The chuckling fingers by Mabel Seeley Read Free Book Online Page A

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?”

CHAPTER FOUR
    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