The Heart Remembers (15 page)

“Well, that's better,” said Marian happily and eyed him warmly. And something in her eyes told Shelley that Marian knew something at least of the “black devils” that rode Philip and hoped in her own way to help him.

She turned to Shelley and said gaily, “Well, let's get moving. Time's a-wastin'.”

The small, bright kitchen was warm and cozy against the bleak dusk outside. The wind in the pines soughed its mournful wail, but inside all was cheer and warmth.

Philip ate with a keen appreciation and an unashamed appetite that delighted Marian, though she chattered gaily as though scarcely conscious of heaping his plate again and again.

When at last they sat before slabs of apple pie so hot that the tangy cheese softened along the edges, and the coffee had been poured, Philip eyed Marian with touching respect.

“Is there no limit to the woman's accomplishments?” he asked Shelley, awe in his tone. “A teacher so highly praised by the community, adored by the ‘young-'uns,' and a cook second to none I've ever encountered.”

“Tell you what,” said Marian demurely. “It's a secret, but not from my two dearest friends. It's that I'm just a frustrated housewife at heart, dying to
sweep and clean and scrub and cook for the right man; to have his slippers warming by the fire when he gets home at night from a long, hard day at the office.”

“That I cannot believe,” said Philip firmly, “or you'd never have become a teacher. Any man in his right senses who had the privilege of meeting you would have seen to it you had no chance to be frustrated—unless that was the way you wanted it.”

Marian fluttered her eyelashes at him with mock coyness.

“Why,
Mis
-ter Foster, how you
do
talk!” she purred languishingly.

Philip studied her for a moment, and there was something in his eyes that Shelley had never seen there before. Later, when they had dawdled over second cups of coffee, and Marian rose briskly to clear the table, Philip stood up hesitantly.

Marian said to Shelley, “You run along and do that bookkeeping you've been worrying about. I know Philip's a first-class washer-upper, and if he isn't it's high time he was learning to be.”

“I can wash dishes,” Philip protested.

“Prove it, laddie boy. Prove it,” ordered Marian. And Shelley slipped from the room, knowing that they were scarcely aware of the moment when she went.

From the living room, she could hear their voices, with an occasional laugh from Philip; a sound which she had heard seldom from him, so that it warmed her and lifted her own spirits.

It was eleven o'clock before Philip tore himself away, and after he had gone Marian stood in the living room doorway watching the door that had closed behind him. When she turned to Shelley, there were tears in her eyes.

“The poor darling!” she said huskily. “Why, Shelley, he was actually hungry! Not hungry for food
alone, but for decent companionship. Lonely and hungry and bored. That's why he heads for that darned Tavern the minute his job is finished.”

“It's a relief to me, Marian, to know that you are aware of Philip's weakness. I was a little worried,” Shelley admitted.

Marian's eyes widened in surprise.

“Worried? For me? Shelley, my sweet, don't be ridiculous. After all, my pet, I'm twenty-seven and I did a couple of years of social welfare work before I became a teacher. I've met a great many Philip Fosters. Most of whom could have been—I loathe the word, but off-hand, I can't think of one to replace it—saved, if someone had taken an interest in them in time.”

“But what worries me about Philip is that he seems content to go the Tavern way.”

“He drinks because he is lonely and bored and because he's trying to run away from himself. There's some dark spot in his life that he wants to forget and can't. And for some reason, probably that same dark spot, he feels cut off from what is laughingly referred to as ‘nice people.' So he gets himself blotto so he won't remember what he's missing.”

She was lost in thought for a moment, and then she nodded.

“But I'll straighten him out,” she said briskly, and went off to bed, leaving Shelley to stare after her, startled and wide-eyed.

From that evening on Philip seemed to change. Not all at once, of course. But more and more often he came to the little house for a meal with Shelley and Marian; and occasionally they asked Jim to make a fourth and it was all very gay and amusing.

Sue-Ellen had gone back to Atlanta at the end of her month “sentence,” but after a couple of weeks there, she returned to Harbour Pines unannounced and settled down for a stay of undetermined length,
to the surprise of everyone.

One afternoon a week or so after her return, Sue-Ellen dropped into the office, looked Shelley over coolly through the smoke of her cigarette and delivered a broadside.

“Look, what's with you and Aunt Selena? Why does she hate your very insides, and why does she hit the roof so hard we have to scrape her off every time Jim mentions your name, with the usual touch of enthusiasm?”

Shelley managed a light laugh.

“Oh, well, there's no reason why Miss Selena should love me. As a matter of fact, I know several people who aren't a bit fond of me,” she answered lightly. “My C.O. overseas had no difficulty whatever in restraining her affection for me.”

Sue-Ellen's airy eyebrows went up.

“Fancy that!” she murmured politely, and was silent for a moment before she went on more earnestly. “Really, I wondered, Shelley. Aunt Selena all but foams at the mouth when you or the paper happens to be mentioned. We're forbidden to bring the
Journal
into Pinelands, even wrapped around a package. You are mentioned rather a lot, I may as well admit. Jim and I have had some perfectly beautiful knock-down-and-drag-out fights about you. I claim he's paying you too much attention for an engaged man, and he claims he isn't engaged, and we go on from there.”

Shelley's eyes brimmed with amusement, though her color rose a little.

“I'm afraid you're going to have to get yourself a nice shiny shotgun before you manage to get him to the altar, Sue-Ellen.”

“Oh, you do, do you? Well, I'll show you. And I'll show him, too.” Sue-Ellen was so matter of fact about it that Shelley could not be quite sure whether or not she was in earnest. “You know, you've won a
lot of friends here and people like and admire you. So I can't understand Aunt Selena. Though come to think about it, it's pretty idiotic to try to understand Aunt Selena. She's always been slightly batty, to put it mildly, since she shot her lover.”

Shelley gasped.

“Oh, really, Sue-Ellen, you should be ashamed to say such things. Someone ought to spank you.”

Sue-Ellen stared at her.

“Oh, didn't you know about that? Gosh, I thought sure somebody would have dragged that skeleton out of the family closet long ago. It's quite true, you know. It happened when she was twenty, and from all accounts she was a raving beauty. A high-tempered, unpredictable sort of wench, though, arrogant as they come. There was rather a lot of money then, and she queened it, but good! And then she finally found a suitor almost worthy of a Durand, and was about to have the wedding of the century and everything was flowing smooth as hot butter and honey. Until came a night when she and the ever-lovin' boy-friend had an exchange of words and the battle was on. She grabbed herself a gun out of a desk drawer and drew a bead on him; he struggled with her, to get it away from her, and bang, bang! It went off, and when the smoke cleared, the boy-friend was breathing his last. He lived just long enough, being a perfect gent, to exonerate her completely.”

Shocked, incredulous, Shelley said swiftly, “Sue-Ellen, I don't believe a word of that! You're just making it up!”

“I am not. Good grief, everybody within miles of the place knows it. Of course it happened a long time ago, almost thirty years back, but it happened just as I've told it. There was a trial, of course, but under the circumstances, can you imagine any verdict except ‘not guilty' for a gal like Selena Durand? I suppose everybody felt that since she was supposed
to be in love with him, her conscience would furnish suitable punishment. But I am reliably informed that from that day on, all marriageable young men detoured around her so widely that she never got another proposal. After all, who can blame them? Who'd want to marry a sharp-shooting virago, as she had proved herself to be?”

Shelley sat very still. So that could explain why Selena had pursued Hastings so relentlessly, so shamelessly, yet with such caution that only Hastings himself and his devoted wife knew about it.

“So you see, Shelley, why I am puzzled and not too happy about the way Selena feels toward you,” said Sue-Ellen, unexpectedly serious. “If you've done anything to annoy her seriously, I feel you should be on your guard. Lock your doors at night, and try not to be alone in dark alleys or lonely woods.”

“Oh, for Heaven's sake,” Shelley laughed.

“Okay, chum.” Sue-Ellen rose. “My conscience is clear. I warned you. From here on out, you're on your own. Anyway, I've an idea that Jim is going to be keeping a couple of eyes on you, now that I am about to take myself definitely out of the picture. I'm about to land the guy I've really wanted all the time. It was a tough battle, because he was a bit on the wary side, and I had to fight my family, as well as his. Of course, his mother feels I'm not good enough for him; I'm not, actually, but I resent her thinking so. But now that I've got him, by using the good old psychology of waving another fellow in his face, and yammering, ‘If you don't want me, there's them as does'—well, I'm taking my claim off Jim. I know he'll be pleased, and I expect you to be, too. Of course, it's a secret for a little while longer; then with the usual fanfare of breathless excitement and ‘surprise, surprise,' it'll be broadcast.”

Shelley offered congratulations and Sue-Ellen went off, very pleased with herself.

She had left Shelley with a good deal to think about. She knew that Selena was driven by fear that even now, at this late date, Shelley might be able to prove her own guilt where Hastings was concerned. And that fear, in a woman as lawless, as arrogant as Selena, could be dangerous.

But she put such dark thoughts away from her at last as she saw Marian enter the drive, and went to meet her. Marian was, as always, full of cheerful chatter, amusing anecdotes of the day's activities; and with Rufus purring happily around their ankles, they went up to the little house.

They had their supper, and fed Rufus the shrimps he adored, carefully free of mayonnaise which he loathed and with which they had adorned their own.

It was after eleven when Shelley was ready for bed. She turned out the light and in her nightgown and slippers went to open the windows wider and draw back the shades. And caught the faintest possible flicker of movement in the shrubbery outside the windows. For a moment she stood perfectly still, too startled to move, a little creepy feeling chilling her spine.
Had
one of those tall shrubs near the window stirred just a little on that calm, almost windless night?
Had
there been a shadow lurking there? And then she laughed at herself, though the laugh was slightly shaky.

This was all the after-effect of Sue-Ellen's crazy warning, of course. And she ought to know Sue-Ellen well enough by now to discount more than half her light-hearted chatter.

She saw to it that the screen was secure and then she went back to the bed, turning back the light cover. A dark blur against the whiteness of the sheet puzzled her, and she put out a fumbling hand for the little lamp on the table.

In the thin yellow light from the small bedside lamp, she stood rigid, staring down at that small
dark splotch against the white sheet. It was no longer than her hand, a narrow, dark thing—and for a moment she could only look at it in shocked amazement and incredulity.

For it was a small doll that looked as though it had been made of something like melted wax. A tiny thing wrapped in a scrap of dark cloth that she identified as a part of a dress she had given to someone, at the moment she couldn't remember who; perhaps the wash-woman, or her daughter who came once a week to do the cleaning. The doll had wisps of hair, too, and a tiny blob of a face, with eyes and mouth pricked into the soft wax. And running through the doll, where the heart would have been had it been anything but a blob of wax, were two small sharp needles, crossed.

At first she was too dazed, too incredulous, to realize fully what the ugly little thing was. Such an absurd, ridiculous thing to find in her bed.

She could not bring herself to touch it. There was something loathsome, unclean about it.

She went back to the window at last, and strained her ears to listen; her eyes to pierce the darkness. But there was only silence. A silence that was intensified rather than broken by the ceaseless murmuring of the pines, a sound to which she had by now become so accustomed that she was only conscious of it when she made herself listen for it.

Suddenly, as she stood there, she was shaken by an anger so deep that it surprised her. The whole thing was so unutterably silly, so childish. That she could be frightened away from Harbour Pines by finding a hideous little voodoo doll in her bed!

She whirled back to the bed, still unable to touch the filthy-looking little thing. She caught up a pair of eyebrow tweezers from the dressing table, lifted the doll with it and went to the window. She unlatched the window and flung it as far as she could out into
the darkness. And heard, startlingly close at hand, a sudden slight unmistakable movement that rustled the tall shrubs and something that sounded like a gasp, a caught breath. And it was then that a momentary terror wiped out her anger and her feeling of outrage.

Swiftly she fastened the screen once more, and without stopping to try to rationalize her terror, closed the window and turned the lock on it. Then she dropped into a chair, put her face in her hands and tried hard to laugh at her momentary fright.