Spindrift

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  He seemed to relent, to unbend a little. “Why not? The room is in the other wing, right on this floor.”

  I left my things on the bed and followed him through the door and down the hall to the opposite wing.

  “Theo found the room exactly like this when she moved in,” Bruce said as he reached the door ahead of me, “and she was delighted to keep it this way in Zenia’s memory.”

  The door was not locked and it opened easily. No one had ever told me about this room before, and I walked into a rather small, crowded area with the feeling that I was stepping into the past. This was late Victorian at its last ebb, with touches of the Edwardian and turn-of-the-century American. A red velvet Hepplewhite sofa with a brocaded seat nudged a deeply buttoned red velvet chair that might have come out of the Crystal Palace. A tapestry footstool was set close to the chair and a small rosewood table held sewing things. The carpet was undoubtedly Aubusson, while the lamp on a round table was a Tiffany and belonged to this century.

  What could be seen of the walls was a periwinkle blue, but the color was almost completely hidden behind the pictures, plates, framed needlework and other oddities that covered them. Some of the paintings and prints were good, others were mawkish and luridly colored, like calendar art. Zenia’s taste had been catholic, to say the least.

  I moved about, intrigued and delighted with this personal museum. Because of her portrait as an appealing young woman and because of the tragedy of her last years, Zenia was coming to life for me, and I wanted to know her better. I paused before a small rosewood desk with a drop leaf on which rested a silver inkwell and a silver pen holder, noting that Madam’s morning book lay open on the desk, as though she had just put it down. The faded directions to housekeeper or butler could still be made out in a rather deliberate script.

  “I wonder if she still comes and sits in this room sometimes?” I said. “It must have been so totally hers—her private haven.”

  Bruce nodded. “I can’t see old Patton-Stuyvesant spending much time among all these frills.”

  Above the white marble of the mantelpiece a mirror with an ornate gilt frame reflected the room. I looked into the glass at the man behind me and caught his eyes upon me with a certain solicitude I hadn’t expected. Perhaps Bruce Parry was sorry for me too—and I didn’t want that. I turned away from the glass and faced him, bringing back the present.

  “Ferris is going to keep an eye on things over at Redstones from now on,” I told him, “but at least I’ve been vindicated as far as the light goes.”

  “Ferris?” There was a questioning note in Brace’s voice that alerted me. I waited.

  “Never forget that Ferris Thornton is Theo’s man,” he went on.

  “Not always,” I said. “Not any more than you are. I’ve heard him counsel her when what he said wasn’t welcome at all. But he’s been my friend too, since I was a little girl. I trust him.”

  There was a closed look about Bruce’s face, as though shutters had come down over his thoughts. It was a look that made me uneasy and I caught him up quickly.

  “Do you know something in particular about Ferris that I don’t?”

  He regarded me steadily for a moment and then shrugged. “No, nothing.”

  “All right,” I said. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to. My father thought the world of him.”

  “Did he?”

  The quiet phrase was disturbing in its challenge. I remembered what Fiona had said about Adam quarreling with Ferris a day or two before he died. But then, Adam seemed to have been quarreling with everyone those last few days. Something had driven him, but I had no idea what it was.

  “I believe I’ll go over to Redstones and have a look around for myself some night,” Bruce said, and I knew he had closed the topic as far as Ferris was concerned.

  He was studying me again, directly this time, not just in the glass, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. It was a tantalizing look, not pitying now, but rather curious, as though there was something about me he couldn’t make out.

  Uncomfortably, without knowing why, I turned back toward the mirror and began to examine the small ornaments on the mantel. That was when I saw it—the tiny object that did not seem to belong in Zenia Patton-Stuyvesant’s room. Here again was a tiny Japanese lady carved in ivory, and surely sister to the one Theo had shown me. Her fan was raised coquettishly beneath her chin, and the hint of a smile curved her lips. She stood upon a long, narrow box with a lump of jade for a handle, but it was not the box which interested me. For all the assorted knickknacks, I did not think this little geisha figure had ever belonged to Mrs. Patton-Stuyvesant.

  Bruce had turned away from me and was roaming the room, stopping beside Zenia’s desk, opening its drawers. With a quick movement that he did not notice, I cupped the carving in my hand and slipped it into the pocket of my slacks. If this was the same figure that had disappeared from Theo’s New York house, then it was the one Adam had called Tyche, or Lady Luck. I didn’t know how she had come to this room, or what she could possibly tell me, but I had to keep her with me for now. Perhaps later I would return her to Theodora Moreland.

  “Sit down over there in the button chair,” Bruce said from across the room.

  There was such a peremptory note in his voice that I looked at him, startled.

  “Why do you want me to?”

  “Don’t argue and ask questions,” he said. “You can be as obstinate as your father. Just sit down. I want to try something.”

  He had found a pad of paper in Zenia’s desk, but he had rejected her silver pen for a ballpoint from his own pocket. When I went in puzzlement to sit in the chair he had indicated, he began to draw swiftly on the pad.

  “Are you an artist?” I asked.

  He smiled at the word. “Perhaps I might have been, if I hadn’t gone in other directions. Sometimes the urge to catch something on paper still comes to me. Sit still—don’t wriggle.”

  No one had ever wanted to draw me before and I felt faintly flattered, but while he worked my mind turned to other things and I touched the small ivory figure in my pocket. How had Tyche come to this room? Had my father placed her here? And if Theo had missed her, why hadn’t she been discovered here? Or could Theo herself have put her on the mantel?

  Bruce paused in his swift sketching to regard his work with dissatisfaction. But when he started to crumple the paper from the pad, I jumped up and held out my hand.

  “No fair! The model has a right to see what the artist drew.”

  He handed it to me reluctantly and I examined the sketch in surprise. I didn’t know why he should be dissatisfied, because in its hurried way it was very good. Except that he had made me look too young, with my hair tousled and my eyes wide, gazing off into distance. This was a young girl with a soft mouth that somehow held an entreaty.

  “I’m not like that,” I said regretfully. “Not any more.”

  “I think you are,” he contradicted. “But I haven’t done you justice. Not nearly. Do you see the chin line? I’ve made it soft, and yours isn’t.” He reached out and drew a finger impersonally along the line of my jaw and my skin tingled at his touch. “Your chin belies your mouth. You’ve got a bit of Adam’s chin.”

  I don’t know why his words reached me so unexpectedly and poignantly, but suddenly there were tears in my eyes. Tears that spilled over and ran down my cheeks. Why should it be, I thought ruefully, that this man was always around on the occasions when I burst into tears. I had never been a weeper before, but lately my emotions were all too close to the surface.

  He put a hand gently on my arm. “Well, now,” he said, “go ahead and cry if you want to. But I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  His words undid me further. “It’s just that—that everything came back and hit me so suddenly. It does sometimes. And then for a few minutes I can’t bear it that Adam is gone Where is he? What has become of him? Why can’t he speak to me?” I was wailing now, without control.

  “I know,” he
said. “I know. I’ve felt like that.”

  I didn’t know what he meant or whom he had lost, but there was understanding in him and he wasn’t just pitying me—he was feeling with me.

  I fumbled in my pocket and when I drew out my handkerchief the ivory geisha flew out with it and fell to the carpet a little way off. Bruce heard the thud and went to pick it up. He didn’t return the carving to me, but stood examining it. Then he whistled softly.

  “Lady Luck!” he said. “Christy, where did you find this?”

  I waved my hand. “Over there on the mantel. I knew it didn’t belong here. Theo showed me its twin sister this morning.”

  “I’ll return it to her,” he said. “She’ll be glad to have it back.”

  That wasn’t what I wanted, but there was nothing else to be done—since I didn’t want to explain. And there was nothing the small figure could tell me anyway. At least I had recovered myself.

  “Why did you call it Lady Luck?” I asked.

  “Because that’s what Adam nicknamed it. Or Tyche. I don’t know what a geisha would have thought of being given those names, but perhaps she’d have been tolerant toward such whimsy, as any geisha was supposed to be tolerant of the whims of men. Like Fiona.”

  “Is Fiona tolerant?”

  “She used to be. At least of Adam’s gambling.”

  “I’m not sure now,” I said. “For one thing I think she’s afraid of something.”

  Bruce made nothing of that and the shutters were down again as he looked at the carving in his hand. If he knew anything of Fiona’s fears, he was not going to tell me.

  “Fiona says Adam carried that little figure home from Theo’s house one time,” I went on. “He had a theory that it brought him luck. But he would have given it back. So how did it come to be here at Spindrift in Zenia’s room?”

  “That’s something of a mystery, isn’t it? I’m afraid I couldn’t guess the answer.”

  “May I keep your drawing?” I said.

  He smiled at me and my wayward heart turned over a little. “Of course, if you want it. I wish I could do something better.”

  I walked to the door and out into the corridor because I didn’t want to be alone with Bruce Parry another moment. Something was happening to me that mustn’t happen. I was Joel’s wife. Peter was our son. I mustn’t feel this attraction to another man.

  He was too perceptive and I think he was aware of my lack of ease as I moved back toward the Red Room, and I sensed a faint amusement in him that stiffened my spine.

  “Thank you for showing me Zenia’s room,” I said a bit curtly. “Now I’ll go and get settled in my new place.”

  I hurried away and he didn’t follow me down the hall. When I glanced back at my own door, I saw him heading upstairs—probably to return to Theodora Moreland.

  I was thankful that this was another room to which Theo had attached a bath, and before I hung up my clothes I washed the tear streaks from my face, more than a little angry with myself, more than a little impatient. I wasn’t a young girl, to be bowled over by unexpected sympathy and consideration. I was alone in the problems that faced me, and I had to remain alone. Besides, Bruce Parry’s very kindness might be the tactic he used with foolish women, and I didn’t mean to be betrayed by it. I wouldn’t be again.

  Yet I couldn’t help carrying Bruce’s sketch to the window where I might examine it more carefully. He had portrayed me sympathetically, and with some strange perception he had drawn the girl I used to be. She wasn’t so far away in time. Only months ago she had existed—until that New Year’s Eve when music in Spindrift’s ballroom had hidden the sound of a shot fired in the Tower Room. She had died too that night, the girl Bruce had drawn. Of course he had known me then, and he could have drawn this from memory, perhaps not wanting to sketch what he really saw in me now.

  I put the sketch away in a drawer, regretting something I had lost, and went to tap on Fiona’s door. Probably she was still upstairs with Theo and I wouldn’t find her here. But her voice bade me enter and I went into the room.

  She still wore the yellow sweater and gray skirt I had seen her in earlier in the day, but she had kicked off her shoes and stood in her stocking feet by a long window that looked out toward the ocean. There was a glass of faintly colored liquid in one hand, and by her blurred look as she turned from the window, I suspected it was not the first today. I wanted to protest that Adam would have hated her drinking alone, and in the morning, but I held back for the moment.

  I told her about my excursion to Zenia’s room with Bruce and of finding the carved ivory figure.

  “I’m glad it’s turned up,” she said. “Theo’s been making nasty cracks about Adam’s taking it.”

  The face she turned toward me with its wide cheekbones seemed thinner and more drawn than I remembered. Her light brown page boy hair had lost some of its luster and her eyes had that blurred look as she faced me. With a start, I realized that I hadn’t really been noticing Fiona lately.

  “But why was it there?” I pressed her. “Could Adam have put it in that room? If Theo missed it, why hasn’t it been noticed there?”

  She took a long swallow of her drink and shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps no one ever looked, since it disappeared from the other house. Theo hardly ever goes to that room, and the servants here are all new and wouldn’t know about it. Anyway, what does it matter, so long as it’s been found?”

  “A lot of things matter that no one is paying attention to,” I said. “For instance, what’s troubling you, Fiona?”

  She drained the rest of the liquor in her glass and her eyes did not meet mine.

  I had to speak out. “Adam wouldn’t like this.”

  “Adam, Adam!” She waved the empty glass at me. “Adam’s gone. He’s left me to fend for myself. I never thought he would. I thought he’d always be here to take care of me, Christy. He was so strong, so dependable.”

  No, I thought—not always dependable. Not with his gambling.

  There were tears of self-pity in her eyes, liquor induced, no doubt, since I never remembered Fiona as self-pitying.

  “It’s time you told me what you quarreled about the night my father died,” I said. “I came to your door earlier in the evening and I heard you, so there’s no use denying it. Unfortunately, I went away without staying to listen. But now I want to know what was wrong. Is wrong.”

  “Why? What good will it do to dig up old pain, old problems?”

  “It may help me find out why my father died. That’s the reason I’m here—to find out the truth. And I think the truth begins with you.”

  “All right,” she said, capitulating unexpectedly. “I’ll tell you. We had a fight over something Adam wrote in that log he kept.”

  I knew what she meant by his log. For as long as I could remember my father had kept a sort of running listing of happenings in what he called a “log.” There were stacks of these long, narrow notebooks that he had kept over the years, all written in his own sort of printed shorthand that he adopted when he wasn’t using a typewriter. He would scribble about plans, or comment on happenings or people he had met during the day. The notes were useful to him when he wanted to refer back to any happening. He used to sit at his desk in the apartment every night and write them up before he went to bed. There had always been an unspoken law that the current pages of his log were private, and I would never have thought of opening one of those books.

  “How did you happen to see what was in it?” I asked.

  “I looked. Oh, I knew about the sacred rule, but I had to find out what he was up to.”

  “And did you?”

  “You’ll never know because I’m not going to tell you.”

  “What happened to that last log?”

  “I don’t know. It disappeared and never turned up among his things.”

  “Was that what someone ransacked your apartment to find after his death?”

  “If it was, they never found it, because I’d looked first. So I could
destroy it.”

  “Do you think he destroyed it?”

  “Never. I think he brought it here with him when he came to Spindrift that last time. If it’s anywhere it must be around here. There were too many important matters set down in it for him to destroy those pages.”

  “What sort of matters?”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” she repeated, looking suddenly stricken. “It’s dangerous enough that I read some of what was in that notebook. I wish I hadn’t. Oh, God, I wish I hadn’t!”

  She moved toward the bed with her usual angular yet graceful gait and flung herself across the spread. The empty glass dropped from her fingers and rolled under the night table.

  “There—I’ve told you the cause of our quarrel. Now just go away and leave me alone. If you had any sense at all you’d get away from this place while you still can.” She drew an arm across her face, hiding the look in her eyes.

  “Because there’s a killer around? Is that what you mean? Because I might be in danger too if I don’t keep still like a good girl?”

  She turned over on her stomach and began to cry into the pillow—long, wracking sobs such as I had never heard from her before.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she moaned. “I don’t know what to do!”

  I hated to press her further when she was obviously suffering, yet this was not the time to be merciful—not when I might be close to something I needed so badly to know.

  “It would help if you would tell me the truth, Fiona. Don’t shut me out.”

  She only went on crying and I knew there was a hopeless impasse between us.

  “Can you tell me which one of them you’re afraid of?” I asked. “Which one of them has you so terrified?”

  The sobbing ceased and her shoulders were still. The voice that reached me was choked and barely distinct. “Oh, Christy, most of all I’m afraid of me. Where have I gone? I’m not like me any more. I’m not Like the woman Adam married.”

  She had struck a note that made us sisters. I too had lost the self I used to be, and I reached out to touch her shoulder in sympathy.