This was even more surprising. “Ty Frazer is your grandfather?”
“Not really. But all us kids call him that. He teaches us about mountain things. Stuff our dads and moms don’t know.”
“I see. And why did Grandpa Ty send you here?”
“He said I should give you this and tell you to take it and go away.”
Zach fumbled in a jacket pocket and brought out a small, somewhat battered jewel box. When I’d accepted it from him, he ran along the deck, swung himself onto the tree branch, and disappeared before I could ask him anything more.
I took the little box into my room and sat down at the desk to open it. Packed into grubby cotton was a slim bracelet of silver links. Every few links along, a tiny silver bell was attached. When I held the bracelet up, the bells tinkled musically. It was a beautiful trinket, but I wondered why Ty had sent it to me. However, I had a very good suspicion about the woman it might have belonged to.
Ty was Victoria’s brother, and who else could this lovely bracelet have belonged to but Victoria? And if I was right, even more questions were opening up. Some of these could be answered only by Ty himself. Did he know who I was?
I picked up a phone book of the Lake Lure area and looked for Finella and Gordon’s number. In a moment, I was dialing their home. Finella answered, sounding cheerful and warm, welcoming whoever called. I told her that something had come up and I needed to talk with Ty Frazer.
She showed no surprise. “He’s not easy to reach. Mostly, we just wait until he turns up. Gordon’s out back feeding our two cats, but I’ll let him know you want to see Ty, in case he runs into him.”
When I’d thanked her and hung up, I went back outside and stood at the rail, once more looking out at that great crouching mountain that always drew my eyes.
Movement on the walk to the boathouse caught my attention. Gretchen Frazer was climbing toward the inn. She saw me at the railing and stopped below me.
“Mind if I come up?” she asked.
I didn’t feel like talking to anyone else tonight, but I suspected that her request was more like a command, so I invited her up cheerfully enough. If the grapevine had been busy, she would know about Roger Brandt’s visit.
I waited for her at my open door and she strode in, bristling with indignation. “That actor isn’t welcome on these premises,” she told me.
I explained at once that I’d had nothing to do with bringing about his visit. She slumped into the room’s one armchair while I sat in the straight desk chair and waited for her to go on.
“What did he want?” she demanded.
“I suppose he intended to tell me off.”
“About what?”
“Remember, I told you that Natalie Brandt had asked me to continue with my husband’s documentary about Roger Brandt. He came here to make sure I wouldn’t touch Jim’s project.”
“And will you?”
I shook my head. “No, probably not.”
Her indignation faded a little. “Of course he’d be afraid that you wouldn’t be as sensitive to his story as Jim had been. He likes to control people and events. He was slowing Jim down, setting limits. I heard about this from Jim himself.”
“Do you suppose that Jim uncovered something the Brandts don’t want to see exposed?”
She hesitated, and I wondered whether Gretchen knew more than she was willing to tell me.
“Who knows? They’re strange people, the Brandts. What does it matter now, if the whole thing’s being dropped?” She dismissed my question with a wave of her hand.
“It might matter if it had something to do with how Jim died.”
She considered this somberly. “I suppose that’s a possibility. Ty thinks—” She broke off, shrugging.
“Gordon has told me what Ty thinks,” I said.
She shook her head wearily. “It never does any good to count on what Ty thinks. He’s been confused for a long time about a number of things.”
“Natalie would really like me to pick up this work. She feels her grandfather should be remembered.”
“Hah! Don’t talk to Natalie. Talk to Camilla—if they’ll let you. Roger wouldn’t let Jim Castle interview his wife. So of course Jim was all the more eager to ask her questions he knew he couldn’t ask Roger.”
“You talked to my husband quite a lot, it seems.”
“We’d become friends to some extent, since I can be a good listener. I know he wanted me to talk about Victoria, and maybe I would have eventually, if only to spite the whole Brandt clan. Of course, Jim was a romantic. He built up the Victoria Frazer–Roger Brandt legend into something bigger than it really was. I suspected that he’d sensationalize the story—in a dignified way, of course. I liked your husband very much, Mrs. Castle. He was what my mother used to call a ‘gentleman,’ back when the word had meaning.”
“Thank you,” I said, and then abruptly changed the subject. “Did you see your sister’s baby before it was sent away?”
Gretchen stared at me for a moment and I saw her sadness. “Of course I saw her. I wanted to keep her, but Victoria didn’t want her to grow up around here. Even though I promised to move away if I could keep her, she chose to send her to friends in California.”
“Couldn’t Victoria have kept the baby?”
“How could she in that day? The scandal would have made it impossible, much as she loved her baby. Besides, Victoria must have had other plans for herself by that time.”
“You mean suicide?”
“What else?”
But Gretchen didn’t look at me now, and I sensed that there might be more that she wouldn’t tell me. After a moment, she continued.
“I tried to keep in touch with Margaret after Victoria died. But she wrote only occasionally. When she grew up, she came to see me just once. The visit didn’t go well, since we were strangers. I don’t know now whether she’d dead or alive.”
Her sadness and loss ran deep, and my feelings toward Gretchen softened. I knew about my mother’s one disturbing visit to Lake Lure.
“What was she like—Margaret?” I spoke softly. Now I was getting close to old mysteries my mother would never talk about.
“She was afraid of this place. She hated the lake and that mountain out there. She didn’t try to meet her father, and he never knew she was here. That was just as well. No matter what he pretends, I can’t believe that he ever forgot Victoria or forgave himself for what he’d done to her. He might even have tried to claim his daughter.”
“That wouldn’t have pleased Camilla.”
“Of course not. But Roger usually does as he pleases.”
I asked the same question I’d heard before. “Why would he live here, after all those terrible things had happened?”
Gretchen looked out at the dark lake. “He is the Keeper of the Legend.”
“What does that mean?”
“Anything you like. Perhaps the real reason why he stayed was to punish Camilla.”
“Why? Wasn’t she the injured one?”
“He loved my sister. He couldn’t imagine losing her. That’s why he insisted on staying at Lake Lure after Blue Ridge Cowboy was finished. The studio was trying to avoid scandal, so they came up with another movie for him set in these mountains. He wouldn’t leave Victoria, you see, and she was in seclusion about ten miles from here, waiting for the baby to be born. Camilla would never have permitted a divorce. Oh my, no! And laws were pretty strict in those days. I could never understand Roger’s appeal, but I think Camilla loved him. And she would never have given him up. So when he decided to stay here, and bought the house he’d rented, he forced her to choose—either live here with him or go back to California alone.”
None of this quite satisfied me. “Have there been other women?”
“Who knows? He doesn’t stay here every month of the year. He was a young man—he had to do something with his life. Now and then, he leaves his family and goes off on his own.”
“He doesn’t sound like a very lovabl
e person.”
“Lovable!” The word rang with derision.
“If I could have kept Margaret—such a sweet little baby!—everything would have been different.”
Again sadness touched her voice, and I could guess how empty the years must have been for her—with the sister she’d loved gone, her brother lost to the strange life he’d chosen, and the baby out of her reach.
She pulled herself back to the present and stood up abruptly. “It’s better not to poke into all that unhappiness, Lauren.”
She went to the door without further ado. “Good night, Mrs. Castle.” She’d turned formal again. “I just wanted to tell you to stay away from all the Brandts. Don’t let Roger beguile you with that actor’s role he plays. And be especially careful with Ty. These days, he lives in his own fantasy world.”
I assured her that I would be careful—whatever that meant—and closed the door.
When I went to bed, I slept soundly, with no vision from the lake to disturb my peaceful dreaming. Breakfast arrived early, as I’d requested, and when I’d eaten, I phoned Natalie to set up the date for the meeting with Roger. Apparently, she had already been told that I was to come over. Though she sounded puzzled, she asked no questions. She would pick me up in the early afternoon—around two o’clock.
So now I had a free morning on my hands. My primary mission at the moment was to locate Ty Frazer, since I wanted to know more about the bracelet he had sent me.
Around nine, I got into my car and drove down to the little cluster of buildings near the landing that was Lake Lure’s business center. There I found Justyn Brandt walking along the dock where the Showboat was moored. I hadn’t seen him since Natalie had taken me off his boat yesterday. Though his look didn’t seem to approve of me, I had something to ask him, so I ventured over.
“When I was in Finella’s shop yesterday, I saw the painting your daughter made of a spaceship that seemed to be crashing on top of Rumbling Bald. Finella said that you and your father were actually on the mountain when this happened.”
He lighted up with an animation I had seen in him only when he was talking to his passengers on the lake tour. The story was one he had probably told many times before and he seemed willing to repeat it again.
“I was only a teenager when it happened, but that was the most exciting experience of my life. Dad and I were climbing Rumbling Bald that afternoon, when a fierce storm broke. A strong wind came up and the sky turned dark as midnight. But before we could take shelter in a cave, lightning flashes showed us some strange sort of aircraft just above the summit. We were free of trees there and we could see it clearly. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It looked as though it was about to crash, but we couldn’t hear anything because of wind and thunder. With the next flash, the sky was empty, and we were pretty sure it had gone down.”
He stopped, lost for a moment in his own vivid memories, and then continued.
“We tried to fight our way to the top, but it took us another half hour just to go five hundred yards. It was rough going because of all the debris from the storm and the mud. I’d never thought much about UFOs, but I’ll never question their existence again. I know that’s what we saw; it couldn’t have been anything else. But we couldn’t get to the top that night to verify what we’d seen.
“Afterward, of course, nobody believed us. That was back in the fifties and our own government was telling us there wasn’t any such thing as a UFO. By the time we got back—in the middle of the next day—army intelligence had soldiers up there restricting access to the area. They claimed they were on maneuvers and that’s why the area was off-limits, but Dad and I suspected a cover-up was going on. Two days later, they were gone and so was every trace of whatever we saw. There was still a scorch mark on the ground where something had slid along, but that was it. Even today, that same hush-hush policy is in effect—though the public is waking up to what’s going on.”
We had been walking along the boards of the landing, but now Justyn turned back toward the boat, where passengers had begun to gather.
I stopped beside him. “Did you talk to Jim about this?”
He hesitated, as though wondering how much he should tell me.
“My father doesn’t like me to discuss what we saw—which wasn’t much, really. You have to remember that the whole thing was pretty scary at the time, with the sky filled with black rain and rolling thunder. I was seventeen, but, believe me, I was pretty frightened. Dad said people would make fun of us, and we needn’t look like fools.”
Justyn stared off toward Rumbling Bald. “We searched the woods all around, but we never found any other trace, and we never knew for sure what had happened. It was as though the whole thing had been a dream.”
We had been walking slowly toward the boat as we talked, and now there was more I wanted to ask him. I searched my handbag for Jim’s letter and drew out the scrap of green material. Justyn took it from me, seemingly puzzled.
“What is this?”
“Jim left it for me in a letter he gave to Natalie. I think it was cut from something larger. He wrote that I could trust Gretchen and Ty, but no one else. He had come to believe that Victoria was murdered.”
Justyn spoke sharply. “I doubt that. And I’m not sure your husband’s views could be trusted.”
“You didn’t like Jim, did you?”
“I had no reason to,” he said coldly, and I remembered that he was Natalie’s father, and Natalie had been all too interested in Jim.
He was still examining the scrap I’d given him. “Will you let me have this piece of material?”
I didn’t mean to give it up, and I took it back. “First I want to find out what it means.”
“I wish you luck,” he told me dryly, his manner dismissive. I watched as he herded his passengers aboard the Showboat and started the motor for the noisy trip around the lake.
Finella’s shop was just across the highway, and I walked over to see whether she had heard from Ty.
7
When I stepped into Finella’s shop, she was waiting on a customer who was examining woven wall hangings. Today a mint green jumpsuit seemed to complement her cheerful manner. She brushed a strand of red hair from her cheek and smiled at me.
I waited until she was free and then told her about Natalie’s request that I continue with Jim’s work.
“And will you?” she asked.
“That’s what Roger Brandt was upset about, but I’ve said I wouldn’t. The only reason I would go ahead is because it’s a project that would give me access to more people I’d like to talk to. About Victoria Frazer, especially.”
Another customer came in and I wandered off idly among display tables. I still wanted to ask when she expected to see Ty. As I rounded the display of Gordon’s drams, I saw a woman sitting on a couch at the back of the store. It took a second glance to recognize Camilla Brandt. This morning, she looked trim in white twill trousers topped by a navy shirt. Her black hair was covered by a wide-brimmed straw hat with a navy band. Again she seemed completely assured and just as intimidating as I remembered.
I wasn’t anxious to talk with her and I would have disappeared into the kudzu room, but she looked up and saw me. Instead of the polite mask she’d worn yesterday, her face lighted, her smile surprisingly friendly.
“Mrs. Castle! I’ve been wanting to see you again ever since my granddaughter told me that she had asked you to continue your husband’s work. Can we talk about it? I do hope you will consider doing this.”
Her words astonished me, after everything Natalie had told me.
When she gestured to a place on the couch, I went to sit beside her, feeling hesitant and a bit wary.
“I’m glad to have this opportunity to talk with you away from the house, Mrs. Castle. Can you tell me about your plan for this film?”
I had no idea whether she knew that her husband had come to the lodge to see me last evening or that I was to visit their house this afternoon, and her very friend
liness made me uneasy and uncertain. She seemed to be a complex woman, whose motives might be difficult to read.
“Nothing is decided yet,” I told her evasively. “I’m not at all sure I have the ability or even the wish to pick up Jim’s work. Your granddaughter’s suggestion came as a surprise.” I said nothing about her husband’s opposition to any such plan.
“What you have,” she assured me calmly, “is an intimate understanding of the subject because your husband cared so deeply about this project. You would bring a certain sympathy to it, and you’re not an outsider.”
Her interest mystified me. “Did you like what Jim was doing?” I asked.
“I was against it at first, since I thought it might create problems. Along with all his success and national popularity, my husband endured a certain amount of—shall we say—adversity.”
To put it mildly, I thought. “I’m not sure my approach—if I tried to do this—would be the same as Jim’s. From what Natalie has told me, his focus was on Roger Brandt. But I might want to take a different approach.”
Finella was free again and had come near us, listening with interest.
“What do you mean?” Camilla asked.
I answered quietly, watching for her reaction. “I would want to include Victoria Frazer. After all, the actress made an important picture with Roger Brandt. I would talk with Gretchen Frazer, Victoria’s sister, if she was willing to help me. And perhaps to her brother, Ty. Though of course this may be futile even to think about.”
Camilla Brandt crossed her knees and swung a long, aristocratic foot in its white pump. The movement seemed to give her time to consider. Beneath the brim of her shadowing hat, I could see again the puckering of the scar on her cheek.
“It might be interesting if you could accomplish this,” she mused. “Something of Victoria Frazer’s true nature might even emerge with such an effort.”
I nodded, but I suspected that Camilla Brandt’s prejudiced viewpoint would not be mine.
“Since I’m staying at the lodge, I’ve already spoken to Gretchen Frazer a couple of times,” I said.
“Does she know what you intend to do?”
Star Flight Page 10