The chuckling fingers (29 page)

Jacqueline said quickly, “It’s ridiculous to suspect Ann. You know she couldn’t have released the brakes of that car tonight.”

He shrugged. “I don’t think she lies to protect herself. I think she lies to protect you. You can go now.”

Yes, that was what he would think. If only I had proof that Jacqueline had been upstairs between ten o’clock and the time we waked her… .

I asked, “Is there anything to suggest Phillips was killed up here?”

He answered shortly, “Nothing that I see.”

“There must be something by which we could—”

When I didn’t finish he turned impatiently to wait. “What?”

I have to remember that it was out of my own head I took the idea which was to produce one of the most damning of all the evidences against Jacqueline.

I said, “We’ve got to think. About the murderer. He was out there on the lawn tonight. Perhaps he killed Phillips somewhere else and dragged him to the car—”

I had what I thought my inspiration then. It lifted me to such excitement I shook Aakonen’s arm.

“That’s it! You looked at our shoes after Fred was shot. Dew had wet the bottom of that cape. Whoever killed Phillips tonight had to walk across grass. If you could find wet shoes— No, some of them have a right to wet shoes. But—Jacqueline, you got out of Myra’s car on the gravel, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

I tugged at Aakonen. “Don’t you see? If all my cousin’s shoes are dry—she can’t have gone out.”

He came willingly after looking at the pumps which Jacqueline had on and which were dry. At the blue cretonne shoe bag which held all her shoes in individual pockets—it hung from her closet door—he took out a pair of white sandals. They were dry.

He took out a pair of black snakeskin oxfords. His back seemed to congeal. Wordlessly he turned, holding out the shoes. The soles were damp, and between sole and upper of one was a still-green blade of grass.

* * *

I stood waiting for something to happen, knowing to the bottom of my soul what it would be.

But it wasn’t Aakonen who spoke next—it was Jacqueline— colder and harder than I’d ever known her.

“This is plenty!” She snatched the shoes from him. “Someone else wore those shoes—”

“The other women in this house are Miss Gay and Mrs Sallishaw and Octavia Heaton. Are you—?”’

“No. Of course not. I—” She held herself an instant quiet.

“No, that’s not the answer. Look—it isn’t even necessary for these shoes to have been worn.”

Aakonen had recaptured the shoes, but she went on. “Someone could have come in here any time today, wet those shoes in the washbowl in the bathroom and stuck in that blade of grass. Do you think if I’d known those shoes were wet I’d have let you come in here looking without one effort to stop you? Do you think if I had shot Fred and Bill—and now Phillips—that I’d point to myself as I’m pointed out now?” It had become an impassioned plea.

“Mistakes are what catch murderers.”

“Can you call all the things that point to me mistakes?”

She was actually advancing on him, he retreating. I came out of stupefaction to join the attack.

“Look at Bill. It’s my cousin’s being there that’s helped pull him through. Has she done one thing to injure him?”

“No, and she isn’t going to.” It was grim. He held out a large hand—the one that didn’t hold the shoes. “Wait. I will have to think. Now. Here is the position. When you and Mrs Sallishaw came upstairs sometime after ten, Mrs Heaton, then Phillips was alive.”

She nodded firmly. “Yes. We left him by the fire downstairs.”

“Are these oxfords the shoes you wore today?”

“No. I wore the pumps I have on now.”

“So the oxfords were here all day… . Was there anything else in the room disturbed when you came back?”

“The bed.”

I said quickly, “That was me, trying to figure out how that fire started.”

“Nothing else disturbed?”

“Not that I saw,” from Jacqueline.

He waved the oxfords at her, his face the shape of a groan. Then he turned away.

“You two go to bed.”

He wasn’t arresting Jacqueline then and there, but there was no triumph in our victory. His back said as clearly as words could,
very little more grace is all I can give you.

* * *

He must have dispersed the others, too; we heard people leaving. The deputy was gone from Myra’s room. We went in to do what we could to make her comfortable. She’d drifted into a half sleep. It seemed criminal to leave her untended. I went to the head of the stairs to call down, and Aakonen answered that he’d leave a man in the house all night; the man would have orders to look in on Mrs Sallishaw occasionally.

Jacqueline and I went to bed in my room, door and window locked. In spite of her roused anger Jacqueline was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow. It took me longer. After this last murder, after the finding of those wet shoes it would be hard to keep Aakonen from acting, perhaps hard to keep some of the others from breaking into open accusation.

Yet. after a while I did sleep, not waking until late morning. Jacqueline was lying wide eyed then, staring at the pattern of the ceiling cracks, her arms under her head.

She said, “All these days I’ve been trying to see who’d want to kill Fred and Bill and I can’t, because the only motive I know applies to me. But I can see why Phillips was killed.”

I sat up in bed, thoroughly shaken awake. “Why?”

“Phillips told you he’d guessed who the murderer was. And Cecile said he told her he was making some lucky investments.”

“Of course. He was telling me the truth—he had guessed the murderer. He tried blackmail—and a bullet was his answer.”

* * *

Jean, Bradley and Mark were all in the living room with the guard when we got downstairs; they’d been there all night. Perhaps they’d dozed a little; it couldn’t have been much. Their eyes were fatigue-puffed, clothes rumpled, faces uncouth, as men’s faces always are when they’ve sprouted a stubble of beard,

Jean rubbed a conscious hand over his chin when he saw us. The other two, sunken in their chairs, just looked away.

Jacqueline and I went to the kitchen; breakfast was a necessity. But we were hardly there before the front door slammed, heavy footsteps sounded, and both Bradley Auden and Mark gave a hoarse shout, so that we ran to see.

Carol Auden stood inside the door between two men.

CAROL’S JAUNTY rust-striped dress was disheveled, her red hair a mop, her pointed face paper pale, but her eyes were feverishly defiant.

“You can beat me and torture me and kill me,” she announced melodramatically. “I won’t talk.”

Aakonen was there within the half-hour, towering over her as she sat, small and crumpled, in one of the wicker armchairs, looking like a defenseless, tired child. Bradley and Mark had tried to question her before Aakonen got there but now they jerked forward with restraining movements of their bodies, as if they wanted to grab her from the inquisition.

She admitted readily enough that she’d taken Jean’s wallet. She admitted hiding the car up a wood road after she fled from the office. What she wouldn’t admit was what she’d wanted in that office.

“You’ll have to tell us sometime.” Aakonen tried patience.

“Will I?” Hard going, but it tried to be pert.

“Why did you open that safe?”

“Call it curiosity.”

“Were you looking for your father’s note?”

She acted as if she hadn’t thought of that. Her lips parted, and her hazel eyes widened. Then she burst into a storm of weeping as violent as she had been subdued.

“Don’t ask me!” she wailed. “It isn’t me! I had to do what I did. What I was doing was
all right!”

“Miss Auden!” From Aakonen a shout with enough authority behind it so the crying stopped in mid-wail, breaking to a gulp. “Why were you afraid of being caught if what you were doing was all right?”

“Because then I—couldn’t do what I’ve just simply got to do.”

“You’re not doing anything”—discipline seemed waking in Bradley Auden—“except go home and get to bed. You—”

Aakonen turned to the man who’d brought her in. “Where did you find her?”

“She was right there in one of them cabins at the resort. Asleep across one of the beds, with her clothes on. When I looked in and seen she was there I just about—”

“At the resort,” Mark said dazedly. “She told me to wait for her. She came there anyway.”

Aakonen asked her, “How did you get there?”

“Walked. I left the car and watched my chance to get across the highway when there weren’t any cars. I knew Jean and Ann would tell.” Her eyes roved over me, but no animosity showed.

A pause during which Aakonen just looked down at her. Then, “Did you come here to the Fingers last night—walking or any other way?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Did you see Phillips Heaton last night?”

“Him? I wouldn’t care if I never saw him.”

“Did you drive Bill Heaton’s car out of the barn last night?”

She glanced then at her father. “What’s he asking me that for?”

“Answer me. Did you have a gun in your hands last night?”

Fright rising at the increasing tensity of the questions. “No! I didn’t—I didn’t have any gun!”

Jean interposed, “She didn’t have any gun when she ran from the office, Aakonen. Don’t “

“Perhaps you will be interested to know”—Aakonen’s sharp gaze kept on Carol as if Jean hadn’t spoken—“that last night there was another murder at the Fingers.”

The girl’s face froze. She whispered, “Another—murder?”

“Phillips Heaton is dead.”

“Phillips—Heaton,” she repeated weakly. And then she turned to Mark. “You were—”

She caught it there. Visibly her head circled on her neck; her father caught her as she went down.

* * *

There was no faking in that faint; it was fifteen minutes before we brought her to.

When she did come out of it she closed her eyes tight almost as soon as she’d opened them, and tears slid from between the lids. She didn’t cry stormily now; she cried helplessly, silently, as if she had neither strength nor hope. When Aakonen after a while tried questioning her again she made no sign even of hearing him.

Seeing her made me remember Myra; I’d completely forgotten until then that Myra, too, was fallen by the wayside. When I ran up to her room I found her asleep, but her breath and her pulse seemed so slight I went back down to say I thought we’d better call Dr Rush.

Aakonen, with his eyes on the still-sobbing Carol, nodded his head.

Dr Rush’s verdict was the same for both. “Exhaustion and collapse. I’ll leave some capsules. Keep them in bed.”

“Carol—it won’t be serious, will it?” That was Bradley.

“Nothing that rest and a relieved mind won’t cure.”

Jacqueline had waited with her own question until Dr Rush had seen Carol and Myra. “Bill—is he doing all right?”

“Nicely.”

“Then can I—?”

“No need for it today.” He was brusque, looking around at those of us in the living room. “You people require a few too many of my services. I was up pretty early with Phillips Heaton.”

Aakonen quickened. “That. What did you find?”

“Shot in the back. From not farther than four feet, I’d say. Bullet lodged against a rib. Got it for you.”

Aakonen walked out with the doctor, to stand leaning over the physician’s car door a moment, then, without a glance at the house, he got into his own car and departed.

“Thank God,” Bradley said, “he isn’t—he didn’t arrest Carol. I don’t know what I could have done for Marjorie if that had happened.”

Thank God,
I
thought, that he hadn’t arrested Jacqueline.

We put Carol to bed in my room, giving her the sedative Dr Rush had left. Bradley called Auden, telling the maid there that Carol had been found and was resting, that Mrs Auden was still to know nothing of what was going on. Then he came upstairs to sit beside Carol. He stayed there all the rest of the morning, watching her as the fitful sobbing slowed and stopped and she slept.

To Myra, too, Jacqueline and I gave the capsules Dr Rush had left for her. When we waked her she just lay quiet, vague and strengthless.

“Phillips,” she said. “If we could have found him before the car went into the lake he might have lived.”

She dozed again after a while. When we left her Jacqueline was grim.

“We’ve got to look out for her—guns aren’t the only way of killing people.”

Sometime during the morning Octavia had unlocked her door, because when we brought up a tray for her the door handle turned.

We didn’t have actual evidence Octavia had been in this room when Bill or Phillips was shot, I thought, even if we did have it for when Fred was shot. But as I looked at the slight ridge made by her small body under the blankets, the body that seemed to cower even there, it seemed impossible this could be the source of the evil against which we contended. Only the smooth brown back of Octavia’s head showed; she lay on her face, with both arms around her head, unmoving, as we entered.

Jacqueline dredged up some difficult calm cheerfulness. “Myra’s not feeling well this morning, so Ann and I brought your breakfast, Octavia.”

Pity for anyone so poorly equipped to meet any kind of life was in her eyes as she went on, “Wouldn’t you like to dress when you’ve had your breakfast? I’ll be driving in to see Bill, I hope. Maybe you’d want to come along.”

A quick, almost convulsive negative movement of the head encircled by arms.

“Myra’s in her room, and there’ll always be someone else in the house too,” Jacqueline produced for a last reassurance, and we left her; there didn’t seem much else we could do.

In the hall outside Jacqueline sighed. “Poor Octavia. If Myra breaks down under this—I don’t just dread it for Myra’s sake. What’ll become of Octavia?”

We went downstairs to Jean and the remote, reserved Mark. For several moments no one said a word.

I tried to see where we were now that Phillips was dead. Two gone now. One fighting for his life in the hospital. Two more, Myra and Carol, pushed beyond the breaking point. Octavia and Bradley and Cecile and the four of us—we were what seemed to be left.