The chuckling fingers (6 page)

“Yes,” she said strongly. “Ann and I know a game. Ann can see blindfolded. She could pick out any one of you that came near her.”

I gave her a look. Why should she choose, so instantaneously, that particular game? The year I’d been ten I was zooming downhill on a toboggan—typical of my activities at that age— when the toboggan flipped me into a tree. The next year I’d gone around with my eyes bandaged, expecting to be blind. Jacqueline had spent that year at my heels. I can still hear her anxious, urgent voice, trying to keep me from looking at blackness. The game was one we’d played then, because my ears and nose had sharpened so I could tell people by scent and sound.

Fred’s comment was, “Cats see in the dark.” Apparently some of his animosity extended to me.

Cecile seized a pretext for being provocative. “I’ve often thought I felt things in the dark.”

Bradley Auden came to attention with, “Who, for instance?”

“Cecile wouldn’t know,” Jean said. “In the dark all cats are gray.”

Carol Auden was watching her father with obvious displeasure as he laughed upward at the girl whose jade sweater gave the old answer to the old conundrum as to why girls wear sweaters. She got to her feet.

“I’ll play.” She undid the kerchief from her hair. “This’ll do for a blindfold.”

“It’s not much of a game,” I apologized, explaining. Jacqueline had risen too. Together she and Carol arranged me in a chair back toward the trees, with the kerchief over my eyes. The spattering of grumbling and amusement died to whispers, and then there was only the lake’s rush and the river’s gurgle and the wind’s sweep—and those other undercurrents.

“Ready now,” Carol Auden called gaily. “Here comes the first.”

It wasn’t hard guessing; no one else there would be wearing a French perfume which if I’d been naming it would have been called “Ouvrez la Fenêtre.” After Cecile, Myra—she’d be the one who used expensive lavender soap. No one strode over grass as swiftly as Bill. Jean Nobbelin smelled clean and warm, surprisingly like rock and earth; the boys were hotter, dustier, damper —Fred more so than Mark.

Then Toby said meekly, quite close, “Is me,” and was hauled back to laughter. There was still an echo of a giggle following Carol Auden. Bradley Auden used Houbigant’s. Then spice— that was Jacqueline. I’d forgotten until then that she used pomanders—small bags of spice—for sachets in her clothes. When I had only two senses the scent came faint but clear, like a plum tree in blossom a block away.

I’ll never forget that scent again.

Phillips came last. I remembered the aura of leather and tobacco in which he’d entered the kitchen that noon.

Carol came then to take off the kerchief, and there was a burst of clapping, with derisive guesses as to what my nose had in some instances told me. “Ann’s smell game,” Bradley Auden dubbed it.

The moment the kerchief was off I looked to Jacqueline, who was smiling a small, successful smile.

She said, “I think it may be comfortable having a detective in the house, don’t you?”

FOR WHOM was that remark intended? Her gaze was directed at no one, and no one answered her. Fred was sitting now beside Carol and Mark, the sullenness gone from his face, leaving it amused, awake, lazily curious. Phillips Heaton, back of the group of chairs, was glancing speculatively, not at me, but at the others—Myra indulgent, Cecile negligently tolerant, Bradley joking. Only Bill and Jean seemed to feel any meaning behind Jacqueline’s remark; they were frowning slightly, and the dark eyes under the frowns were quick.

* * *

Almost immediately there was that second more decided brush between Fred and Mark over Carol, who had remained standing after the game, retying the kerchief I returned.

“Mother’ll be waiting for me,” she said. “I usually read to her evenings. Thanks, Myra. Thanks, Bill and Jacqueline. It was a lovely supper.”

I remembered that I’d heard Bradley Auden’s wife was an invalid, crippled by arthritis.

Fred was quickly on his feet. “Here, I’ll walk home with you.”

“I am.” Mark put it briefly, but there wasn’t any doubt about his intentions. He bent to pick up two weather-beaten leather jackets from the grass. “Thanks for me, too, everybody.”

“The hell you are!” Fred’s head was lowering pugnaciously on his neck. “I invited Carol on this hike. I saw her first.”

Carol snapped, “Mark’s taking me home!” She turned her back to march across the lawn toward the Fingers and the shore, her zinnia-bright head high and obstinate. Mark followed with long strides, catching her elbow to help her down the terrace.

Bradley Auden grinned, boastfully paternal. “No one pushes redheads around.”

“That—” Fred didn’t fill it in. He’d stepped a pace or two forward but halted, his face thunderous. Then he turned, shrugging.

“Don’t lay any bets on Mark. I’ll take care of him.”

His father said evenly, “That should be simple. Your two hundred pounds to his hundred fifty.”

Slow, chanting sarcasm. “But his strength is as the strength of ten, because his heart is pure.”

Myra asked ruefully, “Oh dear, what will you other people think of Heatons?”

* * *

It was soon after that we found the blue chalk gone.

Jacqueline turned to Toby with a cozy, “Lovely, here it is bedtime,” and Toby begged only to finish drawing a wriggly red line down the colorful tangle on her slate.

“I put in box,” she agreed when that was done.

While she was rounding up her chalk Bill and Jean were having a business discussion—I can remember that. Something about whether they should hold some pulpwood stock for a likely price rise now the Nazis had the Scandinavian countries out of the market. It was a warm argument, both men so lost in it they noticed nothing else, both of them sitting up fierce and quick, marshaling arguments like battalions. Yet they seemed without animosity, as if they’d follow amicably any decision made.

“One gone,” Toby complained after a moment of hunting. “B’ue one gone.” She held up the box, showing where one more chalk belonged.

“It must be under a chair, ducky,” Jacqueline told her. “Mama’ll look too.”

So first Jacqueline, then I, then Myra joined in the chalk hunt. Even Jean and Bill, Cecile and Bradley looked around where they sat; Fred had disappeared. The chalk, stayed missing.

When, at Jacqueline’s nod, I carried Toby off she was wailing at the top of her lungs.

“Need!” She kept insisting. “B’ue one gone!”

“If we don’t find it I’ll buy you another in the morning,” I promised rashly in that chalkless spot, but Toby clamped an inconsolable face in my neck and wept on. We tendered her a fancy bath with rose-geranium salts and a spongy Jiminy Crickets I’d brought for a later gift, but she slung the Jiminy Crickets at the bathroom water tank and later sobbed herself to sleep.

“It is odd about that chalk,” Myra said then. “There were blue marks on the slate—she must have just had it. But no one would take Toby’s chalk.”

We were to find out about that.

* * *

Jacqueline didn’t go downstairs again after Toby was asleep.

“I think I’ll go to bed now too,” she said. Her upper lip was stiff with fatigue, and her eyes under the long dark lashes were almost glazed.

Myra said good night and left, but I sat for almost two hours on the foot of Jacqueline’s bed, talking. As soon as she sensed I wasn’t going to ask questions most of her aloofness went.

“I’ll sleep now,” she promised at last. Her arms came up to give me a quick hug. “Oh, Ann, it is good to have you here! Forgive me for being—unpleasant.”

“Things’ll come out somehow,” I promised myself as much as her. After I’d dropped a kiss on her cheek I switched off her light and went along the hall past the closed door behind which Octavia seemed to live her solitary life to my own room.

Undressing, I had my first chance at solitary thought. Through the day one incident had seemed to succeed the other. Now I was alone it seemed again that what I felt so strongly in the presence of Bill or Jacqueline must be wrong; what was going on couldn’t be odd and mysterious; it must be Fred that was the root of difficulty. Wouldn’t his behavior on the lawn this afternoon support that? He’d been my first thought in connection with the wire across the path. Suppose he had some grievance against Ed Corvo that would make him smash up the boat—wouldn’t that explain everything?

But why had Jacqueline been unwilling to admit Fred was the source of difficulty? And why did I feel things were so
serious
?

I went to bed but the moment my backbone hit the sheet I knew I wouldn’t sleep. Through my head milled everything that had happened since I’d come, the words that had been said, the looks on faces… .

In the end I sat up, inactivity becoming unbearable. I hadn’t been able to get anything out of Jacqueline, but there was one person who should be made to see he owed me an explanation. Bill.

Moonlight lay in a long rectangle on the floor, and the air was chill. In slippers and robe I padded out into the hall. Thin lines of light showed under two doors now—Octavia’s and the room across from mine that I’d guessed was Myra’s. At the remaining door there was only the vague opacity of moonlight.

“Bill,” I said at that door, low, not to rouse the others. When there was no answer I felt for the light switch and turned it.

The room sprang into color and solidity: big carved oak bed, with the spread still smooth, towering wardrobe against the north wall, wisteria-chintzed draperies and chairs, nothing but two military brushes on the dresser. Undoubtedly that was Bill’s room, but he must still be downstairs. So much the better; I’d rather talk to him there.

As I turned the light off one detail caught my eye: the covers of the bed had been folded back at the top, revealing a bit of the board along the side, and that bit of board was blackened and charred, as if at some time a careless occupant had set the bed afire with a cigarette.

But I wasn’t interested in that then. Noiselessly I went on downstairs, glad now that the stairs were solid maple planks and didn’t creak, into the black well of the living room. Only toward the front veranda was the darkness fringed with light, faint echo of moonlight from the roofed and screened porch. Under the murmur of water and forest was the murmur of human voices, one of which I thought was Bill’s.

But it was Cecile Granat who was talking when I got within hearing distance. Cecile in anger.

“And you have the right to tell me what to do, too, haven’t you?”

Then Bill, certain and cool as ever. “Maybe I just don’t see you as a stepmother-in-law for Fred.”

* * *

I left, of course, as quietly as I’d come. It was no business of mine how well Bill had known Cecile before he married Jacqueline; he’d never pretended to be a saint. Just the same, that bit of insinuated information didn’t make me feel gentle toward him.

Grimly I waited at the foot of the stairs, interrupted but not deflected. A car started up. Quite soon after that Bradley Auden called, apparently from the drive in front.

” ‘Cile, you on the porch? Ready to go?”

Three is a crowd. I moved back toward the veranda.

Cecile’s answer was, “I can’t wait!” Footsteps rushed across the porch; the porch door slammed.

My mind went over what I’d heard. It hadn’t been hard to guess Cecile was making passes at Bradley Auden; now it appeared she hoped to make those passes legal. “Mother’ll be waiting”—Carol had hurried home after supper to the crippled woman who waited at Auden, but Bradley hadn’t.

Crippled wife against Cecile Granat. And what attitude did Bill take? “Maybe I don’t see you as a stepmother-in-law for Fred.”

I was so busy thinking I didn’t hear him come; he almost knocked me over. He, too, lost balance, clutching at me to right himself.

“Who?” His hand passed over my face. “Oh, Ann. Good lord, what ‘re you doing here in the dark?”

“Looking for you,” I told him levelly. “I’m Jacqueline’s cousin, in case you don’t remember. I’d like to ask a few questions.”

He said quickly, “Come out on the porch where we won’t wake people.” He piloted me, with a hand at my elbow; apparently he, too, knew his way in the dark. On the porch he turned me to face him.

“All right. What is it?”

“That’s what I want to know. What’s making Jacqueline sick and frightened?”

He stood silent, the moonlight faintly etching his face—skull outline, bold socket arch, nostril flare, mouth. When he spoke it wasn’t to answer me.

“Listen, Ann.” His tone was slow, uncertain, low but still intense, as if he were hungry for the answer. “There hasn’t been —the people in your family have always been—
all right
—haven’t they?”

* * *

Nothing happened in my head. My family
“all right”?
My mother, laughing as she packed the picnic basket… . Aunt Ellen and Uncle Dick leading Jacqueline down the front steps of their house… . Why did my mind go back to that day of disaster? Aunt Harriet, a little remote because she was so old, but gentle, holding my forehead when I had the whooping cough… .

“All right”?

Then in one instant I knew, knew I’d been sensing right all day, knew what he’d meant when he started asking me about my family on the way to the resort, knew what the sickness was behind Jacqueline’s eyes.

I went up like a rocket. Bill didn’t think Fred responsible for those tricks—he thought …

“You!”
I said. “You dare to think Jacqueline strung that wire, wrecked that boat!” I was talking before I could possibly have thought out what to say; words spouted—I didn’t know what words. When I slowed Bill was backed against the railing at the west end of the porch, my right hand flat against his chest.

“I suppose you think Jacqueline has to stay married to you!” Fresh anger spurted in a geyser. “She’s leaving here this instant! We’ll divorce you so quick you won’t even know what—”

“Ann, wait!” He managed to get his voice above mine. “I don’t suspect Jacqueline. I just want the reassurance—can’t you understand that? I’ve been faced with the most impossible—”