Irma gave her a bright glance. "Do you? Look, if you give him something that anybody can buy in a store, even if it costs five hundred dollars, that's like giving him money. He wants something he hasn't got." She lifted a heap of material from a workbasket beside her chair. "Like, I'm making him this quilt. The damn thing is ten feet long. Pongo will probably make him a belt or something -- he does leatherwork."
Margaret bent to examine the unfinished quilt, diamonds and stars of pale rose, blue, white, corn yellow. "Oh, this is beautiful. But I couldn't do anything like that."
"You never know till you try," Irma said. She stood up. "Let's go on back -- Pongo will be wanting to make his post-office run. Are you through for the day?"
"I guess so, there's nothing more on my desk. Oh, I forgot to look in his out basket."
"That's all right, I did. You go on home and relax."
The next day there were paintings hanging all along the balcony wall; Anderson was putting one up in the living room when she arrived. She found a disk in his out-basket upstairs, and several letters marked in his meticulous handwriting, "Tell him no." After some hesitation, she translated this into: "Mr. Anderson has asked me to acknowledge your letter of and to tell you how sorry he is that under present circumstances he does not feel able to accept your interesting proposal." She signed these letters; "Margaret W. Morrow, Secretary to Mr. Anderson."
"I thought it would be better, more of a polite brushoff, if these came from me," she explained at lunch. "And it's less work for you; is that all right?"
"Fine, Maggie. A little more polite than I would have been, but okay."
Pongo served another incredible meaclass="underline" lemon soup, turtle steak, shrimp in mustard sauce, and a huge Greek salad with anchovies, black olives, and feta cheese, all in addition to Anderson's porterhouse. Margaret began to wonder what Pongo's dinners were like; if this kept on, she would have to start thinking about a diet.
After lunch Anderson went back to his picture hanging, refusing Margaret's offer of help. "You're not dressed for it," he said, "and anyhow it's a one-man job." Margaret typed two more letters, left them in Anderson's in-basket, tidied her desk.
On her way out she asked Irma, "Would it be all right if I walk around outside a little before I go home?"
"Sure it would. You'd better wear a hat, though. That sun is fierce, and you're burned already."
Margaret put on her dark glasses and went out into the glare. She got her wide-brimmed hat from the car, then strolled up past the garage and the storeroom. Above her the hill began, planted in ferns and flowering shrubs. On a tree with pale bark and narrow boat-shaped leaves she saw a brown lizard with a startling orange throat-pouch. The pouch swelled like a balloon, disappeared; the lizard bobbed its narrow head three times, then the pouch swelled again. It seemed to pay no attention to her until she was almost near enough to touch it; then it whirled and flicked out of sight around the branch.
The driveway curved off to the left and disappeared around the shoulder of the hill. Beyond it, a winding path covered with bark mulch led upward between waist-high shrubs. When she had climbed a few yards, she turned for a better view of the house. It was U-shaped around the garden, thirty feet tall except at the far end, where a sort of tower rose another twenty feet. The roofs were all of Spanish tile, and the house looked vaguely Spanish, with its wrought-iron balconies, except for the modern gleam of the glass doors that opened into the living room.
She went on into the cool shadow of the trees. First they were birches and maples, then young oaks, then pines of an unfamiliar variety, and some other trees that she could not identify. Moss and ferns grew thickly between the trunks; the bark-mulch was gone now and she was walking on a narrow dirt path; she might have been in a northern forest, except that everything was too perfect, too beautifully cared for.
Around the next bend she came upon an old man on his knees beside a wheelbarrow full of bulbs. He had been digging with a trowel near the trunk of a maple; he looked up alertly under the brim of his shapeless hat. "Afternoon."
"Hello," Margaret said.
"Visiting, are you?".
"No, I'm Mr. Anderson's new secretary. Margaret Morrow."
"Glen Hoke is my name. I put in all this here." He waved the trowel vaguely at the forest around them.
"You mean, the ferns, and flowers?"
"No, I mean the whole thing. Been working here a year. He's a crazy man. He built this hill, you know."
"He built the hill?"
"Sure. There's no hill like this in Florida. Brought in crushed rock and bulldozers, then topsoil. Must of been near ten thousand yards of topsoil. Then trees, and all the rest of it. You know what it cost him for this one tree?" He slapped the trunk of the maple beside him. "Seven hundred dollars. That's one tree."
"I didn't even know you could transplant a tree that big."
"You can, if you want to pay for it. The brook over there, have you seen that?"
"No."
"Drilled six hundred feet, put in a pump, dug a channel and lined it with rock. There's your brook. Seems like you could build a house where there was a brook."
"You don't really mean you did all this by yourself, do you, Mr. Hoke?"
"No, no." He looked impatient. "I had a whole crew in here, twenty men at one time. I'm a contractor, but hell, he pays me enough, and I take an interest."
"You say the brook is over that way?"
"Just follow the path. Nice meeting you, Miss."
The trail forked, and forked again; Margaret took the downhill branch both times, and presently found herself descending into a ravine cool with willows. She heard the brook before she saw it: it ran bright and transparent over red stones. It was narrow enough, almost, to jump over, but a little farther down there was a little Japanese footbridge, sunbleached and sturdy, looking as if it had been there forever.
After another few yards she heard the water change its tone, and saw that it fell over a miniature precipice into a thirty-foot pool, deep enough for diving at one end. Beside the pool, in a shaded grassy place, something white hung from a limb. When she came near enough, she saw that it was a towel.
Chapter Nineteen
Margaret stayed in the cabin at Site O'Sea until the end of the week, partly because she had paid in advance and partly out of a superstitious feeling that her job was too good to last. On Friday, when Irma handed her a check and said nothing but "Have a good weekend, honey," she began to believe in her luck. She went househunting over the weekend and found a furnished two-room apartment in Madeira Beach, overlooking the bay. She also found time to shop for clothes: modest, well-tailored sundresses, skirts and blouses in unobtrusive pale colors, several pairs of shoes and sandals, and two linen dusters with vast pockets.
When she came to work on Monday, she knew she had been right to wear a duster when she glanced through the open door of the library and saw Anderson on his knees beside an open carton, pulling books out in handfuls and looking at them. "Moldy," he said to her, holding one up to show her the pale corruption that had spread across the cover. He brushed his hand over it, and when he put it down, by some trick of the light, it looked better. "The whole carton is, not worth the trouble."
"I could get something from the kitchen and wipe them off."
"Okay."
She came back with a rag and a bowl of water in which, on Irma's advice, she had mixed a couple of tablespoons of vinegar.
"If I put these on the table," Anderson said, "could you make a list of the titles and authors?"
"Sure." Margaret found a normal-sized chair, pulled it up to the table and sat down. "Where have they been, to get like this?"