The Winter People

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  No one called to me. No one stopped me, and I went through the door and stood looking around. The oak desk was neat, its papers thrust into pigeonholes, the drawers closed and orderly. A clothes tree stood in one corner and upon it hung a woman’s nylon uniform. A prickling ran along my nerves at the sight of the white dress. I stepped to the window and looked down upon the sloping brown lawn, to find that the sun had gone behind clouds that rolled up the sky on a rising wind. I had yet to learn how quickly the weather could change here, how quickly mist, or snow, or sleet, could blow across the lake, dropping the temperature, shrouding the scene.

  The window was closed. I knew without touching it that it would not open easily to my push, and that the lock would be balky, stuck with varnish or disuse. I stepped close to the glass, knowing very well that I was here because of the painting Glynis Chandler had done of the burning inn, and because that picture had somehow possessed my imagination.

  Movement near the edge of the lake caught my eye, and as I watched a man came into view to stand looking up at my narrow window. It was Trent McIntyre. Without warning, my heart went into its renegade thudding, and I had a horrid feeling that the picture was now complete, that the key to it had been given me. Now I knew why it had haunted me from first sight. The woman in white was I—even though this morning I wore a pale green sweater and darker green slacks. The woman who stood against the flames with her arms upflung, while the man on the bank watched in helpless horror—was I, Dina Blake. Dina Chandler! The picture was not fact, but prophecy.

  I whirled, half expecting to see fire blooming red and dangerous behind me. Instead, I found myself facing a woman with short fluffy hair that had been tinted the color of dark honey. Her eyes viewed me in lively fashion and were the same bright intense blue I had seen in the eyes of her son and grandson.

  “Good afternoon,” she said, and the rich lilt of Ireland was in her voice. “It must be you’re the young bride Glen has brought home to our lake. Trent tells me he met you when he was working on that piece about your father out in California. I’m Dora McIntyre—though you may as well call me Pandora—everyone does. Welcome to Gray Rocks.”

  She came toward me with her hand outstretched, and I took it in relief, grateful for being awakened from a bad dream.

  “I’m trespassing,” I said. “I called out when I came in, but no one answered.”

  “I was in the basement. I can never hear a thing down there. But you’re welcome to look about if you wish.”

  She slipped out of her short gray coat and hung it on the clothes tree beside the white uniform. Her gray skirt was box-pleated, and a wide leather belt buckled sweater and skirt together at the waist with a jaunty touch of brass. On her feet were brown country brogues, meant for walking rough paths. She was of medium height, a little on the plump side, and her figure seemed to go with her cheerful, expansive manner. There was nothing drawn and anxiously thin about Pandora McIntyre.

  From the hillside outdoors the crack of a rifle sounded and she turned toward the window at once.

  “He’s hunting again!” she cried. “How I hate hunting!”

  I listened intently as the firing was repeated. “It must be on Chandler land, though I noticed when I came through the woods that the area is posted.”

  “That makes no difference if it’s Keith.” Pandora McIntyre lifted her shoulders and let them drop helplessly. “Colton has given him permission to hunt over there.”

  Someone crossed the inn veranda and footsteps approached the office. A moment later Trent stood at the door, regarding me with a thoughtful, rather speculative look.

  “Good afternoon, Dina. Is anything wrong?”

  “Wrong?” I shook my head. “Why do you think—?”

  “If ever a woman gave me a frightened look, that’s what you did through the window just now,” he said.

  I felt myself flushing as I tried to explain. “I suffer from too much imagination,” I told him. “This morning I saw a picture that Glynis Chandler painted—”

  Pandora glanced at her son, then turned her quick look on me, nodding. “A picture of the inn burning, it was?”

  “Then you’ve seen it,” I said. “The picture’s been haunting me, and I’m afraid when I stood at that window just now—” I let my words trail into silence, finding I could not explain.

  Trent did not smile. “Glynis’s pictures work that sort of witchcraft. I’ve never been able to forget one of them myself. Though I haven’t seen this inn-burning inspiration, Keith has told us about it. She showed it to him right after she painted it last winter. But the inn is still standing.”

  His mother put a hand on his arm—a hand that seemed to gentle him. “It’s the sort of primitive thing she paints—not to be taken seriously.”

  “Most primitives are innocent,” Trent said. “There’s nothing innocent about anything Glynis does.”

  He spoke so harshly that I looked at him in surprise. What undercurrents stirred here? He was hardly the man I had known in California.

  His mother changed the subject swiftly. “Have you seen Keith since breakfast, Trent?”

  He shook his head. “He went hunting, I think. I’ve heard shots off and on this afternoon.”

  That other picture painted by Glynis Chandler flashed into my mind. The one which hung in Glen’s gallery in New York and showed a boy standing on the frozen lake, aiming at a small animal that fled toward the bank. I remembered the circle of small dead things around the boy’s feet. What Trent had said was true. There was nothing innocent about the scenes Glynis painted.

  Pandora went to her desk, opened a drawer, and drew out a sheet of paper. “I’d better get to work,” she said. “I’m opening the inn for another private dinner party next week, and I must get everything ready. If you’re going to help me, Trent—”

  I wished I might offer to help too, but I could not very well ignore what Glen had said about the McIntyres belonging to an enemy camp. It was certain that he would disapprove any friendship I might entertain for these two. Besides, it was better for me if I saw as little of Trent as possible. He had changed greatly, and I did not care for the change. Yet I liked Pandora. It would have been pleasant to have a woman friend away from the Chandler house.

  Trent moved from the doorway to let me pass, but before I could leave the office, there came a sound of running feet as Keith dashed through the big dining room, knocking a chair or two clumsily aside, and burst in upon us. His rifle was still in his hands, and he leaned it with care just outside the office door before he faced us, a hint of defiance lacing his obvious excitement. Thick brown hair tumbled over his forehead in an untidy shock, and beneath brows as heavily marked as his father’s, his eyes were that electric, Irish blue.

  “They’re home!” he announced. “Both of them are home—Colton and Glynis! I was on the hill above the road, and I saw her car take the turn toward High Towers.”

  A look sped between Trent and his mother. Then the man put one hand upon his son’s shoulder.

  “It’s neither the beginning nor the end of the world when Glynis comes home. Is it?”

  Keith jerked his shoulder from his touch. “For me everything begins when she comes home! It’s hopelessly boring here when she’s away.”

  He swung about, but Trent was beside him at once and I saw the concern in his face. “You’d better wait, Keith. She won’t want you underfoot right away.”

  All his youthful rebellion, his resentment of parental direction, was stamped on the boy’s face. “You want to keep me away from her. You’ve always wanted that. But I don’t have to do what you say any more. I’m old enough to think for myself. She wrote me in her last letter that she wanted to see me. She said I was one of the first people she’d want to see when she came home. And I’m to go to High Towers for Christmas. Just try and stop me from seeing her then!”

  Insolently he picked up his rifle, and there seemed something disturbing about the way he held the gun—almost as if it were a weapon he might
use against his father.

  Trent stood quietly, not moving or flinching, facing his son. Yet I had the feeling that if the boy made the slightest threatening move the man would move more quickly.

  Pandora stepped between the two. “Let him go, Trent. It’s true that you can’t stop him.”

  The boy was already gone, rifle in hand. I returned to the window and saw him lope around the end of the inn and start across the lawn. What his startling news meant to me began to come home. If Glynis had returned, and Colton with her—this might mean that they had left before Glen’s cables had reached them. If that were true, then neither would know of our marriage. I wondered whether I could find Glen and warn him. Without thinking, I reached for the window sash and raised it easily. The window was neither locked nor stuck, but the prophecy of the painting did not concern me now. I leaned my hands on the sill and called after the boy.

  “Keith—wait for me! I need to find Glen. Can you help me find him in the woods?”

  He turned to look up at me, impatient and far from gracious. “Okay—I’ll wait. But hurry up.”

  I flung an apologetic glance at the two in the room. “I’ll have to find Glen and—and let him know. He only cabled his father and sister recently about our marriage, and it may come as a surprise to them.”

  Neither Trent nor his mother spoke. I was aware of Pandora watching me almost pityingly. Trent’s look was more remote, and put me back in my enemy camp. Yet when I started through the dining room he came with me, and on the veranda he held me back for a moment.

  “I don’t know much about you any more,” he said, “but I know you’re not Chandler-oriented. So if anything happens to trouble you, come to my mother. You’ll have a friend there.”

  I would hardly accept such an invitation. I knew where my loyalties lay.

  “I have my husband to turn to,” I said, and started down the veranda steps.

  He came with me, unasked and without comment, walked around the end of the inn with me, thoughtfully silent, so that I felt uneasy, wondering what he meant by his veiled warning.

  “I’ll run now, or Keith won’t wait for me,” I told him. Then I paused and held out my hand. “Thank you, Trent. I’ll be fine, you know. Of course a family of geniuses is something new for me, but I’ll manage. I always do.”

  His handclasp seemed rough, impatient. “Perhaps you’d better be told—in case no one else has informed you. Mother was right. I can’t stop Keith from seeing Glynis when he wishes. He’s her son and he has that right. Colton of course is his grandfather.”

  The news astonished me. Glen had never given me the slightest hint that his sister had ever married. And that it should be Trent—

  “Then—then you’re—” I found myself stammering in bewilderment.

  “No!” He contradicted me sharply before the words were spoken. “I haven’t been her husband since Keith was nine and Glynis went off on her own and left him to me. She dropped my name after the divorce and went her own way. As I’ve gone mine.”

  We were on the brown lawn, moving toward the lake, where Keith waited for me near the water’s edge.

  “You’d better know, since you’re one of the Chandlers now,” Trent explained grudgingly. “Pandora has raised Keith and we’ve had no worry about him until recently. Glynis has paid little attention to him. Now that he’s in his teens, however, she’d like him as one of her devoted following. Something I find it hard to stomach.”

  “I’m sorry,” I managed. “I’m awfully sorry.”

  The words were feeble, but he seemed to accept them as they were meant. The harsh look of his mouth softened a little.

  “I wouldn’t worry you with past history, but I know Glynis. She won’t welcome you as Glen’s wife, and she’s accountable to no one. She makes her own laws.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said, encouraging myself.

  He shook his head almost despairingly, as though he thought me hopelessly foolish, and I ran down the bank to where the impatient boy waited. Before I reached him, Keith started along the path, so that I had to run after him, following single file.

  In spite of my boastful words to Trent, I felt shaken and unable to think clearly. Glynis was the woman my young self had once envied as Trent’s wife, though I had never seen her. Now she was my husband’s twin sister and a woman I wanted as my friend. I felt bewildered and not a little alarmed. Yet out of the confusion Keith’s news had thrown me into, one thought was beginning to drive me. Nothing must interfere with the work Glen had started this morning. For some reason he had seemed almost fearful about Glynis’s reaction to it. He had spoken of having time enough to get well along in his work before his sister came home for Christmas. Now that time was lost. But she must not be allowed to spoil what he meant to do—if that was what he feared from her. She must not discourage him, or disparage his work. Somehow I would manage to stand beside my husband so strongly and confidently that nothing his twin sister might do or say would bring down the high crest of his inspiration.

  With the sun gone the bare brown hillside caught the wind and I shivered in my sweater. Trying to warm myself, hurrying too carelessly, I tripped over a snakelike root and called out to the boy who ran ahead.

  “I’m not used to the woods. You’re going too fast for me!”

  He paused in his headlong plunge uphill and looked back at me. A branch caught at my hair, pulled a lock loose from my braid, twisted my velvet ribbon askew, jerked me to a halt with a cruel tug. The boy leaned his gun against a tree and came to release me from the branch’s hold, his touch unexpectedly light and skillful. In the woods he was less awkward in his movements than in a house.

  We walked together now, as the path allowed, and I regained my breath. “Have you realized something?” I asked him. “We’ve each just acquired a new relative. I seem to be your aunt, and you’re my nephew. I’ve never had a nephew before. It’s rather interesting.”

  A smile lighted his somber young face for the first time. “You aren’t old enough to be my aunt.”

  “Aunts come all ages, and anyway I’m ancient,” I told him. “Twenty-four.”

  He accepted that age as obviously ancient, but a more companionable climate existed between us.

  “I know where Glen likes to go,” Keith offered as we followed the shore path. “Do you see that pile of rock rising from the lake’s edge on ahead? There’s a place up near the top where he goes sometimes when he wants to be alone. I can show you the way up if you like, and then I’ll cut up through the woods and back to the house.”

  I was grateful for his help, and as the path narrowed, I fell behind again. He walked more slowly now, and even stopped once or twice to hold back a branch which would have slapped me, seeming again a more gentle, courteous boy here in the woods than he had been at the inn.

  Or so I thought, until he came to a sudden halt on the path ahead of me and raised his gun to his shoulder. Instinctively I stopped too, as quiet as he. In scrubby brown underbrush near the lake’s edge two pricked ears stood up—the ears of a rabbit. The boy moved his gun, aiming.

  “No!” I cried. “No!”

  The rabbit leaped for safety, vanishing behind a bushy cedar, and the boy lowered his gun and looked around in disgust.

  “What’d you go yelling for?”

  “A rabbit!” I cried, thoroughly indignant. “Why should you want to kill rabbit?”

  He snorted at me, equally indignant. “You’re what Glynis calls a bleeding heart! You should see her with a gun. She’s not scary and silly.”

  “Just tell me why,” I persisted. “I’d hate killing anything wild. Woods animals have more right to be here than we have. Why did you want to kill it?”

  He pondered my question seriously. “My grandmother makes great rabbit stew. She talks about hating hunting, but she eats meat right along. Besides, farmers hate rabbits. They eat things up. Like the woodchucks do. I kill every woodchuck I see. Foxes too. There’s a bounty on foxes. Farmers want them killed. I got on
e just last week here in these woods.”

  I was far from feeling sympathetic toward the farmer just then. “Nothing alive should be shot like that! Especially not something beautiful and wild like a fox. Why—tell me why, really!”

  He stared at me, taken aback by my vehemence, and genuinely puzzled. Undoubtedly he thought me a stupid city girl and out of order in the country, but there was something else that drove him—something I wanted to understand. I could not forget the picture Glynis had painted of this boy—her son!—shooting a small defenseless animal, while the corpses of others he had slain lay about his feet.

  “Don’t give me the excuses,” I said. “Tell me the truth!”

  He put his rifle under his arm, muzzle down, and considered my words with care. “Marksmanship?” The word was a question and I waited. “I suppose that’s part of it. I’m a good shot, and I enjoy proving it. Especially when something is moving and I can be faster.”

  “At one moment something is alive, and the next, because of you, it’s dead. A life gone from the woods just so you can prove what a wonderful shot you are. Why can’t you shoot at a target?”

  He looked solemn, thoughtful, but as I watched, the muscles beneath the young curve of his jaw seemed to harden, and he stared at me directly.

  “Maybe this is the only way I know to play God,” he said. “Everyone else can push me around—but not the animals in the woods. I can control whether they live or die. Glynis understands that. She knows about playing God, though she can do it in other ways.”

  “None of us is God,” I said. But he was Glynis’s son, and I turned away revolted. “If you’ll show me where to find Glen, I’ll go on alone. Then you won’t have anyone around to interrupt your hunting.”

  He grinned at me, his eyes openly mocking. “Okay—I’ll show you. Maybe Glen will come down and help you up if you call to him. If he’s there he has already heard us, though he can’t see us because of the spruce trees.”

  It was true that I could not see the rocky pinnacles from where we stood, though the massive base of gray rock rose just ahead, lifting upward from the edge of the water.