Chiffon Scarf (27 page)

“It wasn’t Jim!” gasped Eden. “It wasn’t Jim—”

“Then you know who it was! You told the sheriff you saw—and pretended you couldn’t remember who it was you saw. Well, who was it, then? Why don’t you tell? We all heard the sheriff tell you to try to remember whose face it was—as if you could forget anything like that! The reason you won’t tell is because it was Jim—”

“It was not Jim. Averill, stop—you don’t mean what you are saying. You mustn’t—”

Jim said: “Thank you, Eden. Averill—”

“Not now,” said Averill, quickly, eyes smouldering. “We’ll have this out later.”

“Your private quarrels can wait,” said Sloane. “Just now—”

“Just now,” said Pace unexpectedly and with determination, “there is something I want to say. There are things you must know. You can’t touch me; up to now I’ve kept silent; I am discreet; I must keep my coats clean of this affair. If you’ll promise me immunity—”

“I’ll promise you a long jail sentence if you don’t tell anything you know,” said P. H. Sloane savagely.

Pace smiled a little.

“Oh no, my dear sir. I’m innocent. There’s nothing you can prove against me. I have no stolen plans. I have an alibi for the time when this poor, pretty woman was murdered. You cannot charge me with intentions that came to nothing; intentions which had their birth in—patriotism,” said Pace as coldly and as smugly as a snake. “And I am of a mind to tell you a story. All in the interests of justice. Besides,” he looked at his cigar and added with simple honesty, “besides, I cannot stay here longer. I must be about my—mission. And if my little story can aid in the progress of justice—”

“God damn you,” said Jim.

Alarm flared in Pace’s eyes.

“You must guarantee my own immunity,” he said to Sloane. “Someone might fail to understand my motives.”

“I’ll guarantee nothing,” said P. H. “But if you don’t tell what you have to tell—”

“Don’t threaten,” cried Pace hastily. “Don’t threaten. I offered to tell, freely and of my own will. Very well, then.” He flicked the ash from his cigar, smiled a little and said with the utmost neatness and conciseness: “You are quite right about Creda Blaine. She was for years one of our sources of information. A pretty, one would say harmless, little wench, with a shrewdness. Ah, yes, a shrewdness. Too bad she was murdered. Well, then, she married one of her—shall we say merely to be clear, one of her victims. But after marriage (it is as you guessed, Mr. Detective, with that acute brain of yours), after marriage she found herself still, occasionally, in need of money. Therefore she managed on three occasions to provide us with bits of information. Bits only, but we pay well. She supplied them through me whom she knew by another name.” He said it modestly with a self-deprecatory air. Jim, fists looking hard and able, took a quick step toward him; Pace jerked back, shot a glance at the detective which demanded protection and went on more rapidly: “She was unable, however, to secure the entire plan for this new engine. Which we wanted very much; a valuable engine,” he interpolated with a flicker of congratulation toward Jim who did not respond, and Pace went on even more hastily: “Therefore, since she failed, we were obliged to take steps. Even if necessary to buy the engine. I came in person, myself. It was a delicate bit of business.” He paused there as if to rearrange certain facts. “Well, Creda Blaine recognized me when we met; if I had had the opportunity I should have warned her I was now Major Pace. However, we had an immediate understanding. We went for a walk after dinner and she understood at once that I must have her help; otherwise—well, I daresay you understand that, too. In the end she agreed to supply what I wanted.”

“And that was?” said the detective.

“Only a key,” said Pace airily. “And her own escort to the Blaine factory. We left the house, I expect, about two o’clock in the morning.”

“Creda!” gasped Averill. And Eden remembered that wakeful night; footsteps past her door, the sense of a sleepless house.

“And when you got there what did you do?” demanded Jim.

Pace spread his hands outward.

“Nothing,” he said and sighed. “You see someone got there first. And it was someone she saw. I don’t know who it was. I wish she had told me because then I would know who murdered her.”

There was a charged silence. Then the detective said: “What do you mean, someone got there first?”

Pace lifted his eyebrows.

“Just what I say! We reached the plant; the watchman was snoring in a cool spot under some trees. We simply went to the front door and entered. That was all. She went ahead of me to see that the coast was clear. (I had told her, merely, that I must see the engine.) When she came back she was frightened. She said someone was working at the plane; that whoever it was had an electric torch and was doing something to the engine. She said, I believe, that it must be a workman. But she wouldn’t let me go to see for myself. She said we had to leave at once. I—I believed her. There was truth and genuine fear in her manner. I know, now, that she recognized someone. There was nothing, then, I could do. We went back by taxi as we had come. No one saw us enter the house. She kept the key. I admitted defeat. Naturally I didn’t want to buy the engine if I could help it.”

“Then you really meant to fix the engine and steal the plans.”

Again Pace lifted his eyebrows.

“Whatever I meant to do (and mark you, I admit nothing) I failed. Except that the plans alone would have been no good to me if there had existed a complete and thus saleable model of the engine. Besides,” he added with a sigh, “when I looked in the library table for the plans—where I had seen Miss Averill place them only a few hours earlier—the plans were already gone. No,” he sighed again, “I failed. All the way around. But that’s my whole story. And you can’t touch me.

“Who was in the plant?”

“I don’t know. I told you that. I don’t know. She didn’t say. But she was terrified. Blue with fright. Undoubtedly whoever it was killed her.” He put his cigar at last to his lips, drew on it, frowned when he discovered it had gone out and reached for a match.

The curious thing was that his story sounded true in every detail.

“Was it Cady?” said the detective suddenly and harshly.

“I cannot say. I don’t know. It may have been.”

“It wasn’t,” said Jim. And Pace, having found a match, interrupted:

“But there is the letter she wrote before she died, addressed to him. ‘Cold-blooded murder is too much,’ ” quoted Pace. He added thoughtfully: “It must have terrified her when (after she kept silent about what she had seen, because naturally she didn’t dare tell under what circumstances she had seen it) the plane crashed and killed two men. One of them her husband. I’m sorry she had to die. However,” he shrugged, “her usefulness was at an end.”

“P. H.” It was Charlie, speaking a little diffidently at the detective’s elbow.

“What? Oh! Yes, we’ll be right along. You’ve got horses?”

“Yes, boss. Maybe we’d better be getting back to Wilson.”

“Right. You’ll come along, Cady?”

“P. H. You’ve got to listen. I checked those plans; yes, I found them in the house after the others had gone. I went back to look for them. And I didn’t tell you because I had to convince you the crash was phony and the disappearance of the plans helped. I intended to tell you later that I’d found them. But I had to have your help—I had to interest you—”

“Do you admit you took the plans from the library table?”

“No. No, they were stolen. But I found them still in the house. Hidden in a drawer of an unused bedroom. Whoever took them would have had to come back for them. I checked them simply for safekeeping until we returned. And—oh, it may have been a mistake. If they’d been hidden anywhere but in that damn bureau—I mean if it had been a more ingenious hiding place, so it looked as if somebody’d stolen them, I’d have told you. But if I told you the truth you’d say they were simply mislaid. And I knew damn well they weren’t. It was a crazy impulse—perhaps coming out here at all was crazy—but I had to do it. The way I did it. I had to make you believe me. If I was wrong I’ll take the consequences.”

“Consequences,” said the detective softly. “But that includes murder. Creda Blaine. And now young Wilson.”

And Charlie said, rather plaintively: “I told Ed we’d be right back, boss. You know Ed. He kinda hated staying there with Curly. Alone.”

Oddly it brought the thing to an end if not a conclusion. P. H. said shortly: “You’ll come along, Cady. Anyone else—”

In the end, as if every one of them had to see for himself, all the men went—Jim and Noel riding easily and well; Strevsky, all his grace gone, sitting like a block of wood on the saddle, grasping the horn anxiously but determinedly; Pace riding with unexpected ease and certainty. It was queer to see them leave in a group, following Sloane’s tall figure on a sleek bay mare, followed themselves by several cowboys who looked as if they’d been cut in one piece with their horses.

Averill, standing by the railing of the porch and watching them leave, turned at last toward Eden, gave her a long enigmatic look and without speaking entered the house. Dorothy Woolen, a silent, recording figure, had already disappeared so quietly that Eden did not note her going.

She stood still, watching the group of horses and men grow smaller and smaller in the distance, thinking of the suddenness with which the scene had ended, and of the questions that ending had left unanswered. The last horseman disappeared over the distant slope. Silence and heat settled down upon the ranch and claimed it. Silence and heat and emptiness. Averill did not return. Chango, whose beady, inquisitive eyes and flapping white apron Eden remembered vaguely as having hovered about for the past quarter hour, had disappeared, too.

She sat down listlessly in one of the big chairs, leaned her elbows on the porch railing and tried to summon reason out of chaos. But the trouble was Jim’s explanation of the missing plans; his lack of explanation about the letter. She believed him. But perhaps no one else.

Sloane had said the consequences included murder. Creda. And now Wilson.

She thought back, touching certain memories cautiously as with frightened, cold little finger tips. The plane crash—flames shooting earthward from a bright sky, where a skylark had mounted and sung. As bright a sky as the sky that day—that stared down into the blank, blue eyes of the little, curly-haired steward.

They were not pleasant thoughts. She rose restlessly and walked slowly, thoughtfully down the path. She paused in the cool shadow of the pines and remembered again. Irresistibly, with a heart that ached.

How merciless, under that demure manner, Averill actually was! How cruelly able to govern emotions, to direct her will! Averill could have murdered. Had she so willed it.

Suppose—suppose she had willed it!

It was so sharp and clear a thought that, despite (again) her own instinctive denial, she had to consider it. She walked on slowly, thinking.

The sun high above traveled slowly on, past its height, toward a descending arc. Brilliant sunlight poured down upon the ranch which looked small and unimportant in all that expanse of sand and sagebrush rimmed in distantly by mountains.

Eden walked on, lost in thought. She turned away from the path leading to the gate and in a long circle skirted the house, went past barns and corrals and stopped for a while in the shade of the great cottonwoods.

Off in the distance, shimmering in the sunlight, lay the great silver plane.

Without thinking, perhaps because of a subconscious desire to assure herself that this tangible link with the outside world still existed and had being, she left the shade of the cottonwoods presently and walked slowly toward the plane over the hummocky land, flat as her hand at one moment and tumbling into and out of a dry stream bed the next.

It was hot and the sun poured relentlessly down, leaving no shadows except that of the cottonwoods behind her and the outline of the plane’s wings flat upon sagebrush and sand.

She hadn’t remembered it was so far to the plane.

When she reached it the house and corrals looked small and unreal, like a distant mirage in the heat-laden air.

She touched the side of the plane; it was hot, warmed by the sun. The steps were down and after a while she pulled open the heavy door and entered the cabin. No one, of course, was there. The aisle tilted a little but the seats looked inviting and comfortable. She went to the front of the plane, paused, moved slowly back again and stopped at the seat she had occupied on that night flight. She had sat just here. With Averill in her yellow coat ahead of her so she could see the black satin cap that was Averill’s hair. Who had been across the aisle? Dorothy? Or Pace in his red shawl?

She sat down in the seat she had occupied during the night in the plane and then because of the sun moved to the other side. The leather cushion sank softly downward. Pace had sat here—or Dorothy.

If only the plane could speak! If only the metal furniture, the neatly upholstered, thin leather cushions could tell her what had been witnessed during that night.

If she were a detective perhaps she could discover some clue, some tangible bit of evidence in that plane where they had all sat through the night, thinking what thoughts, planning what plans, arriving at what desperate, ugly decisions?

But there was nothing. Blank, clean leather and steel. Small windows letting in sunlight. Nothing human; nothing that was evidence.

Time passed without her consciousness of its passage. There was no sound anywhere. She wondered once what the men were doing; what they had found; if they had drawn any conclusions at all from the circumstances of the little steward’s death.

He had sat in that plane, too, dozing childishly with his mouth open, in the end seat.

There was some special significance about his murder.

Her mind touched it, was caught again in the swirl of other thoughts, then returned, fumbling for that significance.

How silent it was! She might have been the only living thing in all the world. It was curious how distant the ranch house seemed, how remote she was from it and from human life. The desert stretched away from the windows, flat, empty, shadowless.