The House at Sandalwood Read online

  I sat up on one sand-covered elbow. “What made you say that? Was there a lover at all in her life?”

  She waved away the notion with scorn. “Whatever killed Kekua, it wasn’t any love affair. But between you and me, little old Kekky was doing all right in the dollar department.”

  I watched a big outrigger canoe sailing across the bay, its mainsail a gaudy red and gold, but I was thinking of Nelia’s words.

  “You think she was blackmailing someone?”

  “That’s putting it pretty crudely. All I’m saying is that people are true to their character. If they love something, they can hate just as hard, but the love is still there. And the same goes for greed. Greedy people don’t change. When I was a lot younger, they sent Kekua to a school in Kaiana City one time. That’s where I met her. She found out I’d driven to the pool on the windward coast with my boyfriend instead of going to the movie house. I had to pay her a dollar a week to keep her from telling my pa, until her family decided to take her home. They didn’t like our haole ways. Our ways, mind you.”

  Beyond the bright outrigger a prop plane was headed out over Kaiana Bay toward Ili-Ahi. It did not surprise me too much, since my mind was on other things, but Nelia pointed out its importance. She got up, shaking white sand off the deep, marine blue suit she wore.

  “That’s funny. Looks like that plane is going to land on the island.”

  Startled, I got up as well. “How can it land? There is no field, is there?”

  “On the west coast beyond the jungle there’s a field where the Hawaiians keep a small herd of cattle. Mostly beef, but I think there’s a dairy herd as well. They haven’t had any to sell us lately, or so they say. Now, with Kekua’s death, they’ll tighten everything up until Mr. Stephen stops work on the grove.”

  Anxiously, I picked up my beach hat and the hamper.

  “If that plane is coming in, they must intend to visit Sandalwood. We’d better be going.”

  “Right!”

  We made our way around the tiny cove and took the path up past the copper light to Sandalwood House above the gulch. We did not look toward the noisy falls or the broken clumps of fern and bright ginger and the darker, prickling bushes that had gone into the gulch when Kekua fell. But there was still the sweet, haunting perfume of those ginger flowers on the moist air, and it was difficult not to remember what happened in this place so short a time ago.

  Nelia laughed. “I hope the plane doesn’t land on some of those cows, or we’ll be getting milkshakes for free.”

  I couldn’t see the humor in this, especially as I now realized that the field she referred to was literally a pasture.

  “You mean to tell me there is no landing strip at all?”

  She shrugged. “If you can call one unpaved jeep road a strip. A couple of years ago Mr. Stephen and his pilot came in on a belly-whop. No wheels. Mr. Stephen got a black eye and a broken leg. The pilot was okay. But Queen Ilima wouldn’t give permission for any more landings. Scared the cows and they wouldn’t give milk, or something.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.” Her information indicated that the plane we could see circling above the westerly half of the island was not here on a joy ride.

  By the time we were inside Sandalwood, Mr. Yee was standing in the hallway, hands on hips.

  “Madam—” (He must have meant me.) “I take it I may expect your assistance when you have shed your wet garments.”

  “Are you having difficulties?” I asked as coolly as I could.

  Nelia sensibly chose this moment to duck upstairs and change while Mr. Yee made me acquainted with what he considered a new catastrophe.

  “I am informed by the telephone that Mrs. Stephen arrives in the airplane. Madam Ilima gave the pilot permission to land. This will take place within minutes if all goes well.” Whatever I had expected, it was not this. In view of Nelia’s tale about the last plane to land here, I could only hope all would go well.

  “But that is dangerous! She knows there isn’t a landing strip here. And she should be in the hospital! Surely, her husband doesn’t know about this.”

  Mr. Yee said, “I was not consulted on the matter of Mr. Stephen’s views. Mr. Berringer and Mr. Pelhitt, I believe, visited Mrs. Stephen in the hospital and talked with her. She wished to return to Ili-Ahi. Having talked with her about many things, I am told, they agreed to assist her.”

  I was starting up the stairs in a great hurry, to get into some other clothing, when I was jolted by Mr. Yee’s final statement. “The four will be asking to see Mr. Stephen at once.” “Four? Including the pilot?”

  “No, madam. Including the lieutenant from the Honolulu police department. I believe Mr. Berringer acted as pilot.”

  Eighteen

  I had long ago steeled myself against reacting to shocks of any kind and I went on up to my room, showered and changed. I kept glancing out the window every minute until I saw the three men—Berringer, tall, confident, and powerful, William Pelhitt, looking too hot in the sun and still with a patch on his forehead, and the stranger who was probably Filipino and Hawaiian, a good-looking dark man, with the heavy grace of the Hawaiians I had seen. That would be the police lieutenant. Deirdre was with them, walking a trifle sedately, not running as she usually did, but she looked cheerful and surprisingly perky after her ordeal.

  Now that I knew Deirdre had landed safely, I could finish dressing with an easier mind and did so in haste. By the time I finished, Deirdre was already on her way to her strange, greenish-hued room above the river and the falls. I called to her in the hall and followed her.

  “It’s wonderful to see you, dear. It seems like ages. How are you feeling?”

  She hesitated, then turned and smiled, holding out her hands, but for an instant I felt sick—as if she had struck me. She had almost failed to turned around when I spoke, and I knew the delay was real, not my imagination. Something had happened during her hospital stay, something to turn her against me. She had made too much of those moments in her sickroom at the Kaiana Hilton when she looked at her husband and at me.

  “I’m fine,” she told me coolly. “It all turned out to be a false alarm. Palpitations, they call it. An old lady’s disease. Stephen was going to come and be with me tonight but he wouldn’t bring me back home until the fuddy-duddy doctors said I could go. Then Mr. Berringer came to the hospital. He was scary at first—” She leaned nearer to confide, “He still is. But he talked to me awhile and he didn’t seem so bad. And then, when I complained about being kept in the hospital, he said he’d get me home if I would talk about the days with Ingrid.”

  “And did you?”

  She shrugged. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought. I just told what I remembered, and he didn’t get mad or anything.”

  “And you feel perfectly all right. No pain? Everything fine?”

  “Of course!”

  Why did Berringer want Deirdre home on Hi-Ahi? Did he hope she would lead him to something—some clue about his daughter’s disappearance?

  “But you shouldn’t be climbing stairs,” I insisted. “You know that. When Stephen talked to the hospital they told him you wouldn’t be released for several days.”

  “That’s right.” She squeezed my hands with a more friendly gesture, and her warm, full lips spread in her childlike smile, but her eyes were wary and watchful. “As it happened, Berringer turned out to be a friend. Yes, wise old auntie, I really have friends of my very own.” She withdrew her hands with a kind of thoughtful deliberation. “Imagine! I was important to them. They came clear to the hospital, he and that Pelhitt man, just to listen to my opinions and what I had to say.” Without being sure what this meant, I was almost afraid to ask. I knew anything Berringer might want of Deirdre would be disastrous.

  “Of course they wanted to talk with you, Deirdre. After all, you knew Ingrid. Was the lieutenant with Mr. Berringer and Bill Pelhitt when they saw you in the hospital?”

  She had started into her room. She looked over her shoulder, a trifle puzzl
ed but apparently not in the least suspicious of any ulterior motive in all this.

  “The policeman? No. Why would he visit me? He’s not my friend.”

  “And Berringer is? Deirdre, when you first met that man, you were terrified. You drew sketches of him as Satan. Why the sudden change?”

  With an insouciance that reminded me of her mischievous childhood years she taunted me, “I changed my mind. Mr. Berringer isn’t like you or Stephen. Or Dr. Ito Nagata. He listened to me about that awful Pele goddess who scared me so.”

  “What! But Deirdre—”

  “In the grove. I saw that thing from my window, that goddess—whatever it was—right after Stephen and I were married. Nobody believed me. Why do you think I moved out of my pretty pink room? I was frightened of that thing, and Stephen just wouldn’t believe me. He thought it was because of ... because I was afraid of him.” She bit her lip and looked as if she was sorry she had told me so much.

  I said quietly, “I understand. I really do.”

  This time the faint flicker of a smile was genuine.

  “In a way, I was afraid. I was so stupid. Ingrid said I was the most ignorant freak she ever knew. I don’t mean about sex and things like that. But about handling men. She said she’d get him back. She said I was an idiot and he’d find out and never want me. But he’s not going to find out. I’ll never let him know me so well he’d be able to hate me as she did. He’s always going to see me the way he thinks I am now. Not—that other me. The one that Ingrid says is an idiot.”

  I could hardly bear this. To think she would believe the foul, treacherous lies of a woman like this Ingrid Berringer! I could kill the woman myself, or very nearly!

  “Deirdre, listen to me. Ingrid Berringer is a jealous female. That is all. You mustn’t believe anything she tells you. Women like that always try to hurt you if they think you are vulnerable. You must never let anyone see that you can be hurt by them. Certainly not by a jealous creature like that.”

  She took a deep breath. “And you, darling Aunt Judy? Are you a jealous female?” she asked me unhappily. Then she went into her study.

  I hadn’t heard the men downstairs, so I went down in a hurry to find out what they were doing. No matter how they may have conned Deirdre into believing them, they were here for some devious reason that would hurt Deirdre and Stephen. And they had risked her life to further their schemes. I bitterly resented them, but I knew this attitude would accomplish nothing. Following their voices, I went into the living room where I found William Pelhitt regaling his two companions with the tale of last night’s storm and the way he had fallen, “fallen into the room through the broken window.” “And here is my young savior,” he pointed me out as Berringer and the dark-eyed lieutenant looked around at me. The lieutenant was not unfriendly, but he had the business-like stare of a man sizing me up. I knew the look and the suspicion that triggered such a look. On the other hand, Victor Berringer’s eyes regarded me with frosty amusement and something else—a certain curiosity—as if he were genuinely interested in my part of this business. Surely, if he were worried about his daughter, he would, understandably, feel rage and fear and all the heated emotions of any other human being in his situation. I sometimes wondered if Victor Berringer actually was human.

  The men were all standing by the new west window from which anyone could get an oblique, northerly view of the sacred grove. Once Berringer and the lieutenant had lost interest in staring at me, they returned to what seemed to be their chief concern, the grove itself. William had tried to concentrate on me, but I could see that his companions’ determined, one-track minds had shaken him. He kept trying, in his heavy-footed, rather endearing way, to play down the seriousness of this visit, but I felt they might as well get on with whatever unpleasantness they intended.

  Bill boomed out with almost an excess of cheerfulness, “Hi! Come here and tell them all about how you saved me from pneumonia last night.”

  “I don’t want to play down your rescue from pneumonia, but I would like to ask you what these gentlemen are doing here. According to Mrs. Giles, they took a great chance by landing in some sort of pasture.”

  “Perfectly adequate landing strip, but thank you for your interest, Miss Cameron,” Berringer put in politely. “We checked by telephone with the noble lady who is called ‘Queen’ Ilima. She described the field minutely, and urged us to make the flight over at our first opportunity. This was our first opportunity. By the way, this is Lieutenant Jose Padilla. Lieutenant, Miss Judith Cameron, Mrs. Giles’s aunt.”

  The lieutenant nodded. I could almost see his brain recalling certain unsavory notes about my past, but he was more interested in the present serious matters. I agreed with him in that—I didn’t like this pussyfooting around.

  “I suggest you get on with whatever you came to do and save the amenities for afterward. Mrs. Giles tells me you persuaded her to leave the hospital against her doctors’ advice. I don’t suggest you try any more tricks of that sort. If something happens to Mrs. Giles, you will be responsible. Now, what did you come here for?”

  “She’s right, you know,” Bill Pelhitt put in, nervously trying to make peace. “Can’t we postpone this business for a little while, until Mrs. Giles is better?”

  Before Berringer could open his mouth with a customary sardonic remark, Lieutenant Padilla turned to me.

  “Miss Cameron, I do agree with everything you say. I am here to see that an area of the grove called Sandalwood heiau is investigated.”

  Since Deirdre had mentioned her phantom goddess Pele, which she claimed to have seen when she was first married, I assumed they were interested in the sacred grove, but Kekua had died less than two nights ago. What had all this to do with Deirdre’s imaginary phantom? The disappearance of Ingrid Berringer so long ago had nothing whatever to do with murder, as yet.

  Then I remembered the marks I saw in the grove the afternoon before the storm. “But Kekua’s footsteps and the others were washed away last night. And today the workers must have trampled all over the place.”

  For the first time Berringer lost his cool self-possession. “What has the native girl’s death got to do with this? Get on with it.”

  “Mr. Berringer, I don’t want to supervise the digging until Mr. Giles is here. These men are his workers and I want to be quite certain he is witness to everything that is done in that grove.”

  The whole situation was far worse than I had expected or even feared. I was sure that Deirdre never dreamed of what she had stirred up, but I said coldly, “Mr. Giles will be happy to satisfy you when he gets back from Kekua Moku’s funeral. I had supposed you came here to investigate Miss Moku’s death. It seems you aren’t even interested in it.”

  They all seemed upset by this charge, as if it had never occurred to them that there might be something strange and sinister about Kekua’s “accident.”

  Bill Pelhitt and Berringer said almost together, “But it was an accident, wasn’t it?” and Lieutenant Padilla asked me flatly, “Are you trying to tell me Miss Moku’s death was not an accident? If you know something that hasn’t been reported, I advise you to make a statement to that effect.”

  Deirdre’s voice settled priorities for us at that minute when we heard her calling as she ran through the hall toward the front door: “Stephen! You didn’t go to the funeral yet. I’ll go with you. I’m going to the grave, too.”

  The lieutenant glanced toward the doorway but returned his attention to me immediately. “Mr. Giles seems to be here; so unless you have something pertinent to say about the Moku girl’s death, we will have to leave that subject for some later time. Perhaps you would prefer to go in to Kaiana City, or better yet, to Honolulu, and make your statement there tomorrow.”

  “But I have no statement. I simply thought—”

  He turned away with Berringer and went after Deirdre. From the window Bill Pelhitt and I saw Deirdre walk as quickly as she could out across the grass to meet Stephen. He was clearly delighted to see her,
and swung her up to him in an embrace that tore at me emotionally. I was happy at this clear sign of his love, but I couldn’t deny my own anguish. I really did feel jealousy. Bill looked at me.

  “Loves them all, doesn’t he? He may be pretty gentle now, but he managed to make my Ingrid love him, and then he threatened her life.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Are you responsible for filling that policeman with lies?”

  A muscle in his cheek tightened. He said breathily, “Those are no lies. You heard Mrs. Asami. Vic took the lieutenant to question her. Then we went to talk with Mrs. Giles, and Mrs. Giles told him the rest.”

  “How could Mrs. Asami identify Stephen? Or did you just guess at someone who fitted his description?”

  Bill looked around in that embarrassed way he had that was at once annoying and pitiful.

  “I took a wedding picture of Giles and his wife.”

  “How? When?”

  “Last night. In his study. I just borrowed it. A five-by-seven color thing. It will be returned afterward.” He pointed to the little domestic scene on the lawn.

  Stephen was looking Deirdre over from head to foot, and obviously scolding her, but gently. I closed my eyes. When I opened them Deirdre had turned and was staring back at me.

  Beside me, Bill Pelhitt grumbled, “He’s talking about you. Anybody can see that. But it’s only making her hate you. Did you ever think of that?”