Vermilion by Phyllis A. Whitney | eBook

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CHAPTER 1

The first step that would take me to Arizona began at the time of Jed Phillips' murder.

Jed was my father, and for most of my life I'd both loved and resented him. I had seen all too clearly what he was doing to my mother, and some time ago, in spite of the wrench it cost me, I'd made the choice to stand by her when she needed me. Now that she was so terribly ill in the hospital, she needed me more than ever.

The telephone call that told me of my father's death didn't come from my sister Sybil — my half sister — but from her husband, Rick Adams. I sat at my desk that morning in my Manhattan office, feeling only disbelief as I listened to Rick's remembered voice calling from Arizona.

Jed had died in a hotel in Las Vegas, Rick said. He had been entertaining lavishly, as usual, while probably flat broke. Both Rick and Sybil had been invited to the party he had thrown at a luxury hotel in his favorite gambling town — undoubtedly in order to raise money for some new scheme. How well I knew that he'd always been a gambler on a grand scale. Casinos and race tracks were small time to him, however, for Jed's schemes were a lot larger and more imaginative. Also a great deal more expensive and disastrous than any ordinary gambling.

"Lindsay, are you all right?" Rick was asking in my ear.

"I'm all right," I said, and heard the break in my voice. "I'm listening."

I knew I must listen. I must try to understand, even though I was merely holding off grief that waited to engulf me.

"Early this morning," Rick went on, "someone got into Jed's room and struck him down with his own ivory-headed cane. He wasn't found until a maid came in later. Money and his keys were missing. So perhaps it was robbery."

As I listened, my memory of that frightful cane seemed more real than what Rick was telling me. I remembered how I'd hated the dragon's head with which it was decorated. One of Jed's macabre little jokes — and now the weapon for his death.

"What about your mother?" Rick asked. His voice was still strong, deep timbred and recognizable, even though I hadn't heard it in years. "Sybil said you'd written that she was ill."

"She's in the hospital. The doctor told me yesterday that she may not have much longer to live. I would have called Sybil later today. I can't tell Mother this — I can't."

"Then wait a while. It's been hard on us all — pretty shattering. Sybil's gone home to be with Marilla, before anyone else tells her what's happened. She's only nine, and she was devoted to her Grandpa Jed. As we all were."

Not all, I thought dully. "Have you any idea who killed him?"

"There isn't a lead so far. Sybil thought your mother would want him brought home."

Home? His real home, his heart's home, was in the West, to which he'd always returned. He and my mother had never been officially separated, but through no wish of hers they'd moved farther and farther apart over the years. Yet this news would cause her unbearable pain.

"I'll stay on here, Lindsay, and look after everything, if you wish," Rick offered. "You'll have time to work out the details at your end, since the police aren't ready to — to release him yet. Are you really all right, Lindsay?"

I wasn't. But I had to hold on. It was better to be numb for a little while and let reality seep through to me slowly.

"I'll manage," I said.

"He cared about you a great deal. He always talked about you with such pride and affection."

I didn't doubt that this was true. Yet my feeling about all this was one of anger as well as sorrow. When it came to Jed Phillips these two emotions had always gone hand in hand.

Rick continued, "If you'd like, Lindsay, I'll bring Jed's body to New York."

I said, "Please, Rick. And thank you ... thank you."

Feeble words. After he hung up, I sat at my desk dry-eyed and unable to cry, even though I felt sick and shaken. I could remember so well how both Sybil and I had adored Jed when we were children. Nevertheless, my sister had never forgiven him for fathering me outside of his marriage and bringing me home as a baby only a few weeks old. If there had been deep pain in this for the woman I called my mother, she had never let us know. But my half sister, who was eight at the time, had never forgiven me either.

I knew nothing about the real mother who had let me go, and as I grew up I'd had too much pride to ask Jed any questions. I told myself I didn't care. All my defiant loyalty was for my stepmother. And still was. My father had always been able to look after himself.

Only apparently he hadn't. He'd chosen to live dramatically, and now he had died in the same theatrical way. There had been a gallant sort of recklessness about him that one could almost admire, however ruefully. Even the limp that had plagued him in his last years had been earned in characteristic fashion. Two years ago he'd been driving in the rain down the precipitous hills of San Francisco when his car plunged off a steep incline, rolling over and over. The woman with him — wasn't there always a woman? — had died in the crash, but Jed came out with a few broken bones that mended, and a limp that enabled him to look even more romantic than before. That was when he'd bought himself the cane with the ivory dragon's head. I shivered, thinking of it, and something strange and sad seemed to touch the outskirts of my mind like a hint of foreboding.

Memory swept back to a time ten years ago when Sybil had been twenty-five, a stunningly successful New York model, with a distinction of her own in presenting fashions for the business woman. I'd been seventeen and still in school. Jed came swooping into our lives on one of those waves of electric enthusiasm that always enveloped him when he returned without warning from the West.

On that occasion he had brought a protégé with him — Rick Adams. Rick was twenty-six and I had seen in him some of that same adventurous, enthusiastic quality that surrounded my father. In my young and romantic vision he had seemed a Western man. Not a cowboy with ten-gallon hat and high-heeled boots, but a man who had a look of the outdoors about him, and who didn't fit in with concrete and steel.

What I'd liked most was his joyful quality. I knew hardly anyone except my father who laughed out loud. Rick was full of laughter, and he could make other people laugh. Me, especially. He had gone out of his way to be my friend. It had seemed more than a casual kindness — as though he really liked me and wished me well. He would share jokes with me that made us both laugh, and which never carried hurtful barbs or put-downs. Jokes that I'm sure Sybil never understood. They might have made her grumpy if she hadn't been putting on such a beautiful act.

Of course when Rick looked at her there was a bedazzlement in him, a longing and admiration that he couldn't possibly turn on a child like me. With me he was kind and thoughtful, and very dear, so naturally I fell for him with all the passionate adoration of one who was too young and new when it came to love.

I suppose his laughter grew from his being so exuberantly alive. He was filled with triumphant joy because he had found this beautiful, intelligent, altogether glorious woman who was Sybil Phillips — and because she loved him back.

As I watched, there was a wryness in me born of long experience. I could have told Rick that my sister had never loved anyone. What she loved was her own power over others. What she enjoyed most was making others do as she wished. What she admired most was her own performance. And in that admiration there had always been a strong grain of cruelty toward anyone who crossed her. I'd seen her torment our mother on occasion. I'd seen her heartless treatment of some pretty decent men, and of course my own very existence crossed her, so that I was often her target and too young to defend myself. Oh, I could have quoted him chapter and verse.

Of course I didn't. He would never have believed me, and I wanted so much to have him at least like me. I could still remember my sense of loss after the wedding party, when Rick had searched me out to say good-bye. I'd been hiding from everyone, deep in the gloomy despair of youth. He'd kissed me on the cheek and hugged me, and I'd wept a little in his arms. He understood my foolishness and he'd never laughed at me.

He said, "Being young is very tough. But it's not permanent. You'll recover," and we had laughed together for one last time before he went away. Went off to Arizona, taking with him his enchanting and willing Sybil — who had worn out her fields of influence in New York and wanted new worlds to conquer.

In the years that followed they'd had only one child — their daughter, Marilla. I had seen her just once when she was three and they had come East. Mother wouldn't go to Arizona to visit — because Jed was there and she wouldn't pursue him — so of course I wouldn't go either. I didn't want to see Rick again anyway. Sybil came East only a few times during those years, and then, I suspected, only because it looked better if she visited her mother once in a while. I managed to be away whenever she came.

Rick's prophecy had come true, and I had grown up. I had my own absorbing work in the fashion world, and I was my own person, with no need to worry about an older sister who despised me. Or a father whom I'd loved so desperately, and who left me filled with angry resentment because I'd always wanted more from him than he could give. There had been men in my life, but no one I'd ever become serious about. Watching my mother suffer over Jed had made me wary of any full commitment. Besides, New York was not an easy place for the successful woman who might want a personal life as well. While men might give lip service to the new "equality," some of them still found the old ways more comfortable. It had always been hard for a strong woman to find a strong man.

Not that I was all that strong — if they really knew. What I had achieved made me look that way, and vulnerability was not something one wore like a badge.

Now, with the phone call from Arizona, the past had burst into the open. My father had died brutally, and Rick was coming here. I couldn't escape from searing grief, nor could I escape seeing Rick again. The grief I would manage to face, and of course it didn't mean anything anymore — that old, very young love of mine. Yet I suppose we never quite lose the selves we once were, and I was a little afraid of the girl who still hid inside the woman. Though surely in ten years we would all have changed, and I could count on that to get me through.

I wasn't prepared, however, for the startling change in Rick. A week later he brought my father's body to New York, and he drove me to Connecticut, where Jed Phillips was buried in a country cemetery not far from the town where he'd been born. My mother wasn't told. The doctors said it was pointless to add to her pain. In spite of everything, I knew she would have suffered. Somehow, my father was a man one never stopped loving, no matter how strong the bitterness.

I stood with Rick Adams beside the raw new grave, and still I couldn't cry, though there was a stone in my chest.

"When it was possible, he helped a great many people," Rick said. "He had a joyful spirit. He may have committed all the sins of the flesh — I don't know — but I never knew him to commit a sin of the spirit."

The words were a benediction, even though I couldn't wholly accept them. I had nothing to add.

Rick took me to dinner in New York that night before he went back to Arizona, and as we faced each other across a table I became increasingly aware that the young man whom I'd loved so desperately was gone. In his place was a stranger who had no laughter in him. Not that he wasn't even more attractive, with his sun-browned look, deep-set dark eyes, and springy brown hair that had a tendency to tumble. His face had always squared at the jawbones, but the expression of his generous mouth had hardened with deepening crescent lines, and there seemed a skepticism in his eyes that hadn't been there before. Perhaps he was a stronger, more forceful man than the one I'd known, but with a troubled restlessness in him that surfaced now and then. I knew the answer. Sybil had been at her destructive work again.

Though he didn't speak of my sister, he told me a little of his work in Arizona. There had been a time before he married when he'd worked for the government on a Hopi reservation in a place called Keams Canyon. He had always been interested in Indian crafts, and he could see the danger of their dying out, giving way to cheaply manufactured tourist junk. In the pueblos women still wore exquisite turquoise jewelry, and the Hopi were still weaving and making beautiful pottery.

Rick had begun modestly with a small shop in Phoenix that had been a gratifying success. But he was no shopkeeper, and he discovered quickly that his skills lay in finding and developing Indian artists and craftsmen, and that he could leave the selling of goods to others. What he did was on a cooperative basis with the Indians, and all profited.

His first shop had grown into several — and the prospering had been quite spectacular because what he had to offer was work for which wealthy buyers were willing to pay well. The shop in Sedona was the finest of all, and was managed by his partner, a woman named Clara Robins, who kept an eye on the other shops as well.

As Rick talked with growing enthusiasm, I could glimpse again the younger man I had known, and I listened eagerly, warmly. But he wanted to talk about me, too, and of the success I had achieved for myself. Apparently Jed had briefed him well. Though he was puzzled that I should be a designer in the fashion world — which seemed strange to him — perhaps because of what he regarded as its artificiality.

"Are you happy in what you're doing?" he asked bluntly.

I ate another mouthful of lemon sole and thought about his question. For some reason, it seemed necessary to defend and justify what I was doing.

"Apparently I have a talent for designing women's clothes," I told him. "Though I suppose I'm something of a maverick. I go my own way. I don't think beauty need preclude comfort. Good clothes ought to be good for any time. The great designers have always known that. Clothes should never forget the woman who'll wear them, and fortunately, women are wiser these days, smarter, more natural. They don't want to look like everyone else or be slaves to changing fashions."

Perhaps he thought I protested too much, and he watched me with a half smile that questioned, even doubted. I couldn't explain one of the forces that had always driven me toward success. I had known very early that I would never be content to remain as insignificant and invisible as Sybil thought me. If she had given me nothing else, she had taught me how to fight. In refusing to be her victim as I grew up, I'd learned how to stand on my own feet and develop the self-reliance that I'd needed. Now I could take satisfaction in knowing that I'd done well against enormous odds, that I was respected and recognized in my own field. No one had ever suspected the hollowness in me. But before I could leap into further defense of my work, Rick went down another road.

"It's time you came West for a visit, Lindsay. It's time Marilla got to know you. She needs more family in her life."

There was something in his voice ...

"You're worried about your daughter?" I asked.

"I worry a lot. She's a pretty special person."

And what sort of mother had Sybil made? But he didn't need to say any more. Perhaps he didn't even realize that he'd let down his new, instinctive guard and allowed me to see a tormented man. A strange confusion of love and compassion, as well as anger with Sybil, rose in me, and I reached out to him across the table. He took my hand gently and without surprise.

"Thank you for growing up like this," he said. "I know there was a time when you thought you never would."

Once more we laughed together — and were no longer strangers.

"Will you come to Arizona?" he said. "After all, you were born in the West."

The old, unacknowledged fear sprang up in me, and I let his hand go. Undoubtedly Rick Adams knew more about me than I did about myself, and I must shut this door quickly and firmly. Long ago I'd resolved that I didn't want to know about the past. All my loyalties were for the woman I considered to be my mother — not for someone unknown and faceless who had given me up long ago, valuing me so little.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from "Vermilion"
by .
Copyright © 1981 Phyllis A. Whitney.
Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Vermilion

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