel anything.”

  I had released his hand, knowing that he would not run away from me now, but I took it again and held it lightly. He did not resist.

  “Sometimes it helps to talk,” I said. “It helps to release all the things that are bothering us. I don’t believe that you aren’t feeling anything. Perhaps it would be better if you could talk to your father—”

  “He’s not my father,” Richard said.

  I kept very still for a few moments, too shocked to speak. What had happened? What damage had Elise done before she died?

  “Why do you say that?” I asked at last. “Of course he’s your father.”

  Richard twined his fingers into a clump of long grass and pulled it out by the roots, flung it down the bank toward the marsh. Then he looked at me in a strange, frightened way, and when he spoke it was not about his father.

  “I killed her, you know. It’s my fault that she fell on those rocks and died.”

  “Oh, Richard,” I said softly, “of course you didn’t kill her. You were nowhere about. You were hiding in the oak tree. It doesn’t help to make up things like that to torment yourself.”

  “I’m not making it up. I was in the oak tree, and I was wishing her dead. I was wishing it as hard as I could. And she fell and died. So it was my fault.”

  I looked into the small white face beside me and saw that his lips were working and his eyes had filled with tears. The blankness had dissolved, but this was a terrible thing he believed, and it was not to be lightly dismissed, however fantastic.

  “Sometimes we all wish injury to someone else when we’re angry and upset. But we don’t really mean it when we’re quiet again. And just wishing has never made it so.”

  He threw me a quick look, as though he wanted to reach for the hope I held out to him. Then he shook his head grimly in disbelief.

  “Perhaps you can tell me about it,” I said.

  Silently he yanked up another handful of grass, and this time he spread the blades
out on the ground beside him, as if he sorted them. I watched him at his concentrated, meaningless work. A long time seemed to pass, and then suddenly, in a burst of words which came out so quickly that I was hard put to keep up with them, he began to tell me what had happened.

  After Elise had called him downstairs the night of the ball, and sent him with a message to Hadley Rikers, Richard had found him and told him that Elise was waiting in the trophy room. Then, curious as any small boy, he had slipped outside and gone along the veranda until he could hide himself in the shadows just outside the French door to the room where they were meeting.

  From his words, I could reconstruct what he had seen, as though I had been there. I could look into that small square room with its lighted glass cases, its display of past equestrian triumphs. I could see Hadley come into the room in his hunter’s dress, and take Guinevere in his arms.

  Richard had watched in shock and indignation. He had a sense of propriety toward Elise, and an utter loyalty to his father. When Hadley began to kiss her intimately, Richard had been possessed of a wild, thoroughly male anger. An anger made up in good part, perhaps, of jealousy. He rushed into the room and attacked Hadley with all the strength in his slender body. He punched and kicked fiercely, while Hadley held him off, laughing.

  Elise did not laugh. She was as furious as Richard. She jerked the boy away from his attack and slapped him full across the face. At the moment, I think Richard hardly felt the slap. All his attention was upon Hadley.

  “I’m going to call my father!” he shouted. “He won’t let you kiss my mother!”

  This fully intended threat must have been the last thing Elise wanted. Her angers were uncontrollable, once risen, and she gave full head to her own impulse. She put both hands on Richard’s shoulders and shook him until his head snapped back.

  “You listen to me!” she cried. “I’m not your mother. I never have been. I’m not your mother at all!”

  This time her words penetrated the red haze of his anger. He stood suddenly quiet beneath her hands.