Chiffon Scarf (22 page)

She told herself that and believed it. Aside from everything she knew or thought she knew of Jim, the fact remained that he couldn’t have been in a conspiracy with Creda to wreck the engine he had made and, in the process, to murder two men.

Time went on. The shadows of the cottonwoods grew slowly longer and pointed toward the east and the rim of eastern mountains began to take on a shimmering crimson glow as the sun sank lower. Once Chango came to summon Averill to Sloane’s study and later (a long time later, it seemed to Eden) Noel was sent for. He returned, looking extremely tired and curiously disheveled, as if he had been rubbing his hands through his hair and worrying his tie.

“God,” he said explosively. “Well, that’s over! If there’s anything Sloane and this sheriff don’t know about me, then I don’t know it myself.” He lighted a cigarette with unsteady hands, took a long puff of smoke and sat down disconsolately on the railing. “I wish to God I knew how my revolver got there. Do you know what I’d like to do, Eden?”

“What?”

“Take that plane that’s waiting out there and fly away—away to the ends of the earth. Anywhere away from here.”

“You can’t,” said Eden practically. “The fuel line is cut.”

“I know,” said Noel and smoked and brooded.

“But I’d take you with me if you wanted to go,” he said at last with a flash of his normal, charming smile.

“I wouldn’t be permitted to leave,” said Eden somberly. “I’m almost the First Suspect. If Pace is out of the running.”

“Don’t joke like that.”

“I wish it were a joke.”

“Miss Shore, please,” said Chango’s voice at her elbow. She turned with a jerk, knowing what was coming.

“Mr. Sloane wants you, please. This way.”

Noel got up, too, and laid his arm lightly around her shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Buck up, my child,” he said. “They can’t eat you. We’ve all got it to go through.”

She tried to smile and followed Chango.

Sloane was waiting, and the sheriff. Chango ushered her into the small room, offered her a chair facing the two men and withdrew, closing the door behind him. Sunlight poured through the west windows and lay hot and clear upon the worn brown rug and the shelves and glinted against a microscope on top of the shabby, roll-top desk. Sloane who had risen when she entered resumed his seat before the desk, tilting back in the swivel chair. The sheriff, a big, well-fleshed man with a tired face and pouched eyes, gave her a scrutinizing look and took out his handkerchief and wiped his glistening forehead and bald head.

Sloane said: “Miss Shore, I want you to tell us the whole story of last night over again. This is Sheriff Utley and I want him to hear it from your own lips. Slowly, if you please, and in detail. But first, I want you to look at this.”

“This” was a once crumpled, now flattened piece of paper with words written on it in a large, careless handwriting.

It was the note Creda had written; the note that had been removed from Eden’s own pocket. Yet—yet it wasn’t that either! For there was more, much more, written upon it than the line or two she remembered with such clarity.

She looked at it incredulously and caught her breath in a sharp little gasp. Both men noted that and she realized it. Sloane said:

“I’m told by Averill Blaine, and by Noel Carreaux, and by Jim, that that is in Creda Blaine’s handwriting. Have you seen it before?”

“Yes,” said Eden and instantly cried: “No—no. This isn’t right.”

“Read it,” said the sheriff suddenly.

She gave him a startled look; surely they knew it by heart. But she read, faltering a little in spite of herself.

“Dear Jim. Cold-blooded murder is too much. I won’t do any more, I can’t. Jim—you must believe me—and let me go. I give up my share of the money willingly to you. I promise you not to tell no matter what—”

It stopped there—trailed away in a line of ink that had not been there the night before. Eden cried sharply:

“But it’s not right. It wasn’t like that. It’s all wrong.”

“So you’ve seen this before?” The sheriff leaned heavily forward. “Your fingerprints are on the revolver, Miss Shore. You found the woman dead. Your scarf choked the life out of her. Now then, why did you do it?”

“But I didn’t,” cried Eden, in a high, unsteady voice. “I didn’t!” She turned toward Sloane with her hands thrust out beseechingly. “You must know I didn’t do it! I had no motive. And Jim—this note isn’t right. He couldn’t have been what Creda says—he—why, he’s your friend! You know him.”

A look in the detective’s eyes stopped her. It was a cold, strange look which removed him definitely and finally from a world where friendship counted and appeal had power. He said, although that icy look made it unnecessary:

“Friendship has nothing to do with this, Miss Shore. Please remember that, and Jim himself offers no explanation.”

E
DEN THOUGHT RATHER DESPERATELY
: I must pull myself together; I must arrange what I have to say and I must make my statements clear and simple so they will believe me.

She leaned forward a little, speaking earnestly. “But I found that letter last night; in the cabin where I found Creda. I—took it and slipped it in the pocket of my white coat. Sometime last night it was taken from there; I don’t know who did it. But it was not like this when I found it. The middle part is the same. But words have been added to it.”

Sloane said nothing and the sheriff said: “What words?”

“These.” She pointed. “ ‘Dear Jim’ and all the words after ‘believe me.’ ”

The sheriff took the note from her fingers and read it slowly and ponderously again.

“You claim then that whoever (according to your story) took this note from you deliberately added enough to make a case against this Cady fellow?”

“The note as she claims to have found it is enough,” said Sloane dryly. “That leaves, do you see, ‘cold-blooded murder is too much.’ (Evidently referring to the plane crash.) ‘I won’t do any more, I can’t!’ (Which, in so far as it can, confirms my theory that Creda Blaine was a part of whatever conspiracy there was.) And ‘Jim—believe me’ certainly refers to Jim.”

“But it’s the rest of it that seems to make it clinching,” said Eden quickly. “Her handwriting would be so easy to imitate.”

Sloane said: “How long have you known Jim Cady, Miss Shore? I was under the impression that you met him first when you came to St. Louis for Miss Blaine’s wedding.”

Eden hoped the warmth in her face was not a flush.

“That’s quite true,” she said stiffly. “But I saw the note, you see—”

“Why did you remove it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You gave me to understand you touched nothing.”

“I—but that seemed to me—” She stopped there, helplessly.

“It seemed to you, I suppose, to incriminate Jim. It occurred to you then, too, that a situation whereby a man may wish to receive the entire proceeds from his own invention rather than a mere salary for the time he worked on that invention is not outside the realm of possibility?”

There was a shadow over the detective’s face as he spoke but his eyes remained as coldly inhuman as two small blue icebergs.

“No! Nothing of the kind occurred to me. I—I was frightened—indescribably shocked. I—I had no clear thoughts. I—it was on the desk you see when I saw someone watching me—”

The sheriff, who had been tilting back in his chair, let the two front legs down with a bang and the detective leaned forward and said: “What’s that? You said nothing—
Who
w
as it?
”

“I don’t know. I’m not even sure there was anyone. I didn’t—didn’t think of it,” said Eden quite honestly. “There was so much else and it—it was only a motion—felt rather than actually seen—”

“Listen, Miss Shore,” said the detective rather tensely. “Suppose you begin at the beginning and tell every thing—”

“But the letter. It is wrong—”

“Suppose there were two letters. Suppose she started the other one, the one you found, and left it. And wrote this one complete.”

“But that” Eden thought of Dorothy. “How did Dorothy Woolen happen to have it? Why was it in her room? What does she know of it?”

The detective rose and pulled the shade to keep the level rays of the sun from his eyes and said over his shoulder,

“She insists that she knows nothing of it. Now, then, Miss Shore, we’re waiting. Start please with the time when you left the lounge last night.”

Eden looked at the implacable shoulders of the detective, at the sheriff who, broodingly, looked back at her, took a long breath and began.

The sun crept lower and blue and purple shadows grew at the base of the mountain rims and in the hollows of the arroyo and under the cottonwoods. For they stopped her now and then to question, exhaustively and repetitiously, and it took time.

So she and Jim Cady had strolled down to the clump of pines along the drive, had they? They had been altogether alone? Had they talked of anything in particular? Oh, just chatting—had Jim mentioned the plane crash? Oh, he had. Well, what had he said?

Instinctively she kept the knowledge of the thing that had happened there in the soft shadow of the pines from them. It had no bearing upon murder. It was a thing separate—and besides, just then, she couldn’t have borne to tell anyone. Noel had dimly perceived it; she hoped no one else.

She went on, and the questioning went on. It was a little difficult getting around the brief conversation she and Averill had had in her room, but she managed it. They questioned her over and over again about the time during which she had been alone in her room, next to the room where Creda was murdered. They dug down into her memory and consciousness with prodding, sharp tentacles, demanding answers.

But she remembered only what she remembered. Averill had gone away, still wearing her yellow cloak. There had been voices, women’s voices she thought, and then silence. Silence until there was the sound of a drawer pulled open. (Yes, it might have been the chest of drawers being pulled away from the wall, but she didn’t know why.) And silence again, and then those stealthy, tiptoed steps, entering, pausing, leaving again and closing the door afterward.

And that was all. At length they permitted her to go on. Her own entrance and horrified discovery; the thing that must have been the revolver which she thrust aside without looking when she knelt beside Creda (they listened to that in unrevealing silence); her effort to pull the scarf away. They interrupted her there.

“You knew it was your scarf?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What did you think when you saw it there?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I wondered who had taken it. I didn’t think—I couldn’t.”

“Why didn’t you remove it?”

“I—” She hesitated and repeated: “I didn’t think of that either. Why should I? I didn’t murder her. My only thought was to help her if—if I could. And to call someone.”

“You removed the note to Jim Cady?”

“Yes.”

“What happened next?”

They questioned her at length, as if they were waiting for it, about the half-glimpsed face vanishing into the deep shadow, of the pines. Who was it? She didn’t know? Well, exactly what had she seen? Oh, it was just an impression of a face. Could it have been Strevsky’s? Perhaps. Roy Wilson’s? Perhaps, again. Major Pace’s? She couldn’t tell; there was just a motion and a white, blurred oval vanishing. And a sense of surveillance.

But she would be willing to swear, if need be, that someone had been outside the cabin, watching from the shadow of the pines. Y-yes; yes, she would be willing to swear it.

“Go on.”

But when at last she finished they questioned again, going over every item and every step. And then went back to St. Louis. Went back even to her little apartment in New York—so incredibly distant, so completely outside the world that had enfolded them, shutting out every other existence. Yet hinging so definitely and strangely upon that distant past.

That gave her the chance she needed, however, to tell them of suspicions that were merely suspicions, of half-formed ideas—of facts that were not quite facts. So she thought Creda and Pace had already known each other; why? Exactly why had she failed to believe Creda’s denial? And what was this about a key?

They seemed covertly excited about that, although Eden herself had all but forgotten the key in the welter of what seemed to her more important events that had intervened. Sloane rose and paced the floor.

“The St. Louis police say that the night watchman at the Blaine plant swears nobody entered the plant the night before the crash,” Sloane said to the sheriff. “But it’s a big place; there’s only one man at night; night watchmen have been known to go to sleep on the job before this. But I don’t see what Creda Blaine herself could have known of the engine. It isn’t everybody who would have known of the engine. It isn’t everybody who would know exactly what to do to cripple the plane, or exactly how to mend the break with the diabolic skill that was employed. Wax—”

“There was wax missing from the library table. The table where Averill says she placed the plans for the engine. Red sealing wax.”

It angered Sloane. He turned swiftly toward her and pounded the desk top with the flat of his hand and swore deeply. “
Why haven’t you told me all this before? Why have you kept these things secret? Why have you—
”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, P. H.,” said the sheriff easily. “There’s not been much time, you know. God damn it, the woman was murdered only last night.”

Only last night, thought Eden incredulously. It had been, as a matter of fact, only thirty-six hours or so since the great silver plane had landed them in that fantastic, distant, mountain-rimmed world; a lonely world, beautiful, queerly thrilling, and at the same time frightening. And she seemed to know it as intimately and as familiarly as if it had been years.

“I’m done with this thing,” said Sloane, still white. “You take it over, Utley.”

“I can’t. You know what I’ve got on my hands.” The sheriff was weary and undisturbed. “I know how you feel, P. H., when it’s your friend—Cady, I mean. But you can’t help it.” He rolled a cigarette expertly, lighted it and said reflectively: “I remember how I felt when I had to arrest Apple Johnny Redback. We’d punched cattle together as youngsters; ridden in many a roundup. Were with the same outfit; how Apple Johnny could sing.” He sighed a little and pulled his sagging body upward. “But I had to go after him, just the same—you remember? That was two years ago in January—we had a thaw. A bullet from—one of my men’s guns got him.” A ghost of youthful, singing Apple Johnny seemed to tug lightly at the sheriff’s arm. He moved restively, said: “It’s all in a lifetime, P. H. Can’t be helped,” and dismissed the ghost. “Now then, Miss Shore, anything else?”