The chuckling fingers (17 page)

“And when I looked at the clock it was almost nine-thirty.” Carol was beside Mark now. “And Mark had just gone out of the door.”

Aakonen turned then to flail at her, but she was fiery, standing to her guns. There was a clock in the hall at Auden. Mark had gone out the front door. She’d looked at the clock on her way up to her mother’s room. Twenty-seven minutes after nine exactly. Aakonen couldn’t shake her.

Bradley Auden next. “You—where were you at nine?”

“He was visiting with me at the resort—I don’t suppose he’d want to say so himself.” Quick answer by proxy again, this time from Cecile Granat, bent a little forward, her eyes glowing. “He was still there when Owens came for us. Ask Owens.”

“That right?” Aakonen swung on Owens.

“Yep.”

Back to Bradley. “When did you get to Miss Granat’s cabin?”

Quickly again, “After eight.”

“How long after eight?”

“Twenty-thirty minutes.”

“You!” The pointing finger darted now at Jean.

“At nine o’clock I must have been coming from the resort toward the Fingers.” More steadiness in Jean’s voice, but steadiness under pressure. “I had a sandwich in my hands—I was eating it. I heard a car starting up, here at the Fingers. But when I got here no one was around. I looked in the living room —the light was on. After a while Phillips came in. We thought Bill and Jacqueline and Ann must have driven in to Grand Marais for dinner. We looked upstairs, and no one was there but Myra, asleep in bed, and Octavia in her room. Phillips and I were waiting around downstairs for the others to get back when your deputy got here.”

“So.” Ominously. “It would be easy for you to have gotten here
before
the car left—”

“Lottie gave me that sandwich. It must have been nine o’clock then.”

A swing to Lottie. Lottie thought maybe it had been nine o’clock. She and Ella had been at the resort all day, unlocking the doors only when they knew who knocked. They’d given Phillips Heaton some sandwiches, too, about seven o’clock.

The finger pointed at Phillips. “You—do you have an alibi for this shooting too?”

Phillips, palely, was afraid he didn’t. After he’d eaten he’d gone to his former room over the boathouse to pack.

“I was carrying a suitcase when I walked into the house and found Jean here. I was over the boathouse when the car started. I heard it too.”

“So. But you heard nothing else.” The ominous tone again.

“You’ve got to remember how noisy that boathouse is. Lake right under that room.” He seemed to be holding himself in abeyance, waiting for something, but although Aakonen beat at him he got nothing. He went on to Myra, who said she’d vainly tried to sleep in the afternoon; about five she’d risen, taken two sleeping tablets and gone back to bed. She’d still been asleep when the deputies came.

“I was asleep,” she repeated. She seemed lost in the chaos into which life had fallen. “Bill always made things happen,” she said inconsequently, but I knew what she meant. Bill, the ruler, hadn’t ordered these last days.

“You!” The finger was on Octavia now. Like the eyes of the rabbits we’d flushed that afternoon, her wild dark eyes darted, frantic for escape; her misshapen face took on its stricken, tortured grimace. Myra at once forgot everything else to spring to Octavia’s defense.

“My sister hasn’t been out of her room since Fred’s death, until your men took her out by physical force tonight. Sheriff, you could have talked to her in her room. It isn’t necessary for her to be subjected to this.”

Aakonen took no notice except to let his voice soften slightly.

“Mrs Sallishaw, can you prove your sister wasn’t out of her room this time?”

“Of course I can. She doesn’t want to be out of it.”

Behind Myra, at that, Octavia began a frantic, vigorous nodding.

Into my memory came the recollection of the sound I’d heard as I came up the stairs that evening on my return from the useless hunt. I opened my mouth to speak but closed it. Perhaps Octavia hadn’t actually been out of her room; she might just have been standing at her door listening. It seemed inhumanly cruel to tell of that slight incident before the agonized face that nodded such hopeful, helpless agreement to anything Myra said.

“No, tell me yourself,” Aakonen insisted. “Miss Heaton, were you out of your room this evening?”

The headshaking changed to a vigorous denial.

With a short pause, as if he were still unsatisfied but didn’t know what else to do, Aakonen came on to me, making me tell again what I’d already told him at the hospital. After me he went on to Jacqueline.

“Bill must be doing all right, or they’d call me.” She said that first before repeating, as if by rote, how she had run out to the rocks. Attention had been tense before; now it became painful. Again that awful converging suspicion.

When she was done Aakonen moved back, his head forward, staring at us, picking out one face, staring at it until his gaze became insupportable yet had to be borne. Passing on to another face.

When he spoke at last he was completely quiet, and I knew the shouts and bellowing had just been something he put on to shout someone into panic, into telling the truth.

He said, “There is not one of you who could not have shot Bill Heaton. Mrs Sallishaw, you would only have had to be awake for a few minutes instead of sleeping. Octavia Heaton, there is no real proof this time that you stayed in your room. Phillips Heaton, no one saw you in that boathouse. Jean Nobbelin, Lottie cannot prove when she gave you that sandwich, and I cannot know within a few minutes when that shot was fired. You could easily have done it. Lottie and Ella, if one of you lied for the other—”

His shoulders rose and fell. “The same is true of you, Mr Auden, and of Cecile Granat. True of you, Mark and Carol. One could lie for the other. You, Ana Gay, you would only have had to come downstairs a little before. You, Mrs Heaton, you even say you were right there by the Fingers when the shot was fired.”

In the imperfect light and the fog that seemed to swirl in circles even inside the room he was like an aimed projectile, a projectile with eyes and a blue welt diagonally across the dome above them.

He catapulted himself upon us, beating at us again, shouting, demanding, trying to force confession by power and vigor, throwing himself again and again at people who paled and crouched tighter into themselves and were helpless under his onslaught but who always, consistently, persistently denied.

It went on almost all night. When he stood back again at last we were just the shreds, the remnants of people.

It was then that the long, rusty deputy, Owens, stepped toward Aakonen.

“I—I guess there’s something you ought to know. I just thought. When Mr Auden and Mr Heaton—Mr Phillips Heaton —were over there at the resort talking to me this morning—”

Slowly the remnant of Bradley Auden wavered up, clinging to a chair back.

“Get on with it!” A hoarse reflection of his roar from Aakonen. “If there is anything—”

Owens was pale, swallowing over a jerking Adam’s apple. “You see, I was sitting there on the resort porch, and Mr Auden and Phillips Heaton came, and I let ‘em in. They got some cigarettes out of the machine. So then they started talking, and I told ‘em about you arresting Ed. You never—”

“It was no secret! What about it?”

“So then there was that bundle, lying on a table—”

Through Aakonen the galvanic movement of shock and memory.

“That package …” He moved softly forward on Owens.

“Sure,” Owens said. “It had the pieces of that bathrobe in it and the cape. You’d left it there, and I thought—seeing if the murderer was Ed Corvo—they wouldn’t be very important… .”

He’d given the bundle to Phillips Heaton to take back to the Fingers.

INESCAPABLE, the vision of a Thing again walking the night and the dark, hooded against sight.

Someone screamed, “Let me out! I ain’t going to stay here with her! I know she did it! She got the cape back!” It was Ella Corvo, her hysterical eyes on Jacqueline as she plunged toward the door, dragging Lottie with her, panting, sobbing, fighting back at the men who tried to stop her. The two women were almost carried back and dumped into the chairs they’d left.

“You can’t go until I say so!” Aakonen roared at them, and then advanced on Phillips.

“So you have the cape.” His tone had softened again.

Phillips wasn’t a spectator now; he was scrunched almost like Octavia and he spoke in a rapid, husky whisper. This was what he’d waited for.

“Oh no. Owens said he guessed you didn’t want the cape. He gave it to me. So I brought it along back here. I dropped it on the porch in a chair. That front porch right there.” He pointed. “I didn’t see it again. Anyone could take it. Brad and I came into the room here where some of the others were. We told them Ed Corvo had been arrested. I never even thought of the cape again.”

Descent on Bradley Auden, still clinging to the back of his chair. “You see him leave that bundle on the porch?”

Again a tongue moving over dry lips, under set eyes that stared. “Yes. That’s true. We brought that—terrible thing— back here. Phillips dropped it on the porch. I remember.”

Swiftly Aakonen was out the door; porch lights flashed up.

He found only newspapers, string and the tatters of my bathrobe, crumpled in a corner behind a table.

* * *

He came back into the living room with the bathrobe, the paper, the string. He set them on a table. We all looked at them.

Phillips said shrilly, “Don’t forget, Aakonen, I couldn’t have shot Fred. Joe Hanson will tell you where I was the night of the Fourth if you don’t believe me.”

Shortly, “I have seen Joe Hanson.”

Aakonen looked around at the rest of us, and drive was gone out of him almost as thoroughly as it had gone from Bill.

He said slowly, “A cape is a big thing to hide. Owens!”

Owens straightened, taking the order that wasn’t put into words.

“You can all go,” Aakonen dismissed us. “I’m done with you.”

Jacqueline stood up. “If I can go to the hospital “

Out of my beaten weariness I looked at her, marveling. She stood quiet and aloof, as if she didn’t know that the hand of almost everyone there was now against her, her only anguish that Bill might die.

* * *

No use going into detail over that Sunday; it will always be a nightmare. We did nothing but wait for the outcome of Bill’s battle between life and death. Everything else—even the knowledge that suspicion was tightening so desperately against Jacqueline—seemed secondary.

Later I learned that only Lottie and Ella—escorted—went home that night; the others slept exhaustedly in the beds or on the sofas of the Fingers. Later I learned that crews of men were set to combing the buildings and the wilderness for the cape and the still-missing gun. Then I knew only that Jean, Jacqueline and I were driving to Grand Marais in Jean’s car, with a deputy’s car following, and faint yellow-pink light along a far eastern horizon, with the black sky overhead.

A nurse rustled out to meet us in a corridor still electric-lit; she gave us the emotionless words nurses use.

“Doctor Rush says Mr Heaton is holding his own. It’s impossible to make any prognosis.”

Through bleak early-morning hours we walked the corridors; it was then I learned Jean still kept his first bulldog decision as to Jacqueline’s innocence. Later I was to learn that Myra, too, had stayed on our side, but then it seemed the three of us against the world.

We sat in chairs in a cubbyhole that had a table. After a while I woke with my face in my arms on the table and hot sun beating on the back of my neck. My head ached, and my mouth felt like the inside of a ski boot, including the extra woolen sock. I woke with a start, feeling that Jacqueline was gone. But when I rushed down a corridor where people stared there she was, with her back to the wall near Bill’s door, opposite the guard Aakonen had placed.

“It’s noon,” she told me, “and he’s still alive.”

“I slept,” I said. I was heavy and drugged with it. “Can’t you?”

“I don’t need to. Ann, Aunt Harriet will see about Bill in the newspapers.”

I called Aunt Harriet, hearing alarm quickening in the old voice. Couldn’t I do anything? Couldn’t I get Jacqueline away?

People, so many people, walked up and down the corridor. When I looked out a window I saw crowds of men, some of them in bright shirts such as Fred had worn, standing on the sidewalk. Jean was at the window, too, looking soberly out; he seemed held by a waiting second only to Jacqueline’s.

“Bill’s men,” he said. “Did you know they call him Lord Heaton? They love him.”

Phillips had called Bill that. He hadn’t loved him.

I came to recognize Dr Rush, the physician in charge of the hospital who kept his calm by never being flurried. He moved tirelessly, endlessly—hospital hours, office hours, calls, more calls, office hours, hospital hours. He lived there at the hospital. Miss Fleet, the woman at the door, told us how lucky we were that he had been in the hospital when we brought Bill.

Bill’s condition remained unchanged.

Aakonen was there once that Sunday, looking at a table piled with packages: flower boxes, baskets with napkins, rude crumpled bundles. The warped little man was opening them, taking out hothouse flowers and tight small bundles of wild flowers and cakes and jars of soup.

“None of this is to go in his room,” Aakonen reminded. “A pity so much food must be thrown away.”

At nightfall Dr Rush told Jacqueline, “Mr Heaton is still holding his own. You’ll have to get some sleep, Mrs Heaton. I know you had none last night. I’ll give Miss Gay some sleeping tablets for you.”

Pink under a transparent cheek. “Does that mean it’s safe for me to leave?”

A hesitation. “It means I count on Mr Heaton’s not becoming suddenly weaker.”

* * *

Jean drove us back to the Fingers, saying good night at the door. Even Jean wove a little with weariness, walking. I was long past sensing or knowing much of anything. In the Fingers living room a strange man unconcernedly played Canfield.