The chuckling fingers (7 page)

“My family is so sane,” I said, “Jacqueline is so sane—”

I couldn’t think of any comparison. “There’s never been any but the most levelheaded people in our family from the days of Magna Charta on. We—”

“Ann, I believe that’s true. Of course. I feel it’s true—”

What I said might have been manna out of heaven. He put his arms around me, hugging me, all the hard strength of his body tight against mine.

Behind us a gasp. Myra, with long white braids hanging down the shoulders of a dark robe. She asked in stupefaction, “Bill— Ann—I heard your voices upstairs—what’s—?”

Before I could pull myself free Bill was already answering her.

“Jacqueline. I’m sure now she isn’t responsible for what’s been happening. I’m going to get to the bottom of this business.” He was like a projectile ready to be loosed.

“But that’s what I’ve been telling you all along.” Relief loosened Myra’s face. She came closer to shake Bill’s arm. “That’s what we’ve got to start from—the belief that Jacqueline isn’t responsible.”

“All right,” he said. “You get any new explanation today?”

She spread her hands. “How could I? You know I don’t—”

My fury hadn’t died. “I don’t suppose it’s entered your heads that Fred might be responsible. He’s only too obviously jealous.”

“Fred?” Bill asked as if he couldn’t believe his ears, and his stare grew hard. “Look, Ann, Fred may be jealous, but there’s no small meanness in him. He’s no more capable of playing tricks to put Jacqueline in a bad light—”

At that reminder that Jacqueline had somehow been made to look queer I boiled again. No wonder she’d cried out when I’d used the word
insane
that afternoon.

“Jacqueline isn’t staying here to be put in any bad light,” I said through my teeth. “I’m taking her home to Minneapolis now. This minute. Even if we have to borrow your car. We’re leaving!”

Every muscle in Bill leaped to battle. “I won’t have my wife taken ” But then he just looked at me, his body relaxing.

“Of course, that’s the thing to do. Take Toby and Jacqueline away. Not tonight—they’re asleep. I’ll drive you in to Duluth tomorrow.”

Abruptly he jerked his head back and walked off the porch.

* * *

Left together, Myra and I stood watching his shadow recede swiftly toward the lake. The first sound was Myra’s long exhalation of breath. Her arm came along my back.

“Ann, you’re like new hope. Why didn’t I think of that before? When Jacqueline’s gone and things still happen that will be proof she has no connection with them.”

I was reluctant to wait until tomorrow but I saw reason in Bill’s decision; Jacqueline had been awfully tired.

“Myra,” I asked, “what happened before I came?”

She answered hesitantly, “I think perhaps Jacqueline should tell you… . There’ve just been some tricks that will turn out to be nothing but silly malice—I’m sure they will. And don’t think too badly of Bill. A girl who was working in his office went insane, and it’s made him sensitive about—queerness. It’s going to be terrible to have Toby and Jacqueline gone, but do as you say. It must be done for safety.”

No one had to beg me.

We went together back toward the beds from which we’d risen. At the head of the stairs Myra’s door was open on her lighted room, and the thin line of light still showed from Octavia’s room.

Myra gave a small exclamation, walking forward to her sister’s door.

“I almost forgot.” She turned a key which was outside the lock. “Octavia sometimes walks in her sleep. She likes to have me lock her in. Even out here where we’re alone it wouldn’t be safe for her outside her room, with the current and the sharp rocks along the shore.”

She came into my room with me to tuck me in. It was while I was sliding my feet out of my slippers that I noticed my window was closed and turned to open it. That window gave on the Fingers and the east lawn. I paused a second, looking out through the pearly night to the vague loom of those five tall rocks. As I did so I became aware again of the reach and pound of the lake, the brushing clash of the pine tops, the ceaseless low chuckle of the river underground. In this light the rocks were distant, curtained as if by veils …

In that vague distance something moved, something as dark as the rocks but smaller.

Suffocation in my throat, my body stiffening—how quick fear was to rise!

“Myra!” I whispered. “Look!”

She was beside me, her eyes following where my finger pointed. Unmistakably I saw again that curiously elongated form moving, merging with the Fingers.

Myra said, “Why, there is someone!” And in her voice, too, was quick fear of the thing that walks unknown in the night. But then she gave a little gasping laugh.

“It’s Bill. We know he’s walking around somewhere.”

Slowly the tautness eased out of my body. No sight of moving came again, but of course she was right—it had to be Bill.

“You don’t know how safe things are up here.” Myra was quickly over her first start, reassuring me maternally. “Into bed with you, youngster.” She propelled me firmly to that haven, doing a thorough job of the tucking in, even pulling up the extra blanket from the foot.

“Did I ever tell you I
like
brown grown-up tomboys?” she asked lightly. “But I’m getting back in my own bed before you have me seeing witches sail the sky on broomsticks.”

Even after that I stayed long awake; the uneasiness I’d felt at seeing that dark figure wouldn’t entirely die. It seemed an omen… . And I had plenty else to think about, little of it pleasant.

Of one thing I was certain. The next night Jacqueline and Toby and I would not be sleeping in this house.

* * *

Somehow on that last comforting thought I fell asleep, to wake only hours later with the quick start you have at a sudden unexpected sound or movement in the night.

Was it sound, or was it movement?

As I lay waiting for realization it seemed more a movement than a sound. As if my bed had moved.

I asked, “Jacqui, do you want me?” this time not frightened. The room was dark now, completely dark. No moonlight; nothing around, except the wilderness sounds.

Then again the faint waft of motion.

“I’M AWAKE, Jacqui,” I said again. “What is it?”

Again I thought something moved, retreating. I was by that time sitting up, scrambling to my feet, drawn toward that retreating motion. Asking again, “Jacqui, what—”

Then it seemed the motion was gone.

I groped toward the door and the light switch. My room, as Bill’s had, sprang into reality. Empty, except for me. The door beside me two inches from being closed.

Had Myra left it that way when she went after tucking me in?

I’d wakened so quickly I was still partly bemused, unsure. I looked in the closet, behind the chair. Had I even been certain the bed moved? Or had I been having a nightmare—result of the state of mind in which I’d gone to bed? Why had I waked thinking it was Jacqueline in the room?

I could quickly find out if she had been.

Without further thought, slipperless, hugging my arms across my chest against the cold, I hurried down the hall where no lines of light showed now. Jacqueline’s door was ajar as mine had been, but moonlight lay clear on the floor there. In the intense hush under the wilderness sounds two near sounds of breathing were clearly audible—Toby’s silken and slight, the inhalations quick and distinct, the exhalations slower, quieter. At my left Jacqueline’s breathing was almost like a faint sigh. Soundlessly I moved to bend above her.

She lay on her side, cheek down to the pillow, one arm flung up around her dark tumbled hair, as if she’d cried herself to sleep. I caught the scent of spice.

I whispered, “Jacqui.”

Surely she was asleep; she couldn’t counterfeit that relaxed flow of breath.

As soundlessly as I’d come I went back to the bright rectangle that flung out into the blackness of the hall from my room. I called myself, going back, all the kinds of idiot there are. Once I had thought for them, I realized the maple planks were ice under my feet, and my skin was so contracted by cold it had difficulty holding my bones.

I shut my door tight, wishing it had a key, and then in surprise seeing it did have one. I turned it. Now if I went on hearing and feeling things I’d be able to give myself the lie. Then, with my fingers on the light switch, I halted.

Moonlight in Jacqueline’s room, none in mine … I could see why. The pink-and-blue chintz curtains over the windows here were pulled snugly close.

Myra hadn’t pulled those curtains after she tucked me in—the certainty was in my mind at one leap. Who had? Could she have thought the moonlight would make me wakeful and come back? What other reason could there be for closing them?

The room looked otherwise untouched. Certainly no one was in it now. My dresses hung in the shallow closet. The dresser drawers were closed—I’d have surely heard a drawer opening. Along the foot of the bed lay my pink robe… .

My teeth settled together, all ready to chatter. In one motion I turned the light switch and dived through the quick dark for the bed. From there I reached to pull the nearest of the curtains back so a little moonlight would come in. Myra, I thought, must have come back to pull those curtains—perhaps long before I waked. Then the movement had stayed in my mind and finally roused me.

Only—what had made me think it was Jacqueline in the room? Relaxing into my pillow, I shut my eyes, wakening my ears, my nose, trying to recapture that intangible message which approached, then eluded me. Almost as if—yes, almost as if there were still in the room some faint echo of spice.

What of that? Jacqueline had helped me unpack; reasonable the scent might linger. She might have slept here, even, previously. On that I sent myself to sleep.

So it wasn’t until I woke again to the clear bright light of day —realizing sleepily that, with all the alarums and excursions of the night, I’d slept late and that I must hurry, because today I was taking Jacqueline away, and she didn’t even know yet— that I reached rather blindly for my robe at the foot of the bed, and as it came toward me knew even before I looked at it that something was wrong. Then I sat stupidly staring.

The thing was in ribbons. Slashed. All that lovely salmon-pink woolly fabric cut as if with a razor—again and again, so that when I held it up the cut bands eddied out like pennants.

* * *

I threw on clothes, in my mind the most stumbling, incoherent thoughts I’d ever had in my life. Wanton, useless destruction. Yesterday that boat, today my robe. And the person who’d done it had been in my room as I slept, ripping and slashing.

That dark moving figure I’d seen near the Fingers—suppose that wasn’t Bill? Suppose No, that must have been Bill.

The robe lay where I’d dropped it on the bed, a pink puddle among the blue tufts of the candlewick spread. The questions to ask were the reasonable questions. Who had been in my room, and why? I hadn’t been injured; I hadn’t been touched. Quickly I fingered over my clothes in the closet, the dresser. Nothing else had apparently been touched. Why cut that robe?

It must mean something. What? A warning to leave? But I was leaving… .

Bill and Myra knew, but others didn’t. Fred didn’t—Fred, who might certainly want Toby and Jacqueline gone.

I tried as I zipped on a sweater to think of Fred up to this subtle, menacing trick. Fred was a horned bull, determined but clumsy and blundering. Phillips might be subtle… .

Suddenly I didn’t even want to know the answer. I just wanted to get away, taking Jacqueline and Toby with me. As I sped down the hall the morning chill seemed a part of some unwarming chill inside me. Octavia’s door again was closed, but both Myra’s and Bill’s were open on empty, tumbled beds. In the bathroom the shower was running, an odd, ordinary sound.

Jacqueline’s door, too, was open, the room empty, the blankets tucked around the hollows in the beds.

“Jacqui!” I called as if I expected no answer, but her voice came back from the bathroom.

“Ann? I’ll be right out.”

I took a deep breath, settling myself. No use going into a panic; we’d soon be out of the way. I called again, casual this time.

“Where’s Toby?”

“Didn’t she come in to you? She started for your room.”

At the head of the stairs I called, “You down there, Toby?”

“I eat now!” came instantly and loudly.

“She’s waiting breakfast for you.” Myra’s voice came up too. “Don’t be long.”

Smell of frying sausages and buckwheat cakes, sound of Toby’s running feet. Again I felt dissociated. That was the way the world was; it couldn’t be that other way, with Bill asking about insanity, and my bathrobe slashed.

But it was the other way.

Jacqueline was still in the shower. Impatiently I went about her room, pulling up the blankets on the beds, hanging up Toby’s sleeper, straightening the dresser top.

In the mirror, strangely, appeared my face. It might have been the face of a stranger’s ghost—the ghost of a tall girl, thin and brown, staring at nothing out of brown eyes, her one hand hovering over the dresser top.

Then slowly I looked down again to what I’d seen. Jacqueline’s manicure scissors. Caught where the blades joined was a tiny tuft of salmon-pink silky wool.

* * *

Jacqueline’s voice behind me. “Admiring yourself, darling?”

She stood smiling at me through the glass, her hair the color of walnut wood sparked with light, her brown-flecked green eyes morning fresh, her blue robe that was the twin of my pink one snugly belted around her waist. Affectionately she brushed her cheek against my shoulder.

She must have felt then that I was trembling.

“Ann! What’s the matter?”

I swallowed hard, fighting.
“Your family all right”
—it was a whisper in my ears to which I couldn’t listen.

“Look.” The word came harshly, because what I wanted to do was traitorous—I wanted to tear out that wisp of silky wool and roll it in a ball and not tell her, ever, about my robe. “Last night while I was asleep someone came in my room and cut my bathrobe to ribbons.”