by Zenith Brown
He made a gesture of dryly amused deprecation.
When Fish looked at Polly Randolph he was startled by the guileless wide-eyed wonder in her face.
“Misdeeds? I haven’t an idea what you’re talking about. Did I accuse you of misdeeds, for heaven’s sake? I don’t recall it if I did.” She smiled at him. “It couldn’t be that the guilty flee when no man pursueth, could it, Count de Gradoff?”
De Gradoff moved to settle himself in the spindly gilt chair, smiling at her, amused again.
“You seem to have forgotten that day at my house, Miss Randolph.”
“Not at all. We just don’t seem to remember it the same way.”
A cautious light flicked on in his suddenly watchful blue eyes. She picked up her glass as if dismissing the whole thing, and put it down abruptly.
“All right,” she said. “I was frightened. I might just as well admit it. But it wasn’t you. It was your friend who frightened me.”
“My friend?” de Gradoff was puzzled. Fish felt the warning nudge of her knee against his. “What friend?”
“The woman who was there.”
“My dear Miss Randolph.” He laughed again. “There was no woman there. Except yourself, of course.”
“Look, darling.” Her brows were arched. “It doesn’t make the least difference to me. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone. I never gossip . . . not for free. I’m saving up till I get a column of my own. So you don’t have to be cagey with me. I shan’t tell Dodo.”
He was not frowning at her so much as making a serious effort tinged with caution to try to understand her.
“I’ll admit you acted as if she wasn’t there.” She laughed. “That’s what confused me so. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. You didn’t even look at her when she came in from the garden with the basket of carnations.”
“Carnations?” de Gradoff asked slowly.
“Carnations, darling. You know. Flowers. Very fragrant. I waited for you to introduce me, because she obviously wasn’t any servant. She put the basket on the table and started looking for something. A letter . . . because you must remember when she looked at the ones you had on the coffee table, before she went over to the desk and started writing one.”
It seemed to Fish Finlay that something was changing behind the smiling mask of de Gradoff’s face.
“She seemed so unhappy about the dust all over everything. I hadn’t noticed it until she kept looking at it. That’s when I realized you didn’t have any servants in the house. It all seemed so odd. Especially when she started talking to herself . . . silently, she didn’t say anything aloud. That’s when I got really scared. I thought you’d both lost your minds, and it scared the living daylights out of me. I just wanted out. I was almost fainting. It was so hot, with the room all closed up and the fire burning. And the smell of carnations always makes me a little sick.”
She sniffed lightly. “I can almost smell them now. I really can, as a matter of fact. Somebody’s perfume, I guess.”
De Gradoff leaned forward. “This woman, Miss Randolph . . . what did she . . . look like?”
Polly laughed a little. “She hasn’t changed too much, has she? Except for the way she’s got her hair done. I didn’t have any trouble recognizing her when she came in with you and Dodo this evening.”
“Oh!” de Gradoff sat back a little. He was still puzzled. “My cousin Alla . . . ?”
“Oh, no. I know Mrs. Emlyn when I see her. She wasn’t with you tonight when you came in, she was back with the Davises. I mean the woman. . . . Look, you know who came in with you, for heaven’s sake. The woman with the red-gold hair, sort of sherry-colored eyes, quite a long neck, lovely looking. . . .”
She raised up a little in her chair. “I don’t see her now, but I saw her a little while ago with some other people, looking at Dodo’s rubies. But that’s what alarmed me at your house that day. It was silly, I know.”
De Gradoff’s face was the curious color of coffee with skimmed milk in it. She smiled at him.
“I don’t know what misdeeds you thought I was accusing you of. But I’m glad you told me, because Dodo’s an old friend of mine. I’d be awfully uncomfortable if you thought I was carrying a judgment seat around with me. Good Lord!”
She laughed and pushed her chair back. “I know you’ll excuse us now, I want Mr. Finlay to meet—”
De Gradoff did not seem to be hearing her. He had got up and bowed, and he went off holding himself stiffly erect, like a man afraid to look to either side to see who might be walking with him.
Polly Randolph moved her chair forward again, her eyes fixed on him.
“So I make things up out of whole cloth, do I? Let’s see how he likes that one. But what’s happened? He’s different. He isn’t the least worried about me any more. Or he wasn’t.”
“Not when he came over,” Fish said. He added gravely, “I wish to God you’d left it that way. Why did you—”
“I’ll tell you later. It’s something—”
She broke off as some people came to the next table, and lowered her voice. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m leaving early in the morning. They’re sending me abroad to cover the fashion shows. As long as I’m here, believe me, I’ll—”
She stopped short and looked quickly behind her. “Oh, darling!”
Jennifer Linton was standing a yard from them, still poised in the act of taking the last step, arrested there as motionless as one of the marble nymphs on the balustrade. Her lips were parted, her eyes wide, shifting from de Gradoff going stiffly erect into the house over to her mother hysterically gay at the large table.
Polly reached out her hand. “Come and sit down, Jenny.”
Fish Finlay jerked himself out of a slow-motion universe, his awareness of her so vividly intense for an instant that it blocked out everything else around him. He moved over abruptly to de Gradoff’s chair, holding his own for her.
He looks as if he’d like to cut her throat, Polly thought, a small new light dawning.
“I . . . don’t know what to do,” Jennifer said soberly. “I asked Peter to get Nikki to take my mother home. She never used to get drunk like this.”
“Don’t be brutal, darling. She’s not drunk, she’s just high. And she’s probably declined to be taken home.”
“Somebody ought to make her go,” Jennifer said quietly. “I don’t dare ask her. There’d be a scene with me. She looks awful.”
She turned to Fish, the color seeping into her cheeks. “Could you—”
“Let me.” Polly got up quickly. “You two stay here and keep my place. I can get her upstairs at least. Don’t get up, Fish.”
She slipped lightly away. He’s mad about her too, only she doesn’t know it, the little dope, she thought, enormously pleased. The abominable Peter was nobody for Jenny to know.
The silence at the table hung in a breathless balance. For Fish Finlay it was almost unbearably lovely. For Jennifer Linton . . .
“You like her, don’t you?”
“Very much.” His voice sounded far away and not his own.
I don’t know why I thought he could ever be in love with anybody like me. She managed a crippled smile as Polly Randolph looked back at her across the garden.
“Oh, the little idiot,” Polly thought. As she laughed and shook her head at Jennifer, she caught sight of Fish’s little friend the Gallic waiter tray balanced, poised alertly, eyes darting around to spot an empty glass. He was about two feet from Alla Emlyn. Polly Randolph stopped short, her green eyes saffron with excitement, and flashed back towards Fish. But he was entranced with the girl beside him. What she’d remembered would have to wait.
I can’t ever tell him now, Jennifer was thinking wretchedly. I’ll just have to go on pretending I don’t remember him. The rainbow castle she’d built in the springtime was a miserable heap of rubble that left her heart numb, buried beneath it. She could see in his face the light for Polly still kindled. It lingered there even when he l
eaned forward a little to speak to her. Her eyes were dark pools of misery she was too young to conceal, vivid in her pale otherwise expressionless face.
“Don’t take it too hard, Jenny,” he said. “Your mother’s no higher than lots of others.”
Her eyes widened, her lips parted for an instant. She’d forgotten her mother. Then she swallowed quickly, as the other thing came back to her. “It’s not that,” she said. It was what she’d heard standing there behind him and Polly before the springtime castle began to dissolve. “It’s something else. Polly shouldn’t have said all that to Nikki.”
She turned and looked over her shoulder, the way Polly Randolph had looked that night in Tony’s back room.
“I know where she got all that stuff,” she said, very quietly. “It was a portrait at a one-man show at the Berdan Galleries in Washington, last week. The carnations . . . everything. Some friends of mine from Argentine—”
Fish looked up as she broke off suddenly. A waiter was coming to the table with a small silver salver in his hand.
“Miss Randolph?” He bowed and held it down for Jennifer to take the blue envelope on it.
“Miss Randolph’s over there,” Fish said. “In the green dress, by the yellow rose trellis on the porch.”
He’d had to look to find her. She’d bypassed her mission to Dodo apparently, or decided it was no go. Then something, a sort of alert excitement, in the way she was looking over at Mrs. Emlyn and the hunchback still at her table, sharpened his glance. Unless it was the little waiter, hovering behind them, that she was looking at. He glanced back at Dodo, still high in the treetops of cloud-cuckoo-land.
“It’s all right, Mr. Finlay,” Jenny said unhappily. “I don’t see Nikki anywhere now, but maybe he’ll come get her.” She moved her chair. “I just can’t sit and look at her, that’s all. I’d go home but I have to wait for Peter. Could we go somewhere else? Maybe we could get us something to eat. I’m hungry.”
“That’s a good idea,” Fish said. “I’d be glad to stretch my leg.” It was the first time he’d ever said it without thinking.
“It doesn’t bother you to walk, does it?” she asked, just as naturally.
“Not at all.”
They moved back across the terrace.
“There are lots of nice people around,” she said, as if he might not have noticed it. “You don’t hear them. Food’s on the other side. We could take our plates down to the fishing platform. There’s just surf and rocks down there. I’m just not used to so much racket yet, I guess.”
“That’s a good idea, too.”
It seemed wonderful, in fact, to Fish, caught in the delusive enchantment of having her alone with him just a little longer before the pride of white-coated, nimble-footed young lions surrounded her again.
If only they hadn’t taken so long to get their food at the handsomely laden buffet. Or if halfway there the boy he’d seen with the lovely little golden-haired girl hadn’t stopped them.
“Jenny, have you seen Skunky’s mother any place?”
“She was around looking for Polly Randolph a minute ago, son,” a man passing them with two plates said over his shoulder.
“We’ll see if we can find her,” Jenny said. The boy went on.
“Why not leave her be?” Fish asked.
“Because Skunky’s worried. Sometimes her mother does awful things.”
How long was it? Fish could never remember. He seemed to be moving in a golden haze in which time no longer existed, looking with Jennifer, with an elaborate pretense of being casual, for the blond child Skunky’s mother. Until they found her, and the horror wiped out all the loveliness.
They’d quit looking and got themselves each a plate of food and a cup of coffee. The stairs to the fishing platform were cut in the solid rock, winding down between masses of rugosa roses naturalized in the stony soil, softly lighted on each side with double rows of Japanese lanterns dancing in the breeze from the ocean; the stars, golden bees on the velvet of the night, emerged as he and Jennifer left the garden, talking, so they wouldn’t surprise anyone else taking refuge on the steps. It was where the steps curved for the second time among the roses that Fish, taller, saw—before Jennifer could see it—the concrete platform built out over among the jutting rocks like the base of an unfinished watchtower, a single iron-pipe waist high around it for a guardrail.
He saw that, but saw it only in the instant flash of the horror that made him stand, shocked motionless, for a split second, and then shout, and shout again, as he dropped his plate and coffee cup and ran, sprang forward down the winding steps, shouting to stop the woman there at the rail . . . knowing, before he shouted the first time, that it was already too late. The moving arms and, for an instant, the billowing green skirt caught in the offshore wind, before the monstrous white maw of hungry surf closed over her, swallowing her, dragging her out of sight . . . and then, before Fish could reach the bottom and dash across the flattened rock to the platform itself, tearing off his coat, the surf rising again, hurling her back in its terrible white arms, dashing her with mighty force against the black jagged rocks.
“Oh, don’t, Fish! No! You’ll kill yourself!”
Jennifer was behind him at the iron rail, clinging desperately to him.
“You can’t! It’s solid rock down there!”
He dropped his hands onto the rail as the long grating roar dragged, withdrawing, over the black barnacled rocks protruding savagely through the surf, swirling the frail limp figure in and out of the pitch-black crevices between them.
‘Oh, God, I’ve got to get her . . . it’s Polly!”
He gripped the rail in the maddening frustration of utter helplessness as he saw the great wave came back empty-handed, and break. From under its white crest a single feather of spray lifted a golden sandal and tossed it up onto a cluster of black mussels clinging to the rocks where it caught and held and stayed.
“The Coast Guard!”
He heard the shout from behind him and feet were racing back up the carved stairs.
He turned then, slowly, white-faced, to the woman in the splotched print dress holding on to the iron pipe, her body swaying gently back and forth against it.
“She’s gone now, isn’t she?” she asked in a childlike voice. “I pushed her. She said I could have her job when she was through with it. She thought it was going to be a long time. But it wasn’t.”
She moved her head, looking vaguely back at the roses densely clothing the rock. “Voice?” she called. “Where are you, Voice? I did it. You said it wouldn’t hurt her.”
She weaved back around, looking down into the boiling sea.
“Polly’s gone away, now. Maybe the little black man caught her. He was waiting for her. He’s gone away, too. But there won’t be any trouble about the job. Everybody heard her say I could have it.” She held the rail, her head drooping. “Poor Polly. She looked so surprised.”
She’s mad. The woman’s mad.
Her knees bent slowly, her hand loosening on the rail. “I’m dreadfully tired. Polly shouldn’t have been so . . . so. . . .”
She sank gently down on the platform.
Something soft, tenaciously binding, clinging to Fish’s legs, seemed to take away any power to move or think as he stood there. He looked stupidly down. His legs were wrapped in a scarlet pall. It took him a long moment to draw himself back into awareness. It was the folds of Jennifer’s scarlet skirt, whipped around him by the wind. He brought his eyes slowly up to her, standing there motionless, his white coat clutched in one hand, her face as white as it but alive as her eyes were alive. They were pitchy luminous black as she turned to him, her lips moving silently before she could make a sound.
“No!” she said. “She didn’t do it, Fish!” She gripped his arm. “Oh, I knew Polly shouldn’t have told him . . . she should never have told Nikki what she did!”
CHAPTER : 9
“She didn’t do it, Fish!”
“I saw her, Jenny.”
It was all he had time to say before the rock steps were filled with rushing feet. What followed was a nightmare he still hadn’t waked from, how much later he had no idea when he opened the clock tower door and went slowly upstairs to the living-room in the loft. It had been pitch dark, down on the platform. Now the frail dawn was breaking, only the planets still lanterns hung to light the new day’s way into a stinking world. Or was it? For the poor liquor-sodden woman who’d done it, maybe the world was greatly kind where it could have been greatly cruel.
He’d seen them take her out of there. Was it the speed with which they’d got her neatly past the two unsuspecting cops directing traffic outside the gates? Or was it the instant silent recognition of what had to be done and the well-bred ease with which they did it? All of it had staggered him, still taking the count for the thing itself, stunned still more by Jenny’s flat insistence that what he’d seen happen had not happened at all.
The woman hadn’t stirred as the two men lifted her, out cold. She’d wake up this morning in a shaded room, doctors and nurses around her, a brace of high-priced legal talent guarding the door . . . wake up with what, if any, memory of it only they and God would ever know.
He stopped halfway up the stairs, tired, bone-tired, his leg nagging. He couldn’t see Polly Randolph any more or the hell of white surf and black rock . . . just the golden sandal lodged in the black mussels, and the woman in the splotched print peacefully unconscious on the concrete floor. But he could see himself as Polly’s uncle and the three other men in white coats got to the platform . . . taking his white coat out of Jenny’s hand, putting it on, reaching down for his billfold that had dropped out, putting it in his pocket, telling them quietly what he’d seen and what the woman had said.
They lifted her then and Fish saw a gleam of emerald and ruby. Her long full skirts had covered it before. It was an elongated leather-covered flask set with jewels, a braided green and red thong around the neck. Colonel Randolph bent down and picked it up without a word. And all the while the gold slipper was lying there in the mussels on the black rock.
