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

remember that. Something about whether they should hold some pulpwood stock for a likely price rise now the Nazis had the Scandinavian countries out of the market. It was a warm argument, both men so lost in it they noticed nothing else, both of them sitting up fierce and quick, marshaling arguments like battalions. Yet they seemed without animosity, as if they’d follow amicably any decision made.
    “One gone,” Toby complained after a moment of hunting. “B’ue one gone.” She held up the box, showing where one more chalk belonged.
    “It must be under a chair, ducky,” Jacqueline told her. “Mama’ll look too.”
    So first Jacqueline, then I, then Myra joined in the chalk hunt. Even Jean and Bill, Cecile and Bradley looked around where they sat; Fred had disappeared. The chalk, stayed missing.
    When, at Jacqueline’s nod, I carried Toby off she was wailing at the top of her lungs.
    “Need!” She kept insisting. “B’ue one gone!”
    “If we don’t find it I’ll buy you another in the morning,” I promised rashly in that chalkless spot, but Toby clamped an inconsolable face in my neck and wept on. We tendered her a fancy bath with rose-geranium salts and a spongy Jiminy Crickets I’d brought for a later gift, but she slung the Jiminy Crickets at the bathroom water tank and later sobbed herself to sleep.
    “It is odd about that chalk,” Myra said then. “There were blue marks on the slate—she must have just had it. But no one would take Toby’s chalk.”
    We were to find out about that.
     
    * * *
     
    Jacqueline didn’t go downstairs again after Toby was asleep.
    “I think I’ll go to bed now too,” she said. Her upper lip was stiff with fatigue, and her eyes under the long dark lashes were almost glazed.
    Myra said good night and left, but I sat for almost two hours on the foot of Jacqueline’s bed, talking. As soon as she sensed I wasn’t going to ask questions most of her aloofness went.
    “I’ll sleep now,” she promised at last. Her arms came up to give me a quick hug. “Oh, Ann, it is good to have you here! Forgive me for being—unpleasant.”
    “Things’ll come out somehow,” I promised myself as much as her. After I’d dropped a kiss on her cheek I switched off her light and went along the hall past the closed door behind which Octavia seemed to live her solitary life to my own room.
    Undressing, I had my first chance at solitary thought. Through the day one incident had seemed to succeed the other. Now I was alone it seemed again that what I felt so strongly in the presence of Bill or Jacqueline must be wrong; what was going on couldn’t be odd and mysterious; it must be Fred that was the root of difficulty. Wouldn’t his behavior on the lawn this afternoon support that? He’d been my first thought in connection with the wire across the path. Suppose he had some grievance against Ed Corvo that would make him smash up the boat—wouldn’t that explain everything?
    But why had Jacqueline been unwilling to admit Fred was the source of difficulty? And why did I feel things were so serious ?
    I went to bed but the moment my backbone hit the sheet I knew I wouldn’t sleep. Through my head milled everything that had happened since I’d come, the words that had been said, the looks on faces… .
    In the end I sat up, inactivity becoming unbearable. I hadn’t been able to get anything out of Jacqueline, but there was one person who should be made to see he owed me an explanation. Bill.
    Moonlight lay in a long rectangle on the floor, and the air was chill. In slippers and robe I padded out into the hall. Thin lines of light showed under two doors now—Octavia’s and the room across from mine that I’d guessed was Myra’s. At the remaining door there was only the vague opacity of moonlight.
    “Bill,” I said at that door, low, not to rouse the others. When there was no answer I felt for the light switch and turned it.
    The room sprang into color and solidity: big carved oak