The chuckling fingers (3 page)

“Why don’t you swim at the Fingers beach?” I detached a portion of my mind for the impersonal question.

“Current’s too strong. That underground river empties into the lake out of that rock bank in front of the house.”

“Wilderness warning number one?”

“Yeh. Don’t try it.”

Ours was a jerky advance, with Toby jabbering and pointing, stopping to look at a rocking robin on a branch, a red leaf on a strawberry plant, pebbles in the path. Bill paused once to wait, giving me a quick sidelong glance, and I got the feeling he held some pent-up question.

“Your parents,” he said abruptly, “and Jacqueline’s—they were drowned.”

He couldn’t have married Jacqueline without knowing that story. The antennae of my mind started hunting.

“Yes,” I said, “on Lake Pepin. A quick storm came up.”

“It must have been terrible. Young, happy people.” Not a statement; it had an odd effect of being a question.

“Yes,” I said. What I remember most about my parents and Jacqueline’s is their laughter and their waving that day they drove off for the fishing trip, leaving Jacqueline and me with Great-Aunt Harriet, where we stayed.

“Remember your grandparents at all?”

Obscurely I roused to antagonism, as if my family were being attacked. “Grandfather Gay kept a hay, feed and grain store. He died in the odor of sanctity at ninety-two. Grandmother Gay was simply wonderful. Her barn had pigeons in it. We’ve got an Uncle Frank running a mine down in Peru… .”

Right then was when I got in on one of those incidents that were to add up afterward to such a heavy total.

Toby had pulled away from me when I stopped to glare at Bill. The next I heard of her was an outraged yell. She was about twenty feet ahead of us then, smack on her stomach, her heels kicking.

“I failed!” she wailed angrily. “St’ing failed me!”

I forgot about other things, running to pick her up. And then I, too, went to my knees, almost on top of Toby. Something had caught me just above the ankles.

“What—?” Bill asked queerly over my head. “Why, it’s a—”

“Wire.” I’d twisted around to where I could see it. A thin silvery wire stretched tightly across the path, tied neatly and well to a tree on each side. “But someone must have deliberately—”

“Wire,” Bill repeated. Then he was reaching for the snare, ripping it from its fastenings, stuffing it into his jacket pocket. His face – his whole head – had turned almost as dark as blackberry wine.

AUTOMATICALLY I got Toby on her feet, brushing at the path dust that smudged her.

“Who did that?”

He asked haughtily, “Don’t you think I’d like to know?” As if his own question prompted him he walked around first one tree to which the wire had been fastened, then the other, his eyes searching the ground.

“Not a footprint.” It was savage. “This—” Then he seemed to swallow anger, striding away up the path, his back stiff. “Jokes like that make me see red. Let’s get going.”

I looked after him in a confusion of surmise. A joke, he called it. But he didn’t himself think it was any joke.

A wire across a path—that seemed a kid’s trick.

What leaped to my mind was the thought of Bill’s son, Fred. He’d been at the wedding – a burly and unlicked young cub in his second year at the university. Apparently he’d felt toward his father’s marriage the genial, worldly indulgence of a younger brother marrying off an elder. But jealousy is something that can grow… .

I shook myself erect, telling myself that I must be mistaken in the impressions I’d been getting. Whatever had happened must have some ordinary root, must be concerned with something normal, such as a jealous son.

* * *

I wasn’t to wait long for fresh fuel for my confusions.

Toby and I got along slowly. When we reached the edge of the resort clearing Bill was striding along a row of small white cottages and then up a rise toward a porched white farmhouse set behind a few trees. As Toby and I emerged from the path I noticed a large boathouse on the shore, but its interior was dark. We went on as Bill had toward the farmhouse which had been made over into a summer inn by the addition of a wide porch. A few people were eating at its white-covered tables, but no attendant was visible. Toby, however, knew her way. She made straight for a door which opened into a kitchen, a dark room overfull of stove, kettles, tables and two large pulpy women who stood facing Bill.

We were no more than inside the door before I sensed the atmosphere of distrust and wariness in that room. The elder woman—the one with a dark mole at her jaw line and skin the color of sponge-cake batter—was jabbing with a poker at the burning sticks in the fire pot. The other woman was basting six stuffed chickens in a long pan on the oven door. Her face was more firmly fleshed, and patches of red rode her cheekbones; she had a faded, somewhat frowzy youth. Whatever their hands did, both women kept their hard china-blue eyes fastened on Bill, who stood poised forward on the balls of his feet, his hands in his jacket pockets, his eyes fiercely questioning.

“What do you mean,” Bill was asking, “you had something funny happen last night?”

No answer right away. The woman with the poker jabbed once more.

“Our boat got smashed,” she said.

“Your boat,” Bill repeated, and there seemed a heavy acceptance in it. “Where’s Ed? I suppose he’s down at the boat-house.”

“He ain’t inside here.”

Bill left by the door through which we’d come. The women looked after him, quickly at me and then at each other. The older woman lifted her thick shoulders in a shrug before she banged the stove lid down on its round hole and pulled a kettle nearer.

I began hastily, “I—we came over from Fiddler’s Fingers for a chicken and ice cream. Mrs Sallishaw—”

The chicken baster opened a grudging mouth. “Oh, you’re the company they got. I’m the one helps over there—Lottie. I’ll get the chicken ready.”

As she bent to rummage for a kettle under a counter I went on, hoping to get some reason into what I’d heard. “Superior must be a dangerous lake for boats—the shore’s so rocky.”

“Rocks didn’t smash our boat.” The older woman answered just those few short syllables. Before I could ask anything more they had me outside the door, the chicken in a lidded kettle in one hand, Toby by the other.

“You tell Mrs Sallishaw I’ll bring the ice cream and wash her up.” Lottie closed the porch door behind me, definitely shooing me along.

Impossible to go, knowing so much and no more. “Ed will be down at the boathouse,” Bill had said. Ropes pulled me. Inside two minutes Toby and I were at the boathouse door, staring in at the dim interior which seemed lit only by water flashes glinting up from the slip and reflecting from the walls.

In some way it was like a wake. Not quite as grave as that— perhaps more as if a beloved pet had died—a dog or a horse. Yet, of the four people beside Bill who were looking down at a boat in the slip, three were incongruously dressed for mourning; they were in bathing suits. Then I temporarily forgot the boat I’d come to see as the owner of one of the backs before me swung around, reached for a nonexistent handkerchief and flushed from waist to forehead—visibly, since all he had on was trunks, and incredibly, because he was already so dark.

I didn’t have to wonder any more if I’d see Jean Nobbelin.

“Hello, Ann,” he said. “I heard you were coming. Nice seeing you again.”

“Hello,” I said. “I remember—weren’t you at the wedding?”

Very definitely he’d been at the wedding; he was Bill’s best man, a stocky young French Canadian, terribly black as to hair and eyes and very red as to skin, apparently overpoweringly fond of Bill and proud of being Bill’s business partner. He was a good four inches shorter than Bill and much more heavily muscled, but in a good many ways the two were alike—perhaps it was the wickedness of the slow white grins. Since I was Jacqueline’s attendant, Jean had squired me to the wedding parties, and I’d been more disturbed by him than by any man I’d known before; I’d felt I ought to wear armor when he was around—not too secure armor. But after the wedding I hadn’t heard a word from him until that note had come.

“Dear Ann,” that note had read briefly, “weren’t you planning to spend your vacation with Jacqueline? Looks to me as if you ought to make it right away.”

As I looked into the black deep-set eyes so nearly level with mine I was aware of two things: Jean still made me feel as if I needed protection and he didn’t want me to tell about that note.

He asked, “What do you think of a job like this?” stepping aside, so my vision of the boat was unobscured. As he spoke the two other people in bathing suits had turned inquiringly, a girl and a man. I recognized Bradley Auden, who’d also been at the wedding and who greeted me briefly. The girl was a stranger. All my attention had gone to the boat toward which Toby was running excitedly, pointing.

“Boat b’oke! Boat all b’oke!”

She was right—no doubt about that. The sides of the boat were shining and varnished. At first glance the boat had looked all right, but when I moved closer I saw that its leather seat cushions were ripped to shreds, the seat springs and stuffings were scattered like chaff, the motor cover was bashed to splinters and the uncovered motor dented and crumpled.

No lake had done that damage.

Malicious, willful destruction.
What was going on here? What connection did this have—what connection did that wire across the path have—with what I’d sensed in Jacqueline and Bill? Because there was some connection—that was apparent in Bill now as he stared down at the boat with what looked like perplexity and despair.

“Who could have done it?” I asked. Fred was again in my mind, because Fred might explain Bill’s attitude.

No reply—just a silence becoming thick and embarrassing.

Then a man’s slow drawl came. “I’d sure like to get who did it, that’s all I say.”

The speaker was the man halfway down the boathouse, a man with a sword-thin, pale, harsh face and eyes the color of dark water, whom I was later to know as Ed Corvo, owner of the resort. He was sitting bent forward on an orange crate, his gaze on his hands. It was from him the emanations of mourning had come.

Subdued words from the girl in the South Sea-print bathing suit. “We were out in it yesterday. That was a darn swell boat.”

“It’s going to cost a lot to get her fixed.” The boat’s owner kept his gaze on his hands. “And she won’t ever be the same.”

He waited as if he expected some answer to come, but none did.

“I’m going to get the sheriff on this. I don’t care who did it.” This time the drawl carried, very faintly, almost respectfully, a threat.

To that, after another small silence, an answer did come. From Bill.

He said quietly, “That’s right, Ed. Call the sheriff.”

* * *

The group broke up then, Ed Corvo, as if he had waited only this permission from Bill before he acted, going at once crosswise up the sand toward the inn. Bill, with his air of wrenching decision made, turning as if he were shaking off nightmare.

“Oh, you’re here, Ann. Do you know these—? Of course you know Jean and Brad. But Cecile—Ann, this is Cecile Granat.”

Introducing her to me but not me to her.

The girl said, “Hello,” distantly and without glancing at me, as if she expected me to be unfriendly. Definitely she was a man’s girl—sleepy blue eyes, sun tan, silky flaxen hair like doll’s hair blowing around.

“Another girl is wonderful,” I said. “Next time you swim could I go along?” As usual, an attitude like hers made me react perversely; only a girl who’s been pushed around is that unfriendly.

“If you want to.” She made it indifferent, linking her fingers with Bradley Auden’s. “If we’re going to eat before the food gets impossible—”

“Sure.” Bradley Auden came awake with a jerk from his staring at the boat. He smiled at her, a recklessly handsome man of forty or so, with a thin, slightly sunken face and graying brown hair thinned in two Vs like devil’s horns at his temples. At twenty he must have been a heart-cracker, but now there was a disillusioned look over his debonairness, and his eyes were tired—from looking at his own life perhaps. I couldn’t imagine him doing a useful thing or turning down a pleasant temptation such as Cecile.

“See you tonight. Bill.” The fingers linked with Cecile’s tightened as he moved toward the door.

Bill went out with them. For a moment I was alone in the boathouse with Toby and Jean, who moved with awkward hesitance toward me, as if he had something unpleasant coming and could just as soon get it over.

“I got the note,” I said, low, and waited for the explanation. Surely some light should be coming now.

Reluctance seemed to writhe in him. “I just thought you ought to be here. Couple things happened I don’t like.”

“What things?”

He gestured toward the boat. “Stuff like that. I don’t see any sense in it. I just don’t like it.”

“But what has this to do with Jacqueline? Is it Fred?”

I’d almost never seen him without the grin, but his mouth was a straight grave line then.

“You don’t want any prejudices I’ve given you. Just keep a lookout.”

* * *

Keep a lookout
. What was this? Added to my confusion and frustration there was now a growing sense of fright. There was something in Jean’s tone, something in his eyes …

Quickly he was stiffening his shoulders and walking out. When he reached the door and bright sunlight his head ducked, as if the light was water he dived into. Bill stood alone outside; Bradley was walking toward one cottage, and Cecile toward another; Jean broke into a sprint that caught him up with Bradley.

Bill told me curtly, “Don’t say anything about the boat. I want to handle this.” Then, as if he’d waited just for that, strode up the path toward the Fingers.

He walked so swiftly Toby and I were soon left behind again, Toby chattering in a steady stream and making such strenuous efforts to help carry the kettle that we almost had the chicken on the path every twenty feet. As we went my mind seethed, but I didn’t know enough then to get anywhere; I couldn’t see the ends that must meet. Not until we reached the porch and Bill came to open the door did he notice the kettle and in swift compunction reach for it.