Free The chuckling fingers by Mabel Seeley

like that—to get even with him for anything he might have done. As if I were a child. And it wasn’t true. He’d been—I’d been so happy I sometimes thought I couldn’t be alive.”
    Grief I couldn’t bear under her tonelessness. “There has to be an answer. Who did you know there? Who came into the room?”
    “The valet. The chambermaid. The bellboys. Some people we knew casually. After a few days Bill got almost all right again. He said he believed me—he said it must have been a trick or an accident. But when we left he gave that money back to the valet. Without saying anything, as if it were a tip.”
    “You’re certain no one from here was there. Fred or Phillips—”
    Again the shaking head.
    Cold air swept at me. “One other person was there. Bill.”
    That roused her. “Oh no. It wasn’t Bill. If you’d seen him you’d know.”
    I had seen him—when we found the wire across the path, when he looked at the motorboat. No, he hadn’t looked as if he were seeing his own handiwork. He’d been angry, bewildered, hurt, as if someone he loved were torturing him.
    “Besides,” she went on forlornly, “why would he want to?”
    “No,” I repeated. “Why would he marry you just to—? It wouldn’t be sane. And Bill is sane. As sane as you are.” I caught her hands. “Anyway, it’s over. You and Toby are—”
    She interrupted. “But it isn’t over. That’s what I’ve begun to feel. Ann, I have the oddest feeling, as if—”
    She was looking at me steadily, and, as so often in our lives, I got an emotion by direct contact. It swept over me, overwhelming; I felt as I had yesterday when we drove in through the pines, as if I were in a shadowed forest. Only now the dark shapes bore no leaves; they were the strange, incomprehensible forms of happening and circumstance. I felt that same waiting, as if somewhere in that dark forest something waited for the pounce, as if soon a twig would snap under the poised foot… .
    Then the emotion broke, because Jacqueline was talking again, quickly, as if she wanted to get the rest poured out.
    “That’s all until we got here to the Fingers. Then—”
    “Wait.” I couldn’t make the transition that fast. “You mean nothing happened on the boat coming back? And you spent a week at Myra’s in Duluth—”
    “Nothing happened there.”
    “Did you or Bill tell about the incidents when you got back?”
    “Bill jumped on Fred, wanting to know if he had been responsible. On Jean, too, and Phillips and Bradley Auden. But on Fred the most.”
    “I take it no one admitted anything.”
    “That’s what seemed to start Fred being difficult. He said to me afterward, ‘Maybe you think you’ll get somewhere setting Dad against me but you’ll find out.’ He’d been having other arguments with Bill too. Bill wouldn’t let him have a car, because he’d had an accident with one a year ago and hurt a little boy.”
    She looked down at her hands linked with mine.
    “The next one was the first week end we were here at the Fingers—the week end of June fifteenth. Fred hadn’t come up from Minneapolis yet. Myra drove to Duluth that week end, and Octavia and Phillips went with her. Bill, Toby and I were alone here. Saturday night we went to bed about eleven o’clock. We were all in the room Bill has now, with Toby’s crib in the corner. Bill made a joke and locked the bedroom door. About two o’clock he woke me up. The room was full of smoke. I got Toby, and Bill pulled the door open. When we got out in the hall there was no smoke there. Bill ran downstairs for pails, and we filled them in the bathroom and came back and switched on the light. We’d been so bewildered we hadn’t even thought of the light. When we could see we found it was the bed that was burning—the mattress. Bill got it out right away—it was only a small fire for so much smoke. I’ll never forget. Bill stood, with the pails in his hands, staring at the bed and the smoke still in the