Pedro asked huskily, tiredly, “Do we search some more now?”
“I think we’d better talk to Mr. Ryker,” Miss Rachel decided.
There was faint gray light now all through the house. In the living room Florencia was nursing the fire. Dave Grubler stood at the window beside the desk, looking out at the ravaged garden. He glanced up as Miss Rachel came in.
Ryker wasn’t there, and she started to withdraw. Grubler beckoned to her.
She crossed towards him. The gray light gave new lines to his face, gleamed on the little desk, the account book with its half-concealed sheaf of yellow and green checks.
She was frowning at the account book as Grubler spoke: “How long ago do you remember seeing those gloves and that cluster of feathers?”
“I think that the last I saw of them was at the time I followed Zia out of the room—that was before the electricity failed.”
“You and Gail and Pedro have been through the house looking for Ilene. Did you notice them then?”
“No. I’m not sure whether the fact that they were gone would have struck me or not.”
Grubler nodded, as though some suspicion had been confirmed. “I think they were taken during that first confusion, after the lights went off.” He ran a hand through his pale hair. “It was the last anyone seems to have seen of Ilene, too.”
Miss Rachel said, “There is one point I’d like to check. When the second rattling sound came, you and Mr. Emerson were in Ilene’s room. Were either of you by the windows?”
“Yes, Hal had gone over there to look at the floor behind the draperies. We’d decided, you remember, that the rooms had better be searched because of what we’d found out there with Christine.”
“He had moved the draperies?”
“I think he was moving them at the time the sound came.” Grubler looked at her curiously. “That’s what it was, wasn’t it—the gourd-and-the-string business you found there afterward?”
“A rather ingenious arrangement,” Miss Rachel agreed. “Working for Mrs. Ryker for so long, as you did—was she mechanically inclined?”
His eyes grew blank. “Wasn’t that gourd business a rather simple affair?”
“For some people.”
He seemed to turn the question over in his mind. “Christine did figure out a few things when we ran into trouble at the mines. Not anything big, nor involving engineering principles. But she did have a knack of getting things simplified, of figuring how to get ore out of narrow pockets without too much blasting.”
“I see.”
He hesitated. “I don’t mean that she did anything startlingly clever. You do think now, don’t you, that she put that thing outside Ilene’s window?”
“I believe she put it there. I wanted to be sure the idea could have been her own. I tried to put myself in Mrs. Ryker’s place, wanting to scare Miss Taggart with the idea of a snake, and it seemed to me I’d have just tied the gourd to the bed-springs and let Miss Taggart be frightened over the possibility there was a snake under the bed. Under-the-bed is a very frightening place to me—I think it’s the influence of my sister Jennifer and her toads.”
He rubbed the point of his narrow chin. “Toads?”
“She was doing something special in Nature Study for Miss Gerrish’s sixth grade. But she didn’t tell me first, and the toads got very restless in the night and Jennifer wouldn’t wake up.”
It seemed to occur to Mr. Grubler all at once that Miss Rachel was a little old lady who liked to prattle about her childhood. His smile broadened with patient humor. “An impression like that stays with one, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose Mrs. Ryker had some sort of unpleasant experience in her childhood, to account for the way she felt about all you people.”
“She had a possessive streak. Of course, I was her employee. She had a hold over me I couldn’t fight. It was the others she seemed to want to torment. She told me once that her parents had separated when she was small, that she saw them at rare intervals, had no chance to feel close to them. That may answer your question.”
Miss Rachel nodded, as though glad to have the point cleared up.
“People felt that emotional grasping in every contact they had with Christine,” Grubler went on. “Some of them thought she was simply nosy. Some of them sensed what it was—an octopuslike enfolding of mind and will—and she scared them. It was hard to get people to do business with her wherever personal contacts were necessary.”
“I can see how she needed you.”
He bent towards her in the candlelight. “I was exactly what she needed. An utterly colorless sort of fellow. Even physically … Don’t feel embarrassed, because I know exactly how I look. People never could be frightened of me. But afterwards, when they were required to meet Christine after all, it was sometimes worse. The minnow … and then the shark.”
His ease in talking about himself didn’t communicate itself to Miss Rachel. She sensed something bitter under the casual attitude.
He broke off the conversation abruptly. “I’d better look about for the gloves and the cluster of feathers. There’s something odd about their being gone.”
“I have a job to do too,” Miss Rachel said.
Pedro and Gail had waited for her at the top of the stairs. The gray light washed in past them through the arched doorway. Zia was on the gallery, looking out across the garden to the stark black horizon beyond, where the tablelands lay jagged under roiling skies.
Gail knocked at Bob Ryker’s door. There seemed to be movement inside the room, then silence. Finally Ryker’s voice came: “Who’s there?”
“It’s Gail.”
“Oh.” He walked to the door; there was something ragged and tired about the sound of his steps. A key turned and he looked out at them. He took in Miss Rachel, Pedro, and Zia. “A conference again?”
Miss Rachel explained: “We’ve looked everywhere for Miss Taggart. We can’t find her.”
His eyes grew mocking. “You think I’m hiding her?”
“We know that she thought she was protecting you in lying about where you were at one point during the night.”
He drew back a little into the shadow of the doorway. He flattened his lips against his teeth in something that wasn’t quite a smile. It was obvious he had known at once what Miss Rachel meant. “I don’t quite remember where I was at all stages of the evening.”
Pedro, standing politely behind them near the gallery railing, now stepped forward uneasily. “Señorita …” His black eyes were wide, afraid. “There is something wrong down there in that little room.”
They all turned. Gail said huskily, “Wrong? What do you mean?”
“The door is open a little and there is something tied to the knob.” He had forgotten to quench the candle he carried; in the gray light it weaved to and fro, small as a match flame, and trembled with his fear.
The iron railing was cold and wet. The garden looked like a matted and trampled mass of greenery. Blossoms lay beaten into the mud. The fishpond had overflowed.
Miss Rachel took in these details automatically.
At the same moment she realized, with a sense of impatience for her own oversight, that no one had searched the room where Christine’s body lay, in their hunt for Ilene.
What Pedro had stammered out was true. The door of the little room set into the corner of the wall was open. From its knob hung the gay red cluster of feathers.
Chapter 15
Heavy curtains had remained drawn in this room of the dead. The candlelight they brought with them seemed to expand to a smoky brightness that filled the ceiling, reflecting eerily on the objects below.
Ilene lay just inside the door, on her face, her hands flung out in a reaching gesture above her head. The wide skirt of the black negligee was snarled and tom. Her hair had tumbled forward to cover her features. On her hands, grotesque in comparison with the delicate gown and robe, were the thick leather driving gauntlets.
The cot with its sheeted figure seeme
d undisturbed. Under it lay the broken pieces of a brightly colored Indian mask.
Dave Grubler had joined them as they came through the hall. He pushed forward, bent to touch Ilene’s outstretched arm. Gail knelt opposite, lifting the brown hair that covered Ilene’s face like a veil.
No one spoke for a moment. The unnatural yellow light played on each of them, showed Gail’s quivering unbelief, Grubler’s shocked withdrawal, the sudden fine sweat that came out on Zia’s upper lip. Pedro crossed himself and shut his eyes.
Miss Rachel studied Ilene’s features, noting the heavy raw-hide thong almost buried out of sight in the flesh of the throat.
“Should we try anything?” Grubler asked.
“Cut the thong. Do you know anything about artificial respiration?”
“Yes, but … I don’t think it will do any good. Touch her. There’s a faint beginning of coldness.”
Miss Rachel investigated. It was as Grubler said, there was no use trying anything on Ilene’s body. Breath had been gone too long. Miss Rachel reached for the pieces of the broken mask under the cot. “Is this a Kachina mask?”
It had, she saw, been a complete helmet to cover the head. The carving which indicated the features was shallow but elaborate, lifelike in a primitively stylized sort of way. The paint was brilliant in color but without gloss. Feathers and a set of carved horns resembling deerhorns had made a crest at the top.
Gail was staring at the broken pieces. “I didn’t try to copy the Hopi masks accurately. You understand that in the villages each mask represents a kind of spirit, that there is a religious connotation … this combines the features of several. But it represents no certain Kachina, and I made it of wood, because theirs never are.” Her voice broke, shuddered. “Why should Ilene be here, murdered, with it?”
Miss Rachel had been studying the outstretched form. “It seems as if she might have been carrying it, or holding it, when the murderer struck. And wearing the gloves—with the idea of not leaving any fingerprints, perhaps. The gloves made it very easy to strangle her. She couldn’t have gotten any grip on the thong.”
“This thing …” Grubler touched the end of the thong. “Where did it come from?”
“The mask hung from the wall by it,” Gail said.
Grubler got up and went over to the door and looked out at the garden. “I don’t see how we can be expected to take any more of this. I think we ought to try to get out. Take the cars as far as they’ll make it, then go on on foot.”
Gail glanced at Miss Rachel. “What do you think?”
Miss Rachel found to her own surprise that she agreed with Grubler. Perhaps not for his reasons.… “It would, I think, be safer than remaining here.”
Gail’s throat worked. “And leave—them—here like this?”
“They’re quite beyond harm and we’re not. But we must take a vote on it. Leaving or staying ought to be a voluntary business.”
Miss Jennifer had fallen asleep, not intending to. When she finally heard the rapping at her door and jerked erect, it puzzled her for a moment that the room should be filled with pale colorless light, that the furnishings stood out so clearly, and that the candles burned so small and dim.
She moved stiffly out of the bed and went to the door, removed the key, and tried to peer through the keyhole. Peering, she met an eye.
She couldn’t identify the eye, nor the voice that came through the door panel. Both had about them a strange air of disguise. The voice asked, “Are you going to leave with the others?”
All at once Miss Jennifer felt rather strange; she was unaccustomed to fear and to shudders, and their impact was a clammy shock. “Who are you?”
There was a brief anonymous bit of laughter and then silence. She didn’t even hear any footsteps. The keyhole was full of the same kind of light the room had, the eerie stuff that comes long before dawn.
With the idea that she had been abandoned, in panicky fright Miss Jennifer rushed to the windows and examined the courtyard. The cars stood in a row under the shelter. Beyond the courtyard the long plateau stretched into the distance, a gentle downward slope, a running sea of mud.
She was reassured. No one in his right mind would take a car into that.
All at once she was aware of movement below. Miss Rachel had scuttered into view and was making surreptitious signs for her to open the pane. When Jennifer leaned out, full of curiosity, Miss Rachel hissed, “Was someone at your door a minute ago?”
“Yes,” said Jennifer. “Who was it?”
Miss Rachel shook her head and went away. Jennifer cried after her, “Who’s leaving? Is everyone?” but there wasn’t any answer.
She withdrew into the room, and in a nervous excess of energy she blew out the candles, straightened the bed and the cot Ilene had meant to use (what on earth could have happened to Miss Taggart?), and finally dressed carefully in her outdoor clothes. She spent some minutes in futile reconstruction of what might have happened if the car from the travel agency had come after them in time as promised—Mr. Peele had paid her back in solid coin for finding him behind that shrub with Miss Caxton—and what she and Rachel might have been doing now if they could have rejoined the tour.
She was on edge for Rachel to come back and tell her who had been lurking and peeping at the door. But when someone came, it was Gail.
Gail wore a heavy brown coat and her hair was tied into a brown wool net. There were hollow places under her eyes. She had on gloves and galoshes and she had brought an extra pair of galoshes with her. She set them down inside the door. “We’re going to try the Fort Navajo road. It’s higher, and Dave thinks if we take shovels the men can clear the road enough to get through. But we may have to walk.”
“Someone tried to get into this room a little while ago,” Jennifer blurted. It seemed to her now, in her nervous distraction, that this was what had happened. “Tried the door.… It’ll be a relief to be out in the open, even having to walk.” Gail looked at her, and Miss Jennifer saw that terror flickered just under the surface, that it had been there all the time, a controlled but constant fright. “It’s all my fault,” Gail said. “Miss Rachel told me not to bring them here, she saw the danger in it. I’m as much a murderer as anyone. I murdered Ilene, just by inviting her.”
Jennifer started. “Miss Taggart? She’s …”
“In the room where we had put Christine.” Gail shook her head as if to free it from nightmare. “Wearing those gloves … the cluster of feathers on the door. With the Kachina mask broken—as if it broke when she was strangled and she had dropped it.”
“I saw that mask affair. Someone had it on, in the courtyard …” Miss Jennifer glanced uneasily towards the window, wondering what the vague idea was that skittered through the back of her mind.
Gail turned to the door. “Don’t try to pack anything—we’ll come back when the police do.”
“I’ve got a funny idea that I know something I should tell you,” Miss Jennifer worried.
Gail waited with her hand on the doorknob.
Finally Miss Jennifer shook her head. “I can’t remember.” When Gail had gone she locked the door and stood stone-still in the silence, trying to fix the impression. She went back to the window, had her thought distracted by seeing Hal Emerson down there, square and rugged, his face impassive, smoking a pipe. “Is it a shape, a kind of clothes under the mask, that I half remember? Or is it something about that eye in the keyhole?”
Emerson blew smoke and stared at the cloudy sky. There was no rain now, only a trailing mist that was tugged here and there by the gusty winds. The clear gray light was stronger—as strong, probably, as it would be all day.
Bob Ryker sauntered out and seemed to study the weather. He had the wicker hamper in his hand, carrying it negligently, as though the act had become a habit. He made no move to approach or to talk to Emerson. He inspected the cars indifferently, then turned and, in the act of rubbing his head, pushed his hat back and looked up at the windows. When he saw Miss Jennifer he
grinned, whistled softly, and drew one eye down drolly in a wink.
She drew back, flustered. “Making out he’d flirt with me, and I’m old enough to be his mother.” She plucked at her dress, smiled sheepishly before she remembered her upbringing, then in a lather of righteous hurry she unlocked the door and went out to the gallery.
The Indian girl was by the arched doorway, glancing back at her. Miss Jennifer thought approvingly that Zia was very intelligent, nothing like what she had supposed a Hopi girl might be—well, of course, there had been all those extra years in school, not many Indians got that—and she wondered what Zia’s attitude was towards the murders and the panic among the others. Indians were not supposed to show any emotion. Zia hadn’t shown much, except her anger over the pretended Kachina. Miss Jennifer smiled at her politely, uneasily, and asked if the others were ready.
Zia studied the row of doors over Miss Jennifer’s shoulder. “I believe they’ve gone down. Do you think this is wise, leaving like this?”
Miss Jennifer realized that she hadn’t taken any time over her decision to go; that business of the eye outside the keyhole had made up her mind for her, somehow. “If there were any way to know which one of us was a murderer … but of course we don’t know.…” She frowned; the fugitive half-formed idea had skipped across the edge of consciousness again. She wondered vaguely if it had had something to do with the cars. “We can’t leave the guilty one behind with his dead, because we can’t identify him.”
Zia stepped close to her, so close that Miss Jennifer smelled the faint piny perfume she wore, clean and aromatic as desert air, and stared directly into the wide black eyes in which her own spare, erect figure was reflected in miniature. Zia said in a quiet voice, “I know something at last … I know the truth about the Kachina. I figured it out.”
Of course Zia would have a better chance of exposing the business behind that crazy figure than anyone else, Miss Jennifer thought in that first instant of surprise. “You did?”
She saw the intention in Zia’s eyes, the desire to share this knowledge, and sudden warning flared in her. She remembered what Rachel had said over and over about murder, that knowledge was dangerous, that sharing it was downright insanity. The only persons you could share it with were cops … policemen, she corrected herself mentally. Funny how Rachel’s slang crept in.…
The Cat Wears a Mask Page 14