Season of Storm (29 page)

She could not have said how long she stood there, staring at her father, her mind numbed by shock. Then her gaze moved to the familiar stranger. Was he a policeman? Had someone talked? Had they arrested Johnny?

She gave a strange little laugh. Today was the day Johnny had been due to testify before the Cartier Commission. What an awful irony it would be if, in spite of everything, he missed it.

"Suppose you tell me," she said at last. "Who is he?"

Her eyes moved to the papers her father held, and then to the bald man. Suddenly she knew why he had looked familiar: she had seen him before. Outrage flooded her and she strode across to the bed and lifted the papers from her father's hand.  

"5:00 a.m.: left the premises by the back entrance and proceeded on foot to the parking lot of Mountainview Country Club. He entered a black, late-model..."

Her hand shook as she dropped the private investigator's report contemptuously onto the bed. Her heart was pounding its response to danger in her temples and stomach so strongly she felt she might throw up.

"Well, Dad—" her voice was coming out tight and high, but there was nothing she could do about that except inject as much sarcasm as she could into it "—surely you weren't entertaining hopes of my being a virgin at my age?"

Her tone made it sound cheap, even in her own ears. She could not have blamed the detective or her father if they had assumed from that that she was used to letting in a different man every night by the back door.

"He's an Indian!" her father was nearly shouting. "The man's a Chopa Indian!"

"And what are you?" she asked sweetly. "A racist?"

Her father spat his exasperation. "Race has nothing to do with it, girl, and you know it!" He picked up the report again and pointed to it. "He's a Chopa! He testified before the goddamned Cartier Commission this afternoon! Don't tell me you didn't know that!"

She had known. The thought had been with her all day. She had been wishing him luck all day in the back of her mind, even if she only knew it now.

"And how did he do?" she asked the bald detective, who looked as though he sat in on embarrassing family scenes every day and had learned the fine art of being deaf and invisible.

"Sorry?" he asked. He had an English accent.

"Was his submission effective?"

"I couldn't—"

"What I want to know," said her father, in a cold deadly voice, "is what kind of hold he's got over you."

Sexual. Purely sexual,
a voice said inside her head. Shulamith closed her eyes and took a deep calming breath. It was impossible, she thought. She was standing in a brightly lighted hospital room surrounded by danger and the smell of antiseptic, yet the longing for Johnny was suddenly tearing at her, ripping her stomach hollow, making her breasts ache.
 

"He has no hold over me!" Smith exploded, channelling desire through wrath. "Certainly not Stockholm Syndrome, and why you set the Mounties on me with that half-baked theory I'll never know!"

"I—

"Now you listen to me, Father! I want you to call off your detectives and call off the cops and get the hell out of my life! All right? And I'm telling you if you don't leave this alone
now
you are going to end up looking like a fool in front of everybody!
 

"I have some other things to tell you, too, but I'd hate to put your friend here to the trouble of writing them up in a report, so I'll tell you when we can be private. Good night." Smith turned on her heel and strode to the door.

"I am going to give this man's name to the police." Her father's voice was harsh behind her.

She stopped, her hand on the door. "Be sure to tell them you think we're lovers," she said without turning. "Staff Sergeant Podborski is very big on the sexual exploitation aspects of Stockholm Syndrome."

She went out.

***

With her hair hidden under a denim cap, and her eyes behind sunglasses, Smith sat on the cockpit seat of the
Outcast
and watched as Johnny Winterhawk, unaware, approached her along the dock.
 

He was wearing a rumpled linen suit and a tie, and he was pulling at the tie as he walked. And though his stride was long and swift she had never seen such fatigue in him. Even when he had been telling her, "I've been up fifty hours straight and I'm seeing double," he hadn't looked like this. It wrenched at her heart, and she thought of all the times his presence had comforted her and suddenly, desperately, she wanted the power to comfort him.

Johnny Winterhawk checked his stride momentarily and looked around, and then his black gaze swept down the length of the dock to where she sat—hidden almost completely from his view by the boats between them. But he knew she was there as surely as she had known his presence in her garden.

She saw from his change of stride how much he needed her, and she understood that she did have the power to comfort him. He stood on the dock beside the boat, just looking at her, and as she returned his gaze, there were tears in her eyes.

He dropped his briefcase on a seat, threw his tie after it and leapt down into the cockpit as she stood.

"Thank you," said Johnny hoarsely, and wrapped her in his arms.

He held her for a long time without speaking, and she felt him take comfort from her with something like joy. Then they went below, talking quietly. Johnny changed his loafers for canvas deck shoes and Shulamith moved around pouring their drinks.

''A string of bureaucratic minds propped up by their business suits looking at you in blank incomprehension has got to be one of the world's most depressing sights," he was saying. He shook his head and laughed. "I wouldn't have wanted to be selling that bunch a building design, Peaceable Woman. One of them actually wanted to know if we were sure Cat Bite River was a salmon
spawning ground,
and not just a place where there were a lot of salmon." He took the glass of scotch she offered and drank deep.
 

You had to laugh, and Smith did. "What did you say to that?"

"I told him we'd been sure of that for several centuries. He wondered if a scientific study had ever been done." A grim note crept into his voice.

"And?" she prompted.

"I told him the kind of science he was talking about was white man's science, and we had better deal in Indian science because white man's science was destroying the world."

"Oh, boy," said Smith faintly. She took a sip of her own drink. "Have you had time to regret that yet?"

"Not yet." He lifted his glass and looked at the amber liquid in the ray of sunshine slanting though the porthole above his head. "The battle's lost, Peaceable Woman. We might as well get our licks in where we can." He flung himself into a corner of the settee as though the cares of the world were slowly falling off his shoulders and took another pull of the scotch. "I needed that." He smiled at her so companionably that just for a moment she wished their marriage were real, and she could look forward to a lifetime of this. "Thanks for coming."

That reminded her. "Johnny," she said urgently. "My father...my father hired private detectives. They tailed you to your car on Monday morning. He's got your name now. He told me this afternoon. I...he said he's going to pass it on to the police."

Johnny swore softly and sat up. "What did you tell him?"

"I...I insinuated that we were casual lovers and called him a racist."

"Did it work?"

"I don't know. My father doesn't bluster much. He seems convinced you have some kind of hold over me."

Johnny grunted. "Women really aren't much better off than Indians when it comes to being considered intelligent enough to run their own destinies, are they?"

She laughed. "Not much, I guess."

"Well, Peaceable Woman, what are we going to do?"

"I thought...should we just announce that we're married?"

A grimace of something like pain flashed across his face. "No," he said. "No, I…what good would it do?"

She felt a quick anguish and wondered fleetingly what it would be like to be the woman who meant more to him than the hold his tortured history had over him.

And no room for regret
....The words of her own song came into her head, and suddenly she sat bolt upright and slapped her glass down.
 

"Lew!" she exclaimed, looking at her watch. "I've got to go—I'll be late!"

The grim lines around his mouth were suddenly more pronounced.

"Do you have to?" he asked, but she was suddenly excited with what was ahead of her, and she did not notice. She pulled Mel's business card out of her back pocket and looked at the address he had scrawled on the back.

"My God, I'll never make it!" she exclaimed. "We have to talk," she said to Johnny. "We've got to decide what to do. Call me or something. Bye!"

She went lightly up the companionway and over the lifeline without looking back; and it wasn't till she was nearly at her car that she heard his question in her head. "Do you have to?" Smith stopped and put a hand up to her mouth in dismay. What had he meant by that? Did he want her to...?

Smith whirled. She
didn't
have to go, and if Johnny wanted her to stay, she didn't
want
to go.
 

But as she started at a run back down the dock, she saw that she was too late.
Outcast
had already cast off. It was motoring out into the bay, mast glinting in the setting sun. He hadn't even stowed the fenders.
 

She told herself she had been mistaken in the tone of his question, that he had meant nothing by it but common politeness. Then she resolutely turned her mind to business.

She would not be very late. The address wasn't more than fifteen minutes away in the light traffic she was encountering now. Smith thought of the song that was in her glove compartment, and a shiver of anticipation ran down her spine.

She had never collaborated with a musician before, unless you counted the boy up at Paper Creek. She had no idea what to expect. Would Mel prove to have chosen well? Would they get on? Would he want her to change a lot of her lyrics?

It was the sort of excitement she could not recall ever having felt for the lumber industry. The sense of challenge was heady—she was going to make something out of nothing.

The apartment building where Lew had his studio was a small four-story yellow stucco box near English Bay that had a very neat garden and pleasant airy atmosphere. The inner door was open, so Smith walked through without pushing the buzzer. She was ten minutes late—Lew would be expecting her.

He was on the fourth floor, and as she walked down the hall she heard the faint sound of a piano that got louder as she neared the door.

There was no pause in the music when she knocked. "It's open," called a male voice, and she pushed open the door with the sense that
this
now was the Rubicon. She was really and truly changing her life from this point on.
 

The first thing she saw was the black baby grand across a wide, businesslike working studio. The second thing she saw was the face of the man playing it. She gasped in astonishment.

"Luther!" she exclaimed blankly, as the name came to her from the other side of ten long years.

Lew was the boy up at Paper Creek.

Twenty-seven

"Hi there, Shee." Luther grinned at her, his eyes kind but much more worldly-wise than when she had seen him last. "Long time no see." His hands brought a delicate trill from the piano and then stopped.

She crossed the room to him, smiling. "Did you know it was me?"

"I figured there could only be one Shulamith in Vancouver, if not in Canada."

"Well, I didn't know it was you. What a shock!" It wasn't embarrassing, though it might have been. Lew had obviously long since put the episode with her father behind him.

"A shock for me, too," said Lew, leading her to a sofa. "Smith, Mel called you. Where did you get a name like that?"

"What do you mean? In the camps they always called me Smith!" she protested.

"The hell they did. We used to call you Shee."

"Oh, that's right—it started later, in Dog's Ear, maybe. I know I was using it by my first year of university."

"Where you gave in and studied forestry, if what they've been saying about you in the papers lately is true."

"Yeah, you were there that summer I was deciding...."

"Bad choice, girl. You should have stuck with poetry." He smiled, taking the sting out of it.

"
You've
obviously never looked back."
 

Lew laughed. "I've looked back quite a few times, but not lately."

"Mel told me a few of your songs. Congratulations. I'm only surprised I've never heard your name attached to them."

"It can be that way," he said, as though he welcomed anonymity.  

Suddenly it was as comfortable and easy as it had been ten years ago. Lew Brady poured drinks, and they chatted, and after a while he took the pages of the song from her and moved to the piano, and she leaned on it as he tinkled out a couple of notes, and they talked some more.