The chuckling fingers (35 page)

Then the still-wondering eyes traveled to Dr Rush, to all the eyes fastened in judgment upon her. She came back to full consciousness instantly, struggling to rise.

She said with an echo of old crispness, “I’m Myra Heaton. What’s been happening? I’ve been attacked. It must have been—”

“It’s no good, Mrs Sallishaw,” Aakonen told her. “You were seen by three people—Mr Nobbelin and Miss Gay and Mrs Heaton—coming into this room. You fired at the blanket roll which was in the bed. You were wearing the cape. Mr Bill Heaton’s automatic—with a silencer on it—was in your hand.”

“Mr Nobbelin and Miss Gay and Jacqueline,” she repeated. “Will you believe them, Mr Aakonen? They’d do anything to make Jacqueline safe. It’s a trick they’ve worked out.”

As she said it she was fumbling in the bed from which Jean had long since taken the automatic. Aakonen moved forward to stand beside Dr Rush, his hand on a hip holster. Her eyes raised to that hand, got no farther.

Aakonen said patiently, “You don’t understand, Mrs Sallishaw. I am arresting you for the murders of Fred and Phillips Heaton and for the attempted murder of Mr Bill Heaton. You gave yourself away in the hearing of everyone present.”

He told her what she’d said to Jacqueline as she was recovering consciousness.

She sat in the bed, humanity flattening out of her face, leaving it completely brittle.

She gave an ingratiating, rueful, bewildered laugh. “But I can’t be arrested for murder,” she said. “I’m Myra Heaton. Don’t you understand? I’m Myra Heaton.”

I saw in that instant how she really believed that true, how she had walked from her childhood in a charmed spell, believing herself somehow finer than other people, somehow invulnerable, somehow beyond law or guilt, because she was a Heaton—she belonged to the great of the earth. All her life as the trappings of Heaton prestige had fallen from her she had fought against recognizing or accepting the loss; in her own mind she had remained what she believed herself to be— the royal and unapproachable daughter of a royal American line.

* * *

Aakonen would have taken her then, but Jacqueline begged,

“Wait. I’d still be so glad if Myra, you didn’t have any reason for killing Bill—any reason for killing Fred. And your own brother—”

Myra smiled. “Of course. This is all silly. I must get to my lawyer in Duluth.” She was sitting quite straight in the bed now, her white hair down her back in a braid, her black bathrobe around her, the scarlet-lined folds of the cape I’d given Jacqueline still under her. Assurance was increasing.

She asked Aakonen coolly, “Have you forgotten I stood right here in this room with Ann when we both saw that figure near the Fingers where Fred was killed? I could hardly be in two places at once.”

“I saw only a shadow,” I said. “We agreed it might have been Mark coming home—”

“If it was about ten-thirty,” Mark agreed. “Fred didn’t die then anyway. He was alive when I got to the cabin.”

Jean put in quickly, “Don’t you see? That’s tricky, like the rest. She looked out and saw that figure, with Ann right beside her. She wove that in with what she was going to do. Aakonen, we found out about one of those other tricks—the fire in the bed. Ann found out. She—”

Myra stood up from the bed, smoothing her robe around her, standing erect, smiling; no sign about her now of the collapse she’d been displaying since the death of Phillips. The look on her face suggested that she enjoyed the flash of rapiers and was sure of holding her own.

“You found out how the fire in the bed might have started,” she told me coolly, “but you didn’t prove it did start that way or that I had any hand in it.”

“Wait,” Jean said. “This is all unimportant. It’s details. What’s important is the motive. Wait.” The whips of thought dented his face as he went slowly, ploddingly on.

“It was all planned to look as if Jacqueline was responsible. That’s the base. And Myra would have to benefit somehow.” His tone on the last words wore down fine and thin.

Myra took a step forward. There was a movement on her face as if she could have thrown herself at him, clawing, to keep him from reaching what he hunted.

Then Jean said lingeringly, “Lord! I should have seen it. Toby—Toby’s the key. With Fred dead and Bill dead, Jacqueline would inherit. With Jacqueline in prison or an asylum, the money would be held for Toby. Jacqueline said once that if she went to prison Ann would take Toby. But Ann couldn’t have if Myra had wanted her. Myra is Toby’s grandmother, and Ann would be only a second cousin. Myra’d have had Toby and the money too.”

* * *

It was Jacqueline who broke that silence, taking a step forward. “That would mean you hate me.”

Two women confronting each other.

Myra knew then, of course, that she was done. She seemed to grow as she stood there, her height rising; I remembered how gigantic her figure had seemed when it walked into that room in darkness.

“No, you can’t imagine that I’d hate you, could you?” The syllables fell clearly, tightly. “You who murdered my son. If it hadn’t been for you he’d have been in school yet—safe. He’d never have worked in that terrible mill. He was a Heaton. He’d never have had to work. Hasn’t a mother a right to avenge her only son? Everything I’ve done I planned on the day he died. I hated Bill and his luck. I planned for you to marry him. I planned that Fred should die and Bill should die and you should rot in jail and my son’s child should be mine, to take his place.”

* * *

I’d seen her standing through a long afternoon beside her son’s coffin. I’d heard what she’d said to Jacqueline: “He must have married you to leave me someone.”

This had been what she meant.

* * *

Myra moved backward in our silence, her face changing to a sort of triumph.

“You think I failed, don’t you? I didn’t. I’m proud of what I’ve done. Proud of the way I handled it. I had bad luck, but that wasn’t my fault. Everything I did was done perfectly.”

Jacqueline said, “Toby—you did at least love her.”

“I wanted the child to be a boy. But a girl did very well. I’d have married you to Bill even if you’d hated him. But you didn’t. That part was ridiculously easy. I knew I’d have to hurry after that before you had a brat of Bill’s.”

She’d thought even of that.

“It wasn’t hard to get Fred started hating his stepmother.

And after a little incident in his office Bill was extremely sensitive about insanity.”

She paused to look at us, her smile entirely like Phillips’ now.

“I thought it was a pity people couldn’t know how I worked those tricks. Some of them were easy. But the fire in the bed and the holes in Bill’s suit—those were harder. Yet so effective.”

“Not for good,” I reminded her. I had seen through one of those.

“Guns make removing people very simple.” It was still triumph. “All I had to do was wait for Fred near the boat-house stairs after I’d seen everyone safely to bed and the idea of a prowler was in Ann’s mind. I’d known from the moment I saw the cape that it was a godsend, to hide my hair in the dark. I wanted Fred to know me—I had the hood thrown back. He walked to the Fingers with me. He thought his cousin Myra was the only friend he had. He didn’t even see the gun.”

Jean said, “Thank God for that.”

“All I had to do was dress him up a little and hide the gun and the chalk. You’ll never know where. I took the cape back to Jacqueline’s closet and saw her scissors on the dresser. I thought then of her pomanders. But I was wrong to go to Ann’s room to cut up her robe—Ann’s nose is too sharp.”

She did look then for a moment full at the wreckage of her plans.

I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone in a room with eyes that looked at me as hers looked now.

She said, “Ann, you’re too sharp. You were finding out too much. I thought when I shunted you off on Jean Nobbelin— I thought no young man and woman thrown together in these wilds would spend much time thinking. I must say you surprised and disappointed me. It would have been much better if you’d been out of the way.”

“It isn’t because you didn’t try,” I told her grimly.

“Bill was a disappointment too—first when he wouldn’t believe Jacqueline had insanely killed Fred and then when he wouldn’t die. Of course I hadn’t taken sleeping powders that Saturday afternoon. I waited until Jacqueline fell asleep and Bill went out. The cape was so handy on the porch. But then I had to go for the gun—a misfortune, because Ann came home and Jacqueline ran out. I couldn’t, you see, kill Jacqueline. The plan didn’t allow it.”

I could see that our rushing Bill to the hospital had given her plenty of time to hide the cape and the gun and be safely in bed by the time Phillips and Jean looked for her. But she was no longer talking about Bill.

“Poor Phillips,” she was saying sweetly. “He’d been such a drag on me all my life, and when he came to my room and tried to start that new blackmail ” She shrugged.

Bradley Auden spoke then for the first time, quickly. “New blackmail?”

She stopped then, raising her eyebrows, smiling at him.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Myra, I’ve wondered ” Bradley turned slowly then to look at the rest of us. “I’ve been trying to watch. I was out near the barn one night when Jean came home and almost caught me. I had to run. If I’d been caught I’d certainly have been arrested.”

Exclamation from Jean. “That was you?”

“I fell and twisted my ankle. Next day at the funeral I had to fall deliberately so I’d have an excuse for the swelling and the limp.”

Myra paid no attention. “Poor Phillips, he was such a fool. No one in the house but Octavia and Jacqueline, Phillips and I, and I’d given Jacqueline sleeping tablets. I shunted Phillips off and went for the gun, wearing Jacqueline’s shoes—much too big for me. I shot Phillips in his own room. It was very simple to drive the car under his window and slide him through the window so he fell in the car.”

She looked at Aakonen and laughed. “My dear Sheriff, there was even some blood on Phillips’ floor. I washed it up and dropped a soiled shirt over it. You didn’t even find that out.”

I’d walked toward that shirt to pick it up. By the time Aakonen had searched the room the spot must have been dry.

* * *

She said regretfully, “I don’t deserve the misfortune I’ve had. Bill’s not dying—that was devastating. I did go to the hospital but I was too closely watched.”

That was when Aakonen’s face lit with a triumph that transcended hers. He hadn’t made the catch, but one obstinate, determined thing he had set out to do he had accomplished. He’d kept Bill alive.

“I had a right to do what I did,” Myra said stubbornly. “I was the head of this family. I’ve carried all the family burdens —Phillips and Octavia. I took care of them. I saw to it they both had good alibis for that first death.”

When she spoke Octavia’s name I became conscious of a sound that might have been going on for a long time behind me—a faint sobbing whimper.

Octavia, forgotten to the last. No one had even thought to summon her. Yet when I turned she was there, her hand over her mouth, her dark eyes, frightened and sick, on Myra. She must have heard the sounds of conflict in her room and lain wondering—or was it fearing and knowing?—what was going on, until the necessity to see had grown greater than timidity, and she had crept here to the others.

When I looked at her she spoke the first words I ever heard her say.

“What will I do?” It was still the frightened whimper of a child.

Yes, what would she do? What would become of her now? She who must have known—surely after Phillips’ death at least —that Myra was the killer. How had Myra kept her from revealing what she knew? Then I saw the simple weapon. Octavia had just spoken it aloud. With Myra gone, there ‘d be no bulwark for Octavia.

Then with a flash I saw that Octavia, too, might be Myra’s victim. Long years of being made to feel that her defect made her too loathsome for human sight. Jacqueline had said there were more ways of killing people than with guns.

While I stood seeing what Octavia’s life must have been someone else acted. And that person, out of all the people there, was Cecile Granat.

“Let’s you and I go back to your room,” she said, and her voice wasn’t kind—it was casual. She moved toward Octavia, taking her arm, and for a moment Cecile’s face was open. Somewhere back of it was the face of a fourteen-year-old girl who was already outcast and wild, and whose mother was just dead, and who hadn’t yet gotten that letter from Bill which she cherished so strongly she had hidden it in the woods to keep it from sight.

Cecile was also a Heaton. Heatons could be remarkably fine as well as remarkably evil.

Myra watched, indifferently, Cecile leading her sister out. She laughed a little. She said, “I’d like to see Cecile keeping it up as well as I have. I’ve always played my parts perfectly. Not one of you suspected me. When people started getting frightened and falling to pieces and wanting to run away no one wanted to run away or fell in pieces more convincingly than I did. You had to trap me to get me. It’s a pity girls from the best families couldn’t go on the stage when I was young. I should have been the greatest actress the world has ever known.”

* * *

Some days later another section of the puzzle was filled in. Aakonen got a letter with a sealed enclosure.

“To whom it may concern,” the note in that enclosure read. “In case I am unhappily and violently removed from this mortal sphere, it would be the part of good judgment for the investigators of my demise to look closely into the activities of my sister, Myra. Myra’s such an impulsive person. You see, she once had an affair with Bradley Auden—oh, quite a violent affair—and it continued quite some time after she married John Sallishaw. My father unfortunately took the wrong walk through the woods one night. It was Father’s intention to do a little talking to John Sallishaw the next day—dear Father did so hate having his own pleasures appropriated. So Myra, poor girl, had to burn Father up. I was drunk but not too drunk to see her tipping the lamp. I’d have gotten out by myself if I hadn’t tripped. Myra’s rewarded me to the best of her ability for my silence, but someday it may be handy to tell her that this note exists—who knows?” It was signed with a flourish, “Phillips Heaton.” I didn’t see Bradley Auden’s face when he heard of that note.