Hunter's Green

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  With a curious, automatic action I slowly buckled the seat belt around me. Nigel saw me and chuckled wryly.

  “You don’t think that will help you with a drop to the bottom of the quarry, down—close to a hundred feet! Hold tight now, Justin’s darling—” he mocked, “—here we go!”

  Our headlights picked up the bluebells blowing in the wind. The lights rose and dipped, dipped again—and fell upon an obstruction which slanted suddenly across the road ahead of us.

  It was Justin’s gray car, with Justin at the wheel. I screamed—a high, thin sound lost on the wind. I saw Justin’s staring face in the glare of our headlights and knew that the lip of the quarry lay only a little way beyond.

  This was not what Nigel planned, but he accepted what was there. He pressed his foot upon the gas pedal, and the red Mercedes leaped ahead like a rocket toward the gray obstacle in its path. I flung my arms over my face and prayed with all my might.

  I can remember the terrible impact of the crash, the jerk of the seat belt, the rending explosion of sound—and nothing more.

  A distant roaring awakened me. My eyes opened to a darkness that was slashed with flame. I must be lying very close to the fire because warmth from the flames burned my face. A dark figure moved in the flickering light. With one hand I felt about me and found grassy earth. Consciousness swept back as something wet licked at my face. Deirdre was there.

  I remembered now. It was Marc’s red car that was burning! And what had happened to Justin—to Justin’s car after being struck broadside?

  I found I could move my legs, my arms. I could even stumble shakily to my feet. The tall figure silhouetted against the flames knelt beside something on the grass, then straightened and looked toward me.

  “Justin?” I said in disbelief.

  A car door slammed and I heard someone shout, heard Justin call an answer. Then he came to me quickly.

  “You’re all right, Eve? I got you out split seconds before the car caught fire. Then I went back for Nigel.”

  I could not speak my question—I only looked at him.

  “He went through the windshield,” Justin said. “He’s dead.”

  I clung to him. “That’s what he wanted. But he meant to take me with him.”

  “Deirdre met me in the woods on my way back from Alicia’s and let me know by her frantic manner that something was wrong. I got to Marc in the garden after Maggie found him, and he told me Nigel had you. When I found the Mercedes gone, I took my own car and came after you, I could see your headlights now and then and guessed where you were heading. So I cut through the woods by way of the path—it was just wide enough—and I barely made it ahead of you.”

  People from the house had arrived in Maggie’s car. Suddenly Marc was there, his arm in a crude sling. Maggie got out last and stood staring at the burning wreckage, a tall woman in her black dress and evening wrap, the Athmore pearls white about her throat. Justin spoke to her gently. She turned from the dark shape on the grass and came to stand beside me, her face pale in the flaring light.

  “It’s better this way,” she said tonelessly. “Marc would have killed him tonight. Alicia did everything I feared, though it wasn’t Justin she wanted to pay off, but Nigel. She had guessed that he was the one who took her car when Dacia was struck down. And he’d ruined her through the club. I’ve been stupid all along. I truly believed Nigel was fond of me and that he would help me get Marc out of trouble. I never knew it was Alicia he cared about all along—or how he hated Justin. Marc has told me everything. Marc has been their captive, but tonight he meant to free himself.”

  I put my hand upon her arm to stop her painfully blurted words. There was nothing I could say in answer. One day perhaps we would be friends again.

  Marc came over to us. “Thank you, Evie,” he said, calling me by Dacia’s name. “If you hadn’t shouted I’d have bought it. As it was, I ducked in time and only got winged. I’d taken Justin’s car out to hide it from Nigel because Alicia said he meant to destroy it tonight. I wanted it at a safe distance from the house before I settled with him. When I saw my car blocking the road I thought it was Nigel who had come to stop me. With those headlights blazing I couldn’t see you. Not till later in the topiary garden.”

  He bent and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “That’s from Dacia. I don’t think I can fit her into Athmore, but I mean to fit her into my life—my own life away from here.”

  He turned to Maggie, drew her toward her waiting car, while I stayed behind.

  After a time Justin left one of the men from the house to guard the burning Mercedes and came to me. The flames had dropped to smoldering spurts, and beyond I saw Justin’s gray car where it had rolled, almost to the edge of the quarry. The sight seemed to rouse me as nothing else had done. All the years of work he had spent on this car—and now this!

  “Is it hopelessly damaged?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not essentially. The car bounced away from the impact as it was meant to do. Its inner padding protected me, and the new fuel doesn’t explode, of course, or cause a car to burn. I’d not have chosen this way to test it, but the car came through! Are you able to walk now, Eve?”

  My knees were still rubbery, but I could manage. We went together, but not along the road the others had followed. We found the path through the woods along which Justin had come on his wild ride, barely scraping between the trees in some places, leaving the marks of his passage in others. The moon had gone behind another cloud, yet the sky was not dark as it had been.

  Among the stones of Athmore Hall the grass was wet and my slippers were quickly damp with dew. I did not care. I went to stand before the arch of the chapel window, afraid to look at Justin, afraid to be too close to him. I could not ask about Alicia, though her name burned in my mind.

  He answered without my asking.

  “Alicia gave Marc the gun he would have killed Nigel with. That’s what he wanted. Then she held me at Grovesend talking—held me there deliberately, so Marc would get away before I could stop him. She was too angry to care about caution and she told me everything. About her affair with Nigel and what he’d done for her, what he was up to now. If Marc had killed Nigel, it would have been as though she pulled the trigger.”

  There was a sickness of disillusionment, of shock in his words. He had lost his belief in her forever tonight, and in Nigel he had lost someone he had believed his friend.

  We stood in troubled silence, and I knew that the echoes of what had happened would sound down all the years ahead of us.

  Through the arch of the great window pale rose stained the morning, and I moved to where I could look through and watch dawn light the sky. There was hope in light. Tomorrow did come—for some of us.

  “Let’s go home,” Justin said.

  Through the woods we walked together—back to Athmore.

  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, crea
ting 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.

  Whitney at sixty-nine years old with Jahnke in their home in Hope, New Jersey, 1972. Behind them hangs a Japanese embroidery made by Whitney’s mother.

  Whitney at seventy-one years of age with Pat Myer, her long time editor, and Mable Houvenagle, her sister-in-law, at her house on Chapel Ave in Brookhaven, Long Island, New York, 1974. After her husband died in 1973, she lived close to her daughter, Georgia, on Long Island.

  Whitney at eighty-one years old on a helicopter ride over Maui, Hawaii, to research the backdrop for her novel Silversword, 1984.

  Whitney giving her acceptance speech for her Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1985.

  Whitney rode in a hot-air balloon in 1988 to use the experience for her novel Rainbow in the Mist.

  Whitney ascending in the hot-air balloon, 1988.

  Whitney in her study in Virginia in 1996 at ninety-three years old, looking over her “Awards Corner,” which included three Edgars, the Agatha, and the Society of Midland Authors Award.

  Whitney at ninety-six years old with her family in her house in Virgina, 1999. From left: Michael Jahnke (grandson), Georgia Pearson (daughter), Matthew Celentano (great-grandson), Whitney, and Danny Celentano (great-grandson).

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1968 by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Cover design by Mimi Bark

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4383-0

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10038

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  PHYLLIS A. WHITNEY

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