"Phyllis A. Whitney - Spindrift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Whitney Phyllis A)

Spindrift
PHYLLIS WHITNEY
Inside the walls of a palatial Newport estate, a violent struggle was beginning. Christy Moreland had come back to Spindrift determined to uncover the truth behind the mansion's most tightly held secret: the reason for her father's death.
It was a truth that, at times, Christy felt she was barely strong enough to face, for it meant openly confronting Spindrift's domineering mistress-her mother-in-law, Theodora Moreland.
Yet it was a battle that Christy knew she could not escape, especially if she was to free her young son from the obsessive and destructive hold the Morelands had come to exert over him.
As Christy searches out the mysteries that haunt Spindrift-anot the people in it-she slowly unveils a tightly woven web of deceit that only murder can continue to conceal. . . .
A spellbinding novel of romantic suspense from the best-selling author of The Turquoise Mask.
Book Club Edition

SPINDRIFT
Books by Phyllis A. Whitney
Spindrift The Turquoise Mask
Snowfire Listen for the Whisperer
Lost Island
The Winter People
Hunter's Green
Silverhill Columbella
Sea Jade
Black Amber
Seven Tears for Apollo
Window on the Square
Blue Fire
Thunder Heights
The Moonflower
Skye Cameron
The Trembling Hills
The Quicksilver Pool
Red Is for Murder
Phyllis A. Whitney
SPINDRIFT
Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York
JUN 2 7 1985
Copyright й 1975 by Phyllis A. Whitney
All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America
With my thanks to the Newport Public Library for valuable help in my research and to the Newport County Chamber of cornmerce for supplying me with maps and materials.
Also with my apologies to Newport for certain liberties I have taken as a fiction writer. There are, for example, no boathouses along the shore where I have placed mine.
If there is, or has been, any other house named Spindrift, it is not the house of this story. Both Spindrift and Redstones have come wholly out of my imagination, as have all the characters, both dead and alive.

While I was in the hospital I kept drifting in and out of the world around me. It was hard to focus on what was real and what imaginary. Joel was real some of the time and I know that at first he came every evening to see me, and sometimes, when he could leave those writers and manuscripts that occupied so much of his life, he came in the daytime as well. Then his mother convinced him that he was upsetting me, and he came less often. It began to seem as though he were a stranger and not at all the husband I had been so much in love with.
Theo came too. Theodora Moreland, Joel's mother, but she always spelled nightmare, whether she merely stood beside my bed as a small, indomitable figure, waiting implacably, or sat across the room staring at me out of those intense green eyes. The look of her elegantly upswept, expensively perpetuated red hair began to haunt my dreams. Perhaps if I hadn't been my father's daughter I might have died under the balefulness of that watch she kept.
Once I had persuaded a nurse to bring me a mirror, so I knew what she saw-a face too thin since my illness, too delicate to possess the strength to stand up to her. Brown eyes grown too big and cropped brown hair, with the curls damp against my forehead. Her look put me down as weak and without force.
Yet even then I'd had more strength than she guessed. Adam Keene was my father, and he had brought me up to be a fighter, as he was. My mother had died when I was three and I didn't remember her at all, so it was my father who continued to dominate my horizon. Only lately, I hadn't been able to fight.
Perhaps of all my world at that tune he was the figure most real to me, most alive-even though now he too was dead. Again and again I could hear his warning voice in my ear: "Stand up to her, Christy. A fight is the only thing she understands. If you give in she'll destroy you. Christy, hon, watch out for yourself and watch out for Peter if you want to keep your son."
My father had never wanted me to marry Joel Moreland. He had worked with the Morelands most of his life-first with the
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powerful Hal Moreland, who was already a legend in the field of newspaper publishing, and then with his widow, Theo. Joel was the son of their later years, and he was like neither of them. It was inevitable that my father believed him weak and made of poor stuff because the newspaper world was too rough for him. Joel had taken an editorship at Moreland Press, and while the books he published weren't always a monetary success-which had disturbed his hardheaded father-Theo protected him in this at least and saw that he went his own way. Joel's was a dreamer's worldan escape from the brutal reality of the Morelands, and in the beginning I had relished my belief that he was his own man.
I'd had a job with the Moreland Empire too, thanks to my father. Nepotism, perhaps, as much as had been Joel's hiring, but I had worked hard at my column to keep it lively and newsworthy, and everyone said I had a flair. I had begun to be syndicated in a number of areas around the country and I was already receiving bushels of mail by the time Theo fired me. Dad had been furious, though Joel had rather shrugged it off: "Do you mind all that much, Christy? You know Theo likes change, variety. She thinks you've gone a bit stale. And this will give you all the more time with Peter."
In the hospital I would not think of Peter. Even in my fantasy world I could not think of Peter. I dared not until I was stronger or I knew I'd never recover. Theo had him-and I couldn't leave him in her destructive hands. But first I had to be strong enough to stand against her.
A nervous breakdown, they said, using the kind, old-fashioned term. A natural enough result following my father's tragic death, they assured me. After the hospital they put me in a "rest home"- very private and expensive and quiet, where I had sympathetic care and a great deal of covert watching. Dr. Dorfman was all consideration and he listened to me endlessly. When I said, "My father didn't die a suicide. He was murdered," Dr. Dorfman would ask me patiently why I thought this, and I would tell him again and again that I knew my father. He had loved life and believed in it. Under no circumstances would he have profaned it by not trying to live it to the hilt, no matter what happened. Dr. Dorfman reminded me gently that the threat of disgrace, the fear of open scandal, the loss of the job he had worked at and loved all his life could drive any man to desperate escape. "Not my father," I said. Dr. Dorfman smiled with compassion and went away, leaving me to stare about my empty sitting room,
leaving me to stare at the plaque on the wall that read: "GIFT OF THE MORELAND FOUNDATION." The very hospital I was in had been a gift of the Moreland Empire. There was no escaping it.