Domino

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

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  Domino

  Phyllis A. Whitney

  THE FIRST MOVE

  The old woman sat by the bedroom window looking out upon the town her father had built. Since there had never been room for more than a few streets running in narrow file along the ledge beneath the mountain, it wasn’t a large town. Now its false fronts were crumbling and the gallows frames that had topped the mines were long gone to dust. Once every house had been occupied and the bustle of furious activity had spelled riches for all. Once she had been young and handsome and vigorously alive. Wealth and power had been hers to do with as she pleased.

  Today, while the wealth remained, both real and potential, the power lay dormant in her own weary body, and no one thought of her as a woman anymore. When there was no one left to help her with the fight, how was she ever again to rouse herself to battle? Wasn’t it easier to close her eyes and let it all go away, give in to the Enemy? Not merely the enemy of time and age, but her real enemy—that man who strode the streets of Jasper with all the force and energy at his command. Not waiting for her to die, as he might have done more kindly, but ordering her out of his way. Threatening her.

  His offer of money she could resist. She didn’t need any more money. What frightened her most was his hinting that if she would not give way, there were stronger weapons he might use. He had even mentioned a name—“Noah”—and that had sent old pain, old horror and despair striking through her, shriveling her very flesh. It was a name she had tried not to think of for years. One she couldn’t bear to remember now in her weakness and desperation.

  Though it cost her painful effort, she had attempted to warn Caleb Hawes, her cold, sometimes intimidating family lawyer, that the man out there was dangerous. Caleb had said there was nothing anyone could do at this late date. He wanted her to let the horrible past keep its secrets; wanted her to give way, give in. Once there had been a time when Caleb would never have dared to urge her in any direction she didn’t choose to take. These days she wasn’t sure she could trust him. Certainly she wouldn’t do as he wanted.

  Never would she give in, despite the moments of wavering. Not as long as there was breath left in her aging body. Eighty-four years of life, and she wasn’t done yet. Not quite yet. If only she could be the woman she had once been. Or was that woman still here inside, wearing this frail disguise?

  The man she feared couldn’t yet command her fully. He couldn’t bring Noah back to haunt her. Not as long as she chose to stay in this house and block everything he wanted, not while the last remnants of her strength remained. On mornings like this, with sun pouring in the windows and the mountains blazing with light, she always felt more valiant, more willing and able to fight. But when the early dusks came and light vanished in long mountain shadows, her courage slackened. She couldn’t go on like this forever. He would wear her down, defeat her in the end, wipe out all that she held dear. In a sense, he would wipe out history.

  Unless.

  Unless she sent for the child. That dreadful, destroying child whom she had never wanted to see again. The child who had brought her life down in ruins about her, and who still lived out there far away to the east. Of course she was a child no longer. All that had happened twenty years ago. She had been no more than eight when she and her mother had fled from this house. She was a woman grown now—and totally unknown. Nevertheless, she was alive. The aunt was still there. She had written from time to time, and she could be reached. The child could be reached.

  Not a child. She must try to remember that. A girl, a young woman. A woman who might be persuaded to help her grandmother. It was time to decide.

  She would write to the aunt now. She would make her plea. After all, that girl owed her something—owed her for everything she had done, everything she had destroyed.

  Across the room, on a desk she seldom used anymore, writing paper and pen awaited her. The old woman reached for her cane and drew herself painfully to her feet, hating her own frailty. She turned for one last look out the window upon the town that he was taking from her, and then moved purposefully toward her desk.

  I

  Because it was crucially necessary for me to escape New York, I had come to Connecticut as the one haven to which I could turn.

  Sitting here on a bench in the peaceful little park that surrounded Dillon’s summer theater, I tried to let apprehension flow away from me. My setter, whose obvious name was Red, leaned at my knee watching ducks paddling in the pond, now and then tugging reproachfully at his leash.

  I was grateful for maple branches overhead shielding me from bright June sunshine. Light was a part of what troubled me. It needn’t matter here. I could let the thing happen—if it must—and gain my release for a time. But this was no way to live for the rest of my life, and I had to find a way out. I must find a way.

  Only a week ago in New York I’d heard them talking in the office of the university press where I worked as an assistant editor. “It’s her husband’s death, you know. He was much older than Laurie, but it was a very close marriage, and she’s still devastated, even after two years.” The words warned me that my rising tensions had begun to show. There was no way to stop this, and I knew what the humiliating, frightening outcome would be, knew no way to avoid it. Doctors had never helped, and I was through with tranquilizers. Nor would I go to a psychiatrist.

  After all, Peter Waldron, my husband, had been a psychiatrist and the author of several much consulted books on emotional disturbances. I could grow angry even now when I thought of how he had used me. My office friends knew nothing about the facts of my marriage, and their judgments were utterly false. Now at last something new was happening inside me. Some strength of will too long submerged, perhaps suppressed, was rising in me. I meant to let it rise.

  In the warm June morning the park was quiet all around me, innocent and dreaming. Last night I’d come here alone to the summer theater to test myself. The lights and crowds had not disturbed me, and I’d been quite taken by the vital young actor who had played the lead. No one had noticed me, and that had been reassuring because it meant that I was doing nothing as yet to make myself conspicuous.

  Yet this morning, when all about me was peaceful in the sunlight, the familiar tension was rising again and beginning to vibrate, almost in tune with the bees. When a dragonfly darted near me, I ducked nervously. In a little while that frightening top in my head would begin its spinning—faster and faster.

  Well, let it come! Let it come, and for once face it through, I told myself.

  The red setter whined plaintively and looked up at me, pleading until I gave in. “All right, Red, have your fun.” I let him off his leash and he bounded joyfully away to investigate strange territory, as unaware as I that he was shortly to become a messenger of destiny. My thoughts turned inward, as they did too often nowadays.

  It wasn’t, as they thought at the office, that I still missed Peter with the same sense of fright and loss that I’d felt at his death two years ago. I had married him when I was twenty-one, a few months after my mother had died, and we’d had five years together. Not very quiet years, as it proved. I had even turned up in one of Peter’s serious tomes. The woman in the case he had recorded had short brown hair and was small, while I was tall and piled my long fair hair on top of my head. Nevertheless, the disguise was thin, and it was me he was writing about. My “aberration” that had so fascinated him was all there, and I’d recognized myself at once with a sense of deep hurt and betrayal. I had hated being examined in print in such meticulous detail by my own
husband.

  Yet I still missed him—most of all at night. I missed the comfort of arms to hold and protect me, and the pillow talks we used to have. How empty a bed could be when you slept alone.

  My feelings toward Peter had always been ambivalent. He had been my protector, counselor, lover—even something of the father I couldn’t remember. And he had loved me in his own way, despite the fact that he was so much older and wiser than I, just as I had loved him in mine. Even though he hadn’t proved to be the source of all the answers I longed for, he was truly a nurturer. Just as my mother had been. And I was too much of a leaner.

  How often I had wondered if everything might have been different if my professor father had lived. But he had died of pneumonia when I was two, and my mother must have suffered deeply, for she could never bear to talk about him. I had seen pictures of her when she was the young wife, Marybeth Morgan, and quite beautiful, with huge eyes, a tremulous mouth, and a lovely figure. Though in life I could only remember her fading, her giving up, and the way she stared at me sometimes with a despairing watchfulness. As though she waited in dread for something to surface in me. At least, through an inheritance my father had left her, there had been enough to live on, and we hadn’t suffered on that score.

  Such memories had been surfacing more than ever lately. At the office my editor had said, “For God’s sake, Laurie, you’re twanging like a harp. Take your two weeks and get away. See if you can get those nerves in hand and some color back in your face.”

  My aunt’s house in Connecticut had always been a storm port in need. I telephoned Ruth Thorne, and as always, she said, “Come.” She had never protected or nurtured. She had never approved of the fearful way my gentle, sad mother raised me. Perhaps it was Ruth’s vinegar and spice that really fed my spirit when I needed it and grew tired of the diet of milk toast and hot lemonade my mother fed me so protectively.

  At my aunt’s invitation, I packed a suitcase, shut up the house in Long Island that I’d shared with Peter, and put Red beside me in the front seat of Peter’s decorous blue sedan. Ruth took one look at me when I arrived and pushed me out of the house.

  “Get outdoors, get some exercise. Come back when you’re good and tired. And no picky eating. You’ll take what I put on the table or back to New York you go!”

  I laughed and hugged her and went out for a walk with Red at my heels. But not even her doses of vinegar caused the spinning in my head to subside.

  I used to warn Peter when it started, when it might be coming on, and he would follow its progress as though I were indeed a bug on a slide. Afterward, shaken by what had happened, I would be quiet for a while. Until it began to build up all over again, winding like some terrible child’s top, forever spinning and reflecting a light that dazzled and frightened me. Peter had wanted to take me to a confrere who would hypnotize me, but I’d flatly refused. I needed to be cured of whatever disturbed me, threatening my very sanity, yet at the same time I had always been afraid to face whatever I might learn. Far deeper than the desire to know, there had been in me a fear of knowing. It was that fear that I must somehow find the courage to defeat. Fear in particular of that name which sometimes returned to haunt me. Noah. Who was Noah, and why did the sound of his name bring terror with it?

  Now as I sat drowsing on my bench in this pleasant park, Red came bounding back to put his paws on my knees and look lovingly into my face. He seemed to sense my moods, and I sometimes felt that his utter devotion helped me more than Peter ever had. Red might coax me at times, but he never required anything more of me than the love I gave him back.

  When I’d petted him sufficiently, he bounded away again, ears flopping, red plumes flying—straight for the open door of the theater, not far away. I called him back, but he paid no attention, so I got up, not hurrying particularly, never dreaming what awaited me, and went after him. The doors were open, so there must be someone inside.

  The building was a converted barn, and a lobby had been partitioned off beyond the main entrance. Other doors opened into the theater itself, and of course it was through one of these that Red went rushing. I didn’t care for the idea of chasing him vainly through the seats of the orchestra section, but there was no help for it. At least it would give me some exercise, and I hoped we wouldn’t be disturbing anyone. This hope was dashed immediately. Up on the bare lighted stage the actors of the summer stock company sat around a long table, with blue-bound scripts before them. An electrician was testing lights, and on the table a large coffeepot offered sustenance. An undistinguished aluminum coffeepot—so prosaic an object to change one’s entire life.

  Red of course made a great commotion as he galloped down the aisle, heading directly for the stage, sensing friendly humans. Humans were always friendly to Red. Up the steps he bounded, making his choice at once in the actor-director of the company. I slowed my steps, hating to be conspicuous. I didn’t belong here at all, interrupting a rehearsal, and dressed as I was, so much more formally than the actors on the stage in their jeans and shorts. My pale blue linen suit and wide-brimmed straw hat set me off as a city dweller. Though the hat wasn’t so much for fashion’s sake as because it shaded my face. As Peter had often pointed out, I was all too often given to hiding.

  There could, however, be nothing inconspicuous about my approach in the wake of my uninhibited dog. It was as though I were the play and the actors the audience. They stared at me, some of them smiling, and the man whom I had seen in the lead role the night before stood up with a pat for Red and came to the edge of the stage to watch my approach.

  “Rescue is at hand,” he said over his shoulder to the company, and flashed me the brilliant smile I remembered from his performance last night.

  I tried again to summon Red, who was by this time garnering so much attention that he had no time for me. Helpless to do anything but walk toward the stage, I could only look up at the man who waited for me.

  At first glance I would never have called Hillary Lange my ideal for lead material in a play. He wasn’t handsome, though his rather rugged features added up to something not easily forgotten. His height barely topped that of his leading lady, but his body was sturdy and well muscled. His hair grew thick and brown above his forehead, and there was a dark flash to his eyes that could surprise with its intensity—so that one’s attention was compelled. When he moved, I had noted that it was with the grace of a dancer, or of some lithe, prowling creature that had never been wholly tamed. On stage I had recognized him as unique. He had presence, electricity. Something I didn’t know how to name. Perhaps it was that dark, half-threatening intensity that the female in me responded to, whether I liked it or not. Up there on the boards he certainly commanded—as he was commanding me now. I was just below him by this time, murmuring embarrassed apologies, when he stopped me.

  “Never mind all that. Will you help us out?”

  His words surprised me and I stood still, startled into my old impulse to flee any unfamiliar situation. His voice went on, its sonorous quality soothing, taking for granted my response.

  “One of our cast seems to have been delayed. Will you come up and help us out—read the part of Maggie for our next production?”

  Inside me the old voice was crying, “No, no—I’d be frightened to death! I couldn’t possibly …” But my feet had better sense. They took me directly up the steps, and he came to give me a hand, bringing me to the empty place at the table next to his own. Standing beside him, I was aware of being tall and too thin, and somehow too pale and blond beside all his dark vitality.

  Red jumped at me in joyous approval and I patted him down, clipped on his leash, and looped it around the leg of a chair at the back of the stage.

  “Stay,” I told him sternly, and for once he decided to obey.

  Hillary Lange reached for my broad-brimmed hat with assurance and removed it. At once I could feel hairpins slipping, and a fair tendril fell over my nose. He laughed, lifting it back from my face with one finger—and it was as though s
ome current had touched me.

  “Tell me your name,” he said.

  I answered without hesitation, “Laurie Morgan,” and wondered why I hadn’t said “Waldron.” True, I no longer wore Peter’s ring, though I wasn’t sure why I’d wanted to put it aside since I didn’t think I would ever marry again. And now I had put aside his name as well. Yet I didn’t feel especially disloyal. I’d given Peter everything I could. He was gone, but I was alive, and I had to find a new way for myself.

  “Laurie Morgan,” Hillary Lange repeated, an odd note that was almost wonderment in his voice. As though in his quick way he already sensed something I would grope my way toward more slowly—that we were going to mean a great deal to one another.

  He introduced me to the company and then handed me the blue-bound side for my speeches. “It’s a very small part—you won’t have any trouble. It’s just that it’s a key role and we need it to go through the reading. Run through it yourself, if you like. We’ll give you time.” Nonchalantly he dropped my hat upon an empty chair and waited. Everyone else waited too, perhaps not as sure as their director that this amateur should be invited to participate.

  I noted the name of the play and looked into the dark flash of his eyes. “I’ve seen it in New York. I remember the part.”

  Somehow I thrust back a self-consciousness that wanted to envelope and smother me, and read my opening lines. Not too badly. Only a falter here and there. I was scared but I was doing it, and lightning hadn’t struck me down, nor was anyone roaring with laughter. With this new tension perhaps the other was fading a little.

  Hillary’s eyes were upon me and I could tell that he was pleased, perhaps even a little surprised, and the tiny kernel of courage began to grow. I read on with more confidence.

  The spotlights were still being turned off and on, as the stage crew experimented with them. They made me uneasy, as lights often did. But at least they weren’t being focused on the table—and they had nothing to do with me. I could hear my voice growing in strength with my growing assurance.