14

For a few moments I couldn’t speak. The fairy-tale lights of the Parliament Buildings were on early for this darkening late afternoon, and we left them behind as we rode toward Radburn House. Everything outside the cab seemed to slide past me in a blur.

“He was right,” Joel said quietly. “It is a can of worms.”

I began to think of the complications. Kirk—he wasn’t Edward to me—was Corinthea Arles’s grandson. He was Peony’s real husband—while Farley Corwin wasn’t. No wonder Peony was desperate.

“I don’t think Farley knows,” I said. “He hasn’t had much to do with Kirk, who has probably stayed out of his way. This will cut Farley out of the whole picture.”

“Right. Though if he still doesn’t know, I don’t think Peony will tell him.”

“But why hasn’t Kirk told his grandmother? Why didn’t he go directly to her long before this?”

“You’ll have to ask him that.”

I didn’t want to ask him anything. He had taken me in along with the others. He might even have considered that Alice was his daughter. He had shown a special interest in her all along.

“And then”—I went on with my disturbing list—“Elbert Dillow is Kirk’s father-in-law. No wonder Dillow took him in and kept quiet about his secret. But there’s still so much I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps you needn’t try,” Joel said. He covered my tightly clasped hands with one of his own, and I relaxed a little. “Just stop worrying, Jenny. Nothing can be done right away—not while Mrs. Arles is ill. So there’s still time for things to shake down and find their course—whatever it is.”

“And if she dies? If she dies without ever knowing that her grandson is alive?”

“There’s nothing we can do. She shouldn’t be told now.”

If she died before she knew, I thought, then her old will would stand and her fortune would go to Joel—which was what Letha wanted. If Mrs. Arles understood that her grandson had returned, that might change everything.

“The worst thing for me,” I said miserably, “is that Alice is beginning to seem farther away than ever. Farley might have been stopped, but if Kirk chooses to claim her—”

“You’re thinking too far ahead, Jenny.” His hand tightened around mine. “Mother still has the plan for opening Peony up. Once she can find out the truth about Alice’s birth, perhaps everything will be clear sailing for you. Just remember that there are people who don’t want that truth to be known. So be careful. It might be wise for you to move out of the house for a time. You could go to Oak Bay and stay with my mother.”

“I don’t feel I could do that,” I said. “I must be here now.”

The cab had turned up the driveway to Radburn House. This time no one appeared at the front door as we got out and went up the steps. Oddly, in spite of the fact that it was growing dark, no lights burned in the front hall. Only a single light was on in the library at the far end.

“I’ll look in on Corinthea,” Joel said. “Then I’ll leave her to Crampton for a while. I need to get back to the Empress to talk with my mother about what’s just happened.”

Joel switched on hall lights as we walked along, but Dillow didn’t appear, and neither did Peony or Farley. In the dining room the table had been set for four—which would include me—but no one was there. The house had an empty feeling about it—unnatural.

When we entered her room we found Mrs. Arles asleep, her lips puffing rhythmically. Otherwise, the room was empty. No Crampton sat beside her bed, and her absence seemed unusual.

“I’ll see if I can locate someone,” Joel said. “Will you stay with Corinthea until I come back?”

I sat down beside the bed. “Don’t forget I’m here. I don’t think I can take much more of this day.”

His look seemed kind, understanding. “I know, and I won’t forget.”

I heard him out in the hall calling for Dillow and Crampton, though no one answered.

Only the sound of Mrs. Arles’s breathing ruffled the texture of silence. Once I got up and went to a long french door, across which draperies had been drawn. When I parted them to peer out, the garden foliage below the house was lost in mist in the last glimmer of light. No lamps were on in the direction of the potting shed, so Kirk-Edward had still not returned from tea at the Empress. Another point for my list—Uncle Tim was really related to Kirk. And now I suspected that Tim had known who he was all along, and had willingly kept his secret.

I didn’t know how to deal with any of this.

Joel returned in a few minutes. “I’ve just talked to the cook. Grace is upset because Peony and Farley decided to go out for dinner—when she was already preparing a meal. I told her that you and Alice probably won’t want dinner now either—right?”

“If we get hungry later, I’ll fix something,” I said. “You might as well tell Grace to go home. But what about Dillow and Crampton? Where are they?”

“Grace doesn’t know. She thinks it’s strange that Crampton should go off without a word. Usually, she and Dillow have an early supper in the kitchen. Dillow did come in, but she said he was acting—as she said—sort of crazy. Almost as though something had frightened him. He didn’t eat much, and he went off quickly on his own. I’ve already suggested that Grace go home. I said I’d ask you to stay until someone shows up. I’ll come back myself after I’ve talked with Mother. I’m sure everything’s all right, and we’ll have the answer soon. Are you willing to stay?”

“Of course I must stay,” I told him.

He thanked me and went off looking concerned, in spite of his reassurances. I couldn’t settle into a vigil in this room without something to do. Perhaps this was the time to write to my parents, and I sat down at the desk and turned on the lamp above it. Pigeonholes offered stationery, and I took out a cream-colored sheet engraved with Radburn House at the top. There were pens in a holder, and I started my letter. I had altogether too much to tell that I couldn’t explain in detail. Instead, I settled for describing Victoria and Radburn House, trying to give my parents a glimpse of the place, at least. I could write about Uncle Tim freely, and they would understand and empathize; It was necessary to tell them my belief that Alice was Debbie—since that was what they wanted to hear—but I also wrote that there were complications I couldn’t explain in a letter.

As I thought about these two who were so dear to me, I choked with tears. Whatever courage I found in myself today was given to me through their nurturing. They’d helped me to stand against adversity—as they had done. They’d seen me through so much, and while I couldn’t tell them in this letter all they wanted to know, I could set down how much I loved them, and how fortunate I felt to have them in my life. How grateful.

For a little while the present went away from me. But when I laid down my pen all the terrible questions that faced me surged back. What had really happened in Brazil? The journal must have been real, and it must have recorded the suspicions Edward Arles—Kirk—held against Farley. Even, perhaps, against Peony. If they had tried to kill him, he’d managed to escape. But he hadn’t—as he’d told me—been able to locate where they were until recently, so years had passed while he wandered about. Bent always on revenge?

Of course Peony knew who he was, and she must be frightened half out of her wits. Yet she’d told me that she’d loved Edward, and that Kirk had “murdered” him. Perhaps, in a strange way, he had done exactly that to the young man he’d once been. The “beautiful,” frail young man Peony had loved had disappeared long ago. He had hardened, toughened, changed physically and emotionally into a merciless stranger of whom she was afraid. Probably with good reason.

Time wore along and Joel didn’t return. After two hours I phoned the Empress and asked for Letha’s room. I was told she had checked out—which further alarmed me. Surely this hadn’t been her plan when I’d seen her. I tried railing Oak Bay, but no one answered. So where was she, and where was Joel? I had a sense of being cast adrift on an island in space. Grace had gone home and it seemed that only Corinthea Arles and I were alive in this empty house. Alice and Kirk and Uncle Tim hadn’t returned, as far as I knew, since there’d been no sign of any of them.

In her bed, Mrs. Arles hardly stirred, and I wondered if she ought to be turned to a new position. The bedridden shouldn’t lie forever motionless.

By this time the silence had grown eerie, and I found myself listening to creakings I’d never noticed before. When the front door slammed, I jumped. Someone was coming down the hall, and I grew suddenly anxious—as though something was about to happen that I didn’t want to face. The sound of steps was muffled by the carpet, but they thudded heavily, and I held my breath. When the door opened and Uncle Tim stood looking at me with a curious uneasiness, I didn’t feel entirely relieved. He too had his secrets.

When I gestured to him to come in, he advanced uncertainly toward the bed. “Crampton?” he asked.

I shook my head and shrugged.

He walked to the table where the nurse had placed the small totem he’d carved for his sister, but it was no longer there, and he looked at me inquiringly.

Suddenly I realized that Mrs. Arles was awake and watching us. She seemed to know what Tim wanted.

“I told Crampton to take it away,” she said, her voice foggy with the drug she’d been given. “It made me nervous.”

She turned her head and seemed to fall asleep again. Tim stood looking down at her, and I sensed a heavy sorrow in him. All the anger he must have felt toward her seemed to have faded into a more generous pity than she deserved.

I stood up. “Let’s see if we can turn her on her side.” I illustrated with motions. He came at once to help me and together we rolled her onto her right side—so she could watch the door if she wanted to. She grumbled a little but seemed comfortable in the new position.

Uncle Tim looked at me. “Where is everybody?”

That was impossible to explain, and I just said, “Not here.” Then I asked him where Alice was.

He read my lips. “She stayed with Kirk. He wanted to show her something in his rooms.”

That left me with more uneasiness. If Kirk decided to tell Alice who he was, and she attached herself to the idea that he was her father—but I didn’t dare think about that.

Perhaps Tim understood more of what I was feeling than anyone else. It was likely that someone had explained my situation to him—probably Kirk.

“You’re tired and worried, Jenny. Go upstairs and rest. I’ll stay here until somebody comes.”

I was too weary to struggle with anything more, and I began to feel almost fatalistic—unable to act. What would happen would happen, and it might not matter in the least what I said or did.

I thanked him with a sign he recognized and went upstairs. Again, there were no lights on, and I fumbled my way to the front bedroom and pushed the door ajar. It was dark inside, except for a patch of moonlight falling through from the porch. Apparently the night had cleared. I was sure I’d closed the porch door when I left the room earlier, though it was open now. For a moment I stood very still, listening, half expecting to hear that eerie whistle come out of the old speaking tube. There was nothing—at least nothing audible.

The moment I came into the room, however, a heavy breath of violet perfume assailed me. Not even the breeze from the porch had dispelled it. Crampton must have been here. But when I turned on a lamp and looked around, no one was there.

I took the black raven’s feather from my bag and held it, wondering again about Letha’s “powers”—good or bad? Perhaps this was the moment when I needed the feather—for whatever charm against evil it might possess.

Feather in hand, I went out into the clear, cool evening, free of violets and smelling of a world refreshed. Winds had swept most of the high clouds away, and as I watched, the moon emerged, big and round and pumpkin-colored. Some sort of ritual seemed required, and I held the feather up against the globe of the moon, so that its black plume shut out the light, with only slits of yellow showing through the fine comb. I smiled wryly over performing some spell for a moon goddess. I’d better get myself in hand first of all!

When I started back to my room my foot struck something that skittered away on the floor of the porch, and I reached down to pick up a piece of wood. It was the small totem pole Uncle Tim had looked for in Mrs. Arles’s room. I could sense the carving of the small faces under my fingers. So Crampton had certainly been here, had brought the carving to my room—and then for some reason carried it out on the porch, where she’d dropped it. All very strange.

I looked around carefully. This small outdoor space was above the front end of the parlor, where bay windows jutted below. On one side I could look down upon the roof that covered the entryway to the house and see the steps beyond. The other side overlooked a small rock garden that I’d noticed when I first came.

There, however, the wooden railing had been splintered and broken through, so that an open space stood between me and the rocks beneath the porch. I held the feather tightly and went to a place where the rail was still intact and I could look down. Something white and still lay across the protrusions of granite.

I rushed into the house and down the stairs, still carrying both the feather and Uncle Tim’s totem. Alice was coming in the front door and she saw my face.

“What’s happened?” she cried.

“Go and fetch Kirk,” I told her. “Please get him right away.”

“Maybe he’s still here—” She gestured. “He brought me up through the garden from his house. The back door was locked and we could see Uncle Tim inside with Corinthea, but he couldn’t hear us knocking. So we came around to the front.” As she explained, Alice ran down the steps and called to Kirk.

I hurried to meet him. “Something terrible has happened—around on the other side.”

I wanted to hold Alice back, but she didn’t mean to miss anything, so we stood together watching as Kirk climbed onto the rocks and knelt beside the sprawled figure.

“It’s Crampton,” he said.

Alice sniffed the air. “Smell the violets, Jenny? Cramp’s been stealing my great-grandma’s perfume again. I saw her once taking some up to her room, and she always uses too much.”

I already knew that Crampton must have come through my room, but the fact that she’d fallen through the railing seemed impossible.

Kirk looked down at us from the rocks. “I’m afraid she’s dead. She fell with her head against this outcropping.” He stood up to stare at the broken railing overhead, its splintered sticks gleaming like white bones in the moonlight.

“That’s where she fell from,” I said needlessly.

The ugly fact that Crampton was dead somehow made her more real to me than she’d been when she was alive. I wondered what her secrets had been. Her fondness for Corinthea seemed suddenly touching and pathetic.

Alice slipped her hand into the crook of my arm and clung tightly. “I never saw anybody dead before.” Her whisper indicated that excitement was mounting in her, and I felt her tremble. In a moment she would be keyed up and hyper—ready to fall apart. I put an arm about her, trying to offer a steadiness I didn’t feel.

“How come Crampton was up there on the porch?” she demanded of Kirk.

“That’s a good question.” He looked at me. “Have you any idea, Jenny?”

I shook my head. “I’ve been sitting in the library with Mrs. Arles, and I didn’t hear or see anything. Not until I came up to my room just now and found the broken railing.”

“She’s been dead for a while, I think. She might have been pushed from up there. It seems unlikely that she’d lean on the rail so heavily that she’d fall through.”

Alice pounced on this. “I bet somebody did push her. Nobody liked old Cramp—not even Corinthea. She was too bossy!”

Kirk recognized Alice’s growing state of excitement and spoke quietly. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Does anybody know where Joel is? He’d be useful now as a doctor!”

I looked up at the broken railing with the horror of growing realization. Until Kirk’s words, I’d thought only of a chance fall. “He was going to the Empress to talk with his mother. She meant to spend the night there. But he hasn’t come back, and when I phoned the hotel they said she’d checked out. I tried to call the house in Oak Bay too, but no one answered.”

“What about Peony and Farley?”

“They went out to dinner and I haven’t seen them. Grace was in the kitchen earlier, but Joel told her she could go home, since no one wanted dinner. When Joel brought me here after we’d had tea at the Empress, Mrs. Arles was alone.”

“Dillow was waiting for me when I got back,” Kirk said. “He and Alice and I had a visit, but Tim didn’t stay. He doesn’t like Dillow.”

A family reunion? I wondered. Except that Alice was not Kirk’s daughter—she was mine.

Alice started to climb up the rocks for a better look, but I pulled her back. For the first time she noticed the feather and Tim’s totem in my hand, and her nervous excitement spilled into more words.

“Why are you holding that feather and the totem pole, Jenny?”

I tried to speak in a quieting voice. “I took the feather from my bag, and I found the totem on the porch floor up there—as though Crampton might have dropped it when she fell. Perhaps she brought it up to leave it in my room—since Mrs. Arles didn’t want it.”

Kirk looked uneasily at Alice, and she recognized what might be coming. “Someone always sends me away when something interesting happens!”

“This isn’t television,” Kirk told her. “This is really happening. ‘Interesting’ isn’t a good word for it.”

Sometimes he even sounded like a father, I thought. But I really was her mother, and I must help her to calm down. I started toward the steps, drawing her with me.

Kirk saw what I was about. “Let’s go inside and I’ll call the police and get an ambulance on the way.”

As the three of us started up the steps, Dillow came rushing out the front door, having let himself in at the back with his own key.

“Why is Tim with Mrs. Arles?” he demanded. “Where is Crampton?” For the moment the butler had vanished, and he was one of the family.

“Crampton’s dead!” Alice cried. “She’s lying out there on the rocks in front of the house. She fell through the railing of the porch outside Jenny’s room, and maybe somebody pushed her!”

For a moment I thought Dillow might faint. He clung to the rail beside the steps, his color ashy in the moonlight.

Kirk said, “I’m going inside to phone. Get yourself a drink, Dillow.”

I wanted to ask Dillow where he’d been this evening before he went to Kirk’s room to wait, but he looked too awful.

The tight clasp of Alice’s fingers told me that the real world was beginning to come fearfully through to her.

In the parlor Kirk sat beside the phone, while Dillow went to get the suggested drink. Kirk was still phoning when Farley and Peony walked into the room. Alice let go of me and rushed toward Peony, who backed away from her assault. She never liked to be mussed or hugged.

“Crampton’s dead!” Alice cried. “She fell off the porch upstairs outside Jenny’s room and hit her head!”

Peony gasped and leaned into Farley’s arm. His usual stage presence was intact, however, and he looked as suave and unshaken as ever, though his first words were defensive.

“My wife and I have been away from the house for several hours. We’ve been out to dinner. It’s all right, Peony—the dead woman had nothing to do with us.”

Dillow came back into the room, weaving a little, as though on rubber legs, and sat down with his glass of Scotch in hand. He’d heard Farley’s last words.

“Maybe this has something to do with all of us. It could have been anyone who pushed her over, couldn’t it?”

“Pushed her?” Peony’s voice rose to a screech.

“Why do you think it wasn’t an accident?” Kirk asked Dillow.

“Because she’s been asking for trouble.” He sounded angry now, and more sure of himself.

“You might explain that when the police come,” Kirk said, and Dillow subsided.

At Dillow’s words, Peony began to cry helplessly, and Alice put both arms around her.

“You’d better go upstairs,” Farley said to Peony. “And take Alice with you.” Then to me, “My wife is easily upset, and—”

“Your wife?” Kirk asked quietly.

Peony rushed out of the room, pulling Alice with her, but Farley remained unshaken.

“She will be, of course. As soon as she divorces you. After all, you’ve come to life pretty suddenly. Naturally, Alice will stay with her mother.”

Kirk let that go, and turned toward the door at the sound of a car braking in front of the house. However, it wasn’t the police but Joel Radburn who walked into the parlor, looking surprised at the tableau we must have presented.

“I’m glad you’re here, Joel,” Kirk said. “Come outside and have a look at Crampton. She’s had a fall—fatal.”

Dillow and I watched as the two men, who had once been boyhood friends, went off together.

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” I said to Dillow, “—the way everything has changed, so nobody has to keep up a pretense any more.”

Dillow took another long swallow that finished his drink. “I think that goes for you too, Mrs. Thorne.”

“You mean that you can accept the fact that Alice is my daughter?”

Of course he would accept nothing of the kind. “That, if I may say so, is ridiculous.”

We could hear the ambulance coming from far off, its siren wailing—or sometimes yelping at intersections. It had just pulled up to the house when Uncle Tim came running down the hall and burst into the parlor, excited, his words rushing out.

“She’s—she’s awake! She’s talking! She wants Crampton. Right now!”

Both the totem and the raven’s feather were still in my hand. Tim saw the carving and pounced, snatching it from me.

“That belongs to my s-s-sister!” he cried.

“I know.” I nodded. Dillow had started toward the door and I stopped him. “Let me go and see her. You’re upset now, and she won’t like the smell of liquor.”

The old habit of taking orders was still natural to him, and he didn’t oppose me.

I found Mrs. Arles sitting up on the side of her bed, reaching for her dressing gown. I ran to hand it to her before she toppled off.

“You’re feeling better,” I said, hearing the false note in my voice.

She took the paisley silk gown and tried to slip her arms into it, then gave up. “Why am I so weak? Where is everyone? I want to see Crampton at once!”