The Golden Unicorn

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  As I stood there unseen, a telephone rang, and I noted the library extension. Evan lifted the receiver.

  “Hello,” he said and then listened for a moment, while I saw a scowl crease his forehead. When he spoke the chill note I had heard before was in his voice. “No, you may not speak with her. I’ve left word that any call from you is to be transferred to me. . . . If you keep on along your present course, Olive, you can only end up on the wrong side of the law. . . . Don’t bother making threats—do what you like. . . . What did you say? . . . Hello? . . . Olive? . . .”

  Apparently the speaker had hung up, and I realized tardily that I was in a position of eavesdropping. Before I could turn away, however, I saw that I was not alone. A little way down the hall William Asher had come within hearing and looked thoroughly upset. When he noted my attention he gave me a haughty glance and disappeared into the dining room. I followed him a short distance and then returned down the hall, making more noise than before. Yet when I reached the doorway for the second time, Evan still did not look around.

  “May I come in?” I asked.

  Only then did he turn his head to regard me without welcome, rising reluctantly from his place at the table. He was as tall as I remembered, and as dark-haired and dark-browed. His eyes seemed to hold me off. I wondered whether it was because he disliked reporters in general, or me in particular, or whether it was because he had sensed and reacted to my own antagonism toward him. I had no time now to wonder about the speaker on the phone, or who “Olive” might be. At the moment I needed to tackle this bear of a man in his den.

  “Last night you said you would be willing to tell me something about Ethan Rhodes and the great whaling days of Long Island,” I reminded him.

  “Then you’ve decided this is part of your story?”

  “I haven’t decided anything. I’d just like to know. The more material I have to draw from, the better. I can always discard. It’s not having enough to write about that can do me in.”

  “Do you know anything about whaling?”

  “Very little, I’m afraid. But I know very little about most subjects when I start on an interview assignment. I’m a good learner. So I can begin anywhere. Whaling was a pretty brutal business, I’ve gathered.”

  “That’s true enough. But necessity as well as greed was the contributing factor in the nineteenth century. There wasn’t much else to produce lubrication and illumination, and almost every part of the whale was used—bones, teeth, millions of barrels of oil.”

  “I remember something Jacques Cousteau once said,” I mused. “That there’s more to life than hides and oil and meat and ivory.”

  “He was right and I agree. But at least in the old days the whale stood a chance against the man. A good many times the man lost. But the beasts don’t stand a chance against modern equipment and there can be more whales taken in a year than are born. Most nations are trying to do something about that. Only the Soviet Union and Japan have been holding out.”

  I was still curious about him. “What fascinates you most about whaling?”

  “The whales themselves. And of course the men who hunted them. It’s a dramatic story that shouldn’t be forgotten. Comparatively, the great whaling days lasted only a short time, but they were filled with drama and tragedy—both human and animal.”

  His eyes had brightened with an interest I had not seen before, and his voice came alive as he went on.

  “I want to see these old books and papers preserved. There was a lot more to whaling than bringing home barrels of oil. The whalers were the country’s early explorers and geographers and sociologists. Whaling ships might set out from Sag Harbor and other spots along the coast, but they sailed all the seas. They charted waterways we knew nothing about and they brought home word of distant places. They gave us knowledge we’d never had of faraway islands and the people who populated them.”

  I hadn’t realized that this remote and rather cold man, whose only emotion seemed to be anger, could so warm to a subject. He cared about this task he had chosen to do, and listening to him, I began to sense its importance—an importance that would reach far beyond this room.

  “What will happen to all these records?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to pull them together, arrange some sort of chronological order, and make a full listing of everything that’s here. Then the right place for all of it will be found—a museum, perhaps, as a Rhodes’ gift, where it can be available for researchers, opened to the public as it has never been here. I need to finish before the house is sold.”

  “Who owns The Shingles? Who is selling it?”

  “Do you mind if I get back to work?” he asked coolly as he pulled out his chair at the long table. “You can look around, if you like, and ask any questions about these things that occur to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, equally cool. “But it’s the Rhodes I want most to know about. From Ethan on down. Why is everyone being mysterious about what is going to happen to this house?”

  His smile was scarcely friendly. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “I’m a reporter, and I’d like to know.”

  “It’s hardly a secret—just uncomfortable to talk about. Perhaps the reason no one pins anything down for you is because no one is sure what will happen. At this moment, no one really owns the house.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Herndon Rhodes, who isn’t the oldest son, was the one in whose care Lawrence entrusted it. But it is only held in trust, in the sense that he has preserved and managed everything pertaining to it since his father died. His responsibility will come to an end in a few weeks, and then we’ll all find out what’s going to happen next. There’s been talk of selling. Perhaps you might say a threat of selling.”

  I was still hopelessly in the dark. “But by whom?”

  “By my wife, Stacia. On her twenty-fifth birthday.”

  For some reason that I did not understand a faint chill seemed to trace itself down my spine. What happened to the house meant nothing to me. I had no real kinship with any of these people, and yet I had been drawn to the very edge of a possible maelstrom. A few steps more, the answers to a few questions, and I could be plunged into the vortex—into an involvement I might not want. My task here was as a reporter and I must hold to that.

  I dropped my questioning and began to move idly about the room. At the table Evan turned back to his work. I took books from a shelf, riffled through them absently, put them back. Next to the fireplace was a wall space where several pictures had been hung, and examining them, I saw that one was a yellowed photograph of a sailing vessel called the Hesther.

  “Did this ship belong to Ethan Rhodes?” I asked.

  The man at the table glanced toward the picture. “Yes. Hesther, of course, was the name of Ethan’s wife. That was one of his last ships. It used to sail around the Horn.”

  “And this next picture?” It was of a graceful sloop, its sails filled with wind, and Evan answered with slightly more warmth in his voice.

  “That one was built more recently. John designed and built her before his father died. She’s a real beauty. The Anabel.” A fondness for ships and sailing spoke in his words, but the name of the boat had distracted me.

  The Anabel. That name which had also been given to a baby. A baby whose existence interested me.

  “I wish I could sail in her,” I said. “Perhaps John would take me out sometime.”

  “Aren’t you a city girl? Do you belong in a sailboat?”

  “You’re thinking of the girl you saw on television. I’m someone else. New York City is on the water, and Long Island Sound is close-by. I’ve gone sailing. I can handle a tiller as well as a typewriter.”

  He studied me thoughtfully—as though I might be some curious marine specimen he’d just fished from the sea.

  Then he said, “That next picture is of Br
ian Rhodes, Lawrence’s father. He was a ship’s captain too, but in a tamer day.”

  My great-grandfather? I wondered, never able to suppress the quick instinct to speculation. I moved closer to look at the photo. It was only an enlarged black and white snapshot of a man standing on the deck of a small boat. I couldn’t make out his face very well and the picture meant nothing to me. Where was all that surging longing for a family with which I had started out from New York? Were the Rhodes themselves stamping it out, perhaps releasing me from an imaginary bondage that I’d suffered under all my life? No—I didn’t believe that longing was entirely gone yet. It was somewhere inside me, surfacing unexpectedly at times—waiting. Waiting until I could be sure of something—as I was sure of nothing now.

  I wandered back to the table and looked over Evan’s shoulder, perhaps annoying him further. He had put his ledger aside and appeared to be checking a box of assorted oddments against a faded, handwritten list.

  “Do you want to help?” he asked abruptly. “If you’ve nothing else to do.”

  For Evan Faulkner this was almost amiable—or perhaps he only wanted to stem my questions.

  I pulled up a chair to sit down, and he pushed the box toward me. “I’ll read the listing, and you can look for the matching item in the box.”

  Lying on the table beside the open box was the lid, and I bent to read the spidery writing across it in faded ink—a name, “Sara Rhodes,” Lawrence’s wife, who had died long before her husband.

  “These were her things?” I said. “I wonder what they are doing in the library.”

  “A number of boxes of odds and ends have been carried into this room and stored wherever there was shelf space. I go through them as they turn up, in case there’s something of importance.”

  This box seemed to contain little of real value. I plucked out a blackened bit of tubular silver. “I think this is a toothpick holder,” I said. “Silver.”

  He checked it against the list he had found in the box, and read the next item. “Sugar tongs.”

  Again I found tarnished silver, and set the piece aside with the first.

  We went through the box, checking off item after item. There was a lovely sunburst garnet pin that Evan laid aside for Judith, along with one or two other pieces of Victorian jewelry. There was a small ivory elephant with a cracked trunk, and a miniature carving of an ivory sailing vessel. I held up the latter in delight.

  “Look—there’s a name carved on the prow! It’s the Hesther—Ethan’s wife must have loved this.”

  As I held the tiny thing in my hand, Hesther Rhodes began to seem more to me than a hazy figure out of history, and for the first time I had a sense of connecting to someone who had been flesh and blood—perhaps whose blood still flowed in my veins. For once I did not thrust the thought away from me,

  The man beside me read the next item, and exclaimed, “Here’s something the family has looked for for a long time! It lists a gold pendant in the shape of a unicorn.”

  My fingers poked idly through the remaining items in the box, but for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  “Does the list give any description of the pendant?” I asked in a voice that was not entirely trustworthy.

  He glanced at me and then studied the paper before him. “Yes—it says that the initial ‘R’ has been scratched onto one hoof. What does it matter, if the unicorn is there?”

  “It isn’t,” I said. I didn’t need to look. I knew very well that the golden pendant was upstairs in my room. I had never noticed an “R” scratched onto a hoof, but if there was such a marking, then any last doubt would be gone.

  “Too bad,” Evan said. “Herndon always wondered what became of Hesther’s unicorn. He wanted it for Stacia.”

  I pushed my chair back from the table. “If you don’t mind—I think I’m getting a headache. I’d better go and take an aspirin before ten o’clock when I’m to visit Mrs. Rhodes.”

  “Of course,” he said carelessly. As though he hadn’t expected me to be of much use. When I left the library he was working on the last articles in the box and I didn’t look back. There was no need to take aspirin—my head was fine, but I couldn’t wait a moment longer to take out my golden unicorn and examine its hoofs.

  While I was out, my room had been made up and I went into it and closed the door. In a moment I had pulled open the drawer and had the fold of tissue in my hand. It felt light, with nothing lumpy in the center, and I knew before I spread the paper open. The unicorn was no longer there.

  5

  Minutes ticked by while I stood before the open drawer with the wad of tissue in my hand. Then I began a rather frantic search. The pendant was not in the drawer where I had left it. Nor was it in any of the other drawers I opened, although I came again upon the bisque head of the doll, its eyes closed now—which was the way I preferred them. I left it sleeping and searched on, even though I knew very well that my effort would be futile.

  If someone had taken the pendant, it would surely be Stacia. She could have seen it last night when she put the doll’s head in my drawer. Seen—and recognized it? Had she come back to take it away to show it to someone, or just appropriated it as something she felt I had no right to? And what was I to do about it now? I didn’t want to ask her about this, or mention the missing pendant to anyone. It might be better to say nothing, merely to wait and see what developed. The unicorn was mine! Someone long ago had wanted me to have it, and I meant to get it back. But just for now I was forced to let the matter drift and wait for Stacia to make her next move.

  In the meantime, I felt increasingly uneasy. Perhaps fear would be too strong a word, but it was there at the back of my mind, senseless, yet pervading my consciousness. Fear seemed to be the elusive quality that haunted this house. As though its members might fear one another—as I might fear them?

  But surely this was nonsense. Even if someone discovered who I was, even if they all learned my identity eventually, what would it matter? They were nothing to me, any more than I was anything to them, and I would simply go away and never be heard from again in their lives. If the house was to come to Stacia on her twenty-fifty birthday, that had nothing to do with me, but must be part of a long-ago will of Lawrence Rhodes which left it to her. There was no reason for the smuggling away of the unicorn pendant—except that this seemed a house of secrets and animosities. There was a climate here that suited the growth of hidden motives, like mushrooms sprouting in a cellar. The anonymous notes that had so upset the household were more of the same, and so was that strange phone call from “Olive” that I’d overheard in the library. Even Asher’s behavior had been strange and secretive.

  I wanted none of this. Let me get my interview and go away as quickly as I could.

  Something in me seemed to be building resistance against the knowledge I had so long sought, and it was as though I wanted to hold off any final revelation. I didn’t really want Judith or Alice for my mother, or Herndon or John Rhodes for my father. At least I would have no trouble now in interviewing Judith. I was a reporter, a writer, and she was my subject—no more and no less.

  When my watch hands reached ten, I picked up my small camera and notebook and walked into the hall to seek the stairs to the attic. They didn’t rise from the top of the main staircase, and as I walked down the hall seeking them, Mrs. Asher came out of a bedroom, speaking over her shoulder to a maid. When she saw me she paused uncertainly, and I asked her about the stairs.

  “They’re right down there at the end of the hall, ma’am,” she said, and would have scurried out of sight if I hadn’t stopped her, seized by casual curiosity.

  “Have you worked for the Rhodes a very long time?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am. I’ve only been here for a few years—since I married William Asher.” She waited for no more from me, but ducked back into the bedroom where I heard her talking again to the maid.

  So
this was a late marriage for William, I thought, and accounted for her being less at ease in the house than her husband.

  I walked on toward the narrower flight of stairs, which reached upward at the end of the hall.

  The stairs climbed steeply, as though they had never been intended for much use, and there was a square landing at the top, with a closed door straight ahead. I tapped on the panel and waited. For a moment I thought she must not have heard me, then Judith’s voice called to me to come in. I opened the door and walked into the large attic expanse of Judith Rhodes’ studio.

  The woman at the easel sat on a high stool facing me, and I could not see her canvas as she worked in absorption with her brush. Having called to me to enter, it was as though she had already forgotten me, and I was content to stay where I was, gathering impressions of both woman and studio.

  This morning she wore a rust-colored smock over light twill pants, and her long black hair was caught at the back of her neck with a rust-red velvet bow. She sat on her perch with a brush in one hand, palette in the other, a slight frown of concentration between dark brows. Her complete focus on what she was doing enabled me to study her openly, as I’d had no time to do yesterday. Her sun-tinted face was a long and beautiful oval, with those great green eyes and the lips so perfectly formed that she needed no brilliance of lipstick to enhance them. I was glad of color film in my camera.

  “Do you mind if I take a picture?” I asked. “Just as you are now?”

  The concentration was broken and her brush paused in midair as she looked toward me. Again there was surface serenity, but I wondered if it might perhaps be a controlled calm that she wore, something learned, something adopted. To conceal what?

  “No pictures,” she said quietly in the same low resonance I had heard yesterday.

  “I’m disappointed,” I said. “Our readers would like to see you at work. And you make such a perfect picture yourself, just as you are now.”