The chuckling fingers (30 page)

Would one of us, too, soon lie dead, with no sign to say who had come and gone? And in this small circle whose were the hands that carried so much blood?

Again the feeling of helplessness and futility. The juggernaut of death seemed to roll unimpeded; nothing seemed to halt or hinder it.

The telephone broke that silence.

Jacqueline answered, turning from it breathless and shaken.

“Bill’s conscious.”

* * *

What I said all the way in was, “Suppose—just suppose this is the break we’ve got to have? Suppose this should be the end? If Bill would only know who shot him …”

But even as I said it it seemed an impossible consummation; I couldn’t believe there could be an end.

Just as we reached the hospital Aakonen’s car, too, skidded to a stop before the door.

“They called you?” he asked as if in disapproval. He went ahead of us but he held the door open behind him for Jacqueline to catch.

Dr Rush was waiting at the desk. “Bill became conscious just after I got back. We haven’t tried to question him. He recognized me.”

“He can talk?” Aakonen hadn’t even paused; he was plowing steadily on toward Bill’s room, Jacqueline and I in his wake.

“He spoke my name.”

The guard held the door open. Inside the room Miss Bolles looked up from the bedside.

“He’s still conscious.”

Jacqueline started forward, but Aakonen held her forcibly back.

“No. Stay there.”

Dr Rush backed us into the corner toward which Aakonen pointed.

Bill’s face was alive again, still and graven, his head moving only a quarter of an inch when Aakonen spoke. But his eyes were open.

“Mr Bill Heaton,” Aakonen said, and emotion threaded it, gratitude.

“Aakonen.” Bill’s voice was an echo of itself, but it was a living echo, cognizant, inflected. A greeting as to someone he hadn’t seen for a long time.

Aakonen said, “Don’t try to make long answers. Someone shot you.”

“Like Fred,” the distant sorrowful echo came. Grief was what he’d waked to.

“Yes. You remember then.” The big face over the bed had softened but it was hardening. In a held pause Aakonen half straightened the bulky shoulders in the hunting jacket.

He’s going to ask now
, I thought;
now’s the minute
. I hadn’t a glance to spare even for Jacqueline.

It came. “Mr Heaton, just answer yes or no. Did you recognize who shot you?”

Another pause; quiet in the room so intense you’d think the movement of a finger would be heard.

A faint stir, as if the head on the pillow started to gesture the answer. But instead the weak voice came.

“No.”

Beside me Jacqueline gave an uncontrollable gasp, and Aakonen stepped back as from a blow. Through my own body I felt what hadn’t even been a hope receding like lost strength.

Any other answer would have been too good to be true. What had been happening couldn’t end simply with a word. Yet we’d been keeping that chance in the back of our minds—the chance that Bill might know. Now there wasn’t even that. As I stood there it seemed to me we had nothing as the result of all our efforts. Against what sort of force were we pitted? A force that could kill and kill again and leave us nothing, so that after days of work and hunting we would not have the slightest clue— only that fateful thinning of our ranks.

I had a sensation of being back in the grasp of the lake, of feeling we were all in its grasp—that the lake was tossing us, beating us against the sharp rocks of happening, that we were all helpless; willy-nilly we must take what this outside moving force had decided upon for our lives and our deaths.

* * *

Aakonen asked Bill a few more questions; they served only to establish that Bill knew what he said.

“Where were you when you were shot?”

“The Fingers.”

“Was it long after you went out?”

“A while.”

“Didn’t you hear this person coming?”

“No.”

“You must have seen him.”

“Black,” Bill said. “All over. Black over his head.”

The memory carried excitement; his head and shoulders moved as if he were going to try to get up, and Dr Rush, who had moved to the opposite side of the bed to hold his wrist, held up a restraining hand.

Aakonen said quickly, “I understand, Mr Heaton. You were standing in front of the five rocks. You looked up and saw someone standing quite close, so close the hand with the gun was within a few feet of you. The night was unusually dark, but you could see that the figure was dressed in black and had something black drawn over its face. You perhaps stepped forward—”

“Yes,” Bill said.

“The person fired at once.”

“Yes.” Bill had sunk back, the stimulus of excitement gone. But before Aakonen could go on he’d spoken again. “My wife.”

“I’m here.” She was away from me and at the bedside in one movement. The bleak desperation that held me didn’t touch her; she was smiling, then shutting her eyes on spurting tears. “Darling, you mustn’t talk. You—”

“Not dead yet,” Bill said. It had satisfaction in it, and his mouth relaxed into something that might after a while become a grin. .

* * *

He slept soon after that, and Dr Rush asked us to go.

“You understand,” he told us. “Mr Heaton has made a perceptible improvement, but that does not mean he should be subjected to fatigue.”

The door opened behind him to emit Miss Bolles’s disembodied head.

“He woke right up,” she said. “He—”

From the room the weak voice demanded, “Jacqui.”

Dr Rush threw up his hands. “I’m afraid, Aakonen, that Mrs Heaton will have to be allowed in the room. I’ve known him since he was in diapers.”

So Jacqueline, spouting radiance, went back to stay with Bill, which meant that Aakonen stayed, too—and did no other investigating.

Nothing done and nothing being done to clear up the murders. Alone in the hall, I stood so sunk I could scarcely move. My feet did somehow get me to the waiting-room cubbyhole, and while there I saw through the front window the orderly standing on the walk smoking a cigarette. A man came by, stopping to talk, a talk that lasted only a second and ended by the orderly having his hand violently wrung and the passer-by running toward downtown Grand Marais.

The news that Bill was conscious was out.

And at that reminder that, no matter how skillful the murderer had been, he’d had one failure, my teeth came together with a snap.

Over me, as over the others, death was poised. But until it got me I was fighting.

* * *

A new invasion was on at the Fingers; reporters and cameramen swarmed the place. The news of Phillips’ death, too, was out. As I hastily swung Myra’s car to land directly in front of the door a scow with a crane on it was anchored some distance out in the lake; men on the scow were yelling orders at each other; along the shore more men yelled and milled about, and the cameras ground.

The moment I had my foot out of the car two snappy males popped up like Jason’s dragon-tooth warriors in front of me.

“Miss Gay, you swam out after the car, didn’t you?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I swam in from it. Seems to have done me good.” I felt hard and careless under my new impetus to use what short time I had.

“You know the body was in it last night?”

“Oh, certainly. We have bodies in almost everything these days. One in the bathtub this morning.”

“Say, is it nice to kid poor hard-working guys like us?”

“Look,” the other said. “All we want is a little local color. We got the facts. This Phillips Heaton now. Millionaire sportsman. Grandson of old Rufus Heaton—”

“Millionaire sportsman,” I repeated, and for a second I wished Phillips Heaton could hear it; he’d think that was awfully funny. But there was a third man with a wink in one eye and a candid camera in the other, and I could see Aunt Harriet staring at a front page, with my picture labeled, “
Millionaire Sportsman’s Girl Friend Grieves.
”

“Oh no,” I said. “You see, Phillips Heaton didn’t have a dime. And he didn’t like it. He’d gotten mixed up in something. We don’t know just what. But it seems there’s been information smuggled back and forth across the border. Something to do with certain prisoners interned in Canada… .”

I was making it up as I went along—pure fiction. But that, in case you want to know, was the genesis of the story which was to ripple wider and wider in the newspapers, which had seven government agents snooping the woods and which ended, finally, in the arrest of a guide named Alex (short for Hermann) Duvernois (short for Schneider) and, through him eleven men on the Canadian side of the border and four on; the American side and which was to send one man who had been strutting the national capital back to an unnamed foreign country—where he was not at all anxious to go—very quickly indeed.

Yet what I started with that ridiculous fiction has nothing to do with Jacqueline’s story; I ended my part in it on the note of an opening door and a vicious jerk that got me out of what was by then a knot of reporters, like a fish flipped from water.

“You idiot!” Jean said nicely through his teeth.

Unfortunately—or fortunately, as it turned out in the end— he went back to the reporters.

“There’s not a word of truth in what Miss Gay was telling you. Phillips Heaton never knew a spy in his lie.”

I don’t think those reporters had believed me. But as Jean spoke one of them asked softly, “What are you so hot about, brother?”

“There’s no more connection—”

“We heard you.” The answer was even softer, and the men melted, looking back, whispering.

Inside the porch Jean glared at me. He’d managed somehow to wash and shave. “Now see what you—”

I still felt hard and careless. “Bill’s conscious. He doesn’t know who shot him, but even Doctor Rush says he’s better.”

Jean forgot the reporters. If he were the guilty one, I thought, he did an artistic job of going down to the bottom over the disappointment of Bill’s lack of knowledge—and then an equally convincing job of being relieved over Bill’s improvement.

Inside I found Cecile sitting with Bradley beside Carol. Myra was awake but lying limply in bed. Because it was long past noon the most immediate concern seemed to be lunch; Cecile came down to help me. Bradley got his in Carol’s room, on a tray; with no sleep and what else he had on his mind he was teetering on the edge; the first thing he did was knock the cup off his tray. Carol slept through the crash, but Myra tottered out from her room to see what was happening now. In spite of my protests she insisted on going downstairs to see that a tray fixed just the right way got to Octavia, who lay headlocked on her face, as if she hadn’t moved since Jacqueline and I left her. Some of the breakfast was gone though.

“I can’t fall to pieces,” Myra told herself, dazed and weak but struggling to get herself together, as we came out of Octavia’s room. “I can’t leave Octavia to — Not that you’re a stranger, Ann, but Octavia dreads anyone but me.”

She insisted on coming downstairs to the lunch table, too, where we were joined by a Jean who had pulled into himself like a sulky turtle and a Cecile wavering between hardihood and distrust and the helplessness that had come on her since she’d learned she couldn’t run away. I admit I was ready to jump at a pinfall myself.

“All I think about”—Cecile leaned forward to tap ashes from her cigarette when the meal was done—“is getting away again.”

We’d been keeping the talk on Bill’s recovery as we ate, but she was back on the taboo subject now. “I’m just about ready to let Aakonen put me in jail. Nice, safe places, jails—no murders there.”

As she spoke a shutter in my mind flew open; I didn’t allow myself time for second thoughts.

“That’s right—something turned up when Jean and I were in Bill’s office last night.” I made it significant.

Immediate comprehension and warning in Jean’s eyes. “Now listen, Ann—”

I paid no attention. “Aakonen opened an envelope holding Bill’s canceled checks for last month.”

The full breast rose then and stayed high; fingers tightened on the cigarette.

“There were three checks which had been made out to you, Cecile. Three checks, each for twenty-five dollars, dated May 18, May 25 and June 1.”

Myra asked weakly, “Ann, what are you saying? Surely you can’t—”

But the baby-blue eyes across the table weren’t defenseless; they looked out of armor.

“So what?”

“I thought you might want to make some explanation.”

“I don’t.”

Jean began, “Ann, can’t you—?”

“No,” I said. “I know what it looks like . Three checks made out to Cecile. I know how Aakonen thinks it looks. As if perhaps Cecile always got twenty-five dollars a week from Bill, but when he was away in Bermuda where he couldn’t deliver the money in person, then he sent checks.”

“All right,” Cecile said. “He sent me three checks. Any reason why he shouldn’t owe me seventy-five dollars?”

I didn’t answer. She turned to look at Myra, who’d sunk back in her chair, with her white head averted; she looked at Jean, staring down at the knuckles of his interlaced fingers. For an instant there was something on her mouth that reminded me of Jacqueline’s mouth.

She said, “You think, Aakonen thinks, Myra thinks, Jean thinks that there’s just one reason Bill would give me money.”

“No,” I said, and my skin prickled as if a storm were coming. “If I’d thought that I wouldn’t have said a word.”

“You mean you don’t believe—?” It was quick, but what came next was slow. “Of course. You’re thinking from Bill’s side.”

“Cecile,” Jean said, “let it slide. You don’t have to talk.”

“That’s what I planned,” she said, but something—could it be courage?—was in her tight hands like a weapon.

“You’re right, Jean—I don’t have to talk. That’s what I planned at first. That’s what I was doing that day after Fred died when you surprised me in the woods. I was hiding the— evidence.”

She smiled without humor. “I did a good job, too, didn’t I?

But of course you didn’t know what to look for. Two envelopes. Two letters. One of them written by my mother. One of them from Bill.”