The chuckling fingers (33 page)

No answer.

“Some of you think you know the answer, but you’re wrong. Some of us have set out to prove you’re wrong, but we haven’t gotten very far, have we? There was Bill. He’s supposed to be the new businessman, the type that builds up instead of tearing down. He believed Jacqueline didn’t kill Fred, and look what happened to him—he went out and got shot like a lamb himself.”

Jean spoke slowly then. “Some people get shot for talking too much.”

I wound myself tighter. “Jean, the handler of men. Myra, the clairvoyant. And me, where’ve I gotten in spite of all the talents I boasted? Remember, I was the girl with the eyes and the nose and the ears… .”

Suddenly the table and the faces that bent forward, watching me, were gone; I didn’t see any of them.

“Me with the eyes and the ears and the nose… . Was that me repeating? Or was it an echo? When I came back from the dark, rushing chambers of blind thought I blinked at light and the reserved, wary faces, and my hands pushed at the table edge, white knuckled. The little plan had whirled out and become big, falling over me like a waterspout.

“But I know of something I can at least try,” I said. “There was once when the murderer and I were in the same room. He came into my room to slash my bathrobe and shook the bed to wake me. He’d put on something of Jacqueline’s, or else he carried one of her pomanders, because I caught the scent of spice.”

A gasp from Jacqueline. “You didn’t tell me that!”

“No, I didn’t want to. I was afraid. I’m not afraid now. I know this is a murderer who’d do just that—carry the spice and wake me. I’ll show you why… .”

My coat was thrown over the wicker davenport; from its pocket I got the sandpaper I’d bought at the hardware store. When I went to the kitchen for matches Jean shouted at me, standing up to stop me.

“No,” I told him. “I’ve got to do it.” And he let me go.

Standing beside the table, I ripped a sheet of the sandpaper in two, laying half of it over my emptied water glass. Two of the matches I forced through the sandpaper as far as the heads. Then I laid the second half of the sandpaper over them.

“Look,” I said. “This is a bed. The bottom sandpaper rests on the spring. The mattress is on top. Bill is asleep and he turns in his sleep.”

My hand moved over the sandpaper, rolling it. I didn’t even know it would work; I was risking what I’d guessed. Slowly I moved the sandpaper, and it wasn’t long—a spark flashed; a thin waver of gray smoke went up, and then a black circle showed through the top paper. As intent as the others, I stood back to watch while the sandpaper blackened and curled to a substanceless thinness. When I flicked the ash with my finger the crumbled flakes fell into the glass.

Someone let out a long breath.

Then Jacqueline was hugging me. “Ann, wonderful Ann! You would stick until you got it.”

“It would have worked slower than that in the night,” I said. “But it shows how a fire could have been started by someone who wasn’t there.”

“We can call Aakonen right away—”

I pushed her aside. “That’s not all. Jean has a chemist—a friend of his in Detroit—doing experiments. Any day now”— this wasn’t truth, but only Jean and I would know that— “he’ll be able to tell us the name of the chemical that ate holes in Bill’s suit after it had been on the suit for a whole week.”

I paused. “Perhaps you don’t all see what that means. It means that none of that long series of tricks will any longer be tied up to Jacqueline, because there were just those two that made it look as if she had to be responsible.”

“Ann,” Jacqueline whispered again. Over the others was that complete, intent, intense silence.

“Then that night the murderer was in my room. It was too dark for me to see but not too dark for my ears and nose. There’s something it seems to me I should be able to get.”

In those seven pairs of eyes facing me wasn’t there more than watchfulness? It seemed to me I could feel it—the crouch, the poise of the wolf at bay. I tried to single out the wolf stare, but all the eyes were alight, all were intent, any one pair no different from the others.

“So,” I said, “I want to play the game we played on the Fourth of July. Everyone who was here then, except Fred and Bill and Phillips. And I’d like to have Lottie and the Corvos.” I turned to Jean. “Would you get them?”

He asked, “Ann, do you know what you’re doing?” His lower lids were pulled up so tightly he had almost no visible eyes at all.

“Or die doing it.”

“All right.” He left.

When he was gone the others stirred a little, Bradley Auden laughed, but it was forced.

“So that’s what the burned cover was this afternoon. A matchbox cover. It’s been annoying me ever since.”

Carol shivered. “You wore my scarf that other day, but now I haven’t any. I wished I had had one last night.”

I went upstairs to get a scarf of my own. When I got back Jacqueline was carrying one of the chairs to the opposite end of the room.

“Away from the fire,” she explained. “Fire has a smell too.”

Then I had the rest of my idea.

“It shouldn’t be here at all. It should be in my room upstairs, exactly as it was the night of the Fourth. I’ll pull the curtains and lie, with my eyes bandaged, on the bed. Each one of you can open the door, walk in silently, stand awhile by the bed and then shake the bed before you go away. That’ll be the nearest I can get.”

A gasp then from Jacqueline. “But, Ann—I don’t like that! That’s frightening!”

“I’ll say, ‘All right,’ after each one of you shakes the bed. If you don’t hear that—you’ll know who was in before you.”

They all protested, circling around me. As they did so I just looked from face to face, counting them up. Everyone who … No.

“Myra,” I said slowly, “I’d like it if you’d persuade Octavia to do this too. Not that she’s under suspicion—I remember about her locked door—it’s just to make the test more complete. You can explain.”

She didn’t like it, but there seemed a compulsion now in the room, as it were the common will that this should go through.

She said at last, “I know you’re doing this for Jacqueline,” and went to persuade Octavia.

“Wait for Jean and the others before you begin.” I gave a last suggestion and followed Myra upstairs.

Swiftly in my room I set the stage, drawing the curtains, shutting the place into soft gray dusk. The bedcovers were still thrown back as Carol had left them when she got up for dinner. I leaned back against the propped-up pillow, waking my senses.

From back of me the incessant lake and pine sounds came thinly in. I must tune those out. A door slamming below— that would be Jean coming with the Corvos and Lottie. A loud rumble—that would be Jean’s anger over the change in plans. My toes tingled as if my feet were cold.

A faint scent about the bed that was Carol’s, not mine. I must identify and discard that. Pine fragrance and lake dampness, the varnishy smell of wood, warm dryness of feathers in the pillow, clean smell of cotton. Identify and discard.

People came up the stairs in a body, a heavy charge. Then a hush and the door quietly opening; soft footfalls along the boards of the floor; a pause.

Faint and refreshing, the scent of spice. They’d sent Jacqueline in first. The bed moved gently.

“All right,” I said. The footfalls receded.

A closing and an opening door. Heavier, wearier movements. Pipe tobacco, a slight limp. Bradley Auden. The bed moved.

“All right.”

Lottie next and after her Ella Corvo. They both moved in a heavy slide of garments and limbs, their scent one of cooking and damp awed perspiration; I knew then they could be ruled out as suspects; I never considered them again. Ed Corvo, however, I had to guess almost by elimination; he had no scent that I could catch.

One by one they came: Jean, Myra, Carol, Mark, Cecile, each one conscientiously playing his role. And as they came a fearful wild elation grew in me. All around me I could feel the taut-ness pulling tighter. That was what I wanted.

Octavia came last. I heard the faint footfall, but otherwise it was almost as if there were nothing in the room. No—some slight, sharp scent, hard to identify, and one I didn’t remember.

If I could have recognized after all these days any faint reminiscent scent, any reminiscent movement, that would have been pure gain. I tried, but didn’t expect to.

Kill or cure now. I knew very well what I was doing: I was building a trap, making the murderer feel I was dangerous, making him feel I knew too much. I was so frightened my skin was cold but I went ahead, anyway, making myself bait in the trap.

* * *

After Octavia the door opened with no attempt at softness.

“Okay, you’ve had ‘em.” It was Jean.

I sat up, pulling the scarf from my eyes. The light went on, and they all trooped in.

“There’s something.” I put it with careful vagueness, wrinkling my forehead in token of perplexity and thought. “I have to think. It seems to me there’s some recollection—if I could just get it to the surface.”

They were silent, watching me and waiting, as I swung my legs from the bed.

“I’ll have to sleep over it, I guess. Try to dredge it up from my subconscious. If I wake in the night as I did then, out of sleep …”

As I walked toward them Octavia was still there at the back of the group, but she melted away. They all fell away a little, moving stiffly, as if their joints had rusted. Yet they accepted what I was doing, as if there were a doom over all of us, and whether I exposed myself dangerously or not made no real difference.

Bradley Auden, turning suddenly, almost knocked Myra over; she’d been visibly holding herself together only by force of will. She clutched at him to keep herself upright, her dark eyes completely bewildered and spent.

“It’s dangerous,” she said. “Can’t you all see it’s too dangerous? Ann can’t do this.” When no one answered I did.

“Nothing’s dangerous any more. Don’t worry, Myra. You ought to be in bed.”

Jacqueline and I helped her get there. When we walked downstairs the others were standing almost as helplessly as Myra in the middle of the room. They’d been talking, but at our appearance a dead silence fell.

Jean’s black eyes lifted to me.

“Well, nothing I can do here, I guess.” His hand went to his forehead in a queer half-military salute. “I’ll say good night. I hope some of us live to testify at that inquest tomorrow. Good luck with your subconscious, Ann.”

Cecile was after him in quick panic. “Wait for me!”

Bradley Auden seemed to shake himself partially awake. “I’ll see you get to the resort, Cecile. You, too, Jean and Mark— all of you. This is no time for anyone to walk through woods in the dark alone.”

They borrowed Myra’s car and went together, all of them, even the Corvos and Lottie piling in, hurrying as if they couldn’t get away fast enough. Jacqueline and I stood on the porch watching them go.

Jean, I thought bitterly—he’d accepted the whole thing; he’d gone as easily as that. He, like the others, seemed suddenly to have become just a puppet, jerked by strings, peering out of a masked face with solitary, expectant eyes. Why hadn’t he managed somehow to back me up?

As we turned inside Jacqueline, too, seemed tacitly to accept what I proposed to do. We went about hooking screens and turning off lights—those ridiculous habitual night preparations which guarded against nothing—and she didn’t say a word.

She walked upstairs with me, still not saying a word, and came in with me to help make up my bed with fresh sheets and cases. When that was done she turned to me silently, putting her arms around me, resting her cheek lightly for an instant against mine.

“Ann,” she said, and her eyes were wet, but she turned and walked out, and the light went on in her room… .

Four of us in the house, four women in a summer house in which entry was as easy as a slit screen: shrinking Octavia, Myra broken to uselessness, Jacqueline leaving me, I with my trap built… .

I stood in it, knowing what it is to stand alone.

I couldn’t back out now. I walked down the hall to the bathroom and came back, calling good night to Jacqueline as I passed her closed door, noting that Octavia’s door was tightly shut and, no doubt, locked on the inside, stopping in to see that Myra was as comfortable as she could be made.

She roused to beg me again, “Ann, I don’t like what you’re doing. We ought to have one of Aakonen’s men in the house. I shan’t be able to sleep. I—”

“Nonsense!” I told her cheerfully over the turmoil in my mind. “No one will come. I’m in no danger.”

I closed her door firmly and my own. No chair under my door tonight. Quickly I made a survey of that room where the curtains were pulled and the bed waited… .

It wasn’t waiting for me. That bed was going to be occupied by that pet of girls’ dormitories—a blanket dummy. I was a reckless fool, but not fool enough to try sleeping in that bed tonight.

For the first time I took thought of what I’d cut out for myself, and a cold finger seemed to press against the back of my neck and run delicately, icily, all the way down my spine.

To some extent I’d been successful—I knew I had. I’d felt it in those people—the rising tension. Suppose I were the murderer behind one of those pairs of eyes? How would I rest tonight, wondering when that girl—that Ann Gay, who had discovered the secret in my trick of the fire in the bed—might wake in the night and remember?

Even if the murderer guessed, even if he was pretty sure that I remembered nothing, still he couldn’t be entirely sure. And the night would be on my side, the long hours in which the murderer must lie expecting, waiting. The wilderness sounds would be on my side, because even away from here, where he couldn’t hear the chuckle of the Fingers, the murderer would hear the urging crash and roar of the strong, insistent, hungry lake and the forest… .

Suddenly those sounds seemed to burst into my own room, filling it, crowding it; in that instant I wanted so badly to run downstairs, to call Jean, to call Aakonen that it pulled me completely around, facing the door. Yet I’d known from the moment I set my hand to this plan that I couldn’t ask Jean’s help, couldn’t call Aakonen, that that would give away the trap.