Road to Folly by Zenith Brown

Author:Zenith Brown [Brown, Zenith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2018-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

At the top of the curving stairway I stopped a moment. The door of Phyllis’s empty room was closed. The polished floor in front of it was scuffed and clouded from unaccustomed feet. I had a sudden pang of the most acute loneliness. Phyllis, half flower and half poison, always to be coped with, to keep either half from running wild in the garden of my life, was gone, and there was a bare mangled spot where nothing could ever grow again. All the times I could gladly have cut her throat, all the times I had depended on her and she on me to the utmost of friendship, from our perambulators in Rittenhouse Square to…to this, came surging back to me.

I crossed blindly to the blue room and closed the door, turned off the light and went and sat in the open window looking out over the gardens. The scattered silver loom of night still glowed up from the river. The stars were far-off fields of yellow crocuses beyond the billowing oak tops. A tree frog croaked, a marsh hen disturbed among the rushes chirped and was lost in the deep silence. Then two figures emerged out of the shadows and out of the silence. Rusty Lattimer and his sister Anne crossed the path. I heard Anne’s voice as plainly as if she were in the room with me.

“Don’t be a fool, Rusty,” she was saying sharply. “You can go away a while. It’ll blow over. Plenty of things worse than this have blown over in Charleston. After all, everybody knows you married her for her money. Now you’ve got it, I don’t see what you’re stewing about.”

They both stopped. Rusty must have been speaking very quietly, because I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I did hear Anne’s reply. Her voice was sharp and clear as a bell.

“Oh very well, darling. If that’s your story, stick to it. But don’t be surprised if nobody else believes it. I’m going to bed. Good night.”

She turned and came quickly toward the house, not to the drawing room windows but to the garden door into the hall. Rusty still stood in the garden, watching her. Then he turned abruptly and walked slowly back toward the river.

I heard Anne’s light steps on the stairs, heard them hesitate just at the top, at Phyllis’s door, then come quickly and stop again, at my door this time. I slipped quietly across the powder blue rug and turned on the bedside light just as a little rap-rap sounded on my door.

“Come in,” I called.

I watched the knob turn and the door open. It sounds a little silly, I suppose, but I had a queer feeling that something definitely important to me was happening. And when Anne came in, I knew instantly that something important had happened. I’d suddenly become an unwelcome guest in a stranger’s house. It wasn’t Phyllis’s house any more. Anne Lattimer had taken over. She stood, framed in the door

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