Star Flight

  Star Flight

  Phyllis A. Whitney

  For Julie Fallowfield,

  for so many years my

  friend, agent, and

  counselor. Thank you.

  Foreword

  The most exciting part of discovering a new setting for a novel is the role played by the unexpected. When my daughter and her husband drove me to Asheville, North Carolina, I had never heard of Lake Lure. I’d read about Chimney Rock, but had dismissed it as being out of my reach, with too many steps to climb. (To my delight, there is an elevator!)

  When we started out from Asheville, our direction was chosen arbitrarily. We drove along the Blue Ridge and down into Hickory Nut Gorge. The gorge itself was beautiful, but nothing spoke to me until we came out upon the shore of a narrow lake that stretched below the flank of a rock-scarred mountain. We drove into hills above the water, where we could better view the entire enchanting scene. I knew immediately that I’d found my setting, even though at that moment I had no idea of the treasures that waited to enrich my novel. Lake Lure and Rumbling Bald Mountain provided the atmosphere and legends that would build my story.

  A number of people helped me along the way. Edward J. Sheary, Director of Libraries for the Asheville-Buncomb system, made me welcome and helped with information and introductions. Laura Gaskin, of Central Adult Services in the Pack Memorial Library, furnished me with the names of those who might help in my search and provided me with numerous copies of articles about the area.

  Martha Schatz, Director of the Rutherfordton County Library, became my main contact after I returned home, sending me packets of material on all aspects of Hickory Nut Gorge and Lake Lure. Her enthusiastic report on my manuscript was the first reading I received. Thank you, Martha.

  Joanne Okpych, innkeeper of the Esmeralda Inn, sent me information abut the historic inn, where early movie stars came to stay when they were making pictures in the area. Since I am a movie buff, my imagination took off and I created my own movie stars.

  Dale Miller, then a manager at Lake Lure Inn, gave us a tour of the inn, where so many notables of the past had stayed. He also showed us the kudzu-covered barn behind the inn where square dances were once held. The barn was being used for storage, but I cleared it out with a flick of my typewriter and held a costume ball in that cavernous space.

  Of special help to me were Laney Harrill and his wife, Lyvonne. I met Laney on top of Chimney Rock, and we were invited to his home on Lake Lure. There I could catch the feeling of what it would be like to live on the shore of that mountain-framed stretch of water. Laney also introduced me to some of the marvelous legends that abound in Hickory Nut Gorge.

  For every book I write, I visit the local chamber of commerce. In the chamber’s little building in the village of Chimney Rock, I struck a special lode of gold. Ann O’Leary took us up the mountain to see the set of the Indian village that was used in the movie The Last of the Mohicans. We took photos and videos of that remarkable and very complete Huron village, so that when I was working at home, I could visualize it again. For the movie, sadly, much of the village ended up on the cutting room floor. I’m glad that I could preserve more of its detail in my story scenes.

  Thank you, David Easton, for loaning me your miniature pig. Sigmund von Hogg brings his own individual personality to several scenes. I met Siggy when he was a rather large baby. Now at one hundred pounds he is full grown, but still is considered miniature.

  My special thanks to Edith Edwards of Kudzu Konnections in Rutherfordton. I once wrote about the destructive qualities of kudzu in a book called The Glass Flame, but now I have learned about its virtues. The Book of Kudzu provided me with a fascinating collection of recipes, not only for culinary purposes but for healing as well, all helpful in my fiction writing.

  The handsome drum in the story was the work of Edward King, who makes each drum an individual work of art. I acquired one of his drums for myself so that I could hear its varied tones whenever I wished, and try to catch the sound in my own amateur thumping.

  Two scenes in the story take place in Asheville itself. One is set in the famous Grove Park Inn high above the city. The other takes place in the Captain’s Bookshelf, a delightful antiquarian bookshop. My thanks to Chandler Gordon, son of the original “captain,” and to his wife, Megan Gordon, who created the wall decoration of a Japanese silk dragon that I’ve described in the bookshop scene.

  Randy Williams drove us around the Fairfield Mountains vacation complex, where I was able to set some of the action in my narrative. He also took us to the unique Mountains Library—where my books were on the shelves. Dorothy Dunlap, the librarian, and a volunteer, Eileen Harrison, made us welcome and provided me with still another scene.

  I have taken a few liberties with the geography of Lake Lure’s shoreline, building houses as I pleased, and setting down paths where there may be no paths. For a writer, the imagined and the real are so mingled by the end of a book, that it’s difficult to know which is which. For more than a year I have lived in these pages with this setting and these people. I hope they will come to life for my readers as they have for me.

  Prologue: The Legend

  For nearly sixty years, the mountain had kept its grisly secret. In North Carolina’s early days, the mountain had been called Old Bald. No trees grew along a rocky space near the top, so the name was born naturally. But that was before the “disturbances” occurred in 1874 and again in 1880. On the first date, the mountain’s time of notoriety arrived.

  Farmers in the valley were alarmed when rumbling sounds emerged from deep inside Old Bald and smoke was seen rising above its massive spread. A religious revival began and preachers called sinners into church to save their souls before the coming of doomsday. Rumors of volcanic activity flew quickly, so that newspapers sent reporters from nearby Asheville and from as far away as New York City to investigate. Soon scientists swarmed in to begin arguments that would never entirely resolve the mystery of what was now being called Rumbling Bald Mountain.

  The theory most accepted was that long-ago earthquakes had caused fissures to open inside the mountain. When great boulders crashed into these hollow caverns, the rumbling sound resulted. The smoke that caused alarm among the residents was simply dust rising through crevices when huge rocks fell precipitously from great heights within the mountain.

  In those days, there was no lake, only a long, deep valley along the foot of the mountain. The valley was part of Hickory Nut Gorge, through which flowed the Rocky Broad River. In the 1920s, the vision of a newcomer, Dr. Lucius W. Morse, would become a reality and change the valley and the surrounding countryside forever. Dr. Morse had come to North Carolina from St. Louis for his health and stayed because the country suited him. The results of Dr. Morse’s dream began to transform the area with the building of a hydroelectric dam that created Lake Lure. Soon this part of the state became famous for its beauty and its reputation as a resort flourished.

  Film companies in a budding industry heard about the beauty of these Appalachian mountains and, in particular, the spectacular appeal of the gorge. Actors and crews came to stay at the Esmeralda Inn and the Lake Lure Inn came into being to entertain the wealthy and famous.

  The mountain had been quiet for more than a hundred years and the volcanic theories that had proliferated during the brief period of geological activity had long since been ridiculed and dismissed, so no one who now lived in the area had any concern.

  Interest moved to another source when the resort’s first widely publicized scandal and tragedy occurred in the late thirties. Victoria Frazer, a beautiful and glamorous film star, had come from Hollywood to make a picture with Roger Brandt, already famous for his cowboy roles in Westerns. The very combination of these two opposites i
n the same picture excited the imaginations of moviegoers across the country and the movie magazines had a field day.

  It was inevitable that two such beautiful and dynamic people, cast in intimate scenes, should fall in love. Victoria possessed a passionate quality that played well on the screen, while Roger was an educated and well-read man—something seldom revealed in his movies, most of which featured monosyllabic dialogue. The two were magnets for each other.

  As inevitable as their falling in love might have been, Roger was already married to a young woman of Spanish descent from a fine old California family, and no divorce was likely. The studio stood on its ear trying to avoid a scandal that might destroy two valuable properties. In those less-than-tolerant days, repercussions had to be avoided at all costs.

  The studio was not entirely successful. While in North Carolina, Victoria gave birth to a baby girl who was quickly spirited away to adoptive parents in California, a childless couple who were friends of Victoria. Perhaps all might have been saved, even then, had Victoria lived, but she chose instead to drown herself in the lake at the foot of Rumbling Bald Mountain. Her scarf was found wrapped around the pilings of a dock. She had left an unfinished letter to the daughter she had sent away, and the message had been interpreted as a suicide note. In any case, the divers who searched the deep waters of the lake never recovered her body. And whatever the mountain knew, it wasn’t telling.

  Juicy reports of the scandal appeared in magazines and newspapers across the country, and Roger’s career plummeted. At the age of twenty-three, with one of the most recognizable faces in America, no studio would touch him. Movies were made in a few months in those days, and when his last picture was released—one made shortly before Victoria’s death—audiences booed and walked out. The public, which had accepted him as the pure and noble rescuer of maidens in distress, could not handle the reality presented by the press.

  The behind-the-scenes story was as romantic and tragic as any screenplay, but the truth was not to be known until many decades later.

  Oddly enough, Victoria’s roots were in North Carolina and quite a few Frazers still lived there. She’d been born in Asheville, where a talent scout, home for a holiday visit, had discovered her while she was very young. So, in a sense, she had come home to die. Roger Brandt, on the other hand, was a native Californian. While Blue Ridge Cowboy was being filmed, he rented a house on the lake and brought out his wife of two years to stay with him until the end of the picture. Rumor had it that Camilla Brandt had come to Lake Lure to keep an eye on her husband. If so, her presence had no effect.

  After the scandal broke and Roger Brandt became an untouchable in Hollywood, he defiantly bought the Lake Lure house he had rented and moved in permanently with his wife. No one could ever figure out why he wanted to live near the scene of a tragedy that had destroyed his career. Equally mysterious was how he had persuaded Camilla to uproot herself from her family and move to so isolated a spot in America’s South. Since Roger answered no questions and never allowed reporters near his wife, no one knew their reasons. Soon the Brandts had a son and the family became as much a part of Lake Lure’s legend and scene as the mountain itself.

  Over the years, the romantic story of the two ill-fated lovers grew. To this day, when visitors are taken on pontoon boats to tour the lake, they are shown the very place where Victoria Frazer drowned. The house where Roger Brandt still lives is pointed out as well, though boats are asked not to approach its dock. One guide even began to add his own embellishments. He claimed that in the early-morning hours, when mists rose along the water, a lovely white spirit appeared, drifting at the foot of the mountain. A spirit that always whispered the same name over and over—that of Roger Brandt. Of course, when Brandt got wind of the story, he immediately put a stop to such nonsense. As a longtime resident whose privacy was accepted and respected, he had influence. Strangely, the uprooted Camilla made herself more a part of the community than her husband was willing to do.

  Not until more than fifty years later did the daughter of the baby who was sent away—the granddaughter of Victoria Frazer and Roger Brandt—come at last to Lake Lure. Only then did the mountain give up its terrible secrets—though not without a good deal of travail for those who were involved with Roger and Victoria’s past.

  1

  Something awakened me so suddenly that I sat up in bed, my heart thumping as I stared at the unfamiliar reflection of water rippling across the ceiling of my room. Being disoriented by my surroundings wasn’t my problem—I knew where I was well enough. Back home in Palm Desert, there was no nearby water to cast ceiling reflections, so I began to wonder whether there had been something out there on the lake—some strange ambience that had reached out to disturb my dreaming—or whether I simply found it hard to sleep in the watery surroundings.

  As I came fully awake, I dismissed the former notion. I was here in North Carolina to find the answers to important questions, some of which had plagued me for years. I knew I needed to search for solutions with logic and good sense. A sound plan, certainly, but one that made me smile as I considered it. I wasn’t sure that I was capable of such a sensible approach. Confusion and concern were too much a part of my emotional baggage at the moment.

  I’d arrived at Rumbling Mountain Lodge in the early evening, after a long flight from California, with several changes before I finally reached Asheville and picked up the rented car that had brought me here. A glance at my watch told me that it was a little before 3:00 A.M. locally, though not yet midnight at home.

  Finding myself sleepless, I put on a robe and slippers, opened the door to the long balcony that ran past several rooms, and stepped outside. The late-September day had been warm, but the night air of the mountains felt wonderfully refreshing. Driving here while there was still some daylight, I had realized how lushly green everything was, very different from the desert browns I was used to. Leaves were just beginning to turn, with the promise of even greater beauty to come.

  I had never meant to come here. I knew the story behind my mother’s birth and had absorbed some of her prejudice against the man who still lived at Lake Lure and was my grandfather. I knew about my grandmother, who had sent her child away to old friends in California before her own suicide. All this was a part of my family history and responsible, I was sure, for the uneasiness I was trying to dismiss.

  Even though my real grandparents had never been a part of my life, I had grown up curious about them, my young imagination fired by the glamour of those two legendary figures. Once, when I was sixteen, I had said to my mother, “Don’t you want to know the truth about your mother’s death?”

  But her sense of having been rejected was too strong and her guard was always up. To the day of her own death, she remained unforgiving toward a past she really knew very little about. She had wanted a life that was safe and secure, and her foster parents had given her that. I remembered them as loving but old, with whatever young leanings toward adventure they might have had long subdued.

  As I stood on this balcony, high above the very waters where Victoria Frazer had drowned, some disturbing enchantment seemed to fill me—as though something in me already knew that how and why she had died would have a startling effect upon my own future. What did Roger Brandt really know about her death?

  I was the one who wanted to know. Once, I sneaked into a movie theater where one of Roger Brandt’s old pictures was playing. In spite of all that seemed sentimental and corny to me, I’d been able to catch a bit of the fascination he must have held for the audiences of his day. He’d been very much a man’s man, strong and vital in his adventure pictures, yet women, too, were clearly susceptible to his special charm.

  A veteran of more than thirty movies since his teens, he would have been in his early twenties in the film I saw. He appeared tall and lean—perhaps lanky was the word—yet possessed a natural grace of movement that was appealing. The camera loved him. His eyes said more than any lines they gave him, and a crease in one che
ek brought an interesting twist to his smile. He had a special way of walking off with his back to the camera and then pausing to look over one shoulder, almost mischievously, as though some secret existed between him and the audience. Of course, his prowess on a horse was famous and the palomino in his films belonged to him. All these things I knew about from old fan magazines I’d picked up in secondhand stores, hiding them from my mother.

  My father, I didn’t remember at all; he’d died in an accident when I was only two, so he held less reality for me than my grandfather did.

  Unfortunately, I had never seen the movie Blue Ridge Cowboy, which starred both of my grandparents. Those same old magazines had shown me her entrancing, tender young face with those great eyes that must have held me spellbound. I knew they were green, because the magazines said so, though all the photographs I saw were in black and white. My own eyes were green as well, and sometimes I’d felt a certain pride of distinction because they’d come from my famous grandmother. She must have been a glorious shooting star across the film screens of the world, only to have her light quenched in the dark waters of Lake Lure. At least she would never grow old. Roger Brandt was over seventy, and probably growing feeble, with all that young charisma long gone. Yet I was curious about him.

  My room at the lodge was on the second floor, at the rear, above the lake. The building was set among tall evergreens, oaks, and maples that offered shade by day and a certain dusky seclusion by night. Beneath my balcony, the hillside dropped steeply to the water. With the lodge’s lighted standards all around, I could make out wooden steps leading down to a slanting walkway that ended where a house stood near the water.

  My coming here still seemed strange and unreal to me. It had less to do with Victoria and Roger and the distant past than with the death two years ago of my husband, documentary-filmmaker Jim Castle, in this remote place. Nevertheless, what was happening now seemed strangely fateful and destined—if one believed in such things.