The chuckling fingers (5 page)

I swung on her. There’d never been any need for finesse between us.

“Look, Jacqueline, don’t you think I can see there’s something terribly wrong? What is it?’”

She drew into herself as if her skin were contracting. “Bill and I’ve got to—handle our own troubles. I’m sorry, Ann. I know you want to help.”

“This isn’t just ordinary trouble—I can feel it. How does that boat today possibly affect
you
? And that wire Toby tripped over—”

She made a wordless exclamation, her hands reaching for me. She demanded fiercely, “Wire? What was that about a wire and Toby?”

“If I tell you, will you—?” But her eyes were so openly frightened now I couldn’t bargain. I told her the whole incident.

“Against Toby.” Desperation in her tone. “There’s never been anything against Toby before… . No, that must have been an accident. No one could know Toby would be along that path.”

She started sitting down. Luckily there was a rock under her —she hadn’t looked to see.

I sat down on my legs beside her. “If you won’t tell me, let me guess. Is it something to do with Fred? Is Bill angry because you think Fred’s up to these malicious tricks?”

She twisted her face aside. “Don’t ask me. Please!”

“Or Phillips Heaton—it’s not hard to see he’s jealous of Bill. But why should that affect you so much?”

“Don’t ask me.”

I hunched closer without rising. “But I won’t stand for your being like this. And that boat and the wire—unless they mean something they’re uncomfortable. Silly and—insane.”

She gasped, “Ann! Don’t say that! You don’t know—”

Horror on her mouth then, but I drove on relentlessly. “Trouble enough to frighten you, to separate you and Bill.”

“Don’t ask me,” she begged again, and suddenly her face went down to hands that rose to meet it. “I can’t stand this! I can’t tell you!” She began sobbing, her entire body shaken.

Emotion she couldn’t control now.

Uncertain, frustrated again, I got to my feet. Where did I go from here? I wouldn’t give up, because I couldn’t, but I could see I’d have to get my information elsewhere.

I said gently, “Look. I’ll walk one minute away and one minute back. Then we’ll pick blueberries.”

* * *

We did pick blueberries after I got back, scrambling over rocks, standing, squatting, sitting, even lying down, Jacqueline still wrapped in what held her, I in my resolves, although we talked casually enough. It must have been nearly five when, our pails filled, we started back toward the Fingers and the incident which was an unguessed mainspring for what was to come.

Jacqueline and I had worked eastward as we picked. Instead of going back to the driveway we struck directly south through the pines, reaching the lake shore some rods east of the Fingers beach. We followed the shore then, scrambling over rocks again, pausing to look out over the tumbling pointed water that was darkening and dulling to gray now that the sun had swung westward, pausing again to pick harebells growing from the rock crevices. We each held a big bunch of the delicate lavender-blue flowers when we rounded a rock and came abruptly upon the Fingers.

A long shadow flung out from the five jagged pinnacles now. As we walked into that dimness the shadowed coolness closed around us; to my ears it sounded as if the chuckle underground were somehow allied with the bewilderments which seemed all that the brief six hours since my arrival had brought me.

When we passed the last of the Fingers, the Thumb, we came in sight of the group on the lawn.

Sometimes there’s a way light strikes down, some contrast of color and shadow, that makes a scene in real life look too brilliantly set, like a play. That scene on the lawn of the Fingers was like that. The thick gold light of the late-afternoon sun came on a long slant, burnishing every object it struck but leaving behind those objects long dark shadows, so that everything was in high relief. Behind were the encircling pines, merged by this light into a unified dark mass. At the side loomed the brown darkness of the house. In the center of the half circle of golden-green lawn were the people, a bright, urban-looking group, lying or sitting on the clipped grass or reclining easily in beach chairs.

Almost all there, the people who were so soon to go into the crucible. Myra in white, leaning back in a chair of brilliant green and orange stripes, her needle point in her hands, but her dark eyes hovering lovingly over Toby, who sat flat legged on the grass near by, her head bent over the slate I’d brought, her hands busy with the chalk. In the next chair Phillips lay with his hands clasped over his abdomen, his bushy white head turned toward Cecile Granat, who sat easily upright in another beach chair, her hand trailing within tempting distance of Bradley Auden at her side. A little apart sat Bill and Jean Nobbelin on the grass, their knees hunched, their arms around their knees. Face down on the grass, in attitudes of collapse, lay three more figures—two strangers. One I recognized as Fred.

Jacqueline called, “Hello!” Her voice, too, was brittle, as if, going into this group, she had to play a part. “Blueberries! Flowers! Look!”

Toby, in a short yellow dress that made her look like a buttercup, bounced toward us across the grass.

“F’owers!” She squealed. “Me! Me!”

Jacqueline gave her some of hers. Toby flew back to push the flowers at people’s noses—Myra first, then Bill. Jean, when she got to him, bit off a flower and chewed it, to her halted bedazzlement.

Again that surface appearance of calm. Calls and questions as we more slowly approached.

“Get your pails full? Aren’t the berries wonderful? What ‘re the flowers for?—Queen of the May? Come on and collapse— it’s almost time for supper.”

We lifted our pails to show the berries, wagged our flowers, called answers back. Bill had risen to get us chairs, and the three who lay face down on the grass lifted their heads.

Fred asked lazily, “What’s the commotion? Oh, hello, Ann.”

“Hello right back.” I made it pleasant but brief, noting that he didn’t greet Jacqueline. His face seemed sullen; the genial man-of-the-worldliness he’d displayed at the wedding was definitely not there.

The girl beside him had lifted herself to her elbows. “Hello —you didn’t see me at the wedding, but I saw you. I’m Carol Auden. You’ll get to know me now.” She was as bright as a zinnia, with a rust-print kerchief over sun-tangled red curls and flushed, bright cheeks. I guessed she could be a long-legged imp.

“Don’t mind our lying around like this,” she chattered on when I’d indicated knowing her would be no grief. “We three got up at six this morning and hiked. Now we’re wrecks. Twelve-mile wrecks.” She dropped her head on her arms again.

The other young man said, “So you’re Ann Gay. I wondered who rated a name as nice as that.” He ducked his head in a bow, still lying on his stomach. “Hi, Ann. I’m Mark Ellif.”

Brown smooth hair and a lean, pleasantly masculine face and body, someway mathematically clean and humorous.

“Engineer?” I made a guess.

“How’d you know?”

“That’s what you look like.”

“Not bad, Ann,” Bill came in. “Mark engineers the insides of one of my boats. Does all right too.”

Myra offered, smiling, “Lovely how people have to introduce themselves up here. I’m ashamed but not ashamed enough to stir.”

Octavia, I noticed, wasn’t there; she’d be hidden from this company.

“Something should be done to greet the ladies.” Fred was slowly pulling his bulk upright. There was a lot more flesh on his bones than there was on Bill’s and more width in his heavy, mobile, unformed face. I could see what he might be like in middle age—portly and perhaps a trifle gross.

“Let’s see now—what do I have to offer?” He went on heavily, as if he forced himself to it. “Queen of the May—no. How would Ophelia be? Or maybe Robinson Crusoe?”

Bill had returned to Jean Nobbelin’s side. He straightened as Fred rose, his brown eyes flicking warningly over his son.

“Twelve-mile limit, kid,” he said.

Fred paused, glancing at his father, but then he swooped up the white shawl that hung from the back of Myra’s chair and the flowers I’d dropped on the grass. Mincingly he stepped across the lawn toward the Fingers, where he struck a magniloquent pose, the scarf over his head, the flowers in the crook of his left arm. His voice came in a falsetto chant:

I’m monarch of all I survey!
My right there is none to dispute;
From the center all round to the sea,
I am queen of the jowl and the brute.”

There was a sudden immediate stillness against the slash of the lake, the brush of trees, the near inhuman chuckle underground.

“
Queen
of the fowl and the brute”—that was Jacqueline he meant. Clumsily, foolishly but with some strong inner compulsion he was trying to express resentment. I was on my feet, but so was Bill, his whole face and body constrained and knotted, powerful and spurred to spend itself. Then in that instant the anger was gone, swallowed in mastery of himself and the situation.

He didn’t even take a step forward; he just spoke quietly. “You and I’ve gotten a little out of touch lately, Fred. I’d like it if we had a talk tomorrow.”

Fred dropped his pose as if it had been peeled off. He stood still, bracing his shoulders back, his face smoothed from its hard smile. Then he flipped the flowers over his left shoulder and pulled the shawl from his head. He came walking naturally toward the group of us, his eyes on his father, as if only the two of them existed.

“Sorry, Dad,” he said. “Talking to you tomorrow is fine by me.”

It was then I found myself still on my feet, all my muscles ready for some kind of action, when the time for it had passed. With my first outraged resentment ebbing, I could see that Bill had done not just what was best for Fred but also perhaps what was best for Jacqueline.

Jacqueline. Quickly I looked toward her, expecting her to be shrinking and stricken, as she’d been all day. Instead she was sitting bolt upright in her chair, awake and taut. I could almost see feelers reaching out from her toward everyone in that group. Starting, the change in her; she wasn’t downcast at all.

I, too, looked then at the others—at Jean, staring flushed and embarrassed at his knees, at Cecile and Bradley Auden, with their lips still parted by amazement; at Myra, uncomfortable but with some of Jacqueline’s speculativeness in quick, questing eyes; at Phillips, slyly watching as if he enjoyed a play. Carol’s uplifted face stared at Fred with something of disgust, and Mark looked as if he wished he could hurry away.

More strongly than ever I felt the pull of concealed stresses and strains. It was as if all the hands there gripped a network of crisscrossed threads. Why didn’t I feel that the trouble was explained now, that this was all there was to it—a jealous and resentful stepson? I couldn’t. More surely than ever I felt there was something else, something deeper… .

I was facing the house; in the center window upstairs something moved—not anything visible—just a play of light and shadow. Then Phillips spoke, his bushy wide head cocked amusedly.

“Better be careful, Fred. Good old Heaton custom—son of the first wife gets kicked out.”

Bill swung on Phillips then. It seemed odd that anyone so imperious would hold his anger at that sly poisoned barb.

“If anyone beside Fred is interested, I’ve never made a will. I never intend to make one. Fred doesn’t have to worry about being disinherited.” Then he turned on the rest of us.

“That’ll be enough of this. Fred’s just a little upset. I can understand how he feels. Lottie should have supper ready. Let’s forget this.”

* * *

No one can say we didn’t try. Again there was one of those concerted efforts to make things look serene. As we all of us— except for Octavia, who stayed hidden—filed around the table Lottie had set for a buffet supper on the side porch anyone watching us would have said that here were leisurely well-to-do people—lucky, enviable people—being gay and charming, not having a care in the world. Yet the stresses remained; Fred was no more than back on the lawn before he was in another skirmish—this time a small one with Mark Ellif.

When Carol Auden came out with her filled plate Mark was behind her; he’d been next in line. Fred was waiting behind two chairs, his plate on the seat of one.

“Got a place for you, Carol,” he invited.

Carol answered casually, “Oh, sorry. Mark asked me to sit with him.” She went past Fred to stand waiting, her chin lifted, while Mark hustled more chairs from the porch. Either she hadn’t liked Fred’s recent exhibition or else she just preferred Mark.

“Look at the gal,” was all Fred said. “Gives me the go-by.” He turned to Jean Nobbelin, the last to come out. “Chair here.”

Jean quickly took in Carol, Mark and—I was pretty sure—me.

“We ought to get in some tennis this week, kid,” he offered, and sat down in Fred’s chair.

Mark and Carol had a twosome conversation; Bradley Auden and Cecile made a chaffering pair, but over the rest of us talk passed like desultory hail.

“You girls missed something,” Myra began, although the moment the words were out she looked as if she wished they weren’t. ” ‘The Case of the Smashed Motorboat.’ The sheriff was here this afternoon—not that he got anywhere.”

Phillips, again amused, looked over from the chair where he was rapidly emptying his plate. “Good old Paavo Aakonen! What you’d expect up here, isn’t it? A Finn for a sheriff. Hot on the trail. Said his men were getting fingerprints.”

“Don’t undervalue Aakonen.” Myra made a crisp return to that. “I’ve found them shrewd people, the Finns.”

Bill began telling me about Finnish
saunas
, which began with being steamed in a family or neighborhood bathhouse and ended with a jump into cold water—an ice-fringed lake if nothing else offered. Jean came in with hilarious reminiscences, but when that subject was wrung dry talk again limped,

I said, “We ought to play games.” Action is my bulwark against social discomforts.

It didn’t meet with much approval. Cecile said, “Ouch!” and Phillips seconded her with a chilly, “I never play games.” But Jacqueline took me up swiftly.