"Phyllis A. Whitney - The Golden Unicorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Whitney Phyllis A)

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THE
GOLDEV UNICORN
Phyllis A. Whitney
Don't try to find out who you are, Courtney. Yo« may uncover horrors you're better of not knowing. Be satisfied with the loving parents who raised you. Let the door stay closed. ...
On the southern shore of Long Island, in a foreboding East Hampton mansion, a violent encounter is in the making. Courtney Marsh has arrived at one of the island's great ancestral estates in search of a truth that has eluded her a lifetime: the identity of her own mother and father.
The only clue she has to her past is a pendant she has always worn-a pendant bearing a golden unicorn-long an insignia of the strong-willed Rhodes family, one of East Hampton's most prominent, yet most reclusive, clans.
But from the moment of her arrival there, Courtney's reception is quite different from any that a long-lost daughter might expect. For Courtney Marsh's fight to discover her heritage was unearthing the hushed-up facts behind a murder committed twenty-five years before ... a
(continued on back flap)
Book Club Edition
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Golden Unicorn
Phyllis A. Whitney
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
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Copyright © 1976 by Phyllis A. Whitney
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Acknowledgments
My special thanks to Miss Dorothy King of the East Hampton Free Library for her assistance when I was doing my research for this book. I am also grateful to Mrs. Amy Bassford and Mrs. Condie Lamb, who helped me immensely.
The background is as I saw it and responded to it in that charming village. However, I "built" my own house on the dunes, and the family that lives at The Shingles is peopled entirely from my imagination. That, too, is the source of all the story happenings.
The Golden Unicorn

CHAPTER I
Except for the mumbling of the television set, the living room of my New York apartment seemed utterly still and empty-without life. My presence hardly appeared to matter, and I wondered if it ever had. I had dressed for bed in my new georgette gown with its matching blue robe-but there was no one to see, and I had a strange, growing feeling that nothing about me or the room had any reality. I felt as static as the room itself, emotionally drained -as empty as the apartment. The loss I had suffered two months ago in July, as well as what had happened to me that afternoon, was having a delayed effect. But I couldn't seem to fight this reaction, or counteract my depression.
If I was honest, what had happened today wasn't even terribly important, but just another setback in a long list of setbacks. I wasn't completely bereft of hope. Tomorrow I would be on my way to East Hampton and my searching would go on. But for now, for this moment, I was numb with discouragement.
On the television screen the talk-show host was putting on his best now-I-am-about-to-present expression and I tried to focus my attention. It was necessary to watch, to listen to his words.
"I want you to meet a young woman who has enjoyed an amazing success," he was saying. "She has become known to us all in the last few years because of her outstanding articles in National Weekly. I'm sure you've read her interviews with American women of accomplishment, and you know what lively and penetrating pieces she writes. I want you to welcome Miss Courtney Marsh."
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The audience applauded with flattering enthusiasm, and the girl came out from the back of the set while I watched with the blank feeling of never having seen her before.
Don't swing your arms when you walk, I thought, but I had no other real criticism. She was slim, blond, smartly dressed in a dark red sheath which hinted at a good figure and revealed a wellshaped pair of legs. She moved with poise and assurance, shook hands with the host and the other guests with accustomed grace, and sat down in her chair, smiling without self-consciousnesswell used to being in the public eye. Her fair hair fell to her shoulders with a brushed shine, swinging when she moved her head. She began to answer questions intelligently in a clear voice and with an attractive effect of modesty, speaking of the surprising success she had made for herself in the last few years. She was a complete stranger to me.
"You're still in your twenties, aren't you?" Hal Winser said. "How did you become such a whiz so soon? How come people tell you so much in your interviews?"
"I've always been interested in other people," she told him smoothly. "I like to find out what makes them tick."
"But now you specialize in women only-and not even particularly famous women. Why?"
"I suppose I've become aware of a great many women around the country today who're doing outstanding work in the arts and the professions. Most of them are working quietly without a great deal of recognition. I've wanted to learn about them myself and I try to give them a little of the credit they deserve-and haven't sought."
"Did you always like to write, Courtney?" he asked with the easy familiarity of his breed, though he'd never seen the girl he called by her first name until this moment. "Did your parents encourage you when you were young?"
I left my chair and turned off the set with a sharp click. I ought to watch critically for whatever I could learn, but that girl on the screen had nothing to do with me, and I didn't want to hear any glib talk about her parents.
Courtney Marsh.
I was Courtney Marsh-whoever that was. Yet right now I could hardly recall the taping of that show weeks before. It had lost all reality for me. Indeed, I sometimes wondered what reality there had ever been for me in my whole life.
Without warning, memory whipped back over the years to a very young Courtney in fifth grade. I had been adopted when I was two months old, and my loving adoptive parents had never kept this fact from me. No one had ever made anything of it until that day in school. I could still hear the voice of the poisonous little boy who had sat next to me.
"My mom says you don't have any mother and father. My mom says you aren't real."
I had run away from school before classes were dismissed that day. I had run all the way home to Gwen Marsh's arms, and she had held me gently, pouring out comfort, consoling me for what could not be helped.
"Of course you're real, darling. You're the realest thing in our lives. Leon and I have had you since you were a baby. We are your mother and father, even though you weren't born to us."
I switched off the memory as sharply as I'd turned off the set. Because I wasn't real. What that boy had said was true and I had only been thrusting back the knowledge all these years while I explored other people's lives and made up fantasies about myself. I had always done that, wondering as a child if I could be the youngest daughter of a queen-kidnaped and lost until Gwen and Leon found me. Or-in a darker mood-perhaps I was the daughter of that horrible ax murderer who had terrified the country. What sort of blood ran in my veins? How could I know?
The only thing I knew for sure was that I was not the natural child of Gwen and Leon Marsh. They had been good and kind, but they had never understood my wild imaginings, my flights of fancy, or, later, my driving will to be somebody. They'd have been happy if I could have married a boy next door and grown up in suburban Connecticut without any thought of a career. My success had bewildered them. I was the cuckoo in the robins' nest, but they'd done the very best for me they could, and I had loved them both dearly.
Now they were lost to me too in that dreadful train accident near Rome during the summer, and I had felt devastated ever since. They hadn't been old enough to die and they should have had the comfortable old age I could have given them. Yet their loss had brought everything to a climax in my life, so that I was driven by a new urgency.