Free The House at Sandalwood by Virginia Coffman Page A

unattractive physically, I found him quite implacable, a man who saw nothing but his own view.
    “Mr. Berringer,” I began as quietly as possible, hoping to calm the atmosphere, “I appreciate your anxiety, but your daughter is a grown woman. She told you she was thinking of going on to the Orient, so it seems to me that...”
    “What theories you may expound, madam, are of no interest whatever to me. William here received a card from my daughter which suggested that she was on her way to Tokyo, but this seems not to have been true.”
    “But why? What would make her change her mind? And why should it have taken you so long to discover that she hadn’t left?”
    William Pelhitt spoke up in an uneasy way, with frequent glances at Berringer, which suggested he took all his cues from the older man.
    “You see, she sent the card by surface mail and it came weeks after her last letter, so we figured the card told us where she was going, what she was up to. We didn’t hear anything from her after that, for months. Not that this is unusual with Ingrid, but finally, he—we sent cables to Tokyo, and they hadn’t heard of her, so we flew there, but couldn’t discover a thing. Then we got to checking the last letter she sent Vic, and found...”
    “But Tokyo is huge. I read that somewhere,” Deirdre put in, startling us all. I am sure the men had forgotten her presence. Whether or not she intended it, she sounded younger than ever. I was by now so ruffled at Mr. Berringer’s manner I decided to delay Deirdre’s introduction.
    William Pelhitt looked to me for an explanation of the girl’s identity, but in the second or two that he looked at me, puzzled and questioning, I saw another man, one not entirely cowed by his long relationship with his companion. I had a sudden notion that he suspected Deirdre was the real Mrs. Giles. The pleasant fullness of his likeable face would probably become substantial and plump in his forties or fifties. He seemed far more human than Victor Berringer who was so chillingly arrogant.
    At Deirdre’s observation about Tokyo, Berringer gave her a scathing look. Quickly and contemptuously, he returned to the matter at hand.
    “Is it too much to ask if we might be alone and uninterrupted for a few minutes, madam? I would like to learn what I—what we can before discussing the matter with the local authorities.”
    Deirdre caught her breath. That gasp troubled me, but I did not pursue the reason for it. I said with false calm, “If you will kindly ask your questions, you will relieve all of us, including yourself.” I was at least honest in that. “I would appreciate your telling me just what Miss Berringer’s last letter had to do with this persecution of us at Sandalwood.”
    “Yes,” Pelhitt put in, obviously trying to please both me and Berringer. “We owe you an explanation. You see, the letter, as it happened, was written three weeks after the card.”
    “Don’t rattle so! Get on with it!”
    “Just let me finish, Vic. The letter said she was coming over here to—whatever it’s called—this island, to have it out with that ... with her friend Deirdre.”
    “ ‘With that silly moron Deirdre’ was how she described you. A bit offensive, and hardly accurate,” Berringer added without a smile to soften the remark. “But my daughter often had bad manners. She claimed that if your new husband had faced the truth about you—whatever that was—after two days of marriage, she would have no difficulty in winning him away from you. She was drunk when she wrote the letter. Obviously.”
    “Obviously,” I echoed just as sharply.
    He moved nearer, as though to exclude Deirdre and William Pelhitt from our conversation.
    As I stared at him, hoping to intimidate him into at least a semblance of good manners, Victor Berringer set his glass on the side table behind me where the sunlight caught it and glistened on the melting ice within.
    “I certainly didn’t take such a rambling and