The House at Sandalwood (7 page)

Five

Kekua went around me, passed Deirdre with a flippant, “Ahoy!” and dashed back to the strangers. Berringer and his friend had stepped up onto the veranda, but as I approached the house with Deirdre hanging back behind me, the tall, frosty man said something to Kekua. She nodded and went off past the bushes masking the gulch at the back of Sandalwood. The man took long strides down the wooden steps toward us.

Deirdre whispered, “Don’t let him talk to me. Please send him away.”

“Well, then,” I said firmly, “you should tell him yourself that you don’t wish to see him.”

“No, no. He wouldn’t pay any attention.”

“Tell him and he will go away.” I didn’t know whether I had convinced her or not until we reached the veranda, but meanwhile, the formidable gentleman reached us. I had been right about the frosty eyes, which were more gray than blue. I was surprised at Kekua’s admiration—they looked as though they could cut one down at twenty paces. For a moment, I feared they would cut
me
down! I was momentarily tongue-tied when he demanded of me, “Mrs. Giles! I do not like to be made a fool of. Furthermore, I don’t intend to be.”

“Then, in the first place,” I began, “you really should know that I am not—”

“However you may be used to being treated, madam, I have been trying to speak with you for three days. And this time I will not be put off. May we go somewhere and discuss this thing? I intend to get the answers to some questions. I’m sure you appreciate my anxiety, Mrs. Giles.”

“Now, see here,” I tried to bring Deirdre forward but she nudged me so hard I was breathless for a couple of seconds.

We had reached the house where the younger, stockier man stood, with a hesitant smile and a hand outstretched to take mine.

“Please ... please ...” Deirdre whispered in my ear, and then she dragged along behind me as Mr. Berringer escorted me into the house. I decided to see just how nasty Victor Berringer was going to be in pursuing his absurd suspicions before I turned Deirdre over to him and acknowledged that she was Mrs. Giles.

I looked around the long, desolate living room, saw nothing that looked like a bar, and went into the hall. Then I remembered the comfortable room at the back of the house. The two men followed me, and Deirdre scuffed along behind us. I asked the men to mix their own drinks at the tiny portable bar across one corner of the room. The Japanese housewoman brought ice, and Mr. Berringer’s companion went to the bar. Both men took Scotch and water. The male “companion” watched Berringer take up his glass before pouring his identical drink. I was too keyed up to have a drink, and Deirdre didn’t even want to go near the bar. Anyway, I wished to keep my wits sharp, as sharp, I hoped, as this stranger. He introduced his companion with a brief movement of his glass punctuated by the tinkle of ice.

“This is William Pelhitt. Willie and my daughter had a—an arrangement. They intended to marry, eventually.”

“Intend, Vic. Excuse me. Intend,” William Pelhitt put in with a kind of nervous, fluttering smile. “Glad to know you, Mrs. Giles. I’ve been in love with Ingrid since—well—since she was about fourteen, I guess. We sort of had it settled we’d be married later on, after she got out of that fancy college.” He glanced at Deirdre, obviously curious about her identity. I glanced at her and opened my mouth, but Deirdre shook her head faintly.

I thought, well, why inflict this angry Victor Berringer on the poor girl until he has simmered down?

Berringer had apparently stored up endless suspicious little details he could use against Deirdre. Although he was not unattractive physically, I found him quite implacable, a man who saw nothing but his own view.

“Mr. Berringer,” I began as quietly as possible, hoping to calm the atmosphere, “I appreciate your anxiety, but your daughter is a grown woman. She told you she was thinking of going on to the Orient, so it seems to me that...”

“What theories you may expound, madam, are of no interest whatever to me. William here received a card from my daughter which suggested that she was on her way to Tokyo, but this seems not to have been true.”

“But why? What would make her change her mind? And why should it have taken you so long to discover that she hadn’t left?”

William Pelhitt spoke up in an uneasy way, with frequent glances at Berringer, which suggested he took all his cues from the older man.

“You see, she sent the card by surface mail and it came weeks after her last letter, so we figured the card told us where she was going, what she was up to. We didn’t hear anything from her after that, for months. Not that this is unusual with Ingrid, but finally, he—we sent cables to Tokyo, and they hadn’t heard of her, so we flew there, but couldn’t discover a thing. Then we got to checking the last letter she sent Vic, and found...”

“But Tokyo is huge. I read that somewhere,” Deirdre put in, startling us all. I am sure the men had forgotten her presence. Whether or not she intended it, she sounded younger than ever. I was by now so ruffled at Mr. Berringer’s manner I decided to delay Deirdre’s introduction.

William Pelhitt looked to me for an explanation of the girl’s identity, but in the second or two that he looked at me, puzzled and questioning, I saw another man, one not entirely cowed by his long relationship with his companion. I had a sudden notion that he suspected Deirdre was the real Mrs. Giles. The pleasant fullness of his likeable face would probably become substantial and plump in his forties or fifties. He seemed far more human than Victor Berringer who was so chillingly arrogant.

At Deirdre’s observation about Tokyo, Berringer gave her a scathing look. Quickly and contemptuously, he returned to the matter at hand.

“Is it too much to ask if we might be alone and uninterrupted for a few minutes, madam? I would like to learn what I—what we can before discussing the matter with the local authorities.”

Deirdre caught her breath. That gasp troubled me, but I did not pursue the reason for it. I said with false calm, “If you will kindly ask your questions, you will relieve all of us, including yourself.” I was at least honest in that. “I would appreciate your telling me just what Miss Berringer’s last letter had to do with this persecution of us at Sandalwood.”

“Yes,” Pelhitt put in, obviously trying to please both me and Berringer. “We owe you an explanation. You see, the letter, as it happened, was written three weeks after the card.”

“Don’t rattle so! Get on with it!”

“Just let me finish, Vic. The letter said she was coming over here to—whatever it’s called—this island, to have it out with that ... with her friend Deirdre.”

“ ‘With that silly moron Deirdre’ was how she described you. A bit offensive, and hardly accurate,” Berringer added without a smile to soften the remark. “But my daughter often had bad manners. She claimed that if your new husband had faced the truth about you—whatever that was—after two days of marriage, she would have no difficulty in winning him away from you. She was drunk when she wrote the letter. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” I echoed just as sharply.

He moved nearer, as though to exclude Deirdre and William Pelhitt from our conversation.

As I stared at him, hoping to intimidate him into at least a semblance of good manners, Victor Berringer set his glass on the side table behind me where the sunlight caught it and glistened on the melting ice within.

“I certainly didn’t take such a rambling and ill-mannered letter seriously. Not until we had returned to Hawaii from Tokyo and discovered what I consider proof that Ingrid never left Hawaii. Mrs. Giles, when did you see my daughter last?”

I felt like a player who had memorized her lines badly. When was the last time Deirdre had seen Ingrid Berringer? I decided to stick to the brief remarks Stephen Giles had made less than an hour before.

“The last time was after the wedding. I don’t know what day, but almost immediately after.”

“When did she leave.”

“Very soon.”

“Alone?”

I said with perfect truth, “I didn’t see anyone with her.”

“But did she operate a motorboat, a launch, or was she taken back to Honolulu in a yacht? Ingrid is hardly the sort of girl to operate her own boat. She is a very popular young woman and besides, she would not depend upon her own skill.”

“I gathered that.”

“Then perhaps you will be good enough to tell me why no one knows how she returned to Kaiana from here
... if she did return.
And there is no record of Ingrid’s having come in by inter-island plane from Kaiana to the Honolulu airport on Oahu.”

“Hardly conclusive. There are other ways of reaching Honolulu. She might have gone by ship, you know.”

William Pelhitt interrupted us with unexpected gallantry. “Now, look here, Vic. She’s right. In fact, it’s even possible Ingrid went on to Hong Kong with friends, on a freighter or something. And she mentioned Tahiti once or twice. Remember?”

“Without her passport?”

“What!” I was startled and glanced over at Deirdre. She was interested but certainly was not shocked or alarmed. She had been looking from one to the other of us as if we were talking about some intriguing mystery story whose details were entirely foreign to her. And surely, I hoped, they were! “Without her passport, and some of her clothes.”

“We aren’t sure about the clothes, Vic. I mean, she might have just—not wanted them.”

“Well, we are sure she left her Honolulu apartment without a word to the owners. And don’t tell me she always does these impulsive things, William. She doesn’t strew passports over the globe.”

A door closed somewhere and there were steps in the hall. The servants were probably talking about this odd conference. I heard voices faintly outside the room. Mr. Berringer saw me glance at the door and turned just as it opened and Stephen Giles walked in. He didn’t notice his wife at once but saw Mr. Berringer and me. We were standing in the sunlit sector of the room, obviously arguing.

“What is all this?” Stephen demanded. “Berringer, what the devil are you doing here? I thought it was you when we passed in the channel. I told you my wife was ill and knew nothing about Miss Berringer’s activities. I also told you I didn’t want you hounding the members of my household.”

“Your wife seems perfectly fit. In every respect,” Victor Berringer added, clipping off each word. “She has answers for everything. She is, in fact, almost too well prepared. I expect her to take the Fifth Amendment any minute.”

Stephen was just as authoritative, and had the facts at his disposal. “Then why, may I ask, are you browbeating a total stranger who was two thousand miles from these islands when your daughter visited Honolulu?”

The icy veneer of Victor Berringer cracked a little. In his arrogant, slightly sinister self-confidence, the man had been unshakable. Now he backed away from me, staring. I felt that something had to be said in order to smooth over this awkward moment, yet my real impulse, perhaps resulting from the tension of the last half hour, was to laugh at his absurd mistake. I didn’t though. Instead, I said, “Mr. Berringer, you haven’t given me a chance to introduce myself. I am Mrs. Giles’s aunt and her companion.”

“Am I to understand—” Berringer cleared his throat. “This young woman is
not
Deirdre Cameron Giles?”

Before either Stephen or I could say anything, William Pelhitt yelled in what probably was one of his few chances to top his prospective father-in-law, “Don’t you get it?
That
’
s
the little lady behind the door.”

With all this attention upon her, Deirdre looked as though she wanted to disappear into some other space, preferably to another island. Berringer gazed around the room, clearly expecting to find one more woman who had slipped in while we were talking. He came back at last to Deirdre.

“That child!”

It was a comment even more embarrassing to her husband than to the rest of us. When I knew her as a girl, Deirdre often wore her lustrous chestnut hair in this Alice-in-Wonderland style with a pink ribbon run through it above her forehead and the wispy bangs. Her mini-length dress with the Empire waistline didn’t make her look any more mature either. Since I hadn’t seen her in nearly nine years, I hadn’t noticed the almost frightening discrepancy between Deirdre’s actual age and the age she appeared to be. There was the child’s seeming innocence about her smooth, unlined face, her mouth that was soft and emotional with a child’s changeable emotions—she was quickly hurt, quickly healed.

As Berringer took a step toward her, she screamed and Stephen pushed her behind him.

“My wife is a bit shy. I’ll ask her anything you want to know. Leave it to me and to Miss Cameron.”

I think Victor Berringer was shocked at Deirdre’s reaction to him as much as by her looks. Whatever his manner, he was a civilized man, and this may have been the first time a young woman had ever screamed in fear of him. I found myself almost sorry for him. It was an awkward moment for all of us.

Berringer stopped, glanced at me and at William Pelhitt, then answered Stephen after he had clearly revised what he intended to say.

“You will appreciate my impatience, sir. I have been trying to trace my daughter’s actions since we received our last word from her. That was almost a year ago. You will admit this is a very long time to have no news of a loved one.”

Stephen was obviously moved by this very natural concern. He motioned his guests to chairs and admitted, “I am sorry. I’ve been in the middle of some tough labor negotiations lately, and I am afraid I haven’t—”

Deirdre interrupted in her soft, girlish voice, “But she was like that. She never sent letters. She bragged about it. She never wrote to her father, except when she needed money. She used to laugh when she said it. That’s Ingrid. Sometimes she laughed at me too.”

I may have been the only one who shuddered. But the men shared my feelings, I am certain. I saw the little exchange of looks between William Pelhitt and Mr. Berringer. They understood now that Deirdre and Ingrid hadn’t really gotten along very well. Deirdre gazed at us all now in complete ignorance of any crisis. She had never looked prettier or more charming. Stephen had caught his breath when she spoke out like a thoughtless child. When he responded, he seemed to talk more rapidly than usual, but I didn’t suppose the other two men knew that.

“Deirdre, where did Miss Berringer say she was going when she left here the last time you talked to her?”

“But I didn’t see her then.”

Victor Berringer started to speak to her, then addressed Stephen. It was as if he felt Deirdre were deaf and dumb or an animal, incapable of understanding him.

“If that is the case, how does Mrs. Giles know
when
my daughter last visited the island?”

Deirdre didn’t seem to know what he was insinuating. Both Stephen and I attempted to satisfy Berringer. I said, “Sir, as I understand it, your daughter came over briefly and left when Deirdre sent word that she couldn’t see her.”

Stephen said, “We had been married only a few days before, and we wanted a little privacy.”

Deirdre had at least won over William Pelhitt.

“Very natural, Vic,” he said. “Hadn’t we better pursue this in Honolulu? After all, that’s where she left her things, isn’t it?”

Three of us snatched at this reprieve. Reprieve from what disclosures, I wondered. I was fairly sure Stephen didn’t know either, and we were joined by these little doubts, this uneasiness concerning Deirdre, although none of us had any tangible evidence as yet that would connect her with Ingrid Berringer’s disappearance.

Stephen pursued Pelhitt’s argument. “Suppose we discuss the matter over another drink. Darling, Mr. Yee is waiting to take your orders for dinner. Judith will help you.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead as she stood obediently before him. The two men witnessing this domestic scene avoided my eyes. I led Deirdre out gently with an arm around her waist, and Stephen closed the door.

I was so shaken by the confirmation of my vague fears about Deirdre’s condition that I hardly knew which way to turn. Deirdre pointed ahead of us, thinking about her husband’s instructions.

“The kitchen is through that pantry. Mr. Yee gets so mad when I tell him what to serve—the menus, you know.”

“Just the same, dear, you want to make Stephen a good wife, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes! Yes! Above anything in the whole world, Judy. Didn’t you feel that way about John Eastman?”

It was a long time since I had thought or felt any way about John Eastman, but the subject aroused surprisingly few bitter memories in me. So few, in fact, that I could say now with a high degree of indifference, “I suppose I did once. I was pretty young.”

“Just the same, poor dear, you can’t really know how I feel, because Mr. Eastman might have been good-looking, but he wasn’t sweet and kind and telling you what to do so you didn’t go wrong, like my Stephen. Remember how you used to tell me about my father? He was strong and quick-tempered and red-haired and sort of told a person what to do, and that made life much easier—you know? Unless they tell you what you don’t really want to do.”

I said yes, I knew what she meant. But how could I point out to Deirdre that a husband was not a father and shouldn’t have all the qualities of one? She was asking for trouble in her marriage. I couldn’t believe that Stephen Giles, a virile and attractive man, could settle for this kind of a marriage. The only consolation was that this was still their first year together, and first years were notoriously rough. While I was in the Islands, the most important service I could do for my niece and for Stephen Giles, would be to wake Deirdre up and make her want to be Stephen’s wife, in every sense of the word. She would have to discover in Stephen the man she physically loved, not just a father image.

I reminded myself now that their private life was not my affair, that it was disastrous to interfere in someone else’s marriage. Years ago, I had been exceedingly careful, and had tried to keep mother from preventing my brother’s marriage to Deirdre’s mother. But this was a different situation. Surely, just a hint here and there, a word or two, some slight suggestions couldn’t hurt. Surely, I could help a little! I would just have to be careful so as not to make the mistakes everyone else always makes when trying to “patch up” their friends’ marriages.
I would be different
...