Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  Sandra had whirled across to poor George Barrol and had him by the arm.

  “You weel come with me, George! They are cowards—we weel show them!”

  Poor George! He hates to get his feet wet, and even Rodman Bishop’s yacht is torture to him in rough weather. But Sandra was the better man. She dragged him out of the open French windows and down the steps, the rest of us looking on dum-founded and horribly, horribly embarrassed . . . for Jim.

  “Can’t somebody stop them?” Mrs. Gould said quietly.

  Rodman Bishop’s deep voice brought all of us back to our senses. “We don’t have to worry. George won’t leave the dock—wild asses couldn’t drag him into a boat tonight.”

  A terrible forked streak of lightning split the dark night. Jim and Andy went out through the windows. The rest of us looked at each other, breathed again and turned back to where we’d been. All except Rosemary. She sat erect in the white leather chair, as frozen as an icicle.

  “Let’s not play any more,” Lucy Lee said abruptly. “I’m going outside.”

  Dikranov stood up and bowed formally. “Shall we go out on the porch, Rosemary?”

  “No . . . thanks,” Rosemary said quickly. Her voice was strained, almost harsh. Then she caught herself and said quite naturally, “You stay and talk to Dad. I’ll go out with Lucy Lee. Come on, Grace.”

  We went, Bill Chetwynd coming with us. From the porch we could hear the sudden burst of applause that went up, and in another minute a saxophone blared. We knew that Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon had arrived. I looked at my watch. It was just eleven.

  Rosemary and I ran across the lawn. Lucy Lee had disappeared. Even when the lightning flashed so that we had a momentary picture of the entire scene we couldn’t see her white little figure in it. We could, however, see a small boat with two figures in it bouncing on the dark waves, and on the dock two other figures in white flannels and dark jackets, running down, shouting.

  “Is her boat out?” Rosemary whispered.

  “Unless they brought it in tonight. They all thought the storm had died down for good.”

  We picked our way down the rock steps aided by the flashes of white light. Not that we needed it. Either of us could have gone from one end of April Harbor to the other in the dark with our eyes closed.

  Suddenly, in front of us, was Lucy Lee, sitting on a step. Just sitting there.

  “What’s the matter, Lucy—hurt your ankle?” Rosemary asked quickly.

  Lucy Lee shook her head.

  “Go on down. I’m all right.”

  Rosemary went on. I stayed.

  “What’s the matter, Lucy Lee?”

  She laughed . . . a ghastly tear-stained laugh.

  “I’m just being a silly fool. Don’t mind me. Go on down.”

  I sat down beside her.

  “Look, precious,” I said. “You are being a silly fool. It’s all right if you can’t help it, but for Heaven’s sake don’t let everybody on the place know it.”

  She didn’t say anything, just sat, a white-faced stricken child, with a thunderstorm playing havoc with her life.

  “I’ll go back up,” she said suddenly. “Mother wants to go home early anyway. Tell Andy, will you? Not that he’ll care, but it . . . sort of keeps up the joke.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I watched her long white dress disappear up the hill, and went down to the float. A drop of rain hit my shoulder, and another. It was dark, but I could make out Andy with his flashlight, trying to untie a motorboat down by the No. 4 landing. I didn’t see Rosemary or Jim. Not until another flash of lightning came, and then I wished I hadn’t. It would have been easier the next day, and a lot easier when the State’s Attorney began asking me questions. I don’t imagine either of them had realized that meeting in the dark there where they’d spent so many intimate growing-up years would simply annihilate in one mindless instant all the bitterness and tragedy of those intervening years.

  I ran on to the end of the pier where Andy Thorp was. He had given up trying to release the motorboat and was standing there dully, staring out at the tiny light bobbing up and down where Sandra and George Barrol were.

  “No use,” he mumbled. “She can handle it if anybody can. I should have gone with her.”

  “She won’t try it, she can’t! Not in this sea.”

  “She’ll go, all right,” he said.

  “She’s a fool!”

  “I guess she thinks Rosemary’s trying to get him back,” he said doggedly. “He doesn’t deserve a woman like her.”

  I stared at him.

  “And I’m not saying I do,” he went on.

  “Well,” I said, “of course, there is Lucy Lee.”

  “I’m not saying anything about Lucy Lee. I guess it’s not her fault she’s sort of all washed up.”

  It wasn’t a particularly appropriate time, of course, to go into Andy’s domestic and emotional difficulties. Not with Jim pounding along the dock towards us and Sandra and George out there in the squall, lightning flashing and the rain beginning to come down in torrents. The trouble with Andy is one of the great troubles with American colleges. He’d been one of those All-American everythings, from marbles to football, to whom just the mere fact of being out of college for a couple of years is deflation enough for one ordinary twenty-five-year-old ego. Andy got the depression slapped on for good measure. Whenever I look at him, I hope my sons will be bandy-legged and cross-eyed so they can’t be All-American anythings, and will escape the dreadful letdown and go into the world and not onto it.

  “You’d better put this on.” He pulled an oilskin coat out of the motorboat and put it over my head.

  Jim was coming. He was alone.

  Even then I don’t think any of us thought Sandra was in any real danger.

  “You going out, Jim?” Andy shouted through the rain.

  “No.” His voice was curt to the point of rudeness. “I’ll stand by if she needs help. Rosemary’s gone to have ’em put the lights on. Sandra can manage a boat better than we can.”

  He came back towards us.

  “That sounds pretty damn offhand to me,” Andy said. He was trying hard to control a sudden anger. “If she was my wife—”

  “You wouldn’t even be down here,” Jim said angrily. Which was the first time I knew he had even noticed Andy and Lucy Lee lately.

  “Yeah? What about yourself? I guess everybody here knows how you’d feel about it if she never got back in!”

  “Andy . . . Jim!” I cried. “Shut up, both of you!”

  I put my hand on Andy’s arm. He shook it off angrily. “You keep out of this, Grace!” he snarled. They stood there face to face, staring at each other for an instant in the crashing storm and the rain and the lightning.

  Then from above the twin beams of the great searchlights flashed out across the rain-lashed inlet. I didn’t look for Sandra just then. I was looking at Jim. His tortured face was turned towards the water.

  “So you’d be free . . .” Andy said deliberately.

  Jim turned back.

  “Steady,” I said. “Andy doesn’t know what he’s—”

  “The hell I don’t. You think I’m too dumb to know what’s going on? What do you suppose she brought her dago fancy man down here for!”

  I don’t think I’d have stopped it if I could. Jim took one swift step. His fist shot out. Andy’s knees buckled like an accordion and down he went. He stayed there motionless a second, more surprised than hurt, and then leaped to his feet. Jim Gould stood square to meet him, back to the bay.

  Then suddenly across the rain-driven water came a high-pitched scream of terror, and with it a man’s voice shouting, “Help! Help!”

  We looked. A white sail, half unfurled, dipped and pitched crazily in the wind and rain. The jib tore loose. I saw Sandra’s slim figure, arms up, caught suddenly by the falling mast, careen and disappear.

  We stood staring for one instant. Then Jim tore off his coat and dived. It’s probably wrong to say that a di
ve could be impersonal, but I had that feeling very definitely, that he was going into it as he would have done if anything had been drowning—a suicide off Brooklyn Bridge, a coolie off a sampan in the Yangtze, or a dog overboard . . . just because that’s the kind of person he is. I saw him strike out in a swift powerful crawl, his shirt sleeves molded to his arms making quick white arcs above the dark water. Then behind him was Andy. I was only reading into it again, probably, what I knew; but it seemed to me that there was a tensely emotional quality to the way he’d gone in and was fighting to reach Sandra first. I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least if he’d caught Jim and pushed him back out of the way.

  But he didn’t. He didn’t even catch him. I could still see him a few yards behind, picked out in the orange path of the searchlights playing frantically across the water. Behind me I could hear them shouting on the topside, and men pounding down the stone steps. Then I heard Sandra scream again, and all the laboring excitement in me went stone-dead.

  Someone shouted from above: “They’re hanging onto the boat!”

  I turned away, feeling curiously unmoved. Joe Bates, our life guard, pounded up. “Jeez,” he shouted breathlessly, “if she can hang on and bellow, why the hell doesn’t she swim?”

  I didn’t say anything. I guess I’m pretty hard-boiled about people like Sandra.

  “Why doesn’t he let her drown, anyway?”

  That was the voice of young Sally Parks, Lucy Lee’s oldest and best friend, and actually about as cruel and cynical as a newborn babe.

  “It’s not right to talk like that,” Joe Bates shouted.

  “I would if I was him. But I hope somebody saves George Barrol. I’d miss him.”

  As it happened, they saved them both. Jim brought Sandra in and Andy brought George. Sandra was much the same as she was after any hard swim, except that she clung to Jim saying, “My brave Jeem!” until he shoved her off and said, “Skip it, for —— sake!”

  But poor George! He was more dead than alive.

  Joe Bates grabbed him and started pumping him up and down on his stomach, saying, “One, two, three; one, two, three!” But not much water seemed to be coming out of his mouth.

  Everybody else was standing about in the deluge.

  “Andy and Jim look the worst to me,” Sally Parks remarked coolly, in her hard practical young voice. “I move we go up and give ’em a hot toddy.”

  “I’ll stay here with Joe,” Jim said stiffly. “Take Sandra up, will you.”

  “But, Jeem, you are wet, darling!”

  “Stow it, will you. Go on up.”

  They went. I stayed down, looking at Jim. His face was a grim tragic mask, and on it was the sort of bitter sardonic travesty of a smile that I don’t want ever to see on anybody’s face again for a long, long time.

  Joe Bates lifted George up and down. “Jeez,” he said. “This guy ain’t drowned, he’s fainted!”

  “Throw some water in his face,” Jim said curtly.

  Joe looked at me, completely bewildered.

  “Pinch him,” I said.

  We eventually brought him around quite decently. He opened his eyes slowly, not sure apparently whether he was waking up in this world or the next. Then he struggled up, wiping the rain off his face, staring at me, the most utter and complete terror gradually dawning in his face.

  “Sandra! Where’s Sandra! Did they save her?” he gasped.

  “Sure they saved her,” Joe said cheerfully. “She’s the original water baby. Couldn’t drown her in the middle of the Atlantic.”

  “Where . . . where is she?”

  “Up top. Where we’re takin’ you. It’s your one chance for a free drink. You don’t want to miss it.”

  I don’t think the idea of free liquor was very tempting to George just then. He shuddered, felt tentatively for his heart, and breathed in a sort of experimental fashion to see if he was all right.

  “I guess that was a pretty close shave,” he said. His voice shook and his face was still white with shock. “Why, I might have been drowned!”

  “Sure,” Joe said. “That’s what some of ’em were countin’ on, all the time.”

  “Really!”

  “Don’t be silly, Joe,” I said. “Get him up.”

  Jim and I didn’t even go to the club.

  “They’ll take care of him,” Jim said. I imagine he didn’t want another scene with Sandra doing the clinging lily. We passed by the club porch, however. We could see a big crowd in the lounge and in the ballroom Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon was playing “The Music Goes Round and Round.” We got into my car.

  “What did she do it for, Jim?” I said.

  “You’ve got me.”

  “She might have drowned poor George.”

  “She had him by the collar, holding him up,” Jim said.

  We rounded the Corner and turned down our road. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it began. A star or two appeared in the cloud rift.

  “Why don’t you come over to my place and have a good stiff drink before you turn in?” I said.

  “O.K.”

  I turned in my back drive and we got out. Sergeant Buck opened the kitchen door and gave what in anyone less completely granite would have been a shuddering gasp. He must have thought I’d drowned his colonel.

  “This is Mr. Gould, Sergeant,” I said. “We’ve been swimming and we’re going to have a drink and a fire.”

  I almost added “if you don’t mind,” but I caught myself.

  “The Colonel’s dancing at the club. I suggest you take my car and go wait for him.”

  Sergeant Buck looked a little uneasy. Then he gave the impression of clicking his heels and saluting without actually doing either. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jim and I lighted a fire in the living room and I got him a drink with hot water and lemon in it and a bathrobe. It was a quarter to twelve by the clock on the mantel. We sat there, Jim hunched down on the middle of his spine, his chin forward on his chest, thinking God knows what. We sat there from quarter to twelve until ten minutes of one, neither of us having spoken a word. We moved then only because we heard Sergeant Buck bringing the Colonel up the back drive.

  Jim got up. “I’ll be shoving,” he said, and grinned a sort of twisted grin at me that brought quick hot tears to my eyes. I let him out the front door and locked it again. Then I gathered up the glasses and ash tray and took them out to the kitchen.

  Colonel Primrose came in.

  “I’m sorry we don’t seem to have any other entrance to this house,” I said. “Did you have a nice time?”

  “Excellent.”

  “How about a nightcap?”

  I noticed he glanced a little cautiously at Sergeant Buck’s dead pan.

  “Perhaps you’d rather have it upstairs. There’s a tray on the sideboard. I’ll see you in the morning. Good night. Good night, Sergeant.”

  I don’t know about the Colonel, but I know Sergeant Buck was definitely and plainly relieved when I let the dog in and went upstairs, leaving them alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I’m not quite sure now what woke me up. I thought as I waked that it was Sheila scratching at the door wanting to get out. But I knew it wasn’t when I sat up in bed and heard her tail wag on the floor under the foot of the bed where she sleeps. I spoke to her, then I sat quite still, listening. The illuminated clock on the table said ten minutes past three. Sheila growled, gave a deep throaty bark and shambled over to the window. She stood there with her feet up on the sill, growling uneasily.

  I put on my dressing gown and slipped out of bed. Sheila’s head was thrust forward, her tail straight and stiff. I went over to the window and pulled her down. A pale quarter-moon was high in the clear sky. All signs of thunder and rain were gone. Sheila growled uneasily and retired to the rug in front of the fireplace when I told her to. I peered out, but I couldn’t see anything.

  I could, however, hear the motor of a car running quietly, rather close to me . . . then suddenly I realized that it w
as only Sheila breathing behind me in my own room. Why I didn’t abandon the whole business then and there, and put it down to an Irish setter’s nerves, I can’t quite say. All I know is that suddenly, almost as if I’d seen handwriting on the wall, I had an intense and unanswerable conviction of something terribly, horribly wrong. I could no more have denied it than Joe Bates could a drowning child.

  I slipped on a coat and a pair of sneakers, told Sheila to lie down where she was, opened my door and looked out down towards the guest wing. I half expected to see Sergeant Buck posted sentry in front of the Colonel’s door, but the hall was empty. I closed the door and went quietly downstairs, taking the big electric torch off the landing table as I went.

  Outside the night was quiet as the grave. I stood and listened. Still, somewhere near me, I thought I heard a car running quietly. I looked around for Sheila, but I knew she wasn’t there. Then I heard someone, somewhere between the back of my house and the Bishops’, moving quickly, and rather heavily, I thought. I crept to the end of the porch and looked out across the lawn.

  A man was there. For an instant I didn’t recognize him—not, in fact, until he heard me, if it was me he heard, and stopped. The next instant he was gone, slipping into the shadow of the big cherry tree by the end of the house. I stood there a little bewildered, wondering not very happily why Rosemary Bishop’s fiancé should be dodging about my garden at that time in the morning. Then I heard the Bishops’ garage door close, and again that low throbbing of a running motor, and I remembered then that Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon had been expected to carry on till two-thirty, so that of course ten minutes past three wasn’t actually late to be getting home.

  I stood there, nevertheless, unable to get the sense of impending disaster out of my head. If Dikranov was coming back from the dance with the Goulds, why should he be so extraordinarily furtive about trespassing on my grounds? Or had he, I wondered, had a clandestine meeting with Sandra there? I waited, hesitating to go back inside, hesitating still more to go any farther forward, when quite suddenly a woman came through the hedge and stood in my garden, looking about. She started to turn back, then changed her mind and came on, towards the porch. She stopped under my bedroom window and called softly.