What could she tell him — that it had been launched without her knowledge? This was literally the truth, but to admit such would be to make herself look an utter incompetent — and that she was not prepared to do. She had come back from a long trip abroad to discover the wheels already turning.
To stop it now would be impossible. For one thing, it would put too many persons out of work, even though the development corporation could well afford the losses involved.
He said, looking weary and old for the second time in her memory — the first was after his son’s disappearance following the frantic fight of which she still knew next to nothing — “Well, sleep on it child. Perhaps, when you view Lakeside in the morning, you’ll feel differently about ordering its execution. You have never been a hardhearted girl. At least, never before...”
He stopped it there, letting it hang. Although his voice had not risen, Eleanor could sense the full-bodied fury gathering behind it, the fury she had experienced but once before. His neck seemed to have thickened and his eyes recessed into tunnels from whose bottoms they gleamed brightly, wickedly, in the firelight.
She promised to sleep upon it, said good night and left him sitting there. As she passed beyond the threshold of the fine old room, she heard the tinkle of glass behind her. Without looking, she knew Alan, Senior’s, anger had caused him to crush the crystal inhaler he held cupped in his hands.
Oh, dear! she thought. I hope he hasn’t cut himself.
Her human instinct was to turn back and offer help, but her experience of the Herrick temper was such that she knew it would be received as insult added to injury. Even her Alan reverted to such childishness when he lost his temper. Mercifully, he had never grown angry with her. But she had seen him explode twice in the brief course of their marriage — and both occasions were remembered with distaste.
The first such occasion had occured on the golf course. It had been the reaction to a succession of stupid mistakes by others, culminating when his caddy directed him to use a wrong club. This had resulted in his hitting an approach into a water hazard short of the green, which was masked by a rise in the ground from where Alan’s ball lay.
When he saw the result of the faulty instruction, he had not said a word... but his neck and thickened and his eyes sunk unnaturally deep in his head. He had stood looking at the small pond in which his ball had vanished — then had picked up the boy bodily and tossed him into the water.
There had been reimbursement — the fit of fury had vanished as quickly as it had come — and Alan had been sweetly apologetic to all concerned. But Eleanor had been disgusted by such childishness and had told him so when they reached the privacy of their room, concluding, “If you ever show violence again in my presence, I shall leave you — and that will break my heart, for I love you very much.”
The second occasion occurred on what was to be the last evening of her husband’s life. On that occasion, he had returned for dinner from a trip alone to the little town of Unity nearby. He had not stated the reason for his visit but, after dinner, father and son had retired to the study for what she presumed to be a private chat. Seated alone in front of the fireplace, she had heard the murmur of their conversation, lulling as the gentle flames in her ears.
Then there had been silence — a silence that for some reason disturbed her — and she had risen to seek its cause. In the study door, she had hesitated. Father and son were facing one another, glaring at one another with what she knew instinctively was mutual fury.
In choked, barely audible tones, she heard Alan, Senior, say, “So you see, you don’t know what you’ve done, you fool.”
In almost the same conversational tone, her Alan had replied, “You should have told me. Now there is something I must do.”
“I must warn you... you idiot — that—” The father spoke to empty air as his son pivoted and left the room, walking blindly past Eleanor without seeing her and on out into the night.
It was the last she had ever seen of him, living or dead. The earth might have swallowed him up — or, as a coroner’s jury had tentatively decided, the dangerous currents and bottomless holes of Birch Lake, just beyond the brim of the lawn.
Shortly after that, a lawyer from Unity had summoned her to tell her that, on the afternoon proceeding his disappearance, Alan Herrick, Junior, had willed all his earthly goods, including Lakeside and all it contained, to her. It was, she thought, almost as if he had known he was going to die, bad known it in advance...
Oh, she — and they — had searched endlessly, had advertised, had hired tracers in a vain effort to discover what had become of Eleanor’s husband. Finally convinced of his fate, Eleanor had removed herself from the house of so many now useless memories after a discreet interval during which she and Alan Herrick, Senior, remained the polite strangers that, in actuality, they had always been.
As Eleanor reached the hall, she was moved by a sudden desire to step outside, to get a whiff of fresh air. The dinner sat heavy on her stomach, the airy old house seemed suddenly to close in on her. The need to fill her lungs with fresh country night air, untainted by smog or gasoline fumes, was urgent.
Instead of stepping out the front door, she chose the other route, around and under the staircase to the French windows that led to the flagged terrace overlooking the lake beyond the bluff.
The moon, near full, was ringed with clouds rendered white by its glow, but the light it gave enabled her to see where she was going.
As if directed by some unseen guide, she moved off the terrace, past the trellis that screened off the kitchen yard, to the gap in the row of tall slender trees that guarded the family burial ground.
She felt drawn by some unseen lodestone whose pull she could no more have resisted than she could have checked her own near-fall down the stairs unaided.
Thanks to the night darkness, she was unable to view the hideous caricatures on the older headstones, those grotesque incisions that made horror masks of what were presumably intended to be likenesses of the departed.
But the moonlight enabled her to see the white granite shaft that marked the final resting place of Alan’s mother — and the new matching shaft that, she realized, must symbolize the grave of Alan, Junior — her Alan, whose body had never been recovered.
Confronting the fact of his death in such fashion, Eleanor felt its reality for the first time, like a sudden hard blow to the diaphragm. For long moments, she stood there breathless, mindless, aware only of the hard fact of his death, of the glossed over loneliness with which she had lived ever since.
When other awareness slowly returned, she felt that she was not alone — not physically alone, there in the graveyard. Some other presence had made itself felt through the numbness that had seized her senses.
Since she was not aware of having heard any actual sounds, she felt a sudden rush of hope — or was it fear? — that her husband’s spirit had come back to join her from wherever it now was...
She stood there, still as a statue, holding her breath, waiting for some further evidence of the existence of the other. When none came, she inhaled deeply, carefully, and slowly turned her head in the direction in which her instincts told her the presence lay.
The evidence she sought came swiftly with a rush of soft sounds beyond the barrier of trees that separated the graveyard from the immediate neighborhood of the old house. Whatever this was, Eleanor realized, it was no spirit, and she strode toward it. When she reached the gap in the trees, she was in time to see an orange and furry tail disappear around a corner of the woven wood trellis.