The Dark of Summer

“Sleeping beauty,” he said.

Morosely, she said, “Hardly. I haven't had a shower today, and I know I must look like a witch.”

“Not at all,” he said, putting the tray on her lap and adjusting the two sets of tubular steel legs that supported it on the mattress. “You are lovely, as usual.”

“And you're a liar,” she said.

“Have it your own way,” he said. “You really do look nice. But that's neither here nor there. The important thing isn't how you look, but how you feel, right?”

“Right.”

“So how do you feel?”

“Not hungry,” she said, looking down at the food.

He laughed and said, “I'm afraid you don't have any choice about that. I got strict orders from Mrs. Barnaby to see that you eat it all. And I'm not to let you start the dessert until everything else is gone.”

“Have Uncle Will and Elaine left for their dinner engagement yet?” Gwyn asked, picking up her fork and studying the tray for the least offensive looking dish.

“A few minutes ago,” Ben said.

“Good,” Gwyn said. “I was worried that they wouldn't go. Aunt Elaine has been so good with me, almost too good. I was afraid she'd reconsider at the last moment so she could stay here and look after me.”

He sat down in the easy chair where Elaine usually sat, and he said, “She feels you're recovering nicely.”

Gwyn nodded and forked buttered noodles into her mouth. They had little taste, but more than anything else she had eaten in the last day and a half. She worked at the dish until she had emptied it, which seemed to take forever. Recently, she felt as if her entire lif e consisted of sleeping and eating, and that only the former was not an arduous task.

“I hope your illness didn't have anything to do with the sailing we did the other day,” Groves said, when she had begun to eat the warmed chicken breast on the largest plate.

She looked up, surprised. “How could it?”

“I don't know,” he said. “But you seemed to get sick right after that, so I thought perhaps—”

“Hasn't anyone told you what's wrong with me?” she asked.

“Why should they?”

Gwyn considered this a moment. She should have known that neither Uncle Will nor Elaine would gossip about her to the help, yet she had automatically assumed everyone in the house knew about her ghost. She was relieved that Ben, at least, had been kept in the dark.

“Believe me, Ben, I really enjoyed being on the Salt Joy with you,” she said. “It was the nicest day I've had in a long time. My illness has nothing to do with that.”

“What a relief!” he said. “Well then, maybe we can go out in the boat again, when you're feeling up to it.”

“I don't see why not.”

He peered at her tray with an exaggerated look of anger. “You've hardly touched your chicken, so don't put your fork down yet.”

She laughed and said, “You'd make a very good mother.”

“I try,” he said.

Because she had not taken a sleeping tablet since that morning, and because Ben's presence was considerably more vital, in an undefinable way, than Elaine's was, she found herself more alert, her mind functioning in less of a haze than it had for the past forty-eight hours. Inevitably, then, she began to think about the ghost and about all the things that might be connected with it, and she broached a tangent of the subject with him.

When she'd reached her dessert, she said, “Do you know any of the fishermen who've been giving Uncle Will trouble?”

“A bad lot,” he said.

“Which ones do you know?”

“Younger, Abrahams, Wilson, nearly all of them.”

“Is it true they threatened Uncle Will?”

“They did, all right.”

“How?”

“In vague, but definitely meaningful terms,” he said.

“Do you think that they'd carry through on those threats?”

He grimaced and said, “They're not an easy group of men to get along with, and they don't hold their anger well. Yes, I believe they'd have gone through with the threats if Uncle Will hadn't reported them to the sheriff.”

Outside, night had fallen; the remnants of an orange sunset lighted a half inch of the horizon on the far side of the house but did not light the sky beyond Gwyn's windows.

She ate several more spoonfuls of the same kind of chocolate pudding which she'd been served for lunch, then said, “Do you think they'd be the kind to strike out at me, when they saw they couldn't easily get at my uncle?”

“What do you mean?”

She couldn't tell him without mentioning the ghost, and she did not want him to know about that, because she was still pretty sure that it was only an illusion, the symptom of emotional instability.

He said, “Do you mean would they hurt you?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Not likely,” he said. “At least, I don't think they'd stoop so low as to carry a grudge against innocent bystanders. Why? Has something happened?”

“Nothing, really,” she said.

“Then why did you ask?”

She ate another spoonful of chocolate pudding and, rather than answer him, asked another question. She said, “What do you know about International Seafood Products?”

He looked at her strangely and seemed, at first, unable to find a response. “What do you mean?”

She finished her pudding, enjoying the taste of the last few mouthfuls, and she said, “I understand that ISP wants to build a seafood processing plant nearby.”

He nodded. “ISP wants to, and the fishermen want them to — but everyone else in the area is dead set against it.”

“Why?”

“The filth, of course.”

She said, “As I understand, ISP wants to build a modern plant that wouldn't foul the sea or the air.”

“You've heard wrong, then.”

“But don't they have a plant like that operating up in Maine?”

She thought that there was a look of deep anxiety on Ben's face, though she couldn't imagine what he had to be anxious about. He leaned forward in the easy chair and finally began to reply, when the telephone rang, somewhere downstairs.

“That's Mr. Barnaby's private line, in the study,” he said. “I'll have to go down there to answer it. I'll be right back.”

He departed before she could say anything, and she heard him taking the main stairs two at a time.

Ben picked up the study phone and said, “Hello?”

“It's me,” Penny said. She was calling from the house phone, in the kitchen, to give him an excuse to get out of Gwyn's room, according to plan.

He sat down heavily in Will Barnaby's leather chair, behind the desk, leaned his elbows on the blotter and said, “Elaine told me that the kid would be dopey — from all the drugs she had this morning and from her own state of mind.”

Apprehensively, Penny said, “And she isn't?”

“Depends on your definition of 'dopey,' he said. “She's not her usual self, to be sure. But she's a damn sight