The chuckling fingers (16 page)

Automatically, staring at myself in the mirror, I reached out my hand to my powder box on the dresser and flapped the puff against my nose.

Then in a great gasp of stinging pain I ran groping for the bathroom. Pepper. Someone had put pepper in the powder!

Sneezing, coughing, weeping, I threw water on my streaming eyes; it was minutes before I could even see myself. Then as pain subsided, broken by recurrent fits of sneezing, anger began rising. I looked as if I’d had a three-week crying bout. Of all the nasty tricks …

Tricks
. This was another

Anger got too big to hold. I bounced down the stairs to wake Jacqueline, to stand furiously staring at her chair, thinking that my blinded eyes were telling me lies. I even put my hand on the cushion.

She wasn’t there.

I looked for her in the shadows of the room, calling her. “Jacqui! Where are you?”

“Ann!” As if in distant answer her voice came calling me, mingling with the lake and forest roar. From somewhere outside.

“Ann!” My name again. Far away, but wild and urgent.

Instinct got me across the front porch, stopped me to listen.

“Ann!” From the direction of the Fingers. Sightlessly I ran, caught my toe in a plant on the terrace, fell, was up again.

She wasn’t calling any longer; she heard me. “Hurry! Get Bill’s car!” She was commanding, weeping.

I got to the Fingers, stumbled again, went down against something that my hands groped for and found—a man’s legs on the gravel, where Fred’s had been.

JACQUELINE’S SOBBING was close to my ear.

“Ann, hurry! It’s Bill. I’ve got to get him away from here. His car. Hurry!”

Senseless thunder and chuckle in ears, all around and through me. I rose to obey, running sightlessly and thoughtlessly.

“No! Ann, wait! Come back! The keys—”

She must have been groping in Bill’s pockets for them, because she had them ready when I got back. Again I ran across the lawn, it seemed to me still hearing her sobbing mingled with the chuckle of the river and the boisterous, pounding rush of wind and water, sweeping up again its loud pagan exultation.

I could remember where Bill’s car was in the barn. I was in the seat, the wheel under my hands. The car moved as if it were rehearsed—back, around in complete darkness. The lights went on, twin beams flashing across the lawn, arcs of light fringing into blackness; my eyes stung, but I could see. Ruthlessly I drove across the lawn and the flower bank. The lights picked up Jacqueline sitting with Bill’s head and shoulders on her lap; even the colors flashed up, unforgettable— her blue dress, her white face, Bill’s long brown shadow. When I swung the car to stop beside them she was rising, trying to lift the man in her arms.

I saw Bill clearly then—over the front of his white shirt a red stain, wetter, redder, wider than that other stain. His head lolled limply on her arm, the ridges of cheekbone and nose and chin too sharp, too bold.

“He’s dead,” I whispered. Ice, as if the cold of an entire winter flowed out from my heart.

“No!” she denied me fiercely. “I shouldn’t move him—it’s all wrong to move him. But I’ve got to get him away.” She struggled, panting, crying, moving him closer to the car. “Ann, help me—”

All our lives I’d been the leader and she the led, but now she whipped commands at me, and I obeyed, taking Bill’s knees, lifting, tugging, dragging him to the car.

She said when we had him on the seat, “I’ll hold him. You drive. Hurry!”

All the way in to Grand Marais that was all she said. “Hurry!” The car could go any speed. Forest rushed by on both sides; we were in a streaking tunnel. A car came up; white faces flashed behind a windshield; it was only a glimpse.

“Hurry, Ann, hurry!” It had become toneless, a whisper. “There’s a cottage hospital. I’ll show you.”

And then she talked to Bill. She said, “Bill, I didn’t mean to. It was all my fault.”

* * *

Small scenes in the jumble of those next hours. A big white house that looked like a dwelling but that smelled disinfectants inside and had a woman at a table inside the door.

“Hurry! Bill Heaton’s been hurt. We’ve got him here. We need a doctor—any doctor.”

A man running, getting a stretcher, Bill being lifted to the ground, four of us carrying him, and then the stretcher lying on a narrow table in the hall, the shirt too red for horror in terrible bright light, the face with its driving intensity gone, looking dignified and majestic, as a dead king should look.

A second man coming out of a side room, pushing up his shirt sleeves.

He said, “Good lord! It
is
Bill Heaton!” as if he couldn’t have believed. Then he shouted, “Scissors!” and scissors were in his hand. There in the hall he slashed twice at the shirt; the blood-soaked fabric folded back from Bill’s chest and the awful jagged hole under the collarbone.

Jacqueline whispered, “Hurry!”

The doctor’s eyes swept over her, over me like fire passing.

“Get me Miss Bolles,” he told the doorkeeper, and to us, “You can’t come.”

The orderly trundled the table with Bill on it quickly down the hall, the doctor following. A door slammed behind them. The doorkeeper ran upstairs. In a minute a second woman in white came downstairs, running. The door closed behind her too.

“He’s got to live. It was my fault,” Jacqueline said. The entire front of her dress was red-soaked. She’d forgotten I was there. She walked up and down the hall, grinding her palms. Repeating.

“He can’t die. He can’t die. It was my fault.”

The doorkeeper came back, telephoned. Before anything else happened Aakonen was there, bulking in heavy and huge, his somber eyes distraught.

He asked, “What happened out there?”

I stammered, “I don’t know. I found – found them—”

“No—Mrs Heaton. How did Mr Heaton get shot?”

Jacqueline asked, “Is that important now? What’s important is that he’s got to live.” But she was looking beyond us. She said, “I don’t know. There was someone. I think he must have gone behind the Fingers. I heard the shot when I was coming out the front door. I ran, calling. And something moved. It must have gone behind the Fingers.”

She stopped, as if anyone could understand.

Aakonen took her arm. “Mrs Heaton, if you would get calm and tell it all … I sent men out but I want to hear from you.”

“It was my fault. I went to sleep. I wasn’t going to leave him. I thought if I stayed with him all the time, then nothing could happen to him. No one could shoot us both at once. Don’t you see? But I fell asleep. And he went out.”

Again she stopped, as if that could be all.

My own thoughts had scarcely more coherence. So that was what she’d meant by its being her fault—that Bill couldn’t have been shot if she’d been with him. The skin loosened a little over my bones.

I said, “She and Bill were in the living room this afternoon when Jean Nobbelin and I went out. When we got back about eight-thirty Mrs Heaton was in the living room alone, asleep in a chair.” No fencing, no concealment now; I didn’t realize enough of what I said to know what to conceal. I told about the travel folders and the pepper in my face powder, told of running downstairs, of hearing Jacqueline call… .

“So,” Aakonen said when I was done. “Mrs Heaton, try again.”

“That’s the way it was. We were in the living room this afternoon, Bill and I. He was thinking out who could have killed Fred. I was watching him. Then suddenly I was waking up, and there was a lamp lit. Bill was gone. I knew where he’d be—outside, walking. I ran out, calling him. He shouted from over near the Fingers. And then there was the shot. Not very loud. Dull. I ran there—”

“That shout—what was it.””

“It didn’t say anything—it was just a shout—a warning. I got there, and someone moved right in front of me. It was very dark—black. Bill was on the ground. I tried to carry him but I couldn’t. I called for Ann to come—”

Swiftly—“This something that moved “

“I’m sure it went behind the Fingers. But then it went away while I was calling Ann. Toward the east. Away from the house.”

“You didn’t try to catch this person?”

“I was thinking about Bill.”

“You saw nothing of him?”

“No. It was black.”

I said, “It’s dark outdoors tonight.”

“Yes,” he said, repeating to Jacqueline, “This person moved away when you got there but not until you were close.”

“Yes.”

He said to me, “Would that make it about nine o’clock when Mr Heaton was shot?”

How long had I been upstairs? What time had it been when Jean and I got back?

“It must have been about that time.”

He left us abruptly to go down the hall to the telephone. We heard him there, guarding his voice with his hand.

“Can’t they know soon now?” Jacqueline asked me, as if I could hurry the doctor’s hand.

How much was there of that waiting? I don’t know. Eternity. The doors of the hall going by until they became as familiar as the beads of a fingered rosary.

Then the door at the end of the hall opening, and the doctor coming out, a blunt man, thick; there was black hair on his arms. The world rocked and waited as he walked toward Jacqueline.

He said, “He’s alive, Mrs Heaton. It’ll be touch and go. I think he’ll fight.”

Jacqueline went back against the wall.

Aakonen asked, “You get the bullet out?”

“Kept it for you, Sheriff. It missed the heart. Went through the apex of the left lung. Some internal hemorrhage. God’s hands from here on.”

Aakonen asked, “Would there be time for you to call if—?”

The doctor nodded. “There should be.”

Jacqueline gasped, “Oh no! I’m staying right here with him. I want to be in his room. Can’t I go there now?”

Aakonen had her arm. “No,” he said. “I am putting a guard at his door and another under his window outside. Until I know who shot him no one is to go in his room except the doctor and the nurse, unless I, too, am there.”

Jacqueline became still all over. “But I’ve got to be with him.”

Aakonen repeated.

“Very well, then,” she said. “No one is to see him at all. No one is to carry anything in to him. Food or flowers. No one from—out there—is to come near the hospital.” As if Aakonen’s order were her own, and she were amplifying it.

* * *

Aakonen wanted us back at the Fingers. He was like a river in flood, propelling us out to his car, driving as if some of the car’s impetus came from himself.

“Suppose they should call now,” Jacqueline kept saying, “now while we’re on the road? …”

Even when we walked into the living room at the Fingers her mind stayed at the hospital; apparently she felt nothing of the emotion sweeping out from the huddled people. Myra was there, her dark eyes seeming to quiver in the pallor of her face. And yes, in the shadows behind her there was a gray dress and gray face—Octavia, shrinking behind Myra as if that frail body must cover and conceal her. Phillips was near, staring and ash gray. Bradley Auden had a face as stark as if death had touched him too. Carol crouched, white, beside him. Apart and alone sat Cecile, and in another spot Ella and Lottie sat, trembling so I saw their bodies in a shimmer. Mark and Jean looked to be fighting against the terror but held by it.

After Fred had died there was horror, because murder and a killer were near, touching us. But now there was a different terror, the terror of people in a trap who knew for sure now that the killer would strike again, knew that any eyes at which theirs looked might be a killer’s eyes… .

Aakonen herded Jacqueline and me closer into the light; as he did so a concerted gasp of horror went all over the room; the eyes centered on Jacqueline, fascinated and fearful. I remembered then the red ruin of her dress; to them it looked a symbol. That was Bill’s blood staining her.

“Come upstairs with me.” I knew she must quickly get into another dress.

She remained impervious to their stares, walking with me toward the steps.

Jean was on his feet, asking harshly, as if he dreaded the answer so desperately he could hardly form the words, “Bill— is he—?”

“He’s alive,” Jacqueline answered. “They’ll call me if I’m needed.”

“Thank God!” Surely that was honest prayer. Over the rest of the faces, too, passed a relieving stir.

When we came downstairs again Aakonen was talking to men not a part of the group: Owens, the wood-shingle man, others.

“You go over there and sit,” Aakonen told us, gesturing. Somehow the chairs were in a rough order, facing forward toward Aakonen and the wary-eyed men who stood beside him. Unmistakable again, the drawing away from Jacqueline as she went toward one of those chairs.

“Now.” Aakonen said the word with a deadly chill and paused. “I want to know where every one of you was and what you did tonight. I’m going to make you talk in front of everyone, so that you’ll be caught if you lie. Before I leave here I’m going to know who shot Bill Heaton.”

He shouted suddenly, thrusting forward a violent finger. “You! Where were you at nine o’clock tonight?”

It was Mark Ellif his finger singled out; pallor increased under Mark’s livid bruises, and there was pallor in his voice.

“I – I—” And then nothing. Mark just stared, transfixed, at Aakonen’s finger, as if his tongue had refused motion.

Carol rose out of her crouch to stand at bay, words racing.

“Mark was at Auden! With me! He isn’t the one who’s the murderer, and you know it! We hunted that gun all afternoon and couldn’t find it! We came here at six o’clock and told Bill, Then we went to my house and had dinner. Mark was with me every minute!”

Aakonen roared, “I don’t want you talking! Mark!”

Mark moistened his lips.

“He was at Auden!” Carol screamed.

Bradley started to his feet. “She doesn’t lie—”

“Where were you at nine o’clock?”
Aakonen towered over Mark.

“I was at Auden.” Mark at last found tongue.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I—didn’t know when nine o’clock was.”

“I looked at the clock!”—Carol.

“How do you know now when nine o’clock was?” Aakonen still beat at Mark.