“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m thinking about it. We’ll do something.”
“But we only have until day after tomorrow,” Griffin said.
“I know,” he said. “But don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”
CHAPTER 18
ALL THE WAY back to the cabin they discussed what might be done to stop the Jarretts and save the deer’s life. The possibilities were few. James mentioned his idea about trying to get the deer out of the valley, but Griffin said she’d thought of that, too, and had given it up. She pointed out that even if they were able to get him to leave the valley, he would still have the entire hunting season ahead of him, in an area crawling with other hunters as well as the Jarretts. As it became more and more evident that there was really nothing they could do, Griffin’s suggestions became wilder and less practical-things like shooting at the Jarretts from a high point on the trail as they approached the valley. Not intending to hit anyone, she explained, but only to frighten them off. James’ comment that the Jarretts would very likely shoot back—intending to hit someone—seemed to discourage her very little. When James asked if she had a gun, she said no, but couldn’t he think of a way to get them one? It wasn’t until he had firmly and repeatedly said he couldn’t, that she reluctantly moved on to other possibilities.
By the time they neared the cabin, she was favoring what seemed like a desperate and hopeless last stand. They would go to the narrowest part of the cliff trail, sit down and refuse to move when the Jarretts appeared.
“They wouldn’t be able to get past us, so they’d have to listen to us,” she said. “And maybe we could make them understand why they shouldn’t kill him.”
It sounded like a very precarious version of a sit-down strike, and James didn’t like the idea for several reasons.
“I doubt if they’d listen,” he said.
“Well, then,” she said almost casually but with an odd ring to her voice, “I’ll tell them that if they don’t promise not to kill him, I’ll jump.”
“Griffin.” He grabbed her arm and turned her around to face him. She looked as if she actually meant it—calm, but with a light in her eyes that really scared him. He saw then the difference between Griffin’s commitment and his own. He wanted to save the deer for reasons he could explain and others that he couldn’t, and the ones he couldn’t explain were probably the most significant. But even so, he knew there was a limit to his commitment—a point at which he would go no further. Griffin’s reasons were undoubtedly all unexplainable, or at least it wouldn’t occur to her to try; but her commitment was obviously frighteningly close to being unlimited.
“You can’t do that,” he told her. “I won’t go with you; I won’t even try to help anymore unless you promise me you won’t do that.”
She finally promised, but he wasn’t entirely reassured. He would just have to come up with an alternate to the plan for a cliff trail confrontation.
By the time they reached the cabin, James was exhausted, feeling the need for a respite from desperate and hopeless strategies, for sleep, which he had had very little of for several nights, and in particular, for food. Preferably for food that hadn’t been dehydrated, fortified and scientifically prepared for wilderness trail munching. When he mentioned the possibility of a hot meal, Griffin’s troubled frown was replaced by one of her rare high-intensity smiles.
After she had wriggled her way back through the porthole window—a feat that James would never have thought possible—she unlatched the shutters on the kitchen windows, James climbed through, and lunch was underway. The temperamental stove responded to James’ practiced coaxing, and before long they were sitting down to reconstituted pea soup, tuna and noodles and slightly stewed dried fruit. Griffin said she’d never tasted anything as good in her entire life.
With his stomach satisfied, rest and sleep moved into first priority. Three rather sleepless nights and yesterday’s long strenuous hike were catching up with him. Watching Griffin bustling energetically around the sink, he sighed. As soon as she finished cleaning up the kitchen, she would undoubtedly want to get back to plotting and planning. Noticing the long wisps of hair that straggled free from her braid, the muddy smear on her chin and the decidedly grungy appearance of her plaid shirt, he was struck by a sudden inspiration—a scheme that might rechannel her energies long enough for him to get an hour or two of rest.
“How long has it been since you washed your hair?” he asked.
Griffin wiped her hand on her shirt and then reached up to smooth her hair and encounter a small twig that had become entangled in a stringy wisp. “Why?” she asked, looking at the twig.
“Well, it does seem to have collected a bit of debris. Doesn’t it?” he asked. “If you want to make an impression on the Jarretts, if we see them…”
It worked. After firing up the stove again and helping Griffin find a collection of pots and pans and fill them with water, he was able to retire to his old room, stretch out on the bed, and collapse into a coma that must have lasted almost three hours. When he finally emerged, Griffin was sitting on the veranda railing drying her hair. She was wearing one of Dr. Willowby’s enormous bulky knit sweaters, which hung down almost to her knees, and her skin had a freshly washed sheen. Various articles of wet clothing were draped along the railing beside her.
“I took a bath and washed some clothes, too,” she said. “I feel a lot better.”
“You look better,” he said. “A lot better.” She looked, in fact, surprisingly beautiful in an immature way, with her dark eyes and glowing skin and her long, thick curtain of light-streaked hair. She smiled uncertainly. “Did you have any new ideas?” she asked.
So they were back at it again. Back to plots and counterplots, hopes and fears, despair, brief hopefulness and despair again. It went on the rest of the afternoon, and by sunset they had only decided on a fall-back plan—a last resort to be initiated if nothing better turned up.
According to the fall-back plan, they would go the next afternoon to the Jarretts’ cabin. The Jarretts were sure to be there by then, making preparations for an early start the next morning on the first day of the season. Once there, they would simply go in and explain to the Jarretts why they must not shoot the deer. On the surface it seemed ridiculous, but James thought there was some hope. Perhaps not much hope that Hank Jarrett and his family might be moved when they saw Griffin and realized what she had risked in order to save the deer, but a very definite hope that Jarrett might be moved by realizing what the papers might make of the story if the deer were slaughtered. James intended to point out the negative publicity aspect of the situation very clearly. He would remind Jarrett of his previous run-ins with the Sierra Club and other conservation groups and what a new surge of bad press might do to his latest construction proposals.
When he had explained the bad press angle to Griffin, she agreed that it might work. She wasn’t certain, but at least it was better than no plan at all; and afterwards she became calmer and more cheerful. On the top step of the veranda, curled up inside Dan’s barrellike sweater like a minnow in a lobster pot, she stared out over the lake in one of her strange trances. After a long time she sighed and said, “I have a feeling it might work, if I did everything right.”
“What do you mean—if you did everything right?”
“The talismans. And the ceremony.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Right. The talismans. Tell me about them. How are they supposed to work?”
Griffin uncurled herself and began to collect her washing. “It’s getting cold,” she said. “Let’s go in and cook something.”
But he decided not to let her get away with it that easily. “Look,” he said, “if your magic can save the deer, why have you been so worried? Why have we been going to all this trouble?”
“Because—” She stopped and thought. “Because I don’t know how it’s going to work. It might work and the stag might get killed anyway—and that might be part of the magic, too. But I want it to
work so that he doesn’t die, so I have to go on doing everything I can. I think magic always works, but it doesn’t always work just the way you think it ought to.”
“Well, I hate to be critical, but that doesn’t make much sense,” James said.
“Doesn’t it?” Griffin said. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. But it doesn’t really matter. Making sense doesn’t have anything to do with making magic.”
“That does it,” James said. “How about macaroni and cheese and chili beans? Is that something that would make sense right now?”
“It sounds like magic,” Griffin said.
After dinner they built a huge fire in the fireplace. Griffin took her sleeping bag off the swing and sat on it in front of the fire, and James pulled up Dan’s old saggy-bottomed upholstered chair. Candle- and firelight made wavering shadows on the rough log walls and flickering reflections in the shuttered windows.
“I love this room,” Griffin said. “It’s like a bear’s winter cave.”
“Is that why you slept in here instead of one of the bedrooms?”
“Yes. The bedrooms frightened me. I like sleeping on the swing.”
He told her then about how he’d heard the swing creaking that morning, and his rather violent reaction. They both laughed, and then she asked him to explain again about how he and Max had arranged it so his parents wouldn’t know he was missing until Monday.
When he finished, she said, “I wish I could have done something like that. So my parents wouldn’t have had to know.”
She was leaning forward with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring into the fire, her face curtained by hair. But her voice had changed, as it always did when she mentioned her parents. It occurred to James that he had a perfect opportunity to test his theory about Griffin’s emotional problems and how they stemmed from mistreatment and neglect by her jet-set mother. He knew, however, from past experience, that it wouldn’t be easy to draw her out. There was probably just too much pain and anger involved. But it seemed like a good time to try. James Archer Fielding, psychiatrist. The doctor is in—minus a couch perhaps, but a sleeping bag in front of a roaring fire ought to do. He did a quick rerun of all the psychiatric type movies he’d seen and tried to recall a typical opening question. Preferably something disarming, but a little more to the point than, “Just say whatever comes into your mind, Miss Donahue.”
After several minutes nothing very subtle had come to mind, and he gave up and settled for a more forthright approach. “Tell me about your mother, Griffin.”
Her head came up with a jerk, and she turned quickly to look at him.
“What about my mother?” she said.
Her frown startled him. “Nothing in particular. I’m just curious about her.”
Her eyes searched his face.
“She just seems very interesting,” he said. “And very beautiful.”
She smiled uneasily.
“And she must lead a very fascinating life.”
The frown returned. “She’s had a very sad life,” Griffin said. “Ever since she was born, she’s had a very sad life.”
James lost control of his face, and his eyebrows went up in surprise and disbelief.
The frown deepened. “The money doesn’t help. It was the money that made it so awful, at least right at first. When she was just a baby and everyone wanted her for the money and pretended to love her and tried to make her hate all the others, only she always knew it was just the money they wanted, and none of them really loved her.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Yes. She’s told me about it lots of times. And about how she always felt angry at them for only caring about the money, and that was why she did things to get even with them.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Well, like,” Griffin began, but then she stopped suddenly and narrowed her eyes. “Like all the things everybody already knows about because it’s all been in the papers and magazines.”
“I don’t know about it,” James said. “My mother does, I guess. At least she said something about reading about your mother in the papers, but she didn’t say much about what she read.”
“Didn’t she?” Griffin looked intrigued and then pleased. “I liked your mother.”
“No, she didn’t. So tell me. Like what?”
She shrugged. “Things like driving her stepfather’s Rolls Royce into the ocean. And bringing a lot of people from a labor camp to her house for a party when her folks were away. And other things. The papers always told what she did, but they never told why she did things. And usually she had good reasons. Like when she ran away and married my father, the papers made it sound as if she only did it to get her name in the papers.”
“Why did she really do it?”
“Because they were in love. She loved him more than anything in the world.” Griffin’s face had taken on the inward look it always had when she was involved in one of her fantasies—as if she had shut out the world and was tuning in on the data from some kind of internal tickertape. “They were very young and beautiful and happy,” she said. “But then the car crashed and it was all over.”
The therapy session was not moving in the direction he’d expected. Trying a different tack, he asked. “And how about your life? Has it been unhappy, too?”
“My life? No. My life is very happy.”
“But isn’t it pretty much like your mother’s?”
“No. It’s not like that at all. My mother needs me and so does Woody, and I have friends and everything I want. Why do you think I’m not happy?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I just wondered about your parents. They seem to be very busy and gone a lot.”
Griffin’s dark eyebrows drew together, and her eyes blazed. “You be still. You just shut up about them. You’re just like everybody else who gossips about her because she’s beautiful and has money and interesting friends. They don’t know what she’s really like, and you don’t either.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she threw herself face down on the sleeping bag, burying her face in her arms and a tangled swirl of hair.
Well, so much for psychoanalysis, James thought ruefully. He’d read, of course, that it was a dangerous thing to fool around with if you didn’t know what you were doing. But did he let that stop him? Of course not. Not Fielding, holder of the gold medal for the hundred yard dash with your foot in your mouth. So what if Mrs. Westmoreland didn’t really deserve Griffin’s loyal defense—would it really do Griffin any good right now to be forced to admit it. He slid down to the floor and touched her shoulder.
“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to criticize your mother. Just like I said before, I don’t know anything about her except that she’s fantastically good-looking. I guess I just asked about her because I like you and I wanted to get to know you better. To understand about your life and things like that.”
“Really?” Griffin’s voice was muffled.
“Really.”
There was another long silence, and James went into the bathroom and got a washcloth; when he gave it to Griffin, she rolled over onto her back and put the cloth on her face. It was quite a while before she took it off, and when she did her long lashes were wetly dark as if she were wearing mascara. Her eyes looked, more than ever, like her mother’s. She smiled faintly, and then just looked at James solemnly for such a long time he began to feel a little self-conscious. Finally her eyelids began to droop, and she went to sleep.
He must have gone on sitting there for quite a long time, alternately staring into the fire and watching Griffin sleep. Deeply relaxed, her hard young slender-ness softened like a sleeping cat. The firelight made a smooth dome of her forehead and interesting shadows beneath her high cheekbones. A thick strand of hair looped her throat like a necklace and quivered rhythmically with the beat of her heart. He found himself thinking about what she would have to face when she woke up—confrontation with the Jarretts, and then the twenty-second of September.
A
s he drifted toward sleep himself, his thoughts and feelings began to get more and more complicated. It was all very incoherent and confusing, but most of it concerned Griffin’s strange personality—a unique combination of wide-ranging enthusiasms, crazy dreams and ferocious loyalties. She really was an interesting kid.
CHAPTER 19
WHEN HE WOKE up the next morning, back in his old Willowby bedroom, it took him a minute to remember where he was and why. Then it all came back. He’d flaked out on his old bed after Griffin had awakened and moved her sleeping bag to the lounge swing. Surprisingly, considering the day ahead, he seemed to have slept very well. Struggling out of Max’s sleeping bag and into his clothes, he hurried from the room.
Griffin’s sleeping bag was still on the swing, but she wasn’t in it. She wasn’t in the kitchen either, but the window was wide open, and when he stuck his head out and called, she answered from someplace nearby.
“Here I am. I’m coming,” she called, and a few seconds later she climbed in the window. “I’ve been out on the veranda,” she said, “watching the sky. It looks like there might be a storm coming.”
She was wearing her jeans and shirt again, her hair was braided down her back, and she looked more like her old self. She smiled at James, but her face tensed as she asked, “Should we go right away? To see the Jarretts? Do you think they’ll be here yet?”
“We might as well have some breakfast first,” James said, “but then we can get started. It may take some time to find a way into The Camp. We’ll have to get in without being seen. And by then the Jarretts may have arrived. If not, we can wait.”
When breakfast was over and the cabin returned, as much as possible, to the condition in which they’d found it, they started out for The Camp. The sun, which had shone briefly, was hidden now by dark clouds, and a cold wind was rustling the pine trees.
“I suppose we have you to thank for this weather,” he told Griffin.
Fabulous Creature Page 18
