Chiffon Scarf

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  He was breathing heavily. Averill began, “But, Major Pace—”

  He did not look at her or listen but went on rapidly and with growing vehemence:

  “I feel it. I am a man of sensibility. I don’t like the whispers, the looks, the understanding between you. I feel it here,” he said, clasping his heart. “I realize I would be a welcome scapegoat. But I did not kill her. I had no motive. And I can prove I didn’t kill her. I was in this room, there by the window, the whole time during which she was murdered. You saw me—”

  Sloane interrupted.

  “I was at the piano. My back was turned toward the window embrasure in which you sat. The windows were open; you could easily have stepped out that long window onto the porch, followed Creda Blaine when she left the lounge, waited your chance, murdered her and returned.”

  “But I—” Pace was trembling and purple. “But I tell you I didn’t! I would have been seen. Besides there is the other window—over there—” His short thick hand pointed jerkily toward the end of the room. “Someone else sat there. Someone else could have gone without your seeing it, as you said I did. You can’t prove I killed her because I didn’t do it! I demand that you retract—”

  Dorothy Woolen interrupted heavily but with inexpressible conviction: “Mr. Carreaux sat there before the other window. And neither Mr. Carreaux nor Major Pace left the room while you were at the piano, Mr. Sloane. I sat in a chair facing that end of the room. I would have seen either man leave the room.”

  Noel looked embarrassed.

  “I—well, thanks, Dorothy,” he said. His face brightened. “Now if somebody would explain my revolver—” he said.

  Major Pace gave Dorothy a beaming look of gratitude and a sweeping bow.

  “You see, Mr. Detective,” he said. “There is my alibi. Perfect. Thank you, Miss Woolen.”

  It was oddly exasperating and seemed, that time, to have a kind of official weight. Pace obviously considered himself cleared of any ghost of suspicion; his wrath was gone; he was beaming and smiling and gracious.

  No one spoke. And Pace bowed to Dorothy again and said to Sloane: “Whether you acknowledge it or not, you have no shadow of evidence against me. I dare you to find such evidence. I—I defy you, Mr. P. H. Sloane,” concluded Pace in a grand burst of swagger, turned with a sweeping gesture and walked out of the room. It was a curious gesture which suggested the sweep of a cloak. And as he walked away his right hand rested on his hip as if he expected to find a sword. Or a dagger, thought Eden, for there was certainly a hint of medievalism about the man, and about his public somewhat theatrical defiance.

  Sloane looked at his watch and said as if dismissing Pace entirely: “I have very little information about you, Strevsky, and very little about the steward.” Strevsky started at the mention of his name and came forward a step or two, wearily. “I had a talk with Wilson,” continued Sloane briefly. “Last night. About two o’clock, I think. He said, and I believed him then, that he knew nothing whatever about the murder. That he had seen Creda Blaine leave her cabin yesterday afternoon for a long walk; she went alone and some time later he saw her return, still alone. When I questioned him he admitted that he had thought she looked frightened but he wasn’t sure. That was all. Miss Blaine, is there any possibility of this missing steward having known Creda Blaine well at any time?”

  “No. No, certainly not. I never saw him before—to my knowledge.” She leaned forward, one hand still twisting the green necklace. “Why did he run away?”

  “I don’t know. But he’ll be found. He must have food and he must have water.”

  “But—perhaps he, too—” began Averill; a faint gray shadow seemed to creep from her dress to her cheeks and she stopped. But Sloane shook his head.

  “He is probably merely frightened. Some minor peccadillo in his own life, perhaps, and he dreads police investigation.

  We’ll soon know. Now then, Strevsky. You are not a naturalized citizen?”

  “Well, and if I’m not,” said Strevsky insolently.

  “You were born in—”

  “England.”

  “This report says Ragusa.”

  “All right, Ragusa, then. Or Athens. Or Petrograd. Anything you like.”

  “True cosmopolite,” said Sloane but not unpleasantly. “Look here, Strevsky. Nobody’s going to accuse you of something you didn’t do. You can drop that extremely belligerent manner and tell me the truth.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know where I was born. I don’t know who my father was. I remember my mother. She worked and slaved and worried, and drank sometimes to forget the worry. She saw to it that Michael and I had food in our stomachs and shoes on our feet. And she died a year after Michael and I got jobs and could take care of her. There was just Michael and me.” The sullen look of defiance changed to something threatening, suggesting barely restrained violence. “Michael and me,” he repeated. “And Michael was murdered. Like that silly, fat women was murdered. Like big Blaine was murdered and he was as good a boss as man ever had.” His great, strong hands were working nervously, his slanted eyes were two gleaming slits. “The woman wasn’t important. Michael—” He stopped there as if his throat had closed on the word and then said with the queerest effect of simple determination: “If I could get my hands on the throat of whoever murdered him I’d strangle him. Like that.” His hands gave a kind of twist, a shadowy gesture which was nevertheless unpleasantly realistic.

  Sloane said rather dryly: “Well, you needn’t go that far, Strevsky. At least I trust that if your brother really was murdered—”

  “He was murdered.”

  “—that the law will relieve you of any—duties in that respect. Can you tell me anything of Wilson, Strevsky?”

  “No,” said Strevsky. “I can’t.”

  “Thank you.” Sloane glanced at his watch again, took the papers on the table carefully in his hand and said: “By the way, there’s a detail of which the St. Louis police informed me. They say that your house, Miss Blaine, was entered the night you left. Entered and thoroughly ransacked. The police were notified by the servants the next morning but so far have been unable to put their hands on the intruder, whoever it was. Nothing was taken. Did you know that, Miss Blaine?”

  “How could I know?” cried Averill. “Who—are they sure nothing was taken?”

  “So your servants told the police,” said Sloane and started toward the door.

  And Eden thought swiftly: I must see him; I must tell him—alone—about the sealing wax. About Creda and Pace. About my fingerprints on the revolver. About the letter.

  And as swiftly she questioned her impulse; the few things she knew or had casually observed might be significant only in her own mind. And it would be so terribly easy—as with Creda’s interrupted note to Jim—to do more harm than good. To tell Sloane of the letter would only prove that Creda. had written it; that she had actually been writing it, probably, when she was killed. The wave of perplexity caught and held her. Almost certainly, however, she would have gone eventually to Sloane with her story (such as it was) of her own will. But as it happened she was soon to be summoned to Sloane’s study for what proved to be a really official inquiry.

  For five minutes after Sloane walked out of the lounge, leaving a shaken and rather stunned audience behind him, the sheriff and several of his deputies arrived. Clattered up to the front door in an old but extremely powerful automobile and came in—all of them weary, all of them haggard, all of them hurried.

  And they remained.

  It was noon when they arrived. It was perhaps midafternoon when (after a long conference between the sheriff and Sloane, while the other three men joined the cowboys in their, thus far, fruitless search for Roy Wilson) the inquiry began again.

  She was not the first person to be called into the study. And no one was sent for until after the sheriff and Sloane had made a long, slow detour of the cabin in which Creda Blaine died and had spent some time inside the cabin itself. And had f
ollowed this tour (which was witnessed rather uneasily by the little cluster of those waiting on the porch) by another long conference again in Sloane’s study.

  It was not pleasant, waiting while Sloane, apparently, acquainted the sheriff with every detail of which he had possessed himself.

  Dorothy Woolen perhaps was the only calm and unmoved one among them; she got out a great piece of cross-stitch embroidery and worked on it, slowly, painstakingly all that afternoon. Her blonde head and pale face was bent constantly over the fine stitches she took; yet Eden was curiously certain that her mind went right on recording, and her eyes—somehow—seeing every look and gesture and motion on the part of the rest of them.

  But there was nothing to do but wait. They smoked a great deal and talked very little and watched the changing light on the distant rim of mountains. Averill wrote a note or two, seated at the long table in the lounge. Later she and Jim walked out along the path, walked slowly, talking in low voices. Eden watched them go, Averill’s sleek black head so near Jim’s shoulder, her slender figure graceful in every demure, gentle movement under the sleekly fitting gray linen.

  Eden watched and tried not to watch. They reached the cluster of pines and walked on and at last turned onto the road leading to the mile-distant gate and disappeared in the dip of the arroyo. She was not conscious of her face betraying anything of her thoughts until Noel, lounging on the porch railing near her, said in an odd voice: “Eden.”

  She turned with a quick movement, reminded only then of his presence. He was sitting on the broad railing, his knees drawn up and his arms around them, looking very boyish in spite of the touch of gray at his temples and the fine lines around his blue eyes.

  “Noel! I’d forgotten you were there.”

  “So I thought,” said Noel gently. “Eden dear, may I say something?”

  “Of course, Noel.”

  He dropped the end of his cigarette over the porch railing, glanced toward the blue shadow of the arroyo where Averill and Jim, walking so slowly, talking so intimately, had disappeared, and then looked at Eden. Dorothy was at the other end of the porch, some distance from them, her blonde head still bent over her embroidery; Pace and Strevsky were not in sight. Noel said in a low voice so Dorothy could not hear:

  “Eden, my dear—you are not just a little taken with Jim, are you?”

  Eden tried to reply evasively.

  “What a question! Jim is to marry Averill.”

  “That’s it,” said Noel earnestly, blue eyes still watching her anxiously. “It would be no good, you know—I mean, you’d just be letting yourself in for trouble. Averill would never give him up, especially to you. Averill,” said Noel simply, “can hate longer and better and—and meaner than anybody I know.”

  “I know,” said Eden slowly. “Let’s not talk, Noel. I keep thinking of Creda. What do you suppose will be the end of this?”

  “God knows,” said Noel, sighing.

  Brilliant sunshine poured down from a bright sky; the shadows under the pines and under the great cottonwoods were blue as the haze over the mountains. Through the cluster of pines at the south end of the porch Eden caught a glimpse of the cabin where Creda had died—quietly, because she was unable to scream for help, bound in that bloodstained chiffon scarf.

  Again, as she had done already many times, Eden searched her mind and memory about the scarf, her own scarf, once clean and delicate and softly scented. Now an ugly thing, sinister, a silent witness reposing, had she but known it, on a shelf in Sloane’s study along with a revolver and a note. Touched once, exploringly, by the sheriff’s thick fingers. Speculated upon endlessly.

  Somewhere under that brilliant, hot sun the little steward took his secret way; all that day they searched for him. Little Roy Wilson with his childish mouth and his curly blond hair. And they searched, too, because Chango insisted upon it, for a hatchet. A newly sharpened hatchet, he told them; with a notch on it to show it belonged in the lean-to storeroom where he kept stove wood.

  After a long time Averill and Jim, still strolling, still talking quietly with an appearance of the utmost mutual understanding, returned. Jim saw the three on the veranda, glanced once at Eden and went directly into the house and did not return. She had no chance to warn him of the note Creda had written, even if she hadn’t persuaded herself, by that time, that she had been mistaken; that the crumpled paper Chango had given Sloane had not been, after all, the curious letter Creda had inexplicably begun to write, and had failed, not so inexplicably, to finish. And for that letter Jim must have an explanation. There could have been, in spite of the suggestion in Creda’s letter, no league, no understanding between Jim and Creda.

  She told herself that and believed it. Aside from everything she knew or thought she knew of Jim, the fact remained that he couldn’t have been in a conspiracy with Creda to wreck the engine he had made and, in the process, to murder two men.

  Time went on. The shadows of the cottonwoods grew slowly longer and pointed toward the east and the rim of eastern mountains began to take on a shimmering crimson glow as the sun sank lower. Once Chango came to summon Averill to Sloane’s study and later (a long time later, it seemed to Eden) Noel was sent for. He returned, looking extremely tired and curiously disheveled, as if he had been rubbing his hands through his hair and worrying his tie.

  “God,” he said explosively. “Well, that’s over! If there’s anything Sloane and this sheriff don’t know about me, then I don’t know it myself.” He lighted a cigarette with unsteady hands, took a long puff of smoke and sat down disconsolately on the railing. “I wish to God I knew how my revolver got there. Do you know what I’d like to do, Eden?”

  “What?”

  “Take that plane that’s waiting out there and fly away—away to the ends of the earth. Anywhere away from here.”

  “You can’t,” said Eden practically. “The fuel line is cut.”

  “I know,” said Noel and smoked and brooded.

  “But I’d take you with me if you wanted to go,” he said at last with a flash of his normal, charming smile.

  “I wouldn’t be permitted to leave,” said Eden somberly. “I’m almost the First Suspect. If Pace is out of the running.”

  “Don’t joke like that.”

  “I wish it were a joke.”

  “Miss Shore, please,” said Chango’s voice at her elbow. She turned with a jerk, knowing what was coming.

  “Mr. Sloane wants you, please. This way.”

  Noel got up, too, and laid his arm lightly around her shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Buck up, my child,” he said. “They can’t eat you. We’ve all got it to go through.”

  She tried to smile and followed Chango.

  Sloane was waiting, and the sheriff. Chango ushered her into the small room, offered her a chair facing the two men and withdrew, closing the door behind him. Sunlight poured through the west windows and lay hot and clear upon the worn brown rug and the shelves and glinted against a microscope on top of the shabby, roll-top desk. Sloane who had risen when she entered resumed his seat before the desk, tilting back in the swivel chair. The sheriff, a big, well-fleshed man with a tired face and pouched eyes, gave her a scrutinizing look and took out his handkerchief and wiped his glistening forehead and bald head.

  Sloane said: “Miss Shore, I want you to tell us the whole story of last night over again. This is Sheriff Utley and I want him to hear it from your own lips. Slowly, if you please, and in detail. But first, I want you to look at this.”

  “This” was a once crumpled, now flattened piece of paper with words written on it in a large, careless handwriting.

  It was the note Creda had written; the note that had been removed from Eden’s own pocket. Yet—yet it wasn’t that either! For there was more, much more, written upon it than the line or two she remembered with such clarity.

  She looked at it incredulously and caught her breath in a sharp little gasp. Both men noted that and she realized it. Sloane said:

  “I’m to
ld by Averill Blaine, and by Noel Carreaux, and by Jim, that that is in Creda Blaine’s handwriting. Have you seen it before?”

  “Yes,” said Eden and instantly cried: “No—no. This isn’t right.”

  “Read it,” said the sheriff suddenly.

  She gave him a startled look; surely they knew it by heart. But she read, faltering a little in spite of herself.

  “Dear Jim. Cold-blooded murder is too much. I won’t do any more, I can’t. Jim—you must believe me—and let me go. I give up my share of the money willingly to you. I promise you not to tell no matter what—”

  It stopped there—trailed away in a line of ink that had not been there the night before. Eden cried sharply:

  “But it’s not right. It wasn’t like that. It’s all wrong.”

  “So you’ve seen this before?” The sheriff leaned heavily forward. “Your fingerprints are on the revolver, Miss Shore. You found the woman dead. Your scarf choked the life out of her. Now then, why did you do it?”

  “But I didn’t,” cried Eden, in a high, unsteady voice. “I didn’t!” She turned toward Sloane with her hands thrust out beseechingly. “You must know I didn’t do it! I had no motive. And Jim—this note isn’t right. He couldn’t have been what Creda says—he—why, he’s your friend! You know him.”

  A look in the detective’s eyes stopped her. It was a cold, strange look which removed him definitely and finally from a world where friendship counted and appeal had power. He said, although that icy look made it unnecessary:

  “Friendship has nothing to do with this, Miss Shore. Please remember that, and Jim himself offers no explanation.”

  Chapter 18

  EDEN THOUGHT RATHER DESPERATELY: I must pull myself together; I must arrange what I have to say and I must make my statements clear and simple so they will believe me.

  She leaned forward a little, speaking earnestly. “But I found that letter last night; in the cabin where I found Creda. I—took it and slipped it in the pocket of my white coat. Sometime last night it was taken from there; I don’t know who did it. But it was not like this when I found it. The middle part is the same. But words have been added to it.”