Titans (38 page)

F
or the occupants of the Concord, the ride to the town house in Turtle Creek was tense. All had gotten soaked in their dash to the carriage—Nathan and Trevor especially, since they had to help Benjy quiet the horses—and Rebecca would not be shushed. The brim of her sailor hat dripped water as she rocked back and forth reciting the opening lines of John Masefield's poem interminably until Nathan could hardly resist the urge to put his hands over his ears. At one point, Trevor could stand no more and snapped at Rebecca to stop her infernal chanting. Mavis scolded him, demanding why he thought it necessary to prevent the child from quoting poetry that had been dear to her uncle. “Days like this remind her of him,” she said.

“They do me, too, Mother. That's why those particular lines are unbearable to hear,” Trevor had said, silencing his mother.

Once home, the men went to their rooms to change out of their tailored suits and handmade shoes, while Mavis and Lenora tried to divest Rebecca of her wet clothing and wrap a blanket around her. Wild-eyed, she fought their efforts, continuing her chant until her father appeared in the kitchen with Nathan to hang their sodden clothes in the mud room. “
Rebecca! Stop that this instant!
” Trevor commanded. “You're driving everybody mad with that jingle.”

Rebecca, stripped down to her chemise and bloomers, halted midline and blinked at her father as if having to think who he was. Suddenly she sprang toward him crying, “Daddy, Daddy, save him!” and seized Trevor around his waist.

Stricken silence gripped the kitchen. All were aware of whom she spoke. Nathan dropped his eyes, and Lenora and Mavis exchanged helpless glances. Even Zak, sitting on his haunches, sank to the floor with a soulful whine. After a minute's surprise, Trevor wrapped his arms protectively around his daughter's delicate shoulders. “I wish I could have, kitten,” he said softly. Mavis turned abruptly to shake out Rebecca's suit jacket with great force over the sink, but Nathan couldn't tell if the loud snap was from contempt or to free the garment of water.

Lenora bent to Rebecca's ear. “Poor little baby,” she crooned. “Come, let's have a cup of hot chocolate Lenora made for her angel.”

But Rebecca would not be enticed from her father's waist. She had buried her head into his midriff and begun to cry, sobbing into his freshly donned shirt. “There now, it's all right,” Trevor said, extricating himself from Rebecca's vise to scoop her up in his arms. “Let's go to your room and see your dolls.”

“I'll be right there soon as I change clothes,” Mavis called, as Trevor carried his daughter from the kitchen, Zak trotting after them.

Nathan touched her arm. “Maybe they need to be alone for a while, just the two of them,” he said, a little aggravated with his grandmother for wishing to butt in on this private time between his father and Rebecca when she complained often enough that he made no room for her in his daily life. “Rebecca seemed to want only her father just now.”

Mavis turned to him with surprise in her gaze. Nathan expected to be put soundly in his place. It was not his business to suggest when or if his grandmother should look in on her granddaughter, but Mavis with a softly breaking smile reached up and patted his cheek. “You dear boy,” she said. “So very wise beyond your years. It must have been growing up in the country that made you a sage before your time. Yes, they should be alone. Trevor loves Rebecca… in his own way. I forget that sometimes. Lenora, I'm going up to change, then Nathan and I could use a cup of chocolate in the parlor.”

Nathan had a fire going in the grate when she returned. The rain had brought a drop in temperature, and his grandmother drew her shawl around her and sighed deeply as she took her seat in her designated chair. “That heat feels good to these old bones,” she said. “Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for everything, as a matter of fact. You've brought so much warmth into our lives in ways you're too modest to realize.”

Nathan sat down opposite her, feeling inadequate to comment. It looked as if this stormy day had unearthed sad memories. “It all has to do with Jordan, you know,” Mavis said. “It's been three years, but Rebecca never has gotten over her uncle's death. He was her best friend. They were two of a kind, I'm sad to say, and she misses him so. Rain like this”—she motioned toward the streaming parlor windows—“brings back the day he died.” Her lips tightened from the memory. Firelight caught in her bluish-green irises, faded by time, and Nathan saw the bitterness in them that the years had not faded in kind. Sadness filled him for the facts she did not know, information that might relieve the pain of her memories if only his father would trust her with the truth. She might surprise him. It might be that rather than tarnish his grandmother's memory of her first son, the truth would revive her love for her last. But Nathan had given his word, and he would stick to it.

Lenora brought in the hot chocolate and Nathan gratefully accepted a cup, glad of the heat to soothe his tight larynx. Mavis fixed him with her piercing gaze. “You're choking on your thoughts over there, Nathan. I can tell. Your grandfather had the same faculty of saying absolutely nothing when he had too much to say. So spit it out. What's stuck in your gullet?”

Nathan set his cup in its saucer. There was no getting around that sharp, intuitive beam once it lit. A fellow would have a better chance diverting a shooting comet. He cleared his throat and avoided the thrust of her stare by gazing into the fire. Actually, it was Leon who had taught him the wisdom of saying absolutely nothing when he had too much to say. “I prefer to keep private what's not my place to mention, Grandmother,” Nathan said.

“Oh, fiddlesticks!” Mavis tapped the floor with her cane. “This is your home. You are family. In this house, nobody has ‘a place' the way you mean it. There should be no secrets of true feelings. You don't want to be like your father.”

Nathan glanced at her sharply. “I don't know why not. I see nothing about him that would put me off.”

Surprise, close to shock, struck her porcelain face, translucent and finely lined as ancient china. “Ah, I see he's won you to him. That's good. You and Trevor have created a father-and-son bond. It's what I hoped would happen. Trevor will not be left without family when I die.”

Which implied that Rebecca was not family to her son, not by his definition, and Nathan had to yield to his grandmother's point. Nathan didn't doubt his father loved his daughter, but Rebecca could no more fill that role to a man like Trevor Waverling, a worshipper of health and fitness and wholeness, than could a family pet.

“I meant only that your father keeps his feelings under lock and key,” Mavis explained. “Always has, ever since he was a little boy. I wish he hadn't. I could have known him better. Jordan, now, he opened up about everything.”

“No, he didn't,” Nathan disputed, the contradiction out before he thought. He felt his face glow red. “I mean—” He bit his lip.

Mavis's little laugh made light of his embarrassment. “I know what you mean, dear. My elder son couldn't have told his mother
everything
. Jordan was a male, after all.”

They heard Trevor come down the stairs and say to Lenora that Rebecca would take that cup of cocoa now. “She's settled down with Zak,” he reported to his mother and Nathan. “I gave her a small dose of laudanum, and in a little while, she'll be asleep. When she wakes up, the storm may have passed, and she'll have forgotten all about the scene in the kitchen. Nathan, come join me in the study. I have a couple of business items I want to discuss with you before lunch.”

Nathan rose with relief at the interruption but felt his grandmother's forlorn disappointment to be left alone in the parlor with only the sound of the storm and the fire to keep her company on a day like the kind in which her son had died.

The telephone rang on and off the rest of the day with callers sharing trickles of information from friends and relatives of the devastation in Galveston. There would be no full reports of the damage until communication lines were reestablished. Trevor was sure that Beaumont, forty miles up the coast from Galveston, had been hit and thanked fate that the cargo of steel casings, boxed and supposed to have been already shipped by rail to Spindletop, had been delayed by a lack of boxcar space. The salt dome lay virtually in the lap of the Gulf of Mexico. With every ring of the telephone, Nathan expected to hear that Charlotte had canceled her party.

Each member of the household took turns checking on Rebecca. Zak lay vigilant on the floor by her bed, and after lunch, Mavis took a nap lying beside her. The rain continued its pummeling, and Nathan was relieved that Rebecca slept on. After lunch, he managed to contact Charlotte, whose family, too, had been drenched hurrying to their carriage after Sunday worship. It was as Nathan had feared and expected. The party must be canceled, but Charlotte suggested they get together for a game of cards when the weather cleared. Cheered by that proposal, he and Trevor spent the rest of the day in the study discussing business-related topics. As the afternoon wore on, the wind gradually died, and the pounding rain turned to a soft drizzle. Talk ranged from Trevor's design plans for the new plant complex to his interview with the veteran water-well driller he had engaged to dig his first oil well. The man's name was Jarvis Putnam, and Nathan and Todd and Daniel had been invited to sit in on the preliminary meeting at Waverling Tools. Todd had asked him if he thought there was a lot of oil in Texas.

“Hell, yes!” the salty old veteran had answered. “There's oceans of oil in Texas, just like there is water. Been here for thousands and thousands of years way down deep just wait'n to be tapped. Fact of the matter, the whole history of the Earth is down there, trapped in strata older than the first man born to Earth. First trick is to find the experts and develop the tools to dig it out. Second trick is not to destroy one to suit the other.”

Trevor and Nathan had exchanged glances expressing the same thought. Samantha would like this man. Trevor had signed him on the spot.

As the sun began to set, they were about to adjourn to the parlor for Trevor's evening scotch and soda when they heard a frantic pawing and yelping at the closed study door. Nathan hurried to open it and was greeted by the lunge of a pair of wet paws to his chest. “What is it, Zak?” he said, ruffling the German shepherd's sodden neck, but the answer came like a dart to his heart. The dog jumped down and took off barking toward the stairs. “We'd better go,” Nathan said to Trevor. “I think it's Rebecca.”

With a panicked scrape of his desk chair, Trevor was right behind him as they chased after the dog to the upper story. On the landing, the men would have headed toward the open door of Rebecca's room, but Zak, barking, bounded down the corridor in the opposite direction. By then, Mavis had come sleepily out into the hall. “What's going on?” she called. “Why is Zak barking? Where's Rebecca?”

Trevor paused long enough to yell, “She's not with you?”

“No. She was on the other side of me, fast asleep.”

Trevor, eyes strained from thinking the unthinkable, looked at Nathan. “She's gone to the river.”

They sped off after Zak, who had waited yelping by the outer door that stood wide open. As the men rounded the corner, water puddles on the floor told the horror of what had happened. Rebecca had let herself out into the rain with Zak following and had come to some sort of grief that had caused the dog to run back to raise the alarm. Seeing the men, the German shepherd took off down the outside stairs and sprinted toward the pier. Nathan and Trevor splashed in pursuit, Trevor yelling “
Rebecca!
” from panic-stricken lungs. Nathan joined in the cry, but in his pounding heart he knew it was no use. Rebecca had gone to find her uncle. In the rain-drenched afternoon that was slowly fading to dusk, he could almost hear the chant of her last words:
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

Benjy had heard the commotion and come running, reaching them as their feet hit the flooded pier. Nathan feared that Zak would leap into the churning current, and there would be no saving him, but the dog circled in a whining frenzy at the dock's edge, then raced by them to the ground again, setting off up the riverbank. “I think we should follow Zak,” Nathan yelled to Trevor, who nodded, his face the color of the gathering dusk.

It was Zak who found her. The current had not borne her downstream to be swallowed into the mouth of the Trinity River. She lay facedown, wedged between two large rocks by the water's edge, her long, dark hair and napping gown billowing around her. The dog pawed at her and whined until Nathan pulled him away so that Trevor could wade into the water and lift his daughter into his arms. Benjy moved to help him, but he said, “I've got her. I've got my little girl.”

Mavis, thin and fragile, her shawl drawn around her, stood waiting and watching on the crest of the slope leading down to the pier. From her vantage point, her white hair and pale gown water-soaked, she looked like an ancient ghost risen from the river. Her face showed no emotion through the film of drizzle when the silent men, Trevor carrying his streaming burden, gained the ground where she stood. Not even her eyes blinked from the weight of the moisture on her lashes.

“Come inside, Mother, before you catch your death,” Trevor ordered gently.

Mavis followed dutifully, wordlessly. They entered the house through the door to the back stairs where Lenora hovered anxiously in the hall, and Mavis spoke for the first time. “I knew the river would get her one day. Lay her on her bed, Trevor, and I'll get blankets.”

The family doctor was on his way to Galveston with his nurse to offer his services, Nathan was told when he was instructed to telephone the physician's office. It would be best to contact the police, who would notify the coroner.