Chiffon Scarf (17 page)

No one could have entered her room while she slept, heavy from fatigue though that sleep had been. It would have been scarcely possible for her to lose that crumpled bit of paper. Therefore it had to be removed from her pocket.

More troubled by it than she liked to admit even to herself, she unlocked and opened her door. No one was in the long hall, bisected further down by another hall; no one on the stairway. But in the lounge Noel sat staring somberly at his feet and smoking. She stopped in the doorway. At the end of the hall (back of the closed door to the room she was later to learn was Sloane’s study) there was a murmur of voices, the words indistinguishable. Noel saw her and sprang to his feet.

“Hello, Eden. So you’re able to navigate under your own steam? I thought perhaps last night was too much for you.”

“Where’s everybody?”

“Sloane’s in there with Jim and Averill. Dorothy’s having breakfast, I think. Pace has gone for a walk—and needs it I would say, never having seen a gent look greener around the gills.” He took her hand and drew it lightly inside his arm.

“What has been done?”

“Never mind. I’ll tell you while you have breakfast. Nothing much really. Come along.”

Dorothy, white as the tablecloth and not much more expression in her face, looked up as they entered the dining room, nodded, and went back phlegmatically to oatmeal. Noel pulled up a chair beside Eden’s.

“I can put it all in a nutshell,” he said as Chango, still indestructibly cheerful after his all-night vigil, brought in coffee and orange juice. “Creda was taken away this morning. The sheriff telephoned and had a long talk with Sloane; I don’t know what was said but I take it Sloane is still in the saddle and riding high.

“He’s turned out, by the way, to be quite a lad. I’d hate to have his clutches on me. He’s got all kinds of stuff here—fingerprinting outfits, cameras, a whole chemical laboratory—my God, you never saw such a lot of stuff. He said he thought he’d never have a use for it again—well, he thought wrong. All the same—” His handsome face sobered and looked suddenly haggard; his peaked black eyebrows drew together. “All the same it wasn’t just square of Jim to bring us all out here as he did. Never a word of warning. Intending just to dump the lot of us and all his harebrained notions about the plane crash upon this detective. Between us, I’m not sure P. H. is so hot. If he was as good as Jim claims he was, what’d he leave his profession for? People don’t retire while they’re successful—not if they can help it. Success is too potent a drink.”

Dorothy helped herself to more cream with a reckless disregard for her already lumpy figure which would have dismayed Averill. She said blandly: “Don’t be too hard on Mr. Cady. He couldn’t have known what the result would be.”

Noel looked at her sharply. “Do you mean Creda was murdered because we came here? But why? That doesn’t make sense.”

“I suppose not,” said Dorothy calmly. “Still if we’d gone on to the plantation things might have been different. It only occurred to me that if”—she glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice—”if Major Pace hadn’t felt so far from police and regular detectives and all that—”

“Pace,” said Noel. “Well, naturally—who else?” But he was frowning thoughtfully. “I can’t get the hang of it, though. If there really was anything crooked about the plane crash—as Jim insists—why did Pace offer to pay us? He was about to get the whole thing, signed, sealed and delivered, to do as he pleased with. Why go to such lengths as to destroy the only model of the engine, steal the plans … And besides how on earth could he have fixed the plane to crash? A thing like that takes elaborate planning.”

“He hasn’t paid you yet, has he?” asked Eden.

“No. But the money’s there waiting. Oh, of course, he could now withdraw it and vanish with the plans, if he’s got ’em and the money. But—but if that’s the explanation, why murder poor Creda? Creda wouldn’t hurt a fly”

“Suppose she knew that was his plan,” said Eden. “Suppose she threatened to expose him?”

“Even so—killing her like this only makes things worse. They’ll search the whole place for those plans, which are very likely put away in some of Bill’s things in St. Louis right now. Besides, Creda never ever knew Pace; the first time she met him was when he came to the house to dinner Monday night.”

“Are you sure of that?” asked Eden.

He gave her a surprised look.

“Why, yes. Reasonably sure. They were introduced and neither of them acted as if they’d ever met before. What—exactly what are you driving at, Eden?”

Dorothy, blandly attacking an enormous heap of pancakes, was suddenly as blank and receptive as a stenographer’s tablet waiting to be written upon. Eden said, “Oh, nothing really. I don’t know what to think.” And Noel frowned and snapped his fingers suddenly and said:

“Pace is out. He’s got an alibi for the whole time. He was right there in the lounge, sitting in one of the chairs, smoking one cigarette after the other. I saw him. He was there the whole time while Sloane was playing the piano.”

Dorothy’s languid eyelids lifted and there was a small spark in her light, flat eyes. “Why, yes,” she said with a flash of something approaching animation. “You’re perfectly right. I remember. He seemed to really be listening to the music and liking it. I remember thinking he must be a musician.” A faint shadow crossed her face. “I’m sorry,” she said apologetically. “It—it can’t be anyone except Pace, can it? But I—I do remember he was there, the whole time. He was there when you screamed, Miss Shore, and we heard it. He was there when Mrs. Blaine walked out of the room perhaps—oh, half an hour before we heard you call out from the cabin. Mr. Sloane had stopped playing then and we were just sitting, not talking much. That’s why we heard it so clearly.”

Alibis, thought Eden rather drearily. She hadn’t thought of alibis. And there were all the other well-known trails of crime detection. Somehow she hadn’t thought of them applying or being applied to Creda’s murder. It was so far from cities and police mechanism, so completely and entirely in an isolated world that it was as if that world ought to have its own laws.

She wondered what, if anything, Sloane had discovered. She was soon to find out. For on the heels of Dorothy’s disappointingly firm recollection Sloane and Averill and Jim walked into the room.

Eden looked up and straight at Jim.

She was aware of P. H. Sloane, fresh and brown as if the night had held its usual rest for him, newly shaven and clad again in faded khaki riding breeches and boots, and a blue shirt open at the throat. She was sharply aware of Averill, too, as trim and poised as a catbird in a pale gray linen dress. She wore green beads at the base of her slender neck and a lovely square emerald on her right hand, and there was not a hair out of place on her small dark head.

But Eden looked straight into Jim’s eyes. And experienced a shock. For Jim Cady was looking directly at her and his look was as distant, as remote, as impersonal as if he had never seen her before.

L
UCKILY THERE WAS A
little commotion of voices and movement and it covered any change of expression; but her hands made a small involuntary clutch at the edge of the table as if to brace herself against an unexpected precipice looming under her feet.

She hadn’t believed Averill; she hadn’t really had in her heart any doubt at all about Jim.

She told herself a little frantically that Jim looked like that because others were there. Because he was not alone with her. Because he did not want others to have any hint of how things stood with them until—well, until his engagement to Averill was officially at an end.

Sloane had said “Good morning,” and she supposed she had replied along with Dorothy and Noel. They were all talking and Sloane and Averill seated themselves at the table and somebody rang for Chango. She permitted herself to glance at Averill, and Averill was smug and demure and was looking at her with again a faint, secret smile in her shallow eyes and touching the corners of her mouth.

They were again talking of alibis and of Pace, and Eden listened.

For Major Pace did have an alibi. An airtight, waterproof, hard and fast alibi, to which P. H. Sloane himself subscribed as well as Dorothy Woolen and, with a rueful look, Noel.

“It’s like this,” said Sloane and took a pencil and drew a diagram on the tablecloth. Chango glanced over Sloane’s shoulder, stopped smiling instantly so his face was an impassive yellow mask with slitted eyes, and put down the coffee he was carrying with a clatter. Sloane glanced up and said: “Oh. Never mind, Chango, it’ll wash off,” and resumed his drawing as Chango, disapproving, pattered sulkily away.

“Here’s the lounge; here’s the piano along the wall opposite the fireplace. When I began to play the piano, Miss Shore,” he looked briefly at Eden, “had just left her chair by the fireplace and walked out onto the porch. And in a moment or two Jim followed her; he tells me he met you, Miss Shore, on the porch and that you talked a little and strolled down the path where Miss Blaine, who left the lounge ten or fifteen minutes later, came also. Is that right?”

“Yes,” said Eden huskily. Jim was looking straight at the detective, his face a little grim, altogether enigmatic. He must be thinking of that moment in the shadow of the pines; he couldn’t fail to be thinking of it. But if so his expression gave no hint of it and he did not look at her. The detective went on slowly, drawing as he talked a little outline of the long lounge; a triangle showed the location of the piano on the west wall, with the player facing the wide door along the north wall, which went into the hall. Along the eastern wall, opposite the piano, was the fireplace with a long divan before it, its back to the piano but fully visible to anyone seated at the piano. There were chairs before the fireplace, too; chairs in the deep window embrasures opposite the hall door. Pace had been sitting in one of those chairs, facing the room, his back to the deep, curtained window, a table with an ash tray on it at his elbow. He was in the shadow, said Sloane, but Dorothy and Noel had been constantly aware of his presence.

“I’d have known it if he left the room for a moment,” said Dorothy with the utmost matter-of-factness.

But the detective had not finished. Eden realized suddenly that it was not only Pace’s alibi he was concerning himself with. It had been almost a foregone conclusion with her, and she thought, with the others, that Pace was the only logical suspect. But to the detective it was not perhaps so instantly evident that none of them (except Pace) were the kind of people to do murder.

She caught herself on that; what kind of people did murder? And she thought of Averill’s astonishing burst of fury of the previous night. Well, then, perhaps there were among them other hidden capacities for cruelty; hidden fears perhaps; desperation so deep and so harrying that the only recourse was murder. No matter how civilized, no matter how well known people were to you, still underneath ran universal human passions and needs that might result in the undertaking of desperate expediencies.

Averill; but Averill couldn’t murder. She couldn’t have killed Creda. Yet she must have been the last to see Creda. She had been wearing that yellow coat shortly before Creda, wrapped in the coat, was found dead.

The detective was talking again.

“This left Miss Woolen, Pace, Carreaux, Creda Blaine herself and me in the lounge. After a few moments Mrs. Blaine got up and went out; I believe it was just as Jim returned—”

“That’s right,” said Jim. “It’s as I told you. I met her on the steps, we talked a moment or two, then she went down the steps toward the path and I came back into the lounge. I sat down. … I think on the sofa opposite Dorothy.” Dorothy nodded slowly. Jim went on: “Pace was here when I came in and I didn’t leave the lounge again until we heard Noel call us.”

“Time is always difficult,” said Sloane. “If we could know exactly when she died—”

Noel was leaning forward: “Mr. Sloane, exactly what killed her? Was it my revolver? Because I swear to you—”

“I don’t know. My opinion is that she actually died of strangulation. But there were knife wounds, a number of them. Made by a small and I would say single-edged blade. We haven’t yet found the knife. And it’s barely possible that among the wounds there is a bullet wound; there were several wounds at her throat; and it’s difficult to tell without more detailed examination than I was able to give. The coroner is going to do a post-mortem; Miss Blaine has given her per mission. If we find a bullet—”

Noel was looking drawn, his brilliant eyes no longer gay.

“But, Sloane, I swear I didn’t shoot her—”

“No one said you did. Anyway there were fingerprints.”

“Whose?”

Sloane did not reply directly. He said: “Arrangements have been made for you to stay here until—well, until we feel justified in permitting you to leave. I’m sorry; but Miss Blaine at last agrees with me that it can’t be helped. The murder was committed in this county and in this state and the simplest, indeed, the only thing we can do is to request you to stay here for, I hope, only a few days. That, however, remains to be seen. I do want to emphasize again that your cooperation will help more than I can say.”

“Sloane, do you really mean that you believe Jim’s cock-and-bull story about the plane crash?” asked Noel.

P. H. Sloane rose and stood looking down at them from his lanky height. Tall, brown, self-contained, with a suggestion of dry humor in the wrinkles around his eyes, he looked a typical rancher. His eyes had grown so keen, anybody might think, from years of seeing such clear and far horizons.

“It’s worth investigating,” he said. “Pace is worth investigating; all of you, when I’ve inquired, have in one way or another indicated your willingness to blame him for what may amount to three murders.”

“Three—” repeated Dorothy, barely moving her pale lips.

Averill said: “Mr. Sloane—”

“Yes, Miss Blaine.”

“I only want you to say that—that I want to correct something I told you last night. I—the story Miss Shore told you is true so far as I know. That is about my having actually entered her cabin with her. That’s quite right. I entered her room with her exactly as she said, talked to her for a few moments and then went away.”