The chuckling fingers (34 page)

Pulling the belt tight on my roughly dried polo coat, I swung myself around again. Swiftly I crossed to the bed, taking the extra blanket from the foot, pulling back the covers. The blanket I shook out and rolled the long way, placing a diagonal for legs, a curve, then another diagonal. The end of the blanket lay on the pillow. My brown sweater must go over that for hair. I pulled the covers up, tucking them loosely in around the blanket until the similarity grew strong; that blanket might very easily be my body.

I went then to the closet for my sweater, pulled open the door. My mouth opened, but a hand was over it, a rigid arm along my back. I didn’t even fight. Was my heart stopped? I couldn’t move.

That was Jean Nobbelin in my closet, his arm grasping me, his hand over my mouth, his fierce dark grimace before my eyes.

* * *

I don’t think I fainted. I just stood there with shock buzzing through my body.

And then when nothing else happened a slow aching. I waited, and still nothing happened.

My eyes came alive again at last enough to see the movement on his face— his lips moving rapidly but soundlessly. Incomprehensible movements.

Then the lips formed a word I’d seemed to see before—

“Idiot!”

As if that were a key, I could recognize them all.

“Don’t yell, don’t yell”
were the almost soundless words on the lips. “You goof, did you think I’d let you do this alone? Did you think I couldn’t see what you were up to?”

I did collapse then, sagging down against him. The hand went off my mouth.

“Of all the harebrained ideas!” The whisper was in my ear.

“I could have shaken the everlasting—” Then a change.

“Okay, where do we go from here?”

No strength to lift my words to a whisper. “You went with the others—”

“I got back. In here while you were in the bathroom.” The black eyes were looking at the bed then, and his two hands squeezed, one at each side of my waist. “So you did know enough not to get in that bed.”

My paralysis had been so great I’d forgotten the bed. I quickened to what I still had to do, pulling loose from him to get a soft brown sweater from its hanger. Back at the bed I arranged it around the top of the blanket to give a rough semblance of hair.

“Hide. I’ve had the light on too long,” I whispered. He flattened himself against the wall while I pulled the curtains back and the window open, while I stretched in the clear light of the window as if I yawned for bed. A bullet might come through that window… .

But none did. I padded across the room to click off the light, kicked the slippers from my stockinged feet at the bedside, lay creakily down.

The room was in a dark gray haze—oxford gray. No moon— more a reflected lake haze. Through it I could just see outlines—the footboard of the bed, the dresser against the inside wall, the chair to the right of the bed, and beyond the window Jean’s bulk moving soundlessly toward me.

Slowly, against the creak of the spring, I got myself out of the bed.

He was whispering but so inaudibly I couldn’t at first catch it.

“I’ve got my shoes off too. Look, I’ll get on the other side of the bed, behind that chair. The curtains won’t hide you. We’ll have to pull the dresser out so you can get behind that.”

He’d taken command, and I saw the wisdom of his generalship. If he were behind the chair and I behind the dresser, that would put one of us on each side of the bed.

I suppressed a moan. “I didn’t even think,” I whispered. “Anyone could have walked on either side of the bed. If I’d been here alone and on the wrong side—”

The bones of my right hand almost cracked under his answer.

Noiselessly we moved on the dresser, which must be soundlessly raised, soundlessly moved forward, soundlessly lowered to the floor again. When the operation was completed I was dripping and weak, yet the dresser hadn’t been heavy. It had creaked but no more than a bed might.

“Now you stay here behind this dresser.” He thrust something long, smooth and iron-cold into my hands. “That’s the stove poker from my cabin. I grabbed it before I started back.”

“What’ll you have?”

“What would you have had if I hadn’t come?”

Again I saw how reckless my planning had been. But I hadn’t really planned; the thing had just grown. He gave my shoulder a last squeeze and moved away, his dark bulk receding so inaudibly it was uncanny.

The chintz-covered chair swallowed him, and then in the thick grayness of the room there was neither near sound nor near movement, except for the slight flow of my own breath. But, as always when the near sounds stopped, the loud, boisterous roar outside became immediate—the lake lashing against its rock rim, the wind rushing, with its sound of silken tearing, through the trees, the underground river sounding its endless gurgling mirth.

No change in that wilderness sound; it had inflections but no cadences; it softened and loudened but it was always the same sound, the same organ swell, diminishing to a fall of wind, increasing to its rise. An arrogant sound forever untamed. No words in it, but it urged. “Death waits,” it said, “but death always waits… .”

Wasn’t it the wilderness that was making me do what I did now? Would I ever in any civilized place have had the courage to put myself as bait in a trap?

I thought of that unknown person I sought, somewhere outside this room in the night, and it seemed to me I could hear the urging of the wilderness in his ears too. “Go now,” it could say. “Live your lusty life, take what you want in the killing; save yourself by killing. Yours isn’t the weak way, the way of law; yours is the wild way. Take, get, kill… .”

I stirred to get away from that terrible counsel, fastening my thoughts instead to the room and the peril in which I stood. Jean was there, but if the murderer came he would come with a gun. If he dared to turn on the light as he came in …

The blanket roll in the bed was a ruse for darkness only. If the light went on I had a poker, Jean nothing but his bare hands.

I shifted my weight to the other stockinged foot, and then my heart did stop.

The door was opening.

No sound, but the black wedge of wood moving into the deep gray dark. The door closing softly, and there were three in the room. Two soundless, crouching, and one moving softly, hesitantly forward… .

The scent of spice.

Substance seemed to fall from my body, leaving it fleshless. The figure moved until it bent above the pillow,

“Ann, I’ve come to stay with you,” Jacqueline whispered.

From behind the chair a dark movement.

She must have touched the sweater then and known. She whirled. “Ann! Where are you?” A whisper still but beseeching.

Substance closed down on me again. Jean was across the bed from Jacqueline, waiting. I came out from behind the dresser.

“Here.”

“You’re — Of course! I should have known.”

“Sh-sh-sh!” I said. She was whispering a little too loudly in her relief.

She caught at me. “I was frightened to death for you, waiting until I thought it was safe to come.” She saw Jean then, starting.

“Ann, who’s—?”

“Jean.”

She gave a gasping, suppressed laugh. “It’s a convention. Oh, Ann, I’m glad it is!”

Jean had gotten around the bed. “Get behind that dresser. Both of you. Jacqui, are you sure you weren’t heard or seen?”

“I was as quiet as a—termite.”

“If anyone was on the stairs Well, if it’s ruined it’s ruined. Anyway, you whisper too loud. Get back there.”

He stationed us and was gone again.

Once more the inside quiet settled down, the hush under the wide, muted roar. Cold, but I stood doubly warmed. Once more no sound except the breathing, doubled now. Sometimes I thought I even caught the rhythm of Jean’s breathing from across the room.

Jacqueline and I huddled side by side, easing our backs against the wall from the slow strain of standing. Minutes fell into the hush that was so deep you listened for the drop — minutes that lengthened like weighted globules as they drifted down. Minds waited; muscles waited; nerves waited for the sound and movement that did not come. The hush thickened; the deep gray of the room thickened; the roar, too, thickened, as if it might be growing closer, as if the wilderness itself might be creeping in upon us, the lake advancing on its side, the ranks of the forest advancing one pace and then another.

At first I had heard every creak and settle of the log walls and the heavy floors, but as the night wore on I no longer heard those sounds; I seemed to exist in a coma in which there were no sounds except that urgent bell of the wilderness roar. Three people waiting in a trap, listening to that bell… .

But yet there was another presence too. One that waited outside as we waited inside. Waited, debating, pulled and pushed, wondering if I were really enough of a menace so it must kill again. Wondering and listening to that urgent bell.

It was almost as if I had joined tongue to the wilderness, urging that outside inimical force to enter here… .

My signal was the stopping of Jacqueline’s breath.

It had come.

The door. That dark wedge at the door. Increasing. A dark form that was inside, a form that seemed to loom, gigantic in shadow. like a shadow it moved, inaudible, detaching itself from the door. Then it paused. Poised, still, listening.

A long exhalation of breath—mine. I couldn’t stop it. As if I knew it was for that the dark form listened. I breathed in as deeply.

The shadow moved again, became a part of the footboard of the bed, then detached itself from that, too, moving like a black wraith up the side of the bed.

Our side.

The shadow bent.

Jacqueline threw herself forward against a loud, exploding crackle. I was moving quickly too. Something fell with a sharp clatter. The shadow whirled just as Jacqueline and I struck it, carrying it back upon the bed.

In that next confusion of desperate struggle there was again no sound except the labored, panting breaths. Something was in my hand and against my face like unclean clinging fur. We seemed to be, not four people writhing and struggling, but twelve.

“Get the gun!” That must have been Jacqueline, gasping.

Jean—“I’ve got it.”

A long sweeping movement. Impact.

An arm I had been struggling to hold down became still.

“That’s got it”—Jean. Harsh. Quick. “Get on the light.”

I ran. The switch came under my hand. The room burst into light—blinding light in which my eyes swam black, in which there grew the reality of a dresser, a chair, a bed, in which Jean and Jacqueline bent over a black velvet cape with a hood, thrown, face downward, over the tumbled bed.

As I moved forward Jean pulled the hood away from Myra Sallishaw’s head.

THERE WAS BLOOD above Myra’s temple and a blue bruise —on the head that was so delicate it might have been carved by Lalique.

“She came to help. Worn out as she was, she came to help. She must have.” I was at the bed, holding to the footboard.

Jean pointed. “That’s Bill’s automatic.”

Beside the limp hand from which it had been wrested lay what looked like a thin revolver. And in the bedspread over the rolled blanket, just about where my heart would have been if I’d been under that bedspread instead of the blanket, was an irregularly round hole, its edges blackened and singed.

* * *

“Myra!”
Jacqueline said. “But it can’t be Myra who’s been doing this murdering!” She was staring at the figure on the bed, bemused and lost. “She’s been so good to me and she loves Toby… . She’s been so completely wrecked since Phillips was killed. So frail and pitiful “

Jean had the thin wrist in his hand. “I guess we don’t have to tie her up. She’s out. Good and out. If I’d known who it was I wouldn’t have hit so hard. I guess we better get Doctor Rush.”

Disconnected thoughts were running through my head; easy to think of things after guilt is shown.

Myra’s hair was white. The cape would be useful to hide white hair.

Myra had been quick to champion Jacqueline. But she’d been as quick in disbelief when anyone else was suspected—Ed Corvo or Mark or Cecile.

She’d said, “Imagine his keeping those!” when I found the travel folders in Fred’s suitcase. I hadn’t thought of those words from that day to this, but somehow they drifted up now as I stood looking at that hole in the bedspread.

The cape and the gun had been so successfully hidden. No one would know hiding places here better than Myra, who’d lived here or near here most of her life.

Myra, so adroit …

Into the confounded and shocked quiet in which the three of us looked down at her came that impervious, elemental roar through which- the chuckle threaded.

I remembered that the gray wolf of the forest has some of the manners of the aristocrat too.

* * *

Myra was still unconscious when Aakonen came with Dr Rush. Jean had done the telephoning in a sudden wild triumph. He’d called Auden, too, and the resort. Jacqueline had had to hold her hand over the mouthpiece to keep him from calling the hospital at that hour.

“Bill can know in the morning. He can’t be waked up.”

Ed Corvo was there first, an overcoat over his pajamas. He’d stopped, he said, to yell at Cecile and Mark. Bradley, Carol, Mark, Cecile, Lottie, Ella—all were there in various stages of dress and undress, circling the bed, while Dr Rush worked over Myra.

He grunted at Jean, “You’re lucky you didn’t hit any harder.”

Jean glared at me. “My foot hit the poker on the floor. A heck of a lot of good it did giving
you
a poker.”

I’d completely forgotten the poker; that must have been what fell with that sharp clatter.

Jacqueline was helping Dr Rush, bending above the bed as Myra opened her eyes.

So the first words Myra said, in a faint whisper, were, “Jacqueline. What are you doing here? I can’t kill you. That would ruin everything.”

* * *

She must have thought she still bent above the bed, a bed on which somehow Jacqueline lay instead of me.