The chuckling fingers Read online

  “Other people may think they’d like to live their lives over, but not me—not if this last week is going to be in it. Out of what has just happened at the Fingers both Jacqueline and I got something worth keeping, but Heaven defend me from ever again having to stand helplessly by while it becomes more and more apparent to almost everyone but me that the person I love most in the world is murderously insane… .

  “I never again want to know the panic of being up against evil coming out of a mind so much more skillful than mine that even the signs we did see—the acid in a bride’s toilet kit, the burned matchsticks under a bed, the word scrawled with a child’s blue chalk on a rock—all just bogged us deeper in terror and despair….”

  MABEL SEELEY

  THE CHUCKLING FINGERS

  Copyright © 1941 by Mabel Seeley

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This One

  For Janice

  To the eternal glory of Minnesota there is such a place as the North Shore. Otherwise this story is entirely fictitious; there is no such estate as Fiddler’s Fingers, and the people I put there, the events 1 have happen there, are entirely imaginary.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Dramatis Personae

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  About Mabel Seeley

  Bibliography

  SETTING

  Fiddler’s Fingers, a remote and pine-grown private estate on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Ann Gay, stenographer in an insurance office, twenty-six. If trouble was a lake she’d dive into it head first.

  Jacqueline Heaton, Ann’s lovely cousin, whose second marriage precipitates crime.

  Toby Sallishaw, not-yet-three, Jacqueline’s daughter by her first marriage to Pat Sallishaw.

  Bill Heaton, lumberman, Jacqueline’s new husband, whose Heaton inheritance includes the Heaton luck.

  Fred Heaton, Bill’s brash nineteen-year-old son by his first marriage.

  Myra Heaton Sallishaw, Bill Heaton’s cousin, and mother of Jacqueline’s first husband, Pat Sallishaw.

  Phillips Heaton, who believes the world owes a Heaton a very good living. Myra’s brother.

  Octavia Heaton, so often unseen and unheard, younger sister of Myra and Phillips.

  Jean Nobbelin, Bill’s business partner, French Canadian.

  Mark Ellif, just out of college, engineer of one of the Heaton-Nobbelin pulpwood freighters.

  Bradley Auden, old friend of the Heatons, and owner of an estate east of Fiddler’s Fingers.

  Carol Auden, Bradley’s impulsive eighteen-year-old daughter. Her hair is red.

  Cecile Granat, man’s girl, but also something else.

  Ed Corvo, owner of the resort west of Fiddler’s Fingers.

  Ella Corvo, Ed’s wife.

  Lottie Elvesaetter, Ella’s sister, occasional maid at the Fingers.

  Dr Rush, physician and coroner, who has work on his hands.

  Paavo Aakonen, tenacious sheriff of Cook County.

  CHAPTER ONE

  OTHER PEOPLE may think they’d like to live their lives over, but not me—not if this last week is going to be in it. Out of what has just happened at the Fingers both Jacqueline and I got something worth keeping, but heaven defend me from ever again having to stand helplessly by while it becomes more and more apparent to almost everyone but me that the person I love most in the world is murderously insane. Heaven forbid that I ever again see a car moving like Frankenstein, of its own power and volition, carrying a secret burden into a lake, or that I ever again grasp an arm and feel that rigid marble chill or that I ever again have to look on while a blood-drenched shirt is ripped away from the terrible red hole a bullet makes in living flesh.

  I never again want to know the panic of being up against evil coming out of a mind so much more skillful than mine that even the signs we did see—the acid in a bride’s toilet kit, the burned matchsticks under a bed, the word scrawled with a child’s blue chalk on rock—all just bogged us deeper in error and despair. I never again want to have a flying figure come hurtling at me from an unlit staircase or wake in the morning to find my bathrobe slashed or stand endless hours facing a door, fighting a vicarious fight. Any time in my life is going to be too soon for me to want to feel again that I’m a member of a looming last-man’s club, with death walking hooded in the night, relentless and remorseless and successful.

  Someone, I suppose—some Heaton—will live on at Fiddler’s Fingers. But it’ll be all right with me to be away from that particular slash of water, that particular brush of wind, that near inhuman chuckle that came to sound like laughter at all law and right and civilization.

  * * *

  The funny thing is that even on the day I rushed up to the North Shore from Minneapolis I was expecting trouble. Not the kind of trouble I got—just nice, ordinary trouble I could smooth over in a wind. Smoothing over my beloved cousin Jacqueline’s troubles isn’t entirely new in my life; we’d lived together since she was four and I seven. This second marriage of hers to Bill Heaton was bound, I thought, to take adjustments, considering that she had a daughter of two and he had a son at the university. Undercurrents of restraint had run through Jacqueline’s recent letters, and then there ‘d been that out-of-the-blue note from Jean Nobbelin which had catapulted me in to ask my boss for a week’s vacation. Two days after I got Jean’s note—eleven-fifteen on the morning of the Fourth of July, to be exact—I was clinging to the guardrail of the North Shore bus as it slowed for its Grand Marais stop. My neck cricked so I could peer through a window, my feet ready to get me through the door the moment it opened. One glance at Jacqueline, I thought, would tell me what was wrong and how much.

  That girl on the bus seems awfully simple and unsuspecting to me now.

  Just before the bus jolted still I had an instant’s glimpse— against a backdrop of sun-dazzled white cement, filling station and blue lake—of what looked like a completely normal family group: Jacqueline in the fuzzy blue sweater and white slacks I’d given her for her Bermuda honeymoon, Bill all white flannels and almost terra-cotta skin and, down below, holding Jacqueline’s hand, the pink, small, bouncing mite that was Toby.

  Then the bus door folded open, and there was nothing between us but a pushing fat woman with suitcases. In an instant I had Jacqueline’s shoulders in my hands.

  That was when dismay slid all the way down my interior like a liquid silver fish.

  Over Jacqueline, like a fever, was what looked like shivering expectation—no, worse than that, fright. Her eyes were full of it, eyes so lovely you couldn’t usually see anything except their loveliness, brown flecked against a green as dark as pine needles.

  She laughed; she hugged me; she cried lightly, “Ann! We’re so delighted! Your wire surprised us so!”

  She didn’t mean it.

  I said stupidly, “What’s wrong?” Through all
the insecurity of our childhood we’d been almost one person; even that brief and tragic first marriage of hers to Pat Sallishaw hadn’t separated us. But she was shut off from me now; she moved out of my hands, her eyes avoiding me.

  “Wrong?” she repeated as if the word had no meaning. “But nothing’s wrong, darling. Here’s Bill and Toby… .”

  Her head with its free-blowing dark hair was thrown stiffly back. I stood caught in so much bewilderment that for an instant I didn’t see or hear anything—foretaste of a state that was to become all too familiar.

  Then there was a grab at my knees, and I had to tune in Toby, her hands pulling at my skirt, her small pink face impatient and demanding.

  “Me! Me! I here!”

  I bent to scoop her up.

  Usually Toby can grab my attention and keep it—Toby, who’s not yet three and who has funny, wispy, colorless hair sticking out in all directions like tangled petals on an aster,

  Toby, whose eyes are like Jacqueline’s, and who has the promise of Jacqueline’s exquisite, full, bursting mouth. Toby, who’s almost all that’s left now of those five months when Jacqueline was Pat Sallishaw’s wife.

  The small arms gave me one immense return squeeze before the independent back inside the pink corduroy coveralls stiffened.

  “I get down now,” Toby decided, and slid.

  A long brown hand slid in over her head as I looked up to the grin on Bill Heaton’s warmly hued, imperious face.

  “My turn.” He shook my hand hard, the grin intensifying. “Ever thought about going in for pole vaults, Ann? You stepped clean over one fat woman and three suitcases, getting out of that bus. I’ll bet I could get you in the next Olympics.”

  I babbled something.

  Sunlight was blazing back from the white concrete of the filling-station driveway on which he stood; some of that light seemed to come from his easy, commanding strength. I suppose every woman thinks there must be a man like Bill Heaton somewhere if she could only find him. But when I looked closely at the face that was all smooth, brown-red planes meeting at the bold ridges of his brow and nose and chin I saw what was hidden under his jocularity. The corners of his wide, generous mouth were tight, and his eyes—darker and warmer brown than his skin—had been looking at shock.

  Suddenly instead of seeing them as they were now I saw them turning from the flower-banked altar in the living room of Myra’s Duluth house on the tenth of May to face the people who had come to see them married. They’d stood caught up in a kind of shining, supreme content.

  Eight short weeks to make this change.

  * * *

  As we drove eastward the twelve miles from Grand Marais to Fiddler’s Fingers they made an effort to seem normal and casual, but I just felt more and more strongly that something strange was wrong. We sat all of us abreast in the one capacious seat of Bill’s low old topless car, Bill driving, Toby’s head bobbing at my elbow, Jacqueline at my right, staring almost silently straight ahead. With an impatient movement of his wide shoulders against the gray kid of the seat back. Bill began talking about the thousands of acres of cutover woodland he owned near Little Marais and near Hovland, about the crews he kept continually cutting the softwood as it reached the right size and the other crews who replanted. He bought wood from other pulp farmers, too, and what he could get from the government out of Superior National Forest; it was all dumped in Grand Marais Harbor to be loaded on his freighters, to go to Fort William and Duluth and Detroit, to become paper, matchsticks, laths, fence pickets.

  I’d known he was a lumberman; I didn’t listen very hard. All my antennae hunted for the sources of disturbance. The countryside through which we passed drew little of my attention until after fifteen minutes of riding the car swung to the left, through the open wrought-iron gate of a tall spiked iron fence.

  Jacqueline roused to speak almost the only words she’d said since we left Grand Marais.

  “This is the entrance to Fiddler’s Fingers.”

  Near the gate round-boled white birches grew in rings; after that the car entered a grove of Norway pines so densely set that dusk seemed to close in. No green along the earth there— only the light brown of old pine needles halfway toward being resolved into earth again, dappled in moving patterns of light and shade. The pine stems swayed like huge black reeds, extending twenty and thirty feet upward before the branches were needled, in whorls like round green eyes against the thin blue sky.

  My nose filled with the warm sun-heated pine smell that’s as pungent as spice. When the car slowed to take the hairpin curves I heard for the first time over the hum of the motor the wilderness sound that was to be woven through all that happened—the rushing clash of pine tops, the wind’s rustle and swirl among pine needles, the crash of water against rock. The sound seemed in layers—overhead the roaring rush, down below an intense quiet, as if something in the forest listened for the sly, secret pouncing by which most of its denizens died so that others might live, listened for what might be a twig snapping under the paw of death, blood hungry and near.

  Instinctively I reached across Toby for Bill’s coat sleeve.

  He grinned at me briefly. “See a bear?”

  I answered idiotically, “I’d rather see than be one.”

  “Ann likes me.” He patted my knee.

  Jacqueline turned toward me, and for an instant there was contact; we’d long ago had a commune of perceptions—was my thought in her mind too? But she turned away quickly; I couldn’t tell. The car was swinging now toward the opening beyond a last rank of trees; with a suddenness of a picture whose covering has been ripped away, the Fingers and the lake were right in front of us.

  * * *

  I’ll never forget my first sight and my first feelings about Fiddler’s Fingers.

  A clearing on the shore, with the restless silver-peaked blue lake filling the foreground, thick forest filling the background, with the huge square brown log house to the west and those dark rocks to the east. Those rocks—the five tall, jagged pinnacles from which the place got its name—dominated that first sight; they stood a little distance from the drive, crooked, looming, entirely too much like the grasping fingers of a gigantic hand.

  I’d heard the legend from Myra—one of the Paul Bunyan yarns about a girl named Lily Lou whom Paul had favored. When Paul had gone on his long trips East and West Lily Lou had found company elsewhere, so flagrantly that Paul at last had heard. He’d come back to find the girl at a lakeshore dance, waltzing in the arms of one of his own henchmen while his own favorite fiddler scraped out the tune.

  What Paul had done was to beckon the fiddler to play on; he’d grabbed the girl from her partner and danced with her in a tempo quickening like storm, waltzed until the eyes of the watchers swam and the fiddler reached his breaking point. At the crest of music Paul had flung the girl, not even glancing to see who caught her. The fiddler, chuckling, had died in his last effort, falling, soaking into the earth like one of his own tunes. Only his right hand had stayed aboveground, the fingers reaching for the bow.

  “Yaffs!” Toby pushed me, anxious to show of the marvels of the place, as soon as Bill stopped the car.

  I’d heard that part of the legend, too, but somehow as I stood beside those rocks I didn’t feel prepared for what I heard—the large, satisfied, silky gurgle that seemed to come from beneath the stones.

  Bill, amused, said, “No need to look so startled, Ann. That’s just an underground river bouncing around in its rocky caverns. It’s not really Paul Bunyan’s fiddler.”

  But what was making me look startled wasn’t just the sight and sound of the Fingers—it was a feeling I had, a feeling of the wilderness, of which I seemed to be standing at the core; a feeling of being awed and exalted, because that wilderness was so beautiful, so mighty, so aloof. When I turned the lake was before me; this was Superior, the largest fresh-water sea of the world; this steel-blue water that lashed itself white against the harsh and rocky rim was water so old that it had brimmed lost g
lacial and preglacial lakes.

  Much more clearly than in the car I heard the forest roar, the forest that began here along the lake and that I knew stretched from the head of the lakes at Duluth eastward and northward through all the great, lost, undiscovered reaches of the Laurentian Shield. This was the heart of what had once been an entire boisterous wild continent, primeval, bold, tumultuous and dangerous. Wild animals were at home here; I could feel that only strong people ought to live here; weak people, living here, might come to have in their eyes the light, steady stare of the wolf.

  This wilderness could rouse basic desires to be, to get, to do

  Perhaps in what was to happen the wilderness was more important than anything else.

  * * *

  I managed to shake off some of that first overwhelming impression of the wilderness and its power, but through all that followed I was never quite to lose it. The house toward which we turned after a few moments was a huge square barrack of pine logs peeled and varnished until they shone like honey. Inset at the east side was one porch and across the entire front, facing the lake, was another. A terraced bank of flowers divided the lawn from the drive.

  “That low building in back is the barn. Myra keeps cars in it now.” Jacqueline pointed out two smaller buildings. “That other one west on the shore—there, half hidden by trees— that’s the boathouse.”

  Toby had started on a run for the house.

  “Gramma! Where is you?” she called as she went, and disappeared inside the front porch. When we reached there she was jumping up and down announcing loudly, “I go bafroom!”

  Myra, rising, was hastily dropping her needle point in a chair and stooping to undo buttons with a practiced hand. She gave the exposed rear a small spank and came forward smiling as Toby sclittled into the house.