Once

by Elisabeth Grace Foley et al.

  In the scrub below me, something moved.

  My first impulse, I remember, was one of curiosity. I edged closer to the brink of the path to look more closely. The world was so quiet I could hear his footsteps for a moment before he emerged from behind a clump of gorse. By now the light was strong enough to show me his outline. When he came in view he lifted up the pale oval of his face and I saw him hesitate just for a moment. Then he lowered his head again and went on climbing.

  There was no mistaking the set of his shoulders, the unhurried walk, the Homburg hat. It was the man who had followed me by the lakeside yesterday morning.

  I turned from the sunrise and quickened my pace as much as I dared on the steep and treacherous path. Whoever the stranger was, it would do no good to break an ankle on these slopes. Slowly the path lifted above the trees. Now it led me through short grass pocked with rabbit burrows, bristling with gorse bushes and wild roses berry-red with hips.

  Once or twice, as I glanced back, I saw the Homburg hat moving through the bushes, and each time it was a little closer.

  I put on a new turn of speed. How was he gaining on me? How much further to the summit?

  What if Max were late?

  I flung back a glance as I turned another corner, just as the stranger panted into view behind me.

  “Miss—!” he called.

  I didn’t stop. I clutched my bag to my side and ran.

  Impulse will be the death of me. I went up that path slipping and staggering on the stony ridges, with fright roaring in my ears.

  I kept my eyes on the ground, so I never saw him coming. When I collided with another body, I gave a thin yelp of despair.

  Firm hands gripped my shoulders. “Ruby! What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  Max. I knotted my fists into the lapels of his jacket, gasping for breath, my panic ebbing away. When I dared, I glanced back the way I had come.

  No one.

  “It’s nothing,” I managed at last.

  “Nothing, my hat.” He held me away, studying my face. “You’re terrified. I could tell from the way you were running. Out with it.”

  “He was following me again,” I admitted. “The man with the Homburg hat.”

  “Was he?” Max’s mouth set, and he put me aside and started down the path.

  “No!” I ran after him and caught him by the arm. “Don’t leave me!”

  He hesitated, then slipped his arm around my shoulders and stood watching the bend in the path. But no one appeared.

  I said uncertainly, “I must have been wrong.”

  “You say it was the same fellow that frightened you on the lake yesterday?”

  “I thought it was the same fellow. He wore a Homburg hat.” My face went hot. “Me and my vivid imagination. I’m sorry. I’m such a butterfly. Let’s get to the top before we miss the sunrise.”

  He glanced reluctantly downhill, then tucked my arm under his and turned up the last slope.

  On the summit, I discovered that Max had brought a rug for us to sit on, as well as a small basket. “I brought chocolate,” he said absent-mindedly, rummaging in the basket, “and I tried to find strawberries, but I’m afraid they weren’t very good. I bought apples instead.”

  “I love apples.”

  “So did Xue Bai.” He spoke softly, as if on impulse. I couldn’t help wondering how he had come to know her so well—but I didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to stir up the phantom that ruled him. Instead I opened my own bag, afraid of what might have become of the box of Albert Town pastries. But they had survived in all their splendour. And the coffee was still hot.

  “You’ll be getting the wrong idea about me,” I said ruefully, pouring him a cup. “I promise I’m not the kind to panic at a shadow.”

  “So why now?”

  I shrugged. “Too many Ethel Lina White novels before bed.”

  A sliver of the sun’s disk broke out above the eastern clouds and slowly the distant sheen of lakes and rivers—the long looping snakes of the Cardrona, the Clutha, and the Hawea—sharpened to silver. Max unfolded himself onto the rug and leaned back on his elbows, but he wasn’t looking at the sunrise. He was looking at me.

  I sipped my coffee and kept my eyes on the horizon. “So tell me about yourself, Max. Do you have a nice girl to watch sunrises with in Dunedin?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “That’s a pain.”

  “But I’ve got a nice girl to watch sunrises with in Pembroke.”

  “Me?” I spared him a glance from the mountains that glowed red against the skyline as the sun gilded their peaks. “You really don’t have anyone else? Tell me about your last girl, then. Why’d she break it off?”

  Max gave a soft and derisive snort of laughter. The light crawled a little further down the distant slopes before he said, “She didn’t.”

  “You?”

  “No.”

  I waited. It was something my father used to say—Never take the first answer. Wait. When there’s been a little silence, he’ll start talking again. And that’s when you’ll get the information you want.

  Max flung out a hand, picked up a pastry, sat up, and began to eat it. When he finished, he brushed the crumbs off his trousers. Finally, he said, “She was never really my girl. It was more a—a business arrangement between her father and mine. It never came off.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “An arranged match? Golly! How frightfully old fashioned. I’m not surprised you got the icy mitt.”

  There was an odd twist in the corner of his mouth, but he didn’t pursue the subject, however patiently I waited. “What about you?”

  I stretched and began on my own pastry. “Me? Oh, I’m young. I’ve far too many things to do with myself before I shackle myself down. Besides, I don’t see myself finding the right fellow in Pembroke.”

  Max grinned and picked up his coffee cup. “To finding the right fellow,” he announced, and clicked it against mine.

  “To avoiding him as long as I can.”

  Max shook his head with a wry laugh. I took another bite of pastry. Max stared at the view, and I congratulated myself on distracting him from the question of the Homburg hat.

  “Are you going to the police about it?” he said abruptly.

  “The police?” I swallowed. “Goodness, no!”

  “I’m serious. This is how crimes happen.”

  “Come on, Max. What would they do? They’d laugh at me—and I’d deserve it.”

  “I know what I’m talking about,” he said. “I told you. My family—we’re Morans. Crime is a specialty of ours.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I went into a peal of laughter.

  He turned his head and gave me a long hard look. “Do you take nothing seriously, Ruby?”

  “Do you take nothing lightly?” I wiped the back of a hand over my eyes. “For a Moran, you seem very fond of the police.”

  “Don’t assume I’m anything like a Moran. I haven’t spoken to my family since—” He caught himself midsentence. But I guessed at once how he meant to complete it.

  “Since she died?” I took a sharp breath of realisation. “It was her. You were going to marry her.”

  He stared at the ripening east and nodded.

  “Was it your family that did it, Max?”

  He went very still.

  “You said you would tell me, if I wanted to know.”

  “And if you were involved. Personally, I meant.”

  “Oh, but I am, Max.” I fluttered my lashes at him. “Remember Donne? ‘I am involved in mankind.’”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “You think I can make accusations at random?”

  I retired the lashes at once. “If you say so. Curiosity killed the cat. We’ll forget it.”

  “Agreed,” he said. Then, “I still think you ought to be careful. If someone is following you about when you’re alone…”

  There was something frighteningly single-minded about him. I said, “I can take care of myself.”

&
nbsp; “You can’t seriously believe that. Are you dishonest, or just stupid?”

  It took a moment to catch my breath. “Well, aren’t you rude!”

  “No, just correct.”

  Yes, blast it, he was correct. But there was no way I’d admit it.

  “At least tell me if you recognise him at all.”

  “Don’t know him from Adam.”

  “Ruby. Seriously.”

  “I am serious!”

  He let out a sigh. “All right. But if you see him again—please, do go to the police.”

  I screwed up my mouth and began to shred the chocolate wrapper into tiny pieces. “I don’t like to do that. He hasn’t hurt me.”

  “Your safety means so little to you?”

  I laughed. “And it means so much to you?”

  Stubborn silence.

  “I promise you, Max. I do everything, everything I can, to keep myself safe.”

  He still didn’t reply.

  “Anyway, what could the police do? At best, they can’t stop anything happening to me. At worst, they’d be paid to keep their mouths shut. Besides, I’m not in the market for payback. I decided that a long time ago.”

  “Payback?” Max was incredulous. “Payback? Is that what you think this is about? What about justice?”

  “I suppose I don’t see a meaningful difference.”

  “Payback is…” For a moment, he seemed at a loss. “Payback is irrational. Emotional. Personal. Justice is none of those things. Justice is objective—justice is transcendent truth applied to the facts of a situation.”

  “And I suppose you think that it’s justice that motivates you?”

  “You think it’s not?”

  I gave the little shrug I learned from my French teacher. “Objective is not a word I’d apply to a man who carries a picture of his dead fiancée’s eviscerated heart in his pocket.”

  He had no reply to that.

  I took a deep breath. “You see, Max, you may think you’re being objective, but I know I never will be. I don’t think any of us are impersonal enough to deal out justice.”

  “Why not? It’s not so hard to find an impartial third party. That’s why we have a court system.”

  “I don’t know anything about the court system. But I’m not talking about the courts, I’m talking about you and me. I know what I want from my life. I know that joining a crusade takes all the fun out of things and half the time gets you killed to boot. I learned that much in history. Live and let live—love and let love—that’s my motto.” The sun was in my eyes, and the last shadows of dawn were gone. I shifted my seat on the rug and glanced at my watch. “Twenty past eight! Oh, blazes, I’ll be late again.”

  While I stowed the thermos and the flattened pastry box in my bag, Max more slowly gathered up the rug. We headed toward the western path, that wonderful descent through gorse and rose bushes, in silence. The view opened before us—the jewel-like setting of the lake, smooth as glass in the still morning air. Pembroke on the near bank and little Roy’s Island on the far and snowy peaks looming on every horizon.

  I caught my breath. “Odd, isn’t it, how much bigger the mountains seem the higher up you are?”

  Max stared at the lake. “No man is an island.”

  I kept moving as fast as I dared down the path. “Excuse me?”

  “You quoted Donne before. I was trying to remember the whole thing.”

  In a sing-song voice, in time with my feet, I said, “‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’”

  “Any man’s death diminishes me,” he repeated, thoughtfully. “We all bear the same divine stamp. What if that lays an obligation on the rest of us?”

  “To prevent death, you mean?”

  “Or to punish it, if necessary.”

  “Punish it.” My scalp prickled. “You mean you’d have someone sent to the chair. Or hanged.”

  “If that’s what justice requires.”

  “See, you keep using that word.” My voice hitched up a register. “Is that humane? Is that loving? Is that going to mend anything?”

  “It might stop things getting worse,” he said, more gently than I expected. “Just remember Donne. Don’t die and diminish us, Ruby Black.”

  Don’t die—I swallowed, feeling once again the cold burning into my bones, yesterday morning in the lake. I was too young to die; my life was only beginning.

  “Not if I can help it. That’s a promise, Max.”

  By the time we reached the foot of the mountain and circled south toward the Luggate Road it was a jewel of a day, warm and clear. Above the town, Roy’s Peak had gained another powdering of snow in the night. The road was already busy with automobiles and I could see Max’s car, a fawn-coloured Cadillac LaSalle, pulled off and waiting for us beside a shabby Morris.

  Leaning against the little car’s front fender smoking a cigarette was the man in the Homburg hat.

  I stopped so abruptly, Max nearly ran into me. “What is it?” he asked, but from the tone of his voice I thought he guessed.

  “That’s him. The man who was following me.”

  “Is it?” His voice was as soft as my own. Then he stalked off ahead of me, so fast that I had to run to catch up with him.

  “What are you going to do?” I hissed.

  “Nothing. I’ll just ask him what he thinks he’s doing following you around like this.”

  “No! Who do you think you are, my mother?”

  “Ruby. Please. Let me do this for you.”

  He didn’t slacken pace, and for a few footsteps I had to fall behind as the path narrowed between two wild roses. Then I ran to catch up.

  “Over my dead body, Max. Look, you wait here and I’ll go speak to him myself.”

  “All right, you do the talking. But I’m coming with you.”

  I didn’t much like the idea, but it seemed a fair compromise. The Homburg hat went on smoking as he watched us approach. Then he must have finished his cigarette, for he flicked away the butt, sauntered around to the driver’s side, and opened the door. For a moment Max and I lost sight of him in the narrow space between the Cadillac and the Morris, and by unspoken agreement, we both quickened pace.

  Just as we rounded the front of the Cadillac, a brilliant flash struck us in the eyes and we blinked at a camera.

  The Homburg hat appeared from behind it with a flushed and cheerful face. “Hullo, Moran!” it greeted. “Care to introduce the lady?”

  I froze in my tracks.

  “Phipps,” said Max in blank surprise.

  “Do you know him?” I managed.

  He turned on me with a short and embarrassed laugh. “Society journalist. But harmless, mostly.”

  “Thanks,” said the journalist, grinning. He’d already stowed the camera carefully into the Morris again, and stood on the running board behind the open door, one hand on the steering wheel, as if poised for a quick getaway.

  Max glowered at him. “It wasn’t a compliment. What do you mean by harassing this lady? It’s a wonder she hasn’t come to harm trying to get away from you.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” said Phipps. “So give us the scoop. You two are an item, aren’t you?”

  A society journalist. He was a society journalist, and he had my photograph. It ran through my head in a dull litany before I came back to myself. “I’m leaving,” I said coldly, and turned my back on them and headed toward the mountain, back to where I’d left my bicycle on the eastern slope.

  Max swung after me. “Ruby, wait!”

  “Ruby!” said Phipps, triumphantly. “Anything else you can tell us?”

  Max got in front of me, holding up entreating hands. “Look, Ruby, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Let me drive you home, and I’ll apologise all you like.”

  I
didn’t trust myself not to slap him. What use was an apology? “I’ll ride my bicycle, thanks.”

  I tried to push past him, but he shifted to keep blocking my way. “I swear I’ll make this right.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “You want to make it right? Really? You mean it?”

  “Of course I mean it.”

  “Then forget about an apology and make him give you that film.”

  A moment of silence. “All right. But look, if I know Phipps, he’s not going to—”

  “So choke it out of him! Didn’t they teach you anything in the mob?”

  His breath came out in a whoosh of laughter. “Take it easy! Who do you think I am, Al Capone? The film belongs to Phipps.”

  “Then if you won’t help me, get out of my way.”

  He didn’t move and I shot an exasperated glance behind me. Flash! Phipps had his camera out again.

  “To answer your question, Mr. Phipps,” I said, clipping my words short in a frozen rage, “no, Mr. Moran and I are not, nor will we ever be, ‘an item.’”

  “Let’s go, Ruby,” Max said, and gripped my elbow.

  That touch dissolved all my self control, and I whipped around and hit him across the face with my open palm. The camera bulb flashed again as my hand connected. In the roaring silence that followed the blow I froze, suddenly terrified, staring into his face.

  Max blinked twice, and took a firmer grip on my elbow. “All right, Ruby,” he said, “you’re coming with me.” There was such decision in his voice, and I was so dazed by what I had done, that I let him pull me to the Cadillac and help me into the front passenger seat without a word of protest. “Phipps!” I heard him say as he slammed the door shut, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realised he was really angry.

  Inside the Cadillac I couldn’t hear Phipps’s response, and Max had lowered his voice too. I slewed around in the seat to watch them. Max had his arms folded and his lips pressed shut in a furious white line. Phipps backed away from him, hugging the camera. When Max unfolded his arms and stepped forward, shooting out a hand to point at me, the shorter man flinched.