Season of Storm (33 page)

"Like to do a single of it?" he asked Cimarron.

Smith merely blinked. Things were moving so fast around her that sometimes she had to remind herself to breathe. Two hours ago she and Lew had been sitting side by side at the piano, singing the song to Mel. "Okay," he had said, "we've got a song." And then he told them about the singer he was grooming. "She doesn't write enough of her own stuff," he said. "We're putting an album together. I want Cimarron to hear this. I'd like to use it on the album."

She had never dreamed it would happen like this. If she'd had time to think about the possible fate of her song she might have imagined they would send it off to an established singer and wait months or years to hear anything.

So Cimarron had been summoned and had listened to the song; and now she had sung it and electrified them all.

Cimarron looked intently at Mel. "Yes, can I? A single now, and then if it goes, maybe the title song on the album?" She and Mel exchanged a grin. "It's perfect," she said. "Thanks." She looked at Smith and Lew. "It's dynamite."

The song had changed from that morning Shulamith had written it. She had heard that formless music in her head as she wrote, but Lew's music, very different, had brought the words alive. It was as though he looked at the song from an entirely different angle. She had adjusted her lyrics to suit the angle of his vision, feeling that odd perfection that collaboration sometimes gives—as though his music, his slant, were giving her a clearer view of what the song was meant to be.

And now Cimarron King was throwing the light of her interpretation on it, making the vision even clearer. Shulamith was surprised at how much a singer could affect a song. "Do you want me to change anything?" Smith asked now. "If there's a lyric you're not comfortable with. . .."

Cimarron laughed her smoky laugh. "Look," she said, "don't worry about this song. It's great. Just write me another, okay? Write two more—write ten!"

Thirty

"And a strange development," said the news announcer over the car radio as Smith drove toward the hospital, "in the St. John heiress no-kidnapping kidnap case: last night police searched the island home of well-known Vancouver architect Johnny Winterhawk and took Wilfred Tall Tree, a member of the Chopa tribe who lives on the island, into custody.  Tall Tree was admitted to the Royal Georgia Hospital last night five hours after his arrest. A police spokesman said that Mr. Tall Tree, age 76, was found unconscious in his cell.

"Mr. Winterhawk, whose home was extensively searched last night, and who accuses police of removing some property during the search, is the controversial architect who designed the new West Coast Cultural Centre. Photographs of the apparent aftermath of the search of his home in the Gulf Islands are appearing in the city's newspapers this afternoon.

"Mr. Winterhawk says he is looking into the possibility of pressing charges against police under the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Police apparently searched his home under the power of a writ of assistance, a type of arbitrary search warrant which is rarely used nowadays and which has been under fire from civil liberties groups.

"A police spokesman said that the alleged kidnapping of the lumber baron's daughter was still very much under investigation. The only article, apart from papers, seized from Mr. Winterhawk's home, the spokesman said, was a woman's bathrobe."

Smith nearly went off the road. As soon as she could she got out of the stream of traffic and pulled into a no stopping zone. She sat trying to think until a traffic warden pulled up behind her, and then she moved back into traffic, changed her course and drove home. But her ideas were no clearer than before. What did Johnny expect her to do now? What could she do?

The phone, of course, was ringing when she got home—the first of many journalists who wanted her version of events. She answered two questions repeatedly: she had not been kidnapped, and the robe was not hers.

Was there some reason she might have publicly denied being kidnapped, while secretly telling police otherwise? she was asked by one.

"No reason at all," said Smith. "I have consistently and repeatedly told the police that I was not kidnapped."

"Do you know Johnny Winterhawk?"

"Sorry, no comment."

"Do you know why the police are connecting him with your disappearance?"

"I did not disappear...."

When she could hang up the phone without its instantly ringing again, she called her father.

"Are you snowed under with reporters?" she asked him icily.

"Not anymore," he said.

"You mean, not yet," she told him, the fact that her father had been left in peace making her even angrier.

''What's happened?"

"You'll see," she said. "Or maybe you won't. You probably qualify for the Blind Man of the Year Award. If my homicidal rage cools down you may see me."

"Good." said her father. "I've been—"

"But don't hold your breath."

***

On Friday she cleared out her office at the St. John's Wood head office. Her goodbyes were anticlimactic: she had only been back a few weeks and hadn't found her niche yet. But her secretary stood at the door and watched her pack up sadly.

"I'm sorry you're going," Maia said wistfully.

Maia had been upgraded from the typing pool, and Smith realized guiltily that now she would be going back. "I'm sorry. Does this mean you'll take a drop in salary?"

"I don't know about that," answered the young woman, who was shy, but a very sharp worker, "but I'm going to miss you. People say it's horrible working for a woman, but it's not. I really liked working for you."

Smith smiled, remembering her first week back, when she had handed Maia a cluster of tapes and notes she had made abroad—a complex collection of field reports and market evaluations that required cross-referencing and indexing and a great deal of concentration. She had come back from lunch to find the secretary bent over her typewriter in tears. "And it's too complicated, and I'm too stupid." Maia's distress had been mostly incoherent, but at last she had lifted her head out of her Kleenex. "And besides," she had wailed, "I've got my period!" Not the sort of thing you could confess to a male boss, Smith reflected now; or at least, not without risking his using it against you in future. She wondered mildly if it was that incident that had convinced Maia of the advantages of having a female boss and ensured her loyalty.

Three copies of the completed report, spiral bound, colour-tabulated and impressive looking, were on her desk now, mute testimony to Maia's competence. She had finished it during Smith's absence, and Smith's last act as executive in her father's company would be to deliver the report to Rolly.

"Good grief," said Rolly, when he saw the three-inch-thick report. "Didn't you take any time off to enjoy the sights over there?"

"Not as much as I wish now," Smith said. All her experience of overseas markets would be wasted in her new job, but a little more attention to Europe's art and history would certainly have enriched her creativity.

"Is this your last day?"

"My last hour. Minute."

"What are you going to do, or do you know yet?"

"Song writing." She smiled. "And poetry. I intend to be a major addition to popular music, if not to Can Lit."

"Well, we won't lose touch, will we? You'll be dropping in on Valerie?"

"Of course," she said. "Give her my love—and the twins, too. Tell her I'll call her if she doesn't call me." At the door she stopped, struck by a sudden thought.

"Rolly—I never asked you. Why didn't you ever tell the police about that phone call?" She turned, and his face was blank with surprise.

"What phone call?"

"When I was away on that trip I called you one afternoon, and then I changed my mind and hung up. Just as you answered. The police never mentioned it to me afterward."

Rolly shook his head. "Sure you had the right number? I don't remember—or wait! Was that
you
? I thought that was Valerie, thought there was a problem with the babies. I phoned her and asked her if she'd called—one night just as I was about to leave the office."
 

Then he goggled at her. "My God," he said softly. "Were you calling me for help? I didn't even think of you that day! I—"

Great. Nothing like starting up another hare herself. "No, no, Rolly," she said hastily. "I was calling to ask how Valerie was, because I'd forgotten to tell her I was going to be away, and it took an age to get through, and by the time I did, everyone was ready to leave. That's all." She was babbling, and he was staring at her as if he knew she was lying.

"Tell Valerie I'll be around to see her soon, okay?" She smiled and opened the door. "Oh, and listen—it's been great working with you!"

And that was it. The company around which her life had revolved for eight years moved out of her consciousness as easily as that: she closed her office door and, carrying a heavy briefcase, walked down the hall, into the elevator and then out the front door without once looking back. It had been a chapter in her life. She was starting another.

***

"You're in the news again," Lew observed as he followed her blue-jeaned, barefoot figure into her workroom. After the formality of years of office wear, going to work dressed like this was a luxury that was almost sinful.

"Tell me about it," she responded dryly. She paused in the doorway. "There, what do you think?"

Her father had a gardening service one day a week. This morning Smith had asked the gardener to help her shift the piano from the conservatory into this room, which she was rapidly turning into a working studio. One of the sofas had gone out, a desk moved in. There were papers and books and sheet music everywhere. She had been working hard, with the telephone silenced all afternoon.

Lew whistled softly and approached the impressive baby grand piano. "Who plays this?" he asked.

"No one," said Smith dryly. "It's my father's idea of style. I'll take it with me when I move, if you think it would be useful."

Lew ran his fingers down the keys and winced at the tinkling sound. "It needs a bit of tuning." He bonged middle C and played a few chords. "He paid something for this, though. It's a beauty."

"My father always gets the best," she said. "Want to look at what I've done?"

"Of course."

She brought him two songs she had been working on and one of the poems from the growing pile she was making. Lew moved back to the piano, reading. "Are you thinking of these for Cimarron?"

Smith shrugged. "I was, but if you have a better idea…."

"Nope. It's good by me."

With that understanding they began to work. The excitement of working as a team was with both of them, and Smith might never get over the joy of doing this as a career. So they worked well, if not with the marvellous inspiration that had gripped them on their first attempt.

Lew had some music he'd composed previously, and after they had worked with her lyrics for awhile, he played his own for her. Smith flung herself down in her favourite armchair and listened.

The music was softer and sweeter than what he had written for "Wake Me Up to Say Goodbye," and Smith thought suddenly that it needed contradiction, it needed a lyric that would make the music an ironic comment.

"This one makes me feel contrary," she said. Lew stopped playing.

"It what?" he asked with a grin.

"Well, it makes me think of lines like 'don't ask me to say I love you, there's no such thing as love,'" she expanded.

Lew laughed. "That's good," he said. "I was half hoping you'd get that from it." He went back to playing. "Dah da dum da dum," he hummed and sang at intervals, "Dum there's no such thing...as love....Yeah," he said over the music. "That's good. Let's work around that...dum dum, 'cause there's no such thing as love."

It was true, she was thinking suddenly. There was no such thing as love—if what she and Johnny had felt for each other wasn't love, then it must all be an illusion.

She was scribbling odd notes and bits of lyric on a pad as she lounged in the chair. "Have you got a cassette of this?" she asked Lew.

He kept playing. "I can make you one."

"Yes, please." She flung down her notebook and noticed that the phone light was flashing for a call. It had been doing so at intervals all day, and she'd ignored it. But it was late now, this must be a friend. "What time is it?" she wondered aloud, stretching and looking at her watch. Ten o'clock. "News that comes at night can't be good," she observed to Lew, making a face as she crossed to the phone, but she wasn't thinking of her father. She was thinking of Johnny.

"Are you watching the news? Turn on the news!" Valerie shrieked in her ear. "It was just on the headlines! CBC! They're saying you—"

Smith dropped the receiver and dashed across the room, where, to Lew's obvious amazement, she began pushing and pulling at the knobs of an oak sideboard. Finally the doors opened to reveal a television screen, and Smith snatched up the remote control und snapped it on.

When she found CBC, a reporter talking from Jerusalem was just finishing a story, and the anchorman's face appeared on the screen. "In Vancouver tonight," he said, "the revelation of a secret marriage between lumber heiress Shulamith St. John and the architect Johnny Winterhawk has caused red faces among the RCMP. From Vancouver, here's Susan Kalman."