He was clearly surprised by her tone of voice, and he said, “Mean? Why, nothing particular… I was just trying to say that there are more things in heaven and earth than any one person, no matter how bright, can ever hope to comprehend.”
“I guess that's true,” Gwyn said, somewhat nonplussed. She smoothed down her blue denim skirt and said, “I'll be sure to do as you say; I'll keep an open mind about ghosts.”
“They're fun,” he said.
“So I've heard.”
She should not have snapped at him as she had, she realized, for he could have no way of knowing about her dream from the previous night. But that dream — the dead girl, the flickering candle, the whispered words echoing in darkness — had left her slightly on edge, expecting to encounter another spectral vision of her dead sister at any moment, in the most unlikely places. The first had seemed so real, not like a dream at all, though a dream it had surely been…
“Come along,” he said, standing and offering her his hand.
She took it and rose to her feet. His hand was large, warm and dry, a strong hand.
“We've got a lot more to see before lunch,” he said, leading her away from the robins.
She saw Elaine and Will, for the first time that day, at lunch in the small dining room near the kitchen, since they had taken breakfast in their room upstairs, as was their daily custom. Uncle Will was dressed in a dark gray suit, a dark blue shirt and a white tie, not conservative but not flamboyant, terribly distinguished. He had a meeting in Calder, with some real estate developers later that afternoon, and he would make a very good impression. Elaine, who intended to accompany him so that she might do some shopping, was wearing a short white skirt and a bright yellow blouse, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail that made her look almost like a girl in her twenties.
“How'd you sleep last night?” Will asked.
“Fine,” Gwyn said.
“That bed hasn't been used in a while,” Will said. “If it's lumpy or anything—”
“It's perfect,” Gwyn said. She had the feeling that they were still unsure about the room they had given her, and that they were giving her a graceful excuse for changing.
“We'll be gone until nearly dinnertime,” Elaine informed her. “Would you like to come into town with us?”
“I'll stick around here,” Gwyn said.
“Use the pool or the library, whatever you want,” Elaine said. “This is your house, now, as much as it is ours.”
But after they had gone, she knew exactly what she should do if she wanted to avoid any more dreams of ghosts that called her name in the middle of the night. Dr. Recard had repeatedly advised her never to run away from the problem, because running from the problem was also running from the source and the only possible cure. She must always seek out the source of her anxiety, always confront it head-on and thereby defeat it. So when Elaine and Will were gone, along with Ben Groves in the old Rolls Royce, she went upstairs and changed out of her clothes into a swimsuit. She rolled a towel around a bottle of suntan lotion, slipped on a pair of dark glasses, and went down to the beach for a swim and a nice, long session under the early summer sun.
Ben had shown her the steps carved into the cliff, though he had not taken her down to the beach. Now, as she followed the rough-hewn staircase, she realized how easily one might lose balance and topple forward, four hundred feet to the soft sand below, battered by the steps and by the half-wall of rock that framed them… She was exceedingly careful and, dizzy from watching her feet the whole way down, came out onto the beach five minutes later, safe and sound.
The sand was yellow-white and clean, except for a few clumps of freshly tossed up seaweed near the water's edge. She chose a likely spot, opened her large towel and spread it on the sand, sat down on it and gave herself a generous lathering with sun-tan lotion. As pale as she was, she might quickly burn, though she remembered that, as a school girl, she had always tanned quickly.
Oiled, she stood up and kicked off her sandals, scrunched her bare toes deep into the warm sand, letting the brisk sea wind sluice over her, cool and refreshing. And she watched the sea… It moved in toward her, as if it were alive and watchful, surging murderously forth like a many-humped beast, dissipating itself in the last fifty yards, then crashing to the beach and splashing up, foaming over, sliding inexorably away again only to surge forward once more. It put on a good act of ferocity, but she knew that it was more gentle than it appeared to be. It could not frighten her. It reflected the afternoon sunlight, all green and clear and clean, stretching on out and out as far as she could see. It was immense and so beautiful that she could never fear it, no matter whose life it might have claimed years ago, no matter how close it might have come to claiming her own life as well.
She walked to the water's edge.
It slapped over her feet, cool.
She waded farther into it.
Seaweed scratched at her ankles, brushed her knees, frightening her for a moment, because she thought she had encountered some animal or other. She reached down, pulled a fistful of the stuff up and threw it into the air, laughing at her own fear.
When the waves were breaking above her waist and trying to shove her back toward the beach where they seemed to think she belonged, she turned with her back to the sea and as the water rose, fell back into it, swimming with a powerful, rhythmic backstroke that took her over the crests of the waves and farther out, despite the incoming tide.
At last, she raised her head and saw that the beach lay a good two hundred yards away — her towel swallowed up in all that glaring expanse of sand. It was time to stop and let the ocean carry her steadily back toward land. She ceased kicking, brought her hands in closer to her sides and fluttered them gently, the only movement that she required in the salt water to remain afloat.
Above, the sky was blue.
Below, the sea was blue.
She was like a fly trapped in amber. Caught between the two overwhelming forces, she felt at peace, and she did not think that she would have any more dreams about ghosts.
When she reached the shore again and waded out onto the beach, she fell forward onto her towel, turned her head to the side and let the sun beat harshly on her back. She was determined to be as dark and attractive as her aunt before much of the summer had gone by.
Yet, she soon grew restless and decided that she could get just as good a tan if she were up and moving about, perhaps a better one. She stepped into her sandals, caught the toe strap and wiggled it in place with her toes, then left her towel and lotion behind as she set off south along the dazzling beach.
The cliff remained on her right, towering and rugged, as formidable as castle ramparts, spotted here and there with scrubby vegetation that somehow managed to sustain its perilous existence on the verticle, unsoiled plunge of rock. The cliff also harbored a great many birds, mostly terns. These swept in from the sea, crying out high on the wind, as if they were about to dash themselves to death on the sheer stone face — then inexplicably disappeared without a trace at the last instant before disaster. If you stopped to seek an answer to this miracle, you would find a number of chinks and holes in the cliffside, ringed by dung and stuffed with straw, the homes of the sea's winged hangers-on.
As she walked, she noticed a long, motored launch, perhaps as long as sixteen feet, paralleling her course. It lay no more than a quarter of a mile out to sea and contained, so far as she could tell, only one man. It rose dramatically on the swell, dipped down and fell away, leaving a spray of foam behind, only to rise up again. In ten minutes, it had halved the distance to the shore and appeared to be angling in toward the beach a couple of hundred feet below her.
She stopped, watching it, holding one hand up to her eyes to ward off the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun.
Yes, the boat was beaching, just ahead. The man in it looked toward her just long enough to wave; then he cut back on the power, letting the tide and his own momentum carry him into the shallows. There, he shut the engine off altogether, pulled it in over the gunwale on its hinges, leaped into the water and wrestled with the heavy aluminum boat, lodging its prow into the sand so that the sea could not carry it away.
She realized, as he sat down on the beached boat, that he had come in to talk to her, and she began walking
