Columbella

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “What do you want?” she asked, her tone hostile.

  “I need your help. I want to show you what I’ve found. You may know something about these things.”

  Reluctantly she backed from the door, and when I stepped into the room and closed it behind me I saw that she had changed from bikini to her own rumpled shorts and blouse. Her hair was untidy, her cheeks streaked from weeping, and I wanted to put my arms about her, hold her comfortingly, but I put the impulse firmly aside. She would welcome no comfort from me, and the accusations she had hurled at her father could not help but stand between us.

  Not until I was well into the room did I see the bed and what she was doing. Across the spread were heaped piles of clothes. Some of the dresses I recognized. These were things that had belonged to Catherine. Leila appeared to be sorting through them, and I knew why she wept. The very touch of such garments must make her loss all the more painfully acute, and I wondered who had permitted her this self-torture.

  She looked at me defiantly. “Aunt Edith was going to give everything of Cathy’s away, and I couldn’t bear that. I want to keep some of these things myself.”

  I set the murex and the columbella on a table. At once Leila pounced upon the gilded shell with its broken chain.

  “Steve found it in the clearing near the lookout point,” I said. “The murex was at the foot of the catchment.”

  She stared at me, pressing her lips together so they would not quiver.

  “Do you know anything about these?” I asked, holding out the gems on the palm of my hand.

  For a moment she said nothing, her surprise evident. Then she touched the twin diamonds, turning them over on my palm.

  “These are Cathy’s. They’re the earrings that were stolen from her the last time she was in San Juan. Where did you find them?”

  “And the emerald? Have you seen that before?”

  She was watching me, her eyes troubled. “I don’t think it belongs to anyone here. I know all Gran’s jewels because she’s shown them to me often. And Aunt Edith has nothing like that.”

  “It wasn’t your mother’s then?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not. What are you getting at?”

  “Both the earrings and the stone were hidden inside that murex shell before it rolled down the catchment,” I said bluntly.

  Leila sat up on the bed among her mother’s clothes, the columbella held tightly in her fingers, her eyes closed. When she spoke it was not about shells or jewels and her voice took on a trancelike quality.

  “Cathy used to scuba dive a lot. Once she had a terrible experience. She was out in the Atlantic, well off from land, and she’d swum under water away from the boat that brought her out. She surfaced and saw a fin sticking up out of the water some distance away. Then another and another popped up and they began to circle around her, coming between her and the boat, circling in a little closer all the time. She said it was exciting and dreadful—and she was terribly frightened. She couldn’t even move in the water because she kept thinking it would be such a painful way to die, and that paralyzed her. But the people in the boat saw what was happening and they came through the line of fins and pulled her to safety.”

  I waited, not sure why she had told me this chilling story. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me quite clearly and calmly.

  “Perhaps that’s the way it is now,” she said. “Perhaps the fins are circling around and coming in closer to me all the time. Nearer and nearer and nearer until something dreadful happens!”

  My fingers closed about the green stone and the earrings as I stood there trying to put from my mind the eerie picture Leila had painted, seeking an answer to what was happening now. Once we knew who had hidden these things inside the murex shell, a great deal might be explained.

  “I know what you’re trying to do!” Leila cried, suddenly defiant. “You’re trying to find some way to make everything look bad for Cathy. So you can help my father escape what he’s done. But you won’t get away with it, you know. If that black shell rolled to the foot of the catchment—that’s the answer. It’s just as I told you—Dad used it when he struck her.”

  Dealing with her in this distraught state seemed hopeless, but I managed to speak quietly. “You can’t have lived with your father all these years and not know him better than that.”

  Tears glittered in her eyes. “Who was it then? Tell me that—who struck Cathy with the shell if it wasn’t Dad?”

  “I’m not sure anyone did, but if you must believe that—what about Steve O’Neill?”

  She snorted her scorn for my words. “Steve was crazy about her! He’d never have hurt her in any way!”

  “Just the same, he knew the shell might have been used as a weapon. He jumped away when I waved it at him quite feebly.”

  “Of course he knew. I told him myself. But it’s no use your trying to play that sort of game—blaming everyone else. You’re the one who ought to be punished. You’re the one who caused all this. If you hadn’t come here and made Dad fall for you—”

  She had picked up one of Catherine’s dresses, but now she flung it from her violently and pushed past me to open the door and run downstairs as if she were pursued. A voice I had not listened to for some time whispered in my mind: “You’re out of your depth, Jessie dear. You’re not clever enough to handle anything as big as this.”

  I slammed the door on such thoughts and turned my back on Helen. This was now. This was reality. There was no one left but me to fight for King—since I did not think he was going to fight for himself. No matter how stumbling and foolish my efforts, I had to keep trying to prove what perhaps could not be proved.

  Leaving the shells behind but keeping the gems in my hand, I went back to my room. Edith Stair stood in the middle of the floor, looking around. She had come in through the open French doors to the gallery and she regarded me with a dour expression and no surprise.

  I held out my hand, showing her the earrings and the emerald. “Are these what you’ve been searching my room for?”

  She made no effort to deny or defend, but stared at the articles on my palm.

  “So you did take the emerald! I knew it all along, though I couldn’t find where you’d hidden it.”

  “Take it?” I echoed. “Take it from where?”

  Her gaze flicked scornfully to my face and then back to the gems on my hand. Before I could draw my hand away, her fingers darted out suddenly to snatch the jewels into her own possession.

  “Don’t pretend such innocence with me! Catherine said all along that you took something from my workroom that afternoon you were there. But where did you find my sister’s earrings? She told me they were in a safe place where they’d never be discovered.”

  I did not like the woman’s feverish expression, and I was glad of the open door behind me. Yet I had to stay and coax from her whatever I could learn that might help King.

  “I found them just now in that murex shell,” I told her. “Leila believes the shell was used to strike her mother down. I found it lying at the foot of the catchment.”

  Edith’s eyes had turned a little glassy, and one lid twitched out of control. She grasped a corner of the bureau to support herself. My thoughts were running ahead, adding things up, giving me answers that raised more questions. That day when I had built sand castles in Edith’s workroom she had been terribly angry. Because the emerald had been hidden in the sand? There had been a box of sand at Caprice—and another at the redwood house. Perhaps the same box. Harmless seeming enough, but always put in a place where tampering was unlikely—if it had not been for me.

  Edith recovered herself sufficiently to stand free of the bureau. “You’d better keep quiet about this if you want to save King. You’d better say nothing to anyone!”

  She looked quite dreadful and I backed toward the door. I would not bargain with her, nor would I stand th
ere and let her come closer. I could think of only one thing—that sandbox at King’s house. I had to get to it—quickly.

  The moment the door was closed behind me I fled down the stairs, not looking back to see if she followed. The downstairs area was lost in shadows because of hurricane shutters across the terrace doors. The garden boy was there working on the barricades. Apparently the electric power had already failed, for Noreen moved about the room, lighting the candles that stood everywhere in their hurricane globes. King was nowhere in sight, but Leila was coming toward the foot of the stairs, and in the pale candle gloom I saw tears running down her cheeks. As we met she paused, bearing herself with a certain erect dignity that reminded me of her grandmother.

  “I’ve just telephoned Captain Osborn,” she told me. “I’ve let him know that Cathy’s death was—murder. And that Dad was responsible. The captain is coming right up to the house, if he can make it before the storm gets too bad.”

  Somehow it hurt me to breathe because of the pain around my heart. There was nothing I could say to her, and there were only two things left to be done. I had to get to that box of sand before anyone else did. And I had to find King.

  A choking sound from the top of the stairs made me look up to see Edith at the turn, her face yellow-pale. She had heard Leila.

  For a moment I thought she might faint, but she clung to the bannister, her lips moving. “Alex!” she whispered. “Where is Alex?”

  “He’s gone downtown,” I told her, and then spoke to Leila. “You’d better look after your aunt.”

  I ran across the room to Noreen. The little maid had heard and her eyes were wide with fright, the hand that lit the tapers shaking. But she managed to answer my demand and tell me that King had gone to board up the redwood house.

  I waited for no more. Now both my goals were the same.

  20

  I ran through the aisle of royal palms to the road, finding that I had to fight the wind. The sun had disappeared and the sky was a glittery gray. Each moment the wind seemed to grow stronger, and overhead the racing clouds had a ragged look, running together across the sky like clouds at home racing ahead of a storm. From the road I could now and then glimpse the harbor far below, alive with whitecaps and with that strangely empty look about it. In the waters between Frenchtown and Hassel Island a few medium-sized craft had taken shelter, but there were no other boats to be seen.

  The wind tore at my hair, my clothes. The distance to the house was no more than a ten-minute walk, but it took me at least twenty in my struggle against the wind. When I started down the paved drive that led off the highway, I glimpsed King’s car parked beside the house, and saw that the door stood open. Eagerly I ran toward steps to the little deck that rimmed this side of the house, and as I ran I saw that someone had carried the box of sand outside, to set it not far from the top of the steps.

  I called out to King as I went up the steps, and then dropped to my knees beside the box, dipping both hands into loose dry sand. As I had noticed before, there was a roughness to it. I brought up a handful and let it trickle through my fingers, leaving behind something that winked blue in the fading light. It looked like a sapphire. The next cupped handful netted two large diamonds. When I had put the stones down beside me, I dusted my hands free of sand and sat back on my heels, abruptly aware that King had not answered my call. I was about to stand up and shout for him again, to start searching for him through a house which seemed strangely quiet. But before I could move, I heard a step behind me and looked around.

  Steve O’Neill stood in the doorway balancing a heavy flashlight in his hands. This was the same grim young man I had seen searching the catchment—and I was afraid. My interest in the sandbox was clear to him, for my little cache of jewels lay upon the boards of the deck beside me.

  “So what are you going to do now?” he asked, his voice deceptively calm.

  At least I could get to my feet, my concern for King the main worry in my mind. “You made a good combination, didn’t you—you and Catherine?” I said. “Using Caprice and Edith’s workroom for your business—whatever it was.”

  “And you’ve meant trouble ever since you came here,” he said.

  I tried to keep him talking, so King would surely hear us and come to my aid. “It was you in Edith’s workroom closet this morning, wasn’t it? You put on that beach robe and dashed out when I’d have opened the door.”

  Cold spite looked out of his eyes. “You’re pretty smart, aren’t you, Miss Jessica-Jessica? But you were getting too snoopy, and I had to move that box of sand up here before you caught on. Now I think we’ll put a stop to your snooping.”

  I saw the gleam of the flashlight in his hands, but before he could move I whirled away from him, running along the deck to the front of the house and the cantilevered veranda. I rounded the corner into the wind, seeking for an open door. I had to get inside now. I had to find King.

  There was no open door. Here hurricane shutters were already up and the whole stretch of glass was barricaded. Ahead, the veranda ended in a rail above the cliff cutting off my escape. I had run into a cul-de-sac.

  Steve caught me before I reached the veranda’s end, and I cried out in desperation, bracing myself, expecting a blow from his torch, but he laughed and dropped it to the floor, swung me about to face him. He could be as cruel as Catherine. The long rail was behind me, pressing hurtfully against my back, and he had me by the shoulders, forcing me over it. Below me lay the sea of flamboyants, thrashing wildly in the wind, their petals flying. Below and through them lay the drop-off to the cliff. I struggled in his grasp, fighting the force that bent me backward over the rail so that at any moment gravity would win and I would go plunging down from the heights.

  “Do you think this was how Cathy felt?” he cried, his hands cruel on my shoulders as he pressed me down. “Do you think this was the way she struggled when she knew she must go through that railing?” He was whispering now, close to my ear.

  And then, from the corner of my eye I caught movement—the flash of something black in the air—and heard the thud of a blow. Astonishingly, Steve’s hands loosened from my shoulders, slipping away as he went down upon the floor of the veranda. I sprang back from the rail to stare in amazement at Mike O’Neill, who stood looking down at his brother, the flashlight in his hand.

  “You all right?” Mike asked, his young face dark and angry.

  “King?” I gasped. “Is he—”

  “Inside,” Mike said, and knelt beside his brother.

  I ran along the veranda and around the corner to the open front door. Inside the shuttered house the air was hot and still and the rooms were dark after that bright gray glitter outdoors. In the gloom I found him, face down where he had fallen. My heart nearly stopped as I ran to where he lay and dropped to my knees beside him, touching his shoulder gently, calling his name. He groaned, moved, and my heart began to beat again.

  Mike came into the room to dump his brother unceremoniously on the floor not far from King. “What do we do now?” he asked me soberly.

  I waved a hand at King and Mike managed a reassuring grin. “I think he’ll be all right in a few minutes. I had a look earlier. There—he’s coming to now. And so is my brother. I’d better take a hand with him.”

  Steve was trying to sit up and Mike pushed him back. “Take it easy, pal—if you don’t want another conk on the head. You’ve been playing too rough around here.”

  King groaned and sat up, feeling the back of his head, wincing as he found the lump where the torch had struck him. Then he looked blankly at me. “How did you get here? I had a feeling somebody was around while I was putting up the shutters, but I never saw what hit me. How about telling me what happened?”

  My words came hurriedly, without order. “Steve hit you with a flashlight. He’s been mixed up in some kind of jewel-stealing scheme with Catherine. That box of sand outside is a way statio
n to wherever the things were going.”

  The sound of my voice seemed to wake Steve up and this time he managed to get to his feet in spite of Mike. But while he looked grim, he was still too shaken to be a threat.

  “You’d better start talking,” King said. “Keep an eye on him, Mike.”

  Mike stepped closer to his brother, though he did not touch him again. Outside the wind hurled itself at the house, shaking its very timbers.

  “Why don’t you ask her to talk?” Steve said, nodding at me. “She knows so much. Or thinks she does.”

  “I know you tried to push me over the veranda railing just now!” I cried. “Perhaps in the same way you pushed Catherine through the railing above the catchment.”

  “I wouldn’t have pushed you over,” Steve said in disgust “I only wanted to give you a scare.”

  King got up and took a step toward him and Steve edged warily back.

  “Watch yourself,” Steve said. “You make trouble for me, and I’ll go to the police with what happened that night I’ll tell them what all of you at Hampden House are trying to hush up—that Catherine’s husband fell for a schoolteacher and found a way to get rid of his wife.”

  “As it happens I’m going to the police myself,” King said evenly. “And when I do you’re coming with me.”

  This time Steve moved suddenly, unexpectedly. He shoved his brother off balance and dashed for the door before anyone could stop him. Mike made no effort at pursuit and when King would have gone after him Mike held him back apologetically.

  “Let him go, Mr. Drew. He won’t get far. His car won’t start I found it down the road and yanked out the distributor head. Even if he gets away, this is an island—and there’s a hurricane stirring up the Caribbean. He can’t even use a boat.”

  I heard despair in Mike’s voice and knew he could not hate his brother, that he was suffering because of what Steve had done.