Lady Afraid

by Lester Dent

  He went away then. He did not say good-by. He merely went away, his steps quick, his lean back slightly arched.

  A hard, sly, and cruel man, Sarah thought, and her dislike of him stood unabated.

  Chapter Three

  BY NOON THE STORM had lost no force. The rain still came in endless volleys and the wind had backed itself several degrees, indicating further miserable weather. And at twelve-thirty Mr. Collins’s secretary, middle-aged Miss Fletching, dropped a telephone memorandum on Sarah’s desk. Mr. Arbogast phoned to cancel his sail on Vameric today. He doesn’t like the weather.

  “That,” said Miss Fletching, “means your honey of a boat doesn’t make her test run today.”

  “Yes… I suppose so.”

  “I hear you won’t be here for a few days. You’ll miss the trials entirely.”

  “Yes. I—I’m taking a short vacation.”

  Sarah sat still after Miss Fletching had gone. She slowly lighted a cigarette…. A day of ill omens, this, and she knew she was not waiting it out well.

  Nervously she arose. At the window she stood frowning at the yard. She looked out past the woodworking shop, past two of the marine railways to the fitting dock, to Vameric lying there, held by spring lines and her shining mahogany hull protected by fenders.

  Vameric was a yacht, all sail, sixty-eight feet on the water line, built for outside cruising races. She had no engine to drive her. Only sail. But Vameric would, if the aerodynamic figures and the wind-tunnel experiments were any indication, finish first in every deepwater race in which she was entered, perhaps for years to come.

  This was more than just a yacht. This was a culmination, a gathering together of all the skills of sailing ships. Vameric had a deep hard keel and sweet runs; she would leave an almost imperceptible wake, not dragging the entire ocean after her. She should have good manners when hove to. The rig of sails, a wishbone adaption of the staysail-ketch idea, was unusual: Sarah’s idea and a rather radical one. If Vameric lived up to expectations, Sarah, as the vessel’s architect, would suddenly be a name known wherever fine yachts were sailed. She would be eminent in a field where no woman had achieved much.

  For long moments Sarah tried to take her stunned thoughts out of mid-air, wrap them around the lovely yacht, let them be warmed and cheered. It was futile.

  She swung back listlessly to her desk. Her private office was somewhat like Sarah, neatly sufficient without frill. Not masculine, but not frothily feminine either. The desk stood uncluttered; the drawing board was not blotched; her instruments rested in geometrical precision. A bookcase held an excellent collection of works on sail, including items as widely varied as Manfred Curry on aerodynamics of sail curvature, Callahan’s popular how-to-dos, and Lubbock on the clipper ship. The office symbolized, as Sarah herself did, a great deal of achievement in a field almost without women. The office by itself was an odd eminence for a woman; not unaware of this, Sarah should have felt pride, but she could summon no special lift at this moment.

  Gravely she fell to rechecking her plans for tonight…. She had packed the two suitcases yesterday; one held her things, and the other contained stuff she had bought for Jonnie. She did not know her son’s size. She knew only that he would be a little boy two and a half years old, brown-eyed, with freckles. She was guessing about the freckles, but Sarah herself had had them when she was little, and she’d seen baby pictures of Paul, and he’d been as freckled a child as a peppered biscuit. Oh, Jonnie would have freckles. But not knowing his size had made it difficult when she had tried to buy things for him. It had seemed so weird saying, “I want the size for a boy aged two and a half.” In the end she had left most of the things she had intended to get him for later.

  Oh! There was one thing she’d overlooked. She seized the telephone directory, searched out the number of the Union Station, and made reservations—midnight train, drawing room, two adult tickets. Ordering two adult fares was a bit of cunning that smacked of Lawyer Brill—the police would be less likely to seize on such a clue. Sarah named New Orleans for a destination, because it was a city large enough to disappear into. She gave a phony name. Tickets for Mr. and Mrs. Winslow, she said.

  The danger of traveler’s checks was one she’d already foreseen. They could be traced, she supposed. So she was carrying five hundred dollars in cash. Enough, for she planned no elaborate expenses. What she would seek would be a quiet place where she could get acquainted with her son.

  At one o’clock Sarah sent out for sandwiches and coffee. She did not want to be away from the telephone in case Attorney Brill called. The sandwiches came and probably they were tasty, but she discovered that she could no more eat them than if they had been made of wood.

  By two o’clock it was worse. For now she was getting into a state where the whole venture looked raw, uncouth, untried. Doubts were prowling in her mind, predatory and fierce. Utterly unfirm; she found herself sickly mistrustful of the plan, Attorney Brill, herself. About herself she feared it was too late to do anything, because the character and the strengths of a person are not molded in one frightened day. But the rest—the practicality of Brill’s wild plan, Brill himself—could be checked with another lawyer.

  She took up the telephone and asked the girl to get her Randolph & Jessic. Randolph and Jessic were the attorneys for Collins Yard. But Mr. Randolph was out of town, in Jacksonville, she was told. And there was no Mr. Jessic in a practical sense, for Mr. Jessic was very old and had retired years ago. He didn’t even live in Miami any more. Mr. Randolph was elderly too, but he was an excellent marine lawyer, if a bit sour-natured. Sarah trusted him like a bank, as everyone did.

  “Out of town!” Her voice seemed as small as it was empty. She stared helplessly at the telephone.

  This left of the lawyers she knew, Mr. Arbogast.

  “Lord, no! Not Mr. Arbogast!” Her lips shaped this silently. “Ask Mr. Arbogast! Ask the fat duck about the hawk!” It was not possible.

  But her gnawing doubts made it possible, and she dialed Mr. Arbogast’s office number. The voice she got was Lida Dunlap’s—the same Lida Dunlap who had introduced her to Attorney Brill in the first place.

  “Mrs. Lineyack, Lida…. is there a chance of speaking to Mr. Arbogast?”

  “Who? Oh—Sarah!… What about, honey?” Lida had a bird-of-paradise figure, but her telephone voice belonged to a bird of darker feathers.

  “A personal matter, Lida. I—well, rather important—will you tell him?”

  “Oh!” said Lida. “Hold the phone a minute, sport.”

  And presently, “Hello, Sarah?” a muffled male voice said. And she asked, “Mr. Arbogast?” because the voice didn’t seem hearty and soft like Mr. Arbogast. He replied, “Of course…. Oh, Sarah! Why, Sarah, what is on your mind? Are you calling about not making the test sail on Vameric this afternoon?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “No, they told me the test was called off.”

  “That’s right. The storm. Wasn’t that wise? Don’t you think it is too stormy, Sarah?”

  She didn’t think so, for she loved a fine ship in a great sea, but it was of no matter now. “I don’t imagine you would enjoy the Gulf Stream this afternoon,” she said. “But that isn’t what I called about, Mr. Arbogast. If you will let me impose on you, I’d like to ask for a reference on someone.”

  “Of course. You couldn’t impose on me, Sarah,” he said.

  “Do you know an attorney named Calvin Brandeis Brill?”

  “Brill? Brill?” said Arbogast. “Hm-m-m-m. Brill. What about him?”

  “Is he reliable?”

  “Why, I’d say so. Chicago man. Criminal lawyer. Quite adept, I’ve heard.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Arbogast.” Sarah gathered herself, because this next was going to be difficult to get out. And then she plunged, saying, “I wonder if you could answer another question to settle an argument. Take a situation that would be this: A married couple have a small son, and the father is killed in an automobile accident. The grandparents—t
he father and mother of the husband who is killed—make trouble for the mother, try to get charges filed against her. She wasn’t driving the car but they try to claim she was and that she was intoxicated. And while the mother is in a hospital in another state, the grandparents take the mother’s child. They have an adoption put through, without the mother’s consent. The mother was sane, was not intemperate. Can they do that?”

  She had finished on an edge. Why, I’m about to be hysterical, she thought. And then she waited, wondering wildly if Arbogast would realize she had spoken of herself.

  “You say,” inquired Arbogast, “that this is to settle an argument?”

  “Can they?” Sarah demanded quickly. “Can they take the child?”

  “I’m a financial lawyer, Sarah… but it is the intent of most state statutes that there shall be no severance of parental relationship without consent.”

  “Then it’s illegal?”

  “Fundamentally. What did they do, use notice by publication?”

  “Yes.”

  “They usually do. It would be wrong, Sarah.”

  “Then the mother should just take the child back?”

  Mr. Arbogast grunted hastily. “I wouldn’t say—Oh well, who would blame her?… But she might have a legal scrap on her hands, Sarah.”

  “But would it be best for her to take the child and let the grandparents initiate the legal fight?”

  “If she had courage and a sharp lawyer, I’d say that would be a quick way.”

  “Would it look too bad, her just taking her son?”

  “Considering the emotional values involved, probably not. The court will take cognizance of the mother’s love for the child, and the love should be strongly established. I can’t think of a stronger way for the mother to establish interest than by a desperate move like taking the child.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Arbogast,” Sarah said weakly.

  “You’re welcome, of course….” Mr. Arbogast’s pause had a fishhook quality. He let it dangle hopefully. Sarah could imagine him sitting there, plump, soft, dependent. Depending on her even now, to satisfy the curiosity he must have. She fooled him.

  “Thank you again, Mr. Arbogast, and good-by,” Sarah said.

  Replacing the telephone on the cradle, she stood quickly and went to the window. Her gaze was outward and blank, seeing nothing. All of her movements were swift now, and she went to the water cooler for a drink. There was a kind of headlong excitement in her. The way lay open. Doubts she still had, but they were less acute. She crushed the paper water cup. She no longer moved in a dark forest that was frightening. Her fingers sent the crushed paper cup into the wastebasket and she walked back to the desk, sure now where her way lay.

  When Captain Most came into Sarah’s office sometime later, he first knocked, and the knock brought her head up, but her eyes were vague. She was reluctant to quit the pell-mell reverie of her planning.

  “Come in,” she called.

  Captain Most entered. He closed the door and leaned against it for a moment, the expression on his angular face a difficult one to fathom. And presently, without having spoken, he strolled over to Sarah’s drawing board and looked down at the design in the works there. It was a long-keeled schooner with a deep forefoot; it was unlike Vameric in all respects, this one; here was a boat for a man who wanted adventure in far places.

  Most indicated the design on the board. “You’ve a touch for the sea, Mrs. Lineyack.”

  “You think so?”

  “They’ve been saying for years that there’s not much more to be done that will make a vessel sweeter in the water. But you’re showing them. You’ve a hand for rigs too.”

  He had spoken with his back to her and now he turned, then he added, “You’re a down-Easter, aren’t you?”

  She admitted, “I was born in Portland, Maine.”

  “I thought so. I could tell it from the soul your drawing pen puts into a vessel.”

  For the first time since he had entered, Sarah brought herself into focus on his presence.

  “Really?”

  “You’re fantastically good, you know,” he said seriously. “You’ve got something in here”—he thumbed his wide chest—“that rings the bell. I don’t suppose that’s a very clear description, but anyway it’s a feeling that I’ve never thought more than one or two contemporary designers have.”

  “You might really mean,” Sarah suggested, “that only a few others design boats that fit your own notions.”

  He snorted. “No! You watch. Your Vameric is going to bewitch them all.” He grinned at her and added, “Everybody will talk about the beautiful lady architect with the magic touch.”

  She was not displeased, but she did not smile. She said, “I have been around sail all my life. They probably won’t know that.”

  “True. That’s the lot of genius.” He removed a package from under his arm and turned it in his hands, looking at it intently. “You know, I remember you quite well. You were in several cruising races that I was also in, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew I remembered you. I knew it yesterday.”

  “I danced with you in Havana,” she said.

  He looked at her sheepishly and did not get out of his embarrassment too adeptly by saying, “It must have been after the races each time I met you, when the cup that cheers always seems to flow too freely.” He was not satisfied with that explanation himself, and he moved his great shoulders vaguely and was more uncomfortable.

  “I’ve brought you a present,” he said abruptly.

  He brought the package to her desk. His long fingers, adept with lines, unthreaded the cord that bound it.

  About to undo the paper wrapping, he glanced up. His eyes glinted mischievously; a smile ran along his lips for a moment.

  “Not every woman would be pleased with such a gift,” he said. “But I thought you would be.”

  “What is it?” she asked wonderingly.

  “Shoes.”

  He flipped open the paper and showed her. They weren’t just shoes. They were rope-soled for wear on a boat, the only kind that were really good on the spray-wet deck of a sailing craft. Sarah realized that they were a type made only on one of the Bahama Islands; furthermore, that Most must have hunted the stores for them.

  “How nice!” she exclaimed.

  “Like ’em?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Most pocketed his hands and stood straight, more than six feet of him and all of it pleased. His delight must have transcended his natural reticence, because he at once blurted out what he must have come here to say.

  “Would you have dinner with me tonight?”

  Sarah lifted her eyes quickly. “I’m afraid I can’t. And I’m sorry.”

  The boyishness died on his face; his smile went.

  “Shouldn’t I have brought you a present?” he asked. He laid a finger against his jaw and moved it slowly in a circle. “Did I make a mistake? Maybe I did. It never occurred to me.”

  Picking up the boat shoes that were his present, Sarah let the act of placing them in the drawer of her desk cover an unsureness. The man could have, she was beginning to understand, a measurable effect on her. For example, she was now confused; she actually felt a bit like a schoolgirl who had been handed her first bunch of flowers by a boy. She wondered how much of this odd excitement was caused by being flustered by his reputation? Such a man, with the name he had in sail, would naturally awe her somewhat.

  She had lived in sail substantially all of her life, as she had told him, and had loved it. She loved it still. It was quite probable that this facet of her would not change. Even during the period of her marriage to Paul the sea had been a part of her life. She and Paul had lived on a sailboat. So neither marriage nor her child—and, if one wanted to guess at the future, another possible marriage and its resultant possible children—would be likely to alter the influence of sail and the sea. These would always be a part of her life. And this man, Most, was a great name
in sail. So she must consider that in measuring any excitement she could not quite understand.

  “I like the shoes,” she said.

  “But are you mad?”

  She hesitated and then asked, “Should I be?”

  He suddenly decided to back out of the whole thing.

  “Maybe I just picked a poor day for these things,” he said gloomily.

  “Yes, you might have,” she admitted.

  He let it rest and moved—a large angular man who was withdrawing from, but not abandoning, a situation that had temporarily bested him—walking past her desk. He said, “Arbogast won’t sail on Vameric today. Too weatherish. So we’re calling off the test run until later. You had heard, of course?”

  He was being elaborately matter-of-fact.

  Sarah nodded that she knew about Arbogast and no trial today. It occurred to her that she had handled a situation ineptly. He thinks I was curt, she decided, but I did not really feel so.

  Then Most left, closing the door after him. And she found herself glancing at the places where he had been in the room, her cruising-schooner design that he had inspected, a chair that he had occupied very briefly. She knew some dissatisfaction.

  It was four o’clock before Brill phoned.

  “All set,” the lawyer said.

  Chapter Four

  THERE WAS A TALL palm tree with a silver trunk growing at an angle of about twenty degrees off zenith. Around the base of the palm were four palmettos, short, bushy, sprawling themselves from nests constructed of colored sea shells and cement. The palmettos made a little thicket about the base of the palm, like a tall skinny witch that had dropped her petticoats.

  She waited there…. She was not waiting so much as listening. Perhaps not listening so much, either, as she was using the five of her senses like raw-skinned fingers, combing the darkness with them.

  The darkness was nine o’clock February darkness with sundown half an hour gone. There should have been a certain amount of gold still sticking to the night, but there was none because the sky wore clouds like half a black skullcap. Rain no longer came down, but the night reeked of wetness, and rain pools like flat mirrors lay wherever there was a depression. But it was still windy. A Florida wind, as strong and warm and playful as a lusty lover.