The chuckling fingers (32 page)

The voice was rising. “I had to get those notes so you wouldn’t be suspected—that’s what I thought! And it was perfectly awful!”

The look in her eyes had been fair warning; what Mark had on his hands now was a shriek.

“I had to sneak and steal Jean’s pocketbook and I was scared, and they caught me, and I fell down when I was running and hurt my knee and I almost froze to death in those woods, and all the time it wasn’t true!” She lifted her nose, howling.

Mark was laughing, tears running down his cheeks, patting her back as he tried to pull her against his shoulder. “Carol. I’ll never forget what you tried to do for me. It’s all right now— you don’t have to cry.”

But she fought wildly against him. “I do, too, have to cry! I was such an idiot!”

Behind me Bradley Auden gave a sudden bark of laughter, pushing past me, brushing Mark aside. Carol collapsed on his shoulder, and her father rocked and crooned.

* * *

“So that’s that,” Jean said gloomily at the foot of the stairs. We’d both turned as if by common consent to walk away. “Like everything else. Maybe we know now why Carol was in that office, but does it shed any light on the murders? It does not.”

“Except that we know now Mark had no alibi for the night Bill was shot.”

“What’s his motive?”

“Who else has one?” I remembered as I said it that Jean perhaps had as much as anyone, but the necessity to have someone working with me was too strong; I told him what Aakonen had said.

He stood looking at me, completely still. “Of course,” he said slowly. “It had to come, with things going on this way.” He sat down in the nearest chair, resting his face in his hands. “Oh lord, I feel as if I had wires around my chest and someone pulling on the two ends.”

Then in a sudden transition to what looked like anger he was up, pacing the floor.

“What was I given a brain for? There’s got to be some answer to this—got to… .”

I’d had one idea. “There’s your chemist—”

He almost leaped at me. “Yes! If he had anything—”

Then he was at the phone, tearing the receiver from the hook. “Get me George Crowley at the Middle States Paper Products Company in Detroit.”

He waited, with unquiet eyes and the flicking of muscles over his face showing that the hounds of thought still chased. Then the call came through.

“George? listen, we’re getting desperate. How about those acids? … I know, but—can’t you give me anything? … What if it isn’t a week? Test ‘em out now! We’ve got to know!”

He turned from the phone, spreading his hands as Aakonen had that morning.

“He says he can’t tell whether a chemical will eat holes through a suit at the end of a week until I’ve given him a week for the chemical to be on the fabric. He’s trying out some. Some of the fabrics are already in holes. He’s got to leave the others for a week and then see what happens when he puts them in naphtha.”

“So even if there is an answer we won’t get it in time.”

“I’ve been working on the fire in the bed, too, in my cabin. I get the same place you do. If we could get at it from motive … We had a weak one for Phillips. Where’s that now? Who else? Myra, Brad, Mark, Carol, Cecile, the Corvos—I can’t see anything on any of them. You’re out. I know I didn’t do it “

The phone rang, punctuating it. Jean answered.

“Who? … Oh, Mrs Foster.” He relaxed a little. “Yes, of course. This is Jean Nobbelin … Yes, it’s true. Unbelievable but true … No, we still don’t know.”

The news of Phillips’ death had reached Duluth. I moved to take the phone from him, but he fended me off.

“Sure, I’d like to talk to her.”

I stood so close I could hear Toby’s voice when it came on.

“I’m fine, Mama.”

“This is Jean. You being a big girl? Mama isn’t here right now.”

“I coming you now.” Even at my distance I heard the obstinate decision.

“But it’s nice where you are. Lots warmer, and you have things to play with you wouldn’t have here.”

“I yike be Mama and Gramma,” the small voice repeated, and I heard in it something lost and forlorn.

Jean let me talk to her then. I talked quickly, trying to tide over crisis. When I turned from the phone we both said nothing for a moment. When Jean did speak his voice had the oppressiveness of Aakonen’s.

“Poor little chicken. If tomorrow happens … she’ll have to suffer too. As if she had any part in this mess… .”

Myra called from upstairs, and I went slowly up. She’d heard the ring of the phone. I had to tell her all about Toby. She lay wan and white, looking almost blankly over at me.

“Isn’t this ever going to end?” she asked. I couldn’t tell her, either, that it had to end.

She’d heard Carol’s loud wails too. “I’m glad that’s explained anyway,” she said, and I remembered what Bradley had said, that they’d once been in love. “I wonder how long since she’s had anything to eat.”

So I went in to Carol, now leaning back and smiling sleepily at Mark, who held her hands, and at her father, who limped along the floor, with his unlit pipe between his teeth. She was reserved with me but hungry. She’d like ham and eggs.

That’s how it happened that I went down to the kitchen to light the kerosene stove which served as an auxiliary to the range and found there were no more matches in the tin box on the wall. Myra kept staples in the pantry. I hunted along a top shelf until I found the carton. From an individual box I pulled the red, navy-and-white cover, slipping the inner container with its matches into the tin holder. Mechanically I struck a match for the fire, kneeling before the stove.

But I didn’t reach the flame to the burner; my hands halted.

In my right hand was the burning match, tipped to let the flame carry along the stick. In my left was the red, navy-and-white matchbox cover. I’d scratched the match on the strip of sandy abrasive along the side.

Slowly the hand with the match moved until the flame was at the end of the box cover; slowly the flame ate into the cheap cardboard, and the cardboard blackened, red flame curling from it, smoke curling. The cardboard curled back upon itself, disappearing.

All of it.

The match burned my fingers; I dropped it on the burner shelf. Slowly I rose, dropping the matchbox cover, too, of which only a third was left. I stood watching it burn to a thin black ash.

I knew how the fire had been started in Jacqueline’s bed by someone who wasn’t there.

STRANGE now to look back on the incongruous happenings of those next few hours when the cords of circumstance were drawing so inexorably tight.

When I called Jean out to the kitchen to tell him about the fire he went up in a flame as bright as the match. The first thing I knew he had his arms around me and was kissing me, hard, and my whole interior became a ski slide on which something went down, whoosh!

The same instant Bradley Auden asked, behind me, “Are those eggs—”

It wavered and stopped, and what came next sounded completely confounded. “I have heard that romance flourishes in the midst of death.” His mouth twisted in a queer, rather unpleasant grin. “You better tell me—do I start shaking hands or do I look the other way and pretend it never happened?”

I’d started pulling away, heat against my cheeks, but the arms around me held fast. The intense black eyes were watching me as if Bradley Auden weren’t there, and I saw in them something held back, disturbing.

Deliberately Jean kissed me again before he let go. Then he turned to Bradley, his face not relaxing.

“The devil finds work,” he said. “What did you come down for anyway?”

“Eggs,” Bradley said. “Ham and eggs for my repatriated daughter.”

He loosened up to be jocose and familiar when I had to admit the stove wasn’t even lit. Then he saw the ash of the matchbox cover and poked at it with a curious finger.

“What were you up to?”

From then on he watched me with a different surmise as Jean moved smoothly to sweep the ashes into his hand and wash them down the sink.

“It seems I interrupted Ann when she was lighting die stove, and she dropped the match on some paper. You know how a girl gets flustered.”

“That looked more like a box.”

“It was a box cover,” I said.

He kept on watching me until I had the ham and eggs fried and toast made but he went upstairs with them without any more comments.

“Bradley Auden,” I said when he was gone. “Where does he come in on this?”

But Jean dismissed him. “Anybody ‘d have known something was up, with both of us blazing like neon lights.”

“I’m going right in to Aakonen with what I’ve guessed.”

I was halfway to the side porch, but he jerked me back. “Don’t be an idiot. Don’t you see what you’ve got? Fireworks. Something to spring at the inquest tomorrow. You’re going to need fireworks to squeeze Jacqueline by.”

He dropped me then, to walk the kitchen impatiently.

“It isn’t enough. Heaven knows it isn’t enough.” He talked on, speculating, jumping to the attack from one side and another, rehashing what little we knew.

My first reaction to his stopping me was the suspicion that rose so swiftly now against anyone. Did he have any reason other than the one he gave for not wanting me to tell Aakonen?

But as he talked on, shaking a kitchen chair as if to shake from the inanimate object some answer to the questions he asked, I found myself, as usual, following him, beating my head against the things I couldn’t know, feeling myself pitted against that force so much more adept than myself, so much more slippery —and all the time the need for haste rising as the minutes went by, rising like water up a riverbank in flood …

The grocery bus came. I had to tear myself away to buy food for dinner. The dead no longer ate, but the living had to be fed. The phone rang—this time Jacqueline. Bill was apparently asleep for the evening, and she’d been told to go home. She wondered if I’d come for her.

More time, with nothing done. Swiftly I drove to Grand Marais, using Myra’s car again, every mile a minute falling through my hands. I had to do something. At Grand Marais I swerved the car into the Main Street, a vague idea beginning in my mind. When I passed Hanson’s it looked and sounded like a riot. Hanson was leaning good-humoredly against a lamppost in front. I slowed the car.

“Is that the same celebration?”

“Yep,” he said. A bottle came through his front window; his eyes followed it with what looked like admiration as it sailed over his head and the car, shattering against the opposite curb. “They’re all good guys. If they ain’t got the dough today I’ll get it next payday.”

At the hardware store I bought sheets of sandpaper and hurried on to the hospital where Jacqueline waited on the steps, radiant still. Beside her, in dark contrast, Aakonen.

He came down to open the car door for her.

“I have just learned something,” he said. “My men have been working on Mr Bill Heaton’s car. No one pushed it before it went in the lake. No one released its brakes.”

“No one?” My mind sped back to night and the car moving by itself under my window. “But that’s impossible!”

The large head shook. “No. I have just been telling Mrs Heaton. The brakes were set. A chemical started that car— an acid. That was an old car—it had brake bands only on the two rear wheels—exposed brake bands. Those brake bands were eaten through. It must have been an acid.”

“Like Bill’s suit,” I said. The car that had come up out of the lake had had a story to tell.

“Exactly,” he said significantly. “Like Bill’s suit.”

Couldn’t there be any help in this? “Bradley Auden had an alibi for the time that car must have started—he was the only one of us who did.”

The shoulders lifted. “Yes. He now becomes one of you.”

* * *

He trailed us out to the Fingers. He talked to Bradley upstairs for perhaps twenty minutes but came down alone, hunched and tired, to pause in the kitchen where Jacqueline and I had begun preparing dinner. He had gotten nowhere,

“You will remember about tomorrow,” he said as he went out. As if there could be any possible chance of my forgetting.

“What does he mean about tomorrow?” Jacqueline asked. “Oh, I know,” she answered herself, “the inquest.”

And I had nothing but that small idea… .

* * *

Eight of us at that last dinner—the dinner for which, with my idea forming like a slow whirling eddy in my mind, I insisted Jean, Bradley, Mark and Carol stay. Cecile I called the resort to invite; she wouldn’t come alone even through the early evening, so Jean and Mark went for her. Octavia stayed in her room as ever, but Myra we helped down from upstairs.

Eight watchful people, with nerves vibrating like violin strings at a touch. The table was pleasantly set and the food good and the fire warm, but four of those people ate as if they feared the very food and kept themselves apart, not just from Jacqueline now, but from each other.

Of the eight only Jean and I knew how perilously short the time was, but wasn’t there some growing urgency, some new feeling of haste and necessity over the others also? Carol, pale and jumpy, not any too sure in her belief that Mark was innocent, Mark alternately eating and relapsing into abstraction, Bradley trying to hold himself quiet but with a leaping alertness in his eyes, Cecile behind armor, Myra pathetically struggling for strength to get her through the meal, Jacqueline ignoring animosity, watching me.

Jean, too, watched me, his eyes pulled in, as I feverishly, heedlessly talked about anything—Bill’s improvement, the necessity for guarding him, Toby. Muscles in the back of my neck tightened until they were rigid and aching. No one else said much. Over my own voice there was mostly that eternal chuckle and roar of the wilderness, so constant, so insistent in its varied rhythms that it was an almost intolerable drumbeat. If I let myself listen to that thrum I could break, too, break now at this table where people ate wood-broiled steaks and there was that waiting, growing intentness.

I spoke some of that thought aloud. “Here we are, eating steaks—good steaks. Last night one of us died. We’re getting like people in London. We sit at our tables and wait.”