Domino. Part 18

There could be no more postponement.

No one seemed to be around when I went down the hallway 206.

to the rear parlor and turned the k.n.o.b. Gail had not locked the room again. Perhaps she wanted to tempt me into doing exactly what I was doing now, though I wasn't sure why.

The room was as dark and stuffy as I remembered, but this time I didn't mean to rely on dim wall lights. I went to a French door that opened onto the porch. Its dark red draperies hung almost solid with dust and cobwebs, and I held my breath and closed my eyes as I pulled them open. The p.r.i.c.kle of dust touched my face, and I sneezed twice.

Flooded with sunlight, the room seemed less grim, less threatening, and it also seemed a great deal more dingy and dirty. Now I could see those footprints in the dust more clearly, and knew that some of them were mine. The others that I had noted earlier were still there, but they didn't matter to me now. Only one thing mattered-the box that waited for me on the rosewood table.

Until this moment I had moved with a fine deliberation, allowing no hesitation, no delay. But now my steps slowed as I approached the table and stood before it, unable to bring myself to the point of raising the lid. Which, I told myself, was ridiculous. What could the contents of a box seen through the eyes of a child matter to me now? Certainly I mustn't allow my own imagination to frighten me into inaction. Not when I had come this far.

Nevertheless, I managed one more delay for myself. The light from the window, from the wall sconces, didn't seem enough. I wanted to banish every last shadow, and I crossed the room to touch another switch. The chandelier, less elaborate than the one in the front parlor, blazed on, its lights s.h.i.+mmering through cobweb lace, driving all traces of haunted darkness from the room. The radiance was disturbing, but I knew I must face down my own fear of light that dazzled.

I reached for the dusty mahogany box that bore several fingerprints someone else had recently left on the wood and 207.

raised the bra.s.s catches. The lid came up easily, revealing red velvet within. Red velvet, against which a single silvery object shone in the electric light. It was a small blunt-nosed gun, embossed in silver that had not completely tarnished, closed away as it had been from the air. The gun was still bright enough to catch the light and reflect it. There were other small objects in the box as well, each in its own nested compartment: a leather powder flask, a small collection of bullets, a box for percussion caps. And there was one larger, empty compartment, twin to the one that held the gun. All this I seemed to recognize in a flash, because I knew the interior of this box very well.

A trembling had begun deep inside me as the old sense of spinning started in my brain. I was whirling, whirling into oblivion, being tossed into a place where I could not think or feel or remember. But this time I fought the sensation, refused to give way to it, resisted with all the will left in me. There was a terrible moment when everything seemed to fly apart inside my head.

It was as though I could hear the amplified explosion of a gun going off in this room, echoing down through time. I could hear the dreadful impact of a bullet on flesh, see the dazzle of light on the gun. And the blood-spurting.

A voice belonging to the present reached me from the doorway. Dimly I recognized that Gail was speaking to me.

"You remember now, don't you, Laurie? Why not pick up that deringer? Pick it up and hold it the way you did that other time. Put your finger on the trigger and pull. Go ahead-fire it. You want to, don't you?"

There was no reality for me in the present. I was back in another time, and I reached for the small gun as though I couldn't help myself. I could hear the screaming, hear someone shouting. And I could still see the blood. Because I had fired li 208.

the gun. It was I who had picked up this s.h.i.+ning deadly little weapon and pointed it, firing.

My hand held the real gun now, and my forefinger was on its trigger, ready to pull.

"You're remembering, aren't you?" Gail was close beside me, whispering almost in my ear. "What they've told me is true. It was you who fired that gun. You killed your father, didn't you?"

Someone else came in behind us, someone spoke to me. I knew it was Hillary, but he belonged to a future time, and I was in the past and could make no contact with him. I raised the small weapon at shadowy figures that struggled in the room, and I would have pulled the trigger, but Hillary took the gun quickly from my hand.

The floor seemed to heave and rise toward me, and he caught me when I fell. This time there was a true blanking out, and I was conscious of nothing until I opened my eyes to find that I lay on the sofa in the front parlor and Gail was holding ammonia salts to my nose. Hillary stood behind her, concerned and visibly shaken.

Caleb had come in too, and his voice penetrated my haze. "Lie still, Laurie. Don't try to get up. You should never have gone in there. Gail, you should have stopped her."

I gasped for breath from the fumes, and Gail corked the little bottle and stood up. "How could I possibly stop her? I didn't know she was there until-"

"You knew," Caleb said.

"I'm all right," I told him. "Don't fuss."

"Lie still," he repeated as I tried to sit up, but I heard no sympathy in his voice Dizziness shook rne again, and Hillary propped another cus.h.i.+on under my head. "You're all right now," he a.s.sured me. "Take it easy, Laurie. It's over, so just rest and collect yourself."

JJU.

I paid no attention. "I can remember firing that gun! I remember someone screaming. And most of all, I remember the blood."

Caleb spoke sharply to Gail. "Can't you do something? Make her some hot tea. Anything!"

As she went off, he thrust Hillary aside and drew a chair near my sofa. He looked a little gray as he spoke to me.

"Your grandmother and I both hoped that you might never remember, never need to know."

"Just tell me all of it," I pleaded. "Don't hold anything back." I could control my voice a little better now, and in spite of the horror it was as though I had walked through a dark curtain into daylight. No matter how terrible the scenes were in this new place, I must find the strength to face them. Daylight was better than dark. I repeated my words. "Please tell me."

Caleb left his chair abruptly, moving about the room, driven by his own inner tensions, not responding to mine.

Hillary came and took my hand. "It's all right," he a.s.sured me again. "Just rest now. You've had a shock." His voice, too, sounded strained. Because he was seeing me with new eyes?

I spoke to Caleb. "I must know the rest. You have to tell me all of it now."

He stopped his pacing and sat down again, making up his mind. "Very well. If that's the way you want it. I'll tell you what little I know. I came into the room just after it happened. Only the day before, your grandmother had been telling you for the dozenth time the story of those two deringers, and how they had belonged to your great-grandfather, Malcolm Tremayne. That he was supposed to have shot a man with one of them. For honor and chivalry, of course. She always made those stories romantic when she told them."

"There is only one gun in the box," I said dully.

"Wait-just let me go on. For some time Mrs. Morgan had been teaching you to shoot with modern guns, in spite of your 21O.

parents' objections. She felt that any girl who grew up on a ranch should understand about guns. So she taught you when you were very young, just as her father had taught her. Richard and Marybeth didn't like it at all, but they could never do a thing with Persis Morgan. Of course she didn't teach you with the deringers. You were forbidden to touch them unless she was present. However, because they were curiosities, with their old-fas.h.i.+oned muzzle-loading, she showed you how it was done, never dreaming you might experiment for yourself."

I drew my hand from Hillary's. I could remember much more clearly now-remember the forbidden excitement of trying to load the little guns. There had been two of them in the box. I knew how to use the powder from the flask, ram in the bullet that I'd wadded in a bit of cloth so it wouldn't roll out, and set the percussion cap. I could remember hiding behind the sofa in the back parlor with one of the guns I'd loaded in my hand. I was supposed to be upstairs in bed with a cold, but it had been more interesting to hide in the back parlor and watch my mother with that man I didn't like. And then my father had come in and the men had started to fight.

Caleb's voice jarred me back into the present again as he went on bluntly, not sparing me now. "You must have been sitting on the floor behind the sofa, playing with those guns. Apparently you'd managed to load one of them yourself, and when Noah Armand came into the room you stood up to see what was happening. That was when Richard and your grandmother and I came home ahead of time. Mrs. Morgan stopped on the porch to talk with me, but Richard went inside. I suppose he saw Marybeth's suitcases at the foot of the stairs and he heard voices in the back parlor.

"He rushed in and attacked Noah with his fists. You must have thought that your father was in danger, and you pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. It was Richard who fell, fatally 211.

shot. Deringers were never any good at a distance, but pointblank they killed."

I was sitting up now, listening tensely, and I covered mn, face with my hands. Caleb's voice went on.

"Mrs. Morgan got there before I did. In fact, I was out in the yard at the time I heard the shot and rushed back into the house. She was in time to see Noah go out one of those French doors. Marybeth was kneeling beside Richard, sobbing, while ou stood there with that deringer in your hand and Hack powder all over you."

Horror seemed to flow through me in a burning tide. Hillary put an arm about me, and I tried to steady myself. I still kad to hear the rest.

"Go on," I said.

Caleb sighed. "There's not much more. Mrs. Morgan took charge of the gun that had been fired and she washed you free of black traces. She never spoke to Marybeth again, except to tell her what she must say to the police. Between us we concocted that story of the intruder, and she took several pietes of jewelry from her case and put them into a box to be hidden away. No one must ever know that Noah came back to the house, or that you, Laurie, fired that gun. No one must guess that Noah came back to run off with Marybeth."

"What did Noah do?"

"He took off at once, and he's not been heard from since. Before Mrs. Morgan called the police, I remember we stood at the foot of the stairs, away from the horror in the parlor. I remember her thinking out loud. Once she suggested that I take Richard's body to the mine in order to pretend that he'd had a fall that might have killed him. But of course she knew that wouldn't work-the wound was too evident. There was nly one servant in the house at the time, and she was ld and deaf, and had been upstairs in her room lying dovn. So she knew nothing. She was roused only to take care of 212.

Marybeth and put her to bed. From the beginning your grandmother insisted that you were to be protected at all costs, and that no scandal was to touch the Morgan name."

His dry, controlled tones told me that he spoke out of old abhorrence for that child, Laurie Morgan. For what a long time he must have detested me, and how much he must have hated my return!

I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes, shutting both men away. I knew now why I felt that front hall was a place that frightened me. I remembered where I had been-sitting at the top of the stairs, listening and terrified, while they stood in the hallway below and my grandmother planned aloud. I must not have understood much of what was happening. Their talk about riding out to the mine with my father meant only one thing to me. For some reason my imagination made a leap into the belief that they were taking him there to die. This idea had totally possessed me, and had given me something I must do. Later I had understood well enough that he was dead-but not then.

I must have gone out to the barn for my pony. I rode him bareback up the valley, driven by a need to get to the mine to my father. Jon saw me go and came after me. He found me when I fell off my pony, and he brought me back. I had a vague memory of my mother pus.h.i.+ng everyone aside and getting up to nurse me. And after that-nothing. Only delirium that mercifully shut out reality and kept me from remembering what I had done.

Until now.

Gail came with a tray and a pot of tea and offered me a sedative. I shook my head. I didn't want to weaken myself with any more oblivion. The honeyed tea was hot and strengthening, and I tried to pull myself together. I must begin living again, moment by moment. My mind was working now, turning over details that were safe to think about, sidestepping the 213.

rest until I could face all of it. I wasn't quite ready to face the full, terrible reality yet.

"What became of the other deringer?"

Caleb was tiring of my questions. "We don't know. It disappeared at the time. Perhaps your grandmother knows."

It didn't matter. Only the one that fired the shot mattered. The one I had held. But I had to go on questioning.

"What about the jewels?"

"I disposed of them as your grandmother directed," Caleb said. "They had to be put where the police wouldn't find them. They had to be missing."

"Where did you hide them?" Gail asked.

"That's for Mrs. Morgan to say."

Hillary turned from the window, and I saw how shaken he still looked. Perhaps I could understand why. In real life Hillary was always the spectator. On a stage he might live vicariously, with the intensity of an actor. He could step into someone else's skin and pretend another's emotions while he played a role. But he wasn't accustomed to the raw primary colors of what must now involve him through me. Life had been thrown at him, and he found himself suddenly without a role to play.

"You needn't stay with me, Hillary," I said. "I'll be all right now."

"Of course I'll stay. I'll stay as long as you need me."

The strange and not altogether welcome fact was that right now I didn't seem to need him at all. After that first moment of realization I had been fighting to recover my own strength.

By the time I finished the tea, the world had steadied around me. I was no longer dizzy and trembling. The old sense of spinning wildly into oblivion was gone. The cure for that had been effected-but at what cost! To live for the rest of my life ith the knowledge that I had killed my father! How was I to live with that knowledge? I hadn't been able to live with it, of 214.

course. All my life up to this point had been spent in trying to escape this very fact.

Caleb, having opened the sluice gates, was running on in his careful voice that must have so long hidden his own anger and pain. He was hardly the unemotional man I had imagined, but only strongly in control of his feelings.

"When everything had died down and the police were through, your grandmother closed the back parlor and kept it locked. I think if she could have burned it out of the house, that's what she would have done. It was never to be touched, and she grew almost superst.i.tious about that. As though all the lies that had been told for the sake of preventing scandal and further damage to your mother and you, and of course to the Morgan name, could be locked into the room and never allowed to escape."

"Damage to the Morgan name," I repeated. "That was important, wasn't it?"

"It still is. That's what she has held onto with all her might, along with the land and the houses here and in Domino."

Yes. I'd seen that in her-the ironclad pride.

"She has protected you, Laurie."

"But now it's all escaped, hasn't it? It's all gotten out of hand!"

"Nothing is out of hand yet."

"Perhaps it is if Mark Ingram knows. Do you think this is what he's holding over my grandmother's head?"

"I don't know," Caleb said dully. "But I do know that he's dangerous and vindictive. He's carrying some sort of grudge. That's why I've wanted your grandmother to move out and not try to fight him. Your coming here hasn't helped."

My brief suspicion that Persis Morgan might have done the shooting had been exploded. Guilt was in the open nowwhere it belonged. A child's guilt, but guilt nevertheless.

What was I to say to my grandmother when next I saw her?

What could I say, now that I knew everything? It no longer seemed strange or cruel that she had never written letters, never claimed me as her granddaughter. Until she needed me badly. I felt increasingly devastated by all the ramifications that were still coming clear. There was too much for me to grasp all at once, yet somehow I must find the courage to face what had happened.

For one thing, I must face the memory of my mother. If she had blamed me-as she must often have done through the years-I, too, could blame her. I could still remember occasions when she had looked at me strangely, waiting perhaps to see what I could recall. No wonder she had wept, no wonder she had been sad. Had she waited, hoping for Noah's return? It might have been better for us both if she had tried to make a new life for herself, leaving Jasper behind. Instead Jasper and its terrible events must always have been with her, and most of all her own guilt, her betrayal of my father, which had precipitated the tragedy. I was the product of those years.

With an effort I stood up and found that I was steady enough on my feet. All I wanted now was to escape from this house for a little while-escape them all. I needed to get away where I could lick my new wounds and try to recover my bearings, find my way.

Caleb had apparently endured enough, and he had quietly left the room. Gail was still there, and she had listened almost avidly. Now that I stood up, she started toward the door.

"If I'm not needed, I'll get back upstairs to Mrs. Morgan. She's not feeling well this morning, and she shouldn't be left alone."

I remembered vaguely that something should be done about Gail, but this was not the time. Now I must ask her something else.

"Wait," I said, and she turned. "Please don't tell her what 2l6 has happened. I'd like to tell her myself when she's able to see me."

Gail shrugged and went off. Only Hillary was left.

He came quickly to put his arms about me. "I'll stay with you until you're feeling better."

I didn't want him here with me now, and I couldn't help that.

"I need to be by myself for a little while," I told him.

He touched my cheek lightly. "You must forgive yourself. Others who were older brought this about. They are the ones who should be punished. Not you."

I could only remember that my hand had held the gun, my finger had pulled the trigger.

"Laurie," he said, and there was a slightly grim note in his voice, "I do understand what you're feeling-a little. Remember, I lost my father too."

But I had no pity in me now for anyone else's loss.

"I'll be all right," I said.

He walked with me to the foot of the stairs and let me go when I started up. I had the feeling that in spite of his protestations he wanted to get away. When his high moods evaporated, I knew he could become extremely depressed. Just now we both needed to be apart.

In my room I lay on the bed with my eyes closed and tried to let everything slip away. What had happened couldn't be easily a.s.similated and accepted in all its terrible reality. The word Gail had flung at me on my first day in this house was still ringing through my mind. Too large a word for me to face and understand: Murder. Murder directed at my father. By me.

I don't know how long I lay there trying only to empty my mind. When the knock came on my door, it startled me. Before I could answer, Caleb called to me.

"Laurie, I have word of your dog."