The Ivory Cane Read online

  Her father’s hand touched her shoulder and she turned her face to him with an easy smile. ‘You weren’t worrying about me, were you, Sabrina?’ he teased.

  ‘Not a bit. Not a salty old sailor like you. Of course, you were minus the best deckhand you ever had,’ she laughed.

  ‘Yes, well — ’ His stumbling agreement made Sabrina wish she could bite off her tongue. She had not meant to remind him of the many hours they had spent together sailing these very same waters before the accident that had left her permanently blind.

  ‘Women always worry when their men are at sea,’ the stranger named Bay Cameron filled in the awkward gap.

  ‘It’s our nature,’ Deborah spoke up in her best purring voice. ‘You men wouldn’t like it any other way.’

  ‘Quite right, Deborah,’ her father agreed. ‘Mr. Cameron, this is my fiancée, Deborah Mosely.’

  ‘Miss Mosely, it’s a pleasure, but I shouldn’t keep you any longer. I’m sure you all have plans of some kind,’ Bay Cameron responded.

  ‘Thank you for keeping Sabrina company.’ There was sincere gratitude in her father’s offer of thanks.

  ‘Yes, Mr. Cameron,’ Sabrina added, reluctantly acknowledging the fact that he had not given her away. ‘I appreciated your thoughtfulness.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Lack of sight made Sabrina’s hearing more acute. She caught the mocking inflection in his words that quite likely escaped her father and Deborah’s ears. He knew very well what she was thanking him for. ‘Perhaps we’ll all see each other again some time. Good afternoon.’

  After their answering chorus of goodbyes, Sabrina listened to his footsteps fading away to another area of the parking lot. She wondered why he had not seen fit, in his arrogance, to tell her father the way they had really met. Pity, most likely, although he had certainly exhibited a remarkable lack of it earlier. In fact he had been downright rude and tyrannical.

  The car door was opened behind her, bringing an abrupt end to her wandering thoughts as her father’s guiding hand helped her into the back seat.

  ‘I thought you were going to wait in the car,’ Deborah said in a faintly reproving tone after they were all seated.

  ‘It got stuffy, so I decided to get some fresh air,’ Sabrina lied.

  ‘It did put some color in your cheeks,’ Grant Lane observed. ‘You probably should get out more.’

  Was that an innocent comment or a remark prompted by a discussion with Deborah concerning that new school for the blind she had heard about? It was impossible to tell. Sabrina crossed her fingers.

  ‘This Mr. Cameron,’ Deborah said, ‘had you met him before?’

  ‘No. Why?’ Sabrina stiffened, vaguely on the defensive.

  ‘It’s not like you to talk to total strangers, that’s all,’ the redhead replied.

  ‘You mean, not since I’ve been blind,’ Sabrina corrected sharply. ‘I’ve never been exactly shy. Besides, all I did was ask about Dad.’

  There was a moment of uneasy silence. Her reply hadn’t needed to be so cutting, but sometimes Deborah’s air of solicitude and apparent concern got on Sabrina’s nerves. For that matter, anyone’s did.

  ’do you suppose,’ Deborah covered the silence, ‘he’s one of the real estate Camerons?’

  ‘I can’t visualize any other having a ketch in the Yacht Harbor,’ her father replied. ‘The Camerons are one of the founding families of San Francisco.’

  A native San Franciscan, Sabrina was well aware of the city’s colorful history. Until gold was discovered in 1849, it had been a nothing little settlement on San Francisco Bay called Yerba Buena, ‘good herb.’ The bay was a perfect harbor for the ships racing around the tip of South America to join in the rush for California gold. The natural entrance into the bay truly became ‘golden gates’ for a lot of pioneers.

  Few actually found the precious metal in any quantity, but the real treasure had been in the goods and services they brought with them. The great bulk of the gold was possessed by a very small number of men. The majority of it from the California and Nevada lodes built San Francisco, the City by the Bay.

  The Cameron family was one of the less publicized of the original founders. It was laughingly said that they once owned all of San Francisco, and now they possessed only a quarter of the city. Hardly a step down in this day and age, Sabrina thought wryly, and it certainly accounted for the man’s arrogance.

  Oh, well, she sighed, what was the use in thinking about him? He was not the kind of man a person would run into very often, not with his background.

  She had rather liked his voice, though. Sabrina qualified the thought quickly. She had liked it when he hadn’t been dictatorially telling her what to do. The low baritone pitch had been warm and vaguely caressive, mature, too. She wondered how old he was.

  That was one of the problems of not being able to see. She had to rely so heavily on the other senses to judge the new people she met. Still, she was becoming rather good at it. She began a quick exercise of the impressions she had gained in her brief meeting with Bay Cameron.

  He was tall, over six foot by at least an inch. When he had pulled her out of the oncoming car’s path, she had had the sensation of wide shoulders, a flat stomach and lean hips. Judging by the solidness of his muscles he was in excellent physical condition. The salty ocean spray that had clung to him at least verified that he often journeyed forth in the ketch tied up in the harbor and probably had that day since the scent had been predominant. That indicated an affection for the sea or at least the outdoors, possibly both. His clean male scent and the fragrantly spicy after-shave cologne told her a bit about his personal habits.

  At the time she had been too angry to appreciate his sense of humor, but she guessed it was there, somewhere beneath his amused mockery. His intelligence was in some ways measured by his educated manner of speaking and the quick thinking that had immediately assimilated the facts and come up with a reasonable excuse for her father as to why Sabrina had been talking to him. On the business side, he would probably be very shrewd and astute. The family fortune would be safe with him, if not increased.

  She settled back into her seat with smug triumph. That was a great deal of information to glean from one meeting. There were only two things about him she didn’t know. His age she could only narrow as being somewhere between thirty and fifty, judging by the maturity of his voice and his physical condition. The second was a detailed description of his looks — the color of his hair, his eyes, that type of thing. Sabrina was really quite pleased with herself.

  For an instant she was motionless. There was one other thing she didn’t know — his marital status. That was something she couldn’t be certain of even if she could see, unless he was one of those men who faithfully wore his wedding ring. She couldn’t recall the sensation of anything metal on his fingers.

  Not that she cared one way or the other whether he was married or not. She had merely been conducting an exercise of her senses, a satisfactory one at that.

  Two

  * * *

  Sabrina licked the vanilla icing from her fingers, then painstakingly ran the knife across the top of every centimeter of the cake. No matter what kind of cake she made, her father invariably called it a fingerprint cake. Sabrina was never totally confident that the frosting covered the entire cake. The only way she could be certain was by feeling, hence the telltale impressions of her fingers across the icing.

  Placing the knife on the Formica counter, she set the cake platter toward the back, refusing to give in to the sensation that there was a gaping hole somewhere exposing the dark devil’s food cake. Before the accident that had left her blinded, Sabrina had taken the simplest task in the kitchen for granted.

  Now, washing dishes was a study in diligence, let alone cooking a meal. She had mastered nearly everything but eggs. There was only one type she could cook. Invariably they turned out to be scrambled omelettes. For the sake of their stomachs, breakfast had become the meal her father prepared.

 
Sunday was the day that Deborah did all the cooking, as had been the case this last weekend. She was a gourmet cook. Sabrina had always been mediocre at best, which made her doubly conscious of the occasionally charred or rare meals she placed on the table during the week compared to the perfection of Deborah’s. Yet her father had never complained once, ignoring the less appetizing to compliment the good.

  Except for a daily woman who came in twice a week to do the more thorough cleaning, Sabrina took care of the house herself, dusting and vacuuming. It took her longer than the average sighted person, but she had discovered that, with patience, there was very little she couldn’t do. But patience was the key.

  Without the benefit of sunlight, the passage of time was nearly impossible to judge. It seemed to slip through her fingers at times, five minutes turning out to be ten. Sometimes when the loneliness of her dark world caved in about her, the opposite was true. The empty, desolate sensation invariably occurred after a great surge of creative energy that she was unable to release.

  Sabrina had learned to endure the myriad inconveniences that came from being sightless. She could even keep the bitterness in check until she thought about the career that had come to such an abrupt halt after the accident.

  Since almost the first time a watercolor brush had been put in her hand, art and more specifically painting had been her special love. Her natural talent, enhanced by skill taught by some of the best teachers around, had made her a relatively successful artist at the early age of twenty-two, thanks to nearly fifteen years of training. Recognition had been achieved in portraits, not necessarily commissioned sittings but more often interesting faces she had seen along Fisherman’s Wharf or Little Italy.

  That had been the cruelty in the accident that had taken her sight. It had been a car accident. Even to this day Sabrina didn’t know what had happened. She had been driving home very late at night after a weekend spent with a girl friend in Sacramento. She had fallen asleep at the wheel.

  Looking back, her haste to return home seemed so senseless, considering the month she had spent in the hospital recovering from broken ribs and a concussion — not to mention the evident blow to her head that had irreparably damaged the optic nerves.

  Giving her head a firm shake, Sabrina resolutely tried to push such memories to the back of her mind. Her survival lay in the future, not in looking over her shoulder at the past. At the moment the future looked empty, but seven months ago Sabrina had not believed she would accomplish as much as she had.

  Her next obstacle was walking from her home to the drugstore to buy a bottle of shampoo. It was only five blocks, but it was five blocks of San Francisco traffic and four intersections. Only in the last two months had she had sufficient confidence in her ability to attempt such a journey without accompaniment. Her pride always kept the humiliation of getting lost uppermost in her mind.

  The pale green sweater jacket Sabrina took from the closet complemented the dark green of her slacks. She touched the handle of her oak cane in the umbrella stand, the smooth finish of the wood reminding her instantly of the arrogant stranger Bay Cameron that she had met at the Yacht Harbor last Sunday. She didn’t care what he thought. She preferred the anonymity of a wooden cane. It was bad enough blundering about in her permanent darkness without drawing attention to her plight.

  Entering into the stairway, Sabrina walked down the steps to the front door, carefully locking it behind her. The grillework gates just a few feet away creaked noisily as she opened and locked them. The sidewalk sloped abruptly downward. Sabrina counted the paces slowly, accurately turning at the front door of the neighboring Victorian house.

  Pressing the intercom buzzer, she waited for her neighbor’s response. As a precaution, her father insisted that she always let someone know where she was going and when she had safely returned, whether it was Peggy Collins, their neighbor for nearly fifteen years, or himself at his office.

  ‘Yes, who is it?’ a briskly sharp female voice answered the buzz.

  ‘It’s me, Sabrina. I’m on my way to the drugstore. Do you need anything?’

  ‘How about three more hands? Or better yet, a plane ticket to South America?’ the woman replied with amused exasperation.

  ‘It’s as bad as that, is it?’ Sabrina laughed.

  ‘Ken called me an hour ago and is bringing a couple of very important clients home for cocktails and dinner. Naturally there’s not a thing in the house to eat and I’m also defrosting the refrigerator and have the contents of half the closets strewn through the house. It looks as if a cyclone had hit this place. Of all days to get ambitious, I had to pick today.’

  ‘I’ll be back in an hour or so.’ Sabrina smiled at the intercom. There always seemed to be an impending crisis at Peggy’s house that was invariably weathered with commendable aplomb. ‘If we have anything you need — ice, drink, food — you just let me know.’

  ‘My best solution is to find a husband with a better sense of timing,’ Peggy sighed. ‘Take care, Sabrina. I’ll let you know if I need anything when you get back.’

  Humming softly, Sabrina started out again. Her neighbor’s droll humor had restored her somewhat dampened spirits. The trip to the drugstore became more of an adventure than an obstacle. There was a nip in the wind racing down the hill, but there always seemed to be a nip in the winds wandering through San Francisco.

  There was no warmth on her cheeks as she crossed to the normally more sunny side of the street. The sun had evidently not burned through the fog yet. Instantly a vision of the fog swirling about the spans of the Golden Gate bridge sprang to her mind.

  Her concentration broke for a moment and she had to pause to get her bearings. It was so difficult not to daydream. The end of her cane found the drop box for the mail and she knew which block she was on.

  Crossing the street, she began counting her steps. She didn’t want to walk into the barbershop instead of the drugstore as she had done the last time. A funny, prickly sensation started down the back of her neck. She ran a curious finger along the back collar of her sweater jacket and frowned at the unknown cause of the peculiar feeling.

  ‘No white cane, I see,’ a familiarly husky voice said from behind her. ‘You’re a stubborn girl, Miss Lane.’

  A disbelieving paralysis took hold of her limbs for a fleeting second before Sabrina pivoted toward the male voice.

  ‘Mr. Cameron,’ she acknowledged him coolly. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again.’

  ‘The city isn’t as large as it seems. Here I am driving down the street and see a girl walking with a cane. I start wondering if you’ve been run down yet. Then, lo and behold, I realize the young girl with the cane is you. Are you in search of your father again?’ Bay Cameron asked in that faintly amused tone she remembered.

  ‘I was just going into the drugstore here.’ Sabrina motioned absently over her shoulder in the general direction of her destination. ‘You were driving?’

  ‘Yes, I parked my car up the street. Do you live near here?’

  ‘A few blocks,’ she answered, tilting her head curiously and wishing she could see the expression on his face. ‘Why did you stop?’

  ‘To see if you would have a cup of coffee with me,’ he replied smoothly.

  ‘Why?’ She couldn’t keep the wariness out of her voice.

  Bay Cameron laughed softly. ’do I have to have an ulterior motive? Why can’t it just be a friendly gesture on my part?’

  ‘I just don’t understand why you should want to have coffee with — ’ Sabrina nearly said ‘with a blind girl’. The haughtiness left her voice as she ended lamely with ‘ — me.’

  ‘It seems to me, Sabrina, that you not only suffer from a persecution complex but a feeling of inferiority as well,’ he suggested mockingly.

  ‘That’s absurd!’ The sightless brown eyes that had been directed blankly at his face were sharply averted to the traffic in the street.

  ‘Good.’ Strong fingers closed over her elbow, turning her toward the drugstor
e. ‘Where would you like to have the coffee? I know a little cafe in the next block we could go to.’

  ‘I’m sure your wife would much prefer you spend your free time with her.’ She made another feeble protest.

  ‘I’m sure she would — if I had a wife.’

  ‘I — I have an errand in the drugstore,’ Sabrina protested again.

  ‘Will it take long?’

  Hopelessly she wished it would take an hour. She was simply reluctant to spend any time with him. That air of confidence that surrounded him did make her feel inferior.

  ‘No,’ she admitted with a downcast chin, ‘it shouldn’t take very long.’

  ‘Your lack of enthusiasm isn’t very flattering,’ Bay Cameron taunted softly. ‘Would you feel more comfortable if I waited outside for you?’

  Just knowing he was in the vicinity unnerved her. Sabrina shook her head. ‘It doesn’t make any difference.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll go in with you. I need some cigarettes.’

  She felt the brush of his arm against her shoulder as he reached around her to open the door. Her elbow was released and she entered the store more or less on her own. She tapped her way to the rear counter, sighing as she heard Bay Cameron’s footsteps heading toward the tobacco section.

  ‘Is there something I can help you find?’ a woman clerk’s voice asked.

  Before Sabrina could reply, another gruffly happy voice broke in, male this time. ‘Sabrina, I was beginning to think you had forgotten where my store was. I have not seen you in nearly two weeks.’

  ‘Hello, Gino.’ She smiled widely in the direction of the reproachful voice.

  ‘It is all right, Maria, I will help Sabrina. You go see what that man at the prescription counter wants,’ he dismissed the clerk that had initially approached Sabrina. As the woman’s footsteps moved away, Gino Marchetti whispered, ‘Maria is new, a cousin of my wife’s sister’s husband. This is only her first week, so she doesn’t know my regular customers.’