Honolulu Story Page 11

  “Grace darling,” she said. “It isn’t the maids. The phones are all on, the pantry and the hall, the one in Harry’s study and mine. It’s something else, outside—probably a branch across a wire. We’ll report it in the morning.”

  She didn’t come into the room or seem to notice that my “Okay, dear,” came from out on the lanai. She said good night again and closed the door. I didn’t bother to move, as obviously there was no use. It was a stalemate all around—I trusted. I couldn’t move that way and I hoped she realized, being a bright woman, that she couldn’t move the other, with me sitting out there.

  And I sat there until it was light. I was not asleep at any time, and in the overwhelming silence, broken only by the quiet drone of a group of Black Widow night fighters overhead, I would have thought I’d have heard any one coming to the house if they’d come normally at all. And yet the first person I saw as I went around the lanai to breakfast—unwilling and embarrassed after what had happened, I hardly need to say—was Norah Bronson. She was sitting at the table with the Cathers as rigid and unprepossessing as ever, but very obviously a guest who had spent the night and just got up. For an instant I couldn’t believe I was seeing straight.

  “Good morning, Grace—sit right here by Norah.”

  Alice smiled up at me as if nothing at all had ever happened to embarrass either of us remotely and as if Aunt Norah had been there all the time. I couldn’t have been more flabbergasted if Uncle Roy had been there. I looked at Mary. Her face was a little pale and tight but perfectly blank, and her eyes were blank too. There was no visible change in Harry Cather as he put his paper down and smiled good morning to me. Aunt Norah gave me a brisk nod. Kumumato serving from a side table looked precisely as always. The only thing I could think of was that I’d completely lost my mind.

  “You’ll be glad to know I’ve been in touch with Colonel Primrose, Grace,” Alice said, pouring me a cup of fragrant Island coffee. “He’s coming out right away.”

  She looked over at her husband. “I must tell you, Harry,” she said. It couldn’t have been more lightly. “Grace has an idea that there’s somebody locked in the air-raid shelter . . . a spy, or something.”

  Harry Cather, in the act of taking his paper up again, stopped short. The blank look of bewilderment on his face turned slowly into an amused and patient smile that in turn broke into an outright laugh. It wasn’t unkind at all, just amused. I would have felt like a complete fool except that I was sharply aware of Mary’s eyes fixed on me, not blank now but instantly horrified, uncomprehending and accusing at the same time . . . so that I felt not only a fool but a knave too.

  “I’ve told her I thought she’d been around Colonel Primrose too long,” Alice said. “But it’s easy to make sure. I didn’t want to disturb you, Harry. After all, if he’s locked up he can’t get out. That’s certain.”

  Harry Cather smiled again. “I trust he hasn’t drunk up my keg of okolehao. It’s the last one I’ve got. Let me know when you catch him, girls.”

  He went back to his paper.

  Aunt Norah said, “Spies!” and went back to her papaya.

  Mary was trying to go on with hers. Her lids were down and burning along the edges at the roots of her dark amber lashes. Once I saw her give a quick sideways glance from her mother to her aunt, but otherwise she kept her eyes down. Kumumato took my empty glass of pineapple juice and put half a solo papaya in front of me.

  “We’re expecting a colonel, Kumumato,” Alice said. “Let me know as soon as he comes.” She turned her head, listening. “Isn’t that a car coming in? It’s probably him now.”

  She pushed back her chair and got up. She was halfway through the house to the door before the ring of the bell came like a remote and hollow peal of derisive laughter to my particular ears.

  The rest of us got up too. Harry followed into the house. Mary still wasn’t looking at me. As I glanced at her I saw her reach down and pick up, out of the chair she was sitting in, my evening bag. Kumumato went calmly on removing the dishes. Aunt Norah stood over by the rail, looking, I suppose, for termites. A termite hole or any other would have been an elegant place for me at just that point. I could already see, or hear, the pattern, polite and incredulous—“We must do everything possible to relieve your mind, my dear. Mainlanders see a spy behind every hibiscus bush”—that would make me look like a ridiculous idiot to my old friend Colonel Primrose, and of course to Sergeant Buck who had that opinion already.

  Because it really wasn’t necessary to tell me more plainly that Roy Cather was no longer in the air-raid shelter.

  14

  THEY WERE COMING OUT NOW, AND THE voice was the voice of John Primrose but the uniform was the uniform of the Army. My jaw dropped. It was the first time I’d ever seen him in uniform and I hadn’t known he was on active duty. His eagles were bright and shiny new. I looked automatically two paces behind him and there, of course, was Sergeant Buck’s great figure, in uniform too, though he’d never really been out of it in spite of his external raiment. He stood there rock-ribbed, ramrod-spined, lantern-jawed and viscid-eyed, blood brother of the petrified fish as he had always been.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Latham.”

  Colonel Primrose came out on the lanai. His black sparkling X-Ray eyes moved briefly around the group. He shook my hand briefly.

  “They tell me you tried to get in touch with me last night.”

  My jaw had sunk first. Now it was my heart. Something had happened. Maybe it was the uniform, I don’t know. But there was no amused reassuring affection in his face or none of the gentle amused regard I was used to seeing in him in Washington, or wherever I’d called on him when anything alarming happened. It wasn’t Colonel Primrose any more. It was the Army.

  “Well, I did,” I said. It’s hard to explain how unsure I felt. It wasn’t just being made to look ridiculous. It was being made to look hysterical and stupid, a female trouble maker in a war area that has no use for such.

  “I’m afraid there’s not much point in it,” I added feebly.

  Harry Cather relieved the strain momentarily—“This is my sister, Mrs. Bronson, and my daughter Mary”—before he turned to Kumumato. “Bring the key to the shelter, please. The one in the pantry if you’re going down.”

  The house man gave a sort of ducking bow that made him suddenly like a servant again and made me curiously aware, even at such a moment, that usually he wasn’t like one exactly.

  Mary was standing straight and slim, her chin up, her cheeks flushed a little.

  “Don’t go, Kumumato,” she said quietly. “I have the keys to the shelter.”

  I was convinced I was losing my mind then, if I hadn’t already. And everybody stared at her, speechless—even her mother. There wasn’t a flicker that I could see in any face to indicate which one was acting and which was legitimately as astounded as he looked. Colonel Primrose stood there silently.

  Mary opened my bag and reached inside. I knew there wouldn’t be any keys there. I was sure of that. And I was wrong. There were keys there. She brought them out, two of them, and put them down on the table. Harry Cather looked at them and at her, oddly.

  “But . . . those aren’t the shelter keys, Mary.” He frowned a little. “Those are the keys to the front door. The shelter keys are square on top—these are round.” He turned to the house man. “You’ll find them in the usual places, I imagine. Go and get them, both of them, please.”

  Colonel Primrose was looking at Mary, and she was looking at the keys, the red spots in her cheeks fading a little before they suddenly got much brighter again. She looked up at Colonel Primrose.

  “I’m sorry—I thought these were them,” she said. She looked quickly over at me and back at them. “It’s a curious mistake for me to make,” she added calmly. “I don’t see how I ever came to do it.”

  “Suppose we have a look at the shelter,” Colonel Primrose said calmly.

  We went down to it. Mary, walking with me, put her hand on my arm as we came
up to the door. It was closed, but the spray of orchids that had been caught in it wasn’t caught there any more. One spray hung down. The mangled one had been cut off.

  “The door isn’t locked, you see,” Harry Cather said. He looked back at Mary. “You thought you’d locked it?”

  “I must have made a mistake.”

  Harry Cather looked puzzled, but said nothing. He swung the door open and turned on a light at the panel by the door. Colonel Primrose stepped ahead of him.

  “Just a minute, please,” he said. “Buck.”

  He went in. Sergeant Buck, who had been bringing up the rear, did a double-quick forward. He’s a very large man, and was not unlike the camel going through the needle’s eye as he followed inside.

  I waited, feeling indescribably. In a few minutes Colonel Primrose came back to the door.

  “Would you like to come and look for yourselves?”

  He was speaking to Mary and me, excluding the others, I supposed, as not needing to be shown.

  Inside I could see why the young captain had said it was a honey. It was quite literally from soup to nuts—the soup in cans and the macadamia nuts in jars and tinned things in between in the large cupboard at the end of a quite spacious room. There was a small oil cookstove and two couches. Everything needed was there—everything except a shred of visible evidence that it had ever been used by Roy Cather or anybody else. Unless, I thought suddenly, the fact that it was spotless was visible evidence of a negative sort. I’m not much of a housekeeper, but I can tell when a room has recently been cleaned. Even the pillows on the couches were freshly fluffed up.

  Colonel Primrose opened the door of a small washroom. It was empty—and clean. He lifted the woven cover on each sofa. Nobody was under either of them. Nobody was in the radio cabinet, in the knife and fork drawer in the cupboard, or under the edge of the floor mat.

  He looked at Mary and me.

  “Are you satisfied, Mrs. Latham? And you, Miss Cather?”

  Mary nodded. I said, “Quite. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  I was aware of Sergeant Buck, stooping a little to keep his head from denting the concrete ceiling. His fish-gray eyes were fixed on me. It’s the first time I can remember looking at him that his dead pan didn’t turn slowly the brassy color of a tarnished sugar bucket before he looked away—and usually spat to one side as a critical comment that the Articles of War didn’t allow him to express otherwise. I had a grim feeling that he was reviewing those Articles in his mind now, trying to think if they listed the offense of calling out the military on what he calls a wild moose chase as sufficient to indicate a blank wall at sunrise, and what the proper wording of the order to open fire was. And I know he was feeling he’d never have to worry about the altar as a bleak alternative again . . . if he ever had to.

  “If anybody had been here, there’d be some sign of it?” Colonel Primrose asked patiently. “That’s reasonable, isn’t it, Mrs. Latham?”

  “Oh, very,” I said. I took hold of Mary’s arm. “Come along, darling.”

  Sergeant Buck backed against the wall for us to pass. Behind him—I hadn’t noticed it when we came in—was a niche in the concrete wall. In it was a telephone. I caught my breath sharply, remembering the night before and Alice Cather’s desperate cry before she staggered and fell forward in a dead faint in the passage . . . and the four telephone calls around dinner time just after Mary had locked the shelter . . . and Kumumato’s bland assurance it was the wrong number.

  For a split second I stopped. Colonel Primrose stopped behind me. I wanted to turn—but I didn’t. I went on with Mary. If he wanted any help from us he could at least have asked what our side of the story was before he came to the conclusion that we were just a couple of hysterical females seeing things at night. It wasn’t like him, really.

  “Is everything all right, Grace?”

  Alice, standing there with her husband and Aunt Norah, was so instantly sympathetic that I could see the doors of a padded cell at St. Elizabeth’s closing on me.

  I nodded. Just then I felt Mary’s arm in mine tighten. She was looking along the bank where the orchids grew, toward the pool, not the house. Another spray down near the ground was broken off that we’d passed without seeing. There were others too, not broken but bruised. I turned and looked quickly up at the lanai where I’d spent the night. I was about two feet from the bank. I had to move another two feet away from it to see the chaise longue through the redwood railing. Even if it had been a brilliant moonlight night, I could never have seen Roy Cather creep away along the dark shadow of the bank, or any one. And Uncle Roy at least I’d never hear, not jungle-silent as I knew he could be.

  Then it was my arm that tightened on Mary’s. Coming around the bend in the coral road from the back way to the cottage was Swede. He was alone and not in a bathing suit but in uniform, and all properly so and looking curiously businesslike for some reason.

  “Oh, Swede, how nice,” Alice said. “This is Harry’s sister, Mrs. Bronson, Lieutenant Ellicott. Oh, and Colonel Primrose.”

  Swede saluted smartly after speaking to Aunt Norah. Colonel Primrose came forward, his hand out.

  “Hello, Swede,” he said cordially. “I heard you were around. I was supposed to bring you some cigarettes from your father, but I gave them to a needy civilian en route. Be sure to thank him, won’t you? You know the Sergeant.”

  Swede, who knew the Sergeant at least from the time he’d sent a baseball through Colonel Primrose’s window on P Street when he was in school, winked as he returned a salute.

  He turned to Alice. I thought there was something oddly intent about him.

  “I guess this is your air-raid shelter, Mrs. Cather. Mind if I have a look at it?”

  “Not at all,” Alice said. If she was surprised nothing indicated it. I don’t know whether her added remark was malicious. “—Mrs. Latham will probably be glad to show it to you—she’s interested in it too.”

  I said, “Surely.” I didn’t look at Colonel Primrose. The rest of them moved off toward the house, except Mary, who started slowly the other way, by herself, toward the pool.

  Swede had to bend a little too as we went in, through the angled concrete slabs that kept the light from showing outside. He looked around silently for a minute. Then he said, “Neat.”

  “Very,” I said. I added, “I thought you were leaving us.”

  “I was,” he answered. “I decided to stay.”

  Something in his voice made me look at him intently.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He sat down on the couch and looked up at me gravely.

  “That’s what I’d like to know, Grace. Sit down here and tell me, lady. Just what is going on around here?”

  I sat down, but I shook my head.

  “It seems I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Colonel Primrose.”

  “What’s he here for?”

  I didn’t quite know what to say.

  “Because Mary and I think we’re Joan of Arc. We hear voices. We see things in the air.”

  He shot me a look that was as abrupt as his questions had been.

  “Yeah? Did you see who was in here last night, by any chance?”

  His light blue eyes were hard. And I was getting more and more puzzled momentarily.

  “Nobody,” I said. “That’s official. Look around for yourself.”

  He did look around.

  “Somebody was here, Grace,” he said evenly. “And I’m going to find out who it was if it hurts somebody.”

  “What makes you think so?” I asked. “I mean, that there was somebody here?”

  “A friend of mine told me so.” He got up. “Is there a phone?”

  I pointed over at the niche in the wall.

  “Then it was straight dope.” He said it more to himself than to me, as if he hadn’t entirely believed it before that. “—This friend of mine got a call to come up here . . .”

  I looked at him, understanding a little—or probably it w
ould be better to say, thinking I understood a little.

  “Friend named Corinne?” I asked.

  The color came up from his tan shirt collar and stopped somewhere midway to his thick blond hair.

  “It doesn’t matter what the name is,” he said curtly. “I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Why not ask her?”

  “She doesn’t know anything more about it than I do. She just got a call to come up here and get him out of this fancy dump.”

  “—And did she?” I asked.

  “No. It was locked up tight as a bank vault.”

  “And she didn’t tell you who he was?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “She doesn’t want to make trouble for the Cathers, so she wouldn’t tell me his name. She told me something about him. He’s a guy that’s been sick quite a long time. He helped her father and mother, and the Cathers have done him out of quite a lot of money. He came to try to collect, and this is what happens to him.”

  He looked around the shelter again, and I looked at him, trying to figure out things myself.

  “What is your interest in it, Swede?”

  “I’m interested because Corinne asked me to keep an eye out for the old fellow,” he said simply. “She doesn’t seem to think he’s very safe up here, among the mountain lions. If he’s got money, or if he had it, she’s probably got something. Our hostess seems to have an exaggerated idea of its importance. It wasn’t till she discovered my aunt’s money was going some place else that she decided I wasn’t good enough for her charming daughter.”

  The sudden bitterness in his voice was disturbing. It would have been folly to try to tell him anything else just then.

  “That was the way she wrecked Corinne’s marriage to poor old Ben,” he went on. He was speaking with a kind of determined brutality about him that wasn’t like him, as I remembered, at all. “Ben was nuts about Mary too. He got over it out here and married Corinne . . . and right away our lady friend wrote him that Mary wasn’t going to marry me after all. Ben wasn’t himself, I guess—anyway, he blew his top and treated Corinne like a dog and went out and got himself a hunk of lead first crack out of the box. He wrote her he wouldn’t come back. It was a tough deal for her, poor kid. Oh, well, what the hell . . . that’s water under the bridge. But this deal doesn’t look so good to me either, Grace. That’s why I stayed up. I’ve got an old bone to pick with your friend Mrs. Cather, lady.”