by Savage, Tom
She went back to the kitchen, but it was now empty. Mrs. Ramirez and the maids had finished cleaning up and had retired for the night, turning off the lights before climbing the back stairs to the third floor. Mr. Wheatley and the others would be there, too, either in bed or getting ready for it. She was alone here.
With a sigh, she went upstairs. She walked down the guest hall and knocked softly on Ichabod’s door, but there was no reply. She hadn’t expected one, really. She always made appointments with him before going there, and she had the feeling that he slept most of the time when he wasn’t entertaining her.
There was nothing for it but to go back to her room. She took another hot shower, her third that day. She put on her silk robe and sat on her bed, staring down at the telephone. After a while, she realized that she was weeping, the tears moving slowly down her face.
She was still sitting there, wondering whether she should call Mary Smith in Indio, when she heard the soft knock on her door.
He was standing at the fence on the cliff, gazing up at Randall House in the distance, when he saw the light come on in her bedroom.
He’d sat with his mother by his father’s hospital bed until visiting hours were over. Mildred had asked if she could stay the night, and her request had been granted. But she had sent Kevin home.
He’d stopped in town and gone into the local bar, planning to have several drinks while he watched his old high school chums shoot pool, but he didn’t even finish his first beer. He didn’t want to get drunk, and he didn’t want to be sober. He felt restless, too antsy to sit in a crowded, smoky room listening to meaninglessly light chatter and oppressively loud music. So he’d come home, to the gatehouse.
The empty house was worse than the noisy bar, especially with the floral arrangements. Mildred had sent most of the flowers to the chapel for the service, but several tributes still remained behind, covering every downstairs table in the little house. The cloying perfume of a hundred lilies, the scent of death, drove him out again, out into the snowy darkness.
He’d wandered aimlessly around the estate for a long time before he found himself at the cliff edge, staring down into the dark abyss. He listened to the churning of the water against the rocks; a restless sound, as restless as he was feeling. He stood there, repeating the same thought over and over in his mind:
Why, Dora? Why?
Dora was gone, and he had not done anything to help her. He had not studied for, or even seriously looked into, the profession he had vaguely considered. He had not taken care of his sister, as he had promised himself he would do. He had done nothing useful, nothing meaningful with his life.
He wept now, as he had wept when he’d found her here four days ago, as he had not wept since he was a child. He cried for Dora, and for his parents, and most of all for himself. For the vital, purposeful human being he might once have become.
Suddenly, for no reason he knew, as if obeying some secret urge or primitive instinct, he turned around and looked across the lawn at the house in the distance. Gradually his blurred vision narrowed, became fixated on one specific detail of the facade: the dark windows of the farthest second-floor bedroom on the right.
And then her light came on.
He stared, fascinated, at that light shining through the darkness, through the snow. Before he was aware of what he was doing he was walking toward it, across the snowy lawn to the snowy drive and up the steps to the front door. He pulled the key chain from his pocket and fumbled for the right key, and he was inside. Across the foyer and the Great Hall and up the wide staircase. Around the gallery and down the carpeted hallway to her bedroom door.
Still half asleep, still in his trancelike state, still weeping, he raised his hand and knocked.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Island
On December 30, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Holly was on the Long Island Expressway in Kevin’s Land Rover, heading east. She was on her way to Suffolk County, and she was making good time in the preholiday traffic. She was still in Nassau County now, but there was no snow today and the road was relatively empty. She was an hour ahead of schedule, so when she saw the exit sign before her she gave in to a sudden, overwhelming impulse. She steered the car over to the right lane and left the highway.
She’d seen the name of the town on the highway sign, and she’d remembered the address from the newspaper accounts and the documents in Mrs. Jackson’s office, but she had no idea how to get there. She pulled over into the first gas station she saw. While the attendant filled the Land Rover’s tank, she asked him for directions.
It took her a few minutes to find the Hempstead Turnpike, and ten more minutes on the turnpike before she arrived in the little town she was seeking. She found the street the man at the gas station had told her about and turned into it.
She was getting better at handling the big car, she noticed. When she’d asked Kevin if she could borrow the Land Rover, he’d handed her the keys without asking questions, for which she was grateful. Despite their new, intimate relationship, she had no intention of telling him why she didn’t want to get into the blue BMW. After what she’d overheard two days ago, she would never go near the BMW again. But she’d decided not to tell Kevin that, or anything else. Not yet, at any rate. Between his sister’s suicide and his father’s illness, he had enough to worry about at the moment.
Kevin …
No. She couldn’t think about all that. Not now. Now, she was looking for a street.
As she drove farther into the neighborhood, she began to form an impression of it, and it was not a good one. She knew something about the place. Years ago, this prefabricated town was one of many built around the United States to fill a growing need for reasonably priced housing for lower-middle-class families. Holly gazed around at the rows of drab little cement boxes set close together in the flat Long Island landscape. If this place had ever possessed a quaint charm, that time was long gone. Now it was a cramped mélange of bare lawns and crowded clotheslines and inexpensive, badly maintained cars. She imagined ill-clad children playing in these streets in summer, and cheap plastic lawn furniture on the sparse grass near the cracked, uneven sidewalks.
Indio, for all its intense heat and lack of beauty, had never been as bad as this.
She found the street and turned into it. She slowed now, checking the numbers on the battered mailboxes before each unit, counting them off in her mind. 72, 70, 68 … here it was: 66. Number 66, Sixth Street. She pulled over on the other side of the street and stopped the car, staring.
66 Sixth Street, she thought, remembering Sunday school in Indio. The number of the Beast. The sign of the Devil.
The reference, she saw, was apt. The house across the street was even shabbier than its neighbors, if that was possible. A dreary, aluminum-sided, screen-doored nightmare, one that its occupants had not even bothered to maintain. The clothesline here was empty, and the rusting hulk in the carport had no tires, but rested on cinder blocks. It was definitely the right address, however. The tilted mailbox beside the driveway had HALL inexpertly slashed across its side in black paint.
She revved the engine, preparing to drive away, but it was not to be. There was more. At that moment, the front door opened. An enormous old woman in a gray housedress, brown sweater, and incongruously pink fuzzy slippers banged through the screen door and came down the single step to the front walk. Her frizzy white hair was in a loose bun, and she carried a can of beer in her right hand. She came forward in Holly’s direction, and for one horrible moment Holly thought she had been caught spying. But no: when she reached the sidewalk, the woman turned and waddled over to the mailbox. She stopped to drain the beer can, crumple it, and toss it into the gutter before opening the box. She pulled out several large items that Holly could plainly see were brochures and mail-order catalogs. The woman riffled furiously through these, obviously looking for something that wasn’t there. Holly rolled down her window just in time to hear the woman shout a single word.
“Shit!”
With that, the old woman barged up the walk and back inside the house, slamming the screen door and the aluminum front door behind her.
Holly sat there, staring, thinking, Social Security. Late again, no doubt.
She couldn’t breathe.
She rolled up her window and slowly raised a hand to her chest. She sat there for several minutes, waiting for her heartbeat and respiration to return to normal. Then she slammed the car in gear and roared away. She circled back to the street she’d originally been on and made her way back to the turnpike. In a matter of minutes, she was once again on the Long Island Expressway, speeding east.
The woman she had just seen was Beulah Jean Hall, Constance’s widowed mother.
Her grandmother.
Kevin was alone in the gatehouse. His father was being kept in the hospital for several more days, at least until after the new year, and his mother had virtually moved into the room with her husband. He’d been to visit them earlier this afternoon, but now he was back home, wondering what to do next. Holly was away for the day on Long Island, so he couldn’t spend the afternoon with her, as much as he would have liked that.
Holly …
He smiled at the memory of two nights ago, when he’d been drawn, weeping, to her bedroom door. She’d opened the door in a silk robe, and he’d been surprised to see that she was weeping, too. He didn’t ask her why. In fact, neither of them had said a word. One moment they stood there staring, and in the next they were in each other’s arms. The rest of it was a blur of feverishly flung coat and boots and clothing, and that lovely silk robe fluttering to the floor.…
No. He wouldn’t think about that now. Later, when he’d decided what to do about himself. About his parents. About Dora.
Dora …
He managed to eat half of a sandwich he made with some leftover ham, and he was washing up in the sink when he heard a car arriving at the front gates. He looked out through the kitchen window to see Mr. and Mrs. Randall drive by in their silver Mercedes, on their way to the main house. Back from New York, he thought idly, staring after the beautiful car. He’d give anything to own a Mercedes.…
With a pang of remorse, he subdued that thought. The truth was, he’d give anything to have Dora back. But that would never happen, he knew. Dora was dead. A suicide. And for the thousandth time, he asked the air again.
Why, Dora? Why?
He dried his hands on the dish towel above the sink and wandered out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Perhaps he could sleep for a while. He hadn’t been able to sleep since Christmas Eve, since he’d found his sister at the bottom of the cliff. Even the other night with Holly, in her bed. He had lain awake watching Holly sleep beside him, stroking her lovely hair, but sleep would not come to him.
Now, upstairs in the gatehouse, he paused at the door of Dora’s bedroom. He opened the door and looked around the small, tidy room. The bed with the quilt comforter his mother had made for her. The big collection of dolls that covered nearly every surface. The sampler above the headboard that Dora herself had embroidered: HOME IS WHEREVER LOVE is. He stared at the sampler, reaching up absently to touch the sweater he was wearing, the sweater she had made him for his birthday five years ago.
His vision blurred by tears, he went over to the little closet in the corner. He opened the door and gazed slowly around at her simple, well-kept wardrobe. He smiled sadly when he noticed the white dress in the corner, the dress she’d worn to her senior prom. She’d looked so pretty in that dress as she went out the door of the gatehouse, fawned over by her beaming parents, escorted by Leonard Ross.
Kevin blinked, his gaze dropping to the neat row of shoes at the bottom of the closet. Leonard Ross, he thought, her date for the prom. The only date she’d ever had …
The baby.
Still staring down at Dora’s shoes, he thought, Was that it? Was that the reason she’d jumped from the cliff? Mildred had been as discreet as possible about it, but even fourteen-year-old Kevin had figured it out. The whispered conversations, the trips to the doctor in Greenwich, the six months of banishment to New Haven. Dora had been pregnant, and she’d gone away to have the baby. She’d come home without it. Mildred had warned Kevin not to mention it to anyone, and he hadn’t. Later, when he’d asked his mother about the child, she’d told him that it had been given up for adoption. He’d repeated this family secret only once, to Holly, in the restaurant in New York.
Had the baby driven Dora to this? Kevin wondered now. Had years of guilt and remorse for giving up the child led to all the rest of her problems? It was possible, certainly, even probable. And yet, in all these years, Dora had never once mentioned the child. Not to him, at any rate.
He sighed, shaking his head sadly at the memory. He was about to close the closet door when he noticed the box.
It was a big, rectangular wooden thing in one corner beside the row of shoes. There was—or, rather, had been—an intricate design on the lid in gilded paint, now faded to a ghostly series of diamond patterns. Kevin stared at it, wondering what it was. He picked it up, surprised at its heaviness. He went over to the bed and put it down, but when he tried to open it he found that it was locked. There was a tiny keyhole on the front.
He looked around the room for the most likely place to keep a key, and he immediately settled on the top dresser drawer. He pulled it open and rooted briefly among pencils, pens, and a pitifully small selection of cosmetics before he found it. He took the minuscule key over to the box and opened it.
He stood there for several moments, staring down at the box’s contents. On the top lay two medium-sized, leather-bound volumes. When he picked these up, he found identical ones under them, and yet another layer after that. Six books in all. Kevin sank down onto the bed and began to examine them.
They were diaries, journals covering some fourteen years. All the adult years of her life, beginning when she was seventeen, when she’d had the baby.
Starting with the earliest one, he began to read.
Holly drove the Land Rover off the ferry that had brought her over from Long Island, and onto the landing dock. She turned right on the main road before her, as instructed, and drove around the coast of the little island. Another turn, and she was headed up toward higher ground.
It was very pretty here, with many trees that would be beautifully green in summer and big, attractive houses spaced far apart. Of course, many of this tiny island’s residents were elsewhere for the winter, but the resident she sought was here, and he was expecting her.
After giving the matter much thought, Holly had finally decided to call the lawyer, Gilbert Henderson. Ms. Choi at his office had told her that he was away until after the holiday. When Holly convinced the woman of her urgent need to speak with him, Ms. Choi had promised to call him at his home and convey the message.
He’d called Holly at Randall House five minutes later. She’d explained that she wanted to talk to him about private family matters, but that she didn’t want to do it on the phone. It was then that Gil had invited her here, to this island, and she had been happy to accept. So, here she was.
The house was on a hill above the bay, fronted and framed by trees, at the end of a steep driveway. It was a very modern-looking structure, all stone and wood and plate glass. She parked in the drive near the two cars already there, a sleek Nissan and a battered Jeep.
Gil Henderson was waiting for her at the front door, flanked by two beautiful greyhounds. He was grinning, and the dogs were barking and wagging their tails. She smiled as she approached, realizing that she almost hadn’t recognized the imposingly handsome lawyer in his cable-knit fisherman’s sweater and faded jeans.
“Hello,” he said. “Welcome to the island. I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding us.”
“No,” she replied. “Your instructions were perfect.”
“Good. Come in, come in. These are my children: the boy is Tristan and the girl is Isolde.”
Holly knelt briefly to
greet the dogs before following Gil into a living room that could only be described as dramatic. It was two stories high, rising to a central peak, and the entire cliffside wall was glass, affording a magnificent view of water and sky. On the other side of the glass was a big redwood sundeck with a railing. There was a wooden staircase leading up to a second-floor balcony on the inland side, with a row of doors upstairs that were presumably bedrooms. Through an archway under the balcony she could see a gleaming, tiled kitchen.
The living room was a symphony of low-slung leather couches and chairs, with a big coffee table between them. A home entertainment center with a huge television screen filled one entire wall, and a stone fireplace blazed on the other. Several large, ultramodern paintings hung on the walls, and on the coffee table was a small statue, a male nude carved of ebony. A big, round, glass-topped wrought iron table in front of the large window was adorned with linen and candles and place settings for three. Holly stared at this.
“I hope you’re staying for dinner,” Gil said, following her gaze. “Of course, that means you’ll have to stay the night: the last ferry is at seven. I’ve made up the guest room for you, and I hope you’ll say yes.”
Holly thought for only a moment. A whole night here, far away from Randall House. She could drive back tomorrow afternoon, getting home in plenty of time for a New Year’s Eve celebration with John and “Cathy.”
“I’d love to,” she said.
“Then it’s settled. Sam!”
This last was called through the archway toward the kitchen. Holly turned to see a tall, handsome, dark-haired young man in a flannel shirt and overalls arrive in the living room. The son, she thought. She recognized him from the photograph on Gil’s desk in New York.
“Hello,” the young man said, extending his hand. “You must be Holly.”
“She is, indeed,” Gil told him. “Break out some more chops, kiddo. We have company for dinner.”
