The House at Sandalwood (6 page)

“I was young.” I smiled. “Once.”

He waved aside my little joke, which was only half a joke. “Yes, yes,
Aunt Judy
.” He emphasized the title. “I hope we may accomplish one thing, at least, before you are done with Ili-Ahi. We must persuade you that you are not some ancient crone come to slave away for your keep.” And then came that tiresome question: “Why have you never married?”

“I have been engaged.”

He looked far more interested than the question warranted. I felt that he would sit there looking at me until I gave more details, though I couldn’t see what this had to do with my qualifications as a housekeeper. I saw him glance at my hand. I raised it, turned it over. “It was a long time ago.”

“You stopped loving him?”

“I went on trial for murder.”

He didn’t even blink. “In that case, you didn’t lose much. He must have been singularly stupid.”

“As a matter of fact,” I began hotly, “for all you know, I may have had my heart broken over him.” Something about his expression, his clear gaze, made me backtrack. “But of course, I didn’t. Hearts are very flexible. Mine mended and, as I say, it was a long time ago.”

“I’m not sorry.” He held out his hand, took mine briefly. “Deirdre is delighted to have her problems loaded onto your shoulders. They look pretty slim to me. Can you handle the load?”

“Deirdre will do very well, Mr. Giles. Just give her a little time.”

He worried me by making no reply to this. He got up, set the chair back, and started to leave. I was relieved. I had felt uncomfortably conscious of him ever since he came into the room. In the doorway he said, “He really was a fool, you know.”

I didn’t immediately understand him. After an embarrassing few seconds, I finally realized he meant the man I’d been engaged to almost nine years ago. By that time I could think of no way to answer Stephen Giles, but apparently he didn’t expect an answer. He added, “Thank you, Judith. For my wife, and for me. Good night.”

“Good night, Mr. Giles.”

He didn’t like that formality and pretended to scowl but closed the door. I sat for a very long time, not thinking of anything in particular, sometimes getting little blurred visions of the man I had once expected to marry, pictures of the courtroom and the jury. They had looked so sympathetic, almost all of them. It just went to show. You couldn’t tell by people’s looks. Gradually, as if I had been trying vainly to shut it out, I came back to the real problem: the childish behavior of Deirdre who was now a grown-up, married woman of twenty-one.

Was it possible her behavior had something to do with the rheumatic fever that had left her with the slight heart problem? I supposed because she was endearing and often generous and sweet, she must have used these qualities to lean upon and cling to her schoolmates and her teachers. In this way she had discovered she could save herself from every problem. Perhaps, too, the bad heart assisted her in this calculated dependence upon others. But the result was that she had grown to her present age without ever facing anything more threatening than a frown. And now this Berringer and his friend with their awful suspicions came trooping ashore to stir up trouble, so she had run away.

What, precisely, were Berringer’s suspicions? Did he imagine a delicate girl like Deirdre had somehow murdered his daughter? Physically, it was preposterous. Ingrid Berringer, from the little I knew of her, was far more athletic than Deirdre, so the suspicion was extremely farfetched. Unless, of course, they were concerned about the way Deirdre’s mother died.

Feeling as cowardly as Deirdre, I closed my eyes and my thoughts to that subject and got ready for bed. Just before I got into that comfortable bed and sighed at the exact “rightness” of the mattress (not too hard, not too soft), I went to the window which faced west, and opened it to get the fresh, flower-and earth-scented air. The steep path up through the jungle vegetation from the copper-covered light on the channel dock was directly below the house. It was geometrically shadowed by the vegetation on both sides of the path. For a moment or two I imagined I saw long prehensile fingers, weird figures, endless fantasies, but actually, all these visions were formed by the curious, rich growth of the jungle beyond the path.

The moon was high overhead now. A tropic moon, exactly like the one in movies and the travel folders. I stood there dreaming a little, wondering how my life would have been by this time, over eight years later, if I had married John Eastman. Curiously enough, although I tried very hard, I couldn’t remember very much about the face of the man who had jilted me “for my own good,” as he put it at the time. Even the color of his eyes had faded from my mind. Maybe I tried too hard to remember. Or maybe he no longer mattered.

I shook myself and banished the thought of my unpleasant past. I looked out the open window, this time toward the front of the house, toward the green open space, the hole in the center that was the
emu
, and beyond, the grove with its half-finished cabins—Deirdre’s hiding place. I could see why the Hawaiians felt that the lush little grove was sacred. Bougainvillea and hibiscus, orchids and many less-famous bushes of perfume and beauty could be seen as far away as my window. They were guarded and heavily shadowed by hardwood trees, not the thickets I had seen on Kaiana, Ili-Ahi’s “parent” island, but straight, dignified trees intermingled with clinging plants and countless kinds of tropical vines.

I could hear the waters of the stream splashing down into the gulch behind the Giles house but could not see them, of course. I was on the wrong side of the house. The sound reminded me, however, that Deirdre had a private room on the other side, across the hall. Why would a nervous, frightened young woman like Deirdre prefer the view of the noisy, unhealthy gulch with its swampy areas at the foot of the plunging stream?

What was there to see from this side of the house that she feared more than the almost impenetrable swamp? And why did a young bride, scarcely a year married, have her own sets of rooms? Two of them? But there was no immediate answer to this, and speculation certainly was not the way to get a good night’s sleep. I gave up and went to bed.

In view of the many things that had happened since I had left Los Angeles that morning, it was surprising that my dreams were so commonplace. All night I kept missing the plane, a repetition so boring it acted as a soporific and when I did wake up once or twice, hearing the distant roar of the stream pouring down into the gulch, I went back to sleep instantly.

I was awakened by an assortment of sounds. Unidentifiable bird sounds, palm fronds rustling against the open window frame, the distant rush of waters. Although the room had a westerly view, it was filled with light, a slightly filtered and changing light. When I got up and went barefoot to look out the window, I noticed fleecy clouds floating overhead. There must have been showers earlier. All the incredible greenery beyond the steep path sparkled and gave off the acrid, earthy odor of recent rain.

I saw several men—Caucasian and Oriental, but none of them Hawaiian—coming up the path from the channel dock. They appeared to be headed toward the grove of unfinished cabins, that uncompleted Sandalwood
heiau
which had driven Stephen Giles’s father to suicide. This might be one strong reason for Stephen Giles’s own strength and determination. Whether he succeeded or not, I admired his effort. I watched the men move past the front of the house across the green open space. Moku, probably coming to work by way of the trail west of the
heiau
, passed the workers and stood a minute watching as they went into the grove. Then he strode on toward the house.

For many years I had seen California desert views exclusively when I saw outside views at all, and I spent far too long that first morning at Sandalwood sniffing the lush tropic splendor, admiring the multitude of different human types I saw here. It was only when I saw Moku enter the house that I remembered I was an employee, not a guest here, in spite of Stephen Giles’s beguiling attempt to make me believe I was “one of the family.”

I turned away from the window, showered, and dressed in a pale green cotton sheath. Today I went bare-legged like everyone else in the islands. Fortunately, I had a pair of sandals, somewhat worn, but quite adequate. I was just finishing my hair when Deirdre burst in without knocking, and sneaked up behind me, although I saw her reflection in the three mirrors. Before I could turn, she was hugging me as she had done in her girlhood when she was especially pleased.

“Judy! You really are here. I need you so much. Of course, not when Stephen’s here. Wasn’t that sweet and dear of him to hurry home from Honolulu last night just because I needed him? How on earth could he know? He’s psychic—
that
’
s
what he is. Oh, I love that man! Isn’t he divine? Judy, are you struck deaf and dumb? Say something!”

I laughed at this remark so typical of Deirdre. “No, dear. Only waiting for a chance to agree with you.”

“About what? Be specific.”

“About everything you’ve said.”

“Oh, Judy, you are the first one who’s thought I was right about anything since—well, since that awful thing happened and you went away.”

Anxiously, I watched her face hovering above mine as I sat before the mirror.

“But you mustn’t say that. Or even think it. You have just as much right to your opinion as others have to theirs. You are happy here, aren’t you?”

“Divinely!” She hugged me around the neck and almost strangled me in her enthusiasm. We both laughed. “That is,” she added as her mobile, young face shadowed suddenly, “I’m happy when I can be myself and not somebody else. The thing is, I was behaving exactly the way I always have. I’ve never changed. I swear it, Judy! Yet, after I’ve known people for a while,
they
want to change
me
. They say, ‘grow up, Deirdre. Be grown-up, Deirdre. Use your head, Deirdre.’ And yet, I’m only behaving just as I’ve always behaved when they—when they
liked
me.”

Her voice cracked just a little on that word and brought the sharp pinprick of tears to my eyes. I avoided her gaze and patted her hands that kept their tight grasp upon my shoulders.

“Everyone likes you, dear. But people are often very busy, or they have headaches, or they’re feeling angry over their own lives, and so they snap at other people. But they don’t mean it. One of the differences between being a little girl and being a grown-up woman married to Mr. Giles, is that when you are grown-up you understand other people have problems too, and you’re tolerant when they forget how much they really like you.”

“Wise old Judy!”

I wrinkled my nose at our reflections and she giggled. I said, “Remember one more thing. You talk of their liking you. Don’t you suppose they have their needs too? Why don’t you start thinking about liking other people yourself?”

She took her hands off my shoulders and murmured petulantly, “Not unless they like me first.”

The most obvious explanation of her thinking and her behavior was ready in my mind—the only possible answer: “I’m afraid you have been spoiled, Deirdre. By mother and me, and then by others. There really are other people in the world, you know.”

“Do I!” She rolled her eyes which were large and green and innocent as a ... I was about to say “innocent as a child’s,” an ironic cliché, but her eyes
were
childlike, mischievous, easily hurt, quick to laugh and cry. Though they looked like mirrors of what was within her still-childish mind, I felt they were more like the green leaves I had seen on the edge of the path below my window. They were fresh, dewy, and young, but behind them was the jungle, the unknown.

“You don’t want breakfast in your room, do you, wise old Auntie? Let’s eat in the dining room. Very regal and splendid. It’s a creaky old place, but fun. Like the haunted house we used to play in when I was a child, before I got sick. Remember?”

“I certainly don’t want to be served in my room, but strictly speaking, I shouldn’t eat with you and Mr. Giles. I have a job to do here.”