He held the tiny animal carefully, wonderingly. “Marilla did this?”
“Yes. She was afraid to show it to you because she thought you might laugh at her.”
His smile was rueful. “So I have a daughter who thinks I can’t see unicorns?”
“She thinks you’re very busy doing important things.”
“No one should ever be too busy when a unicorn drops in. I’m sorry she thinks that. It’s my fault, and I’ll tell her how much I like this. I’d hoped you’d make friends with her, Lindsay.”
When I reached out to take the unicorn from him, he held my hand lightly.
“You’re not in this alone, you know. We’ll work it all out somehow.”
I wasn’t sure just what he meant. To tell me that I was not alone was perhaps the most threatening thing of all, and I couldn’t answer. Perhaps he saw more in my eyes than I wanted him to, for he let my hand go and went away across the bridge.
For a moment longer I stood in the doorway, watching, and then hurried to shower. When I looked in the long mirror through misting water, it was as if Vermilion stared back at me and her mouth was curved in a mocking smile.
6
Brian arrived promptly at five. He seemed relieved to find me watching for him near the door. We drove off immediately, and I sat holding the small box that Consuela had found for me, and into which I’d nested Marilla’s unicorn in tissue paper.
When we were well on our way, hurrying from whatever it was we fled, Brian said wryly, “A good getaway! Sybil has a talent for thinking up new things for me to do, and I’m trying to get back to my book.”
His words surprised me, since I’d regarded him as a willing satellite. When I made no comment, he went on quickly.
“I’m not being critical. Your sister does a great deal of good and she’s taught me a lot. A remarkable woman. Though sometimes I think she’s made of steel. Also, she has more time to put her energies into whatever interests her. I need to be about three people right now.”
“Don’t we all?” I said. “What’s your book about?”
He was willing enough to talk. “I’m doing a study of Oak Creek Canyon—the rock formations, the plants and animals, the back country. The back country interests me especially. Out there everything is still pretty wild. There are too many houses coming into Sedona, too many people. I’ll show you what I mean—at least a taste of it—if you come with us on Saturday. I suppose Marilla’s told you? Your father liked to get out there too. He had a thing about those rocks, and he could almost make me see spirits in them.”
“My father had a great imagination,” I said.
Brian glanced at me again. “You didn’t like your father very much, did you?”
That came too close to wounds that hadn’t healed.
“Did you like him?” I countered.
“I did for a while.” His answer was short, and after that he gave his attention entirely to his driving.
Orva’s house was a short distance away, located on one of the roads that climbed toward the Coffee Pot, but not on the cliff’s edge like Rick’s house. It was smaller, and built of concrete bricks tinted to look like adobe.
The living room centered about a stone fireplace, where piñon logs burned invitingly, giving off a pleasant scent. I found it a warmer, more restful room than the great living room at Rick’s house. A number of paintings of Indians decorated the walls.
Unlike those I’d helped Clara with in the shop gallery that morning, these paintings were crude, the work of a gifted amateur. One oil of a masked and costumed figure dancing caught my eye.
“Did your mother paint this?” I asked Brian.
He nodded. “She did it from life. She used to teach oil a Hopi reservation years ago. Sit down, Lindsay. Ma’s in the kitchen—I’ll tell her you’re here.”
A moment later Orva came to greet me. Standing beside her muscular son, she seemed thinner and more angular than ever. Her short gray hair flew about in wisps, and there were beads of perspiration on her nose.
“I’m glad you’ve come, Lindsay. May I call you that? Everything’s ready, if you don’t mind eating early.”
The dining room was gracious, with paneled walls and glass doors that looked out upon the view. There were always the rocks to be seen, and I was discovering that they could be different under changing skies, and with the shifting of sunlight and shadow.
Brian sat at one end of the oval table, with Orva at the other, and I sensed between them a liking and understanding that nevertheless seemed to carry a slight edge to it, as though some disagreement, scarcely suppressed, was ready to show itself. Sybil? I wondered.
Supper was a fresh green salad sprinkled with sunflower seeds, and buckwheat pancakes filled with a white cheese that had been mixed with raisins and nuts. Not the thin blintzes of New York, but pancakes you could bite into. The sauce was clear and slightly thickened, with a hint of honey and lemon. Brian brought me a glass of cold milk.
“This sauce is a trick of Parker Hale’s,” Orva said. “The pancakes are mine. I used to feed them to your father when he came to visit us. Of course, though he always stayed with Rick and Sybil when he was in town, he didn’t get along well with his older daughter, as you probably know. So he would come here for meals whenever I’d have him. He’d sit right where you are now and finish off as many servings as I’d feed him. Don’t know where he put it all on that big frame of his. He never gained a pound.”
I tried to shut out the picture her words built in my mind, bringing my father too close again.
“Jed brought me that,” Brian told me, and nodded toward a corner of the room.
I looked at the Indian drum standing against a Mexican serape that draped the corner. It was tall and cylindrical—a black drum, with a red spot in the center of its rawhide top. The drumhead was tightened with thongs that ran down the sides in a crisscrossing pattern, and symmetrical stripes were painted red and white, with scallops of pale blue around the top.
“That’s what they call a barrel drum,” Brian said. “It’s made from a hollow cottonwood log, and it’s typical of Indians in the Southwest. Maybe the tone isn’t as vibrant as the cedar drums of the North, but the Southwest tribes can still make them talk. This one’s a Pueblo drum—from Oraibi—and Jed taught me some of the medicine.”
I found myself staring at the drum with its single padded stick set across the drumhead, as though I could see my father holding it in his hand.
“Medicine?” I asked.
“Sure. I’ve seen a Hopi sit before his drum with that same dreamy, absorbed look that drummers can put on anywhere, so that what comes out in sound can be an almost mystical experience. Some drums are for religious ceremonies, some for dancing. On a personal level they mean a release to the man who plays them. Jed knew that, and he got me interested. He said there was always a spirit power in the drum—the medicine of life.”
“Those blue scallops are the rain symbol,” Orva said. “When we’re through, Brian can show you.”
Emotion came too close again. Too close for comfort. “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to hear it.”
The words sounded terse, but Orva seemed to understand. “I can guess how you feel. We didn’t always love Jed either. If ever there was a man who wasted himself—”
“Sometimes he wasted other people,” Brian said sharply.
“That too,” she agreed.
“I guess the worst time”—Brian was staring out through glass at the rocks—“was when he brought us all to Vegas for that last party—which was only a scheme to get money for a new plan. The time when he died. I haven’t forgotten the way Sybil told her father off that night. Rick was sorry for him and wouldn’t criticize him, ever—so Sybil was the one who quarreled with him. Not that I could blame her. Though, as it worked out, we never did get the details of what he was going to propose. He said he’d tell us the next day—so as not to spoil our fun that night, I suppose. Only he didn’t live long enough.”
&nb
sp; There seemed a rising tension in his voice, as though some deep bitterness he harbored against my father had welled to the surface.
Orva spoke quickly, with a clear intent to cover whatever her son might be feeling. “You can imagine how that party upset Clara—once she knew there was another scheme coming. She’d already been rooked by him, and it made her pretty mad that he’d try it again.”
I still wasn’t ready to hear details about that time in Nevada, and I changed the subject quickly. “Tell me about growing up in Sedona, Orva. Was it very different from now?”
She allowed herself to be diverted. “We were smaller, of course—mostly apple orchards in the old days. We could keep out the bulldozers then, and some of the real old-timers were still alive. Sedona was named for a woman, you know. An early settler—Sedona Schnebly. I remember it as a very good life, though I was hardly an early settler.”
“How long have you known Rick and Sybil?”
“I knew Rick when he was a little boy. I even had him in some of my classes then. That’s how I met your father—when Jed stepped in to help Rick after his father died. I suppose you know that Jed put Rick through the university?”
I hadn’t known that. But Jed had always been generous when he was in the money.
“Of course we met Sybil through Rick when he married her and brought her here to live. I’ve thought ever since that she was bad luck for him. I hope I can speak frankly, even if she is your sister.”
Brian moved restlessly, as though he didn’t want to listen. He got up to clear the table, while Orva brought in plates of homemade pumpkin pie, and poured cups of strong black coffee, which turned out to be made from a sort of bean that wasn’t coffee.
The interruption didn’t shift Orva in her course, however. “You might as well know, Lindsay, if you haven’t already guessed, that there’s very little love lost between Sybil and me. I was fond of Jed at times—when I wasn’t being angry with him—as I’m fond of Rick, so I hated to see what was happening. Sybil—”
This time Brian broke in determinedly, though his tone was light and faintly mocking. “Don’t mind Ma, Lindsay. She’s an intolerant and prejudiced woman!” The edge between them was sharper than ever, for all that he grinned.
Orva responded quickly. “Sybil’s got you under her thumb, and you never see what she’s up to.”
“She’s up to accomplishing some things I could never do by myself,” Brian said. “She’s plenty persuasive when, she sets out to be, and she knows how to play on emotions. She can stir people up enough to get things done. I’d follow her for that alone. Don’t forget that I’m the one who feeds her the factual stuff she uses in her arguments.”
“Do you think she gives a damn about ecology?” Orva’s voice grew heated with indignation. “Jed was right about her. I’m sorry, Lindsay, but all Sybil ever wants is to prove that she’s better, stronger, smarter, and more powerful than anyone else. What’s more, she’s on her way to doing it. And it helps a lot to have Rick’s money behind her. Power—that’s the name of her game. And it was your father who told me so. Sedona, Flagstaff, Phoenix—they’re only the beginning. That’s what he said, and he wasn’t being admiring. She’ll be in papers all across the country—for her good deeds! Just wait and see. Her picture will be in magazines, instead of just the local papers. She’ll be interviewed on national television.”
“Sometimes I feel sorry for her,” Brian said. “All that single-minded drive must come out of a lot of insecurity.”
Again his words surprised me. I’d never looked at Sybil in that light. I knew too much that Brian didn’t—especially about what she was doing now to Marilla.
“I want to show you something,” I said. “Excuse me a minute.”
I left the table and went to fetch the box with Marilla’s unicorn. Orva, cooling down as quickly as she’d heated up, watched with Brian as I unpacked the little creature and set it on the table before me.
“Gosh!” Brian said.
Orva picked up the unicorn, turning it about in her fingers. “This is Marilla’s, isn’t it? Sybil doesn’t deserve a child like her. I didn’t know Marilla had done any work in clay.”
“She said my father showed her how,” I explained. “Could it be fired, do you think?”
“I have a kiln out in back. I’ll take care of it. It won’t last too long otherwise. I wish I had more to give Marilla as a teacher.”
“I showed this to Rick,” I said, “and he was surprised. Marilla’s shy and afraid of criticism, so she hides the things she does. But I think he’ll talk to her mother now.”
“Jed was the one who opened up her mind and her feelings,” Orva said. “And he loved her more than he could his own daughter.” She broke off abruptly, remembering that I too was Jed’s daughter, and set down the unicorn, blinking angrily.
Pain struck through me again. I had been a small girl once, and I too had been the recipient of Jed’s brief affection and encouragement. Before he got bored and went away.
“What Jed had,” Brian said soberly, “was the knack of stretching people to their limits. He could push down barricades because he never accepted limitations for himself or anyone else. I wish I’d never found him out at the end. I wish—” He broke off gloomily.
I could understand exactly what Brian meant. No one ever forgives the magician who reveals himself as human, and I wondered what my father had done to so disillusion Brian.
A silence filled with unhappy thoughts and memories settled on us, and Orva ended it by pushing back her chair.
“Leave the dishes,” she said. “Get along to your book, Brian. I want to talk to Lindsay.”
The time had come, and as I followed her from the table I wasn’t sure I was ready. When I looked back, her son still sat staring at the unicorn. Bearded men could mask their emotions better than most. Facial lines, mouths, were lost, so that only the eyes gave them away. When Brian sensed my attention and looked up, I saw a sadness in him that I hadn’t glimpsed before. He was far from being the mere follower that I’d first considered him.
Orva led me into her small study, where a battered wooden desk—probably a teacher’s desk, left over from a long-ago classroom—held a stack of children’s drawings and watercolors. Books piled upon books burdened the wall shelves, and she picked up a stack from a chair so that I could sit down. But there were evidences of her Jeep Tours business as well—steel files and a big ledger. And on the walls photographs of open safari jeeps in rocky settings.
“Things grow,” she said. “I can never figure out what happens when my back is turned, but when I return there’s always more of everything everywhere.”
She sat down in the modern leather chair behind her desk. A chair that appeared to flaunt its superiority over the rest of the furniture, and which I suspected must have been a gift from Brian. Orva’s tastes ran more to the old and trusted.
There was a moment of silence, and Orva’s eyes seemed filled with a barely suppressed excitement that made me thoroughly uneasy. With one finger she traced patterns in the prevailing red dust on a corner of the desk, and began with no preamble.
“I want to talk to you about Sybil. If you’re really leaving, then it doesn’t matter as far as your own comfort goes. But it does matter that you know something I’ve never told anyone else. Especially Brian. If you decide to stay—and in spite of what Clara told me, I have a feeling that you’re still not sure of anything—if you decide to stay, then I think you must be put on your guard. Sybil is a dangerous woman. The fact that you’re her sister doesn’t change that.”
She seemed to become aware of her finger tracing in dust, and stopped to wipe it clean with a piece of tissue.
“Get’s into everything!” she said, and then went on with what she wanted to say. “Brian makes allowances for how Sybil got the way she is. Maybe that’s something Jed was responsible for too. I think she’s always resented you because you were the one he loved best. But in the end we all have to be responsible for ourse
lves, for our own actions, no matter what has made us that way. Not that we always succeed! In Sybil’s case, it’s getting worse, and it’s the terrible things she can do now that matter.”
I sat very still, with my hands clasped in my lap to keep them from nervous movement. We were coming to the reason that had brought me here.
“Perhaps Sybil has changed in some way,” I said carefully. “Perhaps she’s become a woman who’s in control of her life and herself.”
“That’s exactly what she’s not. Because she always wants most what she can’t have. And she must punish those who hold it from her. She hasn’t had Rick for a longtime.”
I had to stop her, though I kept my tone even. “I’m not sure that’s my business, but I’m very sure it’s not yours.”
Orva spread her hands on the drawings before her, splaying her fingers. They were long, thin hands, brown from the sun, with nails that indicated earth digging without benefit of gloves. They were strong hands that pressed into the papers, as though to restrain her impatience with me.
“What is bound to affect Brian is certainly my affair.”
“Perhaps you don’t do your son justice. I suspect he can take care of himself.”
She slapped one hand on the papers with a quick violence that startled me. “Let’s not play games, Lindsay.”
“All right then—let’s not. You’re the one who brought me here, so perhaps you’d better tell me why.”
She made no denial and excitement was alive in her eyes. “How much do you know about the night your father died?” she demanded.
“I know only what Rick told me, and what little I’ve heard since I came here. He was apparently throwing one of his extravagant parties to bolster his latest scheme, and he invited a number of Sedona friends to attend. But why did any of you go, when you knew him so well?”
“Have you forgotten how persuasive he could be? Sybil gets some of that quality from him, when she chooses to use it. He was indebted to us all—as he admitted readily enough. He deluded us into thinking it was a party to pay us back a little for past generosity. We could easily have gone to Scottsdale, which is a lot closer, but he made one of his grand gestures and chartered a plane. In Arizona we can be a little snobbish about Vegas, but it was always Jed’s town. He was so beautifully, plausible. Of course when I look back, I marvel at how we swallowed it all and did as he asked.
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