Spindrift

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  I drew in a long breath of relief and let it slowly blow away. Already I was feeling stronger.

  And yet—Adam was dead.

  Without warning, my paper house of courage collapsed into thin air. Adam was dead, and he had not killed himself. Somewhere there existed his own writings which would tell me the truth about what had happened. I was not safe. Not if I was about to discover the truth. Evil did exist. It wore a masked face and I was still threatened.

  I glanced at the watch on my wrist and saw that it was a long time until three o’clock. I mustn’t waste whatever hours I had, I’d said I would search, but I was doing nothing, and there was one obvious place where I could begin.

  I went to my door and looked into the empty hallway.

  9

  No one crossed my path on the way to Zenia’s sitting room. Her door opened to my touch and I closed it softly behind me, to find the darkness hushed and empty. I fumbled for the light switch near the door and the Tiffany lamp on a Victorian table that dripped red plush balls came on, sweeping the shadows up the walls. I went quickly to a window and drew back the heavy velvet draperies so that sunlight touched the room. From the walls Zenia’s strange collection of pictures and plates looked down at me. I was beginning to feel rather close to the woman who had once used this room as a haven. But now it was not upon her possessions that I must concentrate.

  If it had been my father who had set the ivory carving upon that mantel, perhaps he had meant it as a marker for something else he had placed there. I looked at the spot where the small figure had stood and saw again that it had rested upon a wooden box with a curious fanged creature upon its lid, carved of some whitish stone used as a handle—probably jade. Was this another of Theo’s treasures?

  I raised the lid of the box by the carving and looked inside. There were long, thin slabs of stone piled in the box—jade again? I picked up the top slab and saw that it was inscribed with Chinese characters in gold. So were the slabs which lay underneath. They meant nothing to me. I replaced the lid and moved uncertainly about the room. I had no hint of what I might be looking for. “Tyche” had been one word my father had written on that slip of paper and Tyche, identified and found, was still meaningless to me. The other words “mutton fat” left me as hopelessly in the dark.

  I spent some time moving idly about the room, admiring a cabinet of inlaid satinwood where vases of cut glass and Meissen and Crown Derby were displayed, picking up a tarnished silver pomander from Zenia’s desk, moving on to discover an arched doorway in a corner of the room which had been hung with a bead curtain.

  The rustling clatter the beads made as I parted the strands was startling in the silence of this quiet room. In a place as huge as Spindrift with its long corridors and high ceilings, it was possible to be thoroughly isolated, even though many people were under its roof.

  I stepped through the bead curtain into what seemed to be a small dressing room. There was a wardrobe—empty—a dressing table of light ash wood, with a mirror in the shape of a shield, now faintly crazed as I saw when I bent to peer at myself in the glass. Here sunlight did not penetrate and I was only a shadowy figure among other shadows. This small room in turn gave off another room that was probably a bedroom, but the door was locked and I could explore no further.

  As I moved back toward the curtain to return to Zenia’s sitting room, I heard the soft sound of a door opening beyond. Opening and closing. Someone had come into the sitting room. I parted strands of beads for a thin aperture through which I could look. Fiona stood with her back against the door, her gaze roaming the room. If she was surprised to find a lamp burning in the room, she gave no sign. She had put on a garnet-colored caftan that swept to her slippered feet. It seemed to me that there was almost a sleepwalking quality about her, her eyes a little glazed and staring as she viewed the room. Her light brown hair, usually sleek with brushing, hung rumpled, framing her white face.

  She must have come to look for what I had come to look for, I thought—Adam’s log—and I watched as she left the protection of the door behind her and moved slowly about the room. Her gaze flitted from one object to another without recognition, but for a few moments she did not touch anything. Her search seemed as fruitless as mine.

  Then she appeared to make up her mind and walked directly to Zenia’s desk. I had thought of the desk earlier, but had postponed searching it because I wanted to know the over-all pattern of the room first. Now it was too late. Fiona would look through it before me.

  Strangely, however, she did no searching. She simply opened a bottom drawer of the desk and bent over it. From among the folds of the caftan she drew some object I could not see, and thrust it into the drawer, pulled the contents of papers over it and shut the drawer quickly. With no further look about the room, she moved with her rangy stride toward the door and disappeared into the hallway. I think she had never been conscious, one way or another, of the lamp burning on a table.

  In a moment I was through the bead curtain to bend over that lower drawer. Beneath the notebooks and papers within lay a lumpy object, revealed in its cold black lines as I thrust the covering away. What Fiona had hidden in the drawer was an automatic pistol. She had not come here to find anything—she had come for the purpose of concealment.

  Even though I didn’t understand her action, the physical presence of the gun did not surprise me. The Morelands had always been gun-oriented. Hal had been a hunter when he was young, and he had a prized collection of guns—both rifles and handguns. In fact, he had made a hobby of collecting handguns of the old West. Theo didn’t like her guns to be “alive,” but I knew she kept an old derringer, borrowed from Hal’s collection, in a desk drawer. My father had owned a gun—the one that had Killed him—and so did Ferris. Bruce scoffed at living with such fearfulness, and Joel would have nothing to do with firearms.

  This pistol, however, was not from Hal’s collection. It was what Theo would have called “live,” modern, and I wondered why Fiona had hidden it. I did not investigate to see whether it was loaded, but restored the covering of papers and closed the drawer. Then, as all those crowded pictures on the walls watched me, I went through the other drawers of the desk. But if Adam had chosen to hide his log in this room, he had not picked so obvious a place. Methodically I examined everything. I opened cabinets, looked in boxes, and even under the cushions of chairs and sofa. And I found nothing at all except a tortoiseshell comb that might once have belonged to Zenia herself. If the log was here it was so disguised that I did not recognize its identity.

  When I was ready to leave, I opened the door cautiously to make sure the hall was empty before I went out. As I passed the foot of the stairs to the third floor I met Joel coming down.

  I tried to speak as though a void had not opened between us. “How is your mother? Did the doctor get here?”

  Joel nodded. “He says the bruise is superficial. She’s already up and she won’t have anyone fussing over her.”

  “Do you think someone struck her down?”

  “It seems unlikely.” Joel’s look was suddenly guarded. “I understand you’re taking Peter into town this afternoon.”

  “Yes. It’s time we had an outing together.”

  “I hope you won’t try to prejudice him against his grandmother.”

  I could only stare at Joel helplessly. “I’d love to do just that but it’s not going to happen so quickly. Anyway, Bruce is coming with us, and he’ll probably look out for Theo.”

  I wondered almost impersonally if Joel would offer to come with us himself, but he only nodded and moved away from me down the hall.

  I hurried after him. “Is it really true you’re going to publish a book by Jon Pemberton?”

  He didn’t break his stride. “Theo and Ferris both think it’s a wise move.”

  “But you’ve always stood up to them before! You’ve always refused to have any interference with what you chose to publish.”

  “Then perhaps it’s time I changed,” he said, a
nd walked away from me toward the door of his room.

  I let him go and went to my own room. There I opened the balcony door and stepped out where I could see the Atlantic rolling in, listen to the sound of it and smell the familiar tang of salt on the breeze.

  What I wanted was to give myself up to the pleasant anticipation of my outing with Peter and Bruce, but my earlier sense of contentment was gone. Too many unsettling things tugged at my consciousness. There were too many unanswered questions, too many disturbing new emotions moving me. There was a restless questing in me, yet I didn’t know what I searched for, what I wanted. While there was no longer any close relationship between Joel and me, I could be upset by the change in his approach to his work. And I was disturbed about Fiona and why she should steal into Zenia’s sitting room to hide an automatic in that desk drawer. My double purpose in coming to Spindrift remain unchanged—I wanted to recover Peter and I wanted to know the cause of my father’s death, but now all sorts of perplexing strands of happenings had begun to weave themselves in and out among these purposes, so that nothing was clear cut any more and new emotions had begun to motivate me. Fear of something unknown was a part of all this, and so was the odd new excitement that gave my life a savor it had not had in a long time. An excitement that had to do with Bruce Parry and was in itself frightening. This was only attraction, I knew, and nothing more. But I couldn’t afford to be attracted, didn’t want to be. Besides, Bruce himself was a complete enigma.

  I returned to my room and managed somehow to fill the time with small tasks of preparation. I got out of my slacks and sweater and put on my brown gabardine suit. Then I brushed my hair which I’d been letting grow since I came out of the hospital, though it was still short.

  When I went upstairs I found Peter ready for me, neatly dressed in gray slacks and a green sweater, his brown hair brushed and his hands clean. Miss Crawford had done her best, but Peter was clearly anxious to escape her, and while he didn’t greet me warmly, at least his earlier sullenness had lifted.

  We went downstairs to find Bruce waiting at the wheel of his Aston Martin and as we hurried down the wide flight of front steps he came around to open the car door for me.

  Driving along Bellevue Avenue with its big trees, its iron fences and sometimes shabby mansions, Bruce pointed out to Peter some of the special houses—Chateausur-Mer, The Elms, Kingscote and the old Newport Casino.

  We continued on to little Touro Park, with the famous Stone Mill in its center. The squat, round tower, open to the sky, its doorways arched, was once supposed to be a relic from the days of the Norsemen, and local legend claimed it had inspired Longfellow to write his “Skeleton in Armor.”

  As we left the ridge of the Historic Hill we could see the graceful white steeple of old Trinity thrusting up from among gambrel and gable roofs that dated back to the 1700s. Bruce drove down narrow streets, turning odd corners so that we could pass more of the old houses before we went down to Thames Street, with its wharfs stretching into the harbor. No Newporter called it “Tems”—the “h” and the “a” were pronounced. Bruce was up on his Newport history and even Peter seemed fascinated by the small tour he gave us.

  Some of my misgivings and concerns had begun to slip away, and when Bruce parked his car and we walked in the direction of Bowen’s Wharf and neighboring Bannister’s Wharf, I sensed that something of the old spirit of adventure had seized Peter. It was clear that he liked Bruce and I listened to Peter’s questions and Bruce’s answers with a pleasure that I had not felt for a very long while.

  We spent some time on the wharfs, looking over the windjammer Bill of Rights and the brig The Black Pearl, before we went to our restaurant and found a table beside an upstairs window, where we could look out at the harbor and Narraganset Bay beyond. Sunlight sparkled on the water, and dozens of small boats were out on this beautiful day. The sound of the buoys had no menace with such clarity of weather, and gulls soared and darted, graceful to watch, but raucous to hear.

  The restaurant was nearly empty at this hour, and we had all the privacy we wished. While we ate ice cream and Bruce and I drank hot tea, Bruce talked about Spindrift as he had known it as a boy when his great-aunt Zenia was an old lady, but not yet in that unhappy last phase.

  “She was still beautiful,” he said. “She had been a wealthy widow for a long time, but she never wanted to marry again. Instead, there were always beaux dancing attendance on her, and more than one man who loved her clear into her eighties. Even though there was always something a little strange and sad about her.”

  “Like Grandma Theo,” Peter said.

  I looked at him in surprise. “Strange and sad—Theo?”

  Bruce laughed. “He doesn’t mean that. Who do you think is in love with your grandmother Theo?”

  “Uncle Ferris, of course. Grandma says he always has been.”

  “At least he seems to have served the Morelands well,” Bruce said, and I heard a dry note in his voice. “In Zenia’s case it was a little different. Of course I suppose there were fortune hunters who wanted to marry her because she was rich. But she really did have a certain glamour, as well. I’ve heard some wild stories about her, and I’ve seen a good many pictures of her in her youth, even though I never saw her as a young woman. She was never tempery, as Theo can be, but I think she must have been equally self-centered and autocratic. She had the complete belief of her Newport contemporaries that she and they were the favored of the earth and I expect she was more of a snob than Theo has ever been.”

  “Have you seen the portrait of her painted by Sargent—the one that hangs in the ballroom?” I asked Peter. “I’m going to be dressed like that picture for the ball. Though I’m afraid I can’t carry off any real impersonation of Zenia.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Bruce said. “You have a touch of Zenia in you. Determination and a willingness to defy anyone who opposes you to get your own way. She was like that too.”

  I looked at him in surprise and then busied myself with my teacup to hide my confusion. These were hardly attractive traits that he’d mentioned, but they were admittedly mine and he must have watched me observantly to be aware of them.

  “I have some of those traits of Zenia’s too,” he went on. “Perhaps we’re two of a kind, Christy. And both of us subversives when it comes to Theo’s plans.”

  “What are you talking about?” Peter demanded.

  We both laughed and I relaxed a little. Peter let our adult laughter pass and went on to talk about the coming ball.

  “Grandma Theo says I can stay on the orchestra balcony for a while, if I like. So I can watch the party. She’s going to put the band right down on the floor because the room is so big. She says there will be lots to see, with all those ladies dressed up in beautiful costumes. She’s already been talking to some of them on the telephone—talking about what they’re going to wear. And she’s asked Jon Pemberton to come. He’s going to be Dad’s new author, and he’s very famous.”

  I could find nothing to say to that, but Peter paid no attention to my silence, running on excitedly with further items he had picked up about the ball. I was glad to see him once more a lively and interested little boy.

  “I think Fiona will have the most beautiful dress of all. She showed me a colored picture of it in a book. It will be a shiny blue, like metal, and she’ll have long green sleeves and a golden girdle. Sometimes Fiona sleepwalks like Lady Macbeth, doesn’t she? Oh, I don’t mean really. She just gets a staring look in her eyes, like she’s thinking of something else, and she walks past and doesn’t see me. This afternoon she was going down the hallway from Grandma Theo’s rooms, and I said, ‘Hello, Grandma Fiona’—because that makes her mad—but she never looked at me at all.”

  It was hard to remember that Fiona was Peter’s step-grandmother. She had never liked to be called a grandmother, so he always used her first name alone. But he had touched on the thing I too had noted about Fiona when she came into Zenia’s room—that blankness of vision, as th
ough she were driven by some inner purpose, or inner fear, that allowed her no attention for side matters.

  I let Peter’s remarks pass and asked Bruce to tell us more about Zenia Patton-Stuyvesant. If I was to wear a dress like hers and echo the pose of her portrait, then I wanted to know more about her.

  Peter grew quickly bored, and when I noticed a boat coming in to the wharf, I suggested that he go to the end of the room, where he could watch it better. He jumped up gladly and ran to the far window.

  Bruce was willing enough to talk about the Patton-Stuyvesants. They had apparently been close friends with the Townsends of Redstones. Theron Townsend was in railroads too, and they were friendly rivals. It was Zenia who was most interesting to me, however. Rumor had it that while her husband, Arthur, was alive she had had a secret lover—the one love of her life—and there had been an occasion when she’d hidden him in one of the empty rooms at Spindrift and Arthur had found him there. No one knew exactly what happened, but the young man disappeared from the Newport scene and for a time Zenia was tragically subdued.