The chuckling fingers (9 page)

“Fred!” I said. “Fred!” Still feeling nothing but hearing the thread of crying, unbelieving horror that ran through my voice at the contact with his shoulder, cold and rigid, like chilled marble under the bright plaid flannel shirt sleeve.

“You can’t be—” I whispered, and then I was standing, running.

“Bill! Bill! Myra! Come help!” I ran by instinct, in darkness, seeing nothing; I think I must have shut my eyes, as if that way I could shut out what I’d seen. Sometime in that headlong plunge someone grabbed me, shook me, shouted at me.

” Ann ! What’s happened?”

Bill. My eyes flew open to numbing light and his face, hard, expectant, armoring itself.

“It’s Fred,” I gasped. “By the Fingers—” Somehow I managed to remember that this was Fred’s father and that what awaited him was anguish; I grasped at him, “No, you mustn’t go ” But he’d wrenched himself free before I got it said.

He was running toward the rocks, shouting, “If he’s hurt gel a doctor quick!”

Still numb, I ran again. The telephone was in my hands and central’s answer in my ear. “Get a doctor to Fiddler’s Fingers! Hurry!”

Then I was looking at Myra.

“Ann! Who’s hurt?”

There must be something we could do. I said, “Towels. Hot water. Quick! It’s Fred.”

Lottie must have been there, because she had the teakettle in her hands when we were running back across the lawn. Phillips, too, had come from somewhere.

But at the Fingers all that frantic, useless hurry stopped.

Bill knelt below the rock, cradling Fred’s head on his shoulder. Even his back, which was all I saw of him, was contorted with agony.

“No use,” he was saying to himself. “No use. He’s dead.”

* * *

Something—towels—fell out of my hands.

The hush in which we stood, with Bill’s tortured voice the only human sound, was an awful unmoving quiet in which the colors and shapes of people and rock seemed set and hard, as if they had petrified for eternity. Minutes fell past. But then slowly, like a wind sweeping up, the quiet was no longer a hush but a great inarticulated roar in which the chuckle of the underground river rose and swelled, in which the lake beat with rush and thunder, in which the wind-shaken forest clamored in a boisterous surge.

For this human evil and suffering and tragedy the wilderness had—

Laughter.

I heard it full. Huge, gargantuan, as old as earth, the laughter of forest and water and wind.

* * *

Someone whimpered. “Lottie.”

Phillips Heaton whispered, “He was killed, wasn’t he? It looks like a shot. Police—we’ll have to get the police.”

Killed … shot … As if those words were a key to reality, I saw the group of us standing in our petrifaction—Myra paper white, caught up into incredulity and lost horror, Lottie in sick fright, her face fallen into lumps, Phillips Heaton for once unamused.

Bill said dully, “Go away, can’t you? All of you go away.”

* * *

“No police here.” Phillips seemed talking to himself as we stumbled back toward the house. “There’s the sheriff. He’s the one.”

As we reached the porch door there was the fall of light, scuttling feet on the stairs and in the hall above; I thought it must be Octavia, that she’d heard the echoes of catastrophe and perhaps been at the porch door watching; against any crisis I’d expect her to run. Octavia—but there was someone else, too, upstairs. Jacqueline, thinking only that she might have to leave …

Phillips went at once to the phone, where he talked low and quickly. I walked toward the stairs as if I were walking against swift opposing water. Telling Jacqueline was the last thing I wanted to do, but I must … .

In the hall upstairs only two doors were closed—Octavia’s and the one to which I went. On the other side of that door Jacqueline was folding a blue nightgown to lay in the suitcase open on the bed. Beside the crib was Toby on the floor, the slate and yellow chalk in her hands, drawing.

My Jacqueline and my Toby, against whom lightning must strike.

Toby lifted her face. “I need a b’ue one. Ann, today you get me a b’ue one?”

Jacqueline said evenly without turning, “Bill sent Toby up when he got back from the resort. Well, I’m packing.”

“Come outside,” I said.

Her face changed when she looked at me; she came at once, closing the door behind her.

“Ann,” she whispered, “there’s been something else.”

“Yes.” I wouldn’t have to give her many words.

“Another—trick.”

“Worse than that.”

Her face set in the mold of anguished expectation. “Bill.”

“No. Fred.”

“Hurt?”

I nodded.

“Ann, he’s dead,” she said, only eyes in her face. She whispered, “Someone killed him. I should have felt it coming. Something as terrible as this.”

When I told her where Bill was she ran out to him at once.

I went in to Toby; that was where I should stay, keeping Toby away from what had happened. I couldn’t stay, yet when I got downstairs, with a subdued Toby clinging to my hand, the group below was almost as I’d left it: Lottie cringing alone near the kitchen door, Myra holding to the back of the davenport, Phillips with his hands on the phone.

“I wonder when it happened,” Phillips said. “I hope it was while I was in Grand Marais.” He was thinking of himself again.

When motors hummed Myra jerked toward the door, but her brother gestured her aside.

“No, I’ll go.”

Through the side windows we could see two cars stop beside the Fingers, spilling men. Phillips reached them. Loud muted exclamations drifted back… . Two figures emerged to come toward the house: Jacqueline escorted by a stranger.

There was that moment then when Jacqueline stood in the door, the tears of pity on her face, the shadow of a sheriff’s deputy behind her.

Murder.
I’d gotten to the place where I could think that naked word.

Murder is something more than someone dead and someone a killer. I couldn’t get Jacqueline away now. Murder is a trap.

* * *

Everything else that morning seems disconnected and dimmed. Small incidents stand out… .

… The deputy who had brought Jacqueline saying at the phone, “That you, Gus? Aakonen wants you at Fiddler’s Fingers right away. Boy got shot here. Bill Heaton’s kid. Yep, news, all right.” Words threaded by the fire of excitement.

… Jacqueline whispering, “It’s so awful for Bill,” sinking to the davenport, her hands to her face, Toby running toward her asking, “You cry. Mama?” the note of beginning fright behind her voice, and Jacqueline’s head jerking back. Jacqueline and I sitting on the floor, cutting snowflakes out of paper in a frantic effort to keep Toby lulled while Myra called a friend of hers in Duluth. “Caroline, I’m going to ask a great favor of you —I must. We’ve got to get Toby away. Something frightful has happened. If you could come …”

… Myra remembering as she turned from the phone, “Oh, poor Octavia!” Her quick ministering feet on the stairs and her distraught return. “She’s in bed. I can’t get her up. She has the blankets pulled to her eyes. Whatever happens, I won’t have Octavia harried—I won’t.” Just as I wanted to shield Jacqueline and Toby, Myra would want to shield her timorous, unworldly sister.

… Cars coming and going. A short, crisp man in shirtsleeves pausing in the doorway to say cheerfully, “Biggest scoop I ever had, Mrs Sallishaw. I’ll phone it in to the big city dailies right away,” as if we would rejoice in that broadcasting. Myra on the floor with Toby, staring after him, white lipped. “Joe Moe, from the Grand Marais
Bugle
. We’ll be overrun. Aakonen will have to put a guard at the gate.”

… Newspapers… . Realization that Aunt Harriet must be prepared against shock; that phone call and her staunch old voice repeating, “I depend on you to look after Jacqueline, Ann —Toby too. Remember you’re the oldest.” What she’d said to me since I could remember.

… A gray hearse by the Fingers, and when it was gone Bill walking in alone through the door, walking into the litter of our cut paper and our silence; Jacqueline rising to meet him, and Bill stopping to rest his face against her hair for a moment before he said thickly, “Stay with the others,” and went upstairs.

… A tall, stooped, bulky man asking, “Mrs Sallishaw, could I have lunch here?” Myra answering, “Of course, Mr Aakonen.”

The trap isn’t enough, is never enough; sooner or later must come the step of the hunter.

* * *

Horror was what we walked in—horror that Fred should be so suddenly dead, horror that one human being had killed another. The fear I had then was vague, obscure, unreasoned, a sick weight at the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t until I was taken to look at the Fingers again that that fear became defined.

Only Aakonen and Phillips ate lunch that day; even Toby left her food untouched. She was fascinated by the sheriff, by the thick blue vein than ran diagonally across the brown bald dome of his forehead; her hand kept stealing to feel of her own brow. Bill and Octavia hadn’t come down.

As soon as he shoved back from the table Aakonen moved purposefully, speaking the words that were to become the focus of our days.

“After a murder only one thing is important—to catch the murderer. I will want to see you one by one, please.”

He moved heavily; the fall of his weight showed as it shifted from foot to foot, but he quickly had the wicker living-room table pulled near a window, a chair behind the table and himself in the chair. He sat hunched, a man of great dignity and benign sadness, looking us over with light, unshifting eyes as we huddled after.

“Mrs Sallishaw, you first, please. The rest go on the porch.”

Jacqueline said, “It’s the little girl’s rest time.”

“Oh sure. You take her upstairs.”

When I went along his eyes noticed, but he didn’t object.

“Mr Bill Heaton,” he said to Myra, as if he were establishing a foundation in a morass before he started building. “He’s your cousin… .”

* * *

Upstairs I sat with Jacqueline, thinking nothing, doing nothing, held by that vague, formless fear, not seeing any reason or pattern in what had happened. The wire over which Toby had tripped, the wrecked boat, my bathrobe—all were gone out of my mind. Nothing existed except Fred’s murder and Jacqueline’s being here—held.

An hour or more until the knock at the door.

“Aakonen wants to see Ann.” It was Bill, whose eyes stared at nightmare.

Jacqueline asked achingly, “Did he question you?”

“He had to.” The answer was wooden. As if he couldn’t bear our pity, he crossed quickly to his own room, closing the door.

I got downstairs where Aakonen leaned forward over the table, pointing with a thick forefinger at a chair facing him and the light. There was another man beside him now, a brown little man like a curled and weather-beaten wood shingle.

“You’re Miss Ann Gay?” The question came while I was sitting down.

“Yes.”

“Mr Bill Heaton says you found his son’s body.”

“Yes.”

“Why’d you go out to the Fingers this morning?”

Why had I? Numbness still held me, but around the edges of the numbness there was a loosening, as if soon now it must break.

“I just—walked out. I was going to sit on the Thumb. I wanted to look at the lake.”

“You have any idea who killed Fred Heaton?”

“No. Oh no.” Numbness retightening.

“You hear any shots during the night?”

Floundering through the night in which so much had happened, my mind could grasp at nothing.

“It’s so noisy here … the lake … I don’t remember.”

“What time this morning was it you found the body?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nine o’clock—nine-thirty.”

“Nobody say anything about Fred Heaton not coming for breakfast?”

“People here seem to eat any time they like .” Could I go on like this, just answering automatically?

He leaned forward, pausing. “You walk out of this house alone this morning. It’s a nice morning. You go out by those rocks. What do you see?”

Everything inside me shivered. I’d have to remember now.

“I saw his feet—Fred’s feet. …” I heard my words, limping, setting that scene again, saw the swollen, bruised face, the stain on the shirt, the white bulk around the neck, felt again that cold rigidity under my fingers. Aakonen and the brown man listened as if they held their breaths. When I finished there was again a pause.

“When we got here Mr Bill Heaton had moved the body. Where were the harebells when you saw him?”

“Harebells?” The scene was in my mind but no harebells.

“Mr Bill Heaton says he took some dried-up flowers out of Fred’s hand. Then that stuff you saw around Fred’s neck—that this?”

He reached toward the brown man who took from the chair beside him a white mass and set it on the table. I stared at it, my skin creeping.

That was Myra Sallishaw’s shawl
—her white hand-knit wool shawl—and the thing had been slashed as my bathrobe was— cut and pulled into a heap of raveled, crinkled yarns.

“That,” I said, “it’s been—”

“Yes?” he urged.

“Cut.”

“Was that what you saw around Fred’s neck?”

“I didn’t look closely.”

“And the word on the rock,” he said, “you didn’t tell about that.”

There was a wall in front of my mind, a wall my mind was hastily building against something that confronted it. Harebells, shawl, a word on the rock …

I asked, “What word?” My voice loud and toneless.

He nodded. “So you didn’t notice. You can walk out there with me now.”

He led the way, lumbering before me, across the living room, halting to hold the door for me. The porch was populated. White, strained faces turned quickly toward the door as it opened, all the eyes asking a question—Bradley and Carol Auden, Cecile Granat, Phillips and Myra, the Corvos, Lottie— sitting together, but with a curious effect of isolation. Against the porch rail leaned a strange man, watching. No one spoke as we passed, crossed the lawn toward the rocks which my very bones protested against nearing. The long, loose man who’d brought Jacqueline in stood there on guard. Only gravel now where Fred’s body had lain, dark, thin, gray pebbles as smooth as lentils, with the huge gnarled Fingers bent above, and, underneath, the incessant chuckle.