The House at Sandalwood (8 page)

“You were wonderful. Absolutely perfect.” And she had been. She had handled the temperamental chef with thoroughly grown-up finesse. And plenty of
hoomali-mali.
I didn’t need a translation to know that must mean a form of flattery.

“Good! Now I’m going up and do some sketching. I just feel in the mood. I haven’t sketched too much since I met Stephen, but I’m so proud of myself—Mr. Yee scares me to death, you know—that I think I can draw something again.”

I thought this was a great idea and said so. “And I’ll look around,” I told her, “get my bearings.”

We parted at the front staircase. She had gone up several stairs before she swung around, called to me. She laughed, a very light, wispy laugh.

“Wasn’t that ridiculous? That awful man thought Stephen was married to you. He actually did!”

“Utterly ridiculous, dear. Don’t think about it.”

I went on toward the
lanai,
with what I hoped was a cheerful expression. But I couldn’t help feeling slightly crushed at her implication that no doddering, creaking old aunt like Judith Cameron would ever be married to a man her husband’s age.

The man is just my own age! Ito said he is.

After some effort I managed to work up my sense of humor and was able to laugh at my vanity by the time I walked out on the lower-floor
lanai.
Strictly speaking, the so-called
lanai
appeared to be a balcony that looked as if it might collapse at any minute into the jungle-covered gulch far below. It actually creaked when I stepped onto it.

The gulch itself fascinated me. I was so impressed at the sight by daylight that I lost all interest in the ancient
lanai.
For the first few minutes the thunderous drop of the falls drowned all the other sounds. I leaned over the wooden railing, caught the rainbow spray of the falls, and then traced their descent. There was so much foliage below I barely made out any pool or even the continuation of the river that crossed the island from the northwest mountain where it began. I remembered reading, after Deirdre’s marriage, that a mountain on the island of Kaiana was called “the rainiest spot on earth.” And the mountain on this island was north of Kaiana. Small wonder this Ili-Ahi gulch was the wettest and most thickly overgrown spot I had ever seen.

I couldn’t begin to identify the plant and forest life in front of me and below me. The intertwined plants, flowers, trees, the vegetation both living and dead seemed endless. The fallen leaves, windblown blossoms, endless palm fronds, not to mention the debris washed down the river, had collected here for months or even years. There was more vegetation further along toward the last barriers before Kaiana Channel, which I supposed was a series of ancient lava outcroppings or coral reefs. I couldn’t tell which they were from this point, although I could see the channel glittering in pools of sunlight, and then, hardly a hundred yards away, the pools turned midnight blue, rolling and angry under the rain clouds.

Either I had grown used to the smell of rotting vegetation, or it was masked by the perfume of the plumeria growing thickly around the house on bushes or young trees. There was a golden shower tree almost on the edge of the chasm, and within the gulch itself, bright vermillion flashes proved to be ohia flowers, scattered among hibiscus and other less familiar blooms.

Even as I watched all this tropic profusion and tried to trace the river after it gathered itself up from the bottom of that violent drop, huge raindrops splashed on my hair and my nose. I ducked into the hall and shook myself.

A minute later I heard the door to that pleasant sitting room open and Stephen Giles, who apparently had his hand on the old-fashioned glass doorknob, said, “I suggest then that you get any other information you want from the Honolulu police. You should have dealt with them in the first place.”

He was answered by Victor Berringer’s clipped, precise enunciation. “I fail to see why the police on Oahu would have more pertinent information than your own natives here on Ili-Ahi. Why do you object to our questioning them?”

“In the first place, they are not
our natives
. You may as well say we here at Sandalwood are part of the Hawaiians who own this island in a kind of joint tenancy with us. Anyway, they know absolutely nothing about Miss Berringer. I told you that in our exchange of correspondence. And now, gentlemen, I have a great deal to do. I have meetings in Honolulu and I have some workmen here on a project started by my father, and which I intend to complete successfully. You understand therefore, I can’t waste more time. Once again, I suggest you see the police and let them handle the matter. From all I have learned of Miss Berringer, she might have gone on to Tahiti or Australia, or even to Taiwan. She mentioned them all.”

“
She would need a passport
!” Berringer insisted, obviously on the verge of losing his temper.

William Pelhitt, sounding anxious, put in, “Say, Vic, why couldn’t she have thought she lost her passport and just have gotten a new one? You know Ingrid. Always mislaying things.”

“Because—as I keep telling you—the Passport Bureau says that is not the case. Don’t you think they would know? There are such things as records, Will.”

Stephen stepped out into the hall, and I hurried up the back staircase to avoid being caught listening. “Gentlemen, I am sorry. I wish you luck, but I’m afraid you are searching in the wrong place. Miss Berringer is undoubtedly thousands of miles from here at this very minute. She was a very self-sufficient young woman and doubtless found some transportation where she didn’t need a passport. You must know that a yacht, a ship of some kind, could put in at any island in the Pacific and its owner could bring Miss Berringer ashore during the night without the local officials being the wiser. During the occasions I met your daughter, before my marriage, she used to joke about such things—’being swallowed up in the immensity of the Pacific,’ is how she put it. She joked about these things one day at lunch. Asked Deirdre if it wouldn’t be fun to go to sleep as herself and wake up as someone else. But you know all this. If I’m not mistaken, I wrote these details to you. Good-bye, gentlemen. Can you make your way to the dock? I’ll take you in my boat if you like.”

“Quite unnecessary. We have the boat we rented from the Kaiana Hilton. Come along, William.”

Their footsteps and receding voices told me they had decided to obey Stephen’s obvious command. A few minutes later, from my room, I saw all three men headed down the steep path to the little landing on our side of the channel. I didn’t like to hound Deirdre, but her husband had made it clear that my real job was to look after her. As a companion, or as a warden? I wondered.

I started toward her suite farther along the hall and knocked. There was no answer, and then I remembered that she liked to use the room across from mine, overlooking the heavy jungle vegetation that masked the Ili-Ahi stream before it plunged over into the gulch. Why she should prefer this to the pleasanter, sunnier side of the building I couldn’t imagine. Although hibiscus hedges and a golden shower tree grew along this side of Sandalwood, the path from the boat landing and the beginnings of the wide green open space in front of the building gave the sunlight a much better chance.

I returned to the door opposite my room and knocked. Nothing happened and I knocked again, thinking that if her windows were open the roar of all that plunging water might drown out any other sounds. This time I could hear little scuffling noises which baffled me.

“Who is it?” Deirdre asked in a high, fluting, breathless voice

“It’s Judith. Do you need anything?”

I was sure she considered carefully. Then she told me, “No, but the door is unlocked.”

I took this as an invitation, though perhaps not the most happily phrased, and went in. The room seemed to have a curious blue-green hue and for a minute I stood there blinking. I could see my way, but I had the distinct feeling that I was at the bottom of an aquarium tank. Deirdre’s infectious giggle brought me out of this dizzy sense that I was drowning.

“You’re perfectly all right, you know. People say they feel like choking in here. The room wasn’t used very much until Stephen married me. But I feel quite safe here.”

“Safe?” I had been looking around at the wallpaper with its fish and great thrown nets, and torches for the night-fishing, but her odd choice of that word surprised me. “Safe from what?”

She shrugged. “Oh, from ... busybodies and people trying to make me do things or go places when I don’t want to ... or when they won’t let me go to Honolulu. They’re awfully mean about that. I’ve gone down to the landing and tried and tried. I’ve offered them money. But nobody will take me across the channel.”

“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.