The Glendower Legacy (33 page)

He broke the comfortable silence: “Well, I think we’d better look around the place, find out what we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

Viewed from the long porch at the front of the house, the island seemed to be smoldering, a kind of smoking pile with the outlines blurred by the blowing fog which obscured the water beyond, faded the forests, and gave it all the look of hardened lava: it was an image he’d seen before,
deja vu,
but he couldn’t place it … He was used to the dense and blowing fog which made everything look like a battlefield with the smoke hanging all about like impending death.

Heading across the damp grass, angled away from the direction they’d come twelve hours before, they saw the character of the island take form: a huge pile of firewood soaked beyond any hope of burning, behind it a solid bank of pines and firs, dark and impenetrable, forming a wall as flat and inhospitable as a bluff of shale. They followed the tree line through the heavy fog which damped them to their skin, heading toward the water, hearing the sound of the surf as they drew nearer, the crashing of the waves breaking through the velvety muffling effect of the fogbank.

Nearer the water the trees and the thick, grasping tangle of shrubbery clawed backwards, inland, trunks and limbs bent and twisted as if fleeing in terror from the sea. Along the top of the escarpment was yet another line of trees—hemlock, red and sugar maples, beech, and spruce—these planted deliberately by man, building a windbreak and leaving a fine view from the house which stood fully a hundred yards back and on much higher ground. They stood at the top of a long, shabby, decidedly rickety wooden stairway which zigzagged erratically down the steep rock face, moss pasted to the cliff on either side.

At the bottom, the beach was actually a shingle of large rocks scattered across a level expanse of sand finally giving way to the sea. A dock and boathouse sat gray and wet some three hundred feet below where they stood and another fifty yards to the right. Just beyond the boathouse was an arm of slate-gray rock sloping outward, covered patchily with brown underbrush and mosses. Well out in the water, forming a natural gateway, there were six large, uneven slabs of stone projecting upward, an arc swinging across the inlet like the teeth of a hag’s gummy lower jaw. The surf foamed white against the gray and purple and blue and black stones on the beach.

Even while they stood silently watching, the fog gusted in like a phantom army and swallowed the hag’s teeth, leaving what seemed to be a misty, hazy expanse of uninterrupted, quiet water, moving gently toward the beach, safe and flat … another burst of wind and they were there again, reminding Chandler of the great stone circles he’d seen in the English countryside, left there by another race of men with their significance and their awesome silence forever enigmatic … this island, he reflected, and the house—they were like that, too, as if there were secrets which would never be revealed. He looked back at the house and it had now disappeared in the fog, there was nothing but the blank grayness where it had been, that and the feel of the mist on his face. Spinning back, he knew what he would see: the hag’s teeth were gone, the water flat and untroubled. Polly smiled tentatively: she had seen it, too. “We’re in the middle, aren’t we?”

“Let’s climb down,” he said.

The stairway creaked but held. The beach made for tough walking and they stumbled frequently, scuffing their shoes, insult to injury which hardly made a difference anymore. Large gray boulders bore wide pink stripes. Polly found pretty little stones, scooped them up, dropped them in her pocket. The water, seen close up, had a savagery when it beat and foamed on the boulders which was not visible from above. Past the large rocks, the surf swept in across the small stones, furling and sucking at their shoes. The sky had a metallic blue-gray quality.

They walked toward the boathouse: “Doesn’t look safe,” Chandler said, nodding toward the catwalk leading across the foam to the boathouse and its dock. The wood was rotting, slats drooping. “Look,” he went on, taking her hand, “let’s skip it. We’d better get back to the house. Suppose somebody comes for us, can’t find us, and leaves—”

She nodded, agreeable, squeezing his hand.

There was an idyllic quality to the moment, their breath hanging like speech balloons before them, holding hands, scuffing along the beach like a couple in a cigarette ad. They stopped once, she closed her eyes, he kissed her, wrapped his arms around her.

Yet, climbing back up the narrow stairway, reaching the tree line at the top, there was the inevitable sense of unease, the incompleteness, the waiting.

Hand in hand they walked back toward the house. A deer flickered across the lawn, white tail like a gentle flag of friendship. “Anyway,” Polly said, looking up at him, “it’s lovely being alone.”

They were not alone, however.

A man watched from a shrubbery-covered promontory above the beach where Chandler and Polly had arrived the previous night. He watched them until they disappeared into the bank of swirling, shifting fog.

Chandler sat by himself in a window seat, feet cocked opposite himself, and watched the lawn and the water far beyond which was a darker shade of gray-blue than the fog which slid constantly across his vision. He watched but saw nothing. Alone, with Polly off puttering by herself, his mind turned anxiously back to Hugh Brennan and Bert Prosser, either one of whom could be dead: he felt desperate and helpless, trapped on the island, unable to come to the aid of either. Though what his aid was worth he wasn’t quite sure. He went outside and paced the length of the porch, accusing himself of being an idiot for having gotten involved at all-then, of course, he realized he’d had no choice. If ever a man had sought to maintain his distance, his innocence, it had been sheltered, academic Colin Chandler.

In the late afternoon they grilled steaks, opened a nice claret, and lazed about the library looking through the matched sets of Thackeray and George Eliot and Jane Austen and Trollope. They snooped in desk drawers which proved to be empty and they admired the old English hunting prints. There wasn’t a clue as to what normally went on at Stronghold, nothing to snap the isolation.

Polly went upstairs, leaving him alone, the fire whispering and the wind racketing outside. He might have dozed: the next thing he knew she was standing in front of him tapping his arm, holding the oilskin package Prosser had wrapped so carefully before they’d left the house in Maine.

“Let’s have another look,” she said. “Maybe you’ll have a revelation once you see it again.”

They unwrapped the package carefully. Underneath the oilskin Prosser had obviously wrapped the portrait and the documents in several thicknesses of newspaper. Polly stood watching, hands on hips, as he peeled the dry, perfectly protected pages away, came aware as he did that something was very wrong. Working feverishly, panicking, Chandler threw newspapers away in a frenzy. In the end he looked up, his face pale.

“It’s nothing but newspapers,” he said. “It’s not here, not any of it.”

“He kept the whole thing,” Polly breathed, a smile slowly spreading across her wide mouth.

“I just don’t understand,” Chandler said. He felt as if the fight had finally gone out of him.

“I knew it!” Polly gloated. “I just
knew
it … damn it, there’s just something weird about him …” She kicked a piece of newspaper, beaming. “Don’t you see, Colin? For once something’s happened that sticks right out. Prosser told us he was giving all the stuff to us, and then he kept it—somebody whose identity is perfectly clear to us has
lied
to us. And I thought Prosser was so worried about the bad guys getting it …”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s weird, everything is very weird …”

Chandler woke in the middle of the night, lay half asleep beside Polly, listening to her breathing and feeling the weight and warmth of her as she shifted, rested against him. The carefully wrapped oilskin packet of newspapers stayed resolutely in the forefront of his mind; when he closed his eyes he saw it, enigmatic, mocking … why would Prosser have done such a thing? So far as he could tell, it made no sense: they had been under siege at the time and the logical thing had been to give it to those who were escaping: keeping it, Prosser had clearly run a greater risk of its falling into the hands of the enemy … Unless—unless what?

He turned on his side and watched the moon shining on the clouds. He was tired and his eyes were bleary. But why was there a pink tinge to the night sky? Decidedly pink, blurring from the left, brightening the rectangles of night through the window. Northern lights? A shooting star? More likely a fire of some kind … As he watched the pink glow lightened, then faded. He was groggy but he wondered what the hell made the sky do that? Polly muttered something in her sleep and tugged the covers over herself, baring him. Finally he stood up and went to the window, looked out: he saw a fogbank resting lightly on the water beyond the hag’s teeth which were perfectly visible in the moonlight filtering through the lacework of clouds. The pinkness had come from the left but was almost gone now, a vague smudge that was gone as he watched. He lit a pipe of ashy, once-used tobacco and stared at the area where it had been until he was sure it was gone, that the night had returned to its normal color. He smoked, watching and thinking and worrying.

To begin with he wasn’t aware of it at all, the movement below him, and then he thought it was a trick of his tired eyes, a bit of fog blowing or a shred of cloud crossing the moon, a symptom of his exhaustion and a bad case of nerves … then the shadows moved again, and again, and he felt his breath catching behind his breastbone, recognized the sickish feeling in his belly: it was the old fear, gnawing, turning his legs weak and his will to sweat and trembling.

The shadows were coming up from the beach where he’d stood and looked back at the yellow blur of the seaplane … the shadows were coming from the direction of the pink glow. He watched, immobilized, as if he’d run utterly out of responses, as they came skittishly, jerkily, like beetles picking their way across the lawn.

There were six of them, six clearly defined shadows—men—darting across the long spread of lawn toward the house. He was afraid all right, but his adrenalin was gone: how to escape? how to protect Polly? how to get help?

The shadows moved into the trees and shrubbery near the house and the lawn was empty again: had he imagined it? Christ, talk about wishful thinking! No. While the experience had had a good many of the characteristics of a bad dream, there was no doubt, he hadn’t imagined it.

Forgetting the shadows for a moment, since they had stealthily concealed themselves out of his angle of vision, he found his eyes drawn upward toward a light blinking in the inlet, inside the hag’s teeth, and he saw in a shaft of moonlight, what looked like a ramshackle fishing boat, a trawler, riding low in the backwater between the rocks and the shoreline.
A fishing trawler?

Suddenly the island was a hell of a popular spot. He watched intently as the light that had seemed to blink beforehand swung nervously along the shoreline: for God’s sake, it was a searchlight with a narrow, piercing beam, winking at him as it played along the sand and rocks. Perhaps Prosser had sent another Kendrick-type to stage yet another rescue? The idea flickered across his mind like the searchlight, went out. Beyond the trawler the fogbank persisted, motionless, providing a gray backdrop for the gateway of stones arcing across the bay. He smelled the sea on the wind which worked its way toward the house.

He gently shook Polly’s arm, insistently, until she was awake and coherent.

“My darling, it’s time to wake up. There are little men crawling all around our house and I’m not at all sure what to do.” He laughed nervously.

“Try not laughing nervously and putting your pants on—”

“But that’s two things at once,” he said.

“Whose little men are they?”

He told her what he’d seen while they were getting into their clothes, stopping every few moments to listen and look at the window. He swung the French window open and stepped out onto the balcony, leaned over the edge, and saw them again in the shadow of the house, by the porch railing, clustered around their leader. They were whispering. They seemed to be somewhat confused.

“Well, Jesus,” the leader finally said impatiently and audibly, “we can’t just knock and go in the front door. You two move out along the porch and try those long windows. You two go find the back door-we’ll stay here and play with the front door. Now git!”

Chandler watched from above as they scampered off, then went back into the bedroom, saw Polly standing in the doorway to the second-floor hallway, watching. A dim nightlight burned outside their door, casting shadows against the stags on the wallpaper.

“They’re coming in,” he said. “Do you think if I ran screaming down the hallway I’d scare them off … no? Well, I can’t think of anything else—”

“Just wait,” she said. “See what they do …”

They heard an attempt to open the front door which was locked. An abrupt curse was followed by a throaty, muffled laugh. Footsteps moved along the porch. The silence was broken by the shattering of glass. They were coming in the French windows. The house creaked in the night wind. They heard the house filling with men, one noise after another now, coming fast: it was like floodwater rising in your own home. There was nothing to be done about it.

They were in the hall below now, voices muffled, tread heavy. Chandler heard the metallic, oiled sound of guns being handled. The hair on the back of his neck crawled. A light flared on at the top of the stairway, at the end of the long hallway. Polly suddenly shook against him.

“God,” she whispered, “this is like getting raped, they’ve penetrated us …”

He heard them on the stair and pulled her back into the room. She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. He went back onto the balcony and looked back toward the spotlight. More shadows fanned out across the wide spread of the lawn coming from the direction of the fishing trawler, moving from the edge of the cliff with its black tree line. He counted seven moving figures and then heard a loud voice braying at him from the bedroom.