“I don’t mind, but what are you talking about?”
Fernanda gestured toward the back of the car. “Open the door and look. I’m really pleased with myself.”
Dorcas did as she was bidden. Beth’s strong canvas bag sat on the floor of the car, its sides bulging, its mouth zippered shut.
“Look inside,” Fernanda urged. “Go ahead and open it.”
Dorcas slid the zipper back and spread open the top of the bag. The moment she touched it, she knew. The thing inside was hard and cold and rough to her touch.
“You’ve stolen one of the catapult balls,” she accused.
Fernanda laughed. “In broad daylight, too! Believe me, those things are heavy, even though I picked one of the smaller ones. No one paid the slightest attention. Of course I chose one that was outdoors and in a convenient place. I simply rolled it into the bag and carried it to the car.”
Fernanda looked thoroughly smug and pleased with herself.
“Johnny will make you put it back,” Dorcas said. “You’ll land us all in jail and there’ll be an international incident. What are you going to do—take it up to your room? Keep it in a hatbox, perhaps?”
“And have the maids report me? No, indeed. I’ll leave it right where it is. Johnny never rides in the back seat. I’ll drape this old jacket of mine over the bag and he’ll never notice it.”
“How are you going to get a thing like that through customs and out of the country?” Dorcas asked. “What do you want it for, anyway?”
Fernanda took the key from the ignition and got out of the car. “I’ll think of something,” she said, joining Dorcas on the sidewalk. “It’s not as if it were really valuable. Those balls are all over the place. There must be hundreds of them. It will make a lovely doorstop at home.”
“Perhaps the authorities would give you one if you asked,” Dorcas suggested.
“And spoil my story?” Fernanda was indignant. “Don’t you dare tell Johnny—” She broke off, looking up at Beth and Vanda on the terrace above. “Beth seems to have made a friend.”
Beth knelt on the flagged terrace petting a yellow tiger cat, while Vanda stood by without objection. The look on the Greek woman’s face arrested Dorcas’s attention. It was a soft, mothering look—almost a look of possession, as though Beth had begun to belong to Vanda Petrus.
The pang Dorcas felt took her by surprise. Intent upon Vanda, she ran up the flight of steps with a suddenness that frightened the cat. It scratched at Beth, escaped from her grasp, and sprang from the terrace to scoot off down the street.
Angrily, Beth held out her scratched arm for Dorcas to see. “You scared the cat away!” she accused. “It wouldn’t have hurt me if you hadn’t scared it like that.”
At once Vanda knelt beside the little girl, tenderly examining the faint oozing of blood. Her eyes when she looked up at Dorcas were as resentful and accusing as Beth’s.
Fernanda had seen the incident. She came up the steps, speaking with authority to Vanda.
“There’s a bottle of antiseptic in my medicine bag. Take Beth upstairs and fix that scratch. Here’s the key.”
Beth had begun to cry, more in frustration over the loss of the cat than because of any hurt. She allowed Vanda to pick her up and carry her away without a backward glance for her mother.
“I could have taken care of the scratch,” Dorcas said.
Fernanda ignored her protest. “You’ve got to stop this. I can understand these upsets of yours, but you mustn’t let them disturb Beth. This is something I won’t have.”
“You won’t have?” Dorcas flung the words back in a challenge. “Sometimes I think you forget that Beth is my daughter.”
All Fernanda’s easy good nature had fallen away. The determination that could drive and govern her was in the set of her chin, in the far from guileless look in her eyes.
“That you’re Beth’s mother is something I never forget,” she said. “I hope you’ll not make me regret the fact. Gino isn’t here to watch over her, but I have a responsibility to Beth.”
The thing Dorcas had feared was in the open. The threat she had more than once been aware of in Fernanda had been put into words.
But even as she recognized it, the other woman softened. “I’m sorry if I was sharp, Dorcas. But you must get yourself in hand. You mustn’t be the sort of mother who is bad for her own child. If you hadn’t rushed up the steps just now without a particle of forethought, nothing would have happened. You behaved as though you were jealous of Vanda’s liking for Beth. And that won’t do. Now let’s forget it. I’ll take you up on your offer to do some work for me this afternoon. Perhaps what you need is more to occupy you and take your thoughts off yourself.”
Dorcas had to admit that there was justification in Fernanda’s words. She had once more behaved without discipline or self-control, put on instinctive guard by the look on Vanda’s face, and responding with the single desire to break up that scene.
She followed Fernanda upstairs and for the rest of the afternoon worked on the portable typewriter in Fernanda’s room. There were copious scribbled notes to set in order, and the adding of her own impressions that Fernanda felt would be useful later. Vanda was sent out for a walk with Beth and there was an obvious effort on the part of both women to keep the child away from her mother.
In a sense the work for Fernanda was calming, yet Dorcas could not give her entire mind to it. At the back of her thoughts questions grew insistently.
Was Fernanda the wise, sensible one, the balance Beth needed against the emotional vagaries of her own mother? Or was Fernanda’s blind determination so bent on separating Dorcas from Beth that she was ready to seize upon any excuse that came her way?
Once, when Fernanda went out and left her alone at the typewriter, Dorcas rested her elbows on the keys and pressed her face into her hands. No one else could help her in this. She must help herself. She must stop leaping in fright at every shadow. That was Gino’s influence upon her reaching out from the past. She must learn to distinguish the real from the unreal. She must recognize where danger might truly lie, and where the threat was only part of her own lively and fearful imagination.
There was no good reason as yet not to accept Vanda’s interest in Beth and be grateful for it. The woman had suffered terribly in the past. The very sight of other women’s children must prod old wounds she carried. It was to her credit that she could give affection to a child not her own and from whom she must be parted before long.
This was the only reasonable attitude, Dorcas told herself. There was nothing wrong with her ability to reason and she must give Fernanda no further excuse for taking over with Beth.
Her fingers busied themselves on the typewriter keys and she forced her attention upon Fernanda’s notes. Yet at the back of her mind voices whispered, accusing, defending, and would not be quiet. The old voices of self-doubt.
6
That evening when she went out to a late dinner with Fernanda and Johnny, nothing more was said about what had happened. Fernanda was full of a gay account of her first encounter with officialdom. Apparently the Greeks were proving themselves a match for Fernanda and could themselves take off down some pretty unexpected roads.
It was ten-thirty by the time they returned to the hotel and Dorcas went directly to her room. Beth lay asleep and the room was dark except for a shaft of light coming through the adjoining door to Vanda’s room. Dorcas looked in to say she was home and found the woman sitting in a straight chair with her hands in her lap, her eyes staring into space. She recognized Dorcas’s presence with a start and said good night to her gravely. Dorcas closed the door between the two rooms, suppressing an urge to lock it.
When she had turned on a lamp, she stood beside Beth’s bed, looking down at the sleeping child. One young arm had been thrust above the covers and to Dorcas’s touch its soft flesh was warm with sleep. Beth’s lips were parted, the other hand curved beneath her cheek. The sight of her sleeping daughter was heart turning. She co
vered the exposed arm and knelt beside the bed, studying with love the delicate contours, the fine soft tendrils of dark hair. She wanted so much for Beth. She had to make up to her for so many things. She could not afford to fail. Not Fernanda or anyone else could do more for the child than she—granted wisdom and balance and a healthy mind. For Beth’s sake she must find in herself all these things.
Later, when she was in her nightgown and had switched off the lamp, she stood for a few moments in the balcony door. The quarter moon had risen and the mountains of Anatolia looked black against the deep dark blue of the sky. The Aegean was faintly gilded, its surface aswell with moving light. Across intervening roofs came the usual soft rush of wind and always the sound of the sea washing over pebbled beaches.
There were few sounds from the hotel. It was early for the tourist season and the rooms were not yet full. This was a quiet, residential street, with little traffic. Lights gleamed and vanished and gleamed again among trees ruffled by the wind. Somewhere a voice was raised in a minor key that cried of heart’s loneliness. A song that must surely have its origin in the Orient—a heritage of Turkey’s four hundred years in the isle of Rhodes.
She turned at last from the cool touch of the wind, purposefully leaving the balcony doors ajar. Chalk marks on a rail had meant nothing and she must begin at once to prove her ability to distinguish between reality and foolish make-believe. She slipped between the covers gratefully, feeling more at peace with herself than she had in a long while.
When she fell asleep she did not know, or when the moon rose high and bright and the narrow light pattern from the balcony doors widened, spreading a bar of gold across the floor. She awakened with a start that set her heart thudding and knew that the pattern of light and shadow in the room had changed disturbingly. The sense of peace was gone.
She sat up in bed and stared at the double doors of the balcony. Where she had left the aperture narrow, it was flung wide. Both doors stood open. The open half at the foot of her bed blocked her view of the balcony, but she could see the expanse of floor where a long shadow stretched part way across the room—a shadow that wore the shape of a human figure.
She cried out in soft terror and there was movement at once. The shadow vanished and the band of moonlight lay unmarred upon the floor. Thinking only of danger to Beth, she slipped out of bed and ran barefooted to the balcony. There was no one before the door, and she dared not step outside. She slammed the doors shut and fastened the catch with fingers that fumbled clumsily. Then she ran to the door into Vanda’s room and pulled it open without knocking.
The woman sat up in bed as Dorcas called her name, reaching at once for the switch on the bed table lamp. She seemed wide-awake and completely alert as she got out of bed in her coarse, old-fashioned nightgown. She brought her own flannel robe to wrap about Dorcas’s bare shoulders.
“What is it, madame? What has happened?” she asked.
Dorcas could scarcely still the chattering of her teeth. “There was s-s-someone on the balcony. A man, I think. He’d opened the doors into my room. He was going to come in when I woke up and frightened him away.”
Vanda did not hesitate. She went at once to her own closed balcony doors, pulled them open, and stepped outside.
“There is no one,” she said. “It is a dream, perhaps.”
Dorcas did not wait to answer her. “Stay with Beth!” she ordered, and ran into the hall from Vanda’s room. There had been someone on the balcony—someone who meant her harm.
The hall was empty, but she went to the door of Johnny’s room and rapped. He came sleepily to open it, and she told him in a breathless whisper what had happened. At once he did as Vanda had done. He ran through Vanda’s open door and out upon the balcony. Then he stepped to the portion of balcony opposite Fernanda’s room and called to her softly. She answered at once, and a moment later she had come along the narrow gallery and through into Vanda’s room. She was enveloped in layers of blue nylon in a matching gown and peignoir, her face aglow with cream, her hair bound in a silken net that tied under her chin.
As always, Fernanda’s enormous vitality was instantly alive. She took charge with hardly a pause for questions. After a quick look into Dorcas’s room, where Beth lay asleep and Vanda, a tall, thin figure in her long nightgown, stood guard beside the child’s bed, she motioned to Dorcas to sit down in the one comfortable chair in Vanda’s room. She took the straight one, and Johnny, in pajamas, and as barefooted as Dorcas, stood beside Fernanda, watching.
“Tell me just what you think you saw,” Fernanda said.
“There was someone on the balcony outside the doors to my room,” Dorcas repeated. “It could have been either a man or a woman, but I think it was a man.”
“What do you mean—could have been either? Did you see this person? Don’t you know how he looked?”
“I only saw his shadow,” Dorcas said. “I left my doors almost closed, and when I awakened they were wide open and there was a shadow across the floor.”
Fernanda and Johnny exchanged a look. Fernanda went to Vanda’s balcony doors and set them ajar. In a few moments the wind had blown them wide open.
“There was a shadow,” Dorcas said, and her voice trembled into an indignant quaver. “I didn’t dream this. I saw the shadow of whoever was out on that balcony. I think he was coming into my room.”
Fernanda sighed. “If there was someone there, where could he have gone? He’s not out there now.”
“Through one of the other rooms, I suppose,” Dorcas said. “There are probably empty rooms through which he could have escaped. Perhaps he’s hiding in one of them now.”
“Would you like me to call the desk clerk and have all the rooms on the balcony side searched?” Fernanda asked with an edge of exasperation in her voice. “We’ve probably waked half the hotel by now, so we might as well wake the other half.”
Dorcas looked at Johnny and saw pity in his eyes. He was not impatient with her now, but merely pitying in his disbelief. None of them believed her. Not Johnny Orion, or Fernanda, or even Vanda Petrus, who had come to the adjoining door to listen and add her own attitude of doubt to the feeling in the room. There was an almost tangible reproach in the air, a rejection of her claims. This same feeling had been in evidence so many times at the nursing home where Gino had sent her. Then the only way to allay it had been to pretend surrender. Pretend that reality was not real, that the things she knew and believed had no validity. But this was Rhodes. This was Greece. Her new life was to be born here and she would not give in to this coercion of disbelief that tried to force her in a false direction.
“If I hadn’t cried out, he would have come into the room,” she repeated stubbornly. “If I hadn’t awakened, I don’t know what would have happened.”
“But you did awaken and everything’s all right,” Johnny said.
Fernanda shook her head. “There’s no use trying to reassure her when she gets into one of these tizzies. They were common when she was ill. Gino often told me about them.”
Dorcas put her hands over her face and held herself very still, very quiet. She tightened the very muscles of her stomach to keep them from quivering, and planted her two feet firmly on the floor, pressing down hard. She must not lash out in frustration. She breathed deeply, long, slow breaths, until the quivering died and the impulse to fling futile, angry words at them subsided. She was under control again.
Johnny came to her and drew her hands from before her face. She saw in his eyes that same pity that she would not accept, had no use for. He put a hand beneath her chin to tilt up her head, and she winced away from his touch in sudden revulsion. Her very skin remembered the touch of Gino’s hand in just such a gesture, and her rejection was instinctive.
Johnny drew back his hand at once. “I’m sorry,” he said, his tone cool.
She could not explain that her revulsion had not been for him. Always that gesture had been a prelude to a mockery of love and the beginning of shame and terror.
&nb
sp; “If it would help,” Johnny said, “I could fix a bed for myself on the balcony outside your room. Would you feel better if someone was there?”
He was treating her like a child who’d had a bad dream and she shook her head firmly. “I’ll be all right I’m sorry I disturbed everyone.”
“That’s a good girl,” said Fernanda with a sigh of relief. “Lock yourself in and never mind the fresh air. It was probably the sense of that open door that upset you.”
Vanda returned silently to her room and Fernanda to hers. Johnny checked the clasp on the balcony doors and saw them secured before he went across the hall to his own room. When Dorcas had locked the hall door after Johnny, she went to Vanda’s door and turned the key. The she hurried to pull out the bureau drawer where she had left her handbag. Swiftly she opened it and felt for her passport case. The folded envelope and the letter within were still in their hiding place.
She bent over Beth for a moment, listening to her soft breathing. Then she got into bed and pulled up the covers. She was shivering again but she could not help it.
If only Johnny believed. If only he had not been sorry for her—sorry and unconvinced. She would rather have his impatience than his pity. Impatience meant he thought her capable of control. Pity told her he was looking at someone ill and helpless.
When she fell asleep at last, it was to struggle against some smothering dream that she could not remember in detail when she awoke. She knew only that she dreamed of weeping and that there had been a voice speaking to her, words that commanded. “Give up the letter! Give up the letter!” the voice had said over and over.
She awoke drenched in cold perspiration, the words repeating themselves in her mind. To whom was she to give up the letter? Perhaps she had only to leave it upon her dressing table when she went out of the room in the morning. Leave it there until the hidden watchers found it and took it away. Then they would leave her in peace and there need be no more dreams of weeping.
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