The chuckling fingers (26 page)

“Myra and Jacqueline must have gone up to bed.”

Phillips, too, was gone from the chair by the dead fire.

Aakonen started for Phillips’ room but as he passed the phone paused to call his office. Carol hadn’t yet been found. He was just completing the call when the door opened on Bradley Auden.

“I met one of your men, and he told me you’d be here.” Bradley spoke to Aakonen; he was breathing quickly, shaken out of lassitude and unconcern now. “What’s this about Carol being in Bill’s office?”

As Jean reluctantly told him he stared at the three of us.

“That’s impossible. Carol knew about that money I owed Bill—it wasn’t any secret. I could have cleaned it up just by letting Bill in to thin out some of my wood stands that are too thick. She knew I could do that. I’ve talked about it. I can’t understand it. The whole thing’s crazy. Honestly, Ann, is this—?”

I had to nod.

Aakonen spoke up. “What Carol was doing in that office is something we will know as soon as we find her. Now I want to see that Phillips Heaton.”

Jean stayed with Bradley while I took Aakonen up to the room Toby and Jacqueline had had and which was now Phillips’. The door was closed, but Aakonen applied a gentle fist. Three other doors on the hall were closed, too—Jacqueline’s, Myra’s, Octavia’s.

When there was no answer Aakonen pushed the door open. The room was dark until he got the light on to show the bed made up but empty, although Phillips had probably lain on it, because the spread was rumpled. A pair of mussed slacks was thrown on a chair back; pajamas lay on a chair seat; a shirt had been thrown on the floor near the window. Mechanically I moved to pick up the shirt; I don’t like clothes thrown on floors. But then I stopped; Phillips’ mess was none of my business.

“Not here.” Aakonen’s low rumble voiced the obvious. “He must have gone out.” The thick hand pulled out a heavy silver watch on a chain. “Eleven twenty-two. He should be back here soon. I will wait downstairs.”

He walked back along the hall with the muffled clumps resulting from his efforts to be quiet. I switched off the light and followed. At Jacqueline’s door I paused, laying my ear to the panel. As I did so Myra’s door opened, and she came out in a bathrobe, her hair in a braid.

“Sh-sh-sh! I gave her two sleeping tablets to take. If she doesn’t sleep she’ll go to pieces.”

Even through the wood panel it seemed to me I caught the regular flow of breath. I couldn’t possibly know how important it was for me to open that door.

Myra had turned to Aakonen. “Is there anything—?”

He hesitated. “I just wanted a little talk with your brother. He told Miss Gay he’d guessed who did the shooting.”

“Phillips did? But then why didn’t he say who it was?” She moved back, staring at Aakonen. “He didn’t say a word to me or Jacqueline when we got home. He’s in his room, isn’t he?”

“Not now.”

She couldn’t understand it. “Phillips is an owl but he’s been sticking close to the house nights now.” She shivered. “He was in the living room when Jacqueline and I went to bed.”

She came downstairs to hear and exclaim over the incident of Carol in the office. “There’ll be some simple explanation,” she consoled Bradley, who seemed close to distraction.

She and I made coffee while Aakonen again called his office, then the resort to ask if Phillips was there; he waited until Ed Corvo made the round. Cecile was in her cabin, Ed reported, Mark out somewhere hunting Carol. Phillips wasn’t anywhere he could see. Aakonen went out after that to look around the boathouse and the barn. He came back to say both Bill’s and Myra’s cars were on the place; Phillips’ couldn’t be gone.

Hot coffee pulled Bradley together enough so that he borrowed Jean’s car and left to continue what must certainly have been an aimless hunt. When he was gone Aakonen looked the rest of us over.

“There is no need you should stay up.” He settled himself definitely in a rocker as Jean left and Myra and I trailed up to bed.

In my room I walked wearily to the dresser, to stand looking at my reflection. Comfortable to know Aakonen sat so solidly downstairs; temporarily, at any rate, the house should be safe. I was rumpled and blown from fighting with Carol but I didn’t look nearly as torn as I thought I should. Phillips, Carol—those were Aakonen’s problems now. But that fire in the bed—I still felt a nagging insistence that if I could figure that out the answer would be valuable.

Jacqueline, I thought, was asleep on the scarred bed, but on an impulse I crossed to my own to pull back the cover and mattress. The spring on mine was a twin of the other, except that it showed no burn. Double-wire mesh on a frame. The mattress was thinner than the one on the other bed—felted cotton in a standard ticking—a good mattress thirty years ago.

Probably the fire had been started in a mattress such as this. I could do my experimenting in my own room. Here, at least, I wouldn’t be surprised by Phillips Heaton. I squatted on my haunches beside the bed.

Suppose it were I who wanted a fire to start in that bed after I was far away. The only signs I could leave would be two burned matches on the floor. The sticks from two ordinary kitchen matches.

Friction was what lit a match.

Again I pulled the mattress back to ponder over the spring. Smooth wires. Smooth fabric covering the mattress. Still, if there were a restless sleeper above and the matches lay between spring and mattress …

Aakonen would see me, but on a spurt of excitement I went down anyway. He was still waiting in the rocker, his brows rising halfway toward the thick blue vein as I tiptoed down.

“Felt like a smoke before I went to bed. …” I had a simple explanation ready. From the up-ended box in the black tin holder beside the kitchen stove I took a generous handful and came out holding the matches ostentatiously as I went through the living room.

“I didn’t know any ladies here smoked.” Faint disapproval.

“I don’t smoke often.”

He patted over his pockets, hauling out a pipe. “Where you get those matches?”

While he was in the kitchen I got upstairs. Two matches went between mattress and spring, carefully caught in the mesh so they wouldn’t fall through. Then the mattress and covers back. I lay on the bed to twist and turn, got up to bounce the mattress with my fists, to move it back and forth over the spot where the matches lay. When I lifted the mattress the match heads were still perfect—a top cap of light blue, a ring of navy. They hadn’t even abraded. One match stem was broken.

Two other matches, crosswise of the mesh this time, not bedded. Again I rolled and tossed, again pushed and bounced the mattress. I—not the matches—got the effects of friction; all they did was break. I tried a handkerchief above and below the matches, tried paper above and below, tried the matches on the metal frame at the side. Still no go.

When I sank on the bed again after an hour of effort I was ready to admit I must be on the wrong track. You couldn’t just put matches between a mattress and bedspring and expect them to ignite from the movements of the sleepers above. There ‘d have to be some sort of apparatus—something that would burn up, leaving no sign.

I’ve never been ingenious about gadgets. Trying to work them just makes me exasperated. As I sat it seemed to me I was numb all over—mind, bones, muscles, skin. Failure again, more failure—were we doomed to go on like this forever, never finding out anything, completely overborne by the superior cleverness of the mind against us?

Slowly and dispiritedly I undressed, tiptoeing down the hall, with my polo coat on over my pajamas, since I no longer had a bathrobe. From below came the faint aroma of tobacco—good tobacco; Phillips must still be out. The night chill had come down good and hard. It was warm under the polo coat, but fingers and nose felt the cold.

When I turned off my light I saw that the clouds must be clearing; dim moonlight came in the window. Feeling cramped and stifled from my unsuccessful efforts, I threw the window up to let some air in before I locked it for the night.

Wind and water and forest kept their eternal tumult of sound and motion. I stood a moment listening to the diapason. The chuckle of the river under the Fingers seemed very loud… .

Then my ears seemed to sort out of all that noise one quiet, stealthy sound, unusual and near, as if something heavy were being drawn or rolled over grass—here, close to the house.

Instantly my head was out the window. I looked below and toward the back of the house. Then as I stood staring I felt over my scalp the tingle of each individual hair rising.

Below, in the dim light of the three-quarter moon then riding between clouds, a car was darkly moving. Bill’s one-seated car, its top still down. Evenly, slowly, it was approaching my window.

I couldn’t see it clearly but I could see this much—there was no driver in the driver’s seat, no hands on the wheel.

The car moved, but there was no one in it at all.

I HAD ONE of those moments in which I thought my imagination must be conjuring up visions that had reality nowhere, as if some spring in the universe had been broken. The car’s hood was almost under my window now, moving smoothly, easily— terribly, as if it moved by its own power. No human being in it, none behind it …

I jerked so far out of the window that I had to clutch wildly at the sill to keep from falling. That shook me into some sense. Weights and balances still worked when it came to falling out windows.

Someone must have pushed that car. Released its brakes. The nose of the car was under my window now, and it seemed to be accelerating.

The lawn sloped. That was how Fred’s motorcycle had been wrecked.

I ran. Aakonen heard my frantic plunging down the stairs.

“Bill’s car!” I gasped at him. “The lake—”

He held out an impeding arm, but I was past him, out the door, across the veranda. The moon was edging behind a cloud; less light, but the dark shadow of the car was there at the end of the porch. Behind me a hoarse shout—Aakonen was at my heels, running in a diagonal to head off the car.

Again it seemed the machine had taken on the attributes of a live thing. It reached the flower bank and went down, gathering momentum as if it speeded to escape us. It had touched the beach when Aakonen leaped on its running board. I caught first at him, then at the car door, dragging my feet on the ground.

He threw himself forward, sprawling, over the door. The car seemed to be moving with unquenchable power; it had jerked as Aakonen caught it, but the drag of my feet on the pebbles did not slacken its movement. A hoarse exclamation from the man writhing over the seat in an effort to reach the emergency brake, and then the front wheels of the car were in water. Only a second, and the whole car was in, staggering, wallowing, plunging like a giant beast in the pulling, pounding, leaping water.

Aakonen yelled in my ear, “Jump!” He’d twisted completely around in one swift movement. His face was toward me as he catapulted himself in a long arc from the side of the car into the churning water. I loosed my hands and immediately plummeted, feet down, into bottomless deep, shot upward, gasping, spitting, reaching for air.

No sight or sound of Aakonen in that roar and motion. I had to swim and swim fast. This was where Bill had said no swimmer ever went; this was where the chuckling river from under the Fingers flowed into the lake; I felt the power of its pull. But even then, even in the surging crash of water all around me, it seemed to me I heard the deep sucking ingestion of Bill’s car by the lake.

The lake wouldn’t be satisfied by the car. It had me in hands that reached more surely than the Fingers of the shore reached; it wanted me, pulled me, sucked me away from shore. I fought it, beating against it with my arms, kicking it with my legs. Water washed in arching walls over my head; the arches crashed in a curve over me, smothering me, dragging me away. I could shoot up and away from that clasp, and the water would only rise to cover me again, to drag me, roll me, wrap me in close, insatiable arms.

Then something like an octopus tentacle had my arm, and I was lifted and thrown one last time.

* * *

“Miss Gay!” I was still being shaken. “Miss Gay!”

Aakonen.

When I opened my eyes my arms and legs were still weakly and ineptly swimming. When there was nothing to swim. The moon was out again, and I lay on my back, with Aakonen bending over me. A path of light ran down the bald dome of his head, and water dripped from it on me. The harsh rasp of his breathing was louder and nearer than any other sound.

“I got you out of the current. You’re all right now. You got to come with me. I don’t dare leave you.”

Urgent.

With the help of his hands I got to my feet. My body swayed. He held me.

“Look. I’ve got to find where everybody is. I got to find who pushed that car.”

Somehow I could stand again, make attempts to think again. Aakonen was running heavily, half carrying me with him. We were beyond the boathouse; the current had carried us that far to the west. Aakonen looked in the boathouse and around it, then on to the house. Odd to see a house with a light in it again. He just looked from the porch door into the living room, then ran on to the barn and around and through it. He was hunting. All I did was follow. Then he ran back to the house, left me by the dead fire to turn on lights in the kitchen, the dining room, the side porch.

“No one down here.” His breath still rasped. Going upstairs, that harsh breathing was the near sound—that and the drip of water, the squish of water in our shoes. He held my hand as if I were a child.

My door first, open as I’d run from it. He turned the light on. Empty. Myra’s door across the hall; Myra starting suddenly from sleep as the light went on, her bemused face rising from the pillow.

“What—?”

Aakonen panted, “Can’t stop.”

He pounded on Jacqueline’s door, shot that light on.

Jacqueline there. Thank heaven, Jacqueline’s dark head on her pillow, motionless. She was sleeping deeply.

He commanded me roughly, “Wake her!” and left me to dart across the hall to Octavia’s room, which wouldn’t open to him and on which he pounded as Myra appeared hurriedly beside him, pulling on her bathrobe.