by Brian Hodge
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Sandy said, poking at the cup’s handle, taking deep breaths that were released in spasms.
“It never does,” Ed said. He rose after a moment, yanking up his jacket’s zipper, and stood behind him, tugging at the chair’s back. “Come on, Sandy, I’ll drive you home. I don’t think I’m needed here anyway, not now.” He looked over the boy’s head at Cyd, who nodded, rose herself and walked them to the door. “I’ll be in touch,” he whispered as he walked outside.
Sandy turned around once on the patio, the light from the kitchen pinning him to the night. “I’m sorry, Miss Yarrow. I just wanted to do something. I just wanted to hit somebody, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
She knew there should have been words for her to say to act as a balm, but she could not find them. She only lifted a hand in farewell instead, and watched them vanish beyond the reach of the light. Then she turned slowly back to the room, her right hand jumping into a fist when she saw her mother standing in the doorway. The peasant blouse had been pulled up over her shoulders, and one curl of grey dangled unbecomingly over her forehead. Her face had grown taut, so much so that her lower lip quivered until she touched a finger to it briefly without losing her scowl.
“What were they doing here?”
Cyd pointed mutely at the cups on the table, too startled by Myrtle’s sudden appearance to say anything immediately.
Myrtle sniffed, raising her head slightly to jut out her chin. “I don’t like that boy,” she said, then moved into the room and walked quickly to a cupboard from which she fetched a tin of China tea. “He tries to stir up trouble for your father and me. Talks around the town like we’re crazy of something.”
“He misses his grandfather,” Cyd said, surprising herself that she automatically took the boy’s defense.
“Nonsense.” Myrtle spun the tin in her hands, held it tightly and tapped a long nail against its lid. “Well, I suppose that’s true enough. But he says things he shouldn’t. Wallace McLeod, he was old, Cynthia, very old. He wasn’t as strong as he liked people to believe, the way he used to be at any rate. We couldn’t keep him, that’s all. Even if we could have afforded him, we couldn’t keep him. I hope that’s clear. Even—”
“All right, Mother, all right! He’s just a boy, for heaven’s sake. You’d think he’d been trying to steal the family treasure or something.”
Myrtle opened her mouth to retort, apparently thought better of it and hurried to the door. At the threshold she stopped and glanced back at the table. “You invite him?”
Cyd had no answer.
Myrtle smiled. Coldly. “If you’re going to stay inside, dear, you’d better take off that sweater. You’ll catch your death. You are going to stay in, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
He mother nodded, as if the response were one that should be rewarded. “Well … as long as you’re not going to prowl around anymore, I don’t suppose you’d want to …”She lifted her shoulders in not quite a shrug.
“No, Mother, I would not. Once is enough, believe me. You grab the little creep yourself, make Father jealous. You know, sometimes I think he takes you and all that you do for granted. Why don’t you let the doctor sneak you off to his clinic? It’ll do Father good to get shaken now and then.”
“Darling, the one thing your father does not do is take me for granted.” Her smile was broad, quick, hung in the air long after she had left, as false as the statement that had caused it to spring.
“I don’t believe that for a minute, Mother,” she muttered to herself as she began to clean the cups from the table. And for the first few minutes she kept her mind clear as she emptied the chocolate into the sink, filled the pan and cups with hot water for soaking. But as she wiped a damp cloth over the table, she could not help seeing Sandy and the desperation on his face, the curious play of emotions that tugged hard at his lips and gave birth to an intermittent tic at the corner of one eye. It was … odd. The boy was a senior at the Station high school on Steuben Avenue, his parents both commuters to an insurance firm in Hartford, and she had noticed nothing in his make-up—until now, that is—that would send him on such a fool’s errand as trying to steal a car just to cause the Yarrows trouble. And the stories he was supposedly spreading around town—that was curious, too, since she had heard none of them and surely would have after all this time. The love, she thought, he must have had for that old man.
And, she added suddenly, the loyalty.
A scarce commodity in this day and age and she wondered if she would have felt the same way had it been her own family thus afflicted.
It frightened her when a negative answer surfaced before she could stop it.
Her brothers were self-sufficient, as were her parents; and while there must have been times when she was young, times of idyllic joy and unquestionable poignancy, she understood readily that the distance of appearance-born wealth had set an almost psychic wedge between herself and others. A wedge she could not quite put a name to but was there nevertheless. If there was loyalty, it was most likely instinctive, and not nearly as powerful as Sandy felt.
And love? She nodded to herself as she dried her hands and moved into the hall and up the stairs. Of course there was love. The family was filled with it, overflowed with it, made living here decidedly more comfortable than in most families she had seen. On the other hand, she asked herself grimly, how much of it had been demanded from history, and how much genuinely earned by the people she loved?
“Lord, Lord, aren’t we getting profound in our old age,” she whispered as she reached the top landing.
A sigh.
She paused, one hand still on the bannister, and looked down into the foyer. The lights in the sitting room had been turned off, the remaining guests still closeted in the dining room. She stared into the slate shadows, straining, then shrugged and took a step toward her bedroom.
Sighing.
The wind, she thought.
She moved across the hall and had her hand on the doorknob when she heard it again, softer, almost elusive in the dark tunnel of the corridor. She turned and walked slowly toward the front of the house, one hand out to trail along the wall, not knowing why she didn’t find the nearest switch and banish the gloom.
A groan this time, and she rubbed at her arms as if chilled.
A dim light created a haze in the front hallway, spilling softly from the open door of her father’s suite. She hesitated—again the reluctance to invade what had been a sanctuary—then hurried into the bedroom: large, light, with pale brown carpeting and indistinct prints on the matching wall.
Barton was lying on a broad, canopied bed, the green quilt beneath him twisted at his feet. He was naked to the waist, trousers and shoes off, eyes closed and hands clenched tightly at his sides.
“Father?” She balked at approaching him, forced herself to cross the room and lay a hand on his brow. “Father, are you all right?”
He was still, the flow of white hair pressed deeply into the pillow, the sagging of his age pulling at his shoulders and chest until he seemed to her to be more dead than alive. She drew back her hand and wiped it hard against her leg.
“Father?”
She could detect no movement, not the slightest bit of stirring. A quick glance at the door that led into his parlor, and she leaned over to place an ear against his chest. And heard nothing. Immediately, she grabbed for a wrist and fumbled to find the reassurance of a pulse. When she failed, and cursed her clumsiness, she felt the side of his neck, behind his ear, his temple … found nothing at all and stumbled back, away from the bed.
He couldn’t be dead; she had heard him groaning.
She had.
She knew that she had.
But the longer she stared at the figure on the bed, the more she realized his chest wasn’t rising, wasn’t falling. And when she moved forward again, and touched a finger to an eyelid, there wasn’t even the grace of a flutter.
Chapter 6
Peop
le die; Yarrows do not.
She wandered lost about the parlor, its earthen-spring colors offering no comfort in its reminders of periodic resurrection.
People die …
She touched at the side tables, at chair arms curled like lion’s claws, at the books in binds of leather that were ranked behind glass fronts on the wall shelves or were tossed carelessly on cushions after brief examination. Doctor Kraylin was in the bedroom, Myrtle with him, but there was no whispering from beyond the closed door, no sudden explosions of sobbing and grief … and no one, after what seemed like hours, came out to reassure her, or steady her. She had wanted to get hold of Evan and Rob, but they’d left no word as to where they would be; and with Ed taking Sandy home she was far more lonely than she thought she had a right to be.
… Yarrows do not.
The house began to work on her then. Large, it became monstrous; broad, it became cavernous. Six people alone in a place built for twice that number, and she wondered why she had not long ago left for one of her own. And that, she knew, was an answer too simple to be considered seriously.
She was afraid.
Twenty-seven years stumbling through life, and she was afraid. Not of being by herself in a few small rooms of her own design; but of, at one time or another, having to come back to her family like a prodigal daughter who would rather be somewhere else and hadn’t the strength. The store was her escape then, however temporary it may be. An apartment that was hers and no other’s was … too permanent.
The fact that she knew this and understood it made her ashamed: both of the thought, and of the fact that she hadn’t the courage to do much about it. At least not now. At least—
The door opened suddenly and Kraylin stepped into the room, closed the door behind him as she turned with hands clasped at her waist, eyes wide and fearful. He smiled rather briefly and without speaking walked to an ornate mahogany sideboard where he poured from a lead-topped decanter a tall, unrelieved glass of scotch. He downed it in two swallows, coughed and wiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his blazer.
“He’ll be all right,” he said as if he’d just realized she was there. He sagged into the nearest chair, waving her to a Victorian love seat that marked the carpet’s center.
“But …” She fluttered her hands helplessly, not really understanding. “I mean, there wasn’t a pulse, nothing. I thought he was—”
“Dead? Not quite. But for a man his age, I would say close enough.”
“I don’t get it. I mean, I don’t understand.”
“His skin color and temperature indicated to me, Miss Yarrow, what was probably a very mild heart attack.”
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“Please,” he said quickly, “don’t be alarmed. I only used the phrase to indicate some trouble with the heart. Don’t go thinking the worst, please.” The smile warmed. “I shall have him in tomorrow for a complete battery of tests just to be sure, but I’m telling you frankly there’s nothing more anyone can do for him now that he can’t do for himself. A night’s rest is the best thing, believe me. We’ll worry about what comes after later.”
“Heart attack.”
Kraylin’s smile became surprisingly gentle. “Miss Yarrow—”
“Cyd,” she corrected absently.
He nodded his thanks. “All right, I can understand your worry, and I know what that phrase sounds like: heart attack. But men like your father don’t drop just like that, believe me. His biggest problem is going to be slowing down. He’ll, naturally, not be able to do the work he’s used to, not if he doesn’t want there to be another episode like tonight’s, and unless I miss my guess he’s going to be an absolute holy terror around here when he gets the word.” He leaned forward, hands loose on his knees. “Cyd, if you don’t mind me saying so, you and I didn’t quite hit it off too well down there, earlier. I know it, and I know you have an instinctive distrust of me, as well.”
She squirmed on the love seat, unable to meet his gaze. “Doctor, I don’t think that’s entirely justified. I mean—”
“I know precisely what you mean, Cyd, and to be honest, I’m used to it. But you can rest assured that I and my staff are as well-trained and as well-qualified as anyone at the hospital. Believe me. And if I thought your father would benefit more by being there instead of in the valley, then believe me again when I say I’d have a stretcher already sitting right here in this room, ready to lug him off.” He shook his head, slowly, a hand tracking up to his beard and brushing at it. “No, he’s going to be fine, with the proper diet, medicine and, above all, rest.”
He watched her carefully, and when she had no response he rose and dusted at his jacket until she grasped the hint and escorted him to the door. At the threshold he turned and took her hands suddenly in his. “Cyd, be sure your mother gets some sleep tonight, will you? I’ve left some pills on the dresser in there. Be sure that she takes two of them as soon as you can.” A voice drifted down the corridor from the stairwell and he glanced toward it. “And if you wish it, I’ll …” He gestured the rest.
Oh my God, the guests, she thought. “Yes. Yes, please, Doctor Kraylin. I don’t know if I could face those who stuck around. Not right now, anyway. Just tell them … well, just tell them anything so they’ll go. I’ll get it straightened out in the morning.”
“Consider it done,” he said, bowed over her hands and left her watching after him.
His footsteps were swallowed the moment the light could not reach him.
And in less than an hour her father was deep in a drugged sleep, her mother beside him on the bed she had not shared with him in over a decade. Cyd stared at them closely for several minutes before she could bring herself to turn out the lights, and it was several minutes more before she was able to leave the suite for her own rooms.
But once there she found herself unable to sit or sleep, and she threw an old woolen robe over her nightgown and began walking through the house. Her brothers had not returned, and her mother had had no idea where they could have gone. A minor debauch in the big city, she thought as she shuffled into the kitchen and turned on the stove; boys will be boys and all that crummy jazz.
She made herself warm milk in hopes of inducing weariness, knew from the first sip that burned the tip of her tongue that her nerves were far too tense for home remedies like this. It was as though she were a cat, she thought, a cat that had seen something uncomfortable in the far corner of a room: tail puffed slightly and the ridge of fur along the spine tingling to raise in signal of battle. On the one hand she knew it was an apropos image; on the other, however, she was bothered because she did not know what had prompted it. Not all of it, at any rate.
There was admitted confusion over the matter of Cal Kraylin. Rather stuffy when she met him first, earlier in the evening, now she was busily rearranging her impressions to such a degree that she nearly felt dizzy. He seemed competent enough, certainly, and friendly, but the turnabout was so sudden and so unexpected that she almost suspected it. Shy, she told herself, or defensive because he knew at once what she’d been thinking. She shrugged. She didn’t know.
And too, there was a persistent image of her father as she had found him in his bed. Though she had no training at all in medicine, she would have sworn on any number of Bibles that he was dead. He had to be, and he was not. When she had eased the quilt up to her parents’ chins before leaving them, his chest was rising normally, and there had even been the return of a blotch of color in each of his cheeks.
She finished the milk, rinsed out the glass and set it upside down on the drain board by the sink.
Color in his cheeks, and her mother with one arm thrown protectively across his stomach.
She leaned back against the counter and hugged herself tightly, staring at the black panes in the patio door. She shook her head and lowered her gaze to the floor.
Confusion was becoming too much a part of her life these days.
It could all very well be the aftereffects of her bout with
that idiot and his limousine, but there was still a strong, unshakable notion lurking back where she could not grab hold of it that something was wrong. No, she thought, not wrong, exactly. Not … wrong. But different. Her eyes squinted to blur her vision. It was as if, somehow, the world had decided to alter its course toward the future and had forgotten to tell her about it. Instead of looking at things one way, then another, she was still unadjusted, her eyes not quite focusing on something she knew she ought to be able to see. It was something along the lines of Poe’s The Purloined Letter and all the imitators it had spawned over the century-plus since its creation—the answer was right there, there where she could see it without question if only … if … she shuddered. What good would it do her to recognize the answer when she did not even know what the question was?
Circles within circles and no way to pass from one to the other, she thought as she headed back toward the stairs. But at least she understood what one of her problems was—too much damned introspection. She was spending entirely too much time these days delving into the unrecognizable patterns of her own confused mind, and definitely not enough time doing something. Action. Deeds. Whatever they were, she was not doing them. And she remembered standing for an hour in the rain by the old shack, sitting in the Mariner Cove with an untouched drink in front of her … too much time thinking and not enough in simply doing. If there was in fact anything wrong—and of that too she had no proof other than some nebulous feeling, which was no proof at all— she decided she should let her subconscious gnaw on it for a while. Take her days one at a time and soon—a soon not to be measured in days or weeks—there would be an answer provided. If indeed there was an answer; if indeed there was a question to be answered. She had her hand on the globed newel-post ready to haul her up to the first step when the telephone in the sitting room stopped her. She had no idea of the hour, save it was past midnight, but the sound of it bothered her. Strident. Demanding. All the clichés of a thousand old movies while the heroine stood at the creaky front door and debated whether or not to charge out unknowing into the trap the audience knew was there, or to pick up the receiver and be saved in the nick of time. She brushed a hand through her hair, one finger scratching at her scalp on the way, and wandered slowly across the foyer. It was most likely one of her dear absent brothers apologizing for the tardiness of their return and saying they had decided to stick around wherever they were and so would not be back until morning at the earliest. So why, she demanded silently, didn’t they just wait and show up? They’re big boys now, damnit.
