The House at Sandalwood

by Virginia Coffman

  “But I’m sure Mr. Giles will if you ask him.”

  “He can’t, he’s so busy. And that’s why I come in here and curl up in the windowseat and draw with charcoals.”

  There was an old studio couch in the room, with a beautifully made afghan thrown over it, but as she had said, Deirdre was sitting on cushions in a deep windowseat with the view of palm fronds and hau trees and what appeared to be a keawe thicket, all crowding in at her against the window. Fortunately, she seemed to have no fear of them. Her imagination did not run in that direction.

  I, on the other hand, felt exactly like a creature in a fish bowl, watched on all sides. I sensed the same horrible lack of privacy that I had experienced in prison during the first months. Everyone had tried to prepare me for what they called my low and squalid and even dangerous company, but except for two women at different times who were not so much criminal as mental cases, I had found that company far less repugnant than the loss of privacy. I tried not to appear too cowardly, but the truth is, I hated this room of Deirdre’s on first sight.

  “How is the sketch coming along?” I asked her, hoping to take my mind off this goldfish-bowl feeling of mine.

  She looked up and across the room at me. “I haven’t started yet.” She had what appeared to be a perfectly untouched pad under her hand, but her fingers were heavily stained with charcoals, so the sketch was hidden. I recognized in her my own deep necessity for a private life, and turned off the subject as casually as possible.

  “You’ll think of something. There is a beautiful golden tree below the downstairs lanai, beside the path. And I saw a young tree, or a large bush, toward the clearing. All those delicate white flowers with yellow hearts. If you look up through them at the blue sky, they would make an exquisite pastel. I think they are plumeria.”

  She wrinkled her small, slightly turned-up nose.

  “Flowers! Everywhere you look. There’s nothing special about them. Orchids common as—as grass.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you to your art and go and write a letter or two until the weather clears. I would like to get a good look at the island, sort of see it in perspective when it stops raining.”

  “But Judy darling, it’s stopped raining already. Don’t mind the overcast. We’re practically the rain headquarters of the universe. You’ll always see clouds. You run along.”

  There was no doubt she wanted to be rid of me. Not that I could blame her. I understood her feelings perfectly. Or thought I did. I wished her luck with her drawing and left quickly.

  In the hall, I didn’t know quite what to do. I couldn’t hound her if she didn’t want company. The best thing I could do was to give her a feeling of freedom without leaving her entirely unwatched. It was a horrid thought, that she should be watched. A harmless, sweet, endearing young woman who had the rare ability to remain eternally twelve or thirteen years old. What was so terrible about this that we should all join in a conspiracy to spy on her?

  Had Stephen Giles any secret doubts or suspicions, any knowledge of something in her life that no one else knew? Would this cause him to conceal her as much as possible from people like Victor Berringer and William Pelhitt? And worse, from others who had no animosity whatever toward her? Perhaps he had a half-knowledge of the kind I possessed, which would always make him afraid for her. But not of her. Surely, not that!

  I went down to the lower floor and came across the pretty Filipino college girl who was dusting the furniture on the side of the house paralleled by the river and the Ili-Ahi gulch. She shook her head as I came into another old-fashioned, high-ceilinged room that was obviously Stephen Giles’s study. All the well-used props were there, even a pipe rack that was just ornamental, the girl explained.

  “Mr. Stephen stopped smoking the day his father died. Not that smoking had anything to do with Mr. Giles’s killing himself. Did it with an old hand gun he’d ‘liberated’ back in forty-five. Poor man. He gambled a lot in the Fan-Tan clubs around the Islands.”

  “But I thought it was because he lost his money on those bungalows in the Sacred Grove beyond the emu,” I said.

  “That, yes. But he’d have lost on that anyway. They’ll never make anything work in that grove. Not even Mr. Stephen can do it, though Lord knows he’s worked like a coolie to build up the family holdings since his father died. Mr. Stephen made it back mostly through shipping. He’s got cargo ships all over the Pacific.”

  I thought I better understood the motivation of Stephen Giles, his determination to make good after seeing and probably suffering with his father in the disaster the older man had made of his own life.

  I helped Nelia Perez move the books and folders carelessly piled on a typewriter table whose small portable Smith-Corona looked as though it might fall off at any minute. I shoved the typewriter over into a safer position, and then we did what we could to tidy up the big desk beside it.

  “If he is like anyone else with a desk full of papers,” I suggested, “he probably doesn’t want anything moved, but it won’t hurt to clean up a little of this dust, I imagine.” With the enormous amount of humidity around the house it was surprising that everything hadn’t rotted away.

  She agreed cheerfully to my helping, and I dusted off the enormous desk top, replacing the stacks of papers exactly as I found them. She had taken another cloth and was polishing some framed pictures set carelessly in front of the books on an openfront bookcase of a very dark wood. Surely, those books needed a closed case, but no one seemed to care, or maybe the books were used often enough so that glass doors would have been in the way. I suspected, though, the main reason was that this bookcase was part of the family heritage. I had not heard about any other members of the Giles family and would have liked to have known who the people in those portraits were. Nelia saw me look over at the frames in her hands and obligingly identified them.

  “Mrs. Steve has two sisters and an aunt in Denver, Colorado. And some cousins in Florida. The sisters and his mother all left here after his father’s funeral, they say. His mother died several years ago.” She lowered her voice and informed me in a heavy whisper, “Mr. Steve’s secretary said he helps to support them all. She makes out the checks every month.”

  “They probably have a financial interest in Sandalwood.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Have any of them met Deirdre—I mean, Mrs. Stephen?”

  “No, but they all sent nice letters and wedding presents.”

  So much for that! No wonder Deirdre had been lonesome occasionally. It was only surprising that she still seemed to enjoy being alone now. She must have found her own amusements—at least, I hoped so. I wanted her to be a resourceful person, not entirely dependent upon her husband or me or anyone else. Life would not be so hard on her if she could rely on herself now and then.

  I asked, “Do the women at Sandalwood talk to Mrs. Steve frequently?”

  “Talk? We all talk to her. I mean, well—if she talks to us, we talk to her. She’s a very nice person. A bit shy, maybe, sometimes, but not highballing it along or anything. Very—I guess you’d call it democratic. Of course, she almost has to be, with her—” Nelia’s voice trailed off. She was excessively busy polishing a desk lamp on the stand beside a big leather chair that looked old and used but comfortable.

  “With her little-girl ways, you mean?” I threw the remark out casually, and added for insurance, “Rather clever of Deirdre. You see, she always gets her way.”

  “So she does! I never thought of that. You know, Dave Shigemitsu, my boyfriend, might ... it’s really clever. Everybody always gives Mrs. Steve her way, so she won’t cry or get sick or make a fuss. I must try that.”

  Poor David Shigemitsu! I could see that in building up a protective cover for Deirdre, I had given Nelia’s boyfriend a lot of future trouble.

  “I wonder if you are going to be working upstairs very soon.”

  “I could take a coffee break upstairs,” she suggested.

  “Good. And just keep an eye on Mrs. St
eve’s sitting room in case she needs anything.”

  She nodded. “I know. Follow her if she leaves the house, and get her out of a jam if she falls into something.”

  “Falls into something!”

  “Just putting you on, ma’am. Mrs. Steve knows this island better than I do. But there are a lot of tricky places. Nothing dangerous. I don’t mean that. Only if she should run away and hide out again, there are a million places for that.”

  That wasn’t a happy prospect. I thanked her, and when we had set back all the framed family portraits she collected the dust cloths and we left the room.

  As I went away from the house, taking the path which crossed the island diagonally, I glanced at the cabins in the grove on my right and remembered the last picture I had dusted in Stephen Giles’s study. A black-and-white, eight-by ten-inch portrait of his father, which bore the strange inscription: “Stevie, be generous. Be tolerant. This is everything.” It had been signed in a dashing hand, “Dad.” A good-looking light-haired man with warm eyes; his features, though, made me suspect he was easily influenced and not very strong on principles. The picture had been in a position so that Stephen could see it from that comfortable leather chair. Deirdre’s color portrait had been on the desk, between portraits of his mother and his sisters—all good-looking, forceful faces, clearly of Celtic descent. I wondered if that portrait of his father had special significance. Something about the inscription suggested to me that Stephen had found himself very early in life rebelling against his father’s weaknesses. This grove, where I could see a half dozen men working now among the trees was a symbol of those weaknesses. Several of the men there were carpenters. Others were working on the many branches of the stream. It seemed to be Stephen’s idea that each cabin of the Sandalwood heiau should have its own miniature river. I liked it. The water ran over stones, carrying leaves and bits of palm fronds, even blossoms, crushed but doubtless still perfumed. Ferns grew thickly everywhere, but there was also a great deal of mud swept down from the mountain that was the source of Ili-Ahi’s own river. Until I heard the people of this island speak of their river and the river on Kaiana, I hadn’t realized how very special such a path of fresh water might be on an island.

  I looked up at the sky, understanding what I had never known before, the real meaning of a tropic blue sky. It was an incredibly pure blue directly overhead, but behind me, at so short a distance they shadowed the Giles house, were clouds gray as charcoal. And off to the west, there were more charcoal clouds in the midst of all that blue purity. I went on along the path which followed the river for some distance. Then both path and river were swallowed up in lush, tropic growth and went their own ways. I could still hear the sounds of running water in the distance, and although the river itself helped to produce more humidity, it acted upon my imagination as a cooling agent.

  I felt my spirits raised by all this wild beauty surrounding me and even stopped to pick several flowers: a particularly large hibiscus, several small, delicate blossoms from bushes bordering the path, and a strong red flower that looked like a pillar on fire. There were ferns of all kinds. Some fronds not yet in full flower, looking like clumps of coiled tentacles. I found myself hurrying. A thousand sounds blended overhead and around me. Nature’s sounds, of course, but I could not identify them, and the odd, distant calls of unknown birds sounded like the voices of loved ones, long dead, calling one’s name.

  The path wound upward, climbing over the saddle of Mt. Liholiho. Here another, narrower trail split off toward the north and east. As my own rising path gave me a better view of the island, I could see toward the east, a terraced series of taro fields beyond the forest vegetation that had bordered the main path. Ahead of me the trail rose, split off again, the righthand trail winding upward higher on the mountain. The way before me was a mass of green—so many shades they made me think of Impressionist art—masses of green dots and strokes, all of different shades, yet all blended into the perfect whole. I might have been looking at a Renoir or an early Monet

  Just as I had been told, the mountain peak really did seem to collect all the rain in the universe. I turned and took the lower path which led, surprisingly fast, down onto an open field. Then I saw that there were several fields separated by bright bougainvillea hedges and small trees with twisted gray trunks. Beyond the fields, which sparkled silver from the recent shower I had escaped on Mt. Liholiho, I saw the village of the Hawaiians. I had expected something like the typical grass huts I had heard so much about, but these houses for the most part were perfectly sensible frame bungalows. A number of people were working in the fields, and the ocean beyond the rugged coastline was dotted with small boats. Along the narrow beach I saw great dark objects spread out. These must be the fishermen’s nets. How beautiful it would be to see one of those night torch-fishing expeditions, I thought.

  Closest to me was a neat, precise and mathematical series of short trees in a grid form. Papaya, I decided, and then had the unsettling experience of seeing a quick movement out of the corner of my eye, and I realized a man had suddenly ducked behind a flame tree this side of the papaya grove. My first thought was that one of the Hawaiians, seeing a stranger coming toward him, had hidden from me. Then I saw the man’s feet and trousers. Slacks, perhaps, but certainly the outfit of a mainlander and a haole. And that hot-plaid jacket.

  I could not picture Victor Berringer hiding from me behind a tree. Whether he wanted to be seen or not, if he were caught, he would bluff it out, as arrogant as ever. This man was William Pelhitt. What on earth was he up to?

  If he was hiding from me, he was going to a great deal of trouble. I had no interest in Berringer’s stooge. If I knew him better, I might actually feel sorry for the poor man, but in the present circumstances, his chief curiosity value was in his relationship to a man who did worry me. I went on down the slightly descending road to the outskirts of the village. It didn’t remind me in any way of postcards I had seen representing Polynesian culture. These were bungalows exactly like those of plantation workers on many of the pineapple and sugar plantations in the Islands. Some were apparently on stilts and rock above soggy ground—the runoff from the mountain whose green slopes formed the eastern border of the village. Others, with their narrow wooden porches—were they lanais?—were more like pleasant little summer cottages on some southern California beach. There were numerous people around, especially the men sitting on the porch of the local store—the only store on the island, as far as I could tell. It struck me as funny to see the men sitting in very modern fold-up canvas chairs and wearing singlets or swimming trunks of brightly decorated cloth.

  I wondered again what William Pelhitt was doing in this area. Certainly, the wide, dark Polynesian eyes of the men on the porch of the village store looked me over without enthusiasm. I tried not to hurry past but I could feel their dislike and I wasn’t sure whether it was because I was a newcomer, a malahini, or because I was a haole, or even because I seemed to be a female without an occupation. There were no females lazily sprawled out on the porch. As I recalled from occasional visits to country stores on the mainland, there weren’t any women lazing there either.

  I reached the narrow strand of beach beyond the village, where children were digging in the sand and teen-age youths in loin cloths of Hawaiian craft design were tossing a very modern-looking rubber beachball. Several Hawaiian girls in bikinis stood by, giggling and encouraging their boyfriends. I didn’t want to get in their way and had just turned around, realizing I had spent longer than I intended on this exploratory walk when great excitement suddenly swept through the main, unpaved street of the village. Even the workers in the fields moved out to the street, buzzing among themselves in low voices. Several of the men from the store rushed out and started up the little slope on the path I had taken from Sandalwood.

  When a youngster from the store whispered something to the ball players, I asked one of the girls near me, “What is it? What has happened?”

  Her big eyes studied me
—not unfriendly, but very sombre. “You are from Sandalwood House.”

  “I am Mrs. Giles’s aunt. It is something serious, isn’t it?”

  “They were warned. They all knew. The place is cursed. First, there was the father of Mr. Steve. Now there is more blood on that sacred ground.”

  This was even worse than I feared.

  “Something happened at the heiau grove?”

  She nodded. She was watching her boyfriend rush past us. “They called from Sandalwood. Sammy Tiji fell off the roof of one of the houses.”

  “Badly hurt?”

  “He fell onto the teeth of a rake. Bad luck. Just like they said if anybody worked in the heiau. It is evil, that ground. The blood will be upon them.”

  I fought the contagion of that fear. “Upon them?”

  “Those who live at Sandalwood. They cannot escape. You will see, haole.”

  Seven

  I forced myself to show no fear or apprehension at this clear warning, but when I had left the girl, I hurried up past the village store, heard a man call me and whirled around, confused. I really should have expected Victor Berringer. After all, I’d seen his stooge nearby. He came striding out of the store with his superior air, his total contempt for all who surrounded him. It was fortunate for his conceit that he possessed that air because both the Hawaiians on the porch and those running up the road glanced at him and looked away, almost all of them with overt or concealed amusement. Possibly because he still wore his eastern Establishment wardrobe without a single bow to the customs and clothing of the Pacific islands.