Miss Rachel came out briskly and picked up the coat. “It isn’t too long now until dawn. And I think it most important that we find Miss Taggart. The worst form the search could take would be to have the whole group straggling about in the dark and running into each other at odd and nervous moments. Someone’s too apt to get hurt—even provided something more sinister doesn’t happen. Gail, I suggest you get everyone to stay put for a while and that you and I and Pedro do the looking.”
The umbrella, a black finger of caution, was being shaken at Miss Rachel as she slipped out of the door. Gail glanced back apologetically at Miss Jennifer. “I suppose it’s best to do as she says.”
“It’s utter insanity to do as she says,” Jennifer squeaked. She rushed to the door, locked it after them. “Don’t try to come creeping and wailing back here … She wiped her eyes indignantly. Actually she couldn’t recall a time when Rachel had crept or wailed, either; there had always been that stubborn devilish sense of mischief. “If Father could see you now!” she cried, a last blast of appeal. The only answer was the cat’s.
The cat was at her feet, wanting to get out and be with Miss Rachel.
On the gallery there was a feeling of quiet, of the rain slackening, of a wet gray dawn beginning to gather itself below the horizon.
Gail touched her arm in the dark. “You said that Ilene had done something else quite out of character tonight.”
Miss Rachel was staring out into the misty blackness in the garden. “She was up here on the gallery, according to her story, when she caught sight of what seemed to be a Kachina figure flitting and fumbling around the door of the room where Christine’s body lay. In a spirit of bravery or idiocy—her attitude seemed to combine the two—she went downstairs and out into the garden to investigate. There terror overwhelmed her and we heard her screaming.”
“I see what you mean,” Gail said after a moment. They were on the stairs now; from the hall below came a footstep, a slight cough.
They looked down at Dave Grubler. He was holding a candle stuck into the neck of a bottle. “Gail? I’ve got to talk to you. There’s something you’d better know.”
“About Ilene?” She hurried down, Miss Rachel following. “Have you found her?”
“I think she’s taken a powder.”
“Gone? Is one of the cars missing?”
He shook his head. Candlelight gave him an even weirder whiteness than before; he looked alabastrine, a man cut from stone. “The cars are all there. Anyway, she’d know better than to take one of them. You’d be in adobe mud to your hubcaps ten feet from that courtyard.… She’s run oil, panicked.”
Gail stared up into his face, astonished. “In the night?”
Dave shifted the candle from one hand to another. Miss Rachel noticed that he, like herself, had taken time to dress completely. He looked businesslike, neat, in his dark suit. “Didn’t you and Miss Rachel see her right in there when we were questioning her?” He nodded towards the living room. “I thought she was going to break down for a moment. You must have thought, as I did at first, that she was afraid we’d find out her lie about Bob being at the dresser at the time that rattling sound was made. Now I’m inclined to think that the lie was mechanical, that her mind wasn’t even on it.”
“You mean—she was afraid of someone in the room?”
He looked at her obliquely. “I’m sure of it. I believe, too, that she said something to Zia there in front of the fire.”
For some reason Zia’s suspicious attitude towards Hal Emerson returned instantly to Miss Rachel’s mind. Zia had accepted the discovery of the gourd outside Ilene’s window with a great deal of reservation. Her glances towards Emerson as he worked at the window had been wary, doubtful.
“Where is Zia now?”
Dave glanced about uneasily. “I don’t know. It’s been some while since I saw any of them.”
Miss Rachel went to the living-room door and glanced into the long room. The fire at the far end illumined a little circle—Pedro, Florencia, Bob Ryker with a bottle on his knee, his head propped among cushions, as though he might be trying to sleep. Most of the room was in a kind of twilight. Shadows flitted on the walls and the smell of the fire was strange and smoky.
Florencia and Pedro looked up as Miss Rachel walked towards them in the gloom. Florencia’s mouth made an exaggerated O and her hands performed praying motions. “It’s just me,” Miss Rachel explained, touching Ryker on the shoulder. His eyes opened; he stared at her glassily. “There is something which has to be done, Mr. Ryker.”
He shook his head, straightened in the chair as if throwing off the desire for sleep.
“We have to see what that final letter was—the unfinished one in your wife’s case.”
She saw that the drowsiness left him instantly, though he continued to sit slouched in an appearance of lethargy. “Hmmm? I don’t remember. Was there something else?”
“You know there was. You kept us from assembling it.”
He set the bottle down carefully, then lifted it, offering it to Pedro. Pedro accepted it, murmuring, “Gracias.” Ryker looked sidewise at Miss Rachel. “Poor old Christine—can’t we let her little faults die with her?”
“Your wife didn’t have little faults, Mr. Ryker. She had big ones. When she hated she went overboard at it. She hated every one of these people with an almost psychopathic intensity. I want to see that letter, because I want to know whom she was working on at the last.”
He rose out of the chair, though with an air of reluctance. “We’ll find out, then.”
Gail and Grubler were at the door. Miss Rachel explained the errand; the four of them returned upstairs.
In Christine’s room Ryker unpacked the small case, turned the contents out helter-skelter on the bed, and then stood back. Grubler’s attention was attracted to the gambling chip. “What’s this?”
“It’s evidence that Mrs. Ryker was in Reno last week.” Miss Rachel was busy with the book of poetry, shaking out the scraps of words and letters upon the counterpane.
Grubler frowned. “I don’t see how you figure it.”
“I was in Reno too,” Miss Rachel explained. “A blonde at a roulette table bought a stack of dollar chips. She was pretty ostentatious about it, liked showing off, liked the picture of herself as a freehanded gambling gal.”
Ryker laughed suddenly, a brief bitter sound.
“All at once the stack of chips slipped and began to roll,” Miss Rachel concluded. “The blonde lost her composure. There were some hectic words with the dealer. But then people began to pick up the chips for her. She got them back—all but one. Rave and threaten as she would, that one lost chip never was turned in.”
The candle which Grubler had set on the dresser made a small sputtering sizzle … there was no response for a moment from the other three people in the room. It was as if each stood apart in his thoughts, setting the incident of the blonde and the dollar chip into the picture of Christine Ryker as he had known her.
Grubler gave a sigh. “It fits, all right—it’s the thing Christine would have done if she’d had the chance. I’ll bet she got a kick out of the frothings of the big blonde.”
Miss Rachel bent above the little scraps of paper on the bed. She frowned; the light was poor and flickering and the long-legged arty lettering not too easy to read at random like this. Still, she had something to form the message to now—an idea based on the thing found behind Ilene’s window.
The words emerged little by little:
Maid or wanton, guard your door,
Fork-tongued venom on the floor—
Justice with a tooth of flame
Comes at night to blot your name.
KACHINA
“It’s all here, all complete. I’d hardly expected that,” Miss Rachel pondered. “She just hadn’t assembled it yet. I wonder when she meant to give it to Ilene?”
“To Ilene?” Ryker moved uneasily between the candle and the bed, and his shadow followed on the wall, huge and mo
th-like. “How do you figure that?”
“It occurred to me—rather late, I admit—that the arrangement we found at Ilene’s window might not have been her doing. You see, Christine had been upstairs alone before anyone else, on the excuse of seeing to her belongings. She had plenty of time for a bit of trickery.”
Grubler knitted his white eyebrows. “She fixed that thing?”
Miss Rachel was looking at Ryker. “She made the trick rattle, she cut out and composed a note which from its opening words would seem to fit Ilene, with a nasty little hint that she knew Ilene was pretending to be something she was not—and then she seems to have stopped. As if”—Miss Rachel’s eye crept over to Gail—“as if she had a doubt, as if she felt she might be making a mistake.”
Ryker didn’t move. His shadow lay across Gail’s face, and slowly, and as if unwillingly, Gail’s eyes lifted towards him.
Miss Rachel saw what it was now—the interchange of thought like a secret means of communication. In it was shame. Shame and fear.
Chapter 14
Miss Rachel finally ran across Zia again quite by accident.
The Hopi girl was sitting motionless in the wicker seat in the under gallery. There was a faint glitter to her hair, as though recently she might have been out in the rain.
Miss Rachel, borrowing Grubler’s trick, had made a candle-holder out of a bottle. She set the bottle on the redwood table. She thought that Zia had more the look of an Indian woman than she had had before. Zia had thrown a bright shawl across her shoulders; her black eyes were obsidian, her pose impassive.
Miss Rachel sat down on the end of a bench. “Have you seen Miss Taggart?”
Zia moved her eyes slightly, enough to take in Miss Rachel’s little figure. “No—not for quite a while. I looked for her and didn’t find her.”
Miss Rachel studied the cool, dark profile. “What do you think of the gourd arrangement outside her window?”
“I don’t believe she made that.”
Miss Rachel waited. She could play Indian too.
Zia decided to go on. “Mr. Emerson seemed so emphatic in his theory, his idea that Ilene had made the trick to scare someone else, that I couldn’.t help wondering if there might be another answer. I saw that the arrangement could have been put there by anyone—perhaps with the purpose of frightening Ilene. I think that must be the solution. Even Christine could have done it.”
“I think now that Christine did do it,” Miss Rachel agreed.
Zia’s glance was quicker, this time. “There is just one stumbling block, one inconsistency. Do you see what it is?”
“Oh yes. If Ilene didn’t put the gourd outside her window, didn’t know it was there, and wasn’t responsible for that first rattling, why did she lie about Mr. Ryker’s being at his window when the second rattle occurred?”
A flicker of admiration shone in the black eyes.
Miss Rachel went on: “Actually, when you think about it, she may not have been lying about the fact that he was at the window. She may have been lying about his being in the room at all.”
“Perhaps in defending him from suspicion she expected to have a hold over him,” Zia said softly. “Poor Ilene! Bob was always her soft spot. He managed to keep her confidence even during the bad time at college, when she thought she was going blind. I suppose she thought of him as a sort of black-sheep hero. And then, often the self-righteous take joy in people like Bob, don’t they?”
“I’ve noticed it,” Miss Rachel admitted. “By the way, Mr. Grubler thinks that Ilene confided something to you while you .were sitting together in front of the fire.”
“She did. About Hal Emerson’s marriage.”
Miss Rachel felt the unexpected shock. She had liked Emerson. “His … marriage?”
Zia explained calmly. “Christine expected him to go to work for her, though everyone knew how he loathed her. She was holding something over him—a secret. He was married two or three years ago. It wasn’t the sort of marriage you talk much about. He was drunk, in a border town, and the woman was a tramp.”
“Oh.” Miss Rachel thought about it, conscious of an odd feeling of sympathy for Emerson. “Docs Gail know this?”
“No. Don’t you think someone should tell her?”
Miss Rachel tried to analyze what she really did think. She had advised Emerson to leave, to forget Gail and let Gail go on to live alone in peace. But now that this other thing was revealed, she was aware of a sort of disappointment. Hal Emerson and Gail were both rather stubborn and hotheaded, and it had been her experience that such people were good for each other. Neither got the worst of things, and they gave each other something to do. “I believe Mr. Emerson should be given a chance to tell her.”
“I think you must like him.”
“I suppose I do.” Miss Rachel spent a moment reflecting that Jennifer always claimed she preferred to like the wrong people—was it true in this case? “Was there a divorce?”
“Yes, a quick one that cost him a lot of money. In Reno, I think. Perhaps that’s how Christine managed to get hold of it—the notices in the paper.”
A hunch began to grow in Miss Rachel’s mind—a hunch concerning the attitude she had sensed between Gail and Bob Ryker. An explanation for the depths of the self-loathing in which Gail had been sunk in Reno.… “Why are you so sure that Gail doesn’t know about this marriage?”
Zia’s expression grew thoughtful. “If she knows, she has found out during the last month or so. I saw her in the spring—she was doing a lot of sketching then and came to the village a number of times—and she let drop the fact that she believed Hal Emerson had never married.”
“Recently … has she said anything like that?”
Zia seemed to consider. The candle flared and spat in the dying wind. Beyond the eaves that thrust out to mark the level of the upper gallery, the rain had softened to a mist. The sky was showing faint iridescent patches of gray. The dim outlines of the growing things in the garden looked beaten and sodden.
Miss Rachel thought irrelevantly at the moment that it was the longest night she’d ever spent in her life.
Zia said, “It seems to me now, thinking back, that she has avoided saying anything at all about him. Her feeling towards him seems to have tightened up, become more bitter.”
Zia straightened on the wicker seat. A fluttering light—another candle—had emerged from the hall door. Behind it Pedro’s face looked darkly haggard and Gail was like a shadow wearing a paper mask. When they were close enough Gail said, “She’s really gone. It must be as Dave said: she started out, probably trying to follow the road, in a moment of panic.”
“Ilene?” Zia asked.
Gail nodded. “We’ve been looking for her—it seems for hours.” She turned to Miss Rachel. “Have you been into the kitchen?”
“Not yet. We’d better go there now.”
Zia came with them. The kitchen, meant to be bright and cheerful, had a ghostly strangeness about it under the candle-light.
“There are some large cupboards here,” Zia said, indicating the storage compartments near the floor.
“I keep canned goods in a couple of them.” Gail stared at the cupboard doors with sudden nervousness. “But they are big. Big … enough.” She put her hand on a yellow plastic knob and pulled outward. Two shelves were visible, well filled with canned foods.
There were three of the big cupboards. The second held dried foods—pink beans in cellophane packs, noodles, soup mixtures—in addition to canned provisions. The third held two large cans, bright as brass in the dim light. “Sugar and flour,” Gail murmured.
“There’s something else back there on the shelf,” Miss Rachel said. “Rags of some sort wadded together. Dustcloths or something.”
“There shouldn’t be anything.” Gail took the candle from Pedro, bent down, then knelt close to the opening and ran her hand in behind the cans.
The things she pulled forth brought an abrupt silence into the room. With a slow falling-apart, a
reluctant spreading-out like the death of a scarecrow, the clothes displayed themselves. The high-necked linen suit … the heavy stockings … the virginal, shapeless white muslin underwear … the sensible square-toed shoes.
Gail sprang up. There was an expression on her face as though she must scream, as though some inner wall had given way in her, some defense now utterly breached and flattened by horror and fear. Zia shuddered.
Miss Rachel spoke quickly and quietly. “She hasn’t gone, then. She’s changed her clothes, for some reason, putting back on that sheer gown and negligee.”
She had caught their attention.
“Remember, in Ilene’s bedroom?” Miss Rachel said to Gail. “I remarked that the night things were missing.”
The search had taken them through all of the bedrooms. Ryker had stayed in Christine’s room, repacking the little case. Miss Jennifer had refused to unlock her door unless Rachel were willing to stay inside until the police came. But the rest of the rooms had been investigated by Miss Rachel, Gail, and Pedro, and a special search had been made in Ilene’s room. Nothing had seemed odd except the absence of the night clothes.
Gail shook her head. “She couldn’t be out there in the open like that—practically naked.”
Miss Rachel frowned to herself. “Obviously she changed her clothing in here from some motive of secrecy. It’s almost as if there were some task she was bound to perform, and that after the first failure she must try again.”
Mechanically, Gail was spreading the clothing on a chair.
“Something is false, doesn’t fit,” Miss Rachel worried. “Gail, are you sure that Ilene’s nearsightedness is as bad as she says it is?”
Gail stood staring at the clothing as though mentally recreating the timid, repressed girl who had worn it. “Somehow, I was sure. I can’t recall the incident. Something convinced me, though, that she was almost blind.”
“This Kachina figure which you and Jennifer seemed to have caught a glimpse of—was it carrying a light?”
Gail shook her head. “No. I saw it by means of a lightning flash.”
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