She flew to New York a week later, refusing a number of invitations to visit from girls she had gone to school with at Fermata and Warrenton, and took rooms in a quiet, upper-East-Side hotel. For the time being, she wanted to feel free.
She had a good time — so good a time that her conscience bothered her a little when it had opportunity to take itself felt. There were theatres, luncheons, dinners, cocktail parties, week-ends in Connecticut or on Long Island. There was shopping — and there was Rick.
He was with her as often and as long as she would let him. He was, unexpectedly, as much of an outdoor sportsman as poor Len had been the reverse — with a casual, loose-leaf California approach that Liz found herself increasingly liking and responding to. After ten days, he asked her to marry him.
“Naturally,” he said over a cigarette, in a quiet little restaurant whose food was as softly palatable as its violin music, “I don’t want to rush you, Liz.”
“Then what would you call what you’ve been doing to me?” she asked him, feeling glowing and alive as she could not remember ever having felt.
He laughed softly, and one of his strong hands captured hers. “I wish I’d seen you first — I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
She withdrew her hand. “But the children, Rick — it wouldn’t be fair to ask you to take on such a load.”
“That’s easy,” was his reply. “We’ll just turn them loose on the beach at La Jolla and let them grow into water-babies. It’s the healthiest, happiest life for a child in the world. I know — I had it.”
“But not right away...” Thus she consented.
She was supposed to break the news to Papa when she got back to Tivoli. But Toby came down with German measles the day after her return, and then one thing seemed to follow another so that, somehow, she never quite got around to it. She tried to explain to Rick over the telephone.
“Okay, Honey,” he said, “then I’m coming down and break the news to Papa myself. After all, a man in love as I am with you has some rights.”
That evening, for the first time since the funeral, she polished the guns. When she came out, Papa was sitting in his big chair, holding his big drink, in the living room. Regarding her with amusement and a flash of keenness, he said, “Something I’ve done, Liz-honey?”
Impulsively, she kissed him, almost causing him to spill his drink. “You’ve been darling,” she told him. “No — it’s Rick.”
“If he’s been dealing off the bottom of the deck, I’ll horsewhip him.” Papa’s frown was ferocious.
“Oh no, Papa!” Liz said quickly. “It’s nothing like that — he wants me to marry him.”
“A little quick, isn’t it?” Carter Lansdowne asked. Then, cocking his handsome, Roman head slightly on one side, “Still, he’s been waiting a long time, Liz-honey. He’s a bachelor, and a gentleman — at least he has the earmarks. I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“But you don’t understand, Papa!” Liz almost wailed. “It’s, oh — anyway, he’s coming down here for a visit.”
“Glad to welcome him,” said Papa. “Nice to have another man around the house for a change.”
Rick arrived the next afternoon. He brought presents for the children, some very special whisky for Papa, a seven-carat diamond ring for Liz, hung on a gold chain. “So you can wear it around your neck, out of sight, until we make this properly official,” he told her.
He fitted into the Virginia life as if he had been born to it. He shot almost as well as Liz, rode almost as well as Papa. The children adored him.
One afternoon, when Liz returned from a household shopping drive to Warrenton, he said, “What are we waiting for, Darling? I’ve been talking to your father about it. I know some people who’ll be delighted to take the place off your hands. They’ll pay a good price, too. Then we can all go out to La Jolla. Your father is all for it — says he’s been needing a change for years.”
“He is?” Liz couldn’t believe it. “He does?” Then she embraced Rick passionately and said, “Oh, Darling!”
The next afternoon, when she got back from a visit to one of the neighbouring houses whose owner’s wife was trying to start a local PTA movement, Rick was gone. Papa was enigmatic, apparently as puzzled as she.
“The damned cad didn’t so such as say good-bye,” he said, frowning.
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand at all.”
She waited three days for word from him, but none came. Then she packed up the seven-carat diamond and chain and mailed them to his address in La Jolla, with a stiff little note.
His answer came a week later. He wrote—
This is a most difficult letter, Liz, because my feelings for you remain unchanged. I shall always love you. Therefore, I wish you had kept the ring as a small to\en of what mere words can never express. But, since you’re the fine person you are, you would feel you had to send it back.
This fineness of quality is what made your father’s revelation all the more shocking. Naturally, it had never occurred to me that poor Len's death was not accidental. Even knowing the truth, I cannot find it in my heart to blame you. Remember, I roomed with him for a year, and I found him pretty irritating much of the time. As for being married to him, as you were, well...
But, just the same, under the circumstances, I do not feel that I could have acted in any other way...
There was more — but she didn’t need to read it. She folded it neatly, thrust it away in her saddle-stitched handbag, went into the gun room. She understood all too clearly now — and with understanding came horror. Papa! It was he who had manoeuvred her into marriage with poor Len. It was Len’s money that had restored Tivoli, and Papa had no intention of giving it up.
What was it that he had said, the evening of the funeral, when he was well into his cups? At that time, the words had meant nothing to her. Now they returned to haunt her.
“...getting a feeling of late that poor Len was about ready to pull up and pull out of here — taking you and the children with him, of course. I never could have endured that... just an outsider. I used to have to call, ‘Covey!’ so he’d know when to stand up and shoot...”
She recalled Papa, that ghastly afternoon, standing to one side, watching her closely, as he always did when she shot — watching her, she had thought until now, with pride. She could hear his cry of, ‘Covey!’ — just before Len came blundering up from cover into the path of her double-charge. The memory remained vividly the same, but the pattern was altered — horribly, unbelievably altered.
She rubbed harder on the gun in her hand, wondering what she should do. There was no sense going to Rick — Papa had fixed that, as he had fixed every threat to his beloved way of life. No matter what she did, the monstrous lie would be always between Rick and herself. Besides, she could hardly call Papa a murderer when she, herself, had fired the fatal shells.
She hefted the gun she had polished until it gleamed and sighted it through the French windows overlooking the lawn. Papa was out there, playing some game with the children, who clustered around him, their golden little faces bright with interest and love. Cooly, Liz lifted the gun, felt the reassuring smoothness of the stock on her cheek.
She calculated the distance — less than fifty feet — and made allowance for the wind, which was high. She brought the ruddy flesh of his face in alignment with the sights. Then she squeezed the double trigger.