Spindrift

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  The other part of the threat against me had been more serious—an effort to stop me if I knew anything dangerous, or to keep me from finding out something that would be dangerous to an unknown hunter. This was the part that was over now unless the hunter still feared that I had read too far into Adam’s pages. Perhaps I could dispel this by letting everyone know just what I had read. I had begun to do that already. What little I’d had time to discover had pointed no finger of guilt at anyone.

  But there was still more that faced me. There was the whole problem of Bruce. Now I felt that if he wanted me to, I would go to him. I owed Joel nothing any more. Yet how could I turn to Bruce unless I could take Peter with me? That was what Theo would fight. Even if Joel never lifted a finger to keep me, Theo would see that he kept Peter. When Bruce held me I wanted only to be with him. Yet when I was out of his arms I was tortured by the problem, not only of keeping Peter but of the hurt I would deal my son by taking him away from his father.

  The whole thing was too big for me, but at least I had an ally now. I would put all this aside until Bruce came back to Spindrift and told me whatever he had been able to discover.

  I stood up, bracing myself to return to the household. I must now try to make myself an agreeable part of it, try to shrug off Theo’s cuts and Fiona’s weeping, try to face Joel as though nothing had happened. But first, I would find Peter and see how he was faring since his ordeal at Redstones. He would probably be awake now, and perhaps I could have lunch with him in his room.

  But as I walked toward the door the Tower Room seemed to pull in around me in some strange way. It was as though it were saying to me, “You must remember what happened here. That is what you must think about while you are in this room.” Arthur’s portrait looked sternly down at me from the wall and I wondered what terrible sight that unwavering gaze had witnessed here last New Year’s Eve.

  When I had gone into the hospital my thoughts had been confused and I had been unable to understand what had happened. I had been instinctively sure, knowing my father, that he had not killed himself. Yet the gun had been his. No one had come to this room bringing the weapon with him from outside. Nevertheless, nothing I knew about my father could make me believe that he had turned that gun upon himself. If he had carried it, it must have been for protection, because he knew that someone might try to stop him from what he meant to do.

  Suppose that person had come here. Suppose it was my father who had turned the gun on him to stop him. Suppose there had been a struggle, so that while my father held the pistol it was twisted against him and the trigger was pulled. It could have been intentional—it could have been an accident. But it had never happened because my father had intended it. Whoever had forced the pressing of that trigger had had time to get out of the room and out of my sight before I came in to find my father dying. Such a struggle could have been equally possible for either a woman or a man.

  There seemed to be a new clarity in my thinking, as though for the first time I had stopped floundering in a morass of grief and denial, and had begun to look at my father’s death with an objective appraisal that I had never managed before. For the first time I had begun to accept its reality, and this was another step toward the healing of grief.

  First, in the beginning, I had been numb and disbelieving. Everything had seemed unreal—not to be accepted. Then, as grief gradually enveloped me, I had tried desperately to recover him through memory, through old pictures and the news stories he had written. Perhaps, under normal circumstances, I would have evolved from that morass to the place where I could accept his death as real, and true healing would have set in. Then I might have comforted myself with happier memories, without trying to force him to be alive again. But I’d had no chance, because into the deepest period of my grieving had been thrust the lies about Adam, about his death, and when I had fought them in a hysteria that was part grief, part helpless frustration, Theo had seen her chance and I had been sent to the hospital.

  It was as though a wound which was open and raw and ready to fester had been frozen into that state. What they had done to me in the hospital with the help of drugs had drawn a deceptive skin of supposed healing over pain that throbbed beneath the surface. The wounds of my father’s death and of the withdrawal of my son from my care were never allowed to heal properly. The cure of the second wound was clear as I drew closer to Peter. Healing was effective there. But I had convinced myself that the first wound could only be healed when the truth was known and justice was done. I had become numb and insensitive to all else. Only now, because of my new feeling toward Bruce, had some of these things been shaken into a truer perspective. Adam was dead and I must stop hurling myself blindly into danger because of an unreal belief that exposure of the truth would somehow bring him back to me. I still wanted the truth to be known. I owed him that. But I wanted it less wildly and recklessly. My father was dead and nothing would ever bring him back. Acceptance of this fact had at last put me upon that long road to healing after loss from which I had been detoured and held back from the true goal.

  I could at last look about me more calmly in this room, and try to find what it had to tell me. If only that person who had struggled with my father had left some evidence of his presence behind. But the police had found nothing and there had seemed to be no reason to believe that Adam had been attacked. If I could only discover something—something real which I could take to Lieutenant Jimson, whose ear I believed I might now have, however skeptical he might be—then perhaps we would be on the way to the truth.

  But there was nothing. Nothing at all. Even the rug upon which two people might have fought, and which had borne the stains of my father’s blood, had been taken away. The closet was empty of my father’s clothes, and the desk of the few things he had left upon it. The bed had long ago been stripped of sheets and blankets. There was nothing here the police had not examined and re-examined. And mute furnishings could not talk, any more than could a watchful portrait on the wall.

  I made one more cursory search of the room, to no avail. I even got down on my hands and knees and looked under the desk, patted the floor beneath it to the very molding—without result. If the carpet had been removed, undoubtedly a maid had been sent here to vacuum and dust as well, so even if the police had missed something, it would be gone by now. It was only my own sensitivity to this room that made me feel it might have something to tell me.

  I was still on my knees, searching idly, when my fingers touched some tiny object wedged in a crack against the molding that the vacuum had missed. I drew it out to find in my hand a single diamond earring clip. I knew whom it belonged to. I remembered seeing Fiona with both clips on her ears when I had talked to her the evening of the ball. And I remembered her later, wearing only one clip.

  Whether it meant anything, I couldn’t tell. She had been in this room later, along with the rest of us. She could have lost it at any time. But I would keep it and when it seemed opportune I would confront her with it She might be startled into telling me something.

  I went out of the room in search of Peter, eager to have lunch with him, if that was possible. But when I reached his room he only looked at me with new resentment.

  “It’s your fault this happened to me,” he said, gesturing toward the cast on his leg. “Grandma Theo says it’s all your fault.”

  So now I must begin all over to find a loving relationship with my son. But I would do this. I had to do it, and there was more courage in me now.

  I talked to him as gently as I could about the need to place first blame where it belonged. I could blame me, but he must first examine his own actions and see if any blame was to be found in him before he looked outward. Whether my words had any effect on his thinking I couldn’t tell. He remained sulky and withdrawn, and I didn’t stay for lunch with him after all.

  15

  In the days that followed, there seemed to be a change in the climate at Spindrift. Perhaps some of this was due to a change in me. I was no lo
nger entirely alone, and I was no longer the center of a whirlpool, so perhaps they all reacted to this in varying degrees, however warily. When Joel and I met again he was studiously polite and I treated him with equal courtesy. We were not even friends any more, and it didn’t seem to matter. Only now and then would some reminder of the life we had shared arise to stab me with old memory. But I hardened myself and refused to be vulnerable. What was over was over.

  Perhaps during this time I even matured a little when it came to my attitude toward Adam. I loved my father no less, but I tried to think of him more objectively. I could see now that I hadn’t always been fair to Joel in the comparisons I had made between him and Adam. In this new and developing relationship with Bruce I must beware of doing the same thing. I must remember that Bruce was his own man. I must stop being too much Adam’s daughter. I still owed my father the truth, but I did not owe him my life.

  During this time there was a little unpleasant publicity in the papers concerning the grisly find at Redstones, and perhaps there were more sightseers than usual following the Cliff Walk for this time of the year. But their interest was an outside thing, and we were only aware of it from a distance.

  Theo had now been fully caught up in her plans for the Sargent ball and had little time for considering anything else. I was giving no immediate trouble, and perhaps she had postponed dealing with me until after the party. Fiona seemed to have relaxed to some extent and she appeared calmer as she ran errands for Theo, wrote letters, consulted with Mrs. Polter, the dressmaker, and went with her to Providence to purchase materials. I sensed that she was avoiding me, but I didn’t mind. I was not afraid of Fiona, or of anything she might do. That single diamond earclip hid its fire in my jewel case and I waited for my right moment.

  Even Ferris seemed to unbend toward me and regard me with a less critical eye. One morning he stopped me outside of Peter’s room and spoke to me in the old way, almost fondly.

  “I’m glad to see you more like your old self, Christy. It’s as though you’ve crossed some area of white water and come out into a calmer pool. And I’m glad you’ve decided to stop tormenting Theodora.”

  For an instant the old indignation rose in me, but I thrust it back. “I thought it was Theodora who was tormenting me,” I said. “Though for the moment she seems to have forgotten me.”

  We smiled at each other in almost friendly fashion and after that he was more approachable, more like the man I remembered from my childhood. Once he even took Peter and me for the Ten Mile Drive out along the ocean, looking at the old “cottages” and talking about the days when they had been the center of life for Newport. Peter was in a “walking cast,” using crutches quite agilely, and rather impressed with the drama of his situation.

  We eventually had had a good talk about his escapade at Redstones, and for the time being Theo was too busy to work against me with my son. Peter was not always agreeable, and I often came upon disturbing traces of Theo’s influence, which I had to work subtly to counteract. But at least he accepted me as a mother again, and we had some good times together. I put out of my mind the unhappy questions of the future. I would have to face them—but not now.

  Only with Joel was I unable to show this new and calmer self. I was on edge and wary whenever he was present, and I think he felt just as wary with me, for all our attitude of cool courtesy. Once he too made a trip to New York and I gathered it was for a consultation with Jon Pemberton. He talked to his mother about it when he returned, as I heard from Ferris, and he brought another stack of manuscripts back with him from the office. But he avoided the subject when I was around and I wondered if knowing how I felt gave him any sense of guilt in having lowered his standards. Once he had shared so many details of his work with me. But that was long behind us. He turned entirely to Theo now, and there was the coldness of antagonism between us. I no longer knew the thoughts which moved behind those remote gray eyes.

  Mrs. Polter had finished my dress for the ball and was working hard on Theo’s “Madame X.” She had finished the Lady Macbeth costume for Fiona first of all, but Fiona had refused to model it for anyone but Theo, who was enormously pleased with Mrs. Polter’s work.

  Bruce stayed away no more than three days, and of course when he returned he became a central part of this halcyon time for me. What he had found in his study of back issues of The Leader appeared to corroborate what I had suspected from reading those few paragraphs of Adam’s log. But it did not advance matters in any way. In a strange sense, I was almost relieved. I had developed a certain resistance to trouble—as though I could hold it off for a little while, if I let everything alone.

  I was thriving, not only mentally, but physically in this new atmosphere which pervaded Spindrift, and I felt a reluctance to disturb it with disquieting news. There would be time enough later. Let me rest for a while and recover from all that had happened to me. I didn’t want to start a new trend of upsetting events. Not yet. And so I ate and slept well, and gained a little weight, which Bruce said became me. I put off coming to grips with the situation between Joel and me. I ceased to prod for answers concerning my father, and I grew well, grew almost happy. Bruce was near and there were moments when his eyes sent warm messages, or his hands might touch me lightly in passing and I knew what lay ahead between us. Yet I was not ready to take any steps toward bringing it about. I clung to my calm and postponed.

  Of course all of this was deceptive. It was only the lull, the quiet eye of the storm, and the real hurricane still whirled on its course just out of sight.

  Only one thing of interest occurred during this period. Lieutenant Jimson came to see Theodora Moreland. Fiona had developed a cold and was staying in her room, so Theo had asked if I would type some letters for her.

  She was in an amiable mood and when she chose she could be agreeable and charming. While she worked at papers piled on her desk, I sat in Fiona’s place and tried to recover my rusty skill at the typewriter. Someone phoned from downstairs to say that the lieutenant was here, and Theo asked that he be sent up to her right away.

  Since she did not dismiss me from the room, I stayed where I was and Jimson nodded to me when he came in. Theo waved him into the chair near her desk.

  “You’ve some news for me?” she asked.

  “In a sense. Laboratory tests indicate that the bones which were found over there at the next house are fairly old. They probably date back forty years or more.”

  Theo seemed relieved. “I’m glad it isn’t someone from the present. That might mean more nastiness, investigations and all that sort of thing. But bones that are more than forty years old needn’t concern us. Have you any sort of theory?”

  Jimson considered her question soberly. “I don’t like to deal in theories. And no identification seems possible at this late date. He was put into that armor without a scrap of clothing to identify him. And there doesn’t seem to have been any missing persons recorded from Redstones or Spindrift in the past years.”

  “You said ‘he.’ Does that mean you can tell definitely?”

  “Yes. The bone structure is that of a man. And the chances are he died a violent death or his body wouldn’t have been hidden like that.”

  Theo looked interested. “Can you tell how he died?”

  “His neck was broken. Could have been a fall, of course. But then why hide the body?” Jimson stood up. “I had to be out this way and I thought I’d stop in and tell you.”

  Theo thanked him and he said good-bye, gave me another nod and an unexpectedly inquiring look before he went out of the room. I wasted no time pondering the mystery of unknown bones, but finished the letters Theo wanted me to do and gave them to her.

  “Thank you, Christy,” she said, still agreeable. “You are looking much better these days. There’s a sort of bloom about you. As if you were going to have a baby. Or as if you were a woman in love.”

  I didn’t rise to the bait. “If you’re through with me, I think I’ll go look in on Fiona,” I said.
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  She didn’t try to hold me. “You do that, Christy.”

  It was all too amiable. Too pleasant. I didn’t trust her, but I was thankful to accept this lull in hostilities while it lasted.

  I found Fiona propped up in bed with the sniffles, a red nose, and a box of tissues beside her. She was reading a mystery novel open against her hunched knees.

  “I won’t ask how you feel,” I said. “But is there anything I can do? Can I get you anything?”

  “Thanks, Christy. There’s nothing. I just have to live and weather this.”

  I told her about Jimson’s visit and what information he had given Theo. “It seems strange to think of some man whose name we don’t even know dying from a broken neck and being hidden at Redstones in that weird way. There are all sorts of violent possibilities in that story.”

  “There are violent possibilities everywhere,” Fiona said huskily.

  I didn’t want to follow the morbid course of her words. In the past few weeks I had begun to insulate myself from horror. I didn’t know whether this was true healing, or just an escape from events that could no longer be borne.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to Theo,” I said. “She couldn’t be more pleasant and agreeable. Do you suppose she’s thinking up some new torment?”

  “She doesn’t confide in me,” Fiona told me. “Not any more. I suppose I’ve disappointed her too many times.”

  I sat down in a chair beside the bed. “Was it you, Fiona, who came to my room and touched my face that first night?”