The chuckling fingers (31 page)

It was me she looked at, unwavering.

“Then later Bill was shot, and I thought he was going to die. I knew how it would look if it got out about the money. I made up my mind then that if the time came I’d tell how it was.”

She dropped the cigarette in her plate and folded her hands in her lap.

“Bill’s supported me since I was fourteen. Ever since my mother died. He says he doesn’t want me to have to make money. I suppose”—it came with what looked like hard self-judgment—“I suppose he knows how I’d make it if I had to make it.”

She stopped. The long dark lashes over the baby-blue eyes lifted to Jean. Then she tossed the flaxen doll’s hair back and looked at Myra, her mouth twisting with a curious mixture of humor and insolence,

“That’s all, except for why Bill supports me. He does it because I’m his cousin, just as you are. He does it because I’m your sister.”

MYRA was in no shape to take it. She asked wonderingly, “My sister? But Octavia is my only sister.” And then her breath caught and her eyes flinched, as if she’d been struck in the face.

She whispered, “My father. Oh no!”

Everything went from Cecile’s face except amusement; certainly there was no pity there. She leaned easily forward, shrugging.

“Oh well, a father isn’t much to have in common. Not one who contributes a few germ cells to your existence and calls it a day.”

“Myra, I’m sorry.” That was my voice working of its own accord, not much help from my mind. “I’m sorry, Cecile.”

I bogged in it. I was sorry, terribly sorry. Sorry this new humiliation and pain had to come to Myra, sorry for Cecile, sorry she’d had the birth she’d had, sorry she must carry the inevitable bitterness, sorry I had provoked this new disdain she had to suffer.

Cecile said, “That’s all right—I’ve been waiting for it,”

“I’m sorry too.” Jean was squeezing Cecile’s wrist, and for once a man was looking at Cecile with an entirely nice look in his eyes.

My first thought was that Cecile needn’t have made that admission; she’d done it out of loyalty to Bill.

* * *

I had to help Myra back upstairs to bed. She said only, “It’s unforgivable of Bill to have brought that girl here.”

When I got back downstairs no one was there; I think Jean took Cecile back to the resort. I started clearing the table, my mind on trying to see what difference this revelation of Cecile’s might make.

I’d had a rush of sympathy for Cecile, but that was neither here nor there—I’d had rushes of sympathy for practically everyone involved, except perhaps Phillips Heaton—and now look where Phillips was.

Would Cecile start out shooting Heatons just because she was an ex-officio Heaton herself? Cecile and her mother might have had plenty of reason for hating Charles Heaton… .

Charles Heaton had been burned to death in a fire whose origin no one knew… .

The bread plate which I’d picked up to carry to the kitchen tipped its forgotten contents on the table.

The fire had been in 1920. Cecile couldn’t have been much more than four then. Impossible for her to have been responsible. But had anyone investigated what her mother was doing the night of that fire?

Suppose a hunger for revenge had been instilled in Cecile?

Phillips Heaton had spent the afternoon before he died with Cecile; I’d seen them on the beach at the resort—Phillips sitting with his arms around his fat seersucker knees. Had it been Cecile that Phillips suspected? In that case Cecile’s story about the investments must have been clever camouflage—Phillips would know he couldn’t get much from Cecile.

“Someone seems to have it in for Heatons… .”

I decided I had better tell Aakonen.

* * *

Bill’s car came up out of the lake just as I was leaving. I heard all the way across water and beach the angry grasping sound the lake made as the car was lifted from it. The car moved in a slow semicircle over the water, hanging from a huge steel arm, to be deposited on the scow in back of the crane. Water poured from it; it looked battered and crippled.

Little chance of getting any clues from that car, I thought, after it had been all these hours in the lake.

At the hospital Jacqueline was gone; Dr Rush had sent her out to get lunch. But Aakonen was in the hall. As I told him of Cecile’s contribution he listened with his head down-bent. When I’d finished he kept on standing that way; no light of interest crossed his face.

“You were right to tell me,” he said at last. “That Cecile is Charles Heaton’s daughter I have known since she was born. It was gossip in the village then. That Mr Bill Heaton was taking care of her—I am glad that is the way it is.”

You had another idea, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

That was the last comment he made on what I had told him of Cecile. When he went on it was to give the warning that accelerated everything that happened from then on.

He moved forward, straight upon me. I backed until the small table of the waiting room hit the back of my legs. There was an ominous soberness about his face and his advance.

He said, “I am glad you are here. There is something I want to tell you. Tomorrow morning there will be an inquest into the death of Phillips Heaton.”

That. I should have remembered it would come.

“Miss Gay, I have no doubt that after that inquest tomorrow I shall have to arrest your cousin for these murders.”

No world under my feet, no solidity anywhere. The only entities were the words he said, screaming past me like vampires in flight.

“You mean you—it’s come.” That was my unrecognizable voice.

“Miss Gay, you will see I won’t be able to do anything else. The jury will find that Phillips Heaton died at the hands of Jacqueline Heaton. Have you forgotten those wet shoes after she’d said she had not stepped on grass?”

“But she explained that. Someone else could have wet those shoes!”

“You can make that explanation at the inquest.”

“But what else can we do?” New terror rising now. I reached for his arm, shaking it. “Jacqueline didn’t do any of this shooting. No matter what other people think, can you let an innocent person be—?”

“Innocent?” he asked. It was as weary as death. “Miss Gay, there is only one reason why Mrs Heaton has not been charged long before this—because I hate to arrest Mr Bill Heaton’s wife.”

He was reminding me what he’d told me about Bill and suddenly he was closer, his voice rough, begging.

“If there is anything you can do do it quickly. I do not know enough about this kind of murder. I can’t rest or sleep, feeling always how I get nowhere, how perhaps even now another person is being killed. I can’t let this go on. Every fact I have is against your cousin. Long before Fred was killed everywhere she was was mischief. Fred was killed after he had provoked her. All the signs of his death point to her. The cape was hers. She was right there when Bill was shot. She could so easily have taken the gun. And then the shoes—”

He spread his hands in a wide, spreading, helpless gesture.

“There is little evidence against anyone else. The only person who could possibly benefit by the deaths is your cousin.”

“She doesn’t benefit by Phillips’ death!”

“You know and I know why Phillips was killed. Because he boasted that he knew the murderer.”

“But Phillips told me he knew the murderer wasn’t Jacqueline!”

“For that I have only your word.”

“What can I do for Jacqueline if everything I say is disbelieved?”

“You admit lying to me twice.”

I groaned. “They were such unimportant things.”

He didn’t answer. I rushed on, “What about all the other things? About Cecile Granat’s being—?”

Another weary gesture. “Would Cecile try to kill the man who was her only support?”

No, in Bill’s death Cecile stood only to lose. I plunged again.

“Mark. He had that fight with Fred. And Carol in Bill’s office —you know she was up to something.”

“Where does Carol benefit by Mr Bill Heaton’s death?”

“The Corvos too. There was that trouble about the accident “

“Miss Gay, the course you are taking now is useless. Phillips Heaton’s death—that perhaps was not planned. But the rest was planned. That Fred should die first, that Mr Bill Heaton should die—only one person benefits by the deaths in that order.”

“But Bill didn’t die!”

“No,” he said, and his lips were folded in a straight line. “And I am here to see he does not die.”

* * *

He was allowing appearances to take their course. He was done investigating. That was what he was telling me.

Even at the first inquest the jury and the people had suspected Jacqueline.

I threw myself against his stand, battered myself against it. It was no use. He didn’t want to arrest Jacqueline, for Bill’s sake, but he himself had come to believe her the murderer. Out of some obscure reasoning he told me this as a sort of last effort to help her out if help could be given.

His parley with me ended when Jacqueline came back from lunch to pause radiantly at the entrance to the cubicle.

“You should have seen Hanson’s. Mr Hanson was out on the sidewalk. The lunchroom was full of Bill’s crews. Celebrating. They’ve taken the place over: Was there ever such a glorious day?”

How could I tell her what sort of day it really was?

Silently I followed her down the hall, Aakonen persistent in our wake. Bill’s eyes were open again, restless until Jacqueline got in. As a last resort I told him, too, what I’d found out about Cecile, to see if the disclosure would waken any suspicion in him.

What it woke was almost a preshooting smile.

The weak voice said, “Good old Cecile.”

* * *

I drove back to the Fingers alone, leaving Jacqueline under Aakonen’s hawklike watching, with Bill. I didn’t think she’d have torn herself away even if she’d known how desperate her situation was.

Not just a matter of fighting until I went down. It was up to me now to see that tomorrow never came.

Couldn’t we ever get a break? Hadn’t that chemist, for instance, had time enough now to do his experimenting? And then that fire in the bed—somehow I felt that if those two, which tied all that succession of tricks to Jacqueline, could be blown into thin air, then some of the weight of evidence would go with them. And if I could fasten those tricks to someone else …

Again I thought how incredibly adept this murderer had been. There had to be clues, if I could only see them. There had to be some other motive beside Jacqueline’s, if I could only worm it out—perhaps from information I already had… .

In the Fingers living room were Jean, Mark and Bradley Auden, hammering away at the problem of what Carol had been doing in Bill’s office. Mark had perhaps slept a little; he looked better, but Bradley didn’t. Neither one was glad to see me, but Jean swung a chair around for me, and I dropped into it. Any answer replacing a question was a step in the right direction.

“Carol inferred it wasn’t for herself she was in Bill’s office,” Bradley was saying. “She has no close friends around here— none who’d have any connection with Bill. That just about narrows it down to her mother, Mark and me.”

He repeated that last. “I guess I’ve got to admit it’s become three.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Mark fumbled with words. He’d been fined down until almost nothing was left but his mathematical cleanness and precision.

“I haven’t got anything against you, Mark, if we can get things straightened out. My wife hasn’t even seen Bill for a long time—she’s bedridden. It couldn’t be for her mother Carol was in that office. Then me. That note of mine. Carol knows I could have cleaned that up. How she could—”

“It looks, then, as if it must be me.” Mark’s eyes had gone wide. “I’ve got to see through it. Carol must have made a mistake, someway, about me. I’m trying to remember what I’ve told her. I know I told her my father worked for Bill’s father and was killed on the job. I lived with an aunt near Lutsen—my mother had died before. The day I finished high school one of the teachers told me to go see Bill Heaton. I guess you know Bill helped me through the engineering course. Then the day I graduated he sent me the notes I’d signed for the money he loaned me and a letter saying I had a job if I wanted it.”

He stopped to sit breath-held and staring. “Good lord! If that could be it — Carol knew Bill helped me. I can’t remember ever telling her he sent those notes back… .”

He was out of his chair, leaping the stairs three at a time, the rest of us after him.

Carol was asleep, but he didn’t stop; he shook her until she woke.

“Carol! Wake up! We’ve got to know—”

She had to come up a long way, blinking dazedly as the light struck her eyes, looking from Mark to the rest of us, expectant. Then she shrank back, twisting to bury her face in the pillow.

“Go away! Can’t you let me alone? I didn’t take anything!”

“That’s it! You didn’t find anything! There wasn’t anything to find!” Mark poured exclamation. “Carol, Bill made me a present of the money he’d loaned me when I graduated from college.”

The shoulders in the bed had quit twisting, become very still. When she turned to lie face upward the hazel eyes were ominously quiet.

“You mean you don’t owe Bill anything?”

“No—I mean, yes—I owe him a terrible lot. But not notes he holds over me.”

She was slowly pulling herself upward, resting her weight back on her hands, staring at him. She’d forgotten the rest of us.

She whispered, “But you fought with Fred the night he was killed. And then when Bill was shot—you let me tell a lie. It wasn’t nine-thirty when you left Auden that night—it was eight-thirty. I did look at the clock.”

“But I never looked to see what time it was. I thought I’d gone home earlier that night but when you said it was nine-thirty I believed you—”

“So I went on lying about the time.” Her tone wasn’t a whisper any longer; it was loud and angry. “I got started thinking why you might want to kill Bill and I remembered you told me he loaned you money for going to school—and your father was killed working for Bill’s father—and you wouldn’t marry me so I couldn’t testify against you—”