Chiffon Scarf (15 page)

“But, Dorothy—it’s better,” said Jim and Noel agreed: “Don’t be silly, Dorothy. Murder—”

In the end she was persuaded by Sloane’s coolly giving an order to Chango to move Miss Woolen as well as Miss Shore and Miss Blaine. Dorothy did not again object but there was a blank, stolid look in her face.

“The boys have been searching the grounds as thoroughly as is possible tonight,” said Sloane. “There are things I will have to do; in the morning perhaps the sheriff can get here, certainly the coroner. Chango—you’ll see that the ladies are comfortable.” The Chinese boy bowed and bobbed away. And P. H. Sloane said simply: “Good night—try to rest. Tomorrow will be a difficult day for you all. Jim, will you come along with me, please? No, thanks, I won’t need anyone else.”

He walked quietly out of the room. Jim glanced once at Eden and followed.

Always to Eden it marked a kind of division.

It was as if, going along a deep but swift and steady stream, she had plunged unexpectedly over a rocky precipice and into a seething, twisting cauldron below. And then fighting her way through that indescribably confusing and bewildering trough she had at last emerged from the first shock of it, into the stream again. It was a treacherous stream full of hidden rocks and deep and powerful currents of human motives which then she was only dimly aware of. But Sloane’s disappearance, his terse advice, the abrupt silence that followed his departure marked in her mind a grateful emergence from those first half-answered, half-asked streams of questions, of speculation let loose, of horror. Indubitable horror. That was, just at first, the worst of it.

It is always difficult to adjust one’s self to death. The irrevocability of it is always a too amazing phenomenon for the mind to grasp immediately. The nearness of Creda’s presence, the mere fact of the shortness of the time which had elapsed since Creda, alive, sentient, had been one of them was in itself baffling. Creda, plumply pretty and aware of it, adjusting her youthful gowns, glancing at her rosy fingernails, powdering her pretty nose and putting lipstick with the utmost care upon her rosebud mouth. Creda with her pansy brown eyes, demure behind those extravagant lashes. Creda with her soft, childish curls.

Yet since the airplane crash she had been a different Creda; she had been silent, with that childish babble—which yet, oddly, didn’t tell anything Creda didn’t want told—still. Creda herself quiet, as curiously unobtrusive as, usually, she was coquettishly obtrusive.

Why had she so changed? Was it due to Bill Blaine’s dreadful death? Or was there another reason—a less accountable reason, one that lay more deeply imbedded in Creda’s selfish, secret little nature.

The change in Creda, however, showed at least one thing and that was that she had a capacity for silence and for secretiveness.

And there was a kind of cruel exasperation in the sense of her continuing nearness, in their inability, yet, to comprehend the enormous reticence of death. If only she could tell them what had happened. If only she could explain those footsteps and the silence in the cabin where she must have died.

Eden, alone in the room allotted to her in the main house, sat dully on the edge of the bed and considered it.

With, in her pocket, the letter Creda’s fat little fingers had begun to write and tragically stopped.

She must see Jim; she must give him the letter.

Her own gray chiffon scarf in tight hard knots around Creda’s soft throat.

She was shuddering, curiously cold and trembling. Chango came to the door and she started violently when he knocked and asked if he might bring her bags into the room. She said “Yes” and did not move while the little Chinese trotted into the room, put down her bags and pattered quickly about, seeing there were towels and soap in the adjoining bathroom, seeing the windows were open upon the still starlit night, seeing there was water in the little carafe beside the bed.

“Sleep well, missee,” he said and pointed to a key in the door. “Here is key, missee. Good night.” He chuckled and smiled himself out the door again. And Eden rose as if she were a doll pulled by wires, went to the door and locked it with a nervous strong jerk of her fingers.

Jim had followed Sloane instantly from the room. Noel had gone with Chango to get his own bags. The men, then, too were to be moved to the main house, for protection? Or to give Sloane a better chance to watch them?

There was no possibility of getting away even if any of them had wanted to leave. Sloane had made that abundantly clear. Fifty miles to the nearest town. Only two cars on the place. “There’s not a soul in the county whose presence is unobserved and whose business is not known.”

She remembered the enormous expanse of flatland, no cities, no stream of human traffic along highways where one might lose himself, which she had seen from the plane. She remembered the barrier the mountains made. Sangre de Cristo—red in the morning light.

No, there was no escape. And anyway you could not escape anything geographically. Simply by removing yourself. You had to fight through—even when it was murder.

Jim.

She wondered what he was doing. Why had he gone with Sloane? Wouldn’t his old friendship with Sloane incline the detective in their favor?

Her own gray scarf.

She kept coming back to that. And remembering Creda flung upon the floor in Averill’s yellow cloak.

She must rouse herself, move about, arrange her toilet things—go to bed.

But she moved in a daze. Eventually she got undressed and into bed. But with her hand stretched out to turn off the lights she couldn’t, although never in her life before had she been afraid of the dark.

If there were sounds of search about the place, then she couldn’t hear the sounds. Once or twice she thought she heard voices and feet on the porch below her window, but if so the sounds were too well muffled to be heard distinctly. What would the next day bring? Why hadn’t she removed the scarf from Creda’s throat? Her own scarf. She intended to think, to try to assemble and consider the chaotic circumstance of Creda’s death. But the facts were too incomplete, too little explored. Too much left in abeyance, inconclusively, pending Sloane’s own activities and decision.

Of one thing only she was certain and that was that the first hurried plunge into inquiry had brought forth only the barest shreds of fact.

What, then, lay deeper?

She was thinking desperately of Pace when, because she was physically and nervously exhausted, unconsciousness possessed her like a faint.

She roused dazedly, dragging herself from sleep as from a drug, when someone knocked sharply at her door.

“Who—who is it?”

“Averill. Let me in, Eden. Hurry.”

The light, of course, was still on, glaring in her eyes. But almost instantly she remembered sharply why she had left the light turned on and had gone to sleep as she must have done with the bright bulb glaring into her face. She rubbed her eyes, realized that there was urgency in Averill’s sharp whisper, and got up and went to the door in her thin white pajamas. She caught a queer glimpse of herself in the mirror over the bureau at the end of the room; a slender woman, looking tall in the long, full white trousers, her brown hair disheveled, her face white above the tailored white collar of her pajama coat. Her eyes were wide and dark and looked frightened. She unlocked and opened the door.

Averill came quickly inside, turned and closed the door herself and said :

“Why didn’t you answer me sooner?”

“I was asleep. What do you want?”

Averill’s slender jet-black eyebrows went up.

“Asleep. Good heavens. Lock the door. I don’t want anyone to interrupt.”

“Very well.” She locked it again. “Averill—I want to talk to you.”

“That’s good,” said Averill calmly. “I want to talk to you. That’s why I came. Do you have any cigarettes?”

“There on the table.” Beside Eden’s cigarette case her little traveling clock pointed to three o’clock.

Averill walked across, took a cigarette and lighted it. She was as self-possessed, as calm as if she had been paying a social call. She turned, blowing a small cloud of smoke from her mouth, and sat down composedly in a small chintz-covered chair. She was wearing a crimson dressing gown, high-necked and long-sleeved, with a train; she crossed one knee over the other so her lace-trimmed nightgown was like a ruffled petticoat around her bare ankles. One crimson mule dropped from her small white heel. Her dark hair was neat and unruffled. Only her altogether colorless face, bare of lipstick and make-up, and the intensity of its expression suggested any anxiety or any hint of the horror the night had held.

“Averill,” said Eden. “Why did you lie? How could you have done it? You’ve got to retract what you said and tell them the truth.”

There was a lambent flash back in Averill’s dark eyes. She said:

“We both like to come straight to the point, don’t we, darling? I should think you would know why I lied. It’s fairly obvious. I believed then and I believe now that whoever killed Creda actually intended to kill me.”

“Averill, you can’t sit there and say that I thought of murdering you. No matter what you think of me you don’t really in your heart believe that, and you know it.”

Averill’s demure face looked suddenly a little pinched about the nostrils and there was a shadow around the corners of her thin mouth. She said:

“Let’s not talk of that, Eden. Perhaps I don’t think you—would kill anyone. I’ve known you so long. Yet the fact remains that Creda was murdered while she was in my room—wearing a cloak everyone knew as mine—her face veiled in a chiffon scarf. Your scarf, Eden. How did it get there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or won’t tell.”

Eden put both her hands on the railing at the foot of the bed, clutching it. She said, her voice shaking: “Averill, there’s no use in our talking like this. Can’t we forget our own feelings toward each other—”

Averill laughed shortly.

“Is that a proffer of peace at any price?” she said. “All right. As a matter of fact that’s what I’ve come for.”

“Do you mean you’ll tell Sloane the truth?”

“I don’t know. Listen, Eden—Jim and I have had a long talk. Just now. In my room, if it interests you to know it.” She waited a moment, watching Eden with narrowed, lambent eyes. “Jim told me about tonight.”

“Tonight?”

Averill’s eyes flashed.

“Don’t pretend innocence. He says he—you rather flung yourself at his head and he—manlike, was a bit flattered and carried away by it for a moment, but it meant nothing to him.”

Eden clung to the bed, this time for support.

“Jim—said
that
?”

“Certainly. How else would I know?” said Averill, coolly watching her.

“But, Jim—” It was as if her body had turned to lead.

She said heavily: “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe Jim said anything like that.”

Averill smiled.

“I don’t care whether you believe it or not. It’s true. I imagine you will shortly be convinced of it. The point is Jim and I have come to a real understanding. He regrets this little passage with you, Eden; he’s really sorry about it and for you. He asked me to apologize. I don’t think myself that Jim is the one who ought to apologize. After all, when a woman throws herself at a man as you have—”

“Averill, that’s not true.”

Averill stood up and smashed her cigarette in the tray with a small savage gesture.

“Can you deny it?” she said quickly but softly as the swish of a garment. “Can you deny you’ve had eyes for no one else since you first met him? That you’ve acted like a moon-struck child, hanging on every word he uttered? You thought I didn’t see it. But I did. You thought I didn’t see you follow him into the garden that first night in St. Louis. Listening, watching, always planning and trying to be near him. My dear child—your methods are jejune. You’ve only succeeded in making a fool of yourself and greatly embarrassing Jim.”

Had she done all that, thought Eden, aghast. She’d followed him to the garden; but why not?

“You were unfair to Jim, Averill. The engine was important; you refused to see his side of the thing or to support him as you could so easily have done. You don’t love him yourself. Why are you trying to keep him?”

“Listen, Eden. Jim loves me. We are going to be married and you can’t stop it. He’s sorry for this little affair with you and glad it went no further. He loves me and doesn’t want me to break off our engagement, or even postpone our marriage. He told me all this. I tell you we’ve had a long talk. And he asked me to come and tell you this. Now will you believe me?”

Eden took a long breath. Only that night in Jim’s arms, with his mouth warm and hard upon her own, she’d thought they held their stars in their hands. She’d thought love was the answer to every question and every perplexity and every doubt of human existence. She said:

“No, Averill, I don’t believe you. I love Jim.” She paused and put up her chin and said clearly: “And he loves me. I—I’m sorry—we were both sorry about you.”

Averill walked quickly toward her, stopped within six inches of Eden and slapped her face.

“You—” she said in a throbbing, panting whisper that it self was shocking. “How dare you—”

The suddenness of it and the ugliness stunned Eden.

“Averill—”

“You can’t even defend yourself,” said Averill, still in that shocking unsteady whisper. “You have no courage—you know you’re in the wrong. You let me strike your face and don’t try to defend yourself. You—”

“Averill, stop that. If you say another word, if you come a step nearer me, I’ll scream. Do you understand? Control yourself—”

“Me, control myself! What about you!” But the words had their effect nevertheless. Averill’s breath still came quickly but the moment of white, mad fury had passed. She said, still panting, but marvelously drawing herself up again in a semblance of her usual poise: “No one would believe you. My word is as good as yours.”

She looked at Eden and actually laughed a little and said: “If either of us looks upset, Eden, it’s you. Not me.”

Probably she was right. For Eden was so swept and shaken with incredulous anger that it was itself frightening in its strength. She must control it; she must not permit that rising tide of something dreadfully like hatred to give itself outlet. Her hands were trembling, her breath coming quickly. She turned half away from Averill and saw her own white coat lying across a chair and, suddenly, remembered Creda’s letter. Creda’s letter, so dreadfully interrupted, mentioning Jim. Averill was incalculable; she was also quick and curious as a cat. She must not learn of the existence of the letter; Averill could be trusted with no secrets, not even a secret which must in some inexplicable way concern Jim.