The chuckling fingers (21 page)

“Mrs Heaton!” It was Nurse Bolles, and for once her face wasn’t withdrawn. “Mr Heaton—his pulse is …”

Jacqueline was running down the hall, I following. The man on the bed was quiet now; the skin seemed to be pulling back from his forehead, his nose, his chin, leaving them too sharp, too bare.

Jacqueline bent over him, calling to him.

Nurse Bolles shoved me out. Aakonen and Dr Rush were both in the room. The door closed; the guard stared at us impassively.

Jean said, “He’s dying. Bill.” He groped blindly for the wall.

SO WE SAW NEITHER Bradley Auden nor Cecile Granat during that longest of all long nights.

It must have been half an hour before Miss Bolles opened the door to meet our mute question.

“He rallied,” she said tersely, and went on swift feet down the hall.

Yet I felt no relief; there had been no loosening of tension in Miss Bolles. Jean’s face, too, stayed strung.

“They must be afraid he’ll go under again.”

When Miss Bolles came back she was accompanied by the orderly trundling a cart that carried canvas, a tank. The door opened for them.

“That was an oxygen tent,” Jean said.

How many hours did we face that door? The orderly came out; the phone rang at the end of the hall, was answered by a voice too low to hear; occasionally a light went on above a door; another nurse rustled out of a side room to answer. Once I felt as if everything—the door at which I stared, the corridor— had begun gently rocking. Then Jean was walking me rapidly up and down.

He asked, “How much sleep have you had since Fred was killed? I’m going to get you a bed.”

“No.” It was as if I could help Bill by staying awake, as if I could fight off death by fighting off my own loss of consciousness.

For four hours then nothing happened. No one came in or out. No phone rang. No light went on. Only time passed, mercilessly slow, flowing down the hall like a river.

At two in the morning Aakonen brought Jacqueline out. Her face was shining.

She said, “He’s fighting. He won’t die.”

* * *

“Perhaps Mrs Heaton should stay,” Dr Rush said. “But you two go home. I hope tonight was the turning point. No pneumonia, though I was afraid of it. The oxygen tent is helping. Still touch and go, of course, but …”

He, too, was hopeful.

Before I left I put Jacqueline to bed upstairs. When I came down Jean had been talking to Aakonen.

As we went out I asked what Aakonen had said.

“He said Bill didn’t recognize Jacqueline but that he seemed to know when she was there. When they took her away Bill would get restless, and his pulse would flag.”

“Doesn’t he realize what that means?”

“Aakonen isn’t against Jacqueline. He’s just helpless in the face of circumstance.”

* * *

Armistice let me know how exhausted I was. I slept in the car going back to the Fingers, not waking until it stopped with a jerk.

What I waked to was Jean half risen over the wheel, his whole body tensed to iron. A smothered exclamation, and he was out of the car, running.

It took me a while to pull myself from the dizzying currents of sleep enough to see that it was the Fiddler’s Fingers barn before which the car had stopped and that Jean was tearing along the east side of the barn toward the pines at its back.

What was he chasing? I was out of the car myself, following. In the black deeps of the trees ahead of Jean nothing was visible, but as I strained my ears it seemed to me I heard the crash of branches. Then that, too, was gone—swallowed in the brushing of the hundred thousand branches, the hundred thousand waves. Jean, too, became a shadow and was gone.

In sudden unreasoning terror I cried, “Jean! No! Come back!” seeing that in the blackness what he chased might have halted, lurking, waiting for him… .

My own feet halted their headlong plunge. Over me like a smothering blanket was the feeling of that evil opposite force that moved, covert, on that strip of shore, as if it were a malignant outgrowth of the wilderness itself, as if the calm, ruthless, impersonal destructiveness that the wilderness could wreak in storm or sunshine had here become personal and purposeful, showing itself only to kill… .

Incessant, the beating chuckle… .

In that moment I wanted so badly to run away it seemed impossible to withstand it. I wanted to fly, screaming, back to Jean’s car. I wanted to drive like a comet through the night, drive anywhere, faster and faster, just so I could get away from the evil in that place. When I got any grip on myself I was standing by the car, shaking it, as if I were fighting it, as if it embodied the temptation I fought.

“It got away—I thought I saw something… .” That was Jean, panting, beside me.

I whirled. I said hysterically, “I suppose now there’ll be some proof that was Jacqueline too! I suppose now there’ll be someone else dead!”

He said, “Gosh, you poor kid—you were asleep and you woke up to that. Here, I’ll get you inside.”

He hustled me into the house, rousing Myra to help get me in bed. While Myra was heating milk for me to drink he called Aakonen. There must have been sleeping tablets in the hot milk, because even as I lay waiting for Aakonen’s men to come I slept.

* * *

Blinding light in my eyes when I wakened—sunlight. And Jean and Myra by the bed. I blinked at them stupidly.

“Well, there isn’t a sign I really saw anyone last night,” Jean told me cheerfully. “I sure thought I saw someone skulking back by that barn, but the woods were scoured and no one found. General idea now seems to be that I thought up the whole thing to make myself look innocent.”

Myra had brought a tray with coffee, fruit and toast which she insisted I eat in bed. She was bone-weary and jumpy but she fussed around, plumping pillows.

“Thank goodness Phillips and Octavia were in bed,” she said. “The other people we know—Bradley and Carol and the resort people—were all in bed when the sheriff’s men reached there too.”

“
Could
have made a dash and gotten there.” Jean wouldn’t quite give up.

“Thank goodness Jacqueline was at the hospital,” I said. It didn’t seem possible to drag myself back into the mess. “I hope she stays at the hospital all day. It’s better for her than getting out here where she gets looked at as if she were a leper.”

“I still think I saw someone around last night.” Jean seemed to feel his honor was involved. “If I could have caught that guy—”

If he could the whole thing might have been ended now. But even as I thought that it seemed impossible; I felt as if we were doomed to live forever in this half-life of distrust and suspicion and failure and fear.

Myra seemed to sense my depression; she said quickly, “Bill’s doing all right—I just talked to the hospital. And Toby’s fine— a little lonesome. I called your aunt Harriet this morning too. She’s worried, but I told her both her girls were safe in bed.”

I was ashamed of myself; if Myra could maintain some courage after so many sieges, then I surely should. I forced myself to eat the breakfast. It was nearly noon, they told me; I’d slept through the morning.

It wasn’t until I wondered why they didn’t get out so I could dress that I began to feel they were still holding something back and noticed that they were both dressed up.

I asked, “Now what?”

“Fred’s funeral,” Jean told me soberly. He’d been sitting on the foot of the bed; now he rose. “One o’clock. Bill had told the undertaker to have it the day after the inquest. We wondered—since Jacqueline’s at the hospital …”

So I dragged myself from bed to represent Jacqueline at that brief private ceremony which only Bradley and Carol, Mark, Jean, Myra and I attended beside the minister and the undertaker’s men but which seemed lit by flashlights and which a thousand people watched outside the church and outside the cemetery wall. Ordeal for all of us; we were all so quivery we jumped each time a flash bulb went off, and Bradley Auden, getting out of a car at the cemetery, slipped and almost fell, hurting his ankle.

* * *

It was when we were back at the Fingers that Jean said thoughtfully, “I notice Cecile wasn’t there.”

It seemed a long time to go back—all the time to the evening before when we’d decided we must find out about Cecile.

“Cecile?” Myra asked, surprised. “But of course she’d know she couldn’t go to the funeral.” She’d sunk into a chair as soon as we returned, her strength inadequate to carry her farther.

“Why not?” Jean turned to her quickly.

“Well, really—she’s been a friend of Bill’s, and I’ve allowed her here for that reason—”

“She’s a Grand Marais girl.” Jean was frowning at her. “What do you know about Cecile, Myra?”

“Not much, except that she’s illegitimate,” Myra said with distaste. “Her mother was a waitress in a Grand Marais cafe. I’ve never heard who the father was. You can’t hold that against the poor girl, of course, but—it’s not a good background. The mother lived until Cecile was about fourteen.”

“Who’d she live with after that?”

“I don’t know. Someone must have given her money, because I’ve never heard of her working.”

Old scandal, Jean stood looking at Myra so thoughtfully her eyebrows rose.

“Surely you don’t — Bill’s thirty-eight. If you think he could be the father of a girl who’s every day of twenty-four—”

“No,” Jean answered, “I couldn’t think that. You’re sure you never heard who her father might be?”

“Village gossip didn’t get to Faraway.” It held a hint of the old crispness. “I heard the story at the time the girl’s mother died. Bradley’d heard it. He was wondering if we should contribute to the girl’s care. Then when he inquired he found she’d been sent to a girls’ school, expenses paid.”

Jean grunted. “
Brad
isn’t her father—not so she knows it— not with the sort of play she’s been making for him.”

He maneuvered me after that out onto the porch. “I think our next play is to get hold of Brad and go into some past history. We’ll have to sneak.”

I could see why; we’d been followed home from the funeral. A camera was set up in the drive, and what were obviously two reporters lurked outside the porch door.

“You could ask Myra about the Heaton family,” I suggested. “She’d know more than Bradley Auden.”

He shook his head. “Ever hear a Heaton on the subject of Heatons? I want an outsider.”

We paused only to call the hospital to make sure that Bill was holding his own—the report was that he was, if anything, stronger—and to tell Myra where we were going. She started wearily to rise.

“If you’re going to be detectives I can go along… . No, I should spend some time with Octavia—I’ve already left her alone too long. And I’m sure Cecile—”

“Why don’t you lock yourself in your own room and get a rest?” Jean asked her. “By the way, do you have any idea where Phillips is?”

Phillips, too, I remembered, had been absent from the funeral.

Her face relaxed momentarily. “I think he’s being a detective too. Anyway, he was here this morning asking for a magnifying glass.”

We saw Phillips ourselves when we drove to the resort for something Jean wanted out of his cabin. Phillips sat on the sand, his arms clasped around his fat gray-seersuckered knees, talking to Cecile. They both stopped talking when they saw us, turning their heads to watch us with the secret distrust which these days looked out of almost every face which turned toward me. That was because I was Jacqueline’s cousin.

* * *

At one point on the highway toward Auden Jean gestured at a gaunt dead pine.

“That’s the end of the Fingers—the place where Faraway begins. The land from here on is Bill’s now.”

The same thick luxuriance of pine, with a narrow road cutting in toward the shore. Hard ruts with sand drifting into them. After that first day there ‘d been no more mention of the lodge Bill was building; that had been forgotten with Fred’s death.

“Already the tracks our trucks made are beginning to fill up,” Jean said.

“Sometimes I can feel it wait,” I said. “The wilderness. Waiting until it can blot us out.”

He didn’t answer, but there was between us in the car a common sensing of the wilderness power, its will to survive in this last stronghold against the holocaust of civilization. From such a stronghold as this, when the human race has finally destroyed itself, the wilderness will come… .

* * *

Auden is not at all like the Fingers. The first Auden had built, not a log house, but a colonial dwelling. Seeing that wide, white, wide-shuttered, strong house in its setting of pines, I remembered that the homes of New England, too, had been built in forest; it fitted. The Audens lived there the year round.

Bradley himself came limping to open the door, his face quickening at sight of us.

“Is Bill—?”

We stood in the hallway talking about the thing that was still more important than anything else—Bill’s chances of survival.

“Carol’s out somewhere with Mark,” Bradley said after that. “They dropped me here after the funeral. Marjorie’s having a bad day, what with this and that. I’m sorry, Ann, because she’d like to see you.”

What arrangements, I wondered as he led us, still limping, across the hall, did he make with his mind and his conscience? He talked now about his wife as any husband might talk of a loved and considered woman—yet how many times had I seen him laughing with Cecile? As if he were helpless, willingly helpless, laughing at his own weakness.

He took us through a living room which looked as if it had been set in a mold years ago, then never lived in, never touched. The glassed porch to which he took us was lived in, however— disorderly. Magazines in piles, a spaniel on the floor in the sun, cocking a sleepy ear above one opened eye. Filled ash trays littered a low table.

Bradley settled us into a glider. There was a nervous expectancy about his movements, as if he waited and apprehended something. When he himself sat down it was to busy himself lighting a pipe. The dog dragged its belly along the floor to lie where he could reach it.