Chiffon Scarf (12 page)

No one could be hidden in the room for there was no place to hide and the door upon the bathroom was open, revealing its emptiness. Eden remembered that but she didn’t, then, consciously make note of it.

Eden had never seen violent death before; it was only deep instinct that warned her of its presence. There wasn’t time to explore the fact, to consider why and how, to think of murder. She leaned over Creda again, forcing her fingers to touch those stifling gray knots, to try to unloose them, to seek a pulse on Creda’s soft wrist, to try to find her heart. And to fail. The knots were tied with desperate tightness; there was no breath, no flutter of pulse, no motion. She pulled the scarf at last away from the upper part of the face and quickly, almost frantically, covered it again. Her scarf. That wasn’t possible either. She never thought of removing it.

A wave of sickness swept over her. She turned blindly toward the window, thinking, if she thought of anything, of fresh air, of fighting off nausea.

And someone moved away from the open window. Someone outside it with a white blurred face looming from that darkness beyond.

She caught only the motion. She had an impression only that it was a face. That therefore someone stood outside the cabin and watched her and the dead woman and vanished when she turned.

She started toward the window; she could call for help. Yet whoever it was must have seen Creda—must have known—

She put her hands to her mouth as if to stifle words on her lips.

This was murder.

It wasn’t suicide. Creda herself couldn’t have tied those horrible knots. And if it was murder then someone did it.

That white face, vanishing silently like a ghost face into the darkness outside the window! Why hadn’t whoever it was called out to her, come to her assistance, demanded at least to know what was wrong!

Terror was in her very veins like an icy stream. She must call the others—rouse everyone—spread the alarm. Would they come if she screamed for help? Dared she leave the gastly, lighted little cabin and venture into the darkness toward the main house?

There was no telephone in the cabin. She turned toward the door. There was no key in the door.

It was then that, photographically, she saw that the small chest of drawers near the door had been pulled out a little from the wall but it meant nothing; she saw it and no more.

If she screamed would they hear her? But she hated to approach the window, with that blurred face, unrecognizable save that it was almost certainly a face, waiting perhaps outside—lurking in the shadow of the pines, aware of her every move.

Actually only a few moments had passed since she entered the cabin but it seemed to Eden that she had strayed far into a morass of incredible ugliness. Murder?

She went toward the window; her fingers were wet and sticky; with a sick kind of shudder she wiped them on her handkerchief and thrust the scrap of linen, marked with her first name, back into her pocket. A small writing table stood near the window. Still terrified and conscious of that unrecognizable white blur that had to be someone’s face dwindling into the darkness beyond the window, she approached the window cautiously and stopped at one side of it to listen. The tinkle of music no longer sounded from the main house and it couldn’t be far across that thicket of pines and rocks. Certainly in the blank stillness of the night they would hear her scream for help. She leaned against the writing table, one hand spread upon it. Paper crackled like a whisper under her fingers and she looked down. Creda had been writing a note. Words in Creda’s flowing handwriting leaped to her eyes: “Cold-blooded murder is too much. I won’t do any more, I can’t. Jim … you must believe me …”

Words stopped there and the ink was blurred as if a hand had brushed over it. And just beside it on the painted green table was a drop of a dark, thick substance which had spattered lightly when it fell.

Jim. She read it again, swiftly, and clutched the little paper and crumpled it and thrust it in her pocket. That, as every act of Eden’s so far had been, was dictated by sheer instinct. It was no good letting anyone see Jim’s name in that dreadfully interrupted note. If Eden had been questioned she would have given that as her reason. At the moment of taking the scrap of paper her reason actually did not operate.

She shrank away from the little table, sinister now because it was a peculiarly telling witness to the dark thing that had happened there. She tried, now, to scream but her throat was dry and no sound came from it. And then someone in the main house came out onto the porch and banged the door loudly and cheerfully and she tried again to scream and did.

It was a dreadful sound, somehow, piercing the darkness and silence of the night. Her own voice—screaming—she heard it with a kind of curiosity. Had she ever in her life before screamed?

Sanity, order, things as they were and ought to continue being, all that normal state of being, was rapidly dissolving. The scream threatened to release her own rigid self-control. Or had it been self-control; hadn’t it been simply the paralysis of shock? In another moment she would collapse sobbing on the bed—she could scream again and gibber and—

She gripped the edge of the writing table with both hands and didn’t scream or sob or do any of those wild and threatened things. And whoever was on the porch heard her and stopped some vaguely whistled tune and cried out sharply:

“What’s that? Who—what’s wrong—”

It was Noel. Miraculously she found her voice: “Noel—Noel—”

Her voice must have told him of horror, for he called sharply to someone inside the house. And then footsteps came running along the path, crashing through the thicket.

Noel arrived first and flung open the door and stared, eyes like blue jet, and then ran across to kneel as Eden had done beside Creda.

“Eden, for God’s sake—”

“She’s dead.”

“How—are you sure … what happened …” His hands, too, were touching Creda, hunting that nonexistent pulse, seeking to pull that stifling, merciless chiffon from Creda’s face.

“She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead—” Eden heard her own voice as eerie and distant and monotonous as an echo.

He got up and came to Eden and took her in his arms. “Stop that,” he said tensely. “Tell me, what happened? What do you mean? What—Eden, tell me—” He turned her so she need not look, so she couldn’t stare at Creda. “Eden, for God’s sake—”

And then the others came. Strevsky, the pilot, was first, oddly enough. Then Jim and Pace and Averill. And Dorothy Woolen, too, face as flabby and white as a piece of dough.

Someone—Noel probably—had put Eden in a chair. Everybody was talking. Everybody was questioning. Somebody screamed thinly and sharply. She closed her eyes against the turmoil, against horror, against sickening reality.

It wasn’t a nightmare. Five—perhaps three minutes—in time had made a gulf none of them could ever recross.

Noel was still beside her, holding both her hands, patting them a little as if he didn’t know what he was doing. There was talk and they were lifting Creda and saying she was dead and there was nothing anyone could do and what had happened. They kept repeating that. What had happened? When? And at last Jim’s voice said: “Who did it? It wasn’t suicide. It couldn’t have been suicide. Who—”

“Eden found her,” said Noel. “Give her a moment. She can’t talk yet. Has anybody got any brandy or whisky or—”

“Chango, go to the house. Get some brandy—” Dimly Eden thought she didn’t recognize that voice and then recognized it. It was Sloane, the rancher. No, no, the detective. But no one knew that except herself and Jim. A detective—what would he do?

And who was Chango? Oh yes, she knew perfectly well, it was the Chinese houseboy.

She was, then, sensible; all that dizziness and confusion didn’t mean that she had fainted or that the black waves of sickness had completely submerged her. She was perfectly sensible. But her eyes were closed and her muscles like lead and the voices of all the others were blurred and only now and then a clear phrase or word came to her ears out of the hubbub.

Moments must have passed without her consciousness of time for all at once someone was holding a glass to her lips.

“Drink this,” said a voice. She opened her eyes and the rancher—no, the detective—P. H. Sloane was bending over her, his face a queer ash gray in the bright light, his eyes two bright points of light. He was telling her to drink. She drank and choked on the fiery brandy and drank again, still choking.

And there was something she had to tell him.

“There’s blood,” she said, coughing. “There’s blood. On the table.”

“Finish the brandy. Yes, I saw that. Can you talk?”

She opened her lips again and he tilted the glass. Jim was standing beside the rancher; she saw Jim now, and felt, through the curious haziness around her, that he was trying to speak to her. Yet he said nothing; it was only that there was some message, some urgent message in his eyes. And something she couldn’t understand. And she must talk to him, though just as that instant she couldn’t remember what she must tell him.

The brandy was like a flame. Already it was running along her pulse; her head was clearing a little. She still wouldn’t look but was conscious of Creda, on the bed now. Of others crowding the little room. Of Dorothy Woolen, pasty-faced, sitting as flaccid as a pillow on a chair, hands gripping its arms. Of Noel’s warm hand, encouraging, on her own shoulder. Of Pace standing in the far corner of the room, face a blank, livid mask, little eyes darting suspiciously here and there about the room. Strevsky was beside him, thick neck and handsome Slavic head thrust forward above Pace’s short broad shoulder. The little steward was there, too, shrinking in a corner behind Pace, frightened, pale as a shadow. And the Chinese houseboy was there too, and—why, cowboys, of course. Several of them; blue jeans and flannel shirts and brown faces which wore exactly the same expression of intense but extremely guarded interest.

And Averill.

She stood beside the little writing table as erect as a knife; she clung to Jim’s arm but that was the only sign of weakness about her. She wore now a silk coat—pale pink with glimmering swirls around her feet; her face was extremely white and rigid but her eyes were very much alive. And Averill, too, seemed to be saying something to Eden, mutely, with her eyes.

Averill. Whose yellow cloak was wrapped about that lifeless thing on the bed. They shouldn’t have moved Creda, Eden thought suddenly. You weren’t supposed to move a murdered person until someone had given you permission to do it. Who, then; what official? But this Sloane before her was some kind of official. No, that was wrong. He was retired. But he expected her to reply to a question he had asked.

She put her hand to her head which seemed extraordinarily light and said:

“Yes. Yes, I can talk.”

Jim said: “Easy there.” He looked from her to Sloane. “She’s had a shock—”

“I know,” said Sloane, watching her, “but I think she’s all right. I think she can talk. And I’ve got to know what happened, quick.”

“Nothing—nothing happened,” said Eden. “I just found her—like that.” She felt all at once quite clear and lucid and the nightmarish, confused quality of the scene was leaving her. Struck by a sudden thought she put her hand upon the rancher’s brown, hard wrist. “She
is
—dead, isn’t she? There’s nothing I could have done—”

P. H. Sloane straightened a little, his face looking very bronzed but still pale under the bronze, his white shirt front and black tie appearing curiously orthodox somehow, orderly in all that debauch of disorder. He said rather quietly:

“Was she dead, then, when you found her?”

“Oh yes. Yes, I made sure. I touched her wrist.”

“What for?”

“Why, for—for the pulse, of course. There wasn’t any.”

“You did nothing else?”

Jim was looking hard at her again as if he were trying desperately to make her understand something he could not say. Warning—was it? But why? She hadn’t killed Creda.

She had thrust a note into her pocket. She’d done nothing else. She said:

“No. I—I was frightened.”

There was a catch in her voice. Sloane said: “Of course you were. But now suppose you tell me quickly how you happened to find her. Where were you—what were you doing? I suppose you”—he hesitated—”you didn’t actually see her killed, did you?”

Eden shrank back and put her hands over her face. “No, no,” she cried. “I—I just came in. Only a few moments ago. I was in my room, you see. Next door. And I—it was so silent in here—”

A cowboy entered, glanced at Sloane and said quietly: “I got the sheriff. He’ll start in an hour or so with a deputy. Ought to be here by two or three o’clock … Boys haven’t found anybody yet.”

“All right. Take lights into the pines. Get both cars out along the roads.”

“Sure.” The cowboy disappeared again. Sloane said to Eden: “Now you were in your room next door. It was quiet in this room. Why did you come in here? Did you know she was here?”

“No, no, I didn’t know it. I—there were footsteps, you see.”

“Listen, Miss Shore, I realize you’ve had a shock. We’ve all had. It is imperative for me to know at once exactly how and when you found her. Will you please try to pull yourself together and tell me?”

“Yes.” Eden swallowed hard. “Yes, of course. I was in my room you see. I don’t remember hearing anything. But all at once there was a sound from this room as if—as if something had been moved. As if a drawer had stuck and someone pulled it out. Then it was quiet—but of course I thought someone was here. Then—then all at once I heard the outer door open and footsteps enter this room and then after a few moments tiptoe away again. It was after they’d gone that I—I came. And she was there. Just as you found her. That’s all I know.”

“Did you hear the sound of voices?”

“No. That is, not then. I—” She glanced at Averill whose small white face was as hard as that of a marble statue. “I had come to the cabin with Averill; we talked in my room for a few moments, then Averill went away. I don’t remember hearing her leave—or hearing in fact anything that was clear and definite. I do have a kind of impression that I heard voices—”