Hidden Legacy

How could she have been so wrong about him? Her spirits sagged beneath the weight of her bad judgment. On her most recent visit to Zizi, she’d wisely gone on her own. They had a perfect, harmonious week together, sharing an empathy that went even deeper than the one she shared with her much-loved mother, Stephanie, and certainly her formidable grandmother, Mariel, Zizi’s older sister.

Then there was Zizi’s marvelous old plantation house, Flying Clouds. She’d adored it at first sight. As a child, it had seemed to her that there was no other house in the entire world like it. For one thing, it had a widow’s walk. She’d never heard of such a thing, let alone seen one. She’d found it thrilling beyond words to pace the narrow walkway looking out to the turquoise Coral Sea.

The house, a profoundly exotic jungle mansion, had a history. Of course it did. A Captain Richard Langford, an English adventurer-entrepreneur, had built it in the late 1800s. At that time Australia had been announcing to the Old Country that it really was the land of opportunity. Captain Langford had answered the call. It was his beautiful schooner, Medora, hired out for trade or charter that had brought him a fortune before he’d eventually turned his attention to starting a small shipping line that serviced the eastern seaboard. His ancestors today ran the giant Langford Container Lines, which transported anything and everything all over the world—automobiles, antiques, fine arts, boats, industrial machinery, whole households of personal effects, you name it. There was no stopping progress, and the Langfords had prospered.

Was it any wonder that in her make-believe games she’d often played the role of wife—and sometimes daughter—of that heroic sea captain? She’d stand high up on the observation platform, waiting for a glimpse of his ship returning home. Other times she was the grief-stricken widow, shedding real tears. For a change she’d be Peter Pan or Wendy and even the infamous Captain Hook. Treasure Island was a favorite and so were all sorts of swashbuckling pirate games—anything to do with the sea. Sometimes she was the beautiful damsel in distress, held for ransom, other times the dashing pirate. Zizi had always given her just the right old clothes to turn into a costume. Those were unforgettable days for the kind of child she was. Zizi understood her imaginative nature far better than anyone else. She was a dreamer, a great reader, often devouring books way beyond her years. It was Zizi who’d understood and nurtured her compulsion to draw and finally, paint.

Zizi!

She’d been totally happy at Flying Clouds, with the bond between them deepening steadily through the years. They both loved the house, although Zizi made it clear from the outset that it was haunted by the benign Captain Langford. At any rate, both of them found they were remarkably easy in his company. Captain Langford had actually died in his bed, but one of his descendants—another Richard and a renowned yachtsman—had drowned off the Reef when his yacht, Miranda, had capsized and sunk without trace during rough monsoon weather. That was in the late 1960s.

Some time after that, Zizi had made her final escape to the tropical North where, in her youth, she’d painted some of her most ravishing canvases. Back then she’d stayed on and off in the artists’ colony long since disbanded. With her intimate knowledge of the area, she’d had the great good fortune to acquire Flying Clouds cheaply, as most people, certainly the locals, believed it to be haunted.

The setting alone captured the imagination. The entrance fronted on to a private road lined by the white flowering evergreen species of frangipani that in the lush tropical climate had grown into very big trees. The rear faced the glorious Coral Sea, with a long, sea-weathered boardwalk that led to a zigzag flight of steps and on to the beach.

The house was of fine proportions and remarkably grand for the area. According to local folklore, Captain Langford’s mother was an American shipping heiress who’d lived in such a house when she was a girl. Whether that was true or not no one knew, but all agreed it was a good story.

The two-story—three if one counted the widow’s walk—was constructed of brilliant white stuccoed sandstone with deep verandas decorated and embellished with distinctive white cast-iron lace railings that appeared again on the upper walkway. The verandas shaded the house from the tropical sun while still allowing every available sea breeze to pass through. The shutters for the French doors, three to either side of the solid cedar front door, and the door itself were painted so dark a green that in certain lights they appeared a glossy black. The huge roof was a harmonious terra-cotta red.

At some stage before the turn of the twentieth century, Flying Clouds became a working sugar plantation using native labor brought in from the Melanesian and Polynesian islands. This scheme, at first a fairly innocent importation of cheap labor, quickly degenerated into the cruel practice known as “blackbirding,” when Pacific Islanders were more often kidnapped from their island homes than offered paying jobs. The Queensland government had finally outlawed the practice in the early 1900s.

These days the house was almost lost in a luminous green jungle that was forever breaking out in extravagant fruit and flower. It would be impossible to starve in the tropics. Tropical fruit in abundance, dropping most of the harvest on to the ground—pawpaws, papayas, mangoes, bananas, custard apples, passion fruit, melons, many new varieties she didn’t even know the name of. Every backyard had a macadamia tree, indigenous to Queensland and named after the Australian doctor John Macadam. This fine source of protein the aborigines had been enjoying for tens of thousands of years. Sated on fruit and nuts, one only needed to throw in a fishing line to avail oneself of some of the best seafood in the world.

The sparkling Coral Sea wasn’t visible from the ground floor, but there was a breathtaking view from the upper story’s balconies and more stupendous again, though a bit chancy in high wind, the widow’s walk. Zizi had always listened when Alyssa made up her endless stories about “The Captain.” It was a secret between the two of them. Her mother regarded Zizi as an endlessly fascinating eccentric, eccentricity being a perfectly acceptable part of the artistic temperament. Mariel, on the other hand, was of the firm opinion that her sister had lost all track of reality.

Neither woman visited Zizi much anymore. Mariel, as strong as a horse, always cited a growing number of psychosomatic ailments—high blood pressure, tachycardia, stress headaches and the like. She claimed she couldn’t abide the tropical heat, which was probably true, though she lived in subtropical Brisbane. Stephanie, though deeply fond of Zizi, was a topflight barrister who had little or no spare time to visit a place that required half a day just to get there.

An only child, Alyssa had grown up knowing her parents hoped she’d follow them into the law. She had bowed to their expectations, completing her law degree and working for three years as an associate in the firm. That was where she’d met Brett Harris, handsome, clever, ambitious. In those days he used to hang on her every word!

She hadn’t been unhappy at the firm. Most of the work allotted to her she found interesting and sometimes challenging, but her heart wasn’t in it. She actually preferred her voluntary work at the women’s refuge, where she’d made good friends and been truly effective. Zizi, realizing that she was floundering in her legal career, had come out of her shell to have an old friend of hers, the highly respected art critic Leonard Vaughn, take a look at the best of Alyssa’s work, which she’d painted while staying at the plantation.

The two of them worked wonderfully well together in Zizi’s large, airy, light-filled studio, which smelled of paint, turpentine, linseed oil, varnish, glue, fixatives and always the salty scent of the sea and a million tropical flowers. Alyssa continually strived to match Zizi’s brilliance. The irony was, within a few years she was receiving the critical acclaim, the hefty prices and certainly the media exposure that had eluded Zizi for most of her working life.

Her great quest was to persuade Zizi to give at least one showing. There were so many wonderful works of hers the public should see, if only she could persuade Zizi. So far, despite the fact that Zizi loved her dearly, she’d been unsuccessful. Zizi was adamant that her work would remain hidden from the world.

When I’m gone, my darling, maybe…

Alyssa couldn’t bear to think of the time her great-aunt would go out of her life. She comforted herself with the knowledge that Zizi was fit and healthy. Zizi might be seventy, but she easily could pass for a woman in her late fifties. And a beautiful one at that. Alyssa wanted her beloved great-aunt to live forever. There was simply no one who could replace her.

IT WAS A BRILLIANTLY fine Saturday morning three uneventful weeks later. Alyssa was extremely grateful for this hiatus, although she feared it was only the eye of the storm. Indeed, for days now she’d been tormented by a vague sense of unease she couldn’t shake off. Now she sat on her deck rereading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi when the phone rang. The kitchen extension was closest. She swung her legs off the recliner, put her book down on the glass-topped table, then went inside to answer it.

She expected it to be Zizi. She’d called her the previous evening and again earlier that morning, getting only Zizi’s charming, cultured voice saying, “I can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave a message after the beep.” She had done so. The older Zizi got, the more she intended to keep in touch with her, a daily call as opposed to twice a week. An old saying kept reverberating in her head. Live alone. Die alone. That couldn’t be allowed to happen to Zizi.

It was her mother, whose voice was so similar to Zizi’s Alyssa often mistook one for the other. Strange, how her mother, a beautiful woman, looked and sounded more like Zizi than she did her own mother, Mariel. Mariel had lacked Zizi’s beauty, although she was undeniably a force to be reckoned with.

MUCH LATER Alyssa would say she’d known at some level what her mother was going to tell her the instant she picked up the phone. Hadn’t she been experiencing those shivery little premonitions?

Her mother, the supremely calm, professional woman, sounded distraught. “It’s Zizi,” she said, with a sob. “There’s no good way to tell you this, darling, but she’s gone. We’ve lost her. A neighbor, an Adam Hunt, couldn’t raise her on the phone so he went to the house to check on her. He found her dead in the bathroom. Apparently she’d fallen while getting into the bath, cracked her head, and—” Stephanie choked on her tears.

Alyssa half fainted into a chair. “Mom, what are you saying? Zizi always took a shower! It couldn’t have happened that way. Zizi never used the bath. She’d slipped once and nearly broke her neck. She always took a shower after that.”

“Try to stay calm, darling,” her mother urged when she was anything but calm herself. “I’m so sorry. I know how much you loved her. We all did, but you two were especially close. Your father’s very upset. He took the phone call. So, of course, is poor Mother. She’s tremendously agitated. I had to call her doctor to the house but thank God he didn’t find much wrong with her. Your father can’t get away, so you and I will have to go up. This is an absolute tragedy. Zizi’s so young for her years. God, was so young. Why did I wait so long to see her?” Stephanie berated herself.

Alyssa tried to offer comfort. “Your heavy work schedule, Mom,” she said, fighting down her own grief until she got off the phone.

“Why did she choose to live so far away from us?” Stephanie lamented. “No one was happy about it. That bloody place, it’s beautiful but it’s so remote. I’ve always agonized that she might die alone.” Stephanie’s teary voice betrayed the extent of her grief. “I can’t believe Zizi’s left us.”

“Neither can I!” In the golden heat Alyssa found herself shivering convulsively.

THERE WAS AN AUTOPSY. Everyone accepted the coroner’s verdict. The blow to the head wasn’t the cause of death, although it was the major contributing factor. Zizi had drowned. She would’ve become dizzy, lost consciousness, then slipped beneath the water. It was all too tragic.

Once her body was released by the coroner, the funeral quickly followed. Zizi had expressed the wish to have her ashes scattered in the Coral Sea, but Mariel as next of kin wouldn’t have it. She overrode that wish, insisting on having Zizi’s casket flown to Brisbane where she could be buried in the family plot so “we can keep an eye on her.”

Such an odd way to put it!

It was a small, private family funeral, although Mariel had been too upset to come. No notice had been placed in the papers. Yet when Alyssa accompanied her parents back to the car after the short service, she saw Brett, dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and black tie, standing some distance off. The sight of him chilled her.

“Isn’t that Brett?” Stephanie asked. “I expect he feels dreadful.”

“How did he even know about Zizi?” Alyssa looked at her father. “Did you tell him, Dad?”

“My dear, Brett has left the firm,” Ian Sutherland answered.

“When was this? Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked incredulously.

“We felt you had enough to contend with. Brett handed in his resignation. I accepted it. I could see he was deeply distressed by the breakdown of the relationship. I don’t think there’s any question that he was—is—madly in love with you. I was sorry to lose him, but it’s better that way, the situation being what it is. He won’t have the slightest difficulty getting into Havelock Hayes. I told him I’d put in a word for him. Brett’s certainly clever, but I have to tell you now that the relationship is over, your mother and I feel relieved. We weren’t all that happy about you and Brett.”

Alyssa looked from one to the other, having difficulty taking it in. “You never said.”

Ian Sutherland smiled wryly. “You’re twenty-six years old, Alyssa. Your mother and I left it to your own good sense, didn’t we, darling?” He glanced down lovingly at his wife. “You deserve someone with a more open nature,” Ian Sutherland said, picking his words carefully. “More openhearted. I don’t know exactly what it is in Brett, but no doubt you do. There’s something…secretive about him.”

Alyssa tried to calm her thoughts. “Things bothered you both and you didn’t tell me?”

“Actually, darling, we were on the brink of expressing our concern.” Stephanie put an arm around her daughter and gave her a little hug. “But just as your father said, you handled it yourself. Trying to put up with someone who constantly needs attention is difficult. That’s going to be a problem for Brett. In a sense he’s his own worst enemy.”

Alyssa fell silent. She was too distressed to pursue the subject.

“Well, there you go!” her father exclaimed, as though that settled it. “Best acknowledge the poor chap. It was decent of him to come, although I always got the feeling he saw Zizi more as an opponent than a friend. Still, no reason not to be kind to him. Your mother and I will wait in the car.”

Alyssa felt no desire to acknowledge Brett. Had her parents known he’d struck her, things would be very different. Brett’s certainty that she wouldn’t tell them was evident in his coming here. He had plenty of self-confidence, the ingrained belief that he was always right, and she’d come to suspect he enjoyed danger. Why was he really here? It wasn’t to pay his respects to Zizi. It could have been sadistic curiosity. That was more in keeping with his character. Or perhaps he was trying to demonstrate to her what a civilized person he was.

She moved toward him but stopped halfway, forcing him to join her on the path. No way was she was leaving her parents’ sight.

“What are you doing here, Brett?” He appeared thinner than usual in his elegant Italian suit. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes as if he hadn’t slept. He wore an air of dejection, but that, of course, could be an act. She realized Brett had the ability to play many roles.

He seemed surprised by her question. “I came to pay my respects, of course,” he said in a subdued voice.

“How extraordinary, given your attitude toward Zizi.”