The chuckling fingers by Mabel Seeley Read Free Book Online

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.
    “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