CHAPTER   12.

SUNDAY WAS A WEARY DAY. TOBIAS was haggard. He had not slept for three nights now. Yet, pushed by abnormal energy, he insisted that Mandy pose. So she sat, in light of day and last night’s finery. It felt queer. She, too, was tired. She had not slept well.

All day there was no signal, no private whisper from Thone. They had no real meeting. She realized that they couldn’t have. They must not appear to conspire. But she had to take it on faith that he conspired at all. He was polite to her. Ione could guess whether he were jealous, annoyed, or bored by it all. Guess—but not know.

Tobias could only guess, also. Tobias was aware of his son’s aloofness.

Perhaps it was the artist’s tension that set them all on edge. Mandy kept suppressing the need to sigh off some of the weight of it. It was a dreadful day!

She thought of Kate, who had, she knew, gone to Catalina with Andrew Callahan and assorted friends. She thought of them in full sunlight, free in the light and the air. For to her, the cool studio was beginning to feel like a corner of hell, in which she was chained by ice-green satin. Also, her heart ached with pity and anxiety for this dear man who worked and talked on, as if unseen devils drove him.

A terrible day!

By nightfall, Tobias was desperately weary. Yet he couldn’t rest. And Ione, who had put herself oddly aside all day, moved her hand.

“I do think,” she said in her crooning way, “a little of your medicine, Toby, dear. A few nights of rest …”

“I suppose so.”

“There,” she said. “Of course. It will help, dear. It always does.” A weary gratitude rolled over the artist’s face. He touched her firm little hand and smiled.

“Yes. Please, Ione.”

He took the chloral in a glass of milk. No one was anything but casual about it. Ione prepared the dose. The drug was kept, Amanda noticed with surprise, very handy. It was kept on the shelf back of the convenient little serving bar and liquor cabinet in the studio corner.

Had it always been kept there? Oh, but, if so, she thought, then no one but Belle could have touched it six years ago. She thought, I must be all wrong. Ione doesn’t like me. But that’s all. Nothing’s going to happen.

She was not offered anything to drink.

Monday was a little better. They’d shaken down into a routine. Mandy posed in the morning and again in the afternoon. Tobias worked and lectured at the same time. It was very illuminating. Thone answered the phone, ducked invitations. He sun-bathed on the terrace. Or lazed in a fat chair in the studio sometimes, half listening. He was not—not really—interested in painting.

He was a strangely aloof and self-contained creature.

But when he was there, Mandy leaned away to stay upright, as one leans on the west when a west wind is blowing.

Dinner was a peaceful family affair. Thone polite, Ione presiding. Tobias, eating he knew not what, still talking. Tobias took his dose and went early to bed. After he had gone, there seemed to be nothing to talk about.

Nothing happened.

Tuesday morning Thone ambled out to the small breakfast terrace beyond the kitchen, which got almost no eastern sun and was, as Tobias said, one of the stupidities of the house. Nevertheless, Thone wore shorts and a T shirt and was nearly barefoot, with his feet thrust into the cross straps of some very sketchy slippers. He greeted his father, who sat brooding, watching the light change on the hills.

Ione, in crisp blue cotton, came out with her bustling air of keeping this house. Came swiftly, beaming good morning, the glass pot of steaming coffee in her hand. Her neat little feet pattered on the paving stones. She tripped. Perhaps she tripped on a seam. On nothing.

The hot liquid cascaded, all of it, over Thone’s bare right foot.

Mandy, coming sleepily up from below the outside way, heard Ione scream, heard Tobias cry out, and Thone’s voice bluing the air with blunt language. She ran up the last few steps, braced for catastrophe.

But it was only his foot. A bad burn, to be sure. Ankle, instep, and toes. But only an accident. A stupid, unimportant accident.

“Oh, what a pity!” Ione kept saying. “Oh, poor boy …” Tobias went tottering to call a doctor. Burt, the gardener, came to help support Thone’s weight and get him into the house. Thone was now silent, very silent. Tense, of course, with the pain.

The doctor came promptly and bound it up, saying comforting words. Not too deep a burn. A matter of days.… Thone said little or nothing. The Garrisons did all the talking. They walked at last to the door with the departing doctor.

“Mandy! Come here!”

She went quickly near where he sat in the studio, with his poor foot stiff and helpless.

“Mandy …” His fingers went around her wrist. He pulled her close. He was looking up. His face was utterly changed. The mask was gone. An agony in his eyes had nothing to do with physical pain. “Mandy, I’m scared!”

“Why?” she breathed. “Why?”

“When my mother died …” She could hardly hear what he was saying. His voice was muted as if his deep alarm robbed it of strength. “I had a bad foot.”

“Oh,” she gasped. She bent down. Her lips near his hair.

“Mandy, for God’s sake, will you stay with me?”

“Yes … yes.”

“If it’s a pattern?” he said, “I don’t think she—tripped.” He kept his hand tight on her wrist but he closed his eyes, and when he opened them they were less wild. “It could be suggestion,” he admitted.

“I know,” she agreed quickly. “The whole thing. We’ve rigged it against her. She can’t help but hate me. I know that. Anyone would.”

He moved his fingers and now her whole hand was warm inside his. “Did she ask about your blood?”

She nodded. “I said what you told me.”

“Same as mine. Just to confuse,” he explained. “Oh, Lord, I was scared there for a minute.”

“Does it hurt?” she whimpered.

“Like hell.” He smiled fleetingly. “But it isn’t that.” He looked behind them and again the color and strength went out of his voice. “I can barely hobble. It’s the same as it was before.” And he shuddered. His wide shoulders shook.

Mandy said blindly, “Oh, maybe not, maybe not. Maybe she didn’t …” She could feel, as if it were in her own heart, his shuddering horror. Ah, if Belle, so beloved, had been sent away! If, these six years, her lost radiance was less lost than stolen! She put her mouth against his hair. It was impossible not to. Impossible.

His head, tilting, brushed her lips. “Mandy, will you go find a man named Kelly? El Kelly, they call him. Pasadena police. Your eyes are fresh. See what there was when my mother died. If I could, I’d go and do that now myself. Will you do it, Mandy?”

“Of course,” she said. “Today.”

“Come up the outside way tonight. My little balcony.” He looked behind again.

“We’ll have to make sure,” she said quietly. “Now you can’t bear not to know for sure. Now it has seemed possible … I understand.”

He let go her hand, a gentle releasing. “You’re the only one,” he said, as if he apologized for troubling her.

She walked away a little. A deep trembling seemed to be shaking her whole body, although she walked steadily enough. It didn’t enter her mind, then—not then—that any pattern that might be forming had herself for its center. She thought it was terrible for him if it was true. Terrible for him even to have to wonder. Yet she was shaking with guilty joy.

For she would stay with him. She would be with him. She was the only one he could turn to, the way things had fallen.