Chiffon Scarf (16 page)

The thought of it and the thought of Jim was steadying. All at once she saw herself and Averill as they were—two women, rivals all their lives, over trivial things—rivals again when it was important. So terribly important. Averill must really hate her; nothing else could drive so deep below Averill’s glacé surface, nothing else could so devastate and shatter Averill’s studied, demure and civilized façade.

Curious how one thought of hatred as being at least polite.

She said, thankful when her voice emerged quiet and controlled:

“I’m not going to engage in a childish and vulgar kind of struggle with you. But I’ll tell you this—if you ever dare touch me again I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” asked Averill with a nice blend of derision and curiosity.

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” said Eden quite honestly. “It’s not exactly a precedented situation. But I’ll do something and it won’t be pleasant—remember that—”

Without warning Averill took a new course.

“I didn’t mean to do that, Eden,” she said with an effect of contrition and frankness. “I’m not like that as a rule; I was angry and forgot myself. You must admit I had some provocation.”

“I don’t believe anything you’ve told me about Jim, if that’s what you mean. Oh, Averill, there’s no use in our talking like this. It’s—it’s all so horrible with Creda dead like that—”

Averill ignored that and said silkily: “Come now, my dear. I’ve apologized neatly. Let’s sit down quietly and talk this over. I came here in the friendliest possible spirit. I only wanted to tell you that I—I’ll tell Sloane the truth about last night.”

“You—” That, too, was surprising; in its way as much of a shock as Averill’s savage, sharp blow across her cheek had been. “Why?”

“Why? Well, really, Eden, what a question! Do you think I’m going to enjoy telling him that I have to retract a statement I made? That I did it because we had had a misunderstanding and I thought you had taken me to be Creda and had been impulsive—”

The anger Eden had felt before was nothing to the cold rage that possessed her then. She walked over to where Averill sat again in the chair, her bare ankles swinging in a froth of lace, her small pale face demure and secret.

“Averill, you wouldn’t dare—”

“That’s the second time you’ve used the word dare, Eden.” She said it as lightly as a song. “Don’t be childish. I’ll tell Sloane I lied; that I was with you in the cabin for a short time. That we had quarreled—no, I won’t tell that. I promise you. So that clears the slate between us. Shall we be friends?”

Eden said quite slowly: “You must take me for a fool, Averill.”

And Averill laughed softly.

“No, darling. I only want you to see quite clearly that your—love as you call it, for Jim is out. Definitely out, my dear. Jim doesn’t want you—he may have been a little carried away last night, there in the shadow of the pines; men are only men and you’re a very pretty girl and it was starlight and romantic. But he doesn’t love you, really; this thing—Creda’s death—is serious. So serious that he realizes now that his little affair with you was only a trivial—and if you don’t mind my saying it—a rather unpleasant little flirtation. He regrets it and he wants you to understand that. Don’t pretend to be so obtuse, Eden. After all, when a man asks you to end a thing, even a trivial kind of affair—”

“Jim looks quite capable of defending himself against unwelcome feminine advances,” said Eden in a cold voice that didn’t sound like her own. “You are lying to me, Averill.” She groped for half-glimpsed motives, whose presence she felt without being able to define. “I don’t know what you expect to accomplish. But I don’t believe a word you’ve said about Jim.”

“Very well,” said Averill. She rose. There was a curious secret smile in her eyes; a shadow of it on her lips. She drew herself up, her slender neck at its full height, her small demure face somewhat triumphant. “If you don’t believe me, ask him. He’ll tell you it is the truth.”

“I will ask him,” said Eden slowly.

B
UT NEVERTHELESS WHEN AVERILL
had trailed her crimson gown away, Eden thought of the certainty and assurance in her manner, of the look of demure triumph in her small face. “Ask him,” she had said promptly and had smiled.

After a while Eden bolted the door, glanced at the traveling clock which said now three-fifteen—only fifteen minutes had that struggle with Averill lasted; again briefly a sense of the amazing suddenness and inexorability of a moment in time touched her and went on—and this time she turned off the light before she returned to bed.

She lay for a long time staring into the darkness. Uneasily aware of a growing conviction that somewhere, somehow, Averill had a basis for her statements.

Yet that wasn’t possible either. The things Averill had said sounded like Averill—not like Jim.

And Jim loved her, Eden—as she loved him. She deliberately permitted herself to live over again every instant of those moments in the shadow of the pines—in Jim’s arms, with his lips on her own. She repeated to herself every word he had said, and every word still held an almost unbearably lovely truth. “I fell in love with you,” he’d said, “the instant somebody trotted you out on the terrace and said this is Eden.” And she herself had looked at him and the whole world and all her life had changed its beat and its rhythm for this was love.

She turned restlessly, putting her face upon her crossed arms, thinking of Jim and the starlit sky and the hushed and tranquil night. Refusing for the moment to think how horribly that tranquillity had so soon been destroyed. Holding one memory out of that night intact and untouched.

How strange it was to be suddenly touched by and then swept irresistibly into that gigantic current! To be all at once a part of the. deep pulse of being and life instead of an onlooker. All her life up to that moment became pallid and without meaning in comparison to the exciting significance every heartbeat now mysteriously possessed. It was, she thought suddenly, like a key with which to open doors of tremendous experience and (curiously, in the distance) doors that held promise of the deepest content.

Jim loved her. How could she doubt the strength of the thing that swept them together?

Yet—yet Averill had been so certain. Ask him, she’d said, smiling.

The night went on. Stars passed serenely and distantly above, tracing their precise course through the dark sky. Stars that had seen many strange things.

Lights were on in the old ranch house all night and in one of the cabins. In the gray, cold hour before dawn coffee was brewed in the low-ceilinged kitchen for men who had been up all night. They were tired and low-voiced, talking laconically among themselves as they did not talk when strangers were about.

“Well, I’ll bet anything anybody wants to bet that one of them murdered the woman.”

“You got no takers, Bill. It’s a cinch there wasn’t anything but a coyote and some jack rabbits around the place tonight. And they weren’t what you’d call strangers.”

“I say there’s something behind it all. Coffee, Charlie?”

“Sure, there’s something behind it. Got to have a reason for murder, don’t you? Pass the sugar.”

“He means something important. Something about this airplane engine that crashed. That’s why they came out here to see the boss.”

“Who told you?”

“Pilot. Strevsky.”

“Yeah, and he might’ve done it, too.”

“I don’t like the looks of that Italian fellow myself.”

“Who? Pace? He’s not Italian, he’s English.”

“If he’s English I’m an Egyptian. I think he’s plain American myself. More doughnuts, Chango.”

“Tough on the girl that found her.”

“Tough on the girl that was killed, if you ask me. What’s the matter, Charlie? You’re not eating.”

“I’m all right, not hungry.”

“Charlie had to help the boss. What really killed her, Charlie, did you find out?”

Chango, still smiling, serving them.

Sloane himself and Jim had about that time a prolonged talk in another room—a small, crowded room which was P. H. Sloane’s own study and held, packed in cupboards and along shelves, all the slowly acquired paraphernalia of a profession he had once disowned. A light burned, too, all that night in the cabin where Creda Blaine still lay.

And sometime that night Sloane talked, also, to Noel and to Strevsky and even to the boyish and frightened steward, Roy Wilson. It chanced that Eden herself was present when he had his first interview with Major Pace.

The day then slowly dawning, with the shapes of sagebrush growing gray, and the tall black cottonwoods looming like sentinels against the pale sky, and the cry of a coyote off in the distance was to have its influence and its weight upon many lives and among them Eden’s.

About five the sheriff telephoned from the other end of the county and held a long conversation with P. H. Sloane. At six, fortified with breakfast, three cowboys carefully wrapped the thing that was left of Creda Blaine, lifted it gently into a car and drove slowly away along the fifty-mile route, scarcely more than a car track in places, toward Rocky Gap.

“Where do you suppose Miss Blaine will want the body sent, when the coroner is done with it?” asked P. H. And Noel told him Louisiana and added wearily that they’d send telegrams.

“Better not be in a hurry about the telegrams,” said P. H. “There’s only one newspaper in Rocky Gap and the editor of it is also its crime, weather and society reporter and occasionally sets type, when his typewriter goes on a spree as he does once in six weeks. But the Blaines have a certain importance. The moment the news gets on the wires there’ll be reporters from St. Louis.”

“Right,” said Noel apathetically. “Okay, no telegrams till we have to send them—God, what a night.”

It was, however, full morning by that time with the sun tipping suddenly over the black ridge of mountains toward the east. From the east they made a shimmering crimson wall, but from the ranch the wall was black and looked impassable, as if it hemmed them all rigidly inside its confines. “You’d better get some rest,” said P. H. “There’s nothing more you can do just now.”

He disappeared, alone this time, still in dinner jacket and black tie, into the study at the end of the hall, beside the billiard room; Jim and Noel talked a little, wearily and without conclusion, and at last went to their rooms, upstairs now, in the main house, where Chango had brought their bags. Tiptoeing carefully past closed doors so as not to wake anyone. The sun had reached the top of a clear blue sky, and the shadow of the cottonwoods lay short and thick upon the sagebrush when Eden awoke.

She lay there for a moment, thinking again and instantly of Jim, of Averill, of Creda’s death and the horror into which that death plunged them. Sunlight lay across the floor; she rose finally and went to the window. The air was clear and dry; the sun poured down from a cloudless sky upon the ranch with its oasis of green, and upon the vast flat reaches of, she supposed, grazing land. Away in the distance the mountains were now vaguely blue and hazy-looking in the heat.

Near at hand so far as she could see there was no movement and no activity except for a squat, thick figure, the thicker for its foreshortening, which waddled out from the porch below and along the paths. It was Major Pace, in white linen which obviously and amazingly had been pressed; he was smoking and looking idly about him, quite as if murder and horror by night had no concern with him. His attitude was so completely and elaborately that of an observer that it was too elaborate. It struck Eden rather sharply that the lack of concern in that strolling, ineffably nonchalant figure was assumed, altogether artificial.

And certainly of all the people who might have murdered Creda the most likely suspect was, to Eden’s mind, the man calling himself Pace. She watched him stroll on down the path and stop in the shadow of the pines (almost at the spot where she and Jim had stood the night before) to light a fresh cigarette from the end of the one he’d finished.

Only last night.

She turned from the window, pushed her hands wearily through her hair, sighed and went to turn on the shower and rummage in her unpacked bags for clothing.

She looked at herself for a long moment before she opened the door into the hall. As she had done when she was starting from her little apartment to the waiting taxi—how long ago. New York and that small apartment where the last two years of her life had been spent seemed incredibly distant in space and time and completely unreal.

She thought of Noel—and her deliberate plan to marry him—if he could be induced to ask her and that too seemed incredible. It was as if it had been another person seated on the westbound plane, coolly planning and arranging her life as one might plan and cut a bit of dress material. She smiled a little, thinking of it, and the woman in the mirror with the pale face and grave eyes with shadows under them smiled too, wistfully, a little sadly. Yet she could see herself that there was in that woman’s face a kind of warmth, a luminous, almost intangible quality of eagerness that had not been there four days ago. Did women in love always show it in their faces?

And then she remembered going back into her apartment on that day that seemed now ineffably distant because she’d forgotten her gray chiffon scarf.

She turned away abruptly and the image turned, a slender woman in a white dress with a crimson belt and the lipstick on her mouth matching the belt. And with the shadow of remembered horror in her eyes.

Instantly the swift marching train of events that had developed since that day marched upon her again, catching her up in the inexorable procession.

At the door she remembered the letter Creda had begun to write and went back for it as she had done, days ago, for the gray scarf.

It was then that she had her first intimation of depths below depths taking their secret course. For the letter was not in her coat pocket. Was not on the dressing table, was not on the night table, was not anywhere in the room.

Someone, then, had taken it; the pocket of her coat was deep, it couldn’t have fallen from it.

Averill had been in her room, but had not approached the coat. She stood still, thinking rapidly of the previous night. Anyone, almost, could have taken the letter from her pocket. She had sat perfectly still for moments in the cabin, only half aware of what was going on. Jim had been beside her. Sloane had leaned over her, pressing a glass to her mouth. Noel had had more opportunity than anyone else; he had walked beside her, half-supporting her with his arm all the way from the horror-laden cabin to the house.