The chuckling fingers (22 page)

Jean asked, “Soso out last night?”

“She’s out every night. Rabbits.” The long nervous hand went down to scratch Soso’s head, and Soso’s muzzle collapsed contentedly on her forepaws. Bradley cautiously stretched a leg whose ankle was badly swollen.

“Saw you twist that ankle,” Jean told him. “You better take care of it.”

“Oh, it’ll take care of itself… . You out detecting today?”

“We hope.” Jean leaned forward, his attitude changing. “What we want to know is about the Heaton family. I can remember there was some sort of smell when Charles and Daniel Heaton were burned in the fire that destroyed Faraway lodge. Of course that was before my sister married Bill. I didn’t “

I straightened, aghast. “Your sister married Bill! You mean your sister was Bill’s first wife?”

The dark face became darker still. “Didn’t you know?”

I hadn’t known, and my mind rocketed, trying to see what change this fact might make. Would a brother be so jealous of a second marriage … ? No, that seemed incredible.

I said, “Then you are—you were Fred’s uncle!”

He asked, “What did you think I was in this for?—the ride?” His face was suddenly swift, fierce, with more emotion than there ‘d been on it even last night when he spoke of Bill. Yet at the funeral his face had been impassive, stoical.

I hadn’t time to think; he was going on to Bradley, “I was a kid about twelve at the time of the Faraway fire. But it seems to me I remember some hint Phillips made to me that a charge had been made against Bill’s father.”

The hand on the dog’s head stopped scratching.

“You think Phillips is the murderer.”

“Not yet. I’m trying to get at motives and causes.”

“You ask Myra?”

“I want it from an outsider.”

“You could find out about the fire from the file of old Grand Marais newspapers.” He seemed queerly on the defensive.

“Then there is something about that fire.”

“Why come to me?”

“Weren’t you living here at the time.””

“I saw the fire. I don’t know—”

“Don’t know what?”

“Don’t know who started the fire.”

“So that’s it!”

Bradley Auden’s long body limped to the end of the porch. He stood for a long moment looking out over his lawn. Then he turned.

“It was hushed up. Phillips Heaton accused Bill’s father of setting that fire. Some other people believe—maybe Phillips set it.”

* * *

We were all standing.

I said, “But Myra’s father was burned to death in that fire— and Daniel Heaton died afterward too. If Phillips is suspected of setting it —
Does Myra know that?”

Bradley walked back toward us. “Wait. I didn’t say there was any suspicion Phillips set that fire deliberately. He was drunk.”

I sank back into the glider. “Oh. You think he—”

“I don’t think anything. I just gathered from Myra that what she believed was that Phillips accidentally upset a kitchen lamp and then went drunkenly in to bed, not knowing what he’d done. Anyway, she was the one who stuck up for Bill’s father.”

Jean had remained standing. “Wait. How did Bill’s father get into this?”

“He— ” Bradley said the one word, stopped. “The whole Heaton history is wrapped up in it.”

“It can’t be too long for us.”

Bradley dropped into his chair. “You know about old Rufus. He was one of the lumbermen who gutted the state. He filled this country up with emigrants, city clerks, bums out of jails— anything. He paid their filing fees on forty-acre plots in the middle of virgin forest. Then he’d go in and cut the timber for miles around. ‘Rubber forties,’ they called ‘em. In the end he didn’t even buy up the homesteaders—he just used names out of the Chicago directory.”

The disillusioned eyes looked steadily at Jean. “He had two lieutenants. John Sallishaw was one of them. My father was the other but he was younger and never made much money out of it.”

“I knew that.” Jean nodded.

“Then you must know old Rufus disinherited his older son, Daniel, when Daniel was sixteen. Dan was crazy about trees— I know because it was to my father Dan went when he was kicked out. A lot of the ideas Bill used really came from his father. My father’s friendship with Daniel lasted until Daniel died. In the summers old Rufus and Charles and his family would be at Faraway. I’d play with Myra and Phillips. But in winter they’d go, and then Uncle Dan and Bill would come out from Grand Marais—to Auden, that is, not to Faraway. Uncle Dan never set foot on Faraway until after old Rufus died in 1918 and Charles began to find out how little money there was.”

He rose to knock his pipe ashes out against a tray and to limp restlessly to a window.

“Lord, I can remember as if it were this morning! July 1920. This same time of year. Uncle Dan came out one night to see Dad, excited. He showed Dad a letter he’d had from Charles— a letter asking Dan to make a bid for the Faraway pines.”

Jean was behind me. “You mean Charles wanted to sell the pines from
Faraway
?”

“Yes. Uncle Dan was — I hadn’t realized it, but even if he’d been disinherited he must have felt as if the Faraway pines were partly his. He couldn’t bear to have them cut. He talked—”

“You heard this?”

“I was twenty-two. Lord, it doesn’t seem to be so long ago!” But his eyes were distant, looking back. “I can remember how I felt. Divided. There‘d been—” He laughed suddenly, softly.

“I’d thought I was in love with Myra—lord, how I was suffering! And she’d married John Sallishaw. A widower as old as her father. Charles Heaton thought the Audens didn’t have enough money.”

Air gasped into my lungs. “You were in love with Myra? But you never—”

He asked, “Does it seem odd anyone would be in love with Myra?”

“No, oh no. She’s lovely and — But you—”

He shook his head at me, smiling. “Let me be a lesson to you. How I suffered! And then the minute I saw Marjorie it was all gone.”

For an instant his face was what it should have been, the disillusionment gone.

“I suppose this is the important part. We went over it enough later. Uncle Dan left Auden about ten o’clock, the night of that fire. Sometime around eleven Dad and I saw the glow over the trees. By the time we got to Faraway the house was a charred frame. Terrible, like a black gallows.”

“Dan Heaton was there?”

“He was running around like a crazy man, carrying buckets of water from the well to wet the ground along the first ranks of trees.”

“Who saved Phillips?”

“Dan. He’d pulled him out.”

“Hadn’t he tried to get Charles?”

“He said he had. He said the stairs were gone. Phillips slept downstairs.”

“No one else in the house?”

“The girl who did the work slept over the boathouse. Dan had her carrying water to the trees too.”

I asked, “What about Myra?”

“You remember she’d married John Sallishaw. She was living at Fiddler’s Fingers. Octavia had already gone to live with Myra too. Myra and John Sallishaw got to the fire sometime after we did.”

“Why did Phillips accuse Dan of setting the fire?”

The thin shoulders shrugged. “Trying to get out of his own hole maybe. The trouble was, Uncle Dan couldn’t prove he wasn’t there when the fire started. He’d stopped his car to walk in among the Faraway pines. Then he smelled the smoke and ran.”

“Saved Phillips,” Jean said. “Let Charles burn.” He took his time to walk up and down the porch.

“Uncle Dan lasted three months,” Bradley went on, “with Phillips trying to fasten an arson charge on him. If it hadn’t been for Myra—” Again the shoulders lifted.

Jean said, “So that’s the story. If I’d been hunting for a reason for Bill to murder Phillips I’d think I might have it. But I’m looking for the opposite. And I don’t see it.”

Neither of us saw the real answer in that fire.

“IT’S ENTIRELY PLAUSIBLE,” I said on the way back, trying to twist facts to be what I wanted them to be. “Look at Phillips. Maybe he upset a lamp in the kitchen. He was drunk. He wouldn’t know. Maybe he actually believed Bill’s father set the fire.”

“So then he’s out for revenge by killing Dan Heaton’s son and grandson.”

“You’re leaving out Bill’s having gone up while Phillips went down.”

“Okay,” he said. “Something is better than nothing.”

“What we should do next is—”

“Wait up. We set out to do two things.”

“I should think we’d have about cleaned up Heaton history.”

He laughed. “Girl, a family lives, dies, suffers, hates for a hundred years—and you think you’ve heard it all in fifteen minutes.”

“What do you think we should do next?”

Lowering darkness over the face already so dark. “Is there any lamp in heaven to light up this mess?” He brooded over the wheel a moment, but then his face cleared.

“Look. Let’s get back to the idea Bill had—his ideas are always right. Do you remember what he thought? He thought everything that had happened since the wedding—all those tricks—was part of one plan. If we could find out how those tricks were engineered and who engineered ‘em—”

The car swerved drunkenly—my fault for grabbing at his arm.

Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

* * *

We went to his cabin to talk out our plan of action. Mark, as he’d expected, was out. Nothing was in the one small room but the inevitable furnishings of cabins, plus what clothes and gadgets two men—two remarkably neat men – would have on hand.

Walking into that cabin, I remembered what it seemed so easy to forget—that Jean, too, was suspect. At moments that memory would come up as it came up now, and I’d draw back, watching him, seeing his curious mixture of litheness and awkwardness, his bulldog tenacity. Then he’d begin talking, and my mind would get drawn into what he said; I’d forget.

“Mark and I just expected to be here four days.” He waved a hand at the iron bed, the flat-topped round iron stove, the table, the two kitchen chairs. The moment the screen door slammed after him he stripped off his coat as if that were standard procedure for entering his own habitat, draped it over the back of a chair and began talking.

“All right. We begin with the idea that someone planned those tricks to make Jacqueline look, if not insane, at least queer. Let’s tackle ‘em one by one and see where we come out.”

Eagerness lashed me as we sat down to his table. “This is what we should have started with. That fire in Jacqueline’s bed. If we could find out how that was done—”

“Wait up.” He had the notebook out again. Under his fountain pen the stumpy thick handwriting appeared. “We’ve got to get things in order. One—that’s probably the travel folders. Not tied up to Jacqueline you’ll notice. Anyone could have sent those to Fred. Two—I guess that would be Bill’s cut-up shoes in Bermuda. Three—Bill’s suit turns up in holes.”

“That fire in the bed came next, I think.”

“All right, four. Five—that must have been the wrecking of Fred’s motorcycle. Six and seven—Myra’s dress and Phillips’ pajamas. Eight—Toby trips on a wire. No, that would be nine— Ed Corvo’s motorboat was eight. Your bathrobe, ten. Pepper in your face powder, eleven. Eleven in all. No—twelve. Somewhere along there a magazine of Octavia’s suffered mayhem too.”

I sat looking at the list. “Start with a belief in Jacqueline’s innocence, and that list is the best bolstering you can have. They make her look—what Bill worried about. Insane. Now they’re part of murder. She couldn’t hope to plead insanity and get
free
. She’d still be locked up in an insane asylum—for years at least.”

“Good girl. We talked about the folders—anyone could have sent them. The next is those shoes. All right. I was there in Bill’s apartment in Duluth the night he packed for his honeymoon. I helped. Those shoes were okay then. I stuck ‘em in myself.”

“Then someone must have cut them up after they were packed.”

“I take that. All right, we try to remember who could have gotten at Bill’s suitcases. They were in the apartment until morning. Some of ‘em in the bedroom, some of ‘em in the living room.”

“Who else was there beside you and Bill?”

“Fred.”

“Not much use suspecting him any more. Did he help pack?”

“A little, poor kid.” That must be grief behind the stupidity.

“Anyone else?”

“There was a woman in every day to clean.” His forehead pressed into bulges with the effort of remembering. “She was gone by then though… .”

The next was explosive. “Good gosh! Cecile Granat was there that night! She wanted to see Bill. She asked if Fred and I could beat it for a while—”

“Cecile!”

“When we got back after half an hour she was still there, having a drink. She went as soon as she’d finished it.”

“If she was angry …” I was speculating down that road.

“What for?”

“Bill was getting married.”

“Look, it’s not quite the way you think. I’ll tell you what she was there for. She’d been out on a party with Brad Auden. She wanted to ask questions. About Brad’s wife. She didn’t want to ask in front of Fred. Bill told me afterward.”

“Oh.”

“Yeh. Don’t drag my mind from those suitcases. Fred bumped his toe on one and swore. That one was in the living room.”

“So if Bill had gone out to fix the drinks Cecile could have done her bit.”

“We’ve got to chalk that possibility up against Cecile. No one else was in the apartment that night, I’m sure. Bill and I slept on the twin beds in the bedroom. Fred slept on the davenport.”

He made a bracket opposite the shoe item on his notebook page and wrote in three names—“Cecile, Fred, Jean.”

“That last name is for your benefit,” he reminded me. “Don’t miss anyone. In the morning we took all that luggage over to Myra’s. We left it there in one of the bedrooms upstairs while we were around Duluth doing the stuff we had to do.”

I could remember Fred and Jean hauling bags upstairs; characteristically. Bill had mounted empty-handed.

Jean inked in more names in his bracket—“Ann Gay, Myra, Lottie …”

I protested, “Lottie wasn’t there.”

“Did you go out in the kitchen?”

Myra’s Duluth house is as 1890-ish as the house at the Fingers—a huge brick “Italian villa,” as it probably was called when it was built; it even has cupolas. Also, it has dark, long, narrow halls and a back stairs. I had to admit I hadn’t been in the kitchen.