Had there been a shadow, momentarily, on the tiled landing beyond the door’s arch? She tried to concentrate; Zia went on.
“The Kachina is always a reflection of the people who conceive it, bring it into being … What are you staring at?” “Nothing.” There hadn’t been a shadow. Or anyway, there wasn’t one now.
“The Kachina which Christine brought into being was cruel, mocking, sadistic. All that she was, this figurative spirit, this letter writer, was also.”
Zia waited, and Miss Jennifer realized that she was expected to make some comment. “A sort of spiritual mirror?”
“You are very acute. Yes—a reflection of self. Even among my people the more warlike pueblos have the warlike Kachinas; the defeated have spirits w’ho come no longer among men but remain in sorrow in the mountains.”
Miss Jennifer said nervously, “Perhaps we’d better go down. The others will be getting into the cars.”
They moved together towards the stairs. Zia went on more quietly, “This figure, the pretended ghost whom you and Gail saw wearing the mask that she had made—even what little we know about it can be revealing.”
Miss Jennifer’s eyes were round.
“Remember Ilene’s actions? She caught sight of the Kachina from the upper gallery—much too far for her, with her poor sight, to have distinguished size or form, even in the brilliance of the lightning flash. It seems logical to suppose that she thought she knew the identity of the figure. She went down, expecting to join in the joke or the game or to give a bit of cautious advice if the pretended Kachina were acting merely out of an excess of drink.”
Miss Jennifer knew whom Zia meant … it had been so obvious that the poor, proper Miss Taggart had been enamored of Mr. Ryker. A timid, half-maternal emotion.
They were at the door of the courtyard.
“She must have been quite sure—unthinking—and then when the truth hit her the shock sent her screaming.”
“The truth?”
“Think about it,” Zia advised. Dave Grubler was standing just outside the doorway. There was no chance to talk any further.
Grubler turned towards them, lighting a cigarette inside his cupped hands. He snapped the match, tossed it to the brick paving. Miss Jennifer met his eyes—peculiarly colorless eyes, and without any trace of nervousness, though he had spoken more of nerves than anyone. It seemed to her that his glance probed and measured, trying to gauge hers and Zia’s attitude towards him. She forced herself to smile, the sort of smile he might expect from a little old lady who hadn’t had much sleep, who was scared to death, and who had a lot of rattlebrained tag ends running through her head but not a theory in the world. No theories, positively. Rachel had told her a thousand times that if you developed a theory the murderer would know it, would smell it out like a bloodhound and kill you for it. She almost wanted to go up to Mr. Grubler and blurt out into his face, “I haven’t any theory at all. Have you?”
Only it might not be Mr. Grubler.
It might be Mr. Emerson, standing in the shadow of the car shelter, his face cold and impassive behind the pipe, his glance straying over to Gail once in a while, where she and Ryker stood between the cars, figuring out a seating arrangement. Mr. Emerson hadn’t seemed to care for Christine Ryker. Perhaps the dislike had boiled up into sudden fury, so that he had brought home a snake from the Hopi pueblo, done up like a gift of some sort, and put it into Mrs. Ryker’s room and let it bite her.
Miss Rachel came out into the courtyard with her cat’s basket over her arm. Jennifer remembered then the mysterious eye outside her door and the fact that Miss Rachel seemed to know something about it. She headed for her sister.
Miss Rachel seemed deliberately to avoid her. With an almost unseemly hurry she managed to get between the cars, opened one of the doors, and put the basket inside. Then she stood listening to the talk between Gail and Mr. Ryker.
“All right, then,” Ryker was saying morosely, “I’ll be good and let you drive the station wagon. You can even put me in Dave’s sedan if you want. I don’t care.”
“I made the suggestion because I don’t think my old car would do it,” Gail explained.
“Sure it wouldn’t,” Ryker agreed. “What hasn’t it got? Brakes? Tires? Compression?”
“It hasn’t any chains and my tires are worn pretty slick.”
“And besides, you feel I’m in no condition to drive.”
He wasn’t being belligerent, merely melancholy. He waited, but Gail didn’t answer. Pedro had come out into the courtyard carrying a couple of spades. Behind him Florencia scuttled along, big-cyed in a black rebozo. Dave Grubler opened the luggage compartment of the sedan and motioned for Pedro to lay the spades inside.
Ryker asked, “Are you taking Pedro and his wife?”
“Of course. I couldn’t ask them to stay when we’re all afraid to.”
Gail took a long look at her house. Miss Jennifer did likewise—not that she expected to see anything strange. They were leaving nothing but Death.
The house looked big, its adobe walls thick and solid among the driven bits of mist. Miss Jennifer thought that its appearance must have been a comfort to those travelers of years ago. A safe repose, secure against the Apache, the highwayman, the weather.
The high windows of the bedrooms were blind and blank, frosted with the damp.… Miss Jennifer searched them nervously, remembering the strange business of the gourd that had been outside Miss Taggart’s window, wondering if they should ever have the truth of that after all—and what had the Hopi girl meant, hinting that Ilene had gone down into the garden to meet the Kachina, thinking she knew who the Kachina was?
Chapter 16
“The way to make an old-fashioned sugar pie,” Miss Rachel explained to Mr. Grubler, at the wheel beside her, “is to take whatever dough you have left after making your regular pics, roll it out thin, dot it with butter, fold over and reroll, dot with butter again, dust thoroughly with brown sugar and cinnamon, and bake in a hot oven.”
“My grandmother used to make them. I thought there was something magic in the process. I think she sprinkled on bits of citron too.”
Grubler spun the wheel hard to avoid a small boulder sticking out of the mud. They were entering a narrow cleft between two small mesas. The car lurched and bumped, the tires slipping in spite of heavy chains, the passengers much aware of a sinking sensation during the skids.
“The sugar pie was simply an economical way to use up leftover dough and help fill the children so that their attack on the real pies would be less ferocious,” Miss Rachel added, hanging onto the door handle. “When Jennifer and I were small we had a certain cook—”
The car gave an especially bad lurch, and Miss Jennifer, in the rear seat, emitted a small scream. Even Zia showed nervousness. The road was climbing, coming out to the top of the tableland, and was bordered by a crevasse in the red, rocky earth.
“—a certain cook, a Mrs. March, who fed us so many sugar pies that we quite lost our appetites. Mother decided that we needed a tonic.”
Miss Jennifer, in the rear seat, frowned; she wondered if nervousness was causing Rachel to prattle on so. She took a sidelong glance at Zia and at Mr. Emerson, over beside the window. They didn’t look very interested over the sugar-pie recipe. Mr. Emerson seemed to be trying to catch a glimpse of the station wagon up ahead. Zia was eying the chasm beside the crumbling road.
“Not sulphur and molasses?” Mr. Grubler asked.
“I was never quite sure just what did go into Mother’s tonic,” Miss Rachel said. “I think she started with a base of white wine and garlic juice and improvised as she went along with whatever else was handy. She was careful, though, not to disturb the clear color. That’s how she got close enough with it before we tried to escape. I almost always thought, before I caught that first whiff, that she was offering me a little glass of water.”
A curious silence seemed to enter the car.
Miss Jennifer wondered what the others were thinking of.
On her part, she was remembering Mr. Ryker’s ever-present bottle of vodka. Vodka, like Mother’s tonic, had a strangely innocent resemblance to water.
“White wine and garlic are both very good in their places,” Emerson said, sitting forward suddenly. “Look, I guess I’m a little late—but I can’t help wondering if this was the smart thing to do. The police are almost sure to get through to the house sometime today. This is … well, it’s rather as if we were avoiding them.”
“Not at all,” Grubler argued. “We know that Captain Isle-ton is trying to reach us by way of the Fort Navajo road. Probably we’ll meet him up here somewhere, and much sooner than we’d have contacted anyone in authority by staying at Gail’s place.”
Emerson didn’t say anything for a moment. “Any particular reason, on your part, for wanting to get to the police ahead of the rest of us?”
Grubler bit his lip and seemed to concentrate for a moment on his driving. They were on a lower jagged shelf of a mesa now, crawling eastward toward what looked like tumbled heaps of masonry, clumps of pine and cedar, and a high rectangular arrangement of logs that gave the effect of a deserted gateway.
Grubler muttered, “There used to be an outpost here at this lower entrance to the fort. It looks horribly … dead, doesn’t it?”
Emerson said, “What about my question?”
“The police? Naturally I think they’ll get to the truth. There is a fact or two I intend to put into their hands. This Reno business, for instance. I hadn’t known, until shortly before we left, that Christine had been to Reno during the past week. I knew that Bob had. If Christine was there, she followed him, and my guess is that she suspected him of keeping a rendezvous with a. woman and intended to spy on them. You know how she was. She might be sick to death of his drinking and ready to dig his eyes out for what she suspected of him in the way of being unfaithful. But she wouldn’t want to let him go. The one thing she feared and hated was freedom—for other people, for people she felt she had a claim on.”
Emerson was staring at the back of Grubler’s head. “Any particular woman in mind?”
Grubler said, much too quickly, “No. Even if I did know …
Emerson took out a package of cigarettes, heard Miss Jennifer’s indignant sniff which implied that no gentleman inflicted cigarette smoke on a lady inside a car, put the pack away, and twisted the flat book of paper matches between his fingers. Finally he asked softly, “Ilene? She’s dead—you can’t hurt her now.”
Grubler frowned, shot a sidewise glance towards Miss Rachel. “I don’t think it was Ilene. I won’t say who I thought it was.”
“Gail?”
Miss Rachel was looking down steadfastly at the cat’s basket on her lap. Emerson hunched even farther forward, so that he hung almost over her shoulder. “Miss Rachel, you’ve known Gail since she was a baby. Do you think she’d—” He stopped talking and sat as still as the car’s motion let him. His mouth twisted and grew tight. “It’s true, then.”
It was at least logical, Miss Rachel thought miserably. Too logical to discard. There wasn’t any other way to explain Gail’s despair than as a sick self-hatred, based on the realization that the sudden knowledge of Emerson’s disgraceful marriage had caused her to act recklessly, to throw away what she had always thought of as valuable and well worth guarding. Her good name, or honor, or call it what you wanted. Gail was old-fashioned enough to hate losing it.
But Miss Rachel said determinedly, “The facts may have quite another meaning when you know them all. Remember that it wasn’t Gail whom Christine was planning to frighten.”
“It was Ilene,” Emerson agreed. “Suppose Ilene had been in Reno too, had perhaps followed Bob there. She’d never forgotten the efforts he made to be kind when her sight went bad, and she was a strange, introspective girl. Perhaps lack of other contacts made that feeling of gratitude grow—she had, literally, no one to love. And so, say she had followed him and made a second witness to the fact that he’d met someone secretly. Don’t you sec where that leads? To something much bigger than simple jealousy. To murder—there were two witnesses to that rendezvous, and both of them are dead.”
Grubler drove with his eyes straight ahead. A small sigh came from Zia’s lips; she looked surreptitiously at Miss Jennifer.
“There ought to be some way to clear up a few of the loose ends, just among ourselves,” Emerson went on doggedly. “We can ask Gail outright if she was in Reno with Bob, and we can sample that stuff he carries around with him in a bottle.”
“Sooner than you think,” Grubler put in, jerking a hand off the wheel to gesture ahead.
They had passed through the high open gateway; the dim road then plunged in close under an overhanging bank. From the bank a slice of earth had fallen and broken up into clods and boulders. To the left stood a clump of small, stunted dark green pines. Just this side of the trees the station wagon was stopped; Pedro and Bob Ryker were out and looking at the fallen barrier measuringly.
Grubler half opened his door, leaning out with one hand still on the wheel. He was hatless; the gray overhead light struck his white hair, set it shining. “Trouble ahead?”
“Work,” Ryker said flatly.
Miss Jennifer was peering at the other car. “Do you know, I had a queer presentiment he was going to say there was something wrong with the car. With the motor or something.” She frowned. “I don’t often have hunches. Funny … this one was so strong.”
Miss Rachel shot a glance across her shoulder. But Jennifer shook her head. “I can’t remember why.”
“Digging to do; I’ll go get the shovels,” said Grubler quietly.
Florencia was the only one remaining inside the other car. Gail was walking the narrow rim of the road where dead, sodden grasses gave some protection from the mud churned up by the cars. She came towards them slowly; the gray light gave her skin a pale luminosity, not flattering, almost the color of death itself. She stopped, regarded them with a serious air. She must have sensed something in Emerson, in Miss Rachel—she tugged the collar of her coat higher and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Emerson was next the window; he rolled down the pane and leaned through. His face looked suddenly hard, cruel, full of determination. “There’s a question you should answer, Gail. About Reno. Were you there with Bob?”
Her eyes flinched. She turned for an instant towards Miss Rachel, her gaze searching. “I went alone. Miss Rachel came home with me.”
Emerson said harshly, “All this careful, tony covering-up won’t help when the police tear into our stories. Quit thinking about your reputation. They won’t leave you even the shreds.… Two women were murdered. They could have been murdered because you and Ryker were keeping a secret.”
Something leaped in her eyes before she controlled it: terror, surprise, fury … She put a gloved hand carefully, precisely, on the side of the door beside Miss Rachel. “What do you advise me to do?”
“I think the truth must be much more palatable than what Mr. Emerson believes,” Miss Rachel said sharply. “But it is true that the two women now lying dead in your house were killed for a reason. If we can eliminate motives, it will help.”
“I ran into Bob in Reno just as I ran into you, quite by accident,” Gail said, addressing Miss Rachel only. “We made the rounds of the clubs, had drinks together, saw the shows. I don’t see that I owe anyone an explanation of my actions.”
Miss Rachel looked Gail in the eye. “The police are going to demand an accounting for every moment of that time with Mr. Ryker. Is there anything they can get their teeth into?”
Gail looked at the ground. She seemed to huddle inside the heavy coat.
Emerson said with conviction, “There is, then. What is it? A hotel register?”
Miss Jennifer had had difficulty in following the quiz; the idea that Gail might have been behaving rather “fast” was incomprehensible to her. But when she heard the words “hotel register” she bent on Mr. Emerson her most glacial eye. “Sir, when Rachel and I
were young ladies, any man uncouth enough to address us with such insinuations would have been soundly horsewhipped by our father.”
Miss Rachel thought to herself that there had never been a time when anyone would have dared hint such things to Jennifer. Not because of Father—there had been something very battle-axey about Jennifer even as a girl. She had worn her militant respectability as a Crusader his sword.
Emerson had been flushed with anger; during the last few moments he had grown quite pale. “Gail … why don’t you answer?”
Her voice was controlled, a monotone without expression. “It wasn’t the way you think. Bob had been drinking too much. He became quite ill. He couldn’t remember the name of his hotel and it was getting terribly late. I registered for the two of us and stayed with him—about two in the morning I called a doctor for him. I was worried, too, because I thought I had caught a glimpse of Christine in the crowd.… Anyway, my reputation wasn’t worrying me then. You see, I’d just found out that you were—were married.” She threw this last at Emerson on a note of hatred. Then she walked away, very straight and erect, out of sight among the little pine trees.
Emerson sat rigid, gripping the door handle, breathing through his teeth.
Miss Rachel turned around to look at him. “I think what she’s trying to tell you—and is too proud to say—is that she was so disturbed by the fact of your marriage that she temporarily entertained ideas of throwing herself at Mr. Ryker. A sort of revenge—you’d have to be a woman to understand, I’m afraid. But your attitude towards Gail is much too brusque, Mr. Emerson. You won’t get anywhere with her that way.”
“… good horsewhipping,” Miss Jennifer finished, having been talking meanwhile to Zia.
The Cat Wears a Mask Page 15