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
