The chuckling fingers (8 page)

She said, “Oh,” retreating, closing up, her face becoming a mask from which the eyes stared at me blankly. Then after a long time and as if the movement hurt she looked down at the dresser top.

She said, “Your pink robe,” and with one quick gesture caught up the scissors and ran to my room where she held the scissors against the slashed fabric, her hands shaking so the scissors shivered against the pink. There couldn’t be any doubt; the fuzz in the scissors was from my robe.

She dropped robe and scissors both, turning to me weakly, helplessly.

“Ann, I can’t remember. Do you think I’ve—gone insane?” Admitting at last the dark doubt Bill had held against her.

Suffocation in my throat again, not fear this time, but tight, swelling anger. My hands took her shoulders, shaking her.

“Get your senses back! You know you didn’t cut up that robe! You didn’t tie the wire across the path or wreck the boat! Someone is—”

Stark dread loosened from her face. She gasped, “I do know. I know I didn’t. It’s only sometimes—”

When my hold of her loosened she sank until she sat upon the bed, but her eyes stayed on my face. “It’s been so awful,” she said tonelessly. “I haven’t known what to do.” All the defenses, all the evasions she’d kept against me yesterday were gone now.

I commanded, “Begin at the beginning and tell me.”

She said in the same dull voice, “It began on our honeymoon. In Bermuda. Bill went to a suitcase to get a pair of white shoes. When he took them out they were like “—her hand gestured toward the robe—“that. As if someone had cut the leather in strips with a knife. Bill was—he was furious. He likes his clothes. He likes everything he owns.”

“So he jumped to the conclusion you’d ruined his shoes.”

“Oh no. He thought it was a joke, because he was married. He thought someone at the wedding had done it.”

Something on which I could pounce. Awareness rose—no use having her tell me things unless I could see through them to the motive and the perpetrator.

“Then he hadn’t looked at those shoes since he left Duluth.”

She shook her head. “They were with some clothes he’d brought just for Bermuda.”

“Anyone could have tampered with that suitcase. Go on.”

“The next was worse.” Still no emotion in the voice. “We were dressing for dinner. Bill went to the closet to get a suit, a gray tweed suit. It was one he’d worn, even there in Bermuda. It had just come back from the cleaner’s. It had big holes all over.”

“That must have happened at the cleaner’s.” Strength was getting back into me and a grimness that was something new for me in grimness. “Don’t tell me Bill didn’t—”

“He had the hotel valet in—all the hotel servants were Negroes. This one said he’d hung the suit in the closet that morning while we were out; he said the suit was all right then.”

“Lying. If Bill let it go at that—”

“The valet looked frightened, and Bill kept asking questions. He found the valet had his own dry-cleaning shop on the side. Bill talked to the other two men who worked there; they both swore the suit was all right when it left the shop. But they looked frightened, too, and Bill didn’t believe them. The hotel manager made them pay Bill half the price of the suit. Then the next afternoon—”

Her voice dragged slower. “I’d been so happy. Those two things had happened but they hadn’t really touched me. I was sitting at the dressing table putting polish on my nails. Bill sat by me, fooling with the bottles in my toilet kit, smelling the cold cream and saying it was lard and perfume, smelling the nail polish and saying it was varnish. Then he took out another bottle and held it to his nose, and his face got—queer. He asked, ‘What’s in this one?’ and I couldn’t even remember seeing the bottle before. He pulled out his handkerchief and tipped the bottle so a little of the clear liquid ran out, and the handkerchief turned brown, and most of it disappeared.”

I said, “Jacqui,” and my voice had become clipped and mechanical too. “Acid. Someone must have put that bottle in the kit before you left. like the shoes.”

“But the suit—how did the acid get on the suit? Bill had been wearing it.”

“You know you didn’t put acid on any suit!”

“I said so, over and over, but Bill stayed white and—away from me. He went out of the hotel - he was gone for hours. When he came back he put his arms around me, asking if he’d done anything to hurt me or make me dislike him. He said I mustn’t take—ways like that—to get even with him for anything he might have done. As if I were a child. And it wasn’t true. He’d been—I’d been so happy I sometimes thought I couldn’t be alive.”

Grief I couldn’t bear under her tonelessness. “There has to be an answer. Who did you know there? Who came into the room?”

“The valet. The chambermaid. The bellboys. Some people we knew casually. After a few days Bill got almost all right again. He said he believed me—he said it must have been a trick or an accident. But when we left he gave that money back to the valet. Without saying anything, as if it were a tip.”

“You’re certain no one from here was there. Fred or Phillips—”

Again the shaking head.

Cold air swept at me. “One other person was there. Bill.”

That roused her. “Oh no. It wasn’t Bill. If you’d seen him you’d know.”

I had seen him—when we found the wire across the path, when he looked at the motorboat. No, he hadn’t looked as if he were seeing his own handiwork. He’d been angry, bewildered, hurt, as if someone he loved were torturing him.

“Besides,” she went on forlornly, “why would he want to?”

“No,” I repeated. “Why would he marry you just to—? It wouldn’t be sane. And Bill is sane. As sane as you are.” I caught her hands. “Anyway, it’s over. You and Toby are—”

She interrupted. “But it isn’t over. That’s what I’ve begun to feel. Ann, I have the oddest feeling, as if—”

She was looking at me steadily, and, as so often in our lives, I got an emotion by direct contact. It swept over me, overwhelming; I felt as I had yesterday when we drove in through the pines, as if I were in a shadowed forest. Only now the dark shapes bore no leaves; they were the strange, incomprehensible forms of happening and circumstance. I felt that same waiting, as if somewhere in that dark forest something waited for the pounce, as if soon a twig would snap under the poised foot… .

Then the emotion broke, because Jacqueline was talking again, quickly, as if she wanted to get the rest poured out.

“That’s all until we got here to the Fingers. Then—”

“Wait.” I couldn’t make the transition that fast. “You mean nothing happened on the boat coming back? And you spent a week at Myra’s in Duluth—”

“Nothing happened there.”

“Did you or Bill tell about the incidents when you got back?”

“Bill jumped on Fred, wanting to know if he had been responsible. On Jean, too, and Phillips and Bradley Auden. But on Fred the most.”

“I take it no one admitted anything.”

“That’s what seemed to start Fred being difficult. He said to me afterward, ‘Maybe you think you’ll get somewhere setting Dad against me but you’ll find out.’ He’d been having other arguments with Bill too. Bill wouldn’t let him have a car, because he’d had an accident with one a year ago and hurt a little boy.”

She looked down at her hands linked with mine.

“The next one was the first week end we were here at the Fingers—the week end of June fifteenth. Fred hadn’t come up from Minneapolis yet. Myra drove to Duluth that week end, and Octavia and Phillips went with her. Bill, Toby and I were alone here. Saturday night we went to bed about eleven o’clock. We were all in the room Bill has now, with Toby’s crib in the corner. Bill made a joke and locked the bedroom door. About two o’clock he woke me up. The room was full of smoke. I got Toby, and Bill pulled the door open. When we got out in the hall there was no smoke there. Bill ran downstairs for pails, and we filled them in the bathroom and came back and switched on the light. We’d been so bewildered we hadn’t even thought of the light. When we could see we found it was the bed that was burning—the mattress. Bill got it out right away—it was only a small fire for so much smoke. I’ll never forget. Bill stood, with the pails in his hands, staring at the bed and the smoke still in the room. He said, ‘There’s no one here but us.’ It sounded as if he were fighting for his life. And I felt as if I— didn’t even want to fight.”

She’d been bewildered and lost; she was that again, even remembering.

I said swiftly, my mind foraging, “That fire must have been set before the others left.”

“They’d left Saturday noon. The fire was more than twelve hours later. If there’d been fire we’d have smelled it when we went to bed.”

“Lottie.”

“She was at the resort.”

“The resort or Auden, if it comes to that. Anyone could have come in—”

“The bedroom door was still locked. Bill looked for marks of ladders under the windows or for signs in the logs if anyone had climbed. There wasn’t anything.”

“But it must have started somehow.”

“Bill found two partly burned matchsticks under the bed. He said, ‘And maybe they came from pulpwood I cut.’”

I sat helpless, wanting to see an answer harder than anything I’d ever wanted in my whole life but unable to see any light.

Jacqueline twisted her hands from mine. She said, low, “It is possible, isn’t it, for people not to know what they do? I keep thinking, suppose I should hurt Toby “

Suddenly she’d twisted around; she had my robe and the scissors in her hands; she cried, “Look, Ann—look, I could take your robe like this and push the point of the scissors through! Look, it cuts so easily, as if I had a razor blade!”

At once and on instinct I slapped the scissors out of her hands, grabbing them up, tearing out that telltale wisp, rolling it between forefinger and thumb until it was a characterless pellet, throwing it.

“That’s enough! Your door was open last night—anyone could have walked in to take your scissors!”

But her voice was hysterically over mine. “I could have done the other things, too, couldn’t I? I could have wrecked the motorcycle Fred got and I could have cut up Myra’s dress and Phillips Heaton’s pajamas and Octavia’s magazine she hadn’t read. Everyone’s had something done, except me. I—”

I shook her to break it. “Listen! We’re getting away from here! You’re leaving with me today—you and Toby! We’re going to Minneapolis! Can’t you understand? There won’t be any more of this!”

As quickly as it had begun her hysteria stopped; she was quiet in my hands, her eyes quiet but defensive, wary.

“Oh no. I won’t do that. I knew you’d say that if you knew. That was why I didn’t want you to come or know.”

“But you’ve got to leave. Don’t you see? When you’re gone and things still happen—”

“No.” Just the one determined syllable.

“Bill talked to me last night. He asked if there ‘d been any insanity in our family. You don’t have to take that. You don’t have to care what he thinks… .”

I was strained forward, shaken with the urgency of my pleading, but she looked coolly back at me, completely in control of herself now.

“That’s your mistake, Ann. I do care. Really I know I didn’t do any of those things. It isn’t often I lose my head. I’ll never lose it again. And I’m glad now that you’re here. You can help find the answer.”

She believed the explanation would have to come and that when it did she and Bill would be back in the happiness they’d lost.

* * *

She seemed to have opened some reservoir of strength; finally and wearily I had to acknowledge temporary defeat. We went down to a subdued and worried Myra who obviously knew of the struggle and its outcome—we’d been talking loudly enough.

“Over to Ella’s people eat their breakfast before it’s noon.” Lottie slammed bowls of chilled blueberries before us.

Myra took her place behind the coffee urn. “Toby got too hungry to wait. She ate and went to the resort with Bill. Jean’s going out on one of the boats with Mark this morning, and Bill wanted to see them before they left.”

When Lottie had stumped back to the kitchen she made a direct plea. “Jacqui, you must go with Ann. You can’t lose.”

There was almost a quarrel, Myra insistent after she’d learned about my bathrobe, Jacqueline adamant. At last Myra said, “But it isn’t a question of whether you want to go. Bill agrees you should.”

Jacqueline sat a moment longer, her face stiffening, then she stood up from her chair to run blindly, her hands over her face, toward the stairs.

“No, wait!” Myra rose to halt me as I started after. “Let her think it over by herself, with no one urging her.”

* * *

And so it came about that I walked out of the house by myself.

Had there ever been a morning when trouble was so incongruous? Sun lay over everything—the grass, the rocks, the trees, the flat blue water, in an actual golden shimmer; the air was like cold water when you’re thirsty; the forest and water sounds were the large, resonant, thrumming hums of bull fiddles.

I walked diagonally across the drive and the side lawn toward the Fingers. I thought I’d boost myself to the bend of the Thumb and sit looking out over the shoreless wide horizon, trying to get some perspective on what had happened.

But someone else was at the Fingers, someone who seemed to be lying on his back, looking upward; a man’s feet in scuffed brown oxfords protruded beyond the base of the Thumb. I rounded the rock to see who it was.

Fred Heaton lay there, his shoulders and head propped against the base of the middle Finger, something bulky and white around his neck.

I said, “Hello, Fred,” and then my hands reached drunkenly sideward for support. The harsh sharp edges of the rock came under them, real and cutting, but there was no reality in what I looked at.

Fred’s face was swollen and bruised, his eyes open and blank. Down the front of his bright blue-and-green-plaid flannel shirt ran a thick stain like the stain of a red fountain that had faintly trickled and stopped and dried.

NOTHING HAPPENED inside me; it was as if a switch had turned, shutting off thought and emotion. I had Fred’s shoulder in my hand, shaking it.