Free The chuckling fingers by Mabel Seeley Page B

direct plea. “Jacqui, you must go with Ann. You can’t lose.”
    There was almost a quarrel, Myra insistent after she’d learned about my bathrobe, Jacqueline adamant. At last Myra said, “But it isn’t a question of whether you want to go. Bill agrees you should.”
    Jacqueline sat a moment longer, her face stiffening, then she stood up from her chair to run blindly, her hands over her face, toward the stairs.
    “No, wait!” Myra rose to halt me as I started after. “Let her think it over by herself, with no one urging her.”
     
    * * *
     
    And so it came about that I walked out of the house by myself.
    Had there ever been a morning when trouble was so incongruous? Sun lay over everything—the grass, the rocks, the trees, the flat blue water, in an actual golden shimmer; the air was like cold water when you’re thirsty; the forest and water sounds were the large, resonant, thrumming hums of bull fiddles.
    I walked diagonally across the drive and the side lawn toward the Fingers. I thought I’d boost myself to the bend of the Thumb and sit looking out over the shoreless wide horizon, trying to get some perspective on what had happened.
    But someone else was at the Fingers, someone who seemed to be lying on his back, looking upward; a man’s feet in scuffed brown oxfords protruded beyond the base of the Thumb. I rounded the rock to see who it was.
    Fred Heaton lay there, his shoulders and head propped against the base of the middle Finger, something bulky and white around his neck.
    I said, “Hello, Fred,” and then my hands reached drunkenly sideward for support. The harsh sharp edges of the rock came under them, real and cutting, but there was no reality in what I looked at.
    Fred’s face was swollen and bruised, his eyes open and blank. Down the front of his bright blue-and-green-plaid flannel shirt ran a thick stain like the stain of a red fountain that had faintly trickled and stopped and dried.

CHAPTER SIX
    NOTHING HAPPENED inside me; it was as if a switch had turned, shutting off thought and emotion. I had Fred’s shoulder in my hand, shaking it.
    “Fred!” I said. “Fred!” Still feeling nothing but hearing the thread of crying, unbelieving horror that ran through my voice at the contact with his shoulder, cold and rigid, like chilled marble under the bright plaid flannel shirt sleeve.
    “You can’t be—” I whispered, and then I was standing, running.
    “Bill! Bill! Myra! Come help!” I ran by instinct, in darkness, seeing nothing; I think I must have shut my eyes, as if that way I could shut out what I’d seen. Sometime in that headlong plunge someone grabbed me, shook me, shouted at me.
    ” Ann ! What’s happened?”
    Bill. My eyes flew open to numbing light and his face, hard, expectant, armoring itself.
    “It’s Fred,” I gasped. “By the Fingers—” Somehow I managed to remember that this was Fred’s father and that what awaited him was anguish; I grasped at him, “No, you mustn’t go ” But he’d wrenched himself free before I got it said.
    He was running toward the rocks, shouting, “If he’s hurt gel a doctor quick!”
    Still numb, I ran again. The telephone was in my hands and central’s answer in my ear. “Get a doctor to Fiddler’s Fingers! Hurry!”
    Then I was looking at Myra.
    “Ann! Who’s hurt?”
    There must be something we could do. I said, “Towels. Hot water. Quick! It’s Fred.”
    Lottie must have been there, because she had the teakettle in her hands when we were running back across the lawn. Phillips, too, had come from somewhere.
    But at the Fingers all that frantic, useless hurry stopped.
    Bill knelt below the rock, cradling Fred’s head on his shoulder. Even his back, which was all I saw of him, was contorted with agony.
    “No use,” he was saying to himself. “No use. He’s dead.”
     
    * * *
     
    Something—towels—fell out of my hands.
    The hush in which we stood, with Bill’s tortured voice the only human sound, was an awful