Fabulous Creature (23 page)

“You look better,” he said. “A lot better.” She looked, in fact, surprisingly beautiful in an immature way, with her dark eyes and glowing skin and her long, thick curtain of light-streaked hair. She smiled uncertainly. “Did you have any new ideas?” she asked.

So they were back at it again. Back to plots and counterplots, hopes and fears, despair, brief hopefulness and despair again. It went on the rest of the afternoon, and by sunset they had only decided on a fall-back plan—a last resort to be initiated if nothing better turned up.

According to the fall-back plan, they would go the next afternoon to the Jarretts’ cabin. The Jarretts were sure to be there by then, making preparations for an early start the next morning on the first day of the season. Once there, they would simply go in and explain to the Jarretts why they must not shoot the deer. On the surface it seemed ridiculous, but James thought there was some hope. Perhaps not much hope that Hank Jarrett and his family might be moved when they saw Griffin and realized what she had risked in order to save the deer, but a very definite hope that Jarrett might be moved by realizing what the papers might make of the story if the deer were slaughtered. James intended to point out the negative publicity aspect of the situation very clearly. He would remind Jarrett of his previous run-ins with the Sierra Club and other conservation groups and what a new surge of bad press might do to his latest construction proposals.

When he had explained the bad press angle to Griffin, she agreed that it might work. She wasn’t certain, but at least it was better than no plan at all; and afterwards she became calmer and more cheerful. On the top step of the veranda, curled up inside Dan’s barrellike sweater like a minnow in a lobster pot, she stared out over the lake in one of her strange trances. After a long time she sighed and said, “I have a feeling it might work, if I did everything right.”

“What do you mean—if you did everything right?”

“The talismans. And the ceremony.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Right. The talismans. Tell me about them. How are they supposed to work?”

Griffin uncurled herself and began to collect her washing. “It’s getting cold,” she said. “Let’s go in and cook something.”

But he decided not to let her get away with it that easily. “Look,” he said, “if your magic can save the deer, why have you been so worried? Why have we been going to all this trouble?”

“Because—” She stopped and thought. “Because I don’t know how it’s going to work. It might work and the stag might get killed anyway—and that might be part of the magic, too. But I want it to work so that he doesn’t die, so I have to go on doing everything I can. I think magic always works, but it doesn’t always work just the way you think it ought to.”

“Well, I hate to be critical, but that doesn’t make much sense,” James said.

“Doesn’t it?” Griffin said. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. But it doesn’t really matter. Making sense doesn’t have anything to do with making magic.”

“That does it,” James said. “How about macaroni and cheese and chili beans? Is that something that would make sense right now?”

“It sounds like magic,” Griffin said.

After dinner they built a huge fire in the fireplace. Griffin took her sleeping bag off the swing and sat on it in front of the fire, and James pulled up Dan’s old saggy-bottomed upholstered chair. Candle- and firelight made wavering shadows on the rough log walls and flickering reflections in the shuttered windows.

“I love this room,” Griffin said. “It’s like a bear’s winter cave.”

“Is that why you slept in here instead of one of the bedrooms?”

“Yes. The bedrooms frightened me. I like sleeping on the swing.”

He told her then about how he’d heard the swing creaking that morning, and his rather violent reaction. They both laughed, and then she asked him to explain again about how he and Max had arranged it so his parents wouldn’t know he was missing until Monday.

When he finished, she said, “I wish I could have done something like that. So my parents wouldn’t have had to know.”

She was leaning forward with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring into the fire, her face curtained by hair. But her voice had changed, as it always did when she mentioned her parents. It occurred to James that he had a perfect opportunity to test his theory about Griffin’s emotional problems and how they stemmed from mistreatment and neglect by her jet-set mother. He knew, however, from past experience, that it wouldn’t be easy to draw her out. There was probably just too much pain and anger involved. But it seemed like a good time to try. James Archer Fielding, psychiatrist. The doctor is in—minus a couch perhaps, but a sleeping bag in front of a roaring fire ought to do. He did a quick rerun of all the psychiatric type movies he’d seen and tried to recall a typical opening question. Preferably something disarming, but a little more to the point than, “Just say whatever comes into your mind, Miss Donahue.”

After several minutes nothing very subtle had come to mind, and he gave up and settled for a more forthright approach. “Tell me about your mother, Griffin.”

Her head came up with a jerk, and she turned quickly to look at him.

“What about my mother?” she said.

Her frown startled him. “Nothing in particular. I’m just curious about her.”

Her eyes searched his face.

“She just seems very interesting,” he said. “And very beautiful.”

She smiled uneasily.

“And she must lead a very fascinating life.”

The frown returned. “She’s had a very sad life,” Griffin said. “Ever since she was born, she’s had a very sad life.”

James lost control of his face, and his eyebrows went up in surprise and disbelief.

The frown deepened. “The money doesn’t help. It was the money that made it so awful, at least right at first. When she was just a baby and everyone wanted her for the money and pretended to love her and tried to make her hate all the others, only she always knew it was just the money they wanted, and none of them really loved her.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Yes. She’s told me about it lots of times. And about how she always felt angry at them for only caring about the money, and that was why she did things to get even with them.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Well, like,” Griffin began, but then she stopped suddenly and narrowed her eyes. “Like all the things everybody already knows about because it’s all been in the papers and magazines.”

“I don’t know about it,” James said. “My mother does, I guess. At least she said something about reading about your mother in the papers, but she didn’t say much about what she read.”

“Didn’t she?” Griffin looked intrigued and then pleased. “I liked your mother.”

“No, she didn’t. So tell me. Like what?”

She shrugged. “Things like driving her stepfather’s Rolls Royce into the ocean. And bringing a lot of people from a labor camp to her house for a party when her folks were away. And other things. The papers always told what she did, but they never told why she did things. And usually she had good reasons. Like when she ran away and married my father, the papers made it sound as if she only did it to get her name in the papers.”

“Why did she really do it?”

“Because they were in love. She loved him more than anything in the world.” Griffin’s face had taken on the inward look it always had when she was involved in one of her fantasies—as if she had shut out the world and was tuning in on the data from some kind of internal tickertape. “They were very young and beautiful and happy,” she said. “But then the car crashed and it was all over.”

The therapy session was not moving in the direction he’d expected. Trying a different tack, he asked. “And how about your life? Has it been unhappy, too?”

“My life? No. My life is very happy.”

“But isn’t it pretty much like your mother’s?”

“No. It’s not like that at all. My mother needs me and so does Woody, and I have friends and everything I want. Why do you think I’m not happy?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I just wondered about your parents. They seem to be very busy and gone a lot.”

Griffin’s dark eyebrows drew together, and her eyes blazed. “You be still. You just shut up about them. You’re just like everybody else who gossips about her because she’s beautiful and has money and interesting friends. They don’t know what she’s really like, and you don’t either.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she threw herself face down on the sleeping bag, burying her face in her arms and a tangled swirl of hair.

Well, so much for psychoanalysis, James thought ruefully. He’d read, of course, that it was a dangerous thing to fool around with if you didn’t know what you were doing. But did he let that stop him? Of course not. Not Fielding, holder of the gold medal for the hundred yard dash with your foot in your mouth. So what if Mrs. Westmoreland didn’t really deserve Griffin’s loyal defense—would it really do Griffin any good right now to be forced to admit it. He slid down to the floor and touched her shoulder.

“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to criticize your mother. Just like I said before, I don’t know anything about her except that she’s fantastically good-looking. I guess I just asked about her because I like you and I wanted to get to know you better. To understand about your life and things like that.”

“Really?” Griffin’s voice was muffled.

“Really.”

There was another long silence, and James went into the bathroom and got a washcloth; when he gave it to Griffin, she rolled over onto her back and put the cloth on her face. It was quite a while before she took it off, and when she did her long lashes were wetly dark as if she were wearing mascara. Her eyes looked, more than ever, like her mother’s. She smiled faintly, and then just looked at James solemnly for such a long time he began to feel a little self-conscious. Finally her eyelids began to droop, and she went to sleep.

He must have gone on sitting there for quite a long time, alternately staring into the fire and watching Griffin sleep. Deeply relaxed, her hard young slender-ness softened like a sleeping cat. The firelight made a smooth dome of her forehead and interesting shadows beneath her high cheekbones. A thick strand of hair looped her throat like a necklace and quivered rhythmically with the beat of her heart. He found himself thinking about what she would have to face when she woke up—confrontation with the Jarretts, and then the twenty-second of September.

As he drifted toward sleep himself, his thoughts and feelings began to get more and more complicated. It was all very incoherent and confusing, but most of it concerned Griffin’s strange personality—a unique combination of wide-ranging enthusiasms, crazy dreams and ferocious loyalties. She really was an interesting kid.

W
HEN HE WOKE
up the next morning, back in his old Willowby bedroom, it took him a minute to remember where he was and why. Then it all came back. He’d flaked out on his old bed after Griffin had awakened and moved her sleeping bag to the lounge swing. Surprisingly, considering the day ahead, he seemed to have slept very well. Struggling out of Max’s sleeping bag and into his clothes, he hurried from the room.

Griffin’s sleeping bag was still on the swing, but she wasn’t in it. She wasn’t in the kitchen either, but the window was wide open, and when he stuck his head out and called, she answered from someplace nearby.

“Here I am. I’m coming,” she called, and a few seconds later she climbed in the window. “I’ve been out on the veranda,” she said, “watching the sky. It looks like there might be a storm coming.”

She was wearing her jeans and shirt again, her hair was braided down her back, and she looked more like her old self. She smiled at James, but her face tensed as she asked, “Should we go right away? To see the Jarretts? Do you think they’ll be here yet?”

“We might as well have some breakfast first,” James said, “but then we can get started. It may take some time to find a way into The Camp. We’ll have to get in without being seen. And by then the Jarretts may have arrived. If not, we can wait.”

When breakfast was over and the cabin returned, as much as possible, to the condition in which they’d found it, they started out for The Camp. The sun, which had shone briefly, was hidden now by dark clouds, and a cold wind was rustling the pine trees.

“I suppose we have you to thank for this weather,” he told Griffin.

“Me?”

“Sure. A storm this early in the year? It’s obviously part of that hunter’s whammy you concocted. There’ll probably be a cloudburst tomorrow for the first day of the season.”

They were walking single-file along the path to The Camp, and Griffin turned back to him, frowning. “If our plan works, we won’t need a cloudburst. Do you think it’s not going to work?”

“No,” he said. “I think there’s a very good chance it will work.” There was no use worrying her by admitting how unsure he really was. But in reality, the more he thought about it, the more he feared that resting their case on an appeal to the Jarretts’ compassion was going to be an exercise in futility. But it was their only hope, and he intended to go through with it.

They tried the fence first, following it for a long way looking for a place where a nearby tree or cliff might offer a way over the barbed-wire barricade that slanted outward from the top of the chain link fence. But the fence had apparently been constructed with such attempts in mind. After a long futile hike, they turned back towards the lake. A swim in the cold, choppy water was not inviting, but it was beginning to seem like the only possibility. But then, when they were passing the west gate, another long shot occurred to James. He would simply announce himself, using his old pass number. The chance that it would still be on the list at the main gate was slight, given T.J.’s passion for record-keeping, but it was worth a try.

When a familiar voice came over the speaker, “Main gate. Sergeant Smithers speaking. Who goes there?” James’ heart sank. Smithers was the type who would go by the letter of the law—a law that would say that the Fieldings’ passes had been cancelled at the end of August. But having gone this far James persevered.