Five

We didn’t follow the original carriage road, but took a path that led through deep woods of oak and hickory, with here and there lovely tulip trees that would bloom in the spring. There were stands of hemlock and pine, and where the woods thinned, patches of sunlight crossed our way and September wild flowers bloomed on every hand.

Trevor identified some of them for me. Those clusters of pink over there were joe-pye weed, and the yellow was wild artichoke. In a low damp place bright cardinal flowers grew, and there were stands of wild purple asters everywhere. The devil’s walking stick fascinated me—thorny, like a small tree with purple-red berries—and I loved the little heart’s-a-bustin’-with-love flowers. Always, of course, there was the surprise of the sourwood trees splashing their early autumn red among the green of other foliage not yet ready to turn.

“Now we come to trouble,” Trevor said. “Look what’s happening here.”

The path had turned away from the water, and a large area of sunlight opened on our left. The sun, however, lighted the strangest of scenes. Running toward the opposite side of the island, a heavy broad-leafed vine had swallowed the landscape. It had grown over bushes and trees and run along the ground unchecked, covering everything in its path. The shape of trees and shrubbery showed beneath the vines in rounded forms—almost like waves running across the island in undulating greenery.

“I’ve never seen anything like it!” I said. “What on earth is it?”

“Around here they call it mile-a-minute. It’s kudzu, a Japanese plant that was mistakenly introduced into the South before World War II. It was supposed to be good for fodder. And it was good for shade and ground cover, and rather beautiful—before it became terrifying. Only once it took hold it couldn’t be stopped. So far they figure it has swallowed at least a million acres of the South. King Kong Kudzu!”

I left the path to touch a broad, three-pointed leaf in wonder. “What does it do—seed itself in?”

“No. The American plants don’t produce seeds, but every twelve inches of the vine there’s a joint capable of producing new plants. That’s the way it moves. It can grow a foot in a night and there are jokes about closing your windows at dusk so the kudzu won’t climb in. James Dickey even wrote a poem about it and called the vines ‘green, mindless, unkillable ghosts!’”

A marvelous description, I thought, regarding the monstrous jungle landscape with misgiving. It looked so—unnatural.

“How did it get started here on the island?”

“I suppose someone brought over a pretty plant—and this is the result. If it isn’t stopped it will bury trees, house, everything. Kudzu doesn’t strangle trees the way some vines do. It just covers them over and shuts out the sunlight so they die. Everything under there is dead or dying. The stuff’s hard to kill, because if you dig it up it will grow wherever it’s discarded. And it’s difficult to burn. There are chemicals that will kill it and I’ll start with them over here the minute Eric gives me a green light. We can’t have it swallowing Cecily’s theater, among other things.”

At least the main thrust of the vine was toward the other side of the island, and the path had been left free, so we were able to walk on until our way met the carriage road again. We followed its broken surface through the woods to a tall hedge, where a gate barred our way. Here the drive ended in an open space where vehicles could be parked.

“There used to be a stable here,” Trevor said, “but it rotted away long ago.”

He opened the rickety gate and set it back on loose hinges. As I went through, the sight of the theater burst upon me in one breathless vision. It was a little Greek amphitheater, still a dazzling white as it ran down the hillside in circling stone steps to the wide spread of a stage below. Crowding hemlocks formed the wings and made a perfect backdrop to the stage. An effort had clearly been made to create a theater that was professional in every respect. High at the top, above the concrete tiers, were roofed sheds and a small building where piles of wooden chairs were still housed. On either hand towers built of open metal piping that would not hide the view held lighting equipment, with ladders climbing to the platforms at the top.

“Did it give Cecily any pleasure at all?” I asked.

“I think it must have at first. I’ve heard Vinnie talk about those days. He even brought in a company of players to act with her, and she had costumes made for the productions. Apparently she had a nice little voice and the acoustics here are good. She could dance a bit too, and Vinnie encouraged her and probably made her think she was better than she was. He told me once that she could never have made it outside on her own. Perhaps that was only what he wanted to think.”

“But to lock her into her room, as Lori said he did!”

“I think that was later, when she must have become a little unbalanced.”

“What happened to her?”

“He never liked to talk about that. I only know that she got away and came down here one moonlit night. She climbed that ladder over there to a lighting platform and threw herself off, down on the concrete. They say she died right away. She was only thirty-seven.”

So this too was a haunted spot, I thought, and found myself sighing. Poor young Cecily, dancing and singing her heart out down on that small stage. Then climbing to the lighting tower and flinging herself off to die on these very stones beneath our feet.

“It’s a sad place,” I said. “Perhaps you should let the kudzu have it.”

Trevor shook his head. “It’s better to build something useful on the old and wipe out painful memories. This is a little jewel of a theater and it could be easily restored. When Belle Isle is finished, and when the people I’ve built it for are living there, they could use a place like this. Then it would be for the living—as it should be.”

“I think Cecily would like that,” I told him, marveling again at his tenacity. Despite all that had happened, he hadn’t given up. I felt far more clearly convinced of his attitude toward Belle Isle than I did about how he felt concerning Lori and David. Now and then I’d glimpsed an inner rage, but the volcano was kept well underground and if he harbored anger against Lori, he wasn’t letting it show. Which might in itself be dangerous.

At least, since the moment when he had found me locked into Cecily’s room, his antagonism toward me seemed to have lessened a little. Indifferent he might be much of the time, but he was no longer blaming me because I was David’s wife.

He smiled at me now as we walked down the steps, and I found that my hand was in his. He held my fingers lightly, casually, as he drew me along, steadying me on the descent.

On the stage below us something moved, then slipped away into the hemlocks at one side. Trevor saw it too and stopped beside me on the concrete steps.

“Who’s there?” he called.

For a moment there was no response. Then a man stepped out from the dark shelter of branches and stood looking up at us from the left side of the stage. It was Gifford Caton—Eric’s son, Maggie’s stepson.

“Hello up there!” He raised an arm in languid greeting and his voice carried to us clearly. “Are you showing Karen our haunted theater?”

“That’s right,” Trevor said, and as we went down the remaining tiers together he did not drop my hand. “What are you doing out here, Giff?” he asked, as we reached the edge of the stage.

Giff stood just above us now, his ash-blond hair shining palely in the sun, and when he smiled I lost the sense that he wasn’t really handsome. It was a beautiful smile that flashed down at us, yet I had a strong feeling that it wasn’t entirely real. Giff, I suspected, would have been more pleased if we hadn’t discovered him here, and I wondered why. Nevertheless, he answered Trevor’s question without hesitation.

“Dad wanted me to have a look at this place, Trev. He wants a report on its condition.”

“Why?”

The smile flashed off like a light extinguished. “Belle Isle is never going to work out the way you planned. You must know that by now. It will revert back to Dad and he’ll put it all to more practical use.”

“Not for another two years,” Trevor said.

“You’ll give up before then.”

“No,” Trevor told him quietly, “I won’t. The fires are over now and we’ll move ahead. No one would stay around to set another and possibly get caught. Even charged with murder.”

Giff turned and waved an arm again. “Come on out, Maggie. Our secret has been discovered.”

Again there was movement from the hemlock wings and Maggie Caton sauntered out upon the stage to join her stepson. She wore a man’s white shirt over her jeans, and her plump person still had a look of being put together with pins and bits of string. The pepper-and-salt mass of red hair turned dingy in the sun as she came to stand beside Giff, staring down at us from the edge of the stage.

“My secrets are still secret,” she said and grinned at me. “Hello, Karen. What do you make of Belle Isle? Have you met Cecily yet?” Her look traveled over me rather oddly, and I remembered the smudged state of my clothes.

“I’d like to,” I said. “Lori tells me that she’s still around. That is, she told me before she locked me into Cecily’s sitting room.”

I was being deliberately provocative. Trevor dropped my hand and I moved a few steps away from him, sensing his disapproval but feeling that small attacks on every front were the only weapons I could use. And I meant to use them. Only with surprise could I catch anyone off guard.

Giff shook his head at the thought of Lori locking me into Cecily’s room, while Maggie looked down at me from the stage, owl-solemn!

“Do you remember what I told you this morning?”

She had told me a lot of things, but I knew what she meant—that I should go away as soon as the funeral was over, and never look back.

“I don’t remember.”

Trevor spoke brusquely. “There’s not much else to see, Karen. A few dressing rooms are around in back, but they were built of wood and they’re falling down. Shall I take you home now?”

There was no further point in staying with him. I had probably misread that moment of friendship, and I disliked his cold courtesy.

“You’ve taken enough time from your work on my account,” I said. “Perhaps Giff and Maggie will let me go back with them. When they’re ready.”

Maggie gave her stepson a quick look, and I suspected that I was not entirely welcome. But that was where I must be—where I was least wanted. Trevor couldn’t tell me anything more for now, but perhaps Giff and Maggie could. An increasing sense of tension was rising in me. Almost without my being aware of it, I was being driven by a race with time. As though some hidden clock were ticking away toward—toward what? Were the fires really over? But even if the man who had set them had fled, the influence behind him remained and was all the more dangerous because of the guilt of David’s death. It was the man who gave the orders who must be found and exposed. I must think only of this. Doggedly.

Trevor left us and went up the tiers in long strides to the side entrance by which we had come in, disappearing through it.

“Have you seen all you want, Giff?” Maggie asked.

“Enough for now. My car’s around on the service road, Karen. Shall we walk over there now?”

Once more I was aware of his charm—aware but not susceptible. I trusted Gifford Caton no more than I did anyone else.

We went through an opening in trees that edged the stage and down steps leading to ground level. Here I saw that a semicircle of connecting wooden dressing rooms had been built. Several were in a state of near collapse, but there was one with an open door that showed a partially furnished interior. Curious, I went to look in.

Giff spoke at my shoulder. “That’s where Great-grandmamma used to dress. Some of her things are still there. As you can see, Lori has been fixing it up.”

“It’s her own private museum,” Maggie said.

“Do you mean the theater has never been used since Cecily’s death?”

“Vinnie wouldn’t allow it,” Giff explained. “But of course if Dad takes the place over after Trevor he’ll turn it into a real theater. There could be money in a place like this if it was opened to seasonal visitors. We’d tear all this stuff down, naturally, and rebuild.”

The vultures waiting, I thought, still strongly on Trevor’s side.

I went up the single step and through the door. One wall of the small room was still a mirror and I saw my soot-streaked yellow sweater and gray slacks reflected in its wavery surface. A wooden chair had been drawn before the make-up shelf, where a single scarlet and black jappened box rested. Where I’d have expected a damp and musty smell, there again seemed to be a faint aroma of sandalwood. When I sniffed, wrinkling my nose, Maggie laughed.

“Nona’s ubiquitous candles. Eric brought some home from his last trip to Hong Kong and Nona dotes on them. I wouldn’t have them around, but Lori’s been bringing them over to the island to counteract must and mildew. To make things pleasanter for Cecily, she says. Lori enjoys whimsical games, as you’re already discovering.”

Whimsical was not exactly the word I would have used, but I let it go.

The decorated black tin box coaxed my curiosity, and with one finger I flipped up the lid. Inside was a rouge-stained rabbit’s foot, a soiled powder puff, a round box of cake rouge with an old-fashioned label on the lid, sticks of dried-out grease paint, eyebrow pencils and brushes. Surely a turn-of-the-century theatrical kit. I let the box lid fall with a clank. These must have been things Cecily Fromberg had used in her pretense that she was an actress on the stage, and the sympathy I’d felt for her in that room at the octagonal house and out in the theater returned. Somehow, leaving these pitiful remnants of her life here seemed almost indecent.

“Why haven’t these things been put away?” I asked Maggie, who had stepped into the room behind me. “It’s a little macabre, isn’t it?”

She looked at me in the distorting mirror. “Vinnie gave an order to leave her dressing room alone, and he never countermanded it. He didn’t want anyone coming here to touch her things. Except himself. Since he hasn’t been gone all that long, nothing has been done.”

“Sometimes,” Giff said from the doorway, “he used to come here at night when he was staying on the island. I remember once when my parents brought me here with them, looking for him because he’d disappeared from the house. I remember walking out from the wings with my father and seeing him out there—sitting on a step watching the stage, as though he might see her again. That was after he was old and his second wife had died.”

“It’s terribly Victorian and sad,” Maggie said. “Nobody goes around haunted anymore.”

Oddly, a memory of the weird ferns of Maggie’s mural returned to my mind, and I wondered. Wasn’t that a haunted painting?

I moved on about the small room. Again there was a wardrobe cabinet that belonged to the days before closets were in use, and I looked inside to see two or three moldering costumes hanging there, their sequins long since dulled. An age-shredded wrapper that Cecily must have worn when making up clung to a hook, and I closed the door quickly, shutting out my own intrusion. Out in the room stood what might once have been a fine Recamier sofa, straight out of a French painting. Now its satin was frayed and torn, and mice had made a nest at its foot.

“Look at this!” Suddenly Maggie pounced and drew out something from beneath the sofa, holding it up.

The object was an empty tomato juice can, its bright red and white label intact, and the top gone.

“Our ghosts have a thirst,” Maggie said dryly.

Giff came into the room, crowding it with his tall presence, and took the can from her. “Sorry, I must have left that behind. I’ve camped out a few times, both here and up at the house, trying to find out what was happening.”

So Lori had been right. “What have you found out?” I asked.

“Only that there’s been someone around. Before the last fire, that is. But I wasn’t lucky enough to catch him, and I haven’t been over here since.”

“Did you ever hear of anyone named Joe Bruen?”

Giff shook his head. “I don’t think so. Why?”

I was never sure whether Giff was telling the truth or not, and I glanced at Maggie. Her usually direct and open look had turned oddly blank. Yet the expression was gone in an instant, leaving me unsure of what I had seen, and increasingly distrustful of both of them. Why had Maggie and her stepson really come to the island? What were they searching for if the danger of fire was over?

“Let’s not stand here talking,” Maggie said impatiently. “This place gives me the creeps. It’s not all that Victorian anymore. Arson’s as modern as that tomato juice can, regardless of its history.”

“And sometimes as useful,” Giff said. There was irony in his words, but his eyes were bright and watchful, his look fixed on me.

Maggie was right, I thought, and Cecily’s long-ago tragedy had nothing to do with what was happening now. Today there was only fire to be reckoned with—and David’s death.

“Let’s go home,” Maggie said.

Again I was aware of how tall Giff was, and of how intent his eyes could be, how watchful behind his often careless manner. He didn’t immediately follow Maggie through the door.

“Did David write you anything in those last weeks, Karen? Anything revealing, that is?”

“As a matter of fact, he did,” I admitted, and walked past him into bright sunlight.

Giff stepped down beside me. “Is it a secret, Karen? What was it he wrote you?”

“It’s no secret. I’ve told Trevor.”

“And you told me,” Maggie said. “I mean that David wrote you that if anything happened to him it wouldn’t be an accident.”

Had I told her that? I wondered. I had told Trevor, yes, and Nona. And a little while ago I’d told Lori. But Maggie? I couldn’t remember and I felt confused, unsure.

“And that was all?” Giff questioned.

“Of course,” I said. “If I had any real information, Trevor would have taken it to the police.”

“Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t,” Giff said, and I knew he believed I’d held something back.

However, he let the matter go, and we left the row of crumbling dressing rooms, walking toward a path that dropped steeply down an embankment. Following Giff, with Maggie behind me, I reached the sandy beach that I had seen when I’d stood beside Trevor on the tower balcony.

“Dad asked me to check on this,” Giff said. “We’ll need to bring in a few new loads of sand. This inlet is especially good for swimming. Fairly shallow until you get out into the lake.” He sounded assured, as though Trevor’s plans were already in the past.

A green arm of land lined with pines reached its half-moon around one end of the beach, protecting it and forming a tiny bay. Directly across the water was the Belle Isle project in its beautiful setting, with the hills rising beyond.

But it was not the houses we watched now. A rowboat was coming toward us, already halfway across the lake to the island. Chris Andrews pulled stoutly at the oars, his back toward us as he rowed, clearly unaware of our presence. He didn’t see us until he neared the beach and turned around, his fair bangs ruffled in the wind. Then he rested his oars uncertainly, staring at us over one shoulder, his expression as grave as ever.

My camera was ready and I snapped a couple of shots of him in the boat, not sure what prompted the impulse, but again obeying it. Perhaps I wanted a means of coming closer to Trevor’s son.

“Come ashore,” Giff called to him, and after a moment’s further hesitation and a glowering look at me, Chris pulled again on the oars, and the prow of the boat grounded in the sand. Giff pulled it up on the beach and Chris got out reluctantly, standing tall and poised as if for flight.

“You here on some special mission?” Giff asked. “Or just rowing for the fun of it?”

The look on the boy’s face was not a normal reaction to so simple a question. He looked so alarmed that I thought he might have run again if Giff hadn’t taken him by the arm and led him up the sand.

“What’s wrong, Chris? Maybe you’d better tell us.”

The boy twisted in his grasp and found an excuse as his eyes fell on me. “It’s her! She’s Uncle David’s wife and he was no good. Aunt Nona says he was evil. So she is too and she has no right to take pictures of me!”

I sensed that he was fabricating on the spur of the moment, blowing up a smoke screen of protest and excitement to cover his real reason for rowing to the island. Nevertheless, his words stung.

“You’re right about one thing, Chris,” I told him. “I shouldn’t have taken pictures of you without your permission. But since I have, I’ll give you the prints, and the negatives too when I get the film developed. And I promise not to do it again.”

Maggie smiled at us both warmly. “There—Karen has made you a handsome apology and everything’s fine. But I’m jealous. She hasn’t taken a single picture of me. I’d have thought I’d make a nice plump ghost back in Cecily’s dressing room.”

Giff, however, was taking no side roads. “You’ve been over here a lot lately, Chris. What’s going on? Were you around when that last fire was set?”

Chris’s eyes were agonizingly wide and he looked a very frightened boy.

“No—I wasn’t there! I wasn’t! I didn’t have anything to do with it!”

“But you did light the first fire,” Giff said. “So you can’t blame people for wondering about the others.”

If Chris could have escaped Giff’s grasp I knew he would have, but the hold on his arm was too tight.

“Now then,” Giff went on, “while I’ve got you away from your mother, for once, and from your father, suppose you tell us a few things.”

Maggie seemed about to protest, but Giff gave her a quick look, and she was silent. This aspect of Gifford Caton was certainly in contrast to the friendly, easygoing guise he usually wore.

“Talk,” he said to Chris.

The boy wriggled, trying to get away, and then gave in. “I did set that first fire. You know all that. I was mad at my father and I was trying to get even. But I was sorry afterwards. I’ve told him so, and I’ve told my mother. And the sheriff too. I didn’t have anything to do with the other fires. Honestly, I didn’t.”

“So why are you sneaking around Belle Isle at odd hours? Suppose you tell me right here and now what you’re up to.”

“If I catch him,” Chris said, his voice rising, “—if I find out who it is—then I can prove I didn’t have anything to do with the other fires.”

“If there’s anyone to catch,” Giff said. “And if there should be, what if he turns out to be somebody you like?”

Chris lowered his eyes. “He’s not anybody I like. He’s not anybody I know.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“Because I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him sneaking around the island. Only he was never close enough so I could catch him.”

Giff let go of the boy’s arm so suddenly that Chris lost his balance and sat down on the sand. “You’re making this up, aren’t you? This is just another one of your stories.”

“I did see him! He’s got gray curly hair and he wears lumberjack clothes—a green plaid jacket. Once he caught me watching him from up a tree. I wasn’t close, but he went straight under the kudzu.”

“When did you last see this phantom?” Giff asked lightly.

The boy hesitated for a moment, as though unsure of how much he wanted to tell. “Yesterday,” he said. “Yesterday when—”

Giff cut him off impatiently. “That’s nonsense. Whoever started that last fire and set the explosion could be wanted for murder, and he’d be far away by this time.”

Chris whirled around and stared at me. “I’ve got a camera at home. Maybe I’ll bring it over and take a picture of him. The way you take pictures all the time. I never thought of that before.”

“No dice!” Giff told him. “I’m going to have a talk with your father about this, and you’re going to stay off the island. I’ve been over it thoroughly and I haven’t flushed anybody into view. But if anyone’s hidden over here it could be dangerous.”

Giff glanced at Maggie—a quick, meaningful look—and she came to his aid. “That’s right, Chris. You mustn’t come here while the island isn’t safe. This is something for the sheriff’s office to handle.”

“Only nobody has!” Chris flung at her. “Nobody’s found out anything. They just think it’s me.”

“Of course they don’t. If there was anything to find out, they’d have found it,” Maggie said gently. “But now we’d better start back. You can come with us, Chris.”

Coming with us was clearly not his choice. “I’ve left my bike over by the entrance gate—” he began.

“Then we’ll pick it up on the way out and take it back in my station wagon,” Giff said, settling the matter.

“If you’ll wait a moment,” I put in, “I’ll use up the rest of my film, and then I can get it developed and give Chris his pictures.”

They waited while I shot one picture across the lake to the houses, snapped another of Maggie in the doorway of Cecily’s dressing room and finished up with the empty amphitheater. I wasn’t attempting to get anything special—just using up the film and making a quick personal record of Belle Isle.

We didn’t drive straight back to the house, however, but went on into Gatlinburg, where Maggie had an errand. On the way I was aware, as I hadn’t been before, of the kudzu that had enveloped stretches of the countryside, rolling along beside the road, and even attempting to climb a telephone pole here and there. Something that must keep the telephone company busy tearing it down.

I found Gatlinburg an attractive little town, in spite of the fact that tourists were its main business and it abounded in shops and motels. The Little Pigeon River ran along its rocky bed beside the main street, the Parkway, and again I had a feeling of being in a pocket of mountains. David’s mountains, I thought again. He had grown up near Gatlinburg.

We parked off the main street near one of the many handcraft shops, and Maggie invited me to come in with her.

“This place is special,” she said. “A handful of us run it as a cooperative and I think we’re pretty good.”

There was a spaciousness and lack of clutter inside that set it apart from cheaper shops, with unobtrusive lighting and glass windows along two sides. While Maggie talked to the manager, I wandered among the tables and counters, looking at carvings and pottery and jewelry displays, until I came upon Maggie’s section in one corner. Her name had been printed on a card, and several of her framed paintings were hung on the wall. Here was more of her strange, oversized vegetation, though not as huge as the mural Lori favored in her dining room. I paused before a lush painting of what was anything but a shrinking violet.

A single blossom splashed its purple-blue at the beholder—not a timid flower to hide along a woodsy path, but bursting with sensual color, its fleshy petals bearing little resemblance to nature. In the next painting a cluster of wild tiger lilies looked as though they might be on the prowl—if such plants could be predators.

Maggie had brought a new picture to hang in an empty space, where something had been sold. When she carried it over I saw that it was a deep red opium poppy with a black center—somehow sensuous with its own intoxication.

“What do you think?” Maggie asked cheerfully.

“Frightening,” I said. “Those ferns in the dining room at Trevor’s terrify me. And these paintings do too.”

“Good! I like to have an impact.”

I looked from a leprous tiger lily to Maggie’s open, eager expression and shook my head. “But why? Do you really see the world like this?”

“Not the world. Just certain members of the garden variety. Don’t try to figure it out. I wouldn’t think of analyzing myself and scaring it away. This is the contrary sort of thing that wants to come out when I paint—so I let it come. If there are snaky, horrible things underneath in my nature, I don’t want to know about them.”

“What does your husband say?”

“Eric? He doesn’t look at them. He thinks it’s dyspepsia and I ought to take a pill.” Her look warmed and softened as she spoke and I sensed again her affection for her husband.

“Do people really buy these pictures?” I asked.

“Of course. Almost as fast as I can paint them. Who wants to hang ordinary flower prints after seeing mine? I’ve done a lot of tiger lilies, for instance. People are always telling me they’re just right for the entry hall at home.”

“To scare away burglars?”

“They might, at that. But I can see you’re a nonbeliever. Here—I’d like you to have one. Perhaps if you look at it long enough you’ll be converted to my wicked ways.”

On a table before the framed paintings was a rack that displayed smaller efforts, and she made a selection quickly.

“Here you are. And don’t deny me my generosity.”

The painting was a soft and glowing pink—the petals of a rose, oversized, but truly beautiful. Then I looked closer and saw that the rose burned out into a deeper fire-red at the farthest point from the heart, swirling into a hint of flame that would consume the blossom itself.

I wanted to tell her that this was a picture I couldn’t bear to look at, but she pressed my arm lightly. “It’s only the fire of the sunset, Karen. I love the fire colors of sunset. Wait, and I’ll have it wrapped for you.”

I felt shaken, yet unable to oppose her. In any case, even if I took the painting home, I need never unwrap it, and I would certainly not hang it on a wall where it would be allowed to haunt me. She must know what fire meant to me at this particular time, and I wondered at her motive in forcing this picture upon me. Or was Maggie Caton merely a woman moved by casual impulse and seldom given to penetrating judgment? Her paintings had a primitive quality, and perhaps that was all there was to it.

In a few moments she came back and held out the package so that I had to take it, however reluctantly.

When we left the shop there were one or two more errands to be done in town, and I left my film to be developed while Chris bought a roll for his camera. Then Giff turned the car once more in the direction of the mountains, heading for Trevor’s and whatever awaited us there.

One thing I knew lay ahead of me—a confrontation with Lori over the trick she had played by locking me in, Cecily’s room. I found, a little to my surprise, that I was looking forward to that next encounter. There were a number of things I wanted to say to Lori Andrews.