The Cat Wears a Mask

by Dolores Hitchens

Emerson jerked open the door of the car. His face was blank, tight, as though Miss Rachel’s reprimand and Jennifer’s idea of corrective measures had both gone over his head. He strode toward the station wagon, where Grubler, Pedro, and Bob Ryker stood in a group, hefting the shovels. Emerson walked close to Ryker, took hold of the lapels of his sport jacket, flung him around to face him.

  Ryker seemed taken by surprise. He had a shovel in one hand; in the other, the small hamper, which he hadn’t as yet put back into the car. At the expression on Emerson’s face, Ryker threw up the arm holding the hamper. Emerson gripped it, tore it out of Ryker’s hands, threw it aside. “I ought to beat you to death.” His fist was quick; it caught Ryker on the jaw, a sliding blow that reddened the skin and snapped Ryker’s head to one side.

  Ryker put up his guard, said through his arms, his voice muffled, “What the devil’s got into you?”

  “Reno.” The second blow tore through Ryker’s slipshod guard and snapped his head back, almost taking him off balance.

  “Wait … Ryker backed, his eyes bewildered, rubbing his jaw.

  He seemed so helpless … Of course, Miss Jennifer reminded herself, he was probably half pickled—one of Rachel’s phrases, again—and in a way deserved what he got. When you allowed Demon Rum—vodka, her thoughts corrected—well, alcohol, to ruin you, you couldn’t expect to do very well at self-defense. Miss Jennifer realized with surprise that she had been bobbing up and down in excitement. Mr. Ryker was going to be murdered, he’d been friendly in a rapscallion sort of way- “Rachel! Can’t you do something?”

  Miss Rachel slipped from the car with a deft movement, ran for the fallen hamper. Mr. Grubler was already bending to reach for it when Miss Rachel snatched it up. Probably he had had the same idea as she had and wanted a chance to test it. Only of course—Miss Jennifer thought, in the midst of her anger and excitement—he might not have tested it by drinking so much.

  Ryker and Emerson were fighting at the fringe of the trees now. There was a lot of blood on Ryker’s face, great smears of it on Emerson’s driving fists. Miss Jennifer began to shriek. There was Mr. Ryker being beaten into a bloody pulp, being murdered under their eyes, while Rachel stood with a vodka bottle tilted to the sky, gurgling its contents, Zia sat calmly motionless, Mr. Grubler looked confused, and Gail went walking in the pine trees.

  She couldn’t quite decide, later, when the fight had begun to go the other way. Mr. Ryker was thin and long-legged, a really much lighter man than Mr. Emerson, and it seemed that Mr. Emerson’s fists would never stop making that smacking sound on Mr. Ryker’s face. Perhaps the beating had made Mr. Ryker grow sober—or perhaps he hadn’t drunk as much as they had supposed. Miss Rachel was making a sour face over the contents of the vodka bottle. At any rate, there was a short lull in the exchange of blows—Mr. Ryker hadn’t struck one as yet, merely gone through some very futile motions—and out of it, with no warning whatever, Mr. Ryker’s fist came up from nowhere and landed on Mr. Emerson’s jaw.

  It didn’t make the smacking sound … it made a noise like a hammer hitting a skull.

  Zia sat up. She said with satisfaction, “He’ll be all right now.”

  Miss Jennifer wasn’t convinced. “He’ll be killed.”

  Zia threw her a look out of the corner of her eye. “Bob did a lot of boxing in college. He’s easygoing and slow to anger, it was always just a game to him—but now I think Emerson has really gotten him started.”

  Funny, Miss Jennifer thought, that Zia disliked Mr. Emerson so much that out of all the group he was the single one she refused to call by his first name.

  Zia went on talking quietly, swiftly, as if in the grip of remembrance. “Bob was always so decent—the decentest one of us, really. Anyone could have seen that. In school, he looked after Ilene when it seemed she was going blind; he was patient with Christine, even in her most horrible moods, and he was the only one besides Gail who ever treated me as anything except a freak.” All at once she bent over, dropping her head as if in pain. Miss Jennifer was startled. Zia said, “That makes it so much worse, doesn’t it?”

  Over beside the pines Bob Ryker had quit standing flat-footed for Emerson to pop at. He was moving cagily, his fists up. While Miss Jennifer watched, another blow landed on Emerson’s square jaw and it was Emerson’s turn to stagger and shake his head.

  “Worse?” she whispered.

  “The Kachina was the murderer. Bob had to be that Kachina.”

  “I don’t see …

  Zia laid an arm across the back of the other scat, put her forehead against it wearily. “Remember what I told you about the Kachina? That even what little we knew could lead us to the truth? Well, we do know that the secret behind that mask was too much for Ilene’s control. And she had good control, almost psychopathic … And she did love Bob. Terribly.”

  It came to Miss Jennifer then—how, loving Mr. Ryker like that, Ilene would have been struck with horror to find him inside that mask … and cold sober, too.

  Chapter 17

  Ryker stood with his back to the pine trees, wiping his face with a handkerchief. Emerson sat on the other side of the clearing, on a stone, working one of his hands slowly, clenching and unclenching it as though wondering if something inside were broken.

  The fight had ended suddenly and indecisively—Emerson seemed all at once to realize that Ryker was going to give him more than he had bargained for. He had blocked a blow, turned his back, and walked off. Ryker hadn’t tried to follow. A look of amusement had come over him, briefly.

  Grubler came up to face Ryker, standing a little below on the scattered fringes of fallen pine needles. “You and Hal have been spoiling for a fight ever since you came.”

  “Longer than that,” Ryker corrected mockingly.

  “You did a lot better than I expected you to.” Grubler narrowed his eyes. “You sobered up damned quick, didn’t you?”

  “Necessity is often the mother of sobriety, among other things,” Ryker said. He walked over to where Miss Rachel stood holding the little hamper. He took the handles from her fingers gently. “Where did Gail go?”

  “I think she’d like to be alone for a bit.”

  “Yes, I guess she would.” He propped the hamper on his knee, spread the handles, lifted the lid. “I thought I might offer to make an honest woman of her, but she might think I was hurrying things a bit. Besides, I’d sort of be getting her on the rebound, wouldn’t I?” His grin was lopsided; there was a lumpy blue swelling extending from his right jaw up into his cheek. He took out one of the bottles, measured its contents with his eye. “My, my! Which one is this?”

  Miss Rachel blushed a little. “It’s the vodka.”

  “You were testing the contents,” he decided.

  “Yes—and then I felt cold and nervous, too.”

  He examined the other bottle. “You didn’t use much of the chaser.” He poured some of the clear liquid into his hand, mopped his face, dried it off with the handkerchief. “Not bad. Water has its uses.”

  “You’ve been drinking a great deal of it,” she pointed out.

  He looked at her obliquely from under the black brows. “Are you going to give me away?”

  “I’m afraid it can’t be a secret any more.”

  There was a touch of bleakness in his eyes before he remembered to grin. “It started as a gag, out of boredom, out of a queer frustrated anger over the fact that my wife was such a damned better businessman than I was. Then I found out that I could get under her skin with it. Just by carrying my little bottle of water and hiccuping now and then and chewing dried onion flakes … Did you know that married people did things like that to each other? Did you ever think that marriage could be prison, and purgatory, and the livelier tortures of the Inquisition all rolled into one?” His glance ran over her small figure. “You’re such a Dresden-china spinster—I’ll bet you think you missed something.”

  Miss Rachel said, “I have a theory that we all make our lives what they are—that, knowing or
unknowing, we don’t leave things to chance nearly as much as we think we do.” She smoothed her sprigged muslin skirt. “If I’d really wanted to be married, I suppose I’d have found someone.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Strict father?”

  “More, I think, a diffusion of effort. I always had what Jennifer called ‘a bee in the bonnet’ about doing or being something odd. At least, Jennifer thought they were odd. Like wanting to run away and join Aunt Lily’s burlesque troupe.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. Finally: “You believe, then, that I brought it all on myself.”

  “Why did you marry Christine?”

  “Do you know, believe it or not”—his eyes mocked not her but himself—“I pitied Christine from the bottom of my heart. I think she was the loneliest person I’ve ever known.”

  “You never considered that it could have been a pose?”

  His face grew blank. “No, I didn’t think that.”

  “Lonely people extract a lot of sympathy from others, force loyalty where otherwise there might be disloyalty. Frankly, your wife impressed me as being most self-sufficient and little apt to cling to or feel the need for other people.”

  The satyr’s grin faltered. “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “No. But it should have struck you that if you could fool Christine with a bottle of water and onion flakes, she could fool you with an affected emotion, a loneliness she had never felt.”

  She sensed that under the cynicism he was temporarily nonplused.

  “Did your wife catch sight of you with Gail in Reno?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did Ilene?”

  “She was such a funny kind of girl. I got a glimpse of her in one of the clubs. I was with Gail, that first evening, the one we spent together. Ilene never mentioned the incident. She must have thought there was something underhanded going on.”

  “How did Mr. Grubler know of your trip to Reno?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  Miss Jennifer had walked over from the car. “Rachel, you’re keeping Mr. Ryker from his job. The other men are already busy with the shovels, and Mr. Grubler keeps glancing over this way.”

  “Of course—and thanks for reminding me of my duty,” Ryker said, then turned obediently and went off towards the heap of earth blocking the road. He put his hamper carefully to one side, then picked up the remaining shovel.

  “I don’t think you should stand around holding private conversations with Mr. Ryker,” Jennifer said darkly. “He may be the murderer.”

  “How can I find out whether he is or not if you won’t let me talk to him?”

  “It’s a job for the police, Rachel. Come and let’s walk for a bit. I’m feeling a touch of nerves … I’d like to get my mind off what has happened. Zia said that the ruins of Fort Navajo are up above us somewhere and that there ought to be a path to it through these trees.”

  “You wouldn’t feel more afraid, wandering around in those pines?”

  Miss Jennifer glanced behind her surreptitiously. “Everyone’s accounted for except Gail. And I’m not afraid of her.”

  They skirted the fringes of the trees and did finally locate a dim trail. The pines closed in about them, making a soft green light and an aromatic air. The sounds of the shovels receded; so, apparently, did Jennifer’s worries. She hiked briskly along, looking about with interest. They came to an ancient boundary marker of some sort, a narrow tall stone cairn with a flat rock at its top, upon which were chiseled some cabalistic markings. Jennifer went all over it, expecting perhaps to find gold or something. “It’s probably just a degree of longitude. Or the edge of the reservation.” All at once she stopped to frown. “Queer how things sneak up on you.… I’ve just remembered why I thought there would be something wrong with Mr. Ryker’s car.”

  Miss Rachel waited. It was very quiet; there was no sound at all here among the trees.

  “You know, that Kachina thing, whatever or whoever it was—I saw it in the courtyard from our window and it seemed so grotesque and sort of—well, spooky—that I didn’t want to discuss it.”

  This was like Jennifer, Miss Rachel thought. If there was going to be a ghost, she’d want it dressed properly. Wearing sensible shoes, too, no doubt. “What do you think this person was doing down there?”

  “It was closing the door of Mr. Ryker’s station wagon.”

  “Which door?”

  “The one by the driver’s seat.”

  “Was it carrying a tool of any sort?”

  Miss Jennifer moved restlessly back and forth in front of the stone cairn. “I can’t recall the hands at all, nor anything being in them. Only, when I saw the station wagon stopped by the trees, the idea came over me that something might have been done to the car.”

  “Much simpler to damage the motor by lifting the hood,” Miss Rachel commented in a puzzled tone. “There wouldn’t be much you could do from the driver’s side except tear up the wiring under the dash. Then the car wouldn’t run at all, wouldn’t have even gotten this far.”

  They walked on a little way, slowly, in silence. What had seemed to be a single clump of pines from below was actually, Miss Rachel realized, a long band of trees which followed the edge of the mesa, rising from one level to another. In places they emerged into open areas at the edge of the cliff. The desert lay stretched out below, a gray-and-purple carpet with a border of fanglike little hills, the dark sky all one dense heavy cloud hanging low.

  “Perhaps there was no intention of damaging the station wagon,” Miss Rachel said finally. “The motive might have been one of search, or of retrieving something which had been hidden. The driving gloves, for instance, and that cluster of feathers … the car would have been a logical hiding place for them. The gloves belonged in the car anyway, and the feathers might have been thought to have dropped accidentally from Christine’s hat. I’m sure that it was this person, disguised as a Kachina, who carried out that gruesome business of putting the gloves on Mrs. Ryker’s body. Ilene obviously stumbled into the middle of things, became panic-stricken, and eventually had to be killed for knowing who was inside that mask.”

  “That’s what I meant about Mr. Ryker. Zia thinks he’s always been quite sober, whereas poor Miss Taggart had gone along believing him as drunk as a lord. Then, in the shock of knowing the truth, she lost control.”

  The path had climbed steeply for the last hundred feet. Now they came out of the trees to a grassy plateau. Out in the middle of the open space was a huddle of fallen buildings, adobe walls almost washed away, old shingles split and crumbling, roof beams standing up gaunt like the bleached skeletons of animals.

  Miss Jennifer said uneasily, “We haven’t seen Gail anywhere.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t come this way. She may be sitting somewhere, down among the trees.”

  “And there’s no sign that the police tried to get through this way.”

  “Let’s go and have a look at the road.”

  On the opposite side of the clearing, past what had once been a barricade or a fence, the road emerged through the trees and widened, as though picnickers had come this far, parked, turned around and gone back. There were ruts in the soil, tire marks too, though none of these looked very recent.

  Miss Jennifer was frowning over a line of footprints along the margin of the road. “Look, Rachel. I’m sure that Gail’s overshoes make this sort of mark. And these seem fresh.”

  Miss Rachel agreed. “She must have come up here after all. We’ve passed her somehow. Perhaps she’s in the fort.”

  They turned and looked back together; the bleached and silent ruin was utterly desolate under the low gray sky. From this direction it could be seen that originally there had been a square, a parade ground probably, sheltered on three sides by barracks and stables. The tallest ruin, Miss Rachel thought, a two-storied affair with a falling porch, had no doubt been the commanding officer’s residence. Loneliest of all was the flagpole, a straight empty pole with a raveling of rope still fixed t
o its tip.

  “Gives me the willies,” Miss Jennifer whispered.

  “Yes, it is depressing. I don’t like this business about Gail—it seems impossible that anyone from the cars could have followed her, or reached this spot before we did. Could we have dawdled more than I thought? Enough so that someone might have cut straight up the slope ahead of us?”

  “We did look at the desert now and then when we came to open spots.”

  “Let’s have a look at the place.”

  They returned at an angle from the way they had come, cutting across the old parade ground, full of holes dug by gophers and prairie dogs and grown tall with grasses which had died.

  The two-storied building had a big front room, still furnished with a single chair. It was a big, old-fashioned platform rocker with leather cushions. Grass seed had blown into holes in the leather and sprouted, and lay spread in yellowish streamers like untidy whiskers. The walls were peeling, the floor sagged in its middle. Miss Rachel put her head in at the doorway and said, “Gail …”

  “She wouldn’t be in there!”

  Miss Rachel experimented with a toe. “Dare I trust the floor, do you think?”

  “Rachel, if she were in there, she’d answer.”

  “Perhaps I’d better walk around to the rear and look in at the windows.” Miss Rachel went cautiously the length of the porch; the rotted timbers sagged and trembled. There seemed to be a walkway between the two houses. Loose boards had fallen from the roofs. Shreds of window glass glittered among other rubbish. Then she saw it, very distinct in the wet earth—a single footprint like the ones at the edge of the road.

  She stood, measuring angles with her eye. Someone could have stood at the rear, between the two ruined buildings, and had a clear view of the part of the road where Gail had been walking. Could have called, in fact, and been seen.

  She debated for a moment, the feeling of urgent fear crowding her. “Jennifer, I’m going to explore the back. You stay out in the open. If I need help, I’ll call. If you see anything funny, scream.”

  Jennifer stood as if rooted. “What do you mean, anything funny?”