High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie Page B

believed Mark’s yarn, do you? Only they—” Charles looked embarrassed. “You know how the Island is. You’re a kind of a pretty kid, and they’ve been waiting to get something on you, something to talk about. It’s a way of getting even with the old man, that’s what it is, if they can spill a lot of dirty chew about one of his kids.”
    She felt sick inside. “Tell me all of it,” she commanded.
    â€œWell, somebody—Mark couldn’t find out who—was hanging around outside the clubhouse last night when you fellas came out. And they started the talk around about seeing something. That damn little scavenger picked it up and brought it right home.”
    â€œSeeing what? ” she said relentlessly.
    â€œSeeing you fool around in the bushes,” said Charles, looking straight ahead at the wharf, and then Joanna knew. Simon . Strong above the cold furious nausea that gripped her rose the certainty that if she only said his name, by nightfall there wouldn’t be much left of Simon Bird. She turned toward Charles, her face ablaze; she opened her mouth, and shut it again.
    The tiredness that came was worse than the nausea. She couldn’t tell who it was. She couldn’t let them know how she knew without telling them of that shameful meeting there in the darkness, and then they would look at her and know her cheapness and her disloyalty.
    The Sea-Gypsy was slipping across the harbor now, setting the other boats to rolling, and she saw Nils’ peapod rocking at her haul­off. Nils couldn’t do anything, either, except take Simon over, and she knew, with a weary wisdom, that a beating wouldn’t help. They were caught. . . . It’s a trap, she thought, and I made it myself.
    Charles said, “They don’t believe it, kid. At home, and plenty of other places on the Island. They know how you and Nils are, just chums, that’s all, ever since you were big enough to tag after him and Owen. But there’s a lot of dirty-minded sons o’ bitches on this place who can’t understand this chum stuff—they go by what they used to do in the bushes.”
    The Sea-Gypsy glided to the car. Two other boats were there; Jud Gray and Jake Trudeau were selling their lobsters to Pete Grant. For a moment she hesitated on the gunwale, dreading to pass them. The world and the Island lay around her, so beautiful as to break her heart, but people were dirty and hateful and cruel.
    Jud Gray’s amiable face smiled at her, and Jake Trudeau said “ ’Ello, Jo,” looking, as always, like a very good-tempered pirate. It made it easier for her to cross the car to the ladder, even though she knew they’d been out hauling all morning and hadn’t heard the story yet. For she knew that over every Island dinner table Joanna Bennett would be the chief topic of conversation. From her they’d go on to other Bennetts, to her father and mother, to the boys with their arrogant heads. It was a knowledge to make her feel like dying inside.
    Charles stayed on the car talking shop with the other men, and Joanna walked up the wharf, and past the group lounging in the sun outside the store. She carried her head with a splendid assurance, though her ears were supersensitive to the sudden pause in voices that would begin again when she had passed.
    They’ll talk, she thought, but they’ll eat every word they say about the Bennetts. And I’ll make Gunnar and Simon pay, if I die doing it.
    It was a promise. And some day, when the right time came, she’d keep it, as the Bennett boys always kept their promises. She walked through the village with her chin high and her mouth steeled against this new and vicious world, and turned at the road that led to her father’s gate.

6
    J OANNA CAME INTO THE KITCHEN , a thin straight girl in dungarees arid shirt. She knew that a tiny muscle jerked at one corner of her mouth, but she couldn’t