Chapter 1
Spring came late to Garns county that year. There were cold snaps in early April. Then greenup occurred almost overnight, the eager earth straining to keep its annual appointment with spring.
Mildred Hager thrilled to the sudden change and allowed restlessness to take over and send her wandering. On this particular day in mid-April, the sky was a heart-breaking shade of deep blue and a soft, warm breeze was blowing out of nearby Connecticut.
Mildred's restlessness was mental, but also a physical thing that twanged at her nerve-ends and filled her mind with uneasy thoughts:
He has not touched me for three months. What does that mean? Perhaps nothing. This could be a natural lull in a husband-wife relationship after eighteen married months. This could mean nothing or this could be the beginning of the end.
Mildred Hager jerked angrily at her mind and broke that train of thought. She was a tall, graceful woman, long-legged, erect, nothing fragile about her. A green scarf now covered her wealth of rich, coppery hair. It had been touched up, but what didn't come out of a bottle these days? Hair coloring, panaceas for losing and gaining weight, formulas for the eternal battle against age-
Yes, and moral codes, too; social patterns expertly manufactured and well advertised. Read the labels and take your choice.
Mildred Hager stopped to take a deep breath and let the soft wind blow on her face. She'd hiked out into the rough, rocky, wooded section of Garns County east of Warrenton and Rebel Hill and now she was facing a steep bluff.
Her deep breath may have been in preparation for the climb, but the pause was to wonder if her thinking had grown morbid. And as she stoop there pondering the point, she made an arresting picture.
Mildred was thirty-eight years old but her true physical age was closer to thirty. She was a woman whose prime had spanned a longer than usual period. There were no lines in the rich, faintly tanned skin of her face and neck. There were no sags or telltale droopings of flesh.
How had Tim put it that day in New Orleans? "The years will never touch you, my darling. Your vitality is too much a part of you."
She had been Mildred Bendixon then, with life a wild, carefree, infinitely wonderful thing. They had had a night of love in that quaint French hotel, a Friday with a football game coming the next afternoon, a game Tom would watch from the press box while he shaped his story for the New York Sunday Dispatch.
After saying that, Tom had taken her in his arms again and she'd cried and said, "Tom, oh, Tom, you've spoiled me for any other man." A stupid thing to say, because there would never be any further need of men. But blindly prophetic, too, because now Tom was gone and that life was gone, its wonder ended; nothing now but a memory of a long-gone dream.
She'd fought that memory valiantly and had been sure of a victory. But now it was suddenly clear again.
Yes, Mildred told herself firmly. Her thinking was morbid. It somehow smacked of infidelity, because she was now Mildred Hager and she had a husband and two ready-made children and a life far richer and more satisfying than the old one.
But ordering thoughts away and forcing them from her mind was the difference between the intellectual and the emotional. They returned lik mocking ghosts.
"You're a volcano, a lovely volcano, that needs exploding at regular intervals."
Tom had said that, too.
Mildred fought the memory, more fiercely now since it would not leave of its own accord. And she discovered that during the skirmish, she'd climbed the hill and was now standing at the edge of the sharp precipice on the far side. Again, she breathed deeply, drawing her diaphragm in; lifting her breasts high; lowering them slowly.
The climb had not tired her. Except for aching calves there had been no physical reaction. And she was no longer morbid because the breathtaking view drove everything else from her mind.
Below, just visible above the new spring green, were the steeples and spires of Warrenton, Garn's County's "typica!" town. Seventy-odd miles north of Manhattan, rooted deep in the flat channel of the Harlem Valley, it was locked tight in a stiff, unyielding tradition that dated back to the Revolution and before. The area was thick with green and yellow Historical Society signs. These noted events and incidents generally forgotten but all splendidly heroic.
Sybil Ludington had ridden through Garns County to rally a rebel army against the British. If Sybil had had a Longfellow to pen her some immortal lines, she would have gleamed brighter than Paul Revere. There was Enoch Crosby, the Nathan Hale of local lore; a hero deprived only of capture and execution to set his star into glowing brightness.
Mildred Hager turned slowly, her eyes, like the eye of a lighthouse, going full circle. A lush country this, still relatively untouched by the population push up through Westchester and Putnam Counties; an area marked by striking contrasts. There were the fine country estates on exclusive Rebel Hill on the one side, and filthy, illiterate communities like Spanish Swamp and Cow Hollow on the other; places from which nothing was expected in the way of ambition, energy, or morals; only the total vote duly delivered on election day.
But an ex-governor had a place on Rebel Hill. Its roster also boasted a nationally-known news commentator, a world-famous violinist, a top-drawer television comedian.
Mildred drew a final deep breath and felt it tingle down into her toes as she surveyed the countryside. This vista was the gift of a prefabricated heritage that Vance Hager had given her as a wedding present.
She turned again to face the cliff, moving forward until the tips of her shoes were on its exact edge. She leaned over and peered down.
A sudden voice warned:
"Hey, lady! Get back! What are you trying to do? Kill yourself?"
Mildred stepped quickly away from the edge, her retort sharp. "Of course not!"
The intruder was a young man. He wore a red hunting jacket and carried a .22 caliber rifle, the barrel of which was pointed correctly downward. As Mildred turned, he changed from an angry would-be rescuer into an embarrassed youth.
"Oh, it's you, Mrs. Hager." He snatched off his cap and took a backward step. "I'm sorry. I thought for a minute-well-finding someone up here all alone leaning over the cliff-"
Mildred laughed, "Hello, Rafe."
Rafe Kolsky gestured. "I really am sorry I startled you, Mrs. Hager, but I would stand back away from the edge if I were you."
He was below her and now he climbed up to her level, concern mirrored in his face.
"But I have no suicidal intent whatever, Rafe."
"It's that surface you're standing on. Treacherous. It's nothing but shale--layers of slate on top of one another. They could slide you right over the edge."
"But I'm not on the edge now."
There was a stubborn streak in him for all his embarrassment. "Bat you're a little too dose for comfort."
"Your comfort, Rafe?"
"Call it that if you want to."
The admiration in his eyes was not lost on Mildred. But she was used to admiration from men. In Rafe's case it was refreshing, however; and it boosted her ego whether she admitted it or not. The age difference was probably the motivating factor. Rafe was no jaundiced professional cocktail party wolf. His admiration was genuine.
"I'm sorry Rafe. And a little chagrined, I guess. You may not believe it but I climbed the Matterhorn once"
He shook his head doubtfully. "Even so, experts get killed too, if they get careless."
He was a singularly humorless boy; well-bred, serious-minded, and totally genuine. Mildred knew that he was not just being polite to the mother of one of his friends.
Rafe Kolsky was twenty-three now, Mildred thought. The son of a syndicated news columnist highly respected in political circles, Rafe had gone through school a year ahead of his age group. Then, after college, he had gone immediately into his two-year service period. Now he had returned to Rebel Hill.
Thus Mildred had not seen a great deal of him. She recalled him favorably though, as one of Jimmie's group; in and out of the house, up and down the roads in their hot rods and sports cars, noisy and restless at country club affairs; recalled him as one of the less boisterous-the exact opposite of the Lazer twins for instance; a solemn lad with perhaps a touch of wistfulness in him from not being able to mix well with others of his own age.
This was strange, too, because he made a very favorable appearance; a dark, handsome youth with broad shoulders that should have done him credit in athletics. But his inclinations pointed elsewhere; in intellectual directions as evidenced by the work he'd done on high school and college magazines and newspapers....
"Did you lose you way, Mrs. Hager?"
"Oh, no. Not at all. I roam these hills quite often." She glanced at the rifle. "Rabbits?"
He pursed his lips; a rather attractive mannerism, Mildred thought. "I suppose so," he said. "If one of the little rodents walked up and insisted on getting shot. It's more for hiking though." He favored her with one of his rare smiles. "When I was a little boy I used to scout this range for Indians. I never found any, but I guess the rifle got to be a habit."
"Did your father allow a small son to carry one?"
It occurred to Mildred that she thought of Rafe in relation to his paternal parent although the boy lived with his mother, a semi-invalid, while his father visited Rebel Hill only upon the rarest of occasions. Bernard Kolsky led a life completely alien to that of his wife and son, although there had never been a divorce. Kolsky was in too vulnerable a position for that. He lived a grim, proper life in Washington D.C. and kept his mistress well hidden in Baltimore....
"No," Rafe said "In those days my gun was a stick with a bayonet carved on the end. Actually, I think this rifle is just to keep me from looking peculiar."
Mildred laughed, "An interest in the out-of-doors isn't peculiar, Rafe."
"I guess not. But who knows? Maybe I will meet up with an Indian someday."
"You must know the country pretty well."
"Amen to that. Just about every bush and stone, I guess."
"I wish I knew it better. As I said, I roam around a lot, but my perimeter has been rather narrow."
"Have you ever been to the Cutoff?"
"No-no, I haven't. I've heard it referred to though."
"The Cutoff's a real weird place. A twenty-room house, stables, a running track, a custom-built lake-the whole place just as it was-standing there deserted for over forty years."
"It sounds fascinating. The old Uphouse estate, wasn't it?"
"That's right. Old Barney Uphouse built it years and years ago. He made his money in crooked stock deals back around the turn of the century. Back when it was still legal to steal people blind. You could be a thief then and still stay respectable. I guess old Uphouse liked Garns County. It was a real wilderness then."
"Some of it is still pretty wild. Someday, I suppose, they'll put a road into that Cutoff area and start modernizing it."
"The Causeway Reservoir blocked the entrance, of course. A mile-long bridge would be about the only answer."
"I'd like to see the old Uphouse estate sometime." This seemed to alarm him. "It's a very hard place to reach."
Mildred was amused. "I'm a very good swimmer."
"Oh, there's another way in-a path on the other side-but it's rugged."
Mildred's amusement changed to mild annoyance and she said, "Good heavens, Rafe. You youngsters seem to think anybody approaching forty is a doddering old...."
His dark, long-lashed eyes jerked away from her face and he gulped. "I'm-I'm sorry, Mrs. Hager. I wasn't referring to your age. It was just that-"
"I'm sorry too, Rafe. Perhaps we oldsters are a little sensitive."
"But you don't look forty, Mrs. Hager. Not anywhere near it. Why, you look-young-you-"
Mildred hid the little surge of pleasure behind a quick briskness. "Well, I'm late, that's certain. I came too far. I'll have a family howling for dinner."
Rafe Kolsky hesitated briefly. Then, as though to make amends for what he considered his boorishness, he said, "I'd like to take you to Full Moon, Mrs. Hager. I'd be honored to guide you."
"Then we'll definitely go sometime. Old Barney Uphouse must have been a romanticist to give his estate a name like that."
"My father wrote a column on old Barney once. A comparison thing. The old robber barons and the new. Maybe you'd like to read it."
"I certainly would. Your father is a famous man. You must be proud of him."
"I wish I could see him oftener."
"Washington isn't too far away."
"I know. But my mother needs me."
"Well, I must be getting back down the hill. My ravenous family."
"May I help you down?"
"You may not. I left my crutches at the bottom of the slope but I'll reach them on my own power if it takes all summer."
"I didn't mean-"
"Rafe! Don't be so deadly serious all the time. I was only joking."
He gulped and blushed. "Well, good-bye Mrs. Hager. I'm going to angle down the slope toward the creek."
"Goodbye. If you meet an Indian, give him my regards."
"I will. And say hello to Jimmie for me."
"I'll do that...."
Mildred's thoughts did not turn morbid on the way home. Meeting Rafe Kolsky had brightened her day.
There had been so much talk, so much concern, about juvenile deliquency that it was refreshing to meet and talk to a young man of Rafe's obvious caliber.
Not that the juveniles of Rebel Hill and Warren-ton were problem children. There had been episodes of course; restless spirits breaking through a few fights in the taverns along Barrett Road when the Connecticut kids came gunning over in their sports cars. But no real viciousness.
But Rafe still stood out. He was a cut above the careless happy-go-lucky youths that made up Jimmie's crowd.
Mildred wished Donna would get interested in Rafe. He would be very good for her....