The Secret of the Sand Castle (4 page)

BOOK: The Secret of the Sand Castle
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searching their faces curiously.

“Remember, Irene, we behaved like that when we went to New York for the first time. Pauline invited us—”

Irene giggled. “And you crammed poor Blackberry into your hat box so the bus driver wouldn’t object to him.”

“Yes, and we met Dale Meredith,” Pauline put in.

“If he hadn’t fallen in love with you at first sight, Irene, I might have been interested in him myself.”

“You
were
interested, and so was I,” Judy reminded her, giggling.

“Not really. You had Peter.”

“That’s the trouble,” Flo put in. “All the really nice men are married. If we were going over to Fire Island in the summer we might meet someone, but at this time of year all the cottages will be empty. It will be like a ghost town.”

“It will be spooky, won’t it?” Pauline asked.

“Cold, too. Will there be any wood to build a fire?”

“Driftwood,” Irene said. “There’s electricity for cooking. It isn’t as primitive as it sounds. Anyway, not in the summer. We won’t stay long. The boat comes back at five o’clock.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. I used to watch it every day from the tower room.”

Judy smiled. She might have known the Sand 28

Castle would have a tower room. She could hardly wait to see it.

After several more stops they reached Babylon.

Judy turned to Pauline when they were out of the train. “What was it you were predicting about Dale?”

“That he wouldn’t be here—”

“Well, you were wrong,” Irene interrupted.

“There he is! You see, Pauline, authors aren’t always off on cloud nine. Dale is pretty dependable.

Just put down your suitcase, Judy, he’ll carry it.” Dale greeted the girls with his usual detached air.

Picking up Judy’s suitcase and the smaller bags, he led the girls to the car. Soon he had made Judy comfortable between himself and Irene in the front seat. Little Judy, sound asleep, was taking up most of the room in back. Pauline and Flo sat on the edge of the seat so as not to awaken her.

“Isn’t she an angel?” Judy whispered, looking around at the sleeping three-year-old.

“Yes, when she’s asleep,” Dale agreed wryly.

“Oh dear! Did you have trouble with her?” Irene asked.

“Did I!” Dale exclaimed. “She remembers Fire Island from last summer and cried herself to sleep begging to go there. I finally had to give in.”

“But we said—”

“I know. We said it would be too cold for her, 29

and so it would on most November days, but have you noticed how sunny and warm it is today?” Dale asked. “If you had ordered the weather yourselves it couldn’t be any better. So take her along, but don’t, whatever you do, miss the boat back. Weather like this can’t last.”

With this dire prediction, he started the car and, in almost no time, they were turning off the highway onto the street that ended at the pier. Beyond were the dark blue waters of Great South Bay, as still as a mountain lake, with Fire Island appearing as little more than a cloud on the far horizon.

The boat that plied from the mainland to Fire Island was a small craft, painted a sort of dingy white with large black letters along her bow proclaiming that she was the
Island Queen.

Dale helped the four girls aboard and then held out his arms for little Judy. Wide awake now, she hugged her daddy and then ran off to explore the boat. The few passengers were not as interesting to her as the many trunks, suitcases, and boxes being loaded on the lower deck.

“Look at all the cookies!” she exclaimed, pointing to one box.

“Provisions,” Irene said. “Quite a few people live on the island the year around.”

“How lonely it must be during the winter months!” exclaimed Judy. “Dry Brook Hollow is 30

lonely enough in cold weather. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t get out in the car.”

“You couldn’t—not over there. They don’t allow passenger cars on Fire Island,” Flo pointed out.

Judy looked at her quizzically. “You’ve made this trip before, haven’t you?” she questioned.

“Not me, though I’ve often thought about it. I begged to go one summer, but my father was against it. I can guess why,” Flo added. “He met my mother when they were both vacationing on Fire Island. She says it’s changed.”

“Of course it has,” Dale agreed. “It changes every year when the summer people leave.”

“Off season, the natives call it.” Irene laughed and explained herself. “You know, the people who live over there the year around.”

“Is all this cargo for them? How do they carry it up to the cottages?” Pauline wanted to know.

“You’ll see.” Irene smiled as if they would see a great many unexpected things.

A sharp toot of the boat whistle told Dale it was time for him to go ashore. Minutes afterwards the
Island Queen
moved out from the dock into the un-ruffled waters of Great South Bay.

“I knew it would be like this,” breathed Flo, looking out across the water.

“How beautiful it all is,” agreed Judy as the boat glided onward. “The sea and sky seem to meet.

31

Irene, your Sand Castle must be a castle in the air.”

“No, those aren’t clouds. You can see there’s land out there when we come nearer.”

“Just smell the salt air!” exclaimed Flo, taking deep breaths of it.

“Bracing, isn’t it?” asked Pauline.

“Are we going to be there pretty soon? I want to dig in the sand,” cried little Judy.

“We’ll both dig for treasure,” Judy promised her.

“Did you know there were two houses buried in the sand, one on either side of the Sand Castle? Maybe, if we dig deep enough, we can find one of them.”

“Really?” Little Judy’s eyes were big. “Could we really dig up a whole house, Mommy?”

“Of course we couldn’t. They were flattened by the storm,” Irene told her.

“Will our house get fattened?”

“Flattened,” Irene corrected her, laughing. “Of course it won’t. There hasn’t been a storm like that for thirty years.”

“You see how clear it is today,” Flo pointed out.

“The sky is as blue as your eyes, with just one little white cloud.”

“Is it a storm cloud?”

“I hope not,” Flo answered a little apprehensively. “I want to do some digging myself and I can’t very well do it in a storm.”

“Will it be a hurricame?”

32

Again Irene laughed and corrected her, but the idea of an impending storm could not be erased from little Judy’s mind. Judy tried changing the subject.

“I’m eager to see the Sand Castle,” she said.

“Why do you call it that?”

“ ‘Sand Castle’ is the name printed over the door,” Irene replied. “All the cottages have names.”

“Will most of them be empty?”

“I’m afraid so. They do look lonely out there,” Irene admitted as they came nearer. “That’s Saltaire out toward the lighthouse. We dock at Fair Harbor.”

“I don’t see any lighthouse. Where is it?” asked Judy.

Irene tried to point it out, but just then the boat turned and headed for a gray line that took shape and became a dock. Two people were waiting there, one a woman in black who seemed to melt into the shadows as the boat approached.

“Look!” exclaimed Judy, but the others had not seen her.

The second person was a man who helped with the lines. When they were securely fastened to a post on the dock the captain of the
Island Queen
thanked him and turned to assist the passengers off the boat. He seemed to know most of them.

“Better watch that little girl of yours,” he cautioned Irene. “Weather like this is treacherous, not like it is in summer. You stayin’ awhile?” 33

“Yes, at the Sand Castle,” Irene told him.

“Good enough! You’ll find your wagon on the dock.” He waved his hand toward a group of wagons no bigger than children’s toys. Judy stared at them in amazement.

“Is this what they use over here in place of cars?” Irene laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I guess they do.”

“I want a ride,” announced little Judy as soon as the wagon marked “Sand Castle” was brought out and loaded with the bags and the suitcase.

She climbed in and the girls covered her with their extra coats and pulled her, first along a cement walk and then along a narrower walk made of boards. The rattling of the wagon wheels and the empty look of all the cottages they passed gave Judy a premonition of trouble.

“You were right,” she said to Flo, “it is like enter-ing a ghost town.”

34

CHAPTER V
The Sand Castle

THE girls took turns pulling the wagon across the narrow island. Although it must have been all of thirty miles long, Fire Island was less than half a mile from the bay side to the ocean beach. Nobody minded walking. There was so much to see.

It seemed strange that a town the size of Fair Harbor should have no streets at all, just walks between the cottages. Many of them were boarded up for the winter. Others were simply locked or shuttered. No people were to be seen inside or near the shuttered houses, and Judy began to think she had only imagined that woman at the dock.

“Everything looks so bare,” she commented half to herself.

A few yards had shrubs planted in the sandy soil or little gardens marked with rows of shells. In the summer Irene said there were wild roses and beach sweet peas, all growing low on the ground. Tufts of 35

grass and clumps of gray Dusty Miller poked their way up through the sand. In most yards there was sand and nothing else.

Soon they came to a sign that said
Birch Walk.

All the walks were named after trees although there were few trees in sight. Most of these were scrub pines twisted into grotesque shapes that almost could deceive a person into thinking they were people.

“How much farther is it?” Pauline asked finally.

Irene assured her that they were nearly there. The cottages nearer the beach were low and colorfully painted, many with decks all the way around them and each with its own sign. Judy knew the Sand Castle the moment she saw it.

“Oh, there it is!” she exclaimed. “I can tell by the tower. Did you rent it because it made you think of Tower House?”

“Partly,” Irene admitted, a shadow crossing her face.

Tower House had been her home in the old Parkville section of Brooklyn. But it had gone the way of other old houses and a new apartment building had taken its place. Irene’s present home in suburban Long Island had nothing of the old haunted look of Tower House but, somehow, this cottage had.

It was squarely built, like a ship, and stood there, 36

high and lonely. The sand dunes on either side of it gave silent testimony to the fact that other cottages had not been strong enough to withstand the hurricanes that had swept the island.

“How old is it?” Judy asked.

“Forty, maybe fifty years old. The Terrys had it custom built before any of these other houses were here. It used to stand on posts,” Irene pointed out,

“but the sand has covered them.”

“Just the way it did those buried cottages,” Flo put in. “I hope we don’t meet that woman in black who comes back to dig for her jewels.”

“I thought I saw someone at the dock,” Judy began.

“A ghost, no doubt. We hoped you’d see one.

Somehow, you always manage to call them forth from wherever they’re hiding,” Pauline teased her.

“Seriously, this woman is supposed to be dead,” Irene said in a lower voice. “She died of a broken heart, they say, after her husband was sent to prison.

He robbed a bank or something. You must know about it, Flo. Weren’t they your relatives?”

“I wouldn’t own them if they were,” Flo declared.

“Who wants to be related to a bank robber?”

“I may have it a little twisted,” Irene admitted.

“Mrs. Hatch says the story has grown a lot in the telling and I shouldn’t repeat it.”

“She must be something of a gossip herself or she 37

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BOOK: The Secret of the Sand Castle
7.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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