Chiffon Scarf (18 page)

There was a little silence. Jim stared into space with completely expressionless gray eyes; Noel made a quickly checked movement, his peaked black eyebrows surging upward in astonishment; Dorothy silently and passively seemed to record every look on the faces around the table—even Chango’s yellow face peering inquisitively through the pantry door.

“Do you mean that you completely retract your former statement saying that you did not enter the cabin as Miss Shore said you did?”

“Obviously,” said Averill neatly. “I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I do subscribe to it; every word of it—”

“
Averill
,” said Jim sharply, turning suddenly toward her. He said only that, and Averill smiled slowly.

“You do understand, don’t you, Mr. Sloane? I entered the cabin with Eden and we talked awhile, then I left it.”

“When did you meet Mrs. Blaine and give her your coat?”

“Afterward—I think,” said Averill sweetly. She turned to Eden. “That’s right, isn’t it, Eden?” she asked in the friendliest and most agreeable way in the world.

She had again outplayed Eden; her whole retraction, true though it was, sounded false; sounded too friendly and agreeable; sounded as if she were merely backing up Eden’s testimony, in order to help Eden. Sounded obviously, flagrantly, a lie.

Eden said: “I don’t know when you met Creda, Averill. I know you came to my room with me and when you left me there you were still wearing your yellow coat.”

Averill, slender eyebrows lifted, patience and forbearance in her smile, turned again to Sloane.

“Then that is exactly what happened,” she said. “Do forgive me for—for not telling the truth at first.”

“Why didn’t you?” asked Sloane simply.

Averill waited a moment before replying, her faint smile undisturbed. Then she said: “It doesn’t matter, does it, Mr. Sloane? So long as I subscribe to Eden’s story now.”

P. H. Sloane turned to Eden. “When you’ve quite finished your breakfast, Miss Shore, I’d like to question you. In the meantime—Jim, will you see if you can find Pace and bring him in here.”

“But, Sloane, you haven’t answered my question,” said Noel. “Whose fingerprints were on my revolver?”

“Oh yes,” said Sloane. “I want to talk to you about that, too, later. Whose fingerprints? I don’t know yet. That’s one of the things I want you to do if you don’t mind. That is, go into my study and let Charlie take your fingerprints. All of you.”

“But we—” began Averill sharply, and Sloane went on without looking at her: “He’s taken mine, too, and those of the cowboys. Sorry, but I’ll have to ask you to do it.”

Jim got up and went into the hall. As he did so a cowboy entered from the kitchen, his sombrero in his hand, and approached P. H. Sloane.

He was tall, lean, brown, like Sloane; laconic, easily graceful and just then his eyes were snapping electrically.

“Just thought I’d let you know I’d got back from Rocky Gap,” he said. “Coroner said he’d phone you tonight and tell you whether he got any bullets or not. And—say, P.H.—”

“Well?”

“Didn’t know whether you knew it or not but Curly (that is the little blond fellow—the steward, I guess you’d call him, on the plane)—well, he’s disappeared. Can’t be found, high, low or level. And—well, Chango says—”

Chango mysteriously appeared at his elbow and nodded his head vigorously, his beady eyes like bright shoe buttons. The cowboy said apologetically: “I know it sounds kinda silly, P. H., but Chango says there’s a hatchet gone, too. I think myself Curly is kinda young to do any murders. But he’s sure as hell run away. With Chango’s hatchet.”

There was a strange little silence. P. H. and the cowboy looked steadily at each other. Dorothy Woolen sat like a figure carved in soap, and Noel’s blue eyes went swiftly from the cowboy to Sloane and back again. Then all at once Averill pushed out her chair with a blundering, scraping sound and got to her feet and cried shrilly: “But you’ve got to find him. He must have killed her. You’ve got to find him—this is horrible—”

“He can’t have disappeared. There’s no place to go,” said P. H. Sloane.

And the cowboy nodded and said: “He’s gone just the same.”

Eden rose, too. P. H. asked how long the steward had been gone and where they had searched for him, and Eden went out of the room. The steward—Roy Wilson; she could barely remember his name and pale face and curly yellow hair—where had he gone? Why?

The obvious answer was guilt on his part and fear of detection. Yet the young, curly-haired steward with his girlish mouth and mildly pleasant manner certainly could have had no possible motive for brutally murdering Creda Blaine. A hatchet had gone, too? Probably it had been lost days ago and Chango had just discovered its loss.

Why hadn’t Creda screamed for help? Why had she pulled the little chest of drawers a few inches from the wall and left it there? Why had she written that strange, scarcely intelligible note to Jim?

She must find Jim. She must tell him immediately about the letter that was lost, and she must ask him a certain question. But in the hall she was stopped pleasantly but firmly and fingerprinted. It gave her the strangest feeling of uneasiness to see her own small prints set down in ink and labeled.

Jim was on the porch when she found him; Pace was nowhere in sight nor so far as she could see anyone else. She went swiftly to Jim, who hearing her approach turned toward her.

Was it the sun or were his eyes exactly as cold and impersonal as they had been there in view of all the others in the dining room? She said rather timidly: “Jim—”

“Do you want me?”

“Yes, I—Jim—” It had to come out. She was too certain, still, to take refuge in silence herself; in pride. She said, fumbling and awkward as a child: “Jim—Averill said you asked her to tell me it was over—between us, I mean.” She put her hands on his arm and he moved his arm deliberately away, and still she could not believe it, but had to go on: “I didn’t believe her. I don’t … I couldn’t. She said you—you wanted to end—” Words stopped in her throat and she couldn’t say any more. She had already said far too much.

For Jim, looking stiffly out toward the mountains, replied quite clearly and deliberately: “Averill was quite right. I’m sorry, Eden. We were both mistaken.”

T
HIS, THOUGHT EDEN, CANNOT
be happening to me.

Not like this; not Jim.

She put both her hands upon the railing of the porch and looked out toward the blue mountain peaks and did not see them. And she forgot the letter in Creda’s writing—blurred with ink, broken off so abruptly.

Jim said, still watching the rim of mountains and speaking in a brisk and businesslike voice: “Averill and I are to be married as it was planned. The only thing I can hope from you is forgiveness.”

She still couldn’t speak. It was quite literally impossible. And besides, what could she say? She began to hope only that she could get away without having to speak at all for talking was dangerous.

And she had already said too much; why hadn’t she let that stirring instinct of warning guide her? Why hadn’t she approached the thing more cautiously—giving herself a chance to see ahead, to draw conclusions from what Jim himself said, or conspicuously failed to say? Why need she invite the direct cruelty of the thing?

Averill had been right. Well, she had recognized Averill’s certainty; her smile as much as the unmistakable air of authority and assuredness in her tone and manner had been convincing. But Eden hadn’t permitted herself to accept it because of her faith in Jim.

So—again—she’d been wrong.

“Will you—forgive me, Eden?”

He was waiting for her to reply. She was poignantly aware of that but she was still shaken, as if the ground under her feet had rocked. Later she supposed she would feel emotion; hurt pride, anger, loss. May as well face that now, for it would be loss. There might be—there would be jealousy, too. That wouldn’t be pleasant either. She didn’t really, she told herself, feel anything now except regret for her own rash and impulsive directness. Well, probably she was not the only woman in the world to which the inconceivable had happened.

The curious thing was even now that she seemed to have known Jim so long; it was still as if all her life he had been a constant, important, deeply familiar force in that life. It was as if old foundations, tried and true, had suddenly gone out from under her; as if a hand always extended when she needed it had suddenly failed her. It wasn’t sensible; in point of fact it had been an incredibly short time since she’d known him at all. But it didn’t seem so; deep in her heart there remained that indestructible, strong sense of understanding, of sharing, of being instantly and forever one with the man beside her.

Well, it wasn’t true. Women’s hearts had made crazy mistakes then. At least she’d had the thing from Jim’s own lips; certainly he had hated to tell her. She said: “All right, Jim.”

Surprisingly, her voice was fairly steady but she wouldn’t look at him. For that matter he wouldn’t look at her. She knew he continued to stare, as she did, at that distant blue rim of mountain. She’d looked at them last night, above the warm pressure of Jim’s arms, and felt indescribably at peace. She broke off the thought at once.

“All right,” she repeated quickly. “You are forgiven. Forget it all as I shall.” She turned away quickly, intending to escape while this incredible calm supported her. But Jim made a swift motion and caught her by the wrist and whirled her around to meet his eyes. For a moment his eyes sought with a kind of desperation into her own. Then he said abruptly:

“No, it isn’t all. There’s something else.”

“There—can’t be anything else.”

“Yes. It—it’s about the murder. I hate to—listen, Eden, did you see Noel’s revolver last night? When you came into the cabin, I mean, and found Creda?”

It wrenched her savagely back to the thing confronting them. She tried to think back to those frenzied, horribly bewildered moments and could not. “I don’t know. I don’t remember it?”

“Think. Are you sure you didn’t touch it?”

“Touch it! How could I? It wasn’t there—that is, it must have been there but I—it’s as I say—I simply don’t remember seeing it.”

“Eden, you’ve got to know. A woman’s fingerprints are on that revolver.”

“But I—you can’t mean my fingerprints?”

“I don’t know. A woman’s. Slim, fine—I saw the print. They haven’t been identified yet. Sloane’s getting a record this morning of everybody’s fingerprints; you heard him say it. He’s got mine and Noel’s and Pace’s. And Strevsky’s. There’s only you and Dorothy and Averill. And this little steward—”

The steward. Well, they wouldn’t be able to get his fingerprints now, until they found him, that is.

“Are you sure you didn’t touch it?” insisted Jim. “You see Creda may have been shot—even though the revolver was fully loaded when it was found—and Sloane’s morally certain she wasn’t shot; he couldn’t definitely say without a post-mortem and he isn’t qualified to do it. But you see, the presence of the revolver shows somebody thought of using it; somebody perhaps planned to shoot her and then—God knows why—didn’t. Perhaps because it was so quiet a night and the sound of the shot would have been heard. But, Eden—”

“Creda,” said Eden with stiff lips. “Perhaps Creda herself took it from Noel—”

“Noel says he doesn’t think so. He says the last time he saw it was when he packed it to go on the plane trip. That night everybody was asleep. His bags weren’t locked; anybody could have taken the revolver—”

“My scarf,” said Eden. “Someone took it—”

“Oh yes. Your scarf,” said Jim. He was silent for an instant or two, thinking; then he said abruptly “Anyway, it wasn’t Creda. Sloane got her fingerprints, too. Before they took her away. I—I helped him. I watched him compare them with the prints on the gun. I couldn’t see much of it but he says they’re not the same prints and Sloane knows. Eden, if you didn’t even see the revolver until Sloane found it then you couldn’t have touched it so that’s all right—”

“Wait.” Unexpectedly, terrifyingly, a small sharp memory, lost and confused by all the intervening memories, returned to Eden like a stab. “Jim—it must have been the revolver! I’d forgotten it! It had to be that! Jim—what shall I do? I didn’t kill her—I had no motive—I wouldn’t—”

“What do you mean? Tell me. Hurry!”

His face was suddenly white; his hand went out involuntarily toward her and then withdrew. “Tell me quickly, Eden. What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure it was the revolver. As I knelt by Creda my knee struck something hard and painful; I didn’t look at whatever it was. I was looking at her. It was in that first moment when I entered the room and saw her and I—I couldn’t believe what I saw. I knelt and—it may have been the revolver. Whatever it was, I remember pushing it out of the way, pushing it from under my knee—but I didn’t look at it … I never thought of it again. I may have thrust it under a fold of the yellow coat. I don’t know. I don’t even remember the touch of it. I suppose it sounds incredible, but it’s what happened. So if it was the revolver my own fingerprints may be on it.”

“That’s all you can remember about it?”

“Yes. Everything—except, Jim, there was a letter …”

He did not hear it for he said quickly and urgently: “Eden, you’d better tell Sloane. But I hate you to tell him; I know it’s true as you tell it but it doesn’t sound true. It sounds like an excuse—”

“But, Jim, I didn’t kill her. Creda was—there was no way in which she even touched my life. I had no quarrel with her—there was nothing—”

He looked away from her then and for a long moment stared again at the distant blue rim lifting into the sky. “Eden, in a thing like this no one is safe from suspicion; no one is safe from accusation. And many an innocent man—yes, and woman, too—has paid penalties for something he didn’t do.”

“But I—”

“Circumstantial evidence still has its weight. Eden”—he turned to her suddenly and with a kind of impatience and cried—”Eden, why in God’s name didn’t you remove that gray scarf? Why didn’t you take it—hide it—do anything with it! There was time—why didn’t you?”

“Why should I?”