The chuckling fingers (27 page)

“Mr Aakonen, what’s happened? Why‘re you—?”

“Explain later. I want to make sure your sister’s in this room.”

“Octavia,” Myra called then, bewildered but obedient. “It’s Myra, darling. Are you—?”

From the room beyond came what sounded like a frightened bleat; at that proof that Octavia was behind the locked door Aakonen immediately went on to Phillips’ room and the bathroom.

Myra remained at Octavia’s door, speaking soothingly until the door was opened; she went inside for just a moment, then appeared anxiously beside me as I still hovered over Jacqueline, who slept so soundly I hated to waken her.

“Ann!” Myra became even more startled as soon as she saw me. “Whatever has happened? You’re wet! Soaking! What—?”

I was wet. Good and wet. When she touched me I could feel how my flesh had congealed on my bones, I was so wet, so cold.

She shook me. “Heavens, Ann, you’ll get your death of cold!” Without any more ado she was hauling me to her room, stripping off my heavy, dripping coat, my pajamas, the stockings and oxfords I hadn’t yet taken off when I ran out; she was pushing me into her bed, rubbing me harshly with towels until blood heat ran again against my skin. Aakonen stood in the door a moment—probably when I had no clothes on, but it wasn’t a time to care. When Myra let up a little his voice was coming up the stairs in a bellow.

Myra repeated, “Ann, can you talk now? What happened?”

I gathered myself together. “Bill’s car went in the lake.”

She stood aghast under this new blow. “You mean someone drove Bill’s car into the lake?”

“No. It was like Fred’s motorcycle. Someone must have pushed it so it started rolling of its own accord down the grade.”

She just stood looking at me, spent. She whispered, “Is this going to keep on forever? It doesn’t seem to me I can stand much more… .” She moved away stiffly, mechanically. When she came back she had clothes from my room.

“You’ll have to put these on,” she said, but her mind was held by the other. “I feel as if I were besieged, the enemy all around… .”

I, too, had had that sense of being besieged; I had it again now. Downstairs Aakonen was yelling, “Get out here! Round up the people from the resort!” He must be phoning.

In Myra’s mirror I looked like a dunked and half-resuscitated cat, my wet hair plastered to my head, my face thinned and sharpened by the struggle in the water. When I was dressed Myra and I went, without speaking, toward Jacqueline’s room, hearing Aakonen’s bellow.

“Auden there? You know where he is?”

Myra said tightly, “He must be getting everyone together again.” She paused at her sister’s door. “It’s Bill’s car, Octavia,” she said soothingly. “It’s been wrecked. Try not to worry too much.”

Octavia didn’t answer; only her nose showed over the blanket.

Another inquisition to come… .

Jacqueline was exactly as I’d left her, sleeping soundly. I went downstairs to tell Aakonen I was reluctant to wake her.

He just nodded at the request. “What did I come out here alone for?” he demanded savagely. “You tell me that!”

“Bill was fond and proud of that car. He’d had it for years,” Myra said behind me, still listless. “After what’s happened—we can be glad this time it’s a car.”

Aakonen had been holding himself like an arrow in a taut bow; as she spoke he stared at her, not breathing. Then he took in air until I thought he must burst. When he let the breath go it went in one tremendous gust.

Still he didn’t say anything.

Myra went wearily on, “You’ll have to get dry clothes on, Mr Aakonen. You’ll have pneumonia if you don’t. I can see it’s important to find who pushed that car, but—”

He said shortly, “One of my men is bringing clothes.”

“Then walk. You mustn’t stand still. I’ll start the fire.”

Obediently, as Myra and I worked with the fire, he walked, plodding up and down the long living room, end to end, bowed, as if he pulled a tremendous weight with each step, as if he were a plow horse pulling a deep share through black root-toughened ground.

* * *

It was perhaps twenty minutes before the first car came—two men in it, one of them with the dry clothes. Aakonen waved us upstairs; we heard there the voices in hurried parley and the car’s motor as it left again. Shortly after it left another car came. Aakonen called us downstairs.

Jean and Cecile Granat were in the living room when we got there, Lottie, Ella and Ed Corvo, too, and a deputy I hadn’t seen before.

Jean’s eyes leaped to me. “
What
do you think you’ve been doing?”

Aakonen shouted at him, “No talking!”

“No talking!” Jean shouted back. “I want to know what’s been going on here! Ann, you tell me! Where ’ve you been?”

I pushed back limp, still-damp hair. “I jumped in the lake. It wasn’t serious.”

“What did you do that for?” He saw Aakonen’s clothes in a puddle before the fireplace, as mine were in Myra’s room upstairs. “Whose clothes are those?”

“Mine.” Aakonen was suddenly more pacific. “Now look, everybody, I want to talk to each of you alone. Jim, see there is absolutely no talking. I’ve got an alarm out for the others.”

No mention of Carol. Hadn’t she been found yet? I had just time for the quick wonder.

“Miss Gay, come out in the kitchen with me, please.” He stood aside for me to pass him, closed the door behind me.

“Now. You sit there.” He pointed me into a kitchen chair but he himself remained standing, leaning with one fist on the table.

“How did you come to see that car go by?”

There was all that business of the matches. No use going into that.

“I fooled around in my room for an hour or so—I wasn’t sleepy. Then I went to the window to open it. I heard the car moving down below. It must just have begun moving.”

“Didn’t you see anyone running away?”

“No. I looked too. I nearly fell out the window.”

“But someone must have been there. To release the brakes, if nothing else.”

“Whoever it was must have gotten away before I looked. Perhaps heard me opening the window.”

He took on air. “Was Mr Bill Heaton’s car parked there beside the house when you left here for Grand Marais this evening?”

I thought back. Jean and I leaving, Phillips by the fire. Jean and I walked to the resort to get his car.

“I didn’t go around to that side of the house.”

“Do you remember the car standing there any other time today?”

I couldn’t remember anything connected with Bill’s car since I started.

“I don’t even — The last I remember is that Jacqueline and I drove Bill’s car into Grand Marais with Bill the night he was shot. But we came back out in your car. I entirely forgot—”

He groaned. “I had one of my men bring the car out and put it in the barn after we’d gone over it. Don’t you remember anything of seeing it after that?”

“I remember that when Jean and I came back to the Fingers tonight I noticed a dim shape beside the house.” I hadn’t looked to see if it was a car I recognized; I just remembered seeing a solid shadow I thought was a car.

He threw out his hands in a gesture of exasperation. “I cannot blame you. When I went out to look for Phillips Heaton I noticed the car was there, glanced at it, saw Phillips Heaton wasn’t in the seat and then went by.”

I sat up straight. “That’s right! You said both cars were here! You must have known that was Bill’s car!”

He explained wearily, “I do not know the habits of the family. I merely thought perhaps Mrs Bill Heaton had run it out so it would be handy if she should be called to the hospital in the night.”

I caught at it. “That may still be true. Someone might have seen it there—”

“I will ask Mrs Heaton when I question her. Now to something else. I was waiting on the porch when you and Mr Nobbelin got here tonight. We looked for Phillips Heaton—”

“Phillips!” I broke in. “He still away! Wherever can he?”

“Yes. He is not here yet. After we had been to his room you stopped, coming back, at Mrs Heaton’s door—”

“I could hear she was asleep.”

“Through the door?”

“I could hear her breathing.”

There was an intentness in his eyes. “This sharpness of your ears—does it ever prove to be wrong?”

I shook my head in exasperation. “What are you trying to imply? That I didn’t hear my cousin in that room? Why should—?” Then, like darkness closing in, I saw why he was intent.

He hadn’t and I hadn’t actually looked in Jacqueline’s room.

He said, “Before you came running down I was on the porch awhile and once I walked out to my car. It would be just possible for a person from upstairs to have gotten out the side way without my noticing, but that person would have to be quick. I do not think you could have done it, because you came from upstairs when you ran out. Mrs Sallishaw might just possibly have done it—she could have gotten back upstairs while you and I were in the lake. Mrs Heaton, however—
she
could have been outdoors all the time, until just before we looked in her room!” He spread his hands helplessly.

I said frantically, “But you saw how fast asleep she was when we opened her door. She couldn’t have gotten that fast asleep in a few minutes! And — and—” Wildly I cast about for any other aid. “Octavia—we didn’t look in her room either! She could have been out of her room all the time too.”

“I know where Octavia was when Fred was shot.”

When I went back to the living room I was in a sort of bleak despair. Why did Jacqueline always have to be so vulnerable? I started toward the stairs. From that time on, I grimly thought, I wasn’t letting her out of my sight.

But the deputy called me back. “You stay here with the others.”

So I had to take my place in the group. At least she should be safe now, with all these people below. In their separate chairs, Cecile, Lottie and the Corvos were huddled in coats, as if they, too, had been dunked; all of them drew perceptibly away from me, Ed Corvo particularly looking at me with bright, angry eyes. Jean moved over on the davenport to make room for me beside him.

After me Aakonen talked to Myra, but she was back in five minutes; the others followed her in short order. Mark was brought in by a deputy. His thoughtful face, still discolored by bruises, was thinned and haggard, and his long body drooped.

He asked, “Have you found Carol?” in a loud, inflectionless tone, as if he were deaf, before the guard had time to give his warning about silence. Mutely I shook my head at him, and he sank into a chair, his hands loose between his knees, his head bowed.

Aakonen took him next but kept him no longer than the others. While Mark was in the kitchen Bradley Auden walked in with Owens.

As Mark had, Bradley burst out, “Is Carol found? What’s happened now?”

Aakonen took him after Mark. When he came back into the living room Aakonen was behind him. There was a curious air of quickening tensity over the room.

“Miss Gay, I’ll have to wake Mrs Heaton now.”

I leaped to my feet as Aakonen said it; somehow I must prove Jacqueline had been asleep.

Myra, too, was on her feet. “Don’t startle her. It’s terrible to be waked with a start as I was when you came into my room.”

“What is it?” Jacqueline asked from deep in slumber when I shook her. Then she was in one instant wide awake, sitting in the bed, snatching for her robe. “Bill! They’re calling for me!” She pulled the blue robe around her, tossing back her hair. “I won’t be a second. I’ve got my clothes all—”

“No, wait.” I pushed her back as she started rising. “It isn’t Bill. Something else has happened. Another trick.”

“Bill’s all right?” She got only that much.

“Yes, Mrs Heaton. At least, we have not heard from the hospital.” Aakonen came forward to stand awkwardly by the bed. “Mrs Heaton, you were at the hospital with Mr Heaton—and me—all day long today. You will remember that.”

“Oh yes, of course.” She looked at him, waiting now.

“Then you came home with Mrs Sallishaw around ten o’clock tonight. When you got home, did you run your husband’s car to the east side of the house?”

“Bill’s car? We were in Myra’s car. She left it in front of the house so that if I had to go I could take that.”

“When did you last see your husband’s car?”

“When was it, Ann? Jean’s been driving us—”

“Then you say you haven’t touched your husband’s car this evening.”

“No. Of course I haven’t.”

Aakonen turned to look at me, then back at Jacqueline. “Will you tell me everything you did do after leaving the hospital tonight?”

“We came straight out here, Myra and Octavia and I. We left Myra’s car in the drive and walked into the living room. Phillips was there.”

She waited as if to be told she was saying the right things.

“Go on.”

“Octavia went up to her room right away, and Myra made a pot of hot chocolate. We all had a cup. Phillips said —” She broke off to address me directly. “Ann, you know you have a perfect right to be in this room—I wouldn’t think of minding.”

“I was just—” I began. Aakonen was again cocking an eye at me. No use denying. I explained about my interest in the fire.

“Of course.” Warm, eager color flushed up in Jacqueline’s cheeks. “Did you—?”

I had to shake the head of defeat.

“But you will—we will. When Bill’s safe I’ll—”

Aakonen interrupted. “You and Mrs Sallishaw and Phillips Heaton were drinking chocolate.”

She went back to that. “I was cross with Phillips Heaton—he was nasty about Ann. I came up to bed, and Myra did too. She told me not to mind about Phillips. I was desperately tired, and she gave me two sleeping tablets. I took them before I undressed so I’d get sleepy quickly. And I did. I went to sleep as soon as I was in bed.”

“And after that?”

“Nothing until you woke me just now. Why—?” Her mind seemed to grasp then what I’d told her. “Ann, did you say another trick? What is it? It isn’t serious, is it? No one else is—?” As if something pulled her up, she was rising to her knees in the bed, clutching the blanket to her breast.

“Oh no,” I explained quickly. Aakonen let me explain.

“Bill’s car,” was her comment when I was done. “Bill liked it so much. But of course it’s not important. He can get another car. It’s not as if—” But then she saw the significance. “Of course! This, too, was done by the murderer.”