Beware the Young Stranger (2 page)

“Early today, Keith made a casual reference about his father's being in town.”

“Yes, Sam Rollins got rid of that two-bit business of his downstate. Maggie—Keith's mother, the sister between Dorcas and Ivy—died last fall. The Rollinses have no more ties or connections in their old home town.”

“Is Sam Rollins staying with Dorcas, too?”

“No,” Howard Conway said, “he's living in a small apartment on the north side.”

“I'd like to meet him.” Vallancourt nodded to the waitress and tasted the mellow Scotch.

Light glinted on Hibbs's glasses as he leaned forward. “You think Nancy is really serious about Keith Rollins, John?”

“Knowing my daughter, I wouldn't be surprised if she decided to marry him. And it's happened quickly, you know. Very quickly.”

“I'm sure he's a fine boy. If there's a … well, a hint of strain in his personality …”

“You noticed it, too?” Vallancourt said slowly.

Ralph Hibbs shrugged. “It hasn't been long since he lost his mother, you know.”

“I was in Europe,” Vallancourt said. “I'd never met Maggie Rollins or her husband or son. But I was sorry I could do nothing more than cable a word of sympathy to Dorcas.”

“Dorcas managed,” Conway grunted.

“Doesn't she always?” Hibbs laughed.

2.

John Vallancourt's Continental whispered its way up the elm-shaded driveway the next day, stopping in the Normandy shadow of Dorcas Ferguson's castle-like home.

Vallancourt was acquainted with the history of the mansion. Dorcas Ferguson's grandfather had built it. Her parents, social gadflies on the fringes of the international set, had lost the estate to mortgage holders in the process of squandering the modest fortune handed down to them. Years later, Dorcas had returned to native soil, paid cash for the place, and restored the house to its original condition.

The heavy oaken door swung open and Dorcas's matronly housekeeper, Mildred Morgan, smiled out at him. “Good morning, Mr. Vallancourt. Miss Ferguson is expecting you.”

The housekeeper ushered him into the spacious entry hall and took his hat.

Vallancourt liked this house, for all its size. It was sound and solid, qualities which Dorcas, like her grandfather, esteemed. She had put a great deal of herself into the house, Vallancourt thought, in the décor and furnishings. The lack of pretentiousness appealed to him. It was the home of a woman of character.

“Miss Ferguson will be right down,” Miss Morgan said. “Mrs. Conway is waiting, too. Would you care to join her?”

Vallancourt nodded.

“May I get you something, Mr. Vallancourt? A cup of coffee?”

“Thanks, no.”

He stepped into a long, friendly living room. Ivy Ferguson Conway was at the grand piano, playing a sentimental melody badly.

“Morning, John.” Ivy swung herself around on the bench. Vallancourt detected a nervousness in her manner. “Do you have a cigarette?”

He offered her the thin, engraved gold case Nancy had given him on his last birthday, and held a light for her, thinking that if Dorcas was a throwback to her grandfather, Ivy, her younger sister, was the orthodox product of her parents.

Ivy's life was a continuity of cocktail and bridge parties, fashion shows, country club gossip, and shallow squabbles with Howard, her husband. Occasionally, she and Howard went abroad, and when Ivy referred to these trips it was always with an accent of condescension for foreign places and foreigners.

She gave a first impression of prettiness, being delicately made, with a fragility of feature. She had small eyes and mousy hair worn in a casual trim. Although she was in her thirties, girlishness clung to her.

“Oh, damn!” She coughed, her hand fluttering to her throat. “John, must you smoke these unfiltered weeds?”

“Don't inhale,” Vallancourt suggested.

“Then what's the use of smoking?” Her glance kept going beyond him, to the living room entryway.

“Are you expecting someone, Ivy?”

“No,” she said quickly. “You're Dorcas's only caller. I dropped in while she was phoning you this morning.”

Vallancourt waited.

Her eyes pinched at the corners. “Aren't you going to ask me what she has on her mind?”

“I assume Dorcas will explain the call.”

“Sure. The way she wants it explained.” Ivy's nervousness was suddenly gone. She snubbed out her cigarette as if she were pressing the hot coal against something more animate than an ashtray.

“John, you're right in suspecting him,” Ivy said.

He made no pretense of not understanding to whom she was referring.

“Howard told me,” she said, “how you were sizing him up yesterday, during and after the round of golf.”

Vallancourt lit a cigarette.

“I see,” she said icily. “You don't care to discuss it.”

“Is there a reason I should, Ivy?”

“Oh, most naturally not!” Her gaze was haughtily fixed on a point over his head. “Nancy, of course, is merely your daughter, and Dorcas will come in here with a whitewash brush in hand.”

“Without a sense of fair play? Dorcas?” John said gently.

“Better drop the rules in the trashcan, John. I know you would value Dorcas's opinion over mine. But any human personality has its foolish zone. Including Dorcas's. No matter what she tells you, remember this: Keith Rollins is a bastard, John!”

She picked up a small handbag from the piano bench, rose, and started stiffly from the living room. But before she reached the foyer she stopped and turned.

“John …”

“Yes?”

She was worrying the handbag. “Do make allowances for me.” The rosebud mouth pleaded; she was very much the little girl now. “Having Keith brought into this house after what happened … It upsets me to think about it.” Then she hurried out, leaving Vallancourt frowning.

He was standing at the windows overlooking the long terraced lawn when Dorcas Ferguson appeared.

“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, John. I had a call from Baltimore.”

“I didn't mind. This house is a pleasant place in which to wait.” The statement was a half-truth. Today, some of the pleasantness was gone from the house.

She glanced about the room. “Did Ivy leave?”

Vallancourt nodded.

Dorcas was paler than when he had last seen her. He had met her five years ago, when he and Nancy had returned home for the summer. He had formed a strong feeling for her almost at once.

She was not a beautiful woman, although she was lithely attractive, wide-shouldered and tall, in contrast to Ivy. Dorcas's almost Indian face was dominated by a firm and generous mouth, high cheekbones, and large dark eyes. Her glistening black hair, stranded with silver, swept in a high widow's peak from her wide forehead.

She took his hand in both of hers. “It's so good to see you again, John.”

“Could I say less?” Vallancourt smiled.

She gestured him to a deep chair. He sat down, and she began to pace in a fretful manner that was uncharacteristic of her.

“Dorcas … if you have something difficult to say, please remember how I feel about you.”

She gave him a grateful look. “It's about Keith, John.”

“I suspected as much.”

“I want you to like him.”

“I've the same wish,” he said.

“But you don't.”

“That's not quite true, Dorcas. After all, I haven't had a chance to get to know the boy.”

She eased herself to the edge of a chair. “But you do have reservations.”

“I honestly don't know. I like some things about Keith. He has a good mind, quick, above average. In his off-guard moments, he's very personable.”

“Off-guard?”

“It's what I sense inside the boy that disturbs me, Dorcas. There is a turmoil, a kind of watchfulness, in his eyes.”

“The cub, backing up, prepared to growl defiance,” she said in a faint, bitter voice. “Many people would look at him and never see. But not you. Not when he moved in on someone dear to you.”

“Would you rather I were less candid with you, Dorcas?”

“You know I wouldn't. There's always been honesty between us, John. I've found little enough of it in the world.” She drew a deep breath, seemed to derive strength from it. “That's why I called you here this morning. I want you to know … what you should know … about Keith.

“You never knew his mother. Maggie was the middle sister, John. Somehow she got lost between me and Ivy. She was the gentle one. She lacked Ivy's brittle selfishness and my energy. The very act of living was bewildering to Maggie. When her final illness came, she didn't know how to put up a real fight. She simply died, helplessly, one morning before dawn.

“I wonder whether it would have made a difference to Keith if Maggie had lived a little longer. I think not. He would have made the trip anyway.”

Dorcas had spoken with composure, in a soft, even voice. But she had aged before Vallancourt's eyes. She raised her slender hand and brushed the corners of her eyes.

“John, you know the latest spring vacation custom adopted by college students. It's become a stupid tradition. They pile in cars and drive non-stop as much as two thousand miles to converge on coastal resort towns. A sleepless weekend on a main diet of hamburgers follows.

“Individually, they're everyday, normal kids. They go, some of them, because it's the thing to do. Parents permit it because they're too busy to think it through, because everybody's doing it, and because such jaunts by the youngsters have taken on the earmarks of status symbols. The results are not always pretty.”

Vallancourt waited patiently for Dorcas to go on.

“This past spring, a lovely girl from Keith's home town—Cheryl Pemberton was her name—talked her parents into letting her go with a group of girls to Port Palmetto, Florida. She put up the usual arguments. The girls had reserved a cottage, quite apart from the boys, she assured them; girls from the best families in town were going; she simply had to fit in with the crowd; she could take care of herself; and, finally, didn't they trust her?”

Vallancourt watched her shiver.

“Cheryl Pemberton's parents never saw her alive again.”

“Dorcas …”

She looked resolutely away from him, spine stiff, hands locked in her lap.

“Don't, John. Please. I have to get this out quickly.

“When darkness came to the beaches at Port Palmetto that Saturday night, the ferment began to work. No one knows just why or how these things get started, but before midnight, in the light of bonfires dotting the beaches, hundreds of young people were snake-dancing and chanting a pagan praise to beer, sand, and sex.

“The local police came out in force. Their appearance on the beach touched off a riot. Several officers were hurt. Squad cars were overturned. The jail was literally packed with youngsters.

“Early the next morning, a city sanitation crew was put on emergency duty to clean the beaches of débris.

“The nude and battered body of Cheryl Pemberton was found under an old wooden fishing pier. Indications were that some boy, inflamed by liquor and mob pyschosis, had lost control of himself and momentarily become a fiend.

“Keith … it was Keith whom the police suspected. He and Cheryl were classmates, completing their senior year. There'd been a tacit agreement that they would be dating each other in Port Palmetto. Keith was the last boy to have been seen with her. He was picked up as he was leaving town.”

Vallancourt mercifully looked out the window.

“Keith withstood nearly sixty continuous hours of interrogation, John. He was able to do this because he was telling the truth. I know he was telling the truth!

“The truth was that he had got separated from Cheryl Pemberton, knew nothing of her death until the police took him in custody. The scenes on the beach had sickened him, and he had decided to leave.

“He was released because there wasn't a shred of evidence against him, just suspicion. John, that suspicion mustn't destroy the only living soul close to me I care anything about!”

3.

Vallancourt turned back to Dorcas with sympathy. But he lacked her subjective entanglement. He had already sensed the tension and hostility in Keith Rollins. He reserved judgment. But then, he could afford to. Dorcas must be prey to her uncertainties and their clash with her loyalty and attachment to the boy.

Vallancourt caught a swift mental glimpse of the girl's beginning to struggle as panic overcame her, and of a drink-crazed boy losing control. It was conceivable that Keith had acted during a black-out, without later recollection of the event. He would then feel only revulsion and a desire to get away.

“I think,” Dorcas was saying slowly, “I've been working all these years for Keith's sake. They haven't been altogether pleasant years, John. When my parents died and left three young daughters in a world of bankruptcy and creditors, the responsibility fell on my shoulders. Poor Maggie would have survived on charity. Ivy might have drunk herself to a bitter, self-pitying end. I picked up the scanty remains, John. I planned, I badgered loans from creditors and bankers who saw the chance of recouping their losses to my parents, I worked eighteen hours a day. And I rebuilt it, John, I rebuilt it.

“Now—I know what drove me to do it. Given the chance, Keith will mature. He'll pick up where I leave off.”

As Dorcas spoke, cold purpose came into her eyes. Without knowing it, Vallancourt thought, in declaring herself she has warned me. The shadow of this boy Keith has fallen across us.

He felt a touch of sadness; he knew the shadow had already darkened the relationship between him and this admirable woman. She would struggle in Keith's behalf. And Vallancourt would fight for his daughter.

“As always, Dorcas, I'm glad things are open and aboveboard between us.”