Lost Island

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  The words choked off, and for an endless length of time the night was still. Nearby insects had hushed at the sound of a human voice, but now they took up their clatter again. My flesh crept at Aunt Amalie’s words. I could see Elise wearing the brooch secretly, superstitiously, the night of the ball, conniving with her mother.

  “Are you listening to me?” Aunt Amalie’s voice sounded closer this time. “I’ve wanted you to understand fully why you must make a payment now. The past can’t repeat itself, I tell you. Now you’ll never have Giles or Richard.”

  Helplessly, I crept toward the back along the rough wall. She could not see me. She could not know where to aim. That was my only hope.

  The first shot crashed into the long cave of the tomb and ricocheted against the arch of the roof. The explosion seemed to echo and re-echo forever in that dark and hollow place. I sobbed for breath and moved frantically away from the back wall.

  “You can’t escape,” she called to me. “I’ve plenty of ammunition. And I can be a patient woman.”

  Once more she pulled the trigger. The awful crash of the explosion was repeated as the bullet splintered tabby and brick from the wall at the back.

  Would it do any good to plead with her? Would it help to point out that if she killed me she would destroy her own life and injure Floria and Richard? But I knew it would not. She had crossed some invisible line into alien territory. Had she been in a passion of grief, or even a passion of hatred toward me, she might have been more approachable. But this was cold madness. The strain in her fabric had always been there, waiting, concealed because she was letter-perfect in the role she had chosen to play. She had called me to her, tested me out, and finally gone deliberately about her intention to destroy me. Until now she had failed. But now—

  She had not fired again and I wondered what fearful strategy she meant to try now. I had not heard her move. I could not see her out there among a hundred other shadows. But she was there and she waited, perhaps moving nearer under the very sound of her firing.

  Her voice cut suddenly through the stillness, chill with warning, and I realized the words were not addressed to me.

  “Don’t come any closer. Stay where you are, whoever you are! This is between Lacey and me.”

  “Mother!” Floria cried. “Mother, you can’t do this. It will harm all of us tragically. Giles is here, and Charles, and Paul—”

  My heart leaped with unexpected hope. Floria had gone for help. They had heard the shots. Giles was here.

  Amalie did not raise her voice. “Stay your distance …”

  I shrank against the wall and steeled myself to the inevitable roar of sound. There were cries outside in the grove and the running of feet. Then another shot, close at hand, but not directed at me. Floria screamed, and under cover of the confusion, I rushed up from the tomb and I tried to slip around behind it. The next bullet grazed my shoulder. I went stumbling to my knees with pain searing my upper arm as I tried to crawl away into shadow. I could see them now in the moonlight. Giles was struggling with Amalie, fighting to wrest the gun from her hand.

  They seemed to move in a dreadful, endless dance, with Floria and Charles and Paul locked to the outskirts of a circle around them. Then Paul moved in and clasped Amalie by one arm. Giles tore the gun from her hand and flung it into the underbrush. A moment later he came running toward me and nearly stumbled over me. Then he knelt and touched me gently.

  “It’s my shoulder,” I said.

  He picked me up in his arms and carried me away from the burying ground. The others were gone, suddenly, strangely, and I heard a shouting, no longer near. Giles paid no attention. He carried me along the path and up the steps to the house. The servants had gathered about on the drive, and Vinnie came running toward us as Giles brought me inside. She gave me a single look, and fled away to fetch whatever was needed.

  Upstairs in my room, the two of them worked over me quickly and efficiently, and I did not mind the pain, now that the nightmare was over. I lay quietly on my bed, and from where I lay I could see my packed suitcase standing near the closet door, my raincoat flung over a chair. The sight of them reminded me.

  “Tomorrow I’m going away,” I told Giles again. “I won’t come back here any more.”

  “Don’t talk foolishness,” Vinnie said. “You ain’t goin’ no place right away.” Then she murmured, “Oh, poor Miss Amalie,” and went out of the room to hide her own emotion.

  I tried desperately to sit up, and Giles pushed me back with a firm hand. “Lie still. Give the bleeding a chance to stop.”

  I had to talk to him. I had to try, but he hushed me at once.

  “I know there are things you want to tell me, but now isn’t the time. I know there’s more to the story than Floria blurted out, but I can wait for the rest.”

  I knew all the more why I loved him. He would be fair, at least, and as generous as was possible.

  He bent over me. “I will never forgive you, Lacey, for not telling me at once. But I love you, and I will try to understand the rest of what you’ve done.”

  He kissed me almost angrily, and I knew he was angry because of all those wasted years that lay behind us. Yet in the same instant I remembered Elise. Remembered her as she had been as a young girl. Would it ever have worked out if I had gone to Giles with the truth at that time? Would he not have felt bound to me because the baby was his, and not because of the love he could feel for me now? I didn’t know.

  When the others returned to the house and came upstairs, he was sitting beside my bed holding my hand. They came into the room, and Floria dropped into a chair nearby. She looked quite dreadful, her face drawn and haggard. Charles went to stand beside a window, to stare into the darkness toward whatever nightmare now haunted him. It was Paul who stood at the foot of my bed and told us what had happened.

  “Amalie broke away from us and ran toward the ruins of the old fort. We went after her, but we were confused about her direction, and she was well ahead of us when she climbed up on the parapet and went over into the river. We were too late. There’s no way to find her until morning.”

  The room was quiet. I closed my eyes and thought of this double loss. I had lost Amalie in life. Lost the loving aunt I had believed in. Now we had all lost her in death. She had thrown everything away so needlessly. Even Elise’s life had been thrown away because of Amalie’s obsessive hatred of her sister’s child. And now what of Richard, who must face another death? Where was he? I wondered. Why hadn’t he heard the shots and the noise when we came back to the house? Why had he not come to this room?

  Before I could ask about him, Charles turned from the window. I saw how white and old he looked. “It’s better this way,” he said. “Amalie couldn’t face the aftermath of Elise’s death—the aftermath of causing it. Paul has told me what she did. I’ve been worried about her for several days, but I was afraid to face the truth. Part of this is my fault.”

  Floria made a harsh sound of pain, but she did not repudiate Charles’s words. “I knew! I knew the night of the ball. I saw her coming back from the beach, and I knew she was planning something dreadful—just as she had planned other attempts upon Lacey’s life. That was why I had to accuse Lacey so recklessly—so I could hide my mother’s actions. Later, after Lacey talked about the loose stone, I put on my Merlin cape and went down there to fix the rock so that Mother would not be blamed. The beard was in a pocket of the cape, and I must have lost it there among the rocks.”

  All the small details were coming clear now, and I felt sorry for Floria, who had never been her mother’s favorite daughter.

  She went on, still not through. “This afternoon, when I was putting Elise’s photographs and letters back together after Richard spilled them out of their box, I found the letter Kitty wrote you many years ago, Charles, telling how she had left the emerald brooch for you to find.”

  “Aunt Amalie told me about that letter,” I said to Floria. “It was she who gave it to Elise. Now it must be given to Char
les.”

  “It doesn’t matter any more,” Charles said sadly.

  “I still wanted to save her from herself,” Floria ran on. “Tonight I tried as brutally as I could to send Lacey away under a cloud that would separate her from Giles forever. That was the only thing that would have satisfied my mother. But I knew quickly enough that it was the wrong thing to do. I’m sorry, Lacey. I almost cost you your life.”

  I had never seen Floria cry before. Paul went to her and put an arm about her. “Don’t take so much blame on yourself. We’re all partly at fault. For what we saw and didn’t speak about. For the things each of us thought he wanted and couldn’t have.”

  A silence lay upon the room as the truth of his words came home to us. A sound from the hallway caught my attention, and I turned my head as the others swung around. Richard stood in the bedroom doorway.

  “What has happened?” he asked. “I was up in the lighthouse tonight when I heard the shooting. It took me a long time to get back here. Where is my grandmother?”

  “There—there’s been an accident,” Floria said feebly.

  Richard came past the others toward the bed and stood looking at me. “You’ve been hurt!” And then anxiously, “Cousin Lacey, are you all right?”

  I held out a hand to him. “I’m fine. What happened to me isn’t serious.”

  “I’m glad,” he said with a relief that touched me. His gaze traveled from one to another of us around the room, and I think there was not a pair of eyes that could meet his own.

  “He’ll have to be told,” Floria said harshly.

  Richard threw her a quick look and then turned back to me. “My grandmother wanted to hurt you, didn’t she, Cousin Lacey? She didn’t like you. She tried all the time to make me hate you, just the way my—my mother did. But I never could. Tonight she tried to shoot you, didn’t she?”

  It was chilling to hear him. I had forgotten how calmly in our time the young can take the subject of violence. I had forgotten how they are so often bombarded with it on every side that horror can sometimes be accepted as we could never accept it when we were as young as Richard.

  “Is she dead?” he asked us point-blank.

  There was not one of us who could answer him easily. But I was his mother, and I had to try.

  “We think she is,” I told him. “She—fell into the river. We can’t search for her until morning.”

  His long lashes came down over his eyes and then he opened them and looked steadily at his father. Giles went to him and put an arm about his shoulders.

  “It got to be so I was afraid of her,” Richard said.

  “There was no need to be,” Giles assured him. “She always loved you very much. And you must go on loving her. If you want to go to your room now, I’ll come in later and say good night.”

  Floria jumped up from her chair. “I’ll come with you, Richard.”

  They seemed to have forgiven each other for their earlier quarrel.

  When they had left, Paul said, “I’d better go downstairs and phone the police.”

  Giles nodded, and Paul and Charles went out of the room together. Giles returned to his place beside my bed.

  “Richard will be all right,” I said to him in relief. “He has more strength in him than we give him credit for. I’m glad you gave his grandmother back to him. The truth needn’t ever be known outside of this room.”

  He took my hand and held it against his cheek. “We’ll tell him soon that you are his mother. We’ll tell him that he’s our son.”

  “No,” I said. “Not for a long, long time. Not until he is older and can understand the reasons. Not until he is used to having me around and can perhaps love me as I hope he will someday. For now, let’s leave him his happier memories of Elise. Too much has been taken away from him.”

  Giles slipped an arm beneath me, careful of my shoulder, and held me to him. “Lacey,” he said. “Oh, Lacey!”

  From the window I could hear the ocean sound forever rushing in upon the island. But it was of the river and the marshes that I thought. Tonight they held their tragic secret. Tomorrow they would give it up and a new peace would come to Hampton Island. Tomorrow we would begin again. The island was not lost to me any more.

  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 writing 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.

  A young Whitney playing with her doll in Japan.

  Whitney with her family in Japan, where they lived for approximately six years. From left: Lillian (Lilly) Whitney, Charles (Charlie) Whitney, Phyllis Whitney, and Philip (Whitney’s half-brother).

  Thirteen-year-old Whitney dancing in the Philippines.

  Twenty-one-year-old Whitney at her graduation from McKinley High School in 1924.

  Whitney worked at the World’s Fair in Chicago, Illinois, in 1933. She was pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, at the time.

  Frederick Nelson Litten, Whitney’s mentor in writing and teaching, in Chicago, 1935.

  Whitney’s first publicity photo for A Place for Ann, 1941.

  Whitney, forty-eight, in her first study in Fort Hill Circle at her Staten Island house, where she lived with second husband Lovell Jahnke, 1951.