Snowfire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “We’re going outside to have a taste of the storm,” I told him, and he regarded me doubtfully.

  “So Adria is converting you to her snowstorm cult?”

  “Not converting, exactly. I’ve never seen a real snowstorm in the country. I’m interested.”

  He smiled at us. “Run along, then. Stay near the house and come in if it gets too bad. You can find yourself losing direction out in the woods in a real storm.”

  “Why don’t you come with us?” I said. “Then well be sure not to get lost.”

  Adria made a sound of delight, but I knew in the same instant that Julian meant to refuse.

  “Please come,” I said quickly.

  His eyes studied me as though he wondered why I wanted him to come.

  “You look tired,” he said. “There’s darkness under your eyes, and a line around your mouth. The outdoors will do you good, so if you want me, I’ll come.”

  “We want you,” I said, and turned away, lest he see too much. I was troubled by the quickening in me. I wanted him to come, regardless of Adria.

  He laid aside his papers. “It’ll take me a moment to get ready. Wait for me and I’ll join you.”

  When he’d gone, Adria danced about the library with more excitement than I had ever seen her show. “He’s really coming, Linda! Oh, I’m glad you’re here. Shan said you might make spells, and I should be careful. So you’ve used one of them, haven’t you? To get him to come.”

  “Spells? Don’t be foolish. Why shouldn’t he want to give you pleasure?”

  She sobered at once. “Because he—he doesn’t like to be around me much. And I know why. He looks at me and he thinks about Margot being dead. Sometimes he hates me.”

  I pulled her small, wool-padded person to me in a hug. “He loves you very much, darling. You mustn’t forget that or ever think anything else. Of course he’s sad because he’s lost your mother—as you’re sad too.”

  “But I—I pushed—”

  I cut her off at once. “You didn’t!” I cried with a conviction that surprised me. “You didn’t push that chair, Adria. I know you didn’t. You must stop thinking such a thing. We’ll find a way to prove you didn’t. I know we will.”

  “Prove it—?” A faint hope came into her eyes, lighting their blue depths.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I have a plan. But I’m not ready to try it, yet. Adria, will you show me your mother’s room sometime? Can you take me into it?”

  She went at once to the door between Margot’s room and the library, and turned the knob. The door resisted her pull.

  “They’ve locked it again. But I know where there’s a key. An extra key. The same one Shan used to lock this door after Margot’s chair went down that ramp, and—and—”

  There was something here I must think about. Who had told me the door was locked between these two rooms that day—before Margot died? Clay? Yes—Clay had said that. But I couldn’t give it my attention now.

  I tightened my arm about Adria. “Never mind. We’ll look into that room another time.”

  “My father won’t like it. He’s told me never to go in there. Of course I did go, anyway. So now he’s locked the door. Probably the other door is locked too—the one from the drawing room. And the one to the balcony locks with a bolt on the inside.”

  “We’ll work it out when the time comes,” I promised. “There’s your father coming downstairs. Don’t let him see you’ve been upset. Make this a happy time for him.”

  She looked at me strangely, a little puzzled. I doubt if she had ever thought about giving someone else a happy time. The idea must have pleased her, however, because when Julian called to us and we followed him out the front door, she skipped after him happily, with the usually hovering darkness that beset her thrust aside.

  The storm had not reached blizzard proportions, but the snow was falling thickly and wind was whispering around the mountain. High up it would be a gale, and the treetops were bending. We walked about the house, with Julian leading the way across the bridge over the stream that was still alive and running between ribbons of ice. For the first time I walked beneath the scarred beeches and saw their blackened trunks and branches close at hand. Apparently the fire had scorched them on only one side, so that the arms they turned toward the house were mostly gray, while here they were a dull black from the long-ago fire.

  Under our feet the snow was deepening, and now and then Adria stumbled into a drift that came to her boot tops. She clung to her father’s hand, laughing, and let him pull her out. Julian watched her with guarded amazement and now and then he looked at me thoughtfully—as though her gaiety puzzled him and he did not know quite how to react to it. As a father, I thought, he needed a few lessons himself.

  A path between hemlocks opened behind the beeches and began to wind up the mountain. Among the trees the wind could not reach us so easily and the flakes came straight down. In the wind the cold burned, but here in this shelter we had some respite.

  “Are we going up the mountain, Daddy?” Adria called to her father over the storm sounds of creaking branches and high, rushing wind. Her cheeks were red, her eyes bright with eagerness.

  “Only a little way,” he told her. “Just to show Linda the lookout place. Though there won’t be much to look at today.”

  Outdoors Julian himself was as much in his natural element as his daughter, and it was I who plodded, occasionally stumbling into a drift and learning that snow over my boot tops was a chilling sensation. But I wouldn’t have spoiled their fun for anything, and in my own way I was enjoying this too. Perhaps mainly because, for the first time since I’d met them, Julian and Adria both seemed untouched by any haunting.

  The trail wound steeply, and sometimes I slipped backward a foot for every foot or two I took ahead. My mittens were snow encrusted and a little damp, and my nose was fiercely cold.

  Once Adria kindly turned to wait for me. “Daddy and Emory cut this trail down from the top of the mountain,” she informed me. “If we want to we can ski all the way home from the top of the lifts. But you have to be careful because there are places where you can drop off a cliff.”

  She plunged on again through the snow, and a moment later, she cried out with pleasure.

  “Here’s the lookout place, Daddy! I’ve never been here in a storm before.”

  She climbed nimbly up what appeared to be a cliff of snowy rock, and her father paused to help me.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks. There’s an easier way up.”

  I clung to his hand and put my feet where he told me to, climbing a sloping bank until I found we were out on a high ridge, about a third of the way up the mountain. Sheer cliffs dropped away below, but swirling snow now hid the countryside that should be spread out beneath us.

  Adria stood on the ridge, a bright red figure, her arms outstretched joyously as though she embraced the elements, her small face lifted to flying snow. In this place the wind struck us furiously and I felt the sting of snow pellets on my face. I had no wish to tilt my head toward the brunt of the snow blast, as Adria was doing.

  Julian came to stand with an arm around each of us, steadying us there in the blast of the wind, with the steep drop to the valley falling away invisibly at our feet. Overhead, white snow clouds blotted out the sky, and there was a sense of isolation that shut us in. Perhaps there was a world out there somewhere in the storm, perhaps there was a house called Graystones, but here all was wild and elemental, and the three of us stood alone with the fury of wind and beating snow full upon us. It was frightening and exhilarating. I was aware of the pressure of Julian’s arm about me. He looked down at me and I knew he felt the moment as intensely as I.

  Slowly a strange feeling of elation began to possess me. I ceased to think of discomfort and cold, because something in me that I didn’t recognize was responding to this turbulence and to the pressure of Julian’s arm. I wanted to shout into the storm and lift my face to the freezing kiss of the snow. I looked at Julian in
something like bewilderment, and he nodded at me.

  “You’re feeling it, aren’t you? It’s primitive pain, I suppose. The skier knows it. You can feel triumphant when you stand up to it.”

  But it was more than that, and I think he knew it too. I sheltered in the crook of his arm, exultantly glad to be there—no longer timid or afraid of the blast. But he did not press this testing for long.

  “We’d better go down now,” he said. “On a day like this the dark falls early, and this is no trail to travel when the light has gone.”

  Adria turned reluctantly from her storm worship, batting snow from her eyelashes, wiping it from her face with a wet mitten. Her cheeks were glowing with a health I’d never seen in them before, and she looked radiantly happy, as though she had been fully released from whatever haunted her at Graystones.

  “I wish we’d never go back!” she cried.

  “I can echo that,” I said, and Julian laughed with pleasure and I knew there was release for him as well.

  “I don’t think I want an ice maiden for a daughter,” he said as he started down the steep portion of the trail. “Let’s go home and sit before a roaring fire. Give me your hand, Linda.”

  It was good to have the wind at my back and the vision of a warming fire in my mind as we started down. The going was worse downhill, but I dug in my heels as Julian told me to, and we went down with the snow smoking from our feet, making better time on the downward course. Skis would have been quicker, but this would be a hard trail to ski because it was narrow.

  Where the hemlocks opened near the foot of the trail, we could see the beeches, with the roofs of Graystones visible between gaunt branches. The elation I’d felt on the mountain began to seep away. Everything that was troublesome and dangerous still lay ahead, and I knew I had no right to the freedom of the mountain—or to the warmth and comfort of Julian’s arm about me. I was anything but free to choose my own actions.

  It was fortunate that Adria’s happy mood lasted longer than my own. While we went to change our clothes, Julian built the promised fire in the drawing room and ordered hot chocolate for Adria, and hot buttered rum for us. Yet the coziness I’d looked forward to was not there for me, after all. I wanted more than I could have. I knew that Julian’s gaze was upon me warmly, and I dared not respond. Too much that was secret and dangerous for me lay between us, and I could not turn to him with honesty and without subterfuge.

  Stuart was with me in that quiet room and I could hear the ticking of a clock—the relentless marching of time. What was it Clay had said when he knew I was coming to the house—that I was moving into “dangerous territory"? It was more dangerous than I had known—and somehow I wanted this danger to come closer. I didn’t want to turn from it as I must.

  Adria was in a chattering mood, behaving more like any little girl than I had ever seen her. Julian seemed to be entertained by her—perhaps still able to carry with him the mountain’s spell and hold off the haunting. He too talked in a more natural way, and he made an effort to draw me out. There was a new intensity in him that I had to guard against, to resist, and I was cold before the fire—cold in a way that I had not been out there in the snowstorm.

  Once he spoke to me directly, curiously. “What sort of woman are you, Linda—with your nose that tilts in a cocky way, and your mouth that’s always in earnest?”

  “Never mind my mouth—I know it’s too big.” I was flushing, squirming inwardly, filled with a ridiculous desire to run away.

  “You seem to spend your life looking after others, but what about you? Aren’t you responsible for a life of your own?”

  I was responsible for Stuart’s life, I thought a little wildly, and tried to answer him defensively.

  “I have my own life.”

  “A man, of course.”

  He was baiting me, his eyes bright with teasing, and I squirmed the more under this pinning down.

  “Of course,” I said. “There’s a man I worked for in the city. I suppose he’d like to marry me.”

  “But clearly you don’t choose to marry him.”

  “That’s not clear at all!” I denied, and welcomed Adria’s interruption.

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded of us both.

  “We’re talking about Linda’s life,” her father said. “Here she is looking after skiers at the lodge, looking after you up here. But when does she get to look after herself?”

  Looking after Stuart, I thought, and saw a yawning pit at my feet—a darkness I didn’t understand and feared terribly. It was necessary to look after others—to pay my debt to life.

  We were nearly finished with our drinks when Shan came downstairs and drifted into the room, dressed in a long violet robe patterned with yellow flowers and slit to one knee. She seemed surprised, and not altogether pleased to find us sitting so cozily before the fire.

  “I couldn’t stand being upstairs alone any longer,” she said, flinging herself into a great velvet chair that engulfed her, stretching her sandaled feet toward the fire. “The weather report promises a real blizzard, and it’s getting worse outside.”

  “Perhaps I’d better get down to the lodge while I still can,” I said. “If it gets too bad, I’ll stay there for the night and come back in the morning. Guests will be down from the slopes early today, if they went out at all.”

  “You don’t know skiers!” Shan said lightly.

  Adria set her chocolate cup on the coffee table and came to stand before me. “Don’t go there tonight, Linda. Please stay here. I need you. It’s at night that I need you.”

  I held her extended hands in mine, both touched and troubled by her appeal.

  “If you feel that way I promise to come back,” I told her.

  “Don’t worry,” Julian said. “I’ll get you to the lodge, Linda, and I’ll come after you. Though we’ll have to walk, since there’s no use trying to plow in this weather and the drive’s already impassable.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Shan said gently. “Linda can stay at the lodge. Adria dear, you can sleep in my room tonight. I’ll have the cot put beside my bed, and we’ll keep each other company. Then the storm can’t hurt us.”

  Adria whirled to face her aunt. “No—no, I don’t want to do that! You’re afraid of storms and you frighten me. And I have enough to be frightened about at night.”

  Julian was a man, beset by feminine vagaries, and he threw up his hands. “Night’s no different from day, Adria. You’re both behaving hysterically, but settle it between yourselves.” He left his chair and went out of the room, impatient and all too nervy himself.

  I spoke again to Adria. “I’ll go to the lodge, if it’s possible. And I’ll come back here when Clay lets me off. I’ll look in on you before I go to bed. I promise.”

  Shan drifted out of the room in Julian’s wake, clearly offended with me and offended because her own rather Victorian vapors were not being taken seriously by her brother. I had no particular sympathy for her. She wasn’t my problem and she was supposedly adult and had lived through blizzards in this house before.

  “I’ll have to get ready for the lodge,” I said to Adria. “Do you want to come with me while I dress?”

  We went upstairs together. Stepping into the tower was like entering another world. The wind was howling now and snow obscured all the outdoors, flung against the windows with the force of hail. Drafts whistled around us and I could see why the doors to the stairway were always kept closed in the winter.

  Cinnabar wandered uneasily about the upper hallway, and not altogether to my pleasure, Adria picked him up and brought him with her to my room, planting him in the middle of the bed. It was already dark outside, for all that the snow gave the afternoon a ghostly sort of light. I pulled my draperies against those staring beech trees.

  Adria laughed at me, striking Cinnabar, who purred deeply. “There’s nothing out there. You don’t need to pull draperies at night at Graystones. Unless you’re like Shan. She’s sure there are faces out
there, staring in. I know better. Whatever wants to get in is already in. So there’s no use in covering the windows.”

  Her words had an eerie ring to them, and I answered her as matter-of-factly as I could.

  “I’m a city girl. I’m not afraid of anything out there, but it’s cozier to be curtained at night, and I’m more used to it when the lights are on.”

  “After all,” Adria went on, “the only spirit that’s around here inside is Cinnabar, and you can’t shut her out.” She bent to nuzzle the cat with a too-elaborate show of affection.

  “You don’t believe that sort of nonsense, any more than I do,” I said impatiently, and paid no further attention as I changed my sweater and combed my hair, pinning it on top of my head, the better to fit under my parka hood. My long johns and ski pants I kept on, since I would need them going and coming.

  Adria sensed that her return to tormenting wouldn’t work with me and she hopped off the bed and went stirring curiously among my things. I watched her in the mirror as I put on lipstick and eye liner, but I let her be. There was nothing she could hurt, and I was just as glad to have her busy, instead of watching me with her sometimes disconcerting stare.

  “Is it all right if I help you unpack?” she asked.

  I nodded. “You can start with my tote bag if you want to.”

  She began to pull out bedroom slippers and extra pairs of shoes from the bag.

  “You like my father, don’t you?” she said abruptly to my reflection in the mirror.

  “Why wouldn’t I like him?” I forced a deliberate casualness into my voice.

  “Shan says you’ll fall for him, the way girls always do. She says she can already see it happening.”

  “That too is nonsense,” I assured her. “I’m afraid Shan’s imagination runs away with her.”

  I set down my hand mirror, blotted lipstick and turned around on the dressing-table bench. Adria had come to stand directly behind me, and I was startled to find her so near. She held out her hand, almost pushing it into my face.