Stacy had brought the anonymous note to Mr. Mears. In spite of his avowed disinterest, he studied closely the fine slanted handwriting:
Dear Mr. Rider:
Your niece is in grave danger. She must go far away from this place. If she stays, wicked men will kidnap her again. I can say no more. Profit by this warning!
Hollis assured the girl that he did not believe in this danger; she was safe.
After a day or two, when she had been shown the whole long, narrow island, Stacy really relaxed. She threw up her arms; and let the south wind blow through her hair, and said, for the first time in her life that she could ever remember, she felt safe and free. And she and Marjorie began to have those happy times together.
You would see them going about, fair head close to dark head, like two schoolgirls. “Isn’t it marvellous, Hollis, she is not the least bit afraid. But we must not let anything happen.”
“What could?” asked little Mr. Mears shortly. He was perhaps a little hurt, thinking it had been dull for his Marjorie with only a middle-aged scholar.
Stacy looked about wonderingly. The lamps were kerosene, there was no telephone, the grounds were lushly ragged. She had never stayed at any place like this in her life. Instead of a private swimming-pool — here was the Gulf. The simple life. (It was a good deal less simple than before she hit the place, preparations for the Rider heiress having been elaborate!) Stacy loved it. She got into a one piece cotton play suit and beach shoes — all one could support with that dry, hot south wind still blowing — and followed Marjorie to the so-called garden. Three white hollyhocks stood up at uneven intervals, a triumph. These were Exhibit A of the island. To achieve them, Marjorie had fertilized till she all but ran them off the island with the stench. When Stacy took a hoe and dug in, Marjorie was exultant.
But if Marjorie taught Stacy the simple life, Stacy introduced her hostess to standards of luxury. The array of clothes in the guest’s closet, of little treed shoes, of hats, was a marvel to Marjorie. Stacy, quite as a matter of course, insisted upon paying a fabulous sum for the accommodation, and Marjorie’s little Panama handbag had never been so stuffed. The two girls went over to the little town of Clearwater on shopping orgies — Stacy timid, without her bodyguard, off the island.
Hollis would come upstairs, from a day’s tussle with the Civil War, to find Marjorie in a new ice-blue dinner dress with a spray of blue pearl flowers in her hair. (They dressed for dinner even alone, but never like this.) On the bed would be spread out a new white chintz beach costume with waterlily design, a new yellow peasant dirndl, etc., etc.
“You care for all this so much?” he would ask, touching it.
“No. No! Darling, I love you! But tell me, do I look nice?”
“You are a little materialist, Marjorie, married to a scholar,” rather sadly...
The golden treasure of this halcyon interlude was Yvette. Marjorie was so sick and tired of the slovenly, childlike negro help. This Frenchwoman was quick, deft and sophisticated. They said about the negroes that if you were a northerner, you never did get on with them. You were too easy on them. She tried sporadically to be very severe indeed. But with Yvette, you could completely let down. You did not need to keep her in her place. She kept herself in her place. There was nothing she could not do — and she was so willing to do it. She took over the washing and ironing of Marjorie’s lingerie: ironed a $2.98 nightgown in dozens of tiny pleats, so that it looked like one of Stacy’s fifty dollar Rue de la Paix masterpieces — almost... when Hollis’s new shoes hurt him at the heel, she said: “You give those to me, Mr. Mears. I feex.” She did, too, — hammered out the lining ridge, worked them soft with her hands. “You know what we women do when war come to France?” she asked, returning them. “We turn cobbler, tailor. In Marie Claire, that is magazine like your Vogue, it is article how to make shoes, how to make woman’s suit from man’s old suit. Frenchwoman is very, how you say—?”
“Resourceful,” supplied Hollis, “Thank you, Yvette.”
“Mos’ welcome, Monsieur.”
She even went into the kitchen and whipped out a light, yellow breakfast cake, delicious with jam, which she called “brioche”.
Moselle’s flat black nose was out of joint — even after Yvette obligingly produced from somewhere the fine wire for a new leader when the colored girl, an inveterate fisher in off hours, lost her tackle. In her feud with the Frenchwoman, you had to be sorry for the sullen, dumb black girl. But when Marjorie heard her black handmaiden jawing the dishrag, “She take it outta your hide, Miz Mears do. Your whole body get tired a-toilin’ for her.”... It was then Marjorie decided she would have to fire Moselle... But Moselle’s hush puppies, with fish, were memorable. And it was so difficult to get help to stay on an island. And Moselle had seen them through two murders...
Yvette, poor thing, was a refugee out of France. When the army planes went over — as they did forty times a day; the island’s peace was long since shattered; every sort of engine poopled and screamed and roared, these waters seemed to have been picked by the United States Army for an intensive training ground for everything from bombers to amphibian tanks — Yvette’s poise sagged. She asked fearful questions.
These planes might always contain Lieutenant Brook Hanna, and little Stacy stood off on a point and waved to them, just on the chance. When Hanna got leave and came to dinner, he proved to be such a sternly handsome youth that Marjorie was prejudiced against him. But when he emerged in bathing trunks, you could but gasp at the Apollo-like body.
“What makes you love him so?” she asked Stacy frankly.
Stacy flushed. Then she answered, as frankly: “There is nothing about Brook that reminds of — I mean everyone else almost could have been one of them, even if he isn’t. But Brook couldn’t have. Never in a million years.”
“You mean... one of the kidnapers?” groped Marjorie, appalled.
“Yes.”
“Who is this other boy?”
“Aunt Cinda wrote you about Carl?”
“She mentioned...”
“He swore he’d kill Brook if I married him. He’d kill me, too.”
“Impulsive lad.”
“He means it,” shuddered Stacy with her wide-eyed, ghost-seeing look.
But it was a happy, carefree week, with not a murder, not a kidnaping, not a hint of anything ominous but the noisy procession of planes going over and that dratted south wind that blew and blew — rattled the dry palms and sighed in the Australian pines and scorched your arid skin.
It never rains but it pours tenants. The Rider heiress had no sooner settled in nicely than two of the Mears’s three fishing shacks, “Windrift”, “Spindrift” and “Seadrift”, which stood on the windy Gulf side, remote from the house, and were almost never occupied, were spoken for. Stieg McCloud came for a week every year — that was not unusual. But the statement from a local real estate agent that she had a tenant from New York was curious. The shacks were shabby. And who, from distant New York, would ever have heard of Little Mangrove Island?