Rainbow in the Mist

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  2

  Refreshed by her shower, and dressed in jeans and a blue chambray shirt, Christy went upstairs, where Nona met her in the hallway.

  “Supper will be ready soon, and a friend is going to join us. I hope you don’t mind. There’s time now for you to see my favorite room.”

  She didn’t feel like meeting anyone tonight, but of course there would be visitors in her aunt’s home. She couldn’t be a recluse and hide from people, though she hadn’t expected to meet Nona’s friends so quickly.

  “Who’s coming?” she asked hesitantly as she followed her aunt.

  They’d reached a big room at the rear corner of the house, and Nona paused to put a reassuring hand on Christy’s arm.

  “Eve Corey is a good friend. She’s closer to your age, and I think you’ll like each other.”

  “Of course,” Christy said, and tried to dismiss her nagging uneasiness.

  Nona’s studio was a long, wide room, divided into two sections by a pair of Chinese screens. The nearer area served as a sitting room; the farther was where Nona worked at her painting. A slanting roof offered two skylights over her easels.

  Nona went ahead, turning on lights. Weather windows, two panes thick, looked out upon darkening treetops at the back of the house. Several paintings stood about on easels—evidently work in progress. Nona had always liked to keep several projects going at once. She would move from one to another, until a painting absorbed her so completely that she worked through to its finish.

  Breathing the familiar smell of oil paints and turpentine, Christy felt immediately comfortable. The seeming muddle of Nona’s worktable, where brushes and palettes and bottles stood about, was a familiar disorder never to be disturbed by others, since Nona knew exactly where everything was.

  One easel had been hidden by a green cloth flung over it, and Nona went to stand with her back to it, almost protectively. “Something new,” she said. “Something I’m not sure of yet, so I don’t want anyone to see it.”

  Christy turned to other easels and glanced at several finished canvases set against a wall.

  “They’re all on the same subject.” She voiced her surprise. “Don’t you paint anything but roads these days?”

  “Red roads! They fascinate me and have ever since I moved here—the red roads of Virginia. Of course, these are back roads and there are endless variations. I’m to have a showing of this series in Charlottesville next month, and I’ll need to complete three more before then.”

  In one watercolor a road of red earth ran beside a railed fence, beyond which cows grazed on a hillside meadow. In another, the road wound its way through high grass, to be lost among mountain folds. Still another road circled a small pond where ducks paddled. All were rural mountain scenes, with always a red road winding through. There were no human figures—and there seemed a loneliness and quiet about each scene. Settings that should have been serene and peaceful somehow were not. These were paintings deceptive in their country simplicity, the mood of each somber and mysterious. Where that quality came from Christy wasn’t sure.

  “What do you see when you paint these?” she asked her aunt. “Are they from life or your imagination?”

  “Both, of course.” Nona gestured toward a separate row of canvases set face out against the wall. “Tell me what you think of these.”

  In an oil with a twilight aura, the road came to a sudden end in tall weeds, going nowhere. In another, a ribbon of road climbed to the top of a wooded cliff, where it vanished into space. A third road led into a covered bridge but never emerged on the other side. In the lower right-hand corner of those she had completed was Nona’s special signature, bold and clear: HARMONY. Yet these were not harmonious paintings.

  “Well?” Nona was waiting. Not that it ever made any difference to Nona what others thought of her work.

  “They’re compelling. After the first bucolic impression, I want to go deeper into what they mean. I want to know where those roads go, and why some of them end so abruptly. They’re unsettling. I’m not sure what you’re doing or what you mean.”

  “That’s the mystery of any road.” Nona sounded pleased, and her turquoise earrings danced with the turning of her head. “You never know what lovely surprise or unexpected disaster waits for you around the curve. I didn’t want to paint pretty country scenes—these reach much more unsettling depths. Of course I don’t know where my roads go, and I’m not sure I want to. I’d like them to tantalize and promise, and pull the observer into them. You may not see the fantasy right away, but it’s always there. These are secret roads and they keep their secrets, even from me.”

  “I’m not sure I like them,” Christy admitted. “They make me uncomfortable.”

  “That’s what I intend. You’ll remember them and go on wondering what’s going to happen in those hidden distances. Come and sit down and we’ll talk a bit until Eve arrives.”

  On the Chinese screens that separated the sitting area from Nona’s work space, waterfalls tumbled steeply down gold panels, to end in white spray over stylized black rocks. All was inked in with sparing lines. Formalized mountains poked starkly into the sky, and small figures on little white horses rode endlessly down precipitous paths between twisted pine trees. Beyond the screens, a small sofa upholstered in wheat-grained cloth with a faint rose stripe, a drop-leaf oval coffee table of polished wood, and several chairs invited the visitor to rest and talk.

  “There’s good energy here,” Christy said. “I can feel it around me. There’s no dis-Harmony here.”

  Nona nodded, pleased. “Sometimes when everything gets too tense with my painting I come here and let it all go away.”

  Christy went to stand before a cork board hung on the birch-paneled wall. Here were clippings about Harmony and her work, as well as snapshots of friends. She recognized a group photo she had sent her aunt, taken when she was dramatizing a story for children at a library back on Long Island. The rapt faces of the small listeners were a study in themselves. But all that had been before witches and goblins began to creep in.

  The next color photo—an enlargement—arrested Christy’s attention. Here was the touch of fantasy again, though this was the picture of an actual woman. Her face showed delicate features, with wide, startled eyes, as though she hadn’t expected to be photographed. Long fair hair, caught back with a violet ribbon, had released a strand, lifted by a breeze to trail across one cheek. Her dress was long and white, with eyelet embroidery and a violet-ribboned yoke. A nightdress, perhaps? Her feet scarcely touched rough grass, and she raised her arms as if dancing to music only she could hear. Behind her a stand of woods seemed darkly secret—the trees very still, watching her.

  A familiar sense of something about to be revealed stirred in Christy. “Who is that?” she asked her aunt.

  Nona went abruptly to the board and removed the pins that held the picture. “I must put this away. Her name was Deirdre, and she was just as ethereal as she seems here. Never mind—we have other things to talk about. Come and sit down.”

  Nona spoke in the past tense of the woman, but casually, as of someone who had moved away, and the stir of warning died in Christy.

  She chose an upholstered rocker and settled herself comfortably. Nona dropped onto the sofa, propping a cushion behind her and stretching out long legs on the coffee table. When a book was shoved aside by her foot and fell to the floor, Christy rose to pick it up and saw that it was Rose Vaughn’s Little Red Road that Harmony had illustrated. She sat down to leaf through the familiar pages.

  “Such a beautiful book! It’s deserved the acclaim it’s won. Children love the story, and they love your pictures when I show them the book.”

  “Rose’s death was a tragedy. I still miss her, though it’s eight months now since it happened.”

  “You wrote about her accident—a terrible shame. She lived around here, didn’t she? I hope you’ll do mor
e work like this with other writers.”

  Nona took the book from her and closed it with a firm snap. “I haven’t the heart to work with anyone else. Rose was working on something—a story about llamas. I believe she’d completed it, though she never showed it to me.”

  “Can’t you still illustrate it?”

  “It’s disappeared, and Oliver, Rose’s husband, says he couldn’t find it among her things. Donny loves this book.”

  “Donny? Is he the small boy I saw outside on the deck downstairs? I tried to make friends with him, but he wouldn’t talk to me—except to tell me to go away. When I said we might get acquainted later, he gave me a black look and ran off.”

  “I’m sorry. Donny has problems right now. He lives close by with his father, Hayden Mitchell. Rose was his special friend, and her death hit him pretty hard.”

  “You said it was a fall—how did it happen?”

  “That’s the miserable part—it never should have happened at all. Like most accidents. Rose loved to hike and often went out alone, since Oliver doesn’t care much about physical activity. She should have known better than to go off without telling anyone where she meant to climb. They didn’t find her for three days. As a matter of fact—” Nona broke off and shook her head. “Never mind. I can’t really talk about it. Not yet.”

  “Did she live in Redlands?”

  “Yes. Over on the mountain above Victor’s cabin. Poor Oliver. He still lives in their house, and it’s been a dreadful time for him. He teaches English lit at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and he’s a writer himself. Though I’m not much in sympathy with his articles on parapsychology. His debunking is passionate and wrongheaded—I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about. Rose understood better—you can sense it in her stories.”

  “She did other stories?”

  “Several earlier ones. If I ever illustrate another book for children I’d like to do one of Rose’s tales. But Oliver doesn’t want them published.”

  “Why not?” Christy was beginning to dislike Oliver Vaughn.

  “They fly too strongly against all that down-to-earth realism he prides himself on. He doesn’t approve of fairy tales for children. He doesn’t understand that fantasy is right brain. It stretches the imagination and helps it to grow. His nothing-but-realism credo stifles it and builds walls around it. I’ve had a few rounds of argument with him, but we get nowhere.”

  Nona sat up, suddenly alert. “There—that’s Eve coming now. Let’s go meet her.”

  Christy had heard nothing, but Nona’s inner faculty was working, and a moment later the door chimes sounded. Nona led the way out to the front deck. “Come around this way, Eve,” she called, and added to Christy, “Eve works for Hayden Mitchell, Donny’s father.”

  Eve Corey waved and started toward the kitchen door where Nona stood. She was probably in her mid-thirties and she dressed as though she cared very little about what others thought. The afternoon had turned warm enough for shorts, and she hadn’t bothered to change. Patched denim revealed plump legs and well-padded hips. Her face was round and devoid of makeup and she wore her brown hair in a straight cut below her ears, with slanted bangs across her forehead. At the moment she looked upset and irritated.

  “Come in and tell us about it, Eve,” Nona said. “Christy, this is Eve Corey. Eve, Christy Loren. What’s happened to upset you?”

  Eve was tall enough to carry her weight fairly well, and she moved quickly, assertively. As she strode into Nona’s red-tiled kitchen, Christy could sense her vitality—an excess of energy that surrounded her—at the moment, angry energy.

  “Want me to fix the salad?” Eve asked. Her Virginia accent was only a hint—musical and pleasing. “Maybe tearing up lettuce will make me feel better. I just had a run-in with Victor Birdcall. How you can stand to have that man working for you I don’t know.”

  Nona raised an eyebrow at Christy, undisturbed. “We keep out of Eve’s way when she gets mad. What did Victor say to upset you?” She handed Christy woven place mats to arrange on the table set in the bay of windows, and opened a drawer to indicate silverware.

  The refrigerator door slammed as Eve took out salad greens and carried them to the sink.

  “Victor thinks Hayden should drop the search for Deirdre and let her stay missing. Of course he’s wrong, and I said so. He shouldn’t go telling Hayden and Donny stuff like that. Even though we’ve combed the woods and hills around here and haven’t found a trace, we can’t give up.”

  Nona cast a wary look at Christy. “It’s been two months, hasn’t it?”

  “Six weeks.”

  Christy repeated aloud the one word she’d focused on: “Missing?”

  “Let’s not talk about this now,” Nona said quickly. “We don’t want to spoil our meal.”

  Moving automatically, Christy finished setting the table, thrusting back a new wave of anxiety. She’d sensed something evasive in Nona ever since she’d told her aunt what had brought her here.

  “It doesn’t matter, Christy.” Nona watched her uneasily. “This has nothing to do with you. Don’t even think about it.”

  Eve went right on. “Doesn’t it seem strange that we’ve had two disappearances in less than a year?”

  “Rose was found,” Nona reminded her. “That was a fall—an accident. While Deirdre could have run off anywhere in her whimsical way.”

  “Helpless little Deirdre, who needs her husband and even her young son to look after her?” Eve shook her head vehemently. “Not likely. Besides, nobody can stop Donny from looking. Not after what happened with Rose. That’s what scares him. He’ll go on and on until there’s an answer. And now Hayden’s letting his work go, which means that I’m taking on most of it at the plant nursery. Donny’s staying out of school on various pretexts, and things are going to pot. It would be better to find her dead than to go on like this.”

  “I’m lost,” Christy said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sorry. I suppose I should have explained.” Nona lifted an earthenware casserole from the oven and set it on a trivet. “As soon as your salad’s ready, Eve, we can eat.”

  “Explain now,” Christy insisted. “Please.”

  “Oh, all right.” Nona gave in. “Hayden Mitchell runs a tree and plant nursery not far from Redlands. He’s put in all these flowering bushes for me, and he’s really creative, imaginative—an artist with growing things. Eve works as his assistant, and she’s pretty good herself at all this horticulture stuff.”

  “I just have a knack for getting things to grow,” Eve agreed. “But you’re marking time, Nona. Tell her about Deirdre.”

  “Not now.” Nona was firm, and Christy understood her aunt’s reluctance, though Eve didn’t. She thought of the photo she’d seen of a slim, almost ethereal woman in a white gown and bare feet, her long fair hair lifting in a breeze.

  “Why did what Victor said upset you?” Nona asked Eve.

  “Victor always upsets me. But this time I started wondering if he knows something he’s not talking about. I asked him right out, and he scowled as though he’d like to hit me. He has a vile temper, and I don’t think you should trust him the way you do, Nona.”

  Eve mixed salad greens as she talked, and now she brought the big wooden bowl to the table.

  Nona gestured them both to chairs. “I’m not worried about Victor.” She pulled off the flowered scarf she’d tied around her head, and graying hair sprang up in little clumps, somehow making her look less indomitable—as though the scarf provided her with an armor, a defense.

  Christy sat where she could look out the window toward the ever changing view. In growing darkness the mountains formed a black silhouette, like a scalloped cutout set against the backdrop of a lighter sky. Far across the dip of the valley, house lights shone among the trees. Houses that weren’t visible by day.

 
; Eve followed the direction of her gaze. “That’s where Victor lives. He built his own log cabin over there in the woods. Oliver Vaughn’s house is higher and a little farther along on the right. He’s stayed there since Rose’s death.”

  Through open windows a breeze stirred the good scents of Nona’s cooking. She had baked chicken with broccoli and mushrooms in her own special stock, seasoned with lemon juice and dill. Hot corn bread added its own appetizing aroma, and Christy found that she was hungry in spite of her uneasiness about all she was learning.

  “Now tell Christy about Deirdre Mitchell,” Eve repeated, undeflected by Nona’s hesitance to explain. “You really must, you know. Sooner or later she’ll meet Hayden.”

  Nona set down her fork and gave in. “What happened was sudden. One night Deirdre got out of bed while Hayden and Donny were asleep—and simply disappeared. She put on sandals and slipped a coat over her nightclothes, but she didn’t take anything else. Which makes her disappearance seem all the more ominous. She intended, obviously, to return to bed.”

  “It wasn’t all that unusual for her to go outdoors in the middle of the night,” Eve said. “We all knew that. She’d stay out for a half hour or so playing her games—dancing with her spirits—barefoot on the grass in the moonlight! That’s what she claimed. She was one of those full-moon people. Or sometimes she’d go out at dawn when the sun was rising on the dew. It’s a wonder a copperhead didn’t get her!”

  “That was Deirdre’s style,” Nona said tolerantly. “Just as it’s mine to paint red roads. As for snakes, Deirdre always claimed they were her friends and she was safe with them. She really did seem to have an affinity for wild things. I sometimes thought that cat of hers was half wild.”

  “That’s another funny thing,” Eve said. “That Siamese disappeared along with Deirdre.”

  Nona explained to Christy. “That’s something that worries us. The cat always stayed close to her—so why hasn’t it been found either? Anyway, Christy, I never meant to have all these unhappy events spill out on your first night here.”