The chuckling fingers (36 page)

BOOK: The chuckling fingers

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* * *

But that was still unknown on that dark Wednesday night when Aakonen drove off with Myra handcuffed to a deputy in the seat behind him.

Those of us left blinked at each other like a colony of underground animals that could hardly stand the light of relief that possessed us.

I didn’t know how I felt. I felt exuberant and wild and exhausted. I felt as if I could waltz to the moon and back. I felt as if I could fall on the floor behind the davenport—that’s where I was standing—and sleep for a week.

Jacqueline was on one side of me, Jean on the other. We seemed to have stuck that way.

Jacqueline said hazily, “It’s all over. There won’t be any more people dying. Bill’s getting better …”

Jean shattered bemusement by yelling, “We’re free! We can do anything, go anywhere! Tomorrow you can get Toby back!”

“Tomorrow?” Jacqueline asked, and suddenly she was laughing and crying. “Tomorrow isn’t soon enough. Get your car.”

It was four in the morning when we started that wild ride to Duluth. Jacqueline talked on the way in.

She said, “All my life I’ve been unsure. I thought, suppose something terrible should happen, so terrible I couldn’t stand it? I’ve always looked for people to help me bear things. But last night, waiting behind that dresser, I wasn’t unsure at all. The worst that can happen to me has happened—waiting beside Bill, fighting for him not to die—that was the worst. And I stood it. I know now I can stand anything.”

She said, “Toby knew all along. That’s why she’s so independent. She knows I’m strong. She knows I’m back of her like a wall.”

She said, “I’m never going to cling to Bill any more. We’re going to be different—even.”

* * *

At seven we were in Duluth and walking into the room where Toby slept in the crib Mrs Foster had borrowed for her. There were streaks of dried tears on Toby’s cheeks.

She lay without stirring when Jacqueline woke her.

“Mama,” she told herself, and when Jacqueline took her up she cried softly, rubbing her nose back and forth against Jacqueline’s neck, sobbing as an adult sobs in grief.

A minute for the memory of a world gone wrong, a minute to accept that it had become as suddenly right. She jerked her wet face up from her mother’s neck, beaming.

“Ann,” she wanted to know, “you get me a b’ue pencil.””

* * *

We told Mrs Foster as we hustled Toby into clothes and clothes into suitcases.

“But Myral”
Mrs Foster kept gasping. “Not Myra Sallishaw!” I don’t think she heard Jacqueline’s heartfelt thanks. She did take the check Jacqueline gave her, but, from the way she was twisting it in her fingers, I wondered if it could last to get to the bank.

* * *

“We’ll make the hospital by ten,” Jean promised. We did. I’d even quit being tired by that time; I just felt mildly and drunkenly hilarious. Jean had been grinning all the way back from Duluth, as if something terrific and wonderful he could hardly wait for was drawing close.

“Central has been calling you the last hour,” Miss Fleet told Jean.

He sat down to call while Jacqueline and I took Toby off to the washroom. When we got back the grin was all over his face.

“Good old George Crowley. Seeing that we were so anxious, he hurried up his tests. It seems he believes a solution of potassium hydroxide—about a ten-per-cent solution, he thought— would stay on wool tweed for a week without showing any ill effects but that at the end of that time the fabric would be weakened enough so cleaning would produce holes. It isn’t acid that eats wool—it’s alkalis. Remember that any time you’re up to tricks.”

He preceded us down the hall but stood back to let us first into Bill’s room. The guard was gone.

The head on the bed turned two inches this morning.

Toby ran. She asked in amazement, “Bill, you s’eep now?”

Bill gave such a convincing demonstration of strangling that Miss Bolles leaped to his side.

“No, go away,” he told her. “That’s Toby. It means—”

Jacqueline and I told him, trying to be subdued and unexciting but finding it hard going. He couldn’t ask questions, much, but when we got through there weren’t many questions left to be asked.

“Myra!” Bill was as confounded as we’d been. “I’d have sworn by my bottom dollar Myra was all right.”

Jean had stood back but now he walked to stand beside me, the grin again all over his face.

“Bill,” he said, “you’ve had the heck of a break out of this. I figure you’ve got a right to a little entertainment. Look what I’ve gone and done.”

The full tide of his exuberance was on him now, and a faint warming excitement woke on the face on the pillow.

Jean faced me, the danger signals up in his black alarming eyes. I started backing. He kissed me—not politely. I started getting mad but I had time to get over it before he pulled his face away.

Jacqueline was just staring; so was Miss Bolles.

The weak but unbroken voice from the bed said, “Make him marry you before he does much of that, Ann. His father had nineteen children.”

That wasn’t just an echo of the Bill Heaton grin.

I remembered I never had liked tame and predictable men anyway.

“You!”
I said at Jean. “Did you have this in mind when you sent that letter that got me here?”

Jean said blithely, “Sure.” There wasn’t any room for him to move closer—I was already backed against the wall. But he moved closer.

FIN

MABEL SEELEY

In the pantheon of venerated mystery writers, Mabel Seeley does not loom large nowadays, although her books are enjoying something of a resurgence in popularity, thanks to the efforts of the Afton Historical Society Press, based in the bustling metropolis of Afton, Minnesota, population 2839.

Seeley was a Minnesota-born writer, who published seven (or ten, depending upon which source you care to credit) critically acclaimed (and strong-selling) mysteries over a period spanning from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. Her fourth book, 1941’s The Chuckling Fingers, reportedly won the Mystery of the Year award. She went on to become an early member of the Mystery Writers of America, and served on its first board of directors. Then, in 1954, she met the man who would become her second husband, lawyer Henry Ross, and retired abruptly from her literary career. Years later, Ross was asked why Seeley had stopped writing. His reply: “She married me. Writing is hard work…and she liked being married better.”

Her mysteries were typically set in the towns and rural areas of Minnesota, or occasionally in towns in “the Midwest”, which could easily be Minnesota as well, of course. There is a bit of the gothic to her work, but it is overlaid with a heartland sensibility that tempers it enough that even hardboiled mystery fans will enjoy her writing. That said, she became associated with the dreaded “Had I But Known…” school of fiction, as her main character often starts out by reflecting on a series of events that transpired not according to plan. And, although you don’t often hear the words “atmospheric” and “Minnesota” in the same sentence, Seeley breathes a moody and distinctive energy into the North Star State.

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