Justice Done Page 6
She could not help but feel a glow of pride, and her original appraisal of Hastings mellowed considerably. But just as she was saying that there were over six miles of carpet on the ship, she happened to glance at Robert Parsons. He was frowning at Hastings, and his fists were clenched on the table.
I’m boring him, Sarah thought, all the pleasure suddenly going out of the game. Her voice trailed off, and she stared down at her hands, too humiliated to continue. Robert was obviously wishing that Hastings would stop encouraging her. She probably hadn’t amused anyone other than Hastings and her grandmother; Robert and Captain Dolman, she was sure, were wishing Ada had left her at home. She had been an obnoxious, unbridled know-it-all.
She was about to apologize when she heard Robert say, “I have an extra pass for the next guided tour, Sarah. Would you care to go on it?”
She had not thought she could be more deeply mortified, but she was wrong. So he wanted to send her off on a ship’s tour, as if she were a child not ready to share the company of adults. Well, and why not? She had just behaved as if she were the kid in the class who waves his hand and shouts, “Me! Me! Call on me!”
“Thank you,” she managed to say.
“Yes,” her grandmother agreed, “an excellent notion.”
So even Ada was defecting, she thought, as Robert, ever the gentleman, stood and helped her from her chair. She was a little surprised when he continued at her side, but she said nothing. She crossed the bar and took the exit to her left, and still he followed. As they passed two of the larger shops along the passageway, he said, “These were once the first class passengers’ library and drawing room. Winston Churchill was given use of the drawing room when he was aboard the ship during World War II. He and other leaders finalized plans for the invasion of Normandy while on this ship, probably in that room.”
Sarah glanced into the rather barren souvenir shop that now occupied the space.
“Don’t worry,” he said, reading her thoughts. “Not all of her dignity has been lost.”
“Where does the tour begin?”
“The port side of this deck,” he said.
“I’m sure I can find it,” she said.
“Undoubtedly. But I’m going with you.”
“But you’ve been before . . .”
“Yes,” he said, “but much of the ship can only be seen on the tour. You don’t mind if I join you?”
“Of course not.”
The tour (she couldn’t prevent herself from counting the group—eighteen sightseers, including the two of them) was led by a retired naval officer. Parsons stayed at her side, but did not touch or crowd her. She soon relaxed and began to thoroughly enjoy the tour itself, fascinated by the grandeur and history of the ship.
When the tour group reached the cabin class swimming pool, she heard a woman say, “I’ve heard that it’s haunted.”
Sarah looked around the room of beige and blue-green terra-cotta tiles, the etched wire-and-glass image of an ancient sailing ship behind her, the glimmering mother-of-pearl ceiling above, the empty, sloping bottom of the pool itself. There were no windows or portholes, but the room was large enough to prevent her from feeling claustrophobic. Nothing about any of it struck her as particularly scary, nothing sent a chill down her back. But when she turned to make a joke to Robert about ghosts who had turned green from chlorine, she saw that he was pale, and had a strange, intense look on his face.
The guide was making light of the woman’s remark. “Do you mean the woman in the mini-skirt or the one in the bathing suit? I’d settle for a glimpse of either one.”
“There’s more than one ghost?” the woman asked.
“Oh yes, the ship has long been reported to be haunted,” the guide said lightly. “If you believe in such reports, this ship is loaded with ghosts. Myself, if I see one, I hope it’s one of the young ladies who rove in here.”
The group laughed and began to move after the guide as he went on with the tour. Robert, however, remained motionless, and continued to stare into the pool.
“Robert?” Sarah asked. “Are you feeling ill?”
When he seemed not to hear her, she touched his sleeve. “Robert?”
He turned to her with a start. “Oh—I’m sorry, we’ve fallen behind. We’d better catch up with the others.” They were not far from the group, though, and once they reached it Sarah asked again if he was feeling ill.
“No,” he said, “I’m fine now, thank you.”
She did not believe him, and glanced back at him several times as they made their way to the next area, along a catwalk over one of the cavernous boiler rooms. He was still pale.
By the time the formal tour was finished, though, he seemed himself again, and Sarah happily allowed him to accompany her to the other shipboard exhibits. He seemed to enjoy her enthusiasm as she was able to see the anchor chains and lifeboats and all the other parts of the ship she had read about. She lost her self-consciousness over her study of the ship’s statistics and decided her knowledge gave her a better appreciation of what she was seeing how.
Not that her appreciation was limited to the ship’s physical power. There was nostalgia, pure and simple, to be relished. She lingered over photos of Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Spencer Tracy, and other famous passengers. She tried to take in every detail of the displays of passenger accommodations and dining rooms.
Robert, cheerful through most of their exploration of the ship, grew solemn when they reached the wartime exhibits on the Sun Deck. The subject matter deserved solemnity, Sarah thought. His mood, however, seemed to remain grim even after they left the exhibit. She felt much more at ease with him by then, which gave her the courage to ask him what was troubling him.
He hesitated, then said, “Did you see how the soldiers were forced to live aboard this ship?”
Sarah, recalling the photos of thousands of soldiers crammed together on the decks of the ship, shuddered. “Yes, it was very crowded—”
“Crowded? You like numbers. The ship was designed to carry about two thousand passengers. On one of its wartime voyages, it carried over sixteen thousand men.”
“It carried sixteen thousand, six hundred and eighty-three,” Sarah said. “The largest number of people ever to sail on any ship—a record that still stands.”
“Sarah, think of what that meant to each of those sixteen thousand!”
She had seen some of this in the exhibit, of course. Tiers of standee berths—narrow metal frames with a single piece of canvas stretched over them—six and seven bunks high, each only eighteen inches apart. The men slept in three shifts; the beds were never empty. Soldiers were given colored badges to be worn at all times; the badges corresponded with a section of the ship where the soldiers were required to stay throughout the voyage.
But for Sarah, who had struggled for years with a fear of confined spaces, thinking about what it actually meant to each soldier was nearly unbearable to her. Suddenly, she felt dizzy, unable to breathe.
In the next moment she heard Robert Parsons saying, “My God, I’m so sorry! I forgot! Let’s go outside, onto the Sun Deck.”
She raised no objections, and found herself feeling a mixture of relief that she was once again in the open air and acute embarrassment that her grandmother had apparently informed Robert Parsons about her problem.
When he tried to apologize again, she said, “I do believe you’re much more upset about this than I am. I’ll be all right.”
“When did it start?” he asked.
“My claustrophobia? Didn’t Grandmother tell you that, too?”
“No. She’s never said anything about it. I’ve noticed it before—at her dinner parties. Too many people in the room and you have to go outside. On nights when it’s too cold to be outdoors in an evening gown, you step out for a breath of fresh air.”
She was quiet for a moment, not sure what to make of his observation of her. Then she said, “I don’t know why this memory has been so persistent, but when I was about four, at the orphanage, I was once punished for something by being shut up in a closet. I don’t remember what I had done wrong, or even who put me in the closet. I just remember the darkness, the sensation of being confined, the smell of the coats and mothballs. I was terrified. I remember counting, singing a song about numbers to stay calm.”
He put an arm around her shoulders, gave her a brief hug. But he seemed to know not to hold on to her—not when she was feeling so close to the memory of that closet. He let her be. As she felt herself grow calmer, she ventured a question of her own. “I’ve been thinking—the way you responded to the wartime exhibit—do you have problems with claustrophobia, too?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t.”
“But it was personal for you somehow, wasn’t it? You’re too young to have fought in anything other than the Gulf War—”
“My grandfather went to war on this ship.”
“Oh! You have something in common with Grandmother then.”
He smiled slightly. “Yes. Ada and I have a great deal in common.”
Not wanting to pursue that subject, she said, “So your grandfather told you about traveling on this ship?”
“No,” Parsons said, looking out over the railing, toward the sea. “He died before I was born. Even before my father was born. My grandfather died aboard the ship.”
“Aboard the ship?” she repeated, stunned.
“Yes. He was a young soldier, newly married. His wife was pregnant with their first child, although he didn’t know that when he left for war. He was, by all accounts, a bright and talented man with a sense of humor; he used to draw cartoon sketches of his fellow soldiers and mail them home to my grandmother. He went off to war, not willingly parted from her, but willing to fight for his country.” He paused, then added bitterly, “He was murdered before he had a chance to reach his first battle.”
“Murdered?!”
“Yes.”
Sarah’s own thoughts raced. It was not difficult to see that under the crowded wartime conditions aboard the ship, tempers might easily flare. She suddenly knew without a doubt that his grandfather had been killed near the swimming pool; this, she was sure, accounted for Robert’s reaction when they were in that area of the ship.
“I’m sorry, Robert,” she said. “What a terrible blow for your grandmother.”
“She didn’t learn exactly what happened until many years later. She thought he had been killed in action.”
“Was the killer punished?”
“No. He got away with it. Listen, I shouldn’t be talking to you about this,” he said. “You’re here for a pleasant occasion and Ada would tan my hide if she knew I was—”
“Ada doesn’t entirely rule my life,” Sarah said. “I’m glad you told me. Does she know about your grandfather?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And she still insisted on bringing you here!”
“Sarah, as I’ve told you, I’ve been here before.” He smiled. “And not just to lay my family ghosts to rest. I’ll admit that was why I made my first visit, but I found I couldn’t dislike this ship—she’s not to blame for what happened to my grandfather. I suppose I fell in love with her style and elegance. She was built for pleasure—a thing of beauty, not death and destruction. And she’s a survivor. Of all the great luxury liners built before the war, the Queen Mary is the only survivor.”
They resumed their tour of the ship. He had saved the art gallery, one of his favorite rooms on the ship, for last. As they left it, he said, “Ask Ada to tell you what sort of relationship I share with her.”
“Why don’t you tell me instead?”
“I promised her I would leave that to her.”
They soon reached the stateroom. As he was about to leave her at her door, he paused and said, “Something was troubling you this morning.”
Her eyes widened.
He shrugged. “I saw it. In your face, I suppose. Your eyes.”
“It was just—just something silly,” she said. “Just a dream.”
“A nightmare?”
“I dreamed of that closet—the one at the orphanage.”
“You’re all right now?”
“Yes. I’ll be fine.”
He started to walk off, then turned and said, “Thank you for taking the tour with me.”
“My pleasure,” she said softly.
When she had finished dressing for the party, Sarah knocked on her grandmother’s door. Ada opened it herself, beckoning Sarah in as she returned to her dressing table. To Sarah’s surprise, Ada was nearly ready, and she was attired not in one of her wild ensembles, but in a very simple but elegant black dress.
“Are you feeling all right?” Sarah asked.
Ada gave a shout of laughter. “It’s best not to let everyone become too sure of what I’ll do next. Do you like it?”
“You look fantastic.” She gave her a kiss. “Happy birthday, Grandmother.”
“Thank you, my dear. How was your afternoon with Robert?”
“Very pleasant. He said I should ask you about your relationship with him.”
She raised an eyebrow. “He did, did he?”
“Yes. Now don’t tease or put me off, Grandmother.”
Ada smiled into the mirror as she fastened an earring. “Do you like him?”
“Grandmother!”
“I’ll tell you this much. He’s not my employee.” She grinned wickedly, then added, “And he’s not my lover. Oh, don’t try to look innocent, I know what’s being said. But he’s not. I have no romantic interest in him—none whatsoever.”
“But you seem so close—”
“We are very close. But that has nothing to do with the price of eggs, so get off your pretty duff and pursue the man.” She turned and gave Sarah a quick kiss. “You were very sweet not to offer your old granny any competition for that young fox.”
“Grandmother!”
“You’re attracted to him, Sarah. Have been from the day you met him.”
“What utter nonsense.”
“Is it?”
Sarah opened her mouth to protest, and closed it again.
Ada laughed and turned back to the mirror. “I thought so. Well, my dear, you have my blessing.”
The birthday party was wildly successful. Sarah, returning from one of her frequent strolls on one of the upper decks, saw Ada dancing an energetic fox trot with Captain Dolman—who was an excellent dancer, but still seemed very nervous. Ada, she noticed, had spent a great deal of time with Captain Dolman. Although Sarah had been dreading another encounter with Senator Hastings, she had not seen him since the first hour of the party, when he had been talking to Robert. Surprised that he would pass up an opportunity to work a crowd this wealthy and influential, she was, nevertheless, pleased that she had been spared another round of quizzing.
She hadn’t seen much of Robert, either. She had danced with him once, but he had seemed so preoccupied that she had difficulty holding a conversation with him.
“I’m terrible company tonight,” he said as the dance ended. “May we try this again, another evening? Just the two of us?”
Telling him she would consider that a promise, she resolved not to make a nuisance of herself to him.
Now, several hours later, she strolled near Ada’s table. Although the invitations had said, “No gifts,” a few of Ada’s friends had ignored these instructions. When her grandmother returned from the dance floor, Sarah offered to take the packages to her room.
“Thank you, Sarah!” she said, “How very thoughtful of you.” She gave Sarah the key to the room and turned to accept an offer to waltz with one of her other guests. Captain Dolman offered to help Sarah, bu
t as there were only five boxes to be carried, she politely declined his assistance.
As she came down the stairs, her arms full, she was surprised to see Robert leaving his suite, his face set in a forbidding frown. He did not see her, however, and quickly moved off in the opposite direction, toward the elevator. She nearly called to him, to ask what was troubling him, but decided not to delay him, as he was so apparently in a hurry.
She managed to open the door to Ada’s suite, only to discover that she had entered through the servant’s door, rather than the main door, which opened into the sitting area. This part of the suite—this small room, and beyond it the bathroom and large bedroom, were closed off from the sitting room, and except for the light from the hallway behind her, it was in darkness. Sarah tried to reach for the old-fashioned light switch, but couldn’t manage it with her arms full of boxes and holding the key. She decided to lay the boxes on the twin bed. But as she stepped inside, the door closed behind her with a loud click. The small room was plunged into nearly total darkness. Panicking, blindly rushing back to the door, Sarah whirled and stumbled over something. The boxes went tumbling from her arms as she fell, and she heard the flutter of papers, felt them raining down on her. She scrambled to her knees, ran her hands wildly over the wall, and found the switch.
For a moment, she could only catch her breath and wait for her heartbeat to slow. Gradually, she noticed that she had knocked over an old leather briefcase. It had opened, and its contents had spilled across the room.
Gathering the gifts first, she was relieved to see that none of them were damaged. She placed them on the bed. She then went to work on collecting the scattered papers.
Most seemed to be old letters bearing three-cent postage stamps. Among them, she saw an old photograph; the smiling young soldier in it looked familiar to her, she thought, picking it up. The back of the photo bore an inscription in a neat masculine hand. “Give me a kiss goodnight, Ada—I’ll return every one with interest when I come back home to you! Love, Elliot.”
Her grandmother, Sarah realized, had brought a photo of her first husband taken on this ship, where she had last seen him. Moved by this, she carefully returned the photo to the briefcase. But it was as she gathered the scattered envelopes that she received a shock. The letters, postmarked during 1942, were addressed to Mrs. Elliot Parsons.