Cast a Pale Shadow(36)

"There's enough to feed the lot of us," said Roger. "Maybe we should all eat in the open air tonight. Who votes yes?"

May and Beverly raised their hands, and Hattie seemed on the verge of it when Trissa's small voice squelched the voting. "No! Umm, I mean, I'd love to have you join us some other day. You know you're better than family to me. But tonight is not a family picnic. Nicholas and I need some time alone." When she looked around the circle and saw their knowing smiles and saw Roger jab Nicholas in the rib with his elbow, she blushed and added, "To talk."

"Roger is just teasing you, honey. Of course, this is a picnic for two only. Run along and enjoy yourselves."

"Yes, enjoy!" Roger raised the bottle of beer he held in his hand, which set May, and Beverly to giggling. "There's a full moon tonight. You know what that does to lovers." He took a deep swallow of his beer. "And madmen."

"Roger, behave yourself," said Augusta.

"Get a jacket," Nicholas whispered in Trissa's ear. After she left, he pretended to struggle with the lifting of the picnic basket. "All of your kibitzing will be for naught, folks, if toting Ruth's dinner ruins me for life." When May wrinkled her brow in her effort to understand the joke that Roger laughed at with such a pained expression, Nicholas winked at her. "Don't wait up, gang," he said and banged out the back door.





Chapter Thirteen





Even the weather conspired to make up for the early cold Easter that year. The cold snap in the middle of March faded to a brief, bitter memory now. With Easter lost to cold and rain, spring was at last poised to attack in earnest. Clumps of daffodils nodded their agreement with the plan, and a warm, steady rain over the weekend had wakened the fields of grass for the battle for the green.

But Trissa was blind to all this. She had lost the strand of hope she held so briefly and sank into silence for the short drive to the park. Nicholas tried to call her attention to a star magnolia ready to burst into flower but her head came up too slowly to see it. She cast her eyes down again and studied her hands clenched in her lap. She did not even look up to count the brash pink flamingos that mobbed one corner of the giant iron birdcage marking the boundary of the zoo.

Nicholas drove the winding roads in the park without apparent destination. Despite the many times he'd driven through, he'd never mastered the layout of Forest Park, but instead relied on getting where he was going by luck and chance. Trissa's navigation skills were better, but she was too absorbed in her thoughts to help.

The weather had drawn walkers and bikers. Horses and their riders dotted the bridal path winding between bright, yellow slashes of forsythia, and golfers were hurrying through their last holes before the waning twilight failed them.

"Spring is taking over, Trissa. It can get the best of you if you let it," he said with futile enthusiasm.

"No, I don't think so," was her absent reply.

The car swooped round the circle at the amphitheater of the open air Municipal Opera complex. Swans sent ripples of gold in the sunset-tinted lake across from its entrance. In honor of the holiday, someone had looped pastel streamers through the lacy grillwork of the Victorian band shell in the middle of the lake. They fluttered gaily in the slight breeze. Trissa didn't notice.

Silently, Nicholas cursed her father and turned up the drive toward the Art Museum. In the pavilion that crowned the terraced hill near the zoo, picnickers basked in the glory of the patchwork quilt of red bud, pear, and crabapple blossoms stretched out below them in the glow of sunset as they had every spring since the 1904 World's Fair. Trissa didn't see them.

Every site they had explored with cameras and laughter on other excursions melted in the long, sharp shadows of the melting sun. Trissa didn't care.

"Are you getting hungry?" he asked.

"If you are."

Nicholas pulled through the small, stone gates at the rear garden of the Jewel Box and parked. She looked up at the Art Deco style conservatory, startled, as if waking from a sleep. "I'm sure it's closed. It's after five."

"I thought we'd eat by the floral clock."

"If you want to," she said, slipping the strap of her purse on her shoulder, and opening the door to get out.

The clock was at the far end of the rose garden. The rose bushes still wore the mounded mulch of winter but tiny green leaves poked through here and there. Trissa walked quickly through the garden, with arms folded and head down, and Nicholas abandoned the picnic gear to catch up with her. He put his arm around her shoulder and she let him.

Their pace seemed more a march than a lover's stroll. At its end, the pansies and grape hyacinth that formed the face and numbers of the clock still winked in the swiftly lowering sun. Below the clock, spelled out in flowers were the words "Hours and flowers soon fade away." Trissa raised her head to the sky and blinked back tears.

"Hey, I thought you said pansies always made you smile."

"Not today. Not here." Nicholas felt her shiver against him. "The army took my brother Lonny from me. A different war. He was in Viet Nam."

Nicholas looked down at the stone and bronze marker at the base of the clock, a war memorial to honor fallen heroes and realized his stupid mistake.

"I'm sorry, Trissa, I didn't know." His hapless efforts to cheer her were only making matters worse. Still, he refused to give up. "It's getting chilly. Let's get someplace warmer."

Obediently, without spirit, she walked along beside him, back to the car. He turned her to face him and lifted her chin with one finger. "You be the lookout. If you see anybody coming, whistle like a whippoorwill. Let me hear you."

"A lookout? What are you going to do?"

He pressed two fingers lightly across her mouth. "Do not question orders. Let me hear you whistle."

She wet her lips and puckered up, a fine strong whistle.

"Good! Once more so I can attune my hearing to it."

This time when her lips formed that tempting, moist circle, he kissed them quickly. "Excellent! Keep a sharp eye!" He hurried off toward the conservatory, searching his pockets as he went.

"Nicholas?"

"Shhh, don't use real names. Try Uncle Pete," came his stage whisper over his shoulder. He followed the shadow of the building until he reached the pink granite steps of its entrance. There the corner of the greenhouse blocked him from her view.

"What are you doing?"

"Quiet. Watch. Whistle."

Before she had time to think of abandoning her post, he reappeared out of the shadows. "Success!" he grinned. "Grab something and follow me." He opened the trunk and took out the picnic basket. Next to it were her rescued record player and the extra blanket from their bed. He lifted the record player, and she got the blanket and pushed the trunk shut. Into the shadows again, he crept with her close behind.

"Where are we going?"

"Eternal Spring," he whispered.

When they rounded the front of the building, Trissa saw that one of the doors was propped open with a rock. "Nicholas, you broke in!"

He put his finger to his lips. "Hush, didn't I tell you to use my alias? Damn, looks like this may be my last caper. I broke my burglar's tool." He held out his palm to show her the broken tip of his old Boy Scout pocketknife. He ushered her through the door and entered after her. Kicking the rock away, he shut the door.

Peace and darkness and the soothing tranquility of softly flowing water enveloped them. It took a few moments for their eyes to gather the available light in the stonewalled vestibule. Trissa's were owl-like with shock, and her mouth formed a perfect circle as she looked around her and back at him.

Nicholas put down the record player and offered her his arm. "Shall we dine among the lilies, milady?" Arm in arm he led her through the portal into the green glow beyond.

Nearly three stories above them, arc lamps suspended from the arch supports cast their dim light down. From the outside at night the glass walls and the verdigris of Jewel Box's framework gleamed with gemlike luster from peridot green at its heights deepening to emerald. The daytime roar of the waterfall and fountains was hushed to a soothing patter as water dribbled down a stone grotto on the back wall into a little stream that meandered the floor to a cedar mill where it was drawn up then splashed down the troughs to the floor again.

The Jewel Box was a favorite place for bridal parties to come to use its seasonal backdrops for wedding pictures and receptions. Nicholas and Trissa had been here in the sparkle of daylight and taken photographs of each other posed against the waterfall, the old mill, on the stone bridge, and up the winding iron stairway to the balcony.

But this night held a special enchantment, like walking on the floor of a rain forest where the only light that penetrated was the luminous emerald reflection like sunlight on leaves. Hundreds of Easter lilies, like tiny trumpet moons, beamed a ghostly white along the pathways.