Curse of Black Tor

Chapter One

The breeze blew streamers across the gray water to hang a tattered curtain of dampness between the ferry and Seattle. Martha Jamison turned and walked to the foredeck, where she stood almost alone, peering into the grayness surrounding the boat.

“It'll clear before you reach the island,” the Seattle taxi driver had insisted. “They get the best of our weather over there.” As though weather were a commodity the Canadians were guilty of hoarding.

Martha touched her hair nervously. Ginetha had helped her do it up in a French knot that morning, but the mist was encouraging stray wisps to curl out of the neat arrangement. The hairdo had been an attempt to seem as “mature” as possible, to fit the ad description. Perhaps she should go back inside?

“Ever been to Victoria?”

Martha turned to face a bearded young man.

“No.”

“You'll like Vancouver Island, but don't stay just in Victoria. The city's a marvel, but if you really want to--
”

Martha recognized the glint in his blue eyes and decided to be blunt. “My plans are all made,” she said. “Someone's meeting me.” Her tone was crisp. She was not one to encourage stray admirers. She turned her back to the young man.

A shaft of sunlight had cut through the overcast and glinted on the water. A sea gull rode a small chunk of driftwood.

“There are two of us facing the future, at least,” the bearded man remarked. So he hadn't left. Martha said nothing.

“I like to think of the ferry as a world microcosm. Hardly original, I'm afraid,” the man went on. “By the way, I'm Branwell Lowrey—my friends call me Bran.”

She didn't respond.

“Well, anyway, we brave spirits here at the bow are looking ahead. The people aft are those still caught in the past, while the few along the sides live for today.”

Am I facing the future? Martha asked herself. Isn't this trip a flight from reality, as Ginetha says? She shook her head.

“You don't agree?” Bran asked.

She turned to him, ashamed of her rudeness.

“I don't know,” she said. He was a good-looking man with chiseled features and would probably be equally attractive without the beard, unlike some men she'd met. His eyes smiled when he did.

“I can at least talk to him,” she told herself. Ginetha's admonitions rang in her ears. “You can't wrap yourself in memories of Johann forever. His death didn't make him a saint. Let other men have a chance in your life.” Martha gazed dispassionately at Branwell Lowrey.

“Where did you get all those freckles?” he asked.

“From my father.” Her reply was automatic for she'd been answering that question since childhood.

“Your freckles aren't all over, are they?” Johann had asked on their wedding night. They weren't, of course. Martha clenched her teeth and tried to listen to Bran.

“I'm Irish,” he said. “Only second-generation American, would you believe?”

“Scottish,” she said. “A long time ago.”

“What's your name?”

“Martha Jamison.” After Johann had died, she'd taken her maiden name again to thrust everything away. But Johann still lived in her mind—Johann and their days together.

“You're certainly not one of the dark dour Scots.”

“No, I'm the sandy kind.”

“Will you be staying long?” Bran asked.

“I—I'm not sure.” Ginetha thought she was crazy for answering the ad in the first place, and maybe Ginetha was right.

Martha studied Bran, bearded and tanned, in his jeans and T-shirt. What would it be like to throw a few necessities in a backpack and wander wherever one chose? She'd seen the group of young people come aboard with their packs. Bran looked as if he belonged with them. She was no older than Bran, surely. Twenty-eight shouldn't be too old to—to what? To be happy?

Martha straightened her shoulders and stared out over the bow. From the way the sun had broken through the weather was obviously clearing, and the sullen water was changing to a brownish blue as more of the sky appeared. Land became visible—pine-covered hills.

“That's Vancouver Island,” Bran said. “We're almost there.”

A sailboat passed to their left, its white sails taut in the crisp breeze. Other small boats skirted the shoreline.

“Salmon fishing,” Bran explained. “This is the season.”

Gray-and-brown gulls swooped low over the ferry, seeming to eye her curiously. The island grew larger, and she could identify houses, a church spire. No, perhaps not a church at all, the rambling white building with the tower up the middle, its peaked roof resembling a spire. That wasn't a cross at the tip but a—was it a porpoise? A whale?

Then the boat entered the harbor inlet, and she had a confused impression of piers, warehouses, the loud roar of a seaplane taking off, a train whistle, the hoot of the ferry, foreign flags flying. But of course in this place she was the foreigner—the flags were Canadian.

“You'll never get the job,” Ginetha had insisted, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer spread on the rug between them, open to the help-wanted ads. Ginetha had been eager for Martha to stay, to find a job in Seattle and not return to what she termed “the nightmare of L.A.”

L.A. was all right, Martha thought. It kept her hidden. But Ginetha hadn't let her alone, bombarding her with phone calls and letters and threatening to come in person if Martha didn't stop moping around in “that depressing apartment—how you can stay there after what happened...?”

But the apartment was the known, and Martha had been afraid to leave it, until Ginetha had suddenly appeared and carted her off to Seattle.

“Listen to this.” Ginetha read ads for office nurses, ICU nurses, private-duty nurses. “Take your pick.”

“I don't think I'm ready, Gin.” Panic rose in Martha at the thought of monitoring the ICU machines, making quick decisions, reassuring frightened patients and relatives.

“Oh, don't be silly. Once a nurse, always a nurse. When we worked together at Camarillo you were better than anyone else on the floor, and you know it.”

Martha had met Ginetha at Camarillo State Hospital when they'd been fresh out of training. Ginetha was from Oregon, Martha from Arizona. They'd taken their state civil-service exam for psychiatric nursing together. Then Martha had met Johann and married him.

“I haven't worked for four years,” Martha reminded Ginetha.

Ginetha waved her protest away and continued to scan the paper. “Here's an impossible one. Listen. 'Mature nurse with psychiatric experience to act as companion for young woman. Must live in.”

“Why 'impossible'?” Martha had asked.

“Because it's on the island and that's Canada and you can't work over there without years of red tape. Anyway, who'd want to live in with a crazy?”

“Let me see the ad.”

“Oh, Martha, you don't want anything like that. Either they have a retarded kid that's gotten too big to handle, or else a schiz. I'd think—” Ginetha broke off.

Martha said nothing at all, knowing that they both were thinking of Johann. But there was no use dwelling on the past. “I'm going to answer this ad,” Martha said finally.

The reply to her letter had been prompt but imperious: “Please bring your luggage so there will be no delay should the interview prove to be mutually satisfactory. It was signed “Jules Garrard,” and a ferry ticket for the Princess Margarita was enclosed.

Even at the moment, with the boat gliding into the dock at Victoria, Martha wasn't sure why she'd persisted in applying for the position. Wasn't Ginetha right? Living-in with any patient could be tiresome, and someone mentally ill might well prove to be impossible. Especially after Johann. Why did she think she’d be able to handle it? Or want to? Did she crave the security of having a house to live in, of having other people responsible for supplying her basic needs? No jockeying for position on a hospital staff, no in fighting, no battling traffic to work and back. Still, she could have done private duty in Seattle.

“
That’s the Empress Hotel you're staring at,” Bran said.

“What?” She'd been so lost in her interior monologue that she hadn't realized what she was seeing. “Oh, you mean the building with all the towers and turrets?”

“Yes. And to the right are the legislative buildings.
The middle one looks like a state capitol. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia.”

“Oh, that's right. Well....” Martha turned from the rail and started toward the cabin. She must smooth her hair before she got off the ferry. First impressions were important. “Goodbye,” she called over her shoulder to Bran, then moved a little faster, hoping he wouldn't follow.

In the women's lounge she checked her appearance in the mirror, quickly tucking loose ends of hair into place. She wore no makeup except for pale coral lip gloss. She'd been sleeping well this past week that she'd spent with Ginetha in Seattle—her eyes were clear, their color enhanced by the delft blue of her jacket.

She joined the line of disembarking passengers, her stomach knotted with nervousness. Why was she here at all? The rest of the people around her seemed to be tourists. There were some of the backpackers now, though Bran wasn't in sight. When the customs inspector asked for identification, she showed her driver's license and said she wasn't sure how long she'd be staying in Victoria—perhaps just overnight.

Then she was out of the ferry shed, suitcases in hand. WELCOME TO VICTORIA was spelled out in flowers, marigolds, on the bank to her right. She took a deep breath.

“Miss Jamison?”

Martha turned and saw a middle-aged man with graying hair in a fringe around an otherwise bald head. He held a cap in his hand that matched his gray uniform.

“Yes.”

He put on his hat and plucked the bags from her hands. With a nod he indicated a gray Rolls-Royce. “This is the car, miss. My name is Henry.”

A chauffeur, yet, she thought after being shut into the back seat. But what else should she expect of a family wealthy enough to hire a live-in psychiatric nurse? The wages mentioned in the letter were very generous.

“Too generous,” Ginetha had said. “This patient must be a real nut. Why don't you reconsider and stay with me?”

Why hadn't she? Ginetha was an easy girl to be around. She didn't ask questions, although Martha felt them there, dozens of questions coiled in Ginetha's mind like poisonous snakes: “Did he really try to kill you like the papers said? Wasn't it awful when you unlocked the door and found him?”

Martha closed her eyes for a moment. Maybe that's why she hadn't stayed with Ginetha—the unasked questions. Maybe she was avoiding reality by this flight to another country. She'd let her hair grow and wore it differently; she no longer lightened it to blond, as Johann had preferred—she wasn't Marty Collier anymore, Mrs. Johann Collier. She was Martha Jamison, R.N. Who in Canada would connect the two?

They drove along a main street that had lamp posts with five round globes in a cluster like grapes. And baskets of live flowers hung from projections under the globes— geraniums, petunias and lobelia in a riot of reds and pinks and blues. The lamp posts themselves were the same delft blue as her pantsuit.

“Admiring the flowers, miss?”