The House at Sandalwood

by Virginia Coffman

  Ilima nodded. “She saw them. I am sure of it. Two Caucasians.”

  Were we getting closer to the real reason for Deirdre’s flight?

  “Who were these men who came to see my niece? And why couldn’t they stay?”

  Ilima reminded me, “They were strangers and there is no possible place for them to stay, unless they are guests of Sandalwood or with friends in the village. One of the men from our village, Andrew Christian, was making a trip back across the bay and agreed to take the two gentlemen to Kaiana. They said they would spend the night at the new Kaiana Hilton.”

  “What did they want with Deirdre? Why not see her husband? Who are they?”

  Ilima said, “The name given, I believe, was Berringer. I don’t recall the younger man’s name.”

  Kekua hesitated. Then she smiled broadly. “He wasn’t the kind you would remember. But Victor Berringer ... ‘Vic,’ the other man called him. Ah! Cold as ice and smelled of money. Not friendly at all. But a man with lots of power ... You can tell. I think it was something unpleasant he came to—”

  “Be quiet.”

  Moku and his daughter looked at Ilima. It was easy to see that the queen of Ili-Ahi still held her sceptre.

  “You do not talk like that about a haole, and a malahini too! A man older than your father. I did not like his eyes. But you are right in one thing, my daughter. His eyes were like cold waters far out from shore.”

  The name was familiar but at the moment I was too upset to care about the cold-eyed strangers who had intrigued Kekua.

  “Perhaps if Deirdre could see me,” I suggested and started to the front of the house. “I could walk about. Do something. Be seen by her if she is hiding somewhere around here.”

  Moku hurried after me, his impressive bulk shaking the hall floor.

  “Maybe with a light. Here. I left one on the veranda.” He added, “She will return soon. She has done so before. Let me show you the places where she goes sometimes to read or to draw the flowers here and to press the flowers. She makes little patterns. Very pretty.”

  I looked back as we crossed the dimly lighted huge living room. The woman and her daughter were talking. The older woman gave her a little push as if to send her after us, but Kekua said abruptly, “I know Mrs. Steve better than you do. She isn’t going to thank me for interfering.”

  Outside the house as we crossed the grassy clearing, Moku took my arm.

  “Careful. The emu is just to your right.” I avoided this pit, at the same time seeing the movements of the island’s population for the first time. Two men with Oriental features, Japanese or Korean, I thought, came around the veranda from the jungle-covered gulch below. They had found nothing, but looked drenched although they wore shiny slickers and boots. It was odd to see such cold-weather clothes in this climate, but even across the clearing my companion’s flashlight recalled the mud-encrusted boots, and the water dripping off their rain slickers.

  Then Moku inadvertently reminded me of the real identity of the man who had come all the way to Ili-Ahi to meet Deirdre. He remarked, “The younger man who came over to meet Mrs. Steve had not so much force. He seemed afraid.”

  “Afraid!”

  “I mean to say, embarrassed. Not wanting to come. He said while I myself heard, ‘She is pretty and gentle. She marries the man. It is always the way. It is not a crime to marry the man another woman wants.’ ”

  So the men were concerned with Ingrid Berringer who had been with Deirdre when they met Stephen Giles. Recalling Ito’s hints about Ingrid, the girl who seemed to have vanished, I realized her father would not be visiting the island on a social call! Deirdre had always preferred peace to quarrels, and it was undoubtedly this timidity or gentleness that caused her to run away instead of meeting these unwelcome visitors.

  “Miss Berringer’s father, was he really angry?” I asked.

  He did not want to say so, but it was apparent that Ingrid Berringer’s father intended to make trouble.

  We passed two women, one Japanese and the other, a younger, Filipino girl who, Moku explained, worked at Sandalwood House to earn her tuition at the university. He introduced us. The pretty Filipino girl said, “We’ve looked everywhere, Moku. Except—” She glanced at him with what was an obvious attempt to keep her suspicions from me. “You know. Those places.”

  “What places are they?” I asked when the two women had gone on to the house.

  “They have been following the river’s course, except near the cottages. Our river runs past them and empties into the gulch behind the Giles house. It was the cottages they did not enter.”

  These must be the cabins built by Stephen Giles’s father: Sandalwood Heiau, the development that killed him.

  “Hadn’t we better look through them?” I suggested. Our path crossed a little footbridge at this point, and I got a good look at the side of one of the cabins in a glade and facing the river. It was an imitation of the original Hawaiian grass huts, although there were windows and the grass was painted straw. But I found it charming. And I remembered suddenly that when she was small, Deirdre had a little pup tent on the back lawn and insisted on covering the canvas with acacia branches to imitate South Seas grass huts.

  “Let’s look in there.”

  “Ah, Miss Cameron...” He was so obviously upset, I realized I had said something either shocking or alarming.

  When we had crossed the dark little bridge, I turned along the path that led past several cabins facing the river. The river itself was calm, looking jellylike under the first stars and the occasional flashes of Moku’s light. He barely caught my arm before I had gone beyond his reach.

  “No, Miss Cameron! The heiau is hated. You are on the heiau land now. Everyone is afraid of it. You would not find her in those cabins.”

  “Why, for heaven’s sake?” All around me the coco-palms fluttered and rustled, although I felt no breeze. They seemed very busy, like gossipers whispering.

  “It is a sacred place,” he began. I said I understood that. “There are certain memories connected with the heiau” he went on. “The kahunas, that is, the priests in the old days placed it kapu for what Steve’s father intended. Kapu—forbidden. It should not be a place for haoles to make money and to bring their malahini friends and soil it with their haole ways.”

  I thought I understood his objections, but they weren’t helping me to find my niece.

  “We might just look past the cabins,” I suggested tentatively. “I wouldn’t do anything to ... soil them with my haole ways, but I feel we could then eliminate this area and go on, for a little while.”

  He did not stop me, but I found myself alone as I went on, feeling my way between new, moist growths, bushes, young trees, and what seemed to me a surprising richness of great multicolored blooms: hibiscus, plumeria, orchids, and red blossoms that glowed in the distant glitter of Moku’s flashlight like fireworks sprays. As I moved beyond the area of his flashlight and became accustomed to the blue-dark, I discovered that the starlight overhead seeped through, offering at least a minimum of light to see my way past the cabins. I glanced in at the first of these and saw how the entire project had not been completed. There were three steps—mere plank steps—up to the doorway. Several cabins nearby had no doors. The interior of the first cabin, left unfinished, showed me that the general family room was to be an imitation of the ancient grass huts, but probably with luxurious, Waikiki kinds of touches. There were no windows, and the flooring was carpeted with blown palm fronds, dust, dead flowers, endless greenery. And no doubt a great many insects. I slipped on something that appeared to mash like a beetle, and felt another creature scamper across my instep as I rushed out and down the steps.

  Little streams had been cut away from the river to run between each cabin, their banks lined with flowers, often blooms I had never seen before. It was all picturesque, but sad and deserted. The scene made me think of so much of the art practiced and exhibited by the inmates of the minimum security sector of the women’s prison.
Their work was so often cheerful and bright and happy. But unfortunately, when I was an inmate there, the twittering buyers had always wanted gloomy, downbeat art, “the way it really is,” as more than one of the ladies remarked, her diamond-studded hands momentarily blinding me. The deserted cabins before me spoke all too clearly of “the way it was.”

  It was darker further inside the grove and after glancing in at two more cabins, I looked back through the trees. Seeing that Moku must have given me up, I decided to take a shortcut back toward Sandalwood, across the next little footbridge. Surely, Deirdre would have returned to her home by now.

  The cabin across the bridge was one of those Stephen Giles must have worked on recently. It looked quite charming surrounded by hibiscus, tiny pastel-colored orchids growing wild and a lovely golden-blossoming tree. The scent of the plumeria was almost overpowering. I made my way under the window, through underbrush that, however exotic, could have used some pruning, and noticed that recent work had been done on this and the next cabin. The windows were in and the rooftops with their simulated grass-hut look were very realistic without being impractical. I turned, went back a little way up the steps to see if I could discern any of Stephen Giles’s touches in the interior. The moon was out by this time, but it was not high enough to be of much help. I stepped inside, but realized I would be unable to see anything except especially dark bundles of rags and canvas left by workmen in the far corners of the living room. I was just turning back to the steps when one of those shadowy bundles moved. The floor creaked.

  I must have cried out. I remember I had visions of ancient kahunas cursing this ground and of ghastly dead warriors rising up, angered at my intrusion. In my panic I backed against the door frame, staring. The bundle in the far corner unfolded, was thrown off. I heard Deirdre’s voice, still so oddly young and innocent, before I could make out her face. She rushed toward me, one sandaled foot still caught in the canvas that dragged behind her.

  “Judy! I can’t believe it ... I was never so glad to see anybody! It is you, Aunt Judith?”

  I had been so dumbfounded by her resurrection from what looked like an old gunny sack that she threw herself into my arms and I found myself hugging her before I could see her. She was crying. I felt my cheeks wet with her tears, and my own.

  “Of course, it is! I came as soon as I could, dear. You knew I would, didn’t you?”

  “It was awful. I was so scared!”

  She came out of the cabin with me, holding tight to my hand as she had done when I found her in her childhood, after she had run off. The repetition of this action of many years ago was disturbing to me. She shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing any more.

  “Deirdre! For heaven’s sake! You didn’t have to see those Berringers. You are a grown-up, a married woman. You needn’t see anyone you don’t want to see. Your husband will handle it if you can’t. Although, it’s better now to begin to handle problems yourself, rather than leave them for others. You really should have begun long ago. Dear, do you want people to think you are a coward?”

  Deirdre looked around anxiously as we hurried through the Hawaiians’ sacred grove toward the welcome open space in front of Sandalwood, where the rising moon cast the emu, the gently bending stalks of orchids, and even the unkempt grass in long shadow.

  “It was awful in that cabin. I kept very still so nothing would find me. I don’t care what people think. I am a coward!”

  I laughed and after a momentary hesitation, Deirdre giggled.

  “Yes. Stephen wouldn’t let them hurt me. He’s so wonderful. Have you met him?”

  “He was very kind.”

  “But he has to be away all the time. Whenever I need him, he’s always got some stupid meeting or other.”

  I had no way of knowing how true her complaints might be and felt that I wouldn’t help anyone if I took sides in a matter between husband and wife. The best tactic, I thought, would be to play down complaints of both Deirdre and her husband unless I felt Deirdre was being seriously harmed by Stephen Giles’s deep devotion to his business. We saw Moku coming back from beyond the unfinished cabins in the little grove. He must have circled the heiau while I wandered among the cabins. I was looking in that direction and Deirdre startled me by clutching my arm tightly.

  “She’s going to be angry.”

  I saw Ilima’s imposing figure on the veranda. She seemed absolutely without expression, but her presence itself was forbidding, even to me.

  “You must remember that is your house, Deirdre,” I told the girl. “Yours and, of course, Mr. Giles’s. It isn’t necessary to be rude for you to stand straight, like Ilima. Just hold your head up, smile, be polite, and give your orders to your servants.”

  “But she isn’t a servant.”

  “Then,” I reminded her, “she shouldn’t frighten you, because she’s just a person standing on your veranda, after all.”

  This seemed to be an entirely new notion to her. I took advantage of her temporary confidence to ask her, “Why did you hide in the heiau if it frightened you so? Wouldn’t it have been better to stay in your room until Mr. Berringer left? Not,” I added, “that I approve of your running away like a child.”

  She sighed. “It was nice when I was a child, except for mother being the way she was, of course. But I hid in the cabin because I knew Ilima and Moku wouldn’t go in after me. They see ghosts and ancient gods there. They’re more afraid than I am.”

  Her persistence in pretending to be that child I had loved and cared for during the periods when we couldn’t locate her mother puzzled me more than anything else that had happened since my arrival in Honolulu.

  Because Deirdre was so obviously afraid of the massive and queenly Ilima, it pleased me that she went up to the veranda and stood her ground, saying to the older woman, “I’m awfully sorry I kept you here so long, only I was looking over my husband’s work in the heiau. My aunt will be my housekeeper now.”

  I whispered, “Thank her.”

  But it was too late. Ilima stepped down to the grass, nodded slightly to both of us and strode off along the path across the island to her village on the far shore. The queen had retired with all of her honor and dignity.

  Almost at once Deirdre seemed to forget the hours she had spent like a cowering animal in the unfinished cabin. She rushed into the house complaining that she was starved.

  “Michiko Nagata’s Korean Uncle Yee is the cook, you know,” she said. “And a wonder. He terrifies us all, even my husband. Yee! Where are you?” she yelled and then tried to duck behind me.

  The serious, severe face of Mr. Yee appeared in the dining room doorway as I was trying, unobtrusively, to get Deirdre on her way upstairs to bathe and change before dinner. We were both covered with dust, leaves, dirt, and possibly insects as well.

  Yee asked, “Mrs. Stephen will take a tray in her room?” He was speaking to me as if Deirdre had mysteriously vanished. He added, “It is usual, on nights after there is this long delay.”

  I agreed and we went on. Nelia Perez, a pretty Filipino college girl, met us on the upper floor.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Steve. Your bath water is ready. Nice and hot. You want to jump in?” She glanced at Deirdre’s long, disheveled chestnut hair, and nodded to me. I released my arm as gently as possible from Deirdre’s tight grasp, and said cheerfully, “I’ll see you later, dear,” and went into my room.

  I felt mentally exhausted as well as physically tired. Every bone and muscle was weak as water. I fell into the big, comfortable chair by the little round rosewood table, and closed my eyes momentarily. I still didn’t know, or wouldn’t admit to myself that my body was actually less tired than my spirit. I had known something was very wrong here, but I had thought and still told myself it was a physical problem of some kind that could be rectified by a little common sense.

  Deirdre was simply new to her position as the wife of an important landowner. She was young. She would grow into her position—I thought it would only take patience. I dec
ided I must explain that to her husband. Fortunately, he was a man one could talk to, directly and to the point. He didn’t seem unreasonable.

  Sitting here taking it easy wasn’t going to help matters. I took the clothes out of my suitcase and hung them in the small but adequate closet, reflecting that there wasn’t much I owned that would be useful in the humid sultry weather of the Islands. At least I wasn’t penniless. I had a small income that would take care of most of my wants, and then too, Stephen Giles had insisted that I must have a reasonable salary, as he called it.

  I ran warm water and bathed in the huge bathroom, loving the old and wonderfully big tub. Then I slipped on a violet chiffon caftan of several layers that I had bought in Los Angeles before my flight. This restored to me something of the femininity that I felt I had lost during the long years past, and when my dinner tray was brought to me by the small Japanese house woman, I felt luxurious and contented, assuring myself that everything would be straightened out in no time. I would soon be able to think about the rest of my life, where I would go, what I would do...

  I had no idea what I would do. Lately, I had not thought beyond my release and the settlement of my niece’s problems.

  “Mahimahi. You will like, please,” the Japanese house woman explained. “Very good fish. And Island spinach. A little poi. So health. Very good health. Coconut pudding. Tea.”

  I thanked her and she shuffled away. She wore a haole dress but her small feet were cushioned in Japanese get as. She was right about the dinner. It was delicious and the mahimahi, as prepared by Mrs. Nagata’s uncle, was superb. When someone knocked an hour later, I assumed it was the Japanese woman, come to take my tray. I called out casually.