The House on Flamingo Cay (11 page)

Conrad seemed quite upset when Sara explained her sister’s errand.

“I’ll go along with her. She may not know where the beach-ferry is,” he said, at once.

“Yes, she does—and she’s already left,” Sara told him.

“She has?” His ordinarily cheerful face looked both downcast and faintly anxious. One would have judged from his expression that a shopping trip along Bay Street was fraught with all manner of hazards.

By the time they had been on the beach for half an hour, he was getting really fidgety.

“She ought to be here by now if she was only out for sun-glasses. Say, maybe she’s had an accident,” he said concernedly.

“Oh, honey, that’s just silly. She’s probably window-shopping,” his mother said indulgently, with a significant wink at Sara.

But after another half hour, when Angela was still missing, his misgivings could not be allayed.

“I’m going back to look for her. I don’t think she looked too rosy this morning. She could have turned up sick,” he said worriedly.

Mrs. Stuyvesant watched him leave the beach and chuckled. “Poor Connie! I’ve never seen him in such a state. It’s a genuine case of love at first sight, I guess. I just hope he’s not riding for a fall, that’s all.” She accompanied this last remark with a hopeful glance at Sara.

“You seem quite eager to see him married, Mrs. Stuyvesant,” Sara said warily. “I thought mothers were usually rather suspicious of any girls their sons seemed to be ... attached to.”

“A lot of them are, honey. Why, some of my friends have been through torture—sheer torture—when their boys fell in love and wanted to get married. But I guess I’m not the possessive type. Maybe it’s something to do with having so many interests. Connie often kids me about that. He says if I take on any more committee work, I won’t have time to breathe. But I reckon if you keep busy you don’t get all tensed up with emotional stresses. You know something? I believe I’m the only woman in my set who doesn’t have to spend a couple of hours a week with a psychoanalyst. No, when Connie marries I shall be just as happy as he is about it.”

By twelve o’clock, when there was still no sign of either Angela or Connie, they returned to Nassau.

“They must have decided that two’s more fun than four. I guess we won’t see them till lunch-time,” said Mrs. Stuyvesant, as they entered the hotel. “Well, for heaven’s sakes!”

Her startled exclamation was prompted, Sara saw, by the sight of Conrad hurrying out of the lounge to meet them in what was obviously a state of considerable agitation.

“Is she with you? Have you seen her?” he demanded.

“You mean you haven’t found her?” Mrs. Stuyvesant asked perplexedly.

“Something must have happened to her! She wouldn’t just go off without a word. There must have been an accident,” he said distractedly. “I’ve looked all over, and there isn’t a sign of her. I even came back to check she wasn’t in her room.”

“Now there’s no sense in getting worked up, honey,” his mother said firmly. “Maybe she decided to have a facial or a massage. There are any number of things that could have kept her. Have you checked that she hasn’t left a message with reception?”

Conrad nodded. “I’ve checked all around.” He turned to Sara. “Did she say anything to you about going to a beauty parlor?”

Sara shook her head. “But I’m sure she’s all right, Conrad. Why should anything have happened to her?”

“Why not? I’m going to ring round the hospitals.” He hurried back to the reception desk.

“He could be right, you know, Sara. It does seem strange for her to disappear like this. I mean she might guess we’d be worried about her. Oh, look, here comes that nice Mr. Rand. Maybe he can suggest something.” And, as Stephen came into the hotel, she darted forward and launched into a voluble explanation of their dilemma.

Stephen listened to her with grave attention, then turned to Sara and said quietly, “Did your sister take a handbag when she went out?”

“I think so—yes, I’m sure she did. She left her beach-bag for me to take over and took her handbag with her.”

“So she’d be likely to have some identification papers in it—letters and receipts and so on?”

“Well, I couldn’t be definite about that, “Sara said uncertainly. “Angela’s very tidy. She never hoards old bits and pieces.”

“But she’d carry her passport, wouldn’t she?” said Mrs. Stuyvesant.

Sara shook her head. “We keep those locked up in our room.”

“Very sensible,” Stephen said briefly. “Well, it does seem a little inconsiderate to go off without letting you know, but I think it would be safe to wait till one o’clock before starting an intensive search. If she hasn’t turned up by then, we’ll—”

He broke off his sentence as a taxi pulled up outside the entrance.

“Why, here she comes! Oh, what a relief that is!” exclaimed Mrs. Stuyvesant. “Say, Connie ... Connie, she’s here.”

It was obvious from the leisurely way in which Angela stepped out of the cab and paid the driver that she had no idea her absence had caused such concern. Indeed, when both Conrad and his mother rushed forward to interrogate her the moment she entered the hotel, she looked completely bewildered.

“I’m sorry you were worried, I don’t know why you should have been. I think I’m old enough to look after myself,” she said calmly, when she could get a word in.

“Worried! We were getting frantic, Angie. We couldn’t think what had happened,” Conrad said, mopping his forehead with a coloured bandana.

It seemed to Sara that, for an instant, a look of intense dislike flickered across her sister’s face. But it was masked so swiftly that perhaps she had only imagined it.

“Oh, Conrad, I
am
sorry. How stupid and thoughtless of me,” Angela said, in a more conciliatory tone.

“Well, where were you anyway?”

“Oh, just shopping. My watch stopped and I didn’t realize how late it was.”

Oddly, this lame excuse seemed to restore Conrad’s good humor. “You know what, honey? You need a bodyguard.” He grinned at Stephen. “If that isn’t just like a girl to go off for a couple of hours and think no one will miss her. I don’t see why we put up with them, do you, Rand?”

Stephen
responded to this sally with a polite smile. But Sara had a feeling that—like herself—he suspected Angela of some subterfuge.

“I sometimes wonder myself,” he said drily. “Excuse me.”

“I guess we could all do with a drink,” Conrad suggested, when he had left them. He took Angela’s arm. “The next time you go on a shopping trip, baby, old Connie will be right alongside.”

It wasn’t until after lunch that Sara had a chance to speak to her sister alone. Deprived of his morning swim, Conrad wanted to go over to the beach again, but his mother had said that she and Sara would prefer to look over Fort Charlotte.

“What really happened this morning, Angela?” Sara asked, when they went upstairs to change.

“I told you—I didn’t notice the time.”

“Oh, come off it, Angie. Even if your watch
did
stop—and I remember you winding it before breakfast—there are plenty of public clocks about.”

Angela swung round from the dressing table. “Don’t call me Angie,” she snapped furiously.

“I’m sorry. I suppose I picked it up from Conrad,” Sara said mildly.

“Well kindly drop it again. My name’s Angela.”

“There’s no need to snap my head off.”

Angela’s shoulders sagged and she gave a long sigh. “I’m sorry, sweetie. The fact is I’ve got a splitting head. I didn’t mean to snarl at you.”

“I’ll get you an aspirin.”

Sara went into the bathroom and filled a beaker with water. When she returned Angela was leaning both elbows on the dressing table and staring at her reflection.

“Thanks, pet.” Her sister took the tablets and a couple of sips of the water. “You’re right, of course,” she admitted. “My watch didn’t stop and I suppose I oughtn’t to have gone off like that. But I wanted to be alone for a while, to ... to think things out.”

“You mean you’re changing your mind about Conrad?” Angela reached for a jar of cleansing cream and unscrewed the lid. She seemed not to have heard the question.

“Look, don’t be angry again, but I must say something to you,” Sara started hesitantly. “If you are beginning to see that you can’t marry Conrad, you must let him know it. He was fearfully upset this morning—almost hysterical with worry. It isn’t right to go on encouraging him, Angela. You ... you could break his heart.”

In spite of her abstracted expression, Angela must have been attending as, at her sister’s last remark, she gave a little laugh.

“Hearts don’t break, my dear. They may get a bit chipped—but they don’t break,” she said sardonically.

“That still doesn’t give you the right to hurt him unnecessarily.” Sara told her of Mrs. Stuyvesant’s remarks on the beach.

“So you really can’t go on with it,” she ended anxiously.

“But of course I’m going on with it. When Conrad proposes, I’ve every intention of accepting him,” Angela said implacably. “In fact, now the Langdon-Owens have turned up, the sooner he comes to the point, the better. Frankly, I think that Conrad is too far gone for anything they might say to make any difference to him. But I shan’t feel perfectly happy until I’m actually wearing his ring. So if Mrs. Stuyvesant refers to it again this afternoon, you might drop a hint that I’m secretly mad about the boy.”

Sara was appalled. “But, Angela—”

“It’s my life, Sara, and I’m entitled to do as I please with it. There’s nothing you can say to change my mind. Now, let’s get a move on, shall we?”

* * *

All afternoon, as she followed Mrs. Stuyvesant around the ramparts of Fort Charlotte and through the maze of tunnels and chambers beneath the old citadel, Sara was weighed down with wretchedness. She knew that it was futile to blame herself for Angela’s reckless determination to wreck her life, but she couldn’t help feeling that, if only she had shown more strength of character at the very outset of this whole venture, their present position could never have come about. Perhaps if she had persisted in her original objections ,and adamantly refused to have any part in the scheme, Angela might not really have carried out her threat to come to the Bahamas alone. Perhaps ... but what was the use of reproaching herself for past inadequacies? All she could do now—what she
must
do—was to find some means of averting the final disaster. But how? That was the problem. Having reached the point when all arguments and appeals were useless, what other means of dissuasion was left to her?

“You look tired, honey,” Mrs. Stuyvesant said, as they left the fortress. “What do you say we find ourselves a drug-store and have a long cool soda to perk us up?”

Sara managed a wan smile. For an instant, she was tempted to take the drastic course of telling the American woman the truth, of saying, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Stuyvesant, but I think you ought to know that if Angela marries your son it will be only because you are rich.’ But, as soon as she had thought of it, she knew that Angela would never forgive her. It would certainly put paid to a marriage to Conrad, but it would do nothing to repair her sister’s state of mind and might even lead to something a thousand times worse.

Conrad and Angela were still at the beach when they returned to the hotel. Mrs. Stuyvesant planned to have an hour’s rest before cocktail time and advised Sara to do the same. But after taking a shower and manicuring her nails, Sara felt disinclined to lie down and brood. After changing into a finely pleated sheath of pale lilac Dacron, she went downstairs again.

She had meant to go into the reading-room and look at some of the American periodicals, but as there was no one at the cocktail bar yet, she ventured inside and asked for an iced fruit juice.
She was sitting at a corner table and glancing through a copy of the
Nassau Daily Tribune
when an elderly couple came in at the terrace entrance. At first, Sara took little notice of them. But they were sitting quite close to her and talking in quiet but audible voices and, suddenly, a remark by the woman caught her attention.

“It might be an excellent thing for her, Robert,” she had said to the man—presumably her husband. “After all, Valerie is nearly twenty-five. It’s high time she had a home of her own.”

Sara stiffened. They must be the parents of the Langdon-Owen girl, she thought, with a curious glance at them.

“Well, that’s up to you, m’dear,” the man was answering. “But we won’t see much of her, you know, if she settles down out here.”

“We shall just have to accept that, I’m afraid,” his wife replied resignedly. “The main thing is to get her comfortably established. The trouble is that everyone at home knows she was involved with that frightful Woodward man.”

“Damned scoundrel! I’d liked to have got my hands on him,” her husband muttered angrily.

“It’s no use crying over spilt milk, Robert. The fact remains that when a girl has been connected with a particularly unsavoury divorce case, it ruins her chances of making a really good match. We can only be thankful that it had all blown over by the time she met Stephen.”

“You think he’s keen on her?”

“I think he’s interested. Now it’s up to Valerie to play her cards well.”

Sara got up and walked quickly out of the bar. She felt almost physically sick with the force of her disgust. How could people think and talk like that? It was bad enough for Angela to be so cold-blooded and mercenary, but for parents calmly to discuss the most satisfactory disposal of their daughter seemed utterly revolting. Suddenly, with the exception of the Stuyvesants, she seemed to be surrounded by people to whom love and tenderness had little meaning and no importance.

After dinner that night, Conrad suggested going to a movie. But Angela, complained of another headache and decided to go straight to bed. The film was billed as ‘the most savagely dramatic epic to come roaring out of Texas’ and, in spite of the fact that Mrs. Stuyvesant rustled through a very large box of chocolates and Conrad sat sunk in gloom because Angela was not with them, Sara enjoyed herself. She liked Westerns, and for an hour and a half she was able to forget her own problems in the more violent dilemma of a group of pioneers.

Back at the hotel, she had a mild nightcap, thanked the Stuyvesants for taking her and went upstairs. But when she quietly opened their door and tiptoed into the bedroom, she was taken aback to find that her sister’s bed was empty.

It was not until she had looked in the bathroom and out on the balcony that she spotted the note on the dressing table. It was scrawled on a page torn from her sister’s address book and anchored down by a lotion bottle.