He turned in his chair so he could glare at Nicholas. The glare was wasted. Nicholas wasn’t paying attention. He and most of the other men were casting sidelong glances at the silent figure by the tree. It was no longer motionless. Slowly, with a majestic stride, it advanced toward the hotel and the terrace where we were sitting.
Frederick continued to grumble.
“Come along, Sandy. There is a good deal of work to do tonight, and I mean to start early tomorrow. It was inconsiderate of you to run off this way. I had no idea where you had gone, and-”
It was as if somebody had chopped him across the throat. His voice caught in a painful grunt.
The woman had stopped a few yards away. The lights on the facade of the hotel shone directly on her, as if she stood in the center of a brilliantly lighted stage. She was looking at Frederick.
If the two of them had been professional actors they could not have communicated emotion more effectively. In fact, there was something decidedly theatrical about the woman’s performance. Her head was thrown back, in the gesture adopted by aging ladies who want a smooth, youthful throat line. Frederick wasn’t putting anything on, though. His face had gone a queer sickly gray. He looked his full age and older. The bones in his cheeks and forehead stood out, skull-like.
Finally, as if some signal had passed between them, they both moved at once. The woman turned, her draperies whirling out around her, and walked away. Frederick shoved his chair back so abruptly that it toppled over. He headed blindly across the plaza, in the opposite direction from that which the woman had taken-away from the street that led to our house. I thought he was going to bump into the tree, but at the last minute he swerved, exaggeratedly, like a drunk, and vanished into the darkness.
Chapter 5
“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ALL ABOUT?” JIM ASKED blankly.
“I-” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat and went on. “I would say that they recognized each other.”
“That was more than recognition, Sandy. It was like some old-fashioned farce. You know what I mean: ‘Good God, it is my husband, back from the dead, the man I thought I murdered thirty years ago!’ Bette Davis and Ronald Colman.”
“Joan Crawford,” I corrected. “Only she didn’t murder him. It was the other way around.”
“Not Ronald Colman, then. He was too noble to murder wives. Broderick Crawford?”
“Robert Montgomery, maybe. He was a smooth murderer in one old movie.”
“Night Must Fall?”
“I don’t remember. Jim, it really isn’t funny.”
“Neither of them seemed to be amused.”
“But-”
“But that’s no reason why we have to get uptight. It’s not our problem. Listen, I don’t even brood about my own past sins. Why should I stew about other people’s? The present-the here and now-is complicated enough without going out of your way to find additional worries.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his face serious.
“What is that?” I asked. “Some kind of creed? Your philosophy of life?”
“I guess it is.”
“Keep out of other people’s lives,” I repeated. “Don’t get involved.”
Jim frowned. His eyebrows made an elongated, flattened capital M.
“I didn’t mean it that way. Sure you should get involved. You have to get involved; people don’t live in a vacuum, their lives get wound up with other people’s. But why go out looking for trouble? Both these people are strangers to you. You’ll never be a friend of Frederick. He doesn’t have friends. And he sure as hell wouldn’t thank you for worrying about him.”
I sat back in my chair, hoping I didn’t look as startled as I felt. I kept forgetting Jim didn’t know I was Frederick ’s daughter. To him I was a casual acquaintance of Frederick; there certainly was no excuse for my concern about him. There was no excuse in any case. He was right. I would never be a friend of Frederick. I didn’t want to be one.
“So I’m nosy,” I said. “People interest me.”
“So be interested. From a safe distance. The farther away from him, the safer.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“I’m trying to tell you that Frederick is bad news. Maybe you ought to find some other place for a vacation.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Oh, hell, I didn’t mean I want you to leave.” Jim gestured helplessly. “I don’t know why I keep saying the wrong things to you. Normally I’m considered a very smooth conversationalist. Let’s change the subject. Have some more wine.”
“No, thanks. I really had better get back to the house. If I remember my guidebooks, they don’t eat dinner in these parts till nine or ten o’clock. Usually I’m tucked into my little sleeping bag at that hour, reading heavy tomes about Minoan archaeology.”
“Stick around, please. Angelos will have some food ready pretty soon. I want you to meet Chris.”
“Why?” I had started to rise. Now I sat down again. “So he can give me some more dire warnings about Frederick?”
“I don’t like your being up there alone with him,” Jim said.
I stared at him for a minute. Then I laughed.
“You don’t really think-”
“No! Listen, I’d worry less if that were what I thought. The man doesn’t have a spark of normal warmth in him. Chris says he’s been on the ragged edge of sanity for years. He may slip over anytime and decide you’re his hated mother or the reincarnation of Helen of Troy, or something.”
He reached for my hand. I pulled it away and stood up.
“I never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life,” I said coldly. “Who was it who was giving me that line about noninvolvement?”
Jim’s eyebrows made alphabetic convolutions. Then they went back to their normal shape and he grinned sheepishly.
“‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’” he said.
How can you stay mad at a man like that? I grinned back at him.
“Okay,” I said. “No hard feelings, but I really had better go. I’ll have dinner another night. Please?”
“Sure. What about that swimming date? We don’t work on Sunday.”
“Sunday at ten. I’ll meet you here.”
Before leaving the plaza, I stopped at one of the shops and bought some tomatoes and a fish. The woman cleaned and gutted the fish for me and wrapped it in a piece of newspaper.
There was no moon, and it was dark as pitch once I had left the lighted windows of the village behind. I kept stubbing my toes, and I cursed myself for not having thought to bring a flashlight. Frederick had several. But I hadn’t expected to be gone so long.
Finally I saw the light ahead. A candle in the window, to guide the wandering child… No, Frederick wouldn’t light a candle for me. He was probably reading.
Now that I could see where I was going and did not have to concentrate on walking, a wild confusion of ideas crowded into my mind, all the new facts and impressions the day had brought. I stopped a few feet from the house. Before I went inside, I had some things to sort out with myself.
Most of them were disturbing things. Frederick ’s strange reaction to the woman-his incredible news about the sunken ships… For the firsttime the enormity of that idea engulfed me. Either he was crazy, or there really were wrecked Minoan ships down in the bay. No, but he was insane either way, because he would have to be out of his mind to tackle a project like that with just me. Even I knew that a trained archaeologist doesn’t grab with both hands when he excavates. And that was all I could do. I didn’t know how to map a site or keep proper records. I didn’t even know what to look for. Minoan ships were about three thousand years earlier than my Spanish galleon. Did they carry anchors? If so, what kind? How about ballast-masts… And there was theproblem of equipment. A camera was an absolute necessity. Did Frederick have an underwater camera? I doubted it. The customs officials would have checked his equipment carefully, and an item like that would have been a dead giveaway. I couldn’t have used such a camera in any case. I didn’t even know how. The more I thought about what I didn’t know, the more I felt like groaning out loud.