The chuckling fingers (23 page)

“Lottie was there, helping for the wedding. She’s talked to me about it since I’ve been at the resort.”

Lottie. Why should she always keep cropping up?

He added more names—“Bradley Auden, Carol, Phillips Heaton.”

The last name seemed thicker, blacker than the rest.

“But I never saw him before—”

“Phillips Heaton.” Jean repeated the name aloud. “He was there, all right. For once he’s where I want him. Myra had him neatly packed away in an attic bedroom. He was sulking. Didn’t go to the wedding or any of the parties but he was there. Lottie saw him plenty—in the kitchen. Easy for him to slip down the back way and mess up a few things in Bill’s luggage while the wedding was going on. And—oh yes—Octavia. Let’s not leave her out again.”

“It begins to look easy, how those shoes could have been cut.” I brooded over the puzzle. “Bill didn’t look at them until he found them ruined, and so many people had access to them. But how about the holes in that suit? That takes explaining.”

“I wasn’t so much interested when I heard the tale. How did it go?”

“Jacqueline said Bill had worn the suit in Bermuda. It was all right until it got back from the cleaner’s. At first Bill thought it was the cleaner’s fault—”

“That whole thing might have been a bit of luck for the unknown wrecker. It might really have been the cleaner’s fault.”

“But there was that bottle of something that ate holes in Bill’s handkerchief in with Jacqueline’s manicuring things. Would those cleaning men have done that?—planted that acid there?”

“It doesn’t seem likely, does it? What I’m wondering is something else. If that was acid in the bottle—suppose there was some other acid—one that would stay on a suit for a week without showing?”

I snatched at it. “An acid with a delayed action! Jean! Of course that must be it! Look, Jean, look at that list—the shoes, Myra’s dress, Fred’s motorcycle, Phillip’s pajamas, the wire across the path, Ed’s motorboat, my bathrobe, the pepper—those are all easy.
Anyone
could have done them. There are just two that make it look as if Jacqueline must be responsible—and those two are the acid on the suit and the bed that caught fire in the night, when only Bill and Jacqueline and Toby were in the house.”

He was staring at the list. “That’s right! I didn’t see it!”

He didn’t know about the bit of fluff in Jacqueline’s manicure scissors, and I wasn’t going to tell him. Anyone could have taken those scissors too.

“You take the acids,” I said. “I’ll take the fire in the bed. That must have been handled by delayed action too. I’m going to find out how.”

That was what I was saying when the door opened on Mark and Carol. They’d pretty well dropped out of mind; they seemed, as Jean said, so remote from what was going on. It was almost a surprise to see them grave and subdued, moving listlessly under the pressure of our sobering events.

“I heard you were at our house.” Carol sat moodily on the bed. “We looked for you at the Fingers. No one was around but Myra, upstairs with that Octavia. Myra came down but she was in the dumps.”

“Dumps,” I said. “That’s a nice way to phrase it.”

“Okay, you phrase it.” She was edgy and distraught, sunk in what seemed to be some personal problem.

“She doesn’t mean to—” Mark began, but she snapped at him.

“How do you know what I mean to be?”

“I’m not
trying
to make you cross, Carol.” The boy seemed puzzled and apologetic toward her, hovering around like an uneasy cloud.

Carol, with her long legs extended, just looked hard at her feet in green anklets and crepe-soled saddle oxfords.

“We were just going.” Jean was rising.

“We didn’t come to chase you out,” Mark offered, but Carol leaped to her feet.

“Don’t you want your coat on. Uncle Jean?”

Jean had turned aside to Mark. “Did you call Captain Vorse?”

As Mark answered what was evidently a business query I barely noticed Carol taking Jean’s coat from the chair back, dropping it, fumbling for it, holding it for Jean until he took it from her.

“Gosh, no girl holds coats for me. And what was that ‘Uncle Jean’ stuff all of a sudden?”

She and Mark came out with us, to wander off toward the lake. The moment they were out of earshot Jean reopened the subject they’d interrupted.

“I know the chemist at the Detroit paper mill. I’ll call him long distance—he might know about those acids.” He started toward the inn but then he stopped, turning to face me.

“No,” he said slowly, “I’ll go in to Grand Marais to put in that call. Ann, maybe I shouldn’t have gotten you so mixed up in this.”

A little clinging movement along my back, as if a butterfly crawled my spine.

“You mean—”

“We all go around expecting a shot to pop off any minute, don’t we? Anyway, I do. If the murderer gets to thinking we know too much there won’t be any doubt who’ll go next.”

* * *

When I reached the lodge no one was downstairs, but in the hall above Myra came to the door of Octavia’s room, her finger in a gaily jacketed book. Ridiculous to hide what I wanted to do from Myra, but the last thing Jean had told me was to hide my activities from everyone. I wondered how I could get her out of the way or how else I could cover my being in Bill’s room, working on that bed.

“Who—? Oh, Ann, you’ve got back.” Relief in it. “I’ve been reading to Octavia. No one’s been near the house except Carol and Mark, and they stayed only a minute.” Weariness and strain were obviously wearing her thin again in spite of her efforts; blue mouth and eye shadows showed against the pallor of her skin. Through the half-open door I could just glimpse Octavia in a gray dress as hard to define as smoke, sitting with her back to the door, her head bent over something in her lap.

“I’ll be back, Octavia,” Myra said, and came out, closing the door. “I’ve always been so glad I was the one who—the one on whom Octavia could depend. But now—the rest of you are at least trying to find out who’s done these terrible things. I feel house-tied.”

I could summon a grim smile for that regret. “We haven’t been what you could call successful so far.”

“I’ve been trying to think… . Cecile’s running away, and then Jean asking those questions today—I don’t see how Cecile could shoot Bill—he’s too much her superior.”

An attitude so outdated it might have made me smile again if I hadn’t seen an odd kind of truth in it. And there was my excuse… .

I said, “We’ve been terribly inconsiderate, leaving you house-tied. Why don’t you drive in to Grand Marais to stay with Jacqueline awhile?”

“I left Octavia alone while I went to the funeral. I hate to—”

“I’ll stay here until you get back or someone else comes.”

She stood hesitant, obviously torn; no question but it would be a relief for her to get away. She went back into Octavia’s room and came out with faint surprise on her face.

“Octavia wants to go, too, for the ride. She says she’ll stay in the car.”

That was the first time I knew, directly, that Octavia could talk and did talk to Myra; I’d somehow thought she did nothing but the headshakings.

From my window I watched them leave in Myra’s car, Octavia flitting so unobtrusively from side porch to car that I almost missed her. The moment the sedan had rounded the first pines I was back in the hall where the doors stood open now on twilight. To make certain Phillips was absent I went to his room, where Toby’s stripped crib still stood against the wall near the dresser; the sight of it momentarily erased my purpose; I felt, looking at it, as if its occupant, now gone, could never come back. I hadn’t heard Toby’s voice since she left.

In an instant I was downstairs at the phone.

“Toby’s aunt?” Mrs Foster asked when I got the connection. “Why, yes, I remember. Have you found out yet who— Oh, I’m so sorry for you people. I can’t think of anything else. Yes, Toby’s fine. She’s just getting ready for bed but she’ll come down.” A cozy, normal, slightly sentimental voice, lulling panic. The receiver steadied against my ear. Then, banishing that particular fright altogether, Toby’s treble.

“Are you fine, Ann? I’m fine. It b’oke.”

“What broke?”

“Cecile. All b’oke.”

She hadn’t missed the likeness in that doll.

“That’s too bad. How is Mickey Mouse?”

“He’s fine. He didn’t b’oke.” Then quickly, with a childish resolution I could feel, “I talk Mama.”

I said, “Mama isn’t here right now. She’ll call you in the morning.” I promised recklessly; death or whatever else came between, that promise should be kept.

“No! I yike talk Mama
now!
”

Then Mrs Foster, anxiously explaining. “She’s really all right. Not very homesick, except when someone calls up.”

Not very homesick. In my ears as I hung up was Toby’s wail, under and behind Mrs Foster’s words.

It was because I’d failed, Aakonen had failed, Jean had failed that Toby had to be sent off alone to live with a stranger—like an orphan, like a war refugee. When I ran back upstairs determination was a hand pushing me. No need for quiet, since I was alone in the house. My feet echoed from the stairs. But cautiously I pulled the curtains shut before turning the light switch of Bill’s room.

In the sudden light I crossed to the bed where the quilt had been pulled down to hide the scarring of the sideboard. Kneeling, I pulled the quilt back, rubbing my finger over the blackened surface then exposed. All the char that would come off had been rubbed away from the wood; my finger didn’t blacken. But the patina of the burn was unmistakable—the wood had been eaten in almost a quarter of an inch; the fire had spread over a length of three feet in a shape like the bottom of a circle—burned deeper and wider at the top of the board than at the bottom.

The fire, then, must have come from above the board, from the mattress. Swiftly I pulled all the covers back. The top of the mattress showed no sign of having been near fire. When I lifted it to see the underside that, too, was unmarred. But it was a new mattress—an inner spring in pale green damask. The old one must have been burned and water-soaked so badly it was unusable.

The spring beneath wasn’t new; clearly it showed the wide blackened circular scar where the fire had been. It was an old-fashioned spring with a surface of silvered double-wire mesh, closely woven, fastened at the top and sides to a metal frame. Underneath, strung along metal strips, were four rows of supporting wire coils, four coils in each row.

As well as I could, kneeling there, with the marks of the fire revealed, I recalled what Jacqueline had told me of it. She and Bill had gone to bed about eleven. The fire was after two. They were alone in the house, with the bedroom door locked and the key in the lock. There ‘d been no signs of anyone getting in a window.

That fire must have been set some way so it would break out in the night. Some sort of device …

Impatiently I dropped the edge of the mattress, which settled back over the spring with a bouncing plop. Wouldn’t a time device call for wires? At least some sort of container. Certainly Jacqueline would have seen anything like that. If she hadn’t. Bill would. She’d said he’d searched. And what had he found? Two blackened matchsticks under the bed.

A slight sound behind me made me turn.

The bedroom door was open. Standing there, watching me, was Phillips Heaton.

NOTHING INSIDE me could move—not my blood, not my heart, not my tongue.
Hide what you guess; hide what you do
— and here I was caught by the one person—I knew now—I least wanted to be caught by. I stood waiting for the forward-coming step… .

But instead he stood still, slowly cocking the white head. The bushy eyebrows went up, and a smile appeared on his small mouth.

“I was certain Jacqueline hadn’t come back.”

He wasn’t looking at me as he said it but at the bed which was as it had been when I dropped the mattress—the covers thrown back, the charred sideboard nakedly exposed.

I opened my mouth to scream but shut it. Screaming might precipitate things.

And then I thought: The cape, he isn’t wearing the cape, and some of the tightness inside me loosened—enough so I could speak with an effect of threat.

“What are you doing here?”

“I saw a light under the door. This is anybody’s game now, isn’t it?” He was stepping lightly into the room, just far enough for the door to be gently closed behind him. My feet returned to enough mobility to edge me sideward toward the door, but apparently he didn’t notice.

“So that’s the line your investigations are taking, is it? The fire in the bed. Well, well. Interesting. Most interesting.”

He reached the bedside; by that time I had my back to the door. My hand found the knob, and at the touch my pulse eased a little from the leaping and plunging that had followed that first freeze.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, my dear.” The next soft words belied his inattention. “I’m interested in this thing exactly as you are. Fascinating problem. Let’s see.” The white head cocked farther. “The fire broke out in the night. Either Lord Heaton set it or Lady Heaton set it or someone else set it. Nice problem all around.”

I bit my tongue to keep back a retort.

“Too bad, isn’t it, that it will be practically impossible to find out how that fire started after all this time? Now if we’d known at the time how important our little difficulties were to become—or if we’d had a well-endowed detective on hand “

He meant me by that last crack, but I didn’t rise.

“I’m almost sorry I wasn’t here on the night of that fire myself.”

“I noticed you were absent.”

He had wits like a mountain goat. “Ah, you believe the fire was started by remote control? How did someone else—in Duluth, for instance—start that fire? Very interesting problem.”

As I had, he pulled the mattress back to look down at the blackened bedspring.

“The fire was confined apparently to this, the side of the bed nearest the door. Bill, as a valorous husband, naturally slept on this side. That’s the convention, isn’t it? Your idea, of course, is that the fire was not started by the adored cousin… .”