Spindrift

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “I don’t like this at all,” Theo grumbled. “There will be unpleasant publicity in some of the papers. I’ll want Bruce to get on the phone to New York and play down the story as far as we’re concerned. Perhaps I’ll send him in.”

  “Why are you so uneasy?” I asked. “Redstones has been closed for a long time and this probably has nothing to do with you.”

  “Those bones may have been there when Redstones was still occupied, for all we know,” Ferris said. “The story is going to be pretty remote from us. I don’t think that’s any recent murder over there. I wonder if it’s a man or a woman.”

  Theo had moved the ivory carving of Adam’s “Lady Luck” to her desk, and she picked it up to turn it about in her fingers, as though she played with worry beads. After a moment of silence she looked up at me, her green eyes spiteful.

  “All right, Christy, you may go. I don’t suppose there’s any use in talking to you further about the damage you’ve been doing to Peter. We’ll just have to see that you have no further opportunity to harm him.”

  I kept my temper with difficulty. “I came here to talk with you. I don’t think you know what happened to me last night. Or perhaps you do?”

  She looked up sharply from the ivory figure in her hands, and Ferris turned from the window to listen. Fiona was very still at her desk. She, at least, knew what was coming.

  “What do you mean, Christina?” Theo asked.

  “You had some sort of drug put in the hot chocolate that Joel brought me last night. It must have been what they gave me in the hospital that used to send me out of my head and bring on strange dreams.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped.

  “I think you do. Anyway, sometime in the night my name was called at my door. I felt a compulsion to see who it was and I got up and looked into the hall. Down at the far end there was someone wearing my father’s plaid sports jacket. Because the drug was making my brain fuzzy I thought it was Adam and I followed him downstairs and into the ballroom.”

  “The ballroom!”

  “Yes.” I looked around at Ferris, but he had his back to me and he did not turn. “Whoever it was disappeared there and it was very dark except for flashes of lightning. But someone was there. Someone who meant me harm. That’s why I’d been lured into that place.”

  “Lured? Oh, Christina, I don’t know what you took before you went to sleep—if you took anything, but obviously something was befuddling your brain.”

  “I wasn’t that befuddled. I was aware of what was happening to me. By that time, of course, I knew it wasn’t my father, and I was terribly afraid.”

  Theo held me with her steady green stare. “I rather think you are making all this up, Christina. This is the way you used to talk in the hospital. You often thought things were happening that hadn’t occurred at all.”

  It was all I could do not to jump up and rush over to confront her there at her desk, but I managed to sit quietly. That much control I managed to achieve.

  “These things did happen,” I said. “Bruce knows. He came across from Redstones just in time, and he frightened whoever it was away. He found Adam’s jacket, and I brought it upstairs with me. I took it to Fiona’s room. So she knows too.”

  Fiona expelled a soft breath and Theo glanced at her sharply.

  “How did that jacket get away from you, Fiona?”

  She shook her head helplessly. “I haven’t any idea. I put it in a suitcase in my closet, as I told Christy.”

  Theo turned back to me. “I rather think you are playing games with us, Christina. Or else you’ve become completely unbalanced.”

  “You can ask Bruce. He was there. He rescued me.”

  “I shall ask him. But what he may say proves nothing. You’re quite interested in Bruce, aren’t you?”

  “I know what you tried to do,” I said. “I know how you planned to use him. He told me. It’s not going to work. I mean to stay with Peter.”

  Theo sighed as though she dealt with a recalcitrant child, and glanced at Ferris. “You used to have some influence with Christina. Talk to her, will you?”

  Ferris had said nothing till now, but he turned from the window and came to sit on the sofa beside me. His tone was kind, his manner gentle, but I thought he looked decidedly wary. He would believe what Theo wanted him to believe, and he half expected me to fly apart.

  “Christy, my dear, this is rather a wild story, and you can’t blame us for questioning it. Are you sure it wasn’t you who carried that jacket of your father’s down to the ballroom, where Bruce picked it up?”

  I’d begun to shake again inside and it was all I could do to hold onto myself. “It was either you or Joel,” I said. “It wasn’t I. But I wonder which one of you was trying to fool me, trying to coax me down there? Maybe it was even Fiona, or you, Theo?”

  Ferris put an arm about me and I jerked away, not wanting him to sense my trembling. “Don’t try to soothe me. I know something is happening. I know you want to drive me away, keep me quiet. I think you’d drive me out of my mind if you could. But I’m going to stay right here where my son is and I’m not going to let you injure me.”

  Deliberately, Theo set the ivory carving down on her desk and picked up a piece of yellow-green jade to hold it up for Ferris to see.

  “I don’t think I’ve shown you this.” She spoke as though nothing I had said mattered and it was perfectly natural to change the subject. “It’s something I found in New York a few months ago—down in Chinatown.”

  Ferris took the piece from her and examined it “Another lung-ma? Very interesting.”

  “Give it to Christina to hold,” Theo said.

  I was trembling and angry, but I took the curiously carved piece of jade from him. It seemed to be some sort of mythical animal with a dragon’s body and a horse’s legs. Stylized waves were breaking around its feet in the carving, and it looked vaguely familiar.

  “It’s a dragon-horse,” Theo told me. “A lung-ma. You can see that it is rising from the waves of the Yellow River and it carries the Books of Knowledge at its side. Let your fingers explore it, Christina. Jade has a calming effect upon the nerves.”

  I wanted nothing more than the courage to throw the bit of jade right in Theo’s face, but of course I didn’t. I let my fingers smooth the rounded back of the creature and explore the carving. Jade, I knew, was as hard as a diamond, but where a diamond flashed fire, jade was translucent. It caught and reflected the light with a glowing quality that was unlike that of any other precious stone. In my fingers it felt cold, hard, smooth and strangely pleasant to touch. I let myself concentrate on it because I wanted to be calm.

  “I used to have another lung-ma,” Theo went on, speaking to Ferris. “The one you remember. It formed the handle on the cover of the box that held my jade book. It was one of my most valuable pieces, but at some time or other it must have been stolen back in New York.”

  “I’ve often warned you about carrying pieces of your collection around with you when you travel,” Ferris said. “The insurance problem is enormous when anything is lost.”

  Theo flicked her fingers at him, and the ring of green jade and pearls on her hand glowed in the lamplight from her desk.

  “You know I mean to enjoy these things. If I have to lock them up or leave them behind, they do me no good. And I haven’t lost much over the years. The ivory carving has come back to me. So only the lung-ma is missing. It was a particularly good example of mutton fat jade.”

  My fingers froze on the small creature in my hands. The term she had used was ringing through my mind. Mutton fat. “MUTTON FAT AND TYCHE,” my father had written on that slip of paper I’d found in his secret pocket. Tyche had proved to be the ivory lady. Mutton fat was apparently a type of jade.

  “What’s the matter, Christina?” Theo was staring at me. “You look positively transfixed. Is my jade having such an effect upon you?”

  “Perhaps,” I said lightly. I stood up and gave the lu
ng-ma back to her. There was no point in remaining here any longer and submitting myself to her insinuating attacks. I had better things to do.

  “If I were you,” Theo said as I moved toward the door, “I’d go and lie down for a while. You’ve obviously had a bad night, whether real or imagined.”

  I went through the door without answering and fled down the hallway and down the stairs to the second floor. Just one place was my goal at the moment and I hurried down the wing that led to Zenia’s sitting room. I had found Tyche there, and I remembered now that she had been resting upon a box with a jade handle. If Adam had put these things in Zenia’s room, he had set them together on the mantel—and made that record on a slip of paper. Temporary hiding, perhaps, but with the intention that they should be found if he did not have a chance to produce them? The maid who dusted this room would be new, and she would see nothing amiss. Theodora, I gathered, had not been here since her return to Spindrift.

  No one had closed the window draperies since I had last opened them, and daylight flooded in so that I needed no additional light. On the mantel sat the long box with a white jade dragon-horse on the lid. But it could wait a moment. Before I looked into it I wanted to check one other thing. I opened the drawer where I’d seen Fiona hide Ferris’s automatic pistol. The gun was gone. I searched beneath the papers in the desk, but it was not there. No matter. There was nothing I could do about that now.

  The wooden box was heavy in my hands as I picked it up and carried it to a table. I had to thrust aside a basket of shells and several small china birds to make room.

  Mutton fat was an unlikely and not particularly attractive name for jade that seemed to glow with a white light. I took the little dragon creature in my fingers and lifted. The lid of the long wooden box came free easily, as it had done before, and I saw again the green slabs inscribed with gold characters. A “jade book” Theo had called it. I lifted the top slab out and there was another underneath, and another under that, until the box was nearly empty. Eventually there was only one slab of jade left. But where I had stopped before when I’d thought that the box contained only these slabs, this time I took out the last one and saw that long sheets of paper had been folded double and placed in the bottom of the box.

  The hand-printed scrawl sent a pang through me because it was as familiar as a loved face. My father had written these lines, and these undoubtedly, were pages from the missing log. The dates were right—this was the time just before he had died. I sat down in Zenia’s rocker and began to read, completely absorbed, oblivious to everything around me. The scrawled phrases were clipped, hurried, a sort of shorthand to record his thoughts.

  The Martin Bradley affair. An old scandal in his past. The “woman in blue” the papers called her. They said at first that she was selling him out. Then they said worse. That he was involved in handing over the documents in the case. Bradley is a ruined man. The same with Malcolm Courtney. A photograph of him in the notorious Amber Club. “Gay” isn’t all that acceptable in politics as yet. He tried to fight, but Hal Moreland was too strong. A brilliant career finished.

  I stopped reading, remembering. My father had admired both men. He had known them both, and had been concerned with the crash of their careers and with the suffering they had experienced, the damage to their families. But they had both dropped from the public eye several years ago. Why had my father been interested enough in them to make this record in his log and then hide it away? Hal Moreland, it was true, had helped to break these stories and expose both men. But what had that to do with my father’s death, or with anything in the present?

  The next line stood alone and the words leaped at me:

  That wasn’t Courtney in the faked picture.

  The movement in the room behind me was so swift, so quietly secret that I heard only a faint rustle before the smothering folds came over my face. My chair rocked wildly as I fought up from it, to struggle against the deadly pressure across my mouth, my nose, covering my face and stopping my breath. I could feel the strands being knotted at the back of my neck and I clawed at them, gasping for breath. Hands seized me and flung me across the room so that I fell against Zenia’s desk, striking my temple as I dropped to the floor.

  I must have been stunned for a moment. Then my hands were tearing at the soft material across my face, snatching it away so that deep breaths of air could flow into my lungs. I got shakily to my feet, looking about the room. There was no one there and I ran to the table where the slabs of the jade book lay. The pages from my father’s log were gone. I had led someone to them and he had taken advantage of my absorbed reading to whip this silk stuff across my face so that I would be prevented from stopping him, so that I couldn’t see him.

  I looked at the silken material for the first time and saw that it was one of the bright batik scarves which Theo had brought back from a trip she’d made to Thailand with Hal. The soft blue and gold strands had been torn by my ripping, but I remembered the scarf. It was one Theo had given to Fiona after that trip.

  My head was thumping and I felt the small swelling at the hairline gingerly. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but I had lost what I’d come here for.

  I tried to remember any sound I had heard just before the attack. Had there been a slight rustle—like the movement of beads in that curtain? Someone could have stood there watching me through the beads, just as I had watched Fiona.

  The jade book was of no further use to me, but I put the slabs back in the box and covered them with the lung-ma lid. Then I went out in the hallway, carrying the box in one hand and the torn scarf in the other. I was going upstairs to see what Theo made of this.

  But before I reached her room Joel came out of Peter’s and looked at me in surprise.

  “What’s the matter, Christy? You look white as paper.”

  I dangled the scarf at him. “Someone just tried to smother me with this. Because I’d found the pages of my father’s log and I was reading them.”

  “Christy, what are you talking about? Is this more of your—”

  I interrupted impatiently. “Whoever it was threw me across the room and I struck my head as I fell. You can see the lump, and I assure you I didn’t put it there myself.”

  He examined the bruise on my head with a light touch that nevertheless made me wince. “I don’t like this, Christy. How much did you read?”

  “A little. Enough to get an inkling of what may have been going on.”

  Joel looked alarmed. “There’s been enough of this. I’m going to take you back to New York and—”

  “You’re going to do nothing of the kind,” I told him sharply. “I’ve had a hint of what my father was about, and I’m not going to run away. Whoever used this scarf is the person who shot Adam. I’m sure of it, and I’m going to find out who it was.”

  Joel was hardly one to be masterful or argue me down, and he said nothing more as I walked past him along the hallway, carrying scarf and box. Theo must be told about this. She could not go on blaming everything that happened on my imagination.

  But when I reached the Green Sitting Room only Fiona sat at her desk, and she looked around at me guardedly as I came in. I placed the jade book on the glass-topped table and stood for a moment twisting the scarf about one wrist.

  Fiona began to make nervous conversation. “I’ve just been addressing an invitation to Jon Pemberton for Theo’s party. She’s decided to invite him.”

  I couldn’t help flinching at mention of that particular name. I still hated to think of Joel lowering his standards to work with Jon Pemberton. But other matters were more important now. I held up the scarf to Fiona.

  “I think this is yours, isn’t it? Have you worn it recently?”

  “Why, yes—I suppose I have. But I couldn’t find it the last time I wanted it, and I couldn’t remember where I might have left it.”

  “Perhaps you left it in Zenia’s sitting room,” I said. “It was used just now in an effort to smother me. Because I had found the pages of Adam’s
log and started to read them.”

  Fiona gasped and put a hand to her mouth. I couldn’t tell whether her surprise was real or counterfeit.

  “What was it about Martin Bradley and Malcolm Courtney that Adam wanted to uncover?” I asked her.

  “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “There was a published picture of Courtney, supposedly taken at the Amber Club. Adam said it was a faked picture.”

  Fiona crossed her arms over her body as though she protected herself from a blow. Once she tried to speak, but the words would not come. She looked so dreadful that I went to the cabinet where Theo kept a few bottles and glasses, poured some brandy and took it to her. She drank a long swallow and seemed to steady herself.

  “Fiona, why did you hide Ferris Thornton’s automatic pistol?” I asked.

  She had recovered enough to look carefully blank. Or perhaps she was beyond being startled by anything more.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you do. You carried it to Zenia’s sitting room and you hid it under some papers in her desk. I was there in the dressing room. I saw you through the bead curtain.”

  For a moment she hesitated, and her eyes avoided mine. Then life seemed to come into them and she reached out her hand and clasped me by the wrist.

  “Then you’d better forget what you saw, Christy. Forget all about it and stay out of trouble.”

  “There is trouble, isn’t there?” I said. “I have stirred up the sleeping beasts, as Bruce says.”

  She choked and took another swallow of the brandy. I had been standing beside her desk and now I drew over a chair and sat near her. I had upset her again and I needed to let her recover.

  “Yesterday Joel took me out in the Spindrift,” I said. “For the first time he talked about the day when his brother and sister were drowned.”