The chuckling fingers (18 page)

“I’m on guard here,” he explained.

“That’s nice.” Nothing was important now except bed.

At the head of the stairs Myra met us, and I saw that she, too, balanced on the thin edge.

“Bill’s all right. He must be all right, or you wouldn’t be here,” she begged. “I’ve been calling the hospital …” She caught at my arm, and I felt her trembling.

“Thank heaven you’ve come! The others were here all day waiting for the news but then they left. Phillips went to Auden for dinner. I stayed with Octavia. I keep thinking—” She was shaking more now. “Suppose it’s happened again? It might be happening now … someone I know, someone I love, being killed, and I sit here helpless to stop it. And maybe it’s my turn to go next… . For the first time in my life I’ve wished I could run away.”

“Bill isn’t running away,” Jacqueline told her. “He’s fighting.”

Myra made an effort to stop her trembling. “I never thought I’d make such a spectacle of myself.”

We put her to bed with one of the sleeping tablets Dr Rush had given me for Jacqueline. More people than Myra, I guessed, would start falling to pieces if this strain kept up. Coming out of Myra’s room, I heard a footstep and looked from end to end of the hall, but there was no one.

Of course!—Octavia. As usual, I’d forgotten she’d be there behind her closed door. But as I stood there now, so tired, it seemed to me I got a stronger sense of her presence, as if for once her personality was not negative but positive.

Poor Octavia, I thought. If Myra could come so close to being shattered, how terrible must be timid Octavia’s waiting!

* * *

Waking on Monday morning was like crawling, weak and confounded but sentient, out of a cocoon. Sunlight lay fuzzily golden over the blue candlewick tufts of the spread; the window was closed and locked like the door, but faintly I could hear a hum and thrum; the wilderness sounds didn’t stop for locked windows and doors.

Beside me Jacqueline still slept, her face tucked down into the blankets, away from light. Sleepy as I’d been, I’d had sense enough to make her sleep with me.

Thinly from below something was ringing—the telephone. The moment it sounded she was galvanically awake, tumbling out of bed, running as she was, in pajamas. I stopped just long enough to get into slippers and my polo coat and grab up her robe and slippers. A phone call might mean …

The Canfield-playing guard had taken the call.

It wasn’t about Bill. As he talked he shook his head at Jacqueline, waiting tensely at his elbow.

“That so? You got her, huh? That’s good,” was what he said.

“Bill—is it about Bill?” Jacqueline kept asking in spite of the headshakes.

He hung up the receiver. “No, that was—”

But she had no time for anything else. At once she was calling the hospital, feverishly putting her question.

Bill, Miss Fleet said, was still holding his own.

“I’ll be right there,” Jacqueline told her, swaying against the wall, weak with relief. “I’ll be there as soon as I can get there.”

Something—this was Monday morning. What was connected in my mind with Monday? Then I remembered.

“The inquest. It’s to be this morning. We’ll have to go to that.” I held out the slippers and the robe.

“In case you’d like to know”—this time the guard’s drawl held a note that made us listen—“Cecile Granat tried to run away last night. That call was to say she’d just been caught.”

* * *

So we had those short hours when attention was focused on Cecile, when it was said aloud that she was the killer and that in sudden convulsive fear of being caught she’d run away.

Again there was a gathering at the Fingers. Every eye went to Bradley Auden when he came in, harassed and uncertain.

“But I don’t see why she’d run away,” he kept repeating.

“No one was suspecting her particularly. You weren’t, were you, Aakonen?”

Aakonen admitted he hadn’t; he, too, was there, waiting for Cecile to be brought in. I remembered suddenly that I’d never told him about seeing Cecile in the woods that day Jean and I had hunted for the gun. When I told him now he just grunted.

“She said she was looking for the gun too,” Jean contributed, his black brows drawn low with thought.

Carol was openly, almost viciously hopeful. “That Cecile! I hope she is the one. I never could stand her.”

Myra, however, was torn by doubts. “I wanted to run away, too, last night. I can’t suspect anyone just for wanting to run away.” She was still tired, but she’d slept, and was able to hold herself together again.

A detective from Duluth brought Cecile just before ten o’clock. She walked into the living room, truculent and sullen.

“All right, so I tried to get out of this hell trap,” she said harshly. “Who wouldn’t? It’s not because I’ve been doing any shooting. It’s because I don’t fancy myself getting shot. And I don’t fancy hobnobbing with a murderer either.”

Aakonen took her off to the kitchen. The sound of the voices came through for half an hour. Around me as we waited I could feel the sway and pull of opinion. Soberer second thoughts were suggesting that if Cecile was the murderer, then she had planned and executed all those tricks to make suspicion point so sharply to Jacqueline. Skill as cunning as that would hardly give itself away by going childishly out on the highway at night and thumbing rides to Duluth.

Yet temporarily Cecile’s running away was lifting some of the weight of the distrust against Jacqueline; no one came near her—I realized that from the time of Fred’s shooting on no one had made one friendly gesture toward Jacqueline, except Jean or Bill or Myra or I—but the difference was perceptible in glances and attitudes.

Aakonen came out of the kitchen in a thick rage. “For this we had to postpone the inquest a whole hour! Get there now, all of you! If any more of you try running away—”

He dropped it there, perhaps because an implied threat was stronger than any he could voice.

* * *

The inquest would be about Fred’s death. As I drove into Grand Marais with Jean and Jacqueline I wondered if we could even remember the circumstances of Fred’s death; it seemed so long ago, so overshadowed by the attack on Bill and the question whether he would live or die.

Again we stopped at the hospital where the guard sat implacably at Bill’s door.

“Mr Heaton’s about the same,” Miss Fleet said. “He’s begun coughing a little.”

I don’t think Jacqueline knew what that meant, because she turned wordlessly away, but I caught the flicker in Jean’s eyes and thought, with a quick stab, that must be blood he’s coughing—hemorrhage. The question was in my throat, but the flicker in Jean’s eyes had turned to warning. Jacqueline had to go to the inquest, and the ordeal would be bad enough as things were.

Confirmation of that was to come only too quickly.

The town hall where the inquest was to be looked like a New England church, except that instead of a steeple it had a flagpole. No flag flew today, but the double doors were open, and people clustered on the wide porch and the sidewalk. Not friendly people.

As Jacqueline stepped up the one step to the building’s vestibule a voice spoke out from that cluster of people, a man’s loud voice, heavy with vindictive hatred.

“There she is. If Bill Heaton dies she’ll get everything he’s got.”

* * *

Blind that I hadn’t seen before the terrible change that the attack on Bill had made in the case against Jacqueline. If Bill died now, with Fred dead before him …

I was so stunned by realization I stood helpless, turning, staring out over those inimical faces, seeing them only as a blur against the backdrop of Grand Marais’s scattered, somehow alien houses and, behind the houses, the rising tree-dressed hill that was the rampart of wilderness. Jacqueline, too, must have halted, but the next instant Jean had us by the arm and was hurrying us on into the room where we must stand against fact.

Bleak light fell in that room through tall, unwashed windows. As we came in the rows of hushed people turned, so that antagonism struck us from a thousand eyes at once.
There she is
, the fascinated eyes repeated. Our passage was like running a gauntlet of whips, so that just being able to sink into our seats in the second row, with the other witnesses around us and the eyes behind us, was like coming to a haven. Distrust surrounding us there was at least familiar.

Ed Corvo was there, sitting self-righteous and vindictive, his arms folded against his chest; of course he’d be out now; he’d been in jail when Bill was shot; he had an unbreakable alibi. Ella and Lottie, beside him, seemed to feel his vindication included them; they looked around at us boldly, spitefully now. Mark didn’t glance at us; he was leaning over to whisper to Carol Auden. Cecile was still sullen and nervous, glancing at us out of the corners of her eyes, then down at her hands. Bradley, too, just glanced; he seemed harassed by some goad that kept him in constant movement – hands, feet, head. Phillips held his short bulk forward, trying to resume his attitude of watcher at a play but cautious lest the play begin too near him in the audience chamber. Only Myra managed a smile at us; she leaned over from her chair next to Carol’s to squeeze Jacqueline’s hand. Octavia wasn’t there; somehow Myra must have managed to persuade Aakonen that, since her sister had been locked in her room, she wouldn’t be useful as a witness.

Had they all before this seen that horribly logical motive against Jacqueline? Probably they had. I’d been the only one so certain of her innocence I wouldn’t think it.
Jacqueline, how would she ever get out of this?
I sat still blinded, held by that terror. .

* * *

Outside me the inquest began.

Aakonen and the tubby, important man lumbered in to sit across the aisle. Behind them came Dr Rush, harassed but capable, carrying a brief case. Apparently he was the coroner, because he seated himself at once behind the table at the front of the room and proceeded swiftly to panel a six-man jury. The stocky, weather-beaten countrymen who responded paused conscientiously before replying that they had formed no previous opinion as to how Fred Heaton had met his death. No one of them tried to evade; each one advanced soberly and portentously to his task, as a citizen of a democracy now goes up to vote.

Dr Rush addressed them. “It will be your duty to decide whether Frederick Heaton met his death by natural or unnatural means, and, if the latter, whether a known or an unknown person caused that death. First I will ask you to view the remains of Frederick Heaton at the undertaking parlors.”

The six men rose to file solemnly out, holding their hats against their shoulders, their eyes fixed stiffly forward. Nothing happened in the room while they were gone, except that Dr Rush sorted papers from his brief case. When the six jurymen returned they were harder, stirred. What had been a told fact had become a real boy—dead.

My name was called first. I had to leave my absorption to go up, my heart pounding, my hands cold, to take the armchair between coroner and jury, facing the eyes.

“Miss Gay, do you know of any reason why anyone should have desired Fred Heaton’s dead?”

All that talking and hunting we’d done, what had come of it? The only motive was the one I couldn’t believe.

I said steadily, “I know of no reason.”

Bit by bit, questions drawing out of me what I knew. Carefully I’d held to what I told Aakonen; his was the face I watched, a face intently waiting to pounce on any slip. I was dismissed as soon as I’d described the scene of Fred’s death.

After me Dr Rush himself talked.

“I arrived at the scene with Sheriff Aakonen. Frederick Heaton was, without doubt, dead, the death apparently due to gunshot wound, although considerable bruising of the face and upper trunk was also evident. Later I established that death was caused by a bullet piercing the upper left ventricle of the heart. The bruises had been received prior to the death and did not contribute to the death.”

A long sigh, and a movement of Carol’s hand toward Mark.

Aakonen went up next to describe in heavy, slow words how the scene had looked when he got there. Evidently Bill had done nothing but pull Fred flat and snatch away the shawl and the harebells.

He gave after that Bill’s evidence. I tightened, then relaxed. Bill had scrupulously shielded Jacqueline.

About that long series of tricks Bill had said, “Until Fred was killed I thought someone must have a grudge—probably against me. But no one would kill Fred just to satisfy a grudge against me.”

As Aakonen repeated the words I could hear Bill’s tortured voice saying them.

Could there be a grudge so great that it could extend to Bill’s murder and to fastening the guilt of those murders on his wife? That seemed only less incredible than that Jacqueline should be guilty.

* * *

Noon brought a recess in which the jury went out to view the scene at the Fingers and in which Jacqueline, Jean and I made, as always, for the hospital. Nurse Bolles, this time, came through the guarded door to see us.

“Mr Heaton’s still coughing, but his pulse and temperature are steady.”

“You’ll let me know at once if—”

“Yes, Mrs Heaton.” A peculiar inflection in the name, a peculiar watchfulness in Miss Bolles’s eyes. She, too, suspected Jacqueline.

We went to Hanson’s for sandwiches. There, sitting in a booth, I learned how much Jacqueline knew and how she was taking it.

She smiled at me, her eyes steady over the glass of milk she held. “Poor Ann, you’re so worried. Darling, if Bill gets well maybe he’ll know who shot him. And if he doesn’t get well … all this won’t make much difference. You’d have to take Toby.”

* * *

The rest of that inquest has little reality for me as I sat facing that stunning acceptance of possible defeat.

Jacqueline testified quite soon after the noon recess, testified well, her voice coming clearly, unfalteringly. “No, I know of no reason why anyone should have wanted to kill Fred Heaton.”