Shadows of the Heart Page 5

  When she made no comment on what he had said, he prompted her with, “Someone did come to your aid, I take it. Or were you alone?”

  “I managed to break the window and then the servants and Edith came.” As an afterthought she added, “Of course I was alone. It was past midnight.”

  “And where was Armando during all this uproar?” he inquired dryly.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Trish answered, beginning to feel irritated. She wasn’t sure if she was irritated by his questions or by the way he seemed to appraise her, find her reasonably attractive, and then dismiss her. “Really, I’d rather not discuss the fire anymore. It was merely an unfortunate accident. So if you’ve found out everything you came for—”

  “Forgive me,” he said. He dipped his head in apology but there was something faintly mocking in his tone. “We’ll talk of other things. Have you met Edith’s father yet?”

  Trish bit her lip. Of all the subjects to pick for casual conversation, why did he have to pick that one? “No, we haven’t been introduced yet,” she said evasively.

  “I see.”

  “Why did you come over here?” she blurted out suddenly. “You must know Armando will be furious if he finds out. And I can’t really believe you’re all that interested in the results of my… my smoking in bed.” He did not seem disturbed by her outburst. He regarded her thoughtfully, one lean, aristocratic hand tapping the little table by the window lightly. “Insofar as I know, Armando does not own the cafetal. At least not yet. Robert Hepler does. And Robert Hepler has never told me I am not welcome here.”

  His contemptuous opinion of Armando as some sort of pretentious upstart was obvious, but Trish was reminded of Armando’s equally contemptuous remarks about Marc’s attempts to ingratiate himself with Robert Hepler in order to buy the plantation cheaply.

  “And as for why I came…” His smile was lazy, but something smoldered beneath it, and Trish’s heart jumped wildly when he added softly, “Would it surprise you to know that I am interested in everything about you?”

  The unexpected reply flustered Trish. She cleared her throat nervously, wondering if he was sincere or if this was some sort of game he was playing to amuse himself. She would not put it past him to come here for the sole purpose of infuriating Armando. She toyed uneasily with the drapery cord by her bed, realizing for the first time that Marc’s house and stables were visible from this window.

  Suddenly Marc leaned forward, his lazy manner gone, his dark eyes intent. A muscle twitched along his lean jaw. “Go home, Trish,” he said harshly. “Go home before—”

  Trish never knew whether it was his totally unexpected words or the intensity of his eyes or just the overwhelming nearness of him, but something within her reacted with a violent spasm of coughing. She gasped for breath and her eyes watered and her chest ached.

  When she finally leaned forward weakly, her face in her hands, she was aware of some sort of commotion. A short, stocky man was waving his arms and chastising Marc in rapid Spanish. The servant woman had returned and was excitedly insisting that it was not her fault, that she had tried to keep Marc out. Edith wasn’t saying anything, but her distress was obvious.

  Only Marc was utterly calm, the eye in the center of the hurricane around him. He was standing now, towering over the others, unperturbed. He looked toward Trish, his expression aloofly inscrutable.

  “I am sorry if I disturbed you, seňorita,” he said. “I wish you a quick recovery from your unfortunate accident.”

  He strode toward the door without looking back, and the little doctor looked vaguely. uncomfortable, as if suddenly thinking that perhaps he should have treated such a powerful person with greater courtesy. Then, shrugging, he turned his attention to Trish and proceeded to give her as thorough an examination as was possible with the limited equipment he had. He listened to her heart and lungs, inspected her throat, nose, and eyes, and tsk-tsked over her singed hair. He spoke little English, but his instructions concerning several days of bed rest were plain enough.

  When the doctor was gone, Edith looked at Trish anxiously. “What in the world happened? Why did Marcantonio come here?”

  Trish shook her head. She leaned back against the pillow weakly, her blond hair fanned out around her. She breathed carefully, trying to avoid that little ticklish feeling that would send her into another spasm of coughing.

  “He asked about the fire, that was all.”

  “Armando will be furious if he finds out Marcantonio was here.” Edith paced nervously between bed and doorway, as if half expecting Armando to come roaring down the hallway.

  “That’s what I told him,” Trish agreed. “But he didn’t seem very worried about it.”

  Unexpectedly Edith smiled. “No, I don’t suppose he would be.” She sat on the edge of the bed. Her hair was done up in the regal coil of braids again, and she looked very much the proud cafetal owner. But it was somehow still difficult for Trish to imagine that the aristocratic and sensuous Marcantonio de la Barca had ever been wildly in love with her.

  “Armando is very jealous of…” Trish paused, searching for the right word. “… of Marc’s former relationship with you, isn’t he?”

  Edith’s smooth skin flushed slightly. She hesitated, playing nervously with the engagement ring on her left hand. “Marcantonio was never in love with me,” she admitted self-consciously. “At one time I had a terrible crush on him, and I’m sure my father would have been delighted if something had come of it. But I am hardly Marcantonio’s type of woman.”

  Edith smiled slightly at Trish’s questioning look.

  “Somehow Armando got the impression Marcantonio had been madly in love with me and I—” She flushed again and averted her head. “I let him believe it. To tell the truth, I have not had many suitors.”

  “I’m sure it has been difficult for you, living way out here with so many responsibilities and all. But now you have Armando, and I’m glad he seems to realize what a lucky man he is to have you.” Trish smiled and reached over to squeeze Edith’s hand warmly. “Besides, I don’t see anything wrong with letting a man think he has a little competition to keep him on his toes.”

  “You’re very understanding.” Edith returned the squeeze. “But I think the matter of the supposed relationship between myself and Marcantonio is only a small part of the hostility Armando feels for him. It is perhaps that Marcantonio has always had so much, and Armando has had to work and struggle for everything.”

  “My grandfather always said it was better to work for something than have it handed to you on a silver platter,” Trish commented. Somehow Trish found herself relieved to hear Edith’s confession about the truth of her relationship with Marc. Intuitively Trish had known he had never been in love with plain, quiet Edith, and she thought more highly of him, knowing he had not attempted to deceive Edith in this matter in order to get the cafetal he coveted. Was it even possible that his desire to reunite the two halves of the plantation was less of a ruthless obsession than Armando believed?

  Edith’s next words dispelled that thought.

  “The other things Armando said are quite true, however,” Edith went on in a low voice. “Marcantonio had tried, with many offers, to persuade my father to sell to him. He can be cruel… and ruthless. I’m sure there are many women who hoped to snare him into marriage who would attest to that.”

  “But there isn’t much he can do about the cafetal, is there?” Trish argued lightly, ignoring the comment about Marc’s prowess with women. “After all, your father has refused to sell, and Armando is here to manage the coffee business now. Someday, of course, I imagine it will belong to you and Armando together.”

  Edith nodded, but an unexpected turmoil in her fine, dark eyes startled Trish. “It would seem so, and yet…”

  “Yet what?” Trish prodded.

  Edith shrugged and stood up. “Marcantonio’s uncle’s obsessive fear forced him to sell the plantation in spite of his love for it. I do not know to what extremes Marca
ntonio’s obsession to possess it again might carry him.”

  Trish shivered as the calm words, unemotionally spoken, hung between them. Somehow Edith’s quiet statement was more disturbing, more damning than Armando’s passionate tirade against the man.

  Trish bathed later in the day, trying to get rid of the smell of smoke that clung tenaciously to her skin and hair. The servants moved her clothes from the other room, but they also smelled of smoke and everything had to be taken away for laundering. Trish wrote a letter to her grandparents and another long one to her parents, though she left out any mention of the fire so as not to upset them even more than they would be when they found she had dropped out of college.

  Mostly she just stayed in bed, finding it not too difficult to follow the doctor’s orders, since any exertion tended to bring on the racking coughs again. Her glance strayed frequently to the other house, partially visible through the trees, but there was no sign of Marc’s coming or going from it.

  Just as frequently her thoughts went back to the unexpected visit from Marc and the even more unexpected things he had said. One minute he had seemed to say he was interested in her, and that smoldering glance had perhaps said more than words. Just thinking about it sent a shiver up Trish’s spine.

  But in the very next breath he had harshly advised her to go home. Go home before— Before what? Had he some suspicion that the fire in her room might not have been an accident? He had dealt with Robert Hepler in the past. He must know of his peculiarities. Was Marc warning her to leave because she was in danger from Edith’s father? Marc had, she remembered, mentioned him only moments earlier. Trish hadn’t let herself examine that night any further; hadn’t let herself ask the questions that didn’t fit in with the neat little smoking-in-bed explanation.

  Deep down she had to admit that she was perhaps as much hurt as puzzled by Marc’s harsh advice. Reluctant as she might be to confess it even to herself, considering the arrogant way he had treated her, Trish had to admit she was attracted to him. It was hardly flattering to have a man to whom she was attracted urge her to leave, not stay.

  A servant brought dinner to Trish’s room and Edith stopped by later in the evening. Edith had a slightly harried look. She said that Armando was “upset,” which Trish took to be a polite term for a sullen, angry reaction to Marc’s visit. Edith indicated there were some problems at the beneficio, the coffee-processing-plant, which had further upset him. In any case, he ignored Trish and did not make even a courtesy call to inquire how she was feeling.

  The next morning Trish felt much improved. The scratchy rawness was gone from her throat and deep breathing brought no pain nor inclination to cough. She accepted a leisurely breakfast in bed, still watching out the window for Marc, but somehow knowing he was long since up and about the business of the coffee plantation. After breakfast she bathed and dressed in blue denim shorts and a comfortable halter top. There was no reason, she decided, that she could not do her lying around in the sun and at least have a tan to show for the time spent doing nothing. The laundered clothing smelled fresh and clean now, all trace of the smoke gone.

  She poked around in the bureau drawers and bathroom cabinet where the servants had placed her things, looking for her suntan lotion, but she could not find it. She finally decided it must have been left in the other room.

  The door to that room stood wide open as she approached, and from inside came voices and sounds of hammering. Trish peered inside. A woman was washing smoke stains from the walls and two men were working on the smashed window. Trish exchanged smiling, friendly greetings with them and finally located her suntan lotion in the bathroom.

  She paused on her way out the door and glanced back, finding the terrifying experience that had happened here only two nights ago difficult to believe. Everything looked so ordinary. The heavy drapes had been taken down and bright light flooded the room now. The woman hummed as she worked and the men chattered cheerfully in Spanish. Only the bed looked odd, with an empty oblong hole where the burned mattress had been removed. There were some very mundane-looking dust balls on the tile beneath the bed.

  Yes, her imagination had really been running away with her that night, she decided. Carelessly smoking in bed, stupidly panicking over a stuck door…That was the only sensible explanation.

  Her hand dropped to the knob and slowly she pulled the door shut, opened and closed it again. It moved smoothly, without the slightest tendency to stick. Trish frowned, remembering how frantically she had jerked on it that night.

  But the men had probably already repaired the sticky door, she decided. She was just about to turn and leave when the door was opened from within the room.

  “Ah, seňorita,” the woman who had been washing walls exclaimed. “I leave the door open for air.” She waved a hand in front of her nose to indicate distaste for the vague odor of smoke that still lingered.

  Trish glanced at the other closed doors along the hallway and then impulsively pointed to the old-fashioned key-type lock on this one. “I was wondering… this seems to be the only door with a lock like this. Do you know why?”

  The women looked momentarily puzzled, then laughed. “Ah, I had almost forgotten. It was long ago, when the seňorita was young. Seňor Hepler could not bear to strike her when she was disobedient, and so he would lock her here in her room for punishment now and again. He would wave his arms and shout that she would stay there until she was sorry for what she had done.” The woman’s eyes twinkled. “But I do not think it was any great punishment because the seňorita would lie on her bed and read and never say a word. And soon Seňor Hepler would feel worse than she did and unlock the door.”

  The woman laughed gaily as if this bit of family history was very amusing, but Trish had to lean against the wall for support, the comfortable, sensible explanations for that night tumbling chaotically around her.

  “And the… the key?” Trish added almost in a whisper, her throat painfully dry.

  “Ah, it has been so long, but…” The woman peered and pointed to a nail slanting into the door frame at chest height. An old-fashioned iron key dangled from the nail. “There it is. I remember once when Seňor Hepler threatened to lock the seňorita in her room for some reason. She marched right over there and reached up on her tiptoes and handed the key to him.”

  The woman laughed again in fond reminiscence as she went back to her scrubbing, but Trish just stood there, stunned, the bottle of suntan lotion clutched so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

  Robert Hepler had used the lock on that door many times, had probably installed it for the specific purpose of disciplining Edith, since it was different from the other locks. There was no doubt in Trish’s mind now that the door had been locked, not merely stuck that fateful night. Robert Hepler thought locking someone in a room was a suitable form of punishment.

  Had he decreed a similar, only far more deadly, punishment for her?

  Chapter Four

  “Trish, what in the world have you been doing? You’re not supposed to be up!” It was Edith, hurrying down the hall toward her.

  Trish licked dry lips, her thoughts in turmoil. The fire had been no accident and the door had been locked. She was almost certain of that now. She kept seeing Robert Hepler as she had seen him that night, not the soft-hearted father the servant remembered, a father who hated to discipline an errant child. She saw a man bitter or mentally deranged enough to use any means of revenge against the woman he hated or the daughter of the man who had taken that woman from him. Or perhaps, in his mixed-up mind, they were one and the same person.

  “Trish, are you all right?” Edith asked, her forehead creased with concern.

  “Yes, I’m fine. I—I was just looking for my suntan lotion.”

  “You should have sent one of the servants,” Edith chided, but her mind was obviously on something else. “I was looking for you because I wanted to tell you Armando is going to join us for lunch. He’s in a much better mood now,” she added.

&n
bsp; Edith’s plain face looked alive and animated, reflecting how Armando’s attitude could affect her. Trish made a quick decision. There was no point in bringing up the matter of the lock and key. Edith knew they were there and had tacitly admitted her father could have been responsible for the fire. But she had also been definite in her assurances that she would take measures to see he would not be a danger to Trish again. Determinedly Trish decided now to ignore all that had happened. She almost wished, in fact, that she had not stumbled onto the dismaying discovery about the lock and the easy availability of the key.

  “Why don’t we eat out by the pool?” Trish suggested, forcing herself to reflect Edith’s gay attitude.

  “And later this afternoon the seamstress is coming with the material for my wedding gown.” Edith sounded almost girlishly happy.

  Trish and Edith were already waiting by the pool when Armando drove up in the Mercedes. Trish was still wearing her shorts and halter but Edith had on a skirt and longsleeved blouse, plus a floppy red straw hat to protect her face from the sun. Trish felt vaguely underdressed as Armando strode through the courtyard gates in a well-cut, lightweight suit.

  “Ah, my two favorite ladies,” he said, sounding as cheerful as he looked. He brushed Edith’s cheek with a kiss and took a seat under the umbrella that shaded the luncheon table. “Trish, I must apologize to you,” he said earnestly.

  Trish murmured something noncommittal, relieved that Armando evidently did not intend to make an issue of that visit from Marc.

  “No, I must apologize,” he insisted. “We had some problems at the beneficio and I am afraid I took my annoyance out on you and Edith. I have not even been to see you since the night of that terrible accident. Are you recovering satisfactorily?” he added anxiously.