The chuckling fingers (13 page)

What acted then was the Bill Aakonen had portrayed for me, the Bill who could be a great man.

He walked toward Jacqueline, who drew away from me, drew away from him, bracing, but then stood proudly still.

“Oh, my darling, I never really believed about those other things—it was just that I was afraid. I know you had nothing to do with this.”

His arms went around her, drawing her tightly, desperately close; his face went down to her hair.

“Forgive me. Help me to bear what’s happened.”

That’s Jacqueline’s face as I want to remember it. Glory breaking over it before she hid it against Bill’s shoulder.

* * *

I didn’t know what repercussions that decision of Bill’s would have. All I felt then was triumph. Bill had shown the others what he thought of their suspicions, and his leadership was strong enough to sway them; they turned decently aside, and I felt a perceptible lessening of their antagonism.

Aakonen’s eyes stayed on Bill, perplexed and baffled. Whatever he had hoped to get from calling Bill down, patently it wasn’t this. He went upstairs again, the cape still over his arm.

* * *

Reaction from too much emotion set in. As I helped Myra .and Lottie make sandwiches and chocolate a little later I was suddenly done in. For the rest of the evening I just remember the bare outlines of what happened—people filing past the kitchen counters to fill plates, they, too, dragging but clinging together as if they’d become parts of a whole and couldn’t break away.

Aakonen returned after a while, the remnants of my bathrobe added to the cape over his arm. He and his men searched the downstairs, moving us from room to room. Bill went upstairs but stayed for a few moments only; he spent the evening at Jacqueline’s side. The phone rang many times but once to give a message he wanted—Toby and Mrs Foster were safely in Duluth.

Phillips told Myra, “I’ll bed here in the living room, if you don’t mind. I don’t fancy sleeping in that boathouse alone.” His regained aplomb had abated a little as darkness increased.

Myra started wearily upstairs for blankets, but Bill stopped her.

“Phillips can have the room Jacqueline was using.”

So that was what he’d done on that short trip upstairs, I thought, and I was right; when I went up to help Myra there was nothing of Jacqueline’s left in the northeast room.

When we returned downstairs Aakonen was waiting. He got sheets of typewriter paper from Myra and a blue wax crayon that had been Toby’s. He had each of us, standing, print the word “monarch” in capitals, first with the right hand, then with the left. He made no comment, and we made none. When we were done he stacked the sheets, folded them lengthwise and stuck them in his pocket. He picked up a newspaper-wrapped bundle into which my bathrobe and the cape had been wound.

“I am stopping at the resort,” he told Lottie. “Would you want to ride?” Then to the rest of us, “I am leaving a man here. It should be safe for you to sleep. If you leave you will be followed. Do not try to run away.”

Somehow the group dispersed then—broke—with no good-byes given. Jacqueline went upstairs with Bill.

Maybe the others depended on Aakonen’s man, but I slept behind a door whose key was turned, and with the window locked tight.

* * *

Like so many of the things that happened, the efforts we made next morning to solve Fred’s murder seemed to get us nowhere, and yet they all had their places in the final pattern. When I woke in my barricaded room to the day that was to begin with striving and end with new disaster I saw through the window a thick grayness of fog so heavy that mist distilled from it to hang in flat beads on the glass.

For a time I lay in a half-state between sleep and waking, my body so weighted that my strength seemed too small to lift a finger. From the shrouded world outside the wilderness sounds boomed dully. The house was as quiet as if no one in it lived.

Somehow today I had to do something to find out who had killed Fred, but inertia lay as heavy as the fog. Where could I begin? Pebbles took no footprints; rough rock took no fingerprints; if there ‘d been any clues left near Fred’s body I’d heard only of the damning ones I couldn’t believe—the harebells, the shawl, the word.

I managed to get up, to dress in the chilly dampness. The four other doors on the hall were still closed as I tiptoed to the bathroom. When I got downstairs the rooms were as they’d been left; Lottie hadn’t come yet.

At the cold kitchen range I stuffed paper in the fire pot and kindling on top of it. Twin sweaters were buttoned to my chin, but the chill struck in, and my mind seemed as congealed as my blood. The fire was just beginning to crackle, sending up spears of heat to my hovering hands, when footsteps sounded on the stairs—Bill and Jacqueline, pale, their faces smudged by weariness, as if they hadn’t slept at all.

“We heard you come down, so we did,” Jacqueline told me. “We’ve been talking—”

“Trying to plan what must be done,” Bill said. Grief still held him but it was harder; he’d begun to think; he’d take charge of this as he would of anything else. “People will want coffee. Ann, I want to talk to you.”

“I’ll get breakfast.” Jacqueline gave me a small, pale smile, accepting.

When I followed Bill to the living room he closed the door, standing with his back to it.

He said, low, “All those tricks, looking as if Jacqueline had done them. And now Fred—looking as if Jacqueline had done that too. Do you see it as I do-f*”

I nodded.

“The amount and the kind of planning,” he went on. “It’s diabolical. Someone—for some reason I can’t see—wanted Fred dead and began planning as long ago as the wedding that Jacqueline should be made to look responsible. That must have been the reason for those tricks—to make Jacqueline look queer.”

Exclamation rising in my throat; as soon as he said it I could see it—that terrible devising. In the light of morning—even this gray, sightless morning—fear had lessened but now it thickened again like the fog.

“Who could it be?” he asked. “Who, Ann? All that cunning —and what’s the motive behind it? No one benefits by Fred’s death.” The tumult of dark, struggling thought was on his face. “There must be something I can’t see “

“No one can see,” I said.

“We’ve got to start work—and, Ann, you mustn’t tell Jacqueline—she mustn’t see this so nakedly.”

But when we opened the door and Jacqueline came in with silver for the table I didn’t think she needed telling. Looking at truth, she quietly made toast.

* * *

Almost at once most of the group that had broken up so late the night before was together again, as if it were drawn by some unbreakable cohesion. Myra and Phillips came down from upstairs, Myra strained and drawn, Phillips at least in this early part of the morning subdued. Octavia, of course, remained unseen. Jean came with Mark; the impact of what had happened showed on Jean’s dark face only in heavy soberness and gravity; he looked as if he’d slept. Mark held himself aloof, quiet, but he had been and was thinking; the alertness of his gray eyes contrasted oddly with the swollen, discolored bruises that still covered most of his thin, thoughtful face.

“The inn’s locked this morning,” Jean told us. “Owens was on the porch – he waved us away.”

Myra roused. “You can get breakfast here.”

“Thanks.” Jean continued looking at Bill. “Do you think the inn’s being locked could mean anything?”

“What could it mean?” Bill began a restless pacing.

“It could mean Ed Corvo.” Jean stood solidly still. “Have you thought of that? Aakonen was there in the inn when I went to bed.”

“Ed?” Bill asked. “He couldn’t have handled this.”

I set down the cups I’d brought in; any possibility was something to grab.

“You mean you think Ed Corvo—?”

Jean turned then to me. “Well, you don’t know it, Ann, but Fred had an accident with a car a year ago—ran into Ed Corvo’s nephew near Lutsen.”

Bill said heavily, “That was why I wouldn’t let Fred have a car.” He turned aside, his mouth twisting.

I remembered that Jacqueline had said something about a car and an accident.

Jean went on to Bill, “The kid just limps a little, and you gave his father all that dough in a trust fund. Just the same, they kicked up a row about wanting the cash instead of the fund.”

“I can’t see it.” Bill’s reluctance held. “I can’t see Ed Corvo managing that acid on my suit and the fire in the bed. If Ed is the answer, then the tricks are one thing and the murder is another. I can’t see it.”

* * *

Bradley Auden and Carol also came; before we’d finished our brief breakfast their car was in the drive.

“Thought we might be of some help. Any news?” Bradley Auden, too, was nervous and strained, his eyes flickering from face to face with a sort of hunger as he lit a cigarette. Carol, like Mark, was quiet outside, alert inside; she moved as if unconsciously in Mark’s direction. I noticed she didn’t look at Jacqueline, any more than the others did.

Bradley talked rapidly on. “No guard at the gate this morning. Was one last night. Who’s around beside the man at the Fingers?”

We all quickened to that, realizing the man at the rocks was the only guard we’d seen that morning. Jean told Bradley about the locked inn.

“Don’t blame them.” Bradley gave a short laugh. “I locked my own house last night—first time in my life.”

Bill got up from the table. “I’m not interested in fright. I want to see this thing cleared up. Jean, if you’ll wait a second, I’d like to send you in to the office. Two of you could go over the barn and boathouse again. How about you. Brad, and Phillips? It was dark last night when Aakonen searched.”

Bradley nodded like a workman relieved to get orders. Phillips asked, “Outdoors in this weather?” But he went.

“Everything but Fred’s room,” Bill went on. “Ann and Myra, would you take that? I can’t make myself. Bring me anything that could have a bearing. Then if the gun were hidden in the rocks—”

“We’ll look around the rocks, sir!” Instantly from Mark.

“Thanks. I want to make a lot of calls. If you’ll help me, Jacqueline …” He was keeping her under the protection of his presence.

Myra, pausing only to take a breakfast tray up to Octavia, came out with me into the gray clouded landscape in which the five rocks and the guard by them loomed almost as obscurely as the shadows had on that significant night.

“It’s a relief to have Bill take hold.” Myra voiced my own thought. “I spent the night trying to see what we could do but feeling lost and helpless.”

I, too, had a feeling of direction. But when I stood in the door of Fred’s room above the boathouse a hand seemed to clap across my nose, shutting off breath. I knew then why Bill couldn’t come. Fred was gone into the dignity of death, and here were the pitiable, ridiculous leavings of the living—two chewed pencils and a gum wrapper beside a tray overflowing with cigarette stubs, detective magazines littering a cot whose brown crash cover was pitted and awry with the twisting and turning of a living body. On the wall above the cot, hanging like a picture, was a football jersey with the number 47 on its back.

Myra’s eyes went first to that. She said, “They were hoping Fred would make the team next fall… .”

Her voice shook, and I had a filled moment of knowing all the hopes and ambitions that room had held, all the restless beating desires, all the hungers and resentments. If Fred’s had been an ordinary death I might have knelt that morning by him. Instead I stood in silence a moment in his room… .

Myra said, low, “A boy doesn’t bring much to a lake for the summer,” in her voice, too, the subdued and humble knowledge of our pitiable humanity.

Slowly we began what we must do, going over what personal possessions the room held—tennis rackets, fishing tackle, golf clubs, more magazines, a college geometry and English textbook from a table near the window, a limp half-emptied cigarette package, match folders from Grand Marais and Minneapolis. In the closet wash slacks were folded over wire hangers; there was one wool suit, heavy jackets, heavy shirts. From the dresser drawers which, boylike, might have been stirred with a spoon we took out each article, refolded and replaced it.

It wasn’t until we were leafing through the magazines that we found anything at all. Myra shut one magazine hastily, thrusting it under a pile.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Nothing important. He drew faces—I didn’t like them.”

I pulled out the magazine she’d thrust away. All around the title of the first story a face had been drawn in—Jacqueline’s. He’d put a witch’s hat on her head. He’d tried to make her malignant and evil but he hadn’t succeeded. He’d drawn her mouth big out of all proportion, but it had stayed soft. He’d drawn, along a margin, mouths that had no face; he must have been trying to find the meanness that wasn’t there.

“I wish you wouldn’t look,” Myra said. “It’s like—” She burst suddenly into fierceness. “People should know when they’re going to die so they can destroy what they wouldn’t want seen. Here we’re prying in the secret places of Fred’s life!”

“We’re doing it for a reason,” I reminded. I leafed on through the magazine, where more sketches appeared, up and down the margins like illuminations. Cecile as a centaurette, her slender waist emerging from the body of a sleek and dappled horse, her fingers spread wide over her breasts, her blond hair billowing from a coyly lowered head. Bradley Auden as a centaur, pawing the earth. Bill in a beard, unmistakably the Lord God, Jehovah. Carol Auden as a mermaid, combing out her hair. Carol Auden as a hollyhock, her hair the petals. Carol Auden in a bride’s veil. Jacqueline again, this time with her eyes tipped upward, and horns.

Not much doubt what Fred had thought of people. I laid that magazine aside to show Bill.

Going through the contents of the suitcase under the bed, we made the next find. The suitcase held notebooks, textbooks —summer-school work Fred would never do. But under a sheaf of paper something bright showed—travel folders. I took them out. Then I sat back on my heels.