Chiffon Scarf (24 page)

Other footsteps were running, too—she could hear the clatter, the shouts, the questions. And the light flashed on again in the little room, this time it was the overhead light, and Noel saw her and cried, “Eden, good God, did he hurt you—”

Sloane was there, too, and Jim. And Averill. All crowding in the door of the little bedroom. On the floor at her feet lay the dressing-table lamp, shattered, the bulb in a hundred pieces, the ivory silk cord jerked from the wall socket and, now, disengaged from her wrist. She pulled it over, then, as she moved.

“
Who—
” she whispered.

Jim cried: “Eden—Eden, what happened?”

“It was Wilson,” cried Noel. “I saw him. Running down the hall toward the back”

“But, Eden—” Jim was touching her, thrusting Noel away, putting his hands upon her arms, her throat. “Eden, did he hurt you? For God’s sake say something.”

“I’m not hurt. I knocked over the lamp. He—there was a hatchet. That’s the only thing I saw. The hatchet—with the light shining on it, then there was a crash—” She was shuddering, burying her face on Jim’s shoulder.

“I thought it was a gun,” cried Noel. “It must have been the bulb breaking. I was halfway up the stair.”

Sloane was in the hall, shouting: “Chango! Pete—search the house! Don’t let anybody get away—it’s Wilson—”

He disappeared, running, shouting directions. The sheriff’s voice from below took up the refrain. All at once men were everywhere—spreading the alarm—searching.

Averill came nearer and put her hand on Eden’s arm.

“Did you see him? Was it Wilson? Do you really mean he had a hatchet?”

Eden all at once was trembling so she could scarcely talk.

“That’s all I saw,” she said jerkily. “He was in the shadow of the door; there was a—a shadow—as if he wore a coat. And a wooden handle like the handle of a hatchet. That was all.”

Hours later, when Sloane questioned her again, it was still all she could remember. And by that time the search for Roy Wilson had perforce been given up until morning.

They had not found him. Jim, Noel, Strevsky—even Pace had joined in the search while Averill and Eden and Dorothy waited in the lounge, huddling together, watching from the windows and the hall, listening.

They did not know, even, how he had escaped. There was a side door at the foot of the back stairway. And on the stairway they found two things.

One was a gray topcoat, belonging to Pace. He admitted it frankly; but denied any knowledge of how it came to be where they found it. He had left it in his room, he said; that was all he knew. No, certainly his room was not locked. Why should he lock it?

“Did the man you saw wear this coat?” asked Sloane, holding it so Eden could examine it.

But she didn’t know.

“It’s possible. There was—just a dark shadow.”

“But he could have concealed his face or his clothing with this coat?”

“Yes.”

The other thing they found was a hatchet. Lying on the stairway as if it had been dropped in flight.

But according to Chango it was not the hatchet he had missed. For this one’s worn, wooden handle had no notch in it.

“Not,” said Noel later, “that I can ever quite believe a Chinese. No matter how frank Chango looks and speaks you always feel he may be holding something back.”

But that night he clung to his story with fervor and so far as Eden could see Sloane appeared to believe him. The hatchet that had disappeared at the same time Roy Wilson had disappeared had had a notch in the handle. This one had none.

“But why,” said Averill, “would he murder Creda? So far as I know I never laid eyes on the boy. Certainly he didn’t know Creda. Unless he’s gone stark, raving mad—” She paused and shrugged her shoulders.

There was a silent moment of extremely unpleasant conjecture. Sloane turned to Noel:

“You’re sure it was Wilson,” he said.

“How can I be absolutely sure?” said Noel. “He was running along the passage up there. Just flashed across it—how can I be sure? I’d heard the sound of the bulb breaking. I was thinking of Eden—I didn’t stop him; I couldn’t have. But I—I thought it was Wilson; I was sure of it then.”

“And you’re not sure now?”

“When you question me like that, no. I mean I can’t remember anything exactly and definite—like yellow, curly hair or—or clothing. But that was my first impression. My only impression. I shouted out something—I don’t know what. And he vanished and I ran to Eden’s room. I had to—see about Eden first.”

Averill said: “Why should he want to murder me?”

“But it wasn’t you,” began Jim. “Creda—”

“Creda in my yellow coat. Creda in my cabin. Creda with a veil over her face,” said Averill with quiet, deadly stubbornness.

Sloane said: “You’d better all go to bed. It’s past midnight. There’ll be a guard around the house tonight. In case he returns.”

The sheriff got up heavily, put down a glass that had held a very long whisky and soda and sighed.

“I’ve got to go, P. H,” he said. “I can’t help it. I’ll leave a couple of deputies, if you want ‘em. And I’ll be back—”

“You can’t go,” said Sloane. “You’ve got to stay over—”

They walked out to the porch together and were still there, talking in low voices, when Eden and Averill went upstairs.

Noel, sitting dejectedly on the lower step of the stairway smoking, got up rather reluctantly to let them pass. His dashing look was decidedly blurred; he looked tired and his full age with the gray patches at his temples and the lines at the corners of his eyes very clear under the light.

“Better lock your door tonight, Averill. You too, Eden. Yell like hell if anything scares you. It’s what I intend to do.” He stopped and brooded and added a little bitterly: “My revolver! If Sloane would lock me up I’d feel safer, anyway. I wish to God Jim hadn’t brought us out here.”

“You aren’t the only one who wishes it,” said Averill crisply. Dorothy came into the hall and Noel roused himself and said gallantly: “I’ll take you to your room, Dorothy; it’s down at the end of the hall.”

Eden, closing the door of her little bedroom, lighted now with no shadow lurking behind the door, remembered the tender little scene Jim had interrupted.

Tender, yes, and gallant on Noel’s part.

But it was only gallantry. Only sentimentalism. Only Noel. With his adventurer’s look, his extravagant talk, his dashing, spuriously youthful mask. Under it he was a little futile, perhaps. Never what anybody could call intellectual; never quite so romantic a figure as he had once been but always amiably helpful, always gallant.

It would surprise him, she thought with a rather mirthless little smile, if she took him at his word.

As she had made up her mind to do. And then—instantly in Jim’s arms—found she couldn’t.

What had Jim thought, she wondered, about the things he must have overheard. Knowing Noel he couldn’t have taken it at its face value! But suppose he had; it was nothing to him what she did, whom she married or determined to marry. Or didn’t marry.

She wondered suddenly if she would ever—years and years from then—marry anyone. And instantly she told herself smartly that she would, certainly, sometime.

But something deep inside of her resisted. Marriage was a thing that lasted; a thing that had its own obligations, its own demands. And one of those demands was the utmost, unswerving loyalty. And how could you be loyal to anybody else when your heart belonged and always would belong to—to Jim, she thought, and put her hands on that stubborn heart as if to control it.

In a few days, in another week at the most, he would go as completely out of her life as if he had never existed.

She was thinking of that when Dorothy Woolen came and knocked and asked in a low voice to come in.

She opened the door and locked it again after Dorothy entered.

“There’s something,” said Dorothy promptly, “that I want to tell you. I haven’t told Sloane. But it—I think you ought to know. In case you need it,” she said, watching Eden with blank, totally expressionless eyes. She wore an unexpectedly coquettish baby-blue dressing gown and her pale hair was in two long, childish braids down her back. But she didn’t look childish; her shoulders were too heavy, her jaw too thick. She said coolly: “Shall I go on?”

“Y-yes.”

“It’s about your gray chiffon scarf. You see—Averill Blaine had it. She picked it up from the floor, there on the plane. She—something roused me and I awoke just in time to see her walk along the aisle and bend over and take your scarf from the floor. She looked at it as if she wondered whose it was and then put it in her pocket. In the pocket,” said Dorothy slowly, “of the yellow coat she was wearing. She—please try to understand me, Miss Shore. She is my employer. But I feel that she will not tell anyone about that scarf and how it came to be there—so that whoever murdered Mrs. Blaine probably saw the scarf in her pocket and simply made it serve his purpose. But I think you ought to know. If you want me to, I’ll tell the detective but I would rather not. My job—”

“Thank you. I understand.”

But Dorothy hadn’t finished. She had more to say and she found it difficult. She started to speak, hesitated, started again.

“It’s—about the plant, Miss Shore. I—well, you see, it occurred to me (I typed the wills, you see) that since Mr. Blaine and his wife are both dead, Miss Blaine stands to inherit all their property.”

“But—she—” began Eden slowly.

Dorothy would not let her put it in words. She rose quickly.

“I only wanted you to know that. And about the failure of the engine; that is no loss to Averill Blaine since she in tends eventually to sell it, when it is rebuilt, to Major Pace. Just the same. And for the same amount of money. Only now she’ll get almost all of it. That—that’s all. Miss Shore. Except, you must believe me, I have no motive in telling you this. It just happens to be a matter of record. Good night—”

S
HE WENT QUICKLY TO
the door, anxious now she had spoken to be away. Yet there was no friendliness, no warmth in the girl’s bland, pale face.

Eden closed the door and locked it again and stood there for a while lost in thought.

Averill had been one of the last to see Creda, certainly; she had loaned her the yellow coat. And then, Averill said, she had returned at once to the lounge. But how could anyone be perfectly sure of what had happened during that little interview between Creda and Averill? She herself had had a glimpse of the violence that lay below Averill’s habitually demure manner. Averill had taken the scarf; if Creda were unconscious anyone could have strangled her—it didn’t take a man’s strength. Anyone—knowing Creda’s inability to scream when frightened—could have made that first attack with a knife.

But Averill couldn’t murder anyone! Revulsion caught Eden sharply and strongly.

Averill’s reason for not telling about the chiffon scarf was quite comprehensible.

But she hadn’t murdered. Eden felt sure of that. She had enough money without Bill’s money and Creda’s; she had enough power, which Averill loved more than money.

No, it wasn’t Averill.

She resolved, however, to tell Sloane about the scarf. In all probability he wouldn’t believe her; but she had to do it. Roy Wilson. Was it actually the little steward who had stood there in the shadow, waiting for her? Waiting for
her!
Why?

Morning came, incredibly bright and hot by nine o’clock with the sun and sky brilliant and not a creature moving on the sweep of pasture and grazing lands all around the ranch house. They had not found Roy Wilson. There had been no further disturbance during the night and they had made certain that the steward was not anywhere about the ranch house, the cabins, the corrals and barns. That much they could be sure about. But nothing else. It was after breakfast that for that long, oddly baffling interview, Sloane summoned Eden to his study. The sheriff had gone, he said; he had had to go but he would return.

And to her questions he replied briefly that they had not found Roy Wilson.

“You are certain it was Roy Wilson?” he asked her. She wasn’t certain, of course. “I didn’t see him. I only saw the—the handle of the hatchet. Nothing else.”

There was a little silence while the rancher-detective’s far-seeing, blue-gray eyes searched quietly into her own eyes.

He looked tired that morning and the easygoing manner which had so neatly suited his rancher role had gone. For the first time she saw him as Jim must have known him, taut, hard-working city detective, a little weary, altogether disillusioned, very tired of people and their tragic frailties. There was something almost inhuman in his look that morning.

But he wasn’t quite inhuman. He was still enamored of his chosen pose for he took from his desk a little fiat package of cigarette papers and a small bag of tobacco and proceeded to make himself a cigarette. It was not made expertly but the making seemed to accord him some inner satisfaction. He licked the paper, rolled it and lighted it.

“Oh,” he said then. “Will you have a cigarette, too, Miss ‘ Shore?” But he passed her a box that stood on his desk and was lavishly supplied with machine-made, expensive cigarettes.

“Miss Shore—can you think of any reason why Roy Wilson—or anyone—would consider you a danger to him? Think.”

“No. No—there’s nothing.”

He paused, watching her, smoking his somewhat wobbly cigarette, thinking.

“Look here, Miss Shore. It seems to me that, without knowing it perhaps, you may have a key to this business. For that reason I’m going to tell you something—rather arrange some things you already know in perhaps a different order. I’ll do it briefly. And I—frankly, I want your confidence.” (Frankly? There was nothing frank, nothing appealing in his look.) He went on:

“It goes without saying (and I’m sure you’ve come to the same conclusion yourself) that some one of your party is responsible for Creda Blaine’s death. Invisible, malevolent beings do not exist, no matter how convenient such a being would be at this point. I had nothing to do with her murder; my boys are out of it. I am absolutely sure of that. Besides, it stands to reason that whoever killed her had a motive, and a motive for murder has to be a deeply personal and urgent motive. No, whoever murdered her has to be one of eight people. Wilson or Strevsky; Pace, Jim Cady, Noel Carreaux, Miss Woolen, Miss Blaine. You, yourself. You do understand that, don’t you?”