“You ran at the first sign of trouble!”
“I stayed well beyond the limits of safety!” she countered, spinning around to face the bed again.
“I thought you had more guts than that!”
“To the very last instant I even tried to pour the poison down her throat, but Emil—”
“Bah! You flew like a frightened rabbit!” shouted Channing, rising shakily from his pillow. “You ran like the cowardly swine you are!”
She sucked in a ragged breath. She had known this was coming, but was still not quite prepared for it.
“I did the best I could,” she said.
“Well, it wasn’t good enough!” he shrieked.
“It never is!” she hissed bitterly.
Channing shifted in his bed and tried to hitch himself up on the pillows, swearing angrily when the activity exhausted him.
“Curse those fool doctors!” he muttered, “coming in here with their antiquated remedies to do nothing but weaken me and keep me in this absurd bed! Blast them all!”
She reached her hand around his shoulder to help him. The action seemed to mitigate his anger momentarily. He shook his head mournfully.
“All that work,” he moaned. “Two years! Plastic surgeons and theatrical coaching for you . . . buying off those muddleheaded lawyers . . . setting the plan up in such detail—all wasted! What a poetic victory it would have been!”
“It may not be too late, Father.”
But Channing waved an impatient hand. “Does it matter anymore?” he lamented. “I thought we had them when I learned about that old crazy woman—what was her name? Whitley . . . something Whitley—the loony old woman trying to get up her nerve to tell the Macintyres about their daughter. It was my moment!” He sank back, his voice losing its force. “Now it looks like I had the old goose put away for nothing. But what does it matter? She’s beaten me again!”
“It was a beautiful plan, Father,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“A coup!” he rejoined, half rising again. “The coup of the century! Installing my own daughter as the unknown heiress to their precious Stonewycke! I could have gone to my grave a contented man. But that snip of a Joanna Matheson did it to me again!”
“Perhaps we can yet undo what she has done.”
But Channing was no longer listening. Hearing the name from his own lips that he had hundreds of times vowed should never pass from his mouth again seemed to send him into a trance. Suddenly he was many miles and many years removed from the Villa del Heimat.
“Oh, Joanna,” he moaned. “Why do you hate me so?”
“I do not hate you, Father.”
“I don’t mean you, you fool!” spat Channing, lurching back to the present only long enough to denounce his own daughter for her stupidity. “I mean Joanna . . . the only woman I ever loved!”
“What about my mother?” Jo shot back. “And what about me?”
“Your mother”—Channing’s lips twisted cruelly around the word—“was a mere convenience. I did, after all, need to be respectable among my peers. You were the result of that union—my only joy, my only hope for—”
“For what?” Jo spat the words at him. “For revenge against Stonewycke? How can you speak of love? You have never loved me—you have only used me. I doubt that you ever for a moment really loved your precious Joanna Matheson! You only wanted to possess her, to use her the way you use—”
“Shut up! Why else do you think I gave you her name? It’s her, I tell you! She’s the cause of all the grief that has ever come to me!”
Again his eyes glassed over. He continued to gaze at his daughter, but his voice had again passed backward in time, erasing six decades in an instant of his own dementia.
“I could have given you everything, Joanna,” he said, his voice rising with passion. “The world was mine! Together we could have reigned over it. But no! Your damnable pride would not be broken! You and your stiff-necked notions of honor! You and that oaf of a ridiculous manure-tromping lout you called a man! Hah! Oh, Joanna, how could you have been so blind! What possessed you to say those things about me to the town? I hated you that day! But in that very act you showed what you were made of. Ironic, isn’t it, my dear? The day I swore eternal vengeance against you was the very day my heart was forever spoiled for another. That day I despised you, yet I also knew I could have no other woman. How I hated you, but could not live without you. Joanna . . . Joanna—”
“Father,” broke in Jo sharply. “You mustn’t go on like this!”
Jolted as if slapped in the face, Channing stared at her blankly, trying to focus his bewildered eyes.
“And stop looking at me like that! I am not that Joanna. It’s enough that I have to bear her name. Don’t speak to me as if I were her! She is dead. And I wish to heaven all the rest of her brood were dead too!”
“Dead?” repeated Channing, still stupefied.
“Dead! Do you hear me?”
“She will never die,” he said softly, his face contorting in the macabre agony of his self-inflicted insanity. “You will not die before . . . before . . . I—”
Jo watched with horrified fascination, aware that Channing was losing all grip on reality.
“I can see you . . . Joanna, you will not go away . . . before you and I . . .”
His voice trailed away and he glanced toward the door as if looking for someone.
“Perhaps you are right,” mused Jo icily, almost to herself. “She lives on in that daughter of hers—Allison Macintyre—still sitting on that hill, mistress of all she surveys! Gloating over their victory! Sitting where I should be sitting! I have borne that hateful name, cursing it every day of my life! Stonewycke should have been mine!”
Without warning Channing’s dulled eyes suddenly came into focus and he was himself again.
“They do not know I was behind the masquerade?”
“Of course not,” replied Jo. “But they still hold Stonewycke.”
“Yes . . . yes.” Channing’s eyes narrowed, his head rolling from side to side, agitated. “They still hold Stonewycke, but perhaps they have not won yet. I hate them . . . I hate her more than them all! I will yet vanquish them! I will not rest! Oh, what a pleasure it would be to break her proud spirit . . . and then watch her die!”
“For me the moment of triumph would be to grind that pompous Hilary under my foot in the dirt!”
“There might yet be time . . .”
Channing closed his eyes as his features grew taut, while evil machinations consumed his thoughts. His aging brain was once more sharp and in control.
“I want her!” he cried passionately at last, rising from the pillow. “Bring her to me! Ha, ha! I will find a way to crush them yet!”
“We will find a way,” said Jo. “We will have our revenge or die. Neither will I rest until it is done.”
“Get back up there immediately! But be on your guard. This time they will be alert for trouble.”
“I will be wary. Don’t worry. I know every inch of the place.”
“I am lucky to have a daughter such as you,” said Channing, in a voice not of love but rather shared cunning. His pinched lips twisted briefly into what might have been interpreted as the semblance of a smile. He grasped her hand in his and closed his eyes, for the moment assuaged in the delicious taste of anticipated revenge.
60
Father and Daughter
Even as Channing and his daughter were planning the final act in a diabolic and empty vendetta, their chief adversary puzzled over his own role in this unsought drama of hate and retribution.
Logan sat alone in the loft above the stables.
He still could not believe it was Channing! The man’s malice against the Duncan clan had spanned six decades, growing each year like an unchecked cancer, never healing, becoming more and more destructive with age, leaving only misery, perhaps even death, in its evil wake.
It had to stop!
Not only for the sake of Logan’s f
amily, but for the future of Stonewycke, Port Strathy, his own posterity . . . and perhaps most of all for the sake of Channing himself. He had to be rotting inside—both physically and spiritually—from the effects of his own pernicious hate.
No longer, Logan now realized, could he sit passively and allow it to continue. Channing was a dangerous man who had wrought much havoc in the world through his greed. Unless it were stopped, his organization would continue to plunder and destroy lives long after the General’s death. The entire network had to be broken.
Whether there was hope for Channing himself, only God could know. In himself, Logan doubted it. But that could not alter his course. What God put in his hand to do, he must do, however unlikely results might appear. There was always the possibility God intended him to be the instrument of the man’s repentance.
Notwithstanding spiritual concerns, however, Channing had to be stopped. There was no question about what had to be done. The problem was how to go about it without being ensnared by the vicious workings of Channing’s machinery, which appeared to have arms and eyes and ears everywhere.
Logan spoke to the Chief Inspector of the London branch of Interpol. They wanted the General and would do whatever it took to get him, but they had already been futilely on his cold track for twenty years.
“These things take time,” said the CI regretfully. “He works entirely through blind intermediaries. Probably no more than a handful of men have ever seen him, and these are so loyal that even if we managed to get our hands on one, we’d have him dropping on the floor with half a cyanide tablet falling out of his mouth before we got a word out of him.”
“You need something—or someone—to bring him out in the open,” suggested Logan.
“And I need a secluded little spot on the Riviera and a fifty-foot yacht!” scoffed the detective. “But I doubt I’ll live long enough to get them.”
“I have a plan.”
“You, Mr. Macintyre? Sleuthing about in our bailiwick, that’s hardly in the province of Members of Parliament, is it?”
“Do you want the General or not, Mr. Rollins?”
“I want him!”
“Enough to give me carte blanche?”
“I don’t know . . . there are dangers—”
“I can get him for you. The man and his methods are not entirely unknown to me—”
“You know the identity of the General!”
“Let me put it this way: I have a strong and educated speculation.”
“Then you must tell us!”
“Not yet. I have an idea, but I must work alone—one whiff of the law, as it were, and his inner circle will bolt so fast it will take another twenty years to ferret him out again.”
“This is highly irregular.”
“Regular methods have yet to be successful.”
“That is true.” Rollins paused in thought. “I’ll bring the matter before my superiors. One more question: are we to be absolutely uninvolved, or may we arrange for discreet backup?”
“I will not turn down a safety net, but it must be very discreet, and utterly invisible. One more thing—there may be some problems with extradition. That is something you could look into and help me on.”
“Consider it done.”
“Good,” Logan replied briskly. “I’ll get back to you tomorrow,” he added, hanging up the telephone before the man could protest further.
That had been two hours ago, and Logan now wondered about his assumed confidence on the phone.
A plan indeed!
He didn’t even know where to find Channing! He could be anywhere from Siberia to Monte Carlo for all he knew, although Logan had been giving the location of the man’s hiding place a great deal of thought.
Of one thing he was confident. He would have a plan. He would come up with something, and somehow he would put a stop to this sixty-year war Channing seemed intent on waging.
He leaned back in Digory’s old chair and closed his eyes.
Dear God, Logan prayed silently, keep my heart pure. Don’t let me fall prey to the very malignancy I am trying to halt. Give me wisdom, O Lord. Guide my path. Open my eyes to subtleties and details I might otherwise overlook. And somehow, Lord, as difficult as it is to say, I pray too for Jason Channing. Infiltrate his twisted heart with your Spirit that the man may see the futility of his bitterness. And make me willing to be your instrument in the answering of that prayer.
Logan heard a soft rap on the rough wooden door, and opened his eyes.
“Come in,” he said, looking up. He smiled when he saw Hilary.
“Allison said you might be here,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind my intruding.”
“Not at all.”
“I have never seen this place, and I thought it might be a good spot to talk, though it could have waited.”
“I’m glad you came. I am happy to share my great-great-uncle’s little home with you. But then Digory is your uncle too—let’s see, how many greats would that be? I tend to lose track.” He laughed.
“What was he to us exactly?”
“He was my mother’s great-uncle. Brother to her great-grandfather MacNab. He never married. His possessions went to my mother’s grandfather when he died, and later to her, where they remained buried for years in an old trunk.”
“Until you came along?”
“Almost,” laughed Logan. “But that’s another story!”
“You’ll tell me someday?” said Hilary with an affectionate smile. “That is one area where Lady Joanna’s journal is a bit scant on detail.”
“No doubt!” rejoined Logan. “Yes, perhaps one day I shall tell you all about my discoveries and my coming to Stonewycke. There’s Digory’s Bible,” he added, pointing to a small table. “I keep it here—sentimental reasons, you know.”
Slowly Hilary walked over and picked up the ancient black volume. She held it silently for a few moments.
“This isn’t such a remarkable place, really,” Logan said at length. “But then, I believe it is that very thing which makes it so special to me. A haven of simplicity in a world that can at times seem overwhelmingly complicated.”
“I can’t picture you as one easily overwhelmed,” replied Hilary, setting the Bible down and rejoining Logan, taking a seat in a plain wooden chair opposite him.
“Is that a daughter or a journalist speaking?”
“A little of both, perhaps.”
“Well,” said Logan with a thoughtful sigh, “all my life I have been too adept at putting on fronts, even when I don’t intend to. That’s how I made a living, that’s how I managed to stay alive during the war—donning one facade after another. And now for the last thirty years I’ve been trying to break the habit. It is an aspect of my character God deals with constantly. But early patterns die hard, and I still have to work to be just myself. Every once in a while I find myself slipping unconsciously into one of my old characters whom I’ve missed.”
“Don’t you ever find it, I don’t know—fun?”
“Sure. I’m not one who necessarily despises my old life. God gave me a fun-loving personality, and yes, I enjoy who I am.” He paused, smiled, a twinkle in his eye, then chuckled lightly. “I still laugh when I think of some of the crazy things I pulled. At the same time, I know God intended more for me. That’s why I am thankful to Him for bringing me out of the need to wear a facade in order to more deeply develop my true personality in Him. Yet still, after all this time, I am often overwhelmed, or would be without God’s steadying hand.”
“It sounds as though you are thinking about this on more than merely an abstract plane.”
Logan sighed. “I hadn’t really stopped to consider why this is so heavily on my mind today. You’re right. It’s no doubt because I have a feeling I’m going to have to slip into a disguise of some sort in order to get to the bottom of this thing with Channing. But I want to do it under the direction of the Lord, not in the power of my old nature. I guess what I’m battling with is whether that’s possibl
e.”
“Why wouldn’t it be? Surely God is able to use us as He made us to accomplish His purposes.”
“I think you’re right. But where the flesh is involved, it always pays to walk warily. The battle I’m waging within myself could too easily requite malice with malice. I mustn’t let that happen.” Logan stopped and rubbed his hands across his face as dark memories from the past intruded into his thoughts. “Jason Channing has brought much pain into my life, and he has haunted those I love like a demon wraith. My human desire is to lash back at him. But, thank God, I am being purged of that desire.”
“What will you do, then?”
“I must confront Channing and make him stop. He is an evil man, a politically and morally and socially dangerous man. He must be stopped before he hurts and destroys further. I know he will not quit until he sees us destroyed. But the confrontation I speak of must grow out of the power of God to work righteousness, not the power of the flesh to seek revenge.”
“The thought that his own people were here among us is enough to make my skin crawl when I’m lying in bed at night.”
“We have to be aware of the fact that your presence is now an added irritation to Channing, making you a target as well.”
Hilary shuddered. “Murry called again this morning,” she said. “Do you remember his man in Oxford—the fellow who first put him onto Trans Global?”
Logan nodded.
“He was found murdered yesterday. A suspect has been arrested, an Argentine national, a man named Raul Galvez. The police have tied him to the General, but Galvez knows nothing. He was merely hired to do the job.”
“The guy in Oxford got too close and Channing had him killed,” said Logan flatly.
“And now Murry is more than a little concerned about his own safety. I told him to back off the story.”
“This is just one more reason, is it not?” asked Logan.
“Reason for what?”
“For me to find and stop Channing.”
“You mean for the police to stop him.”
“No, Hilary, I mean me. Channing as the General has eluded the police agencies of the world for many years. He will be even more cautious now as he senses the walls beginning to close in on him. Only one thing will force him out of whatever hole he is hiding in, and that is the hope of retaliation against the clan he so despises, the family that has once again foiled his designs. He must be lured out into the open.”
The Treasure of Stonewycke Page 41
