The Cat Wears a Mask Page 7

  Thunder rolled from far off on the horizon. The sky was almost black, and under it Christine’s hair shone with a brassy glitter and her dress was a scarlet patch. She lifted her head and saw them—dimly, perhaps—Bob Ryker frozen in that motion of calling, Miss Rachel coming towards her quickly.

  She spoke jerkily. “That damned cat—wait’ll I work it over with this—this—” Her prominent blue eyes grew very wide. A spasm ran over her. The ax handle dropped from her grip to rattle on the paving. She gave a perplexed headshake and at the same moment her hands moved across in front of her eyes as if wiping away a web. She took a single tottering step forward and collapsed.

  They carried her to the wicker scat. Dave Grubler was on hand now, firm and sure, knowing what to do. He jerked down the filmy stocking, took a handkerchief from his pocket, knotted it just below Christine’s knee. Using a fountain pen as a lever, he began to twist the loop of cloth tight. His voice was calm. “Got a knife on you, Bob?”

  Bob Ryker was standing helplessly at Christine’s head. “There isn’t any use going on with it, Dave—she had a bad heart.” His ragged breath filled the moment of silence. “The first touch of poison did for her, finished her.” He put up a hand to cover his eyes.

  Dave took his own knife from his pocket. He looked at Miss Rachel, who was kneeling, her finger tips on Christine’s wrist. “Any pulse?”

  “I can’t find any. It doesn’t have to mean she’s dead.”

  He pressed his thumbnail to the knife’s handle; the blade opened with a snap. Miss Rachel turned her head. Bob Ryker said, “Oh, good God,” through his hands and from somewhere behind them Florencia whimpered something in Spanish.

  There was swift, careful movement on Grubler’s part, then a time of utter stillness, of waiting, that seemed endless. The knife snapped shut. Grubler said wearily, “She’s dead. There isn’t any bleeding.”

  Florencia began to pray. Miss Rachel raised herself, looked about. The dull light gave the scene the quality of nightmare. Grubler’s white hair shone as he bent above Christine’s body, removing the useless tourniquet. Florencia knelt under one of the arches, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands clutched under her bosom in supplication. The others—Miss Jennifer, Gail, Ilene, Hal Emerson, Zia—stood at the corner of the gallery like a group done in stone. Shadows were thick, faces stood out starkly white, and as obbligato to Florencia’s broken prayers there was the hiss of rain, the far-off mutter of thunder in the sky.

  Gail came forward as though she saw that the responsibility of managing the situation was unavoidably hers. “I think we should move her, until the time the police can get here. The rain will slash in under the arches if the storm grows any worse.” She looked at Bob as if for his permission.

  Bob just looked stunned. Grubler sighed and asked, “In her room?”

  “You can’t go in there until that snake’s taken out,” Miss Rachel told him.

  “Oh—so that’s where—” Grubler stopped, looked curi

  ously at the others. “Then it wasn’t a stray she ran into on the grounds somewhere.”

  “No,” said Miss Rachel. “It wasn’t a stray.”

  All sounds died in that moment of oppressive quiet.

  Gail broke the silence. “There is a small empty room—I used to store furnishings in it while I was building here.” She motioned towards the angle where the wall enclosing the garden joined the house.

  Bob Ryker spoke jerkily. “You can’t just dump her into an empty room—on the floor.”

  “No, Bob. There is a cot there. I’d thought that if we had too many guests for the number of bedrooms, I’d sleep there. It’s clean and it’s … away from everything.”

  He looked at her sullenly. “I know what you’re all thinking. That I lived off Christine’s money and stayed drunk and ran around, and that any show of deep grief will be decidedly funny.”

  Gail shook her head. “Don’t talk now. Please.”

  “I still say you’re not going to put her off into a shed somewhere like a dead animal.”

  “All right, Bob. We’ll leave her here.”

  “She isn’t even cold yet.”

  Gail looked at him, defeat in her gray eyes. Perhaps she sensed that he had to get it out of his system—the self-accusation, the things the others might think but wouldn’t say.

  Grubler shrugged, spoke to Gail as he walked away. “I’ll see what I can do about raising the law.”

  She nodded. “You know where the phone is.”

  Rain blew in at them on a sudden burst of wind. Bob Ryker stood and stared at his wife, at the big drops that had spotted the red linen suit, the broken ones glittering in her hair.

  “You’re right, Gail. We’ll move her. Lead the way.”

  Set into the angle of the adobe wall was a small square room—Miss Rachel glimpsed the interior, the neat white walls, the cot in the middle of the floor, as Gail threw open the door. Bob Ryker went in, carrying Christine’s body. He shut the door after him, and didn’t come out.

  In the hall, Zia came quietly to stand beside Miss Rachel. Her voice held no excitement, no nervousness, only a fatalistic acceptance of what was. “Why didn’t she try to treat herself?”

  “She thought the cat had clawed her. She came down for the ax, to destroy the cat, and the delay, the rage, and the sudden exercise all contributed to her death.”

  The wide black eyes were cool, expressionless. “Her manner of dying is strange, coming as it does immediately after the Snake Dance in our village. But the fact of her dying was not strange—she seemed so full of anger and malice towards everyone. Just on the ride home, seeing her for that short time, I sensed this.”

  “There was a sort of frustration too,” Miss Rachel recalled. “As if what she had done in revenge hadn’t satisfied her.”

  Zia studied her obliquely. “You mean she sent the Kachina letters?”

  “We may find the proof among her things.”

  Pedro came through the hall, carrying a hoe in one hand, a short-handled hatchet in the other. There was sweat on his dark face, uneasiness in his eyes. Gail followed, and Miss Rachel put out a hand to stop her. “Ask Pedro if possible not to kill the snake. It would be better if it could be caught, kept alive for the police to examine.”

  Gail stared at her uncomprehendingly.

  Miss Rachel went on: “I noticed today at the ceremony that the snakes seemed rather lethargic. We should observe this one, see how it acts.”

  Zia’s eyes were curious. “You think this could have been one of ours?” She seemed to think for a moment, then went on quickly: “For a week the snakes in the kiva have been handled by the priests in a series of ceremonies. Much of their venom must have been drawn off. I think if this had been one of those it should have been trying to crawl off into the dark to sleep.”

  “That’s what it seemed to be trying to do, under the bed. Mr. Ryker said something about his wife’s having a weak heart. In such case even a small amount of venom—”

  From the gallery came a scream. Gail ran up the steps, Zia and Miss Rachel on her heels. Ilene was already there, crouched as if terrified against the railing above the garden. The door of Christine’s room was slightly open. Inside the room Pedro shouted something in a hoarse voice. Ilene shrieked again, “Don’t let it out! Kill it! Kill it!”

  Perhaps Pedro thought it was Gail who screamed. Perhaps his reaction was the automatic one of self-preservation. There was a heavy chopping noise inside the room, then a scaly threshing, then a sound as if something like a whip repeatedly striking the wall. Ilene covered her face; her hands looked big and ungraceful, the wrists bony in their narrow cuffs. Gail whispered in a tight, dry voice, “This is nightmare, isn’t it?”

  Pedro appeared at the door. There was a gray line around his mouth and his lips were set in a harsh line to hide his fright and loathing. “The snake is dead, though it will move for a while. It cannot bite anyone.” He leaned the hoc against the wall, took out a red bandanna, and wiped his hands c
arefully. “May I have the skin, señorita? This old one, he is a big culebra and marked with many diamonds.”

  “It is for the police to dispose of … probably they will let you have the skin when they are through,” Gail told him.

  He seemed satisfied. “Gracias. You will ask them?”

  “Yes, I’ll ask them.”

  “Someone should be here to watch the door,” Miss Rachel pointed out.

  “I will watch, señora.”

  Thunder rolled, far away on the black horizon.

  “I guess that’s all we can do,” Gail said, looking from one to another. “We may as well go down and wait for the sheriff.”

  Florencia had laid a fire on the broad brick hearth, mesquite roots which popped and snapped, throwing phantom shapes across the furniture. The row of Kachina dolls on their shelf had dancing shadows behind them. Window draperies moved on the gusty wind.

  Gail hurried to close and fasten the panes.

  Miss Jennifer was bolt upright in a chair beside the fire. “I suppose Mr. Grubler told you what he found out over the telephone.”

  The tone, directed at Miss Rachel, implied that whatever had happened was her fault. Miss Rachel discreetly kept still. It was Gail who asked, in a tone half of weariness and half of dread, “What did Dave learn?”

  Grubler himself answered. He must have been close enough in the hall to have heard the conversation. He came into the room. “There have been some big washouts on the road, Gail. It may be morning before we have anyone here from town. Zia, your rain gods answered with a vengeance, but their timing is a little rough on us here.”

  Zia was on a cushion before the blaze. The uneven flame shone in her black hair, touched the soft line of her cheek with pink. If she thought Grubler’s tone a trifle jeering, she made no answer. Her eyes remained cool and sphinxlike.

  He walked over to Gail, who had stopped beside her little desk and was looking down at her account book blankly. “You look done to death. Sit down and have a cigarette.” He took out a silver case and a book of matches.

  “I must go tell Florencia we could do with something hot—coffee and sandwiches,” Gail said.

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “And we can’t let Bob stay out there all night with—with the body.”

  “A little while of meditating on his sins won’t hurt him.”

  Miss Rachel went to the window, pulled the draperies aside, and looked out at the rain. She saw a figure standing alone in the corner of the gallery—Hal Emerson, a raincoat over his shoulders, feet wide apart, the glow of a cigarette in his fingers. She couldn’t read his face. The night was closing in, wet and windy. She could see the tossing of the garden vines, the broken glitter of the fishpond, dimly in the light from the window. Across the garden, the windows of the little room where Christine’s body lay showed no trace of light. She wondered if Emerson were watching that room, waiting perhaps for Bob Ryker to come out of it. There was a hint of purpose, of determination, in the way he stood under the shadow of the gallery.

  Miss Jennifer was explaining to Gail that she’d prefer tea, rather strong tea, and that she wouldn’t require anything to eat since if the car the tour management was sending for her could get through she’d have dinner in Winslow.

  Grubler corrected her. “Nothing can get out here tonight, Miss Murdock. You’d better resign yourself to staying. Anyway, since you were here when Christine was bitten …”

  “I saw nothing Rachel didn’t see.”

  “Still,” Grubler insisted politely, “the police will expect you to be here when they come.”

  The cat came in then, looked around for Miss Rachel, meowed politely to let her mistress know she was there.

  “I should have known,” Miss Jennifer said firmly, “that to follow Rachel out here would mean that I’d find somebody being murdered. It’s as if she’s psychic about it—she feels it coming and hurries to get in at the kill.”

  Miss Rachel felt her face grow hot. “That’s not fair, Jennifer. It’s true that I did consider the situation here dangerous, but I thought that, if anything, the presence of a nosy stranger should keep violence away instead of encouraging it.”

  Grubler coughed to draw their attention, a small discreet cough.

  “Miss Murdock has already stated that the snake which caused Christine’s death was not a stray. On the strength of her statement, I called the sheriff’s office and asked for their help. But since the sheriff and his men are not apt to be here for some time, I think we should let Miss Murdock explain things as she sees them and conduct a bit of investigation on her own.”

  He glanced at the others. Ilene acted as if she hadn’t heard; Zia kept on looking impassively into the fire. Gail hesitated, then said, “I guess that might be best.”

  Grubler said, “I’ll go after Hal and Bob, and while I’m at it I’ll ask Florencia for some hot drinks and some sandwiches.”

  He seemed calmly able to take charge of things.

  Miss Rachel, still beside the dark pane, saw that the door of the little room on the other side of the rain-swept garden was opening slowly, that Bob Ryker’s figure was coming out. He was close to the roof of the gallery when he stopped, looked about, and flipped something small and silvery into the fishpond. The object struck the water with a faint glitter, then vanished.

  Hal Emerson strode out from under the gallery and Ryker flung around and raised his fists.

  Chapter 8

  Bob Ryker sat hunched in a chair, his eyes sullen against the fire, his mouth tight. He hadn’t touched the coffee on the table beside his knee, nor the sandwich Gail had offered. “If you’re all so anxious to know what I threw away out there, go fish for it.” He looked from one to another, belligerently.

  Grubler said soothingly, “All you have to do is say that it had nothing to do with Christine, Bob—that it has no bearing on the truth we’re trying to get at.” He moved over to lean against the mantel. “We don’t know how Christine died, nor in what way the snake came to be in her room. Could it have been the key to that room you threw away?”

  Ryker’s face turned slowly. “Are you trying to say I had anything to do with Christine’s death?”

  “We don’t even know what her death was—accident … or something else. Does anyone know whether Christine kept her door locked when she was in the room? Would there have had to be a key used to place the snake there—providing the thing didn’t crawl there of its own accord?”

  “She was in a hurry to pack and get away. She seemed suddenly convinced about something. Her mind was made up …” Ryker frowned against the light. “She might have forgotten to lock herself in this one time. Otherwise, and previously, no. I had to give forty-seven passwords to stick my head in.”

  Miss Rachel asked, “Could it have been the keys to your wife’s luggage that you threw into the fishpond, Mr. Ryker?”

  There was a minute of silence in the room, broken only by the slash of rain against the windows of the long room. The rain was driving in under the narrow gallery that faced the garden. Miss Rachel went on: “How long have you been sure that your wife had written the Kachina letters?”

  His eyes, facing hers in the bright glow of the fire, seemed mocking and ironic. “Oh, now look, porcelain lady—you wouldn’t throw me to the wolves, would you?”

  “I think you might as well tell the truth. It can’t hurt your wife. It might help unravel the mystery of her death.”

  He seemed to think this over with an air of weary disillusion. “If Christine did make up that business with the letters, it wasn’t for any deep reasons of dislike or revenge. There were times when she got terribly bored. She had money, not too much—enough so that she had to spend a lot of time seeing that it stuck with her. Just for a relief from tension, as a kind of prank, she might have done something a little out of line like that.” His glance defied them.

  “I see,” said Miss Rachel. “An absent-minded bit of fun.”

  Color came up into his hollow cheek
s. “You didn’t know her.”

  “Not well, no. On the surface she seemed unhappy and frustrated. But since she seems to have had so much more in worldly goods than the rest of the group, the motive—if she wrote the letters—couldn’t have been one of blackmail in the common sense.”

  His lips drew back. “Blackmail! If she were here, she’d laugh at you.”

  “There are all sorts of blackmail,” Miss Rachel pointed out mildly. She looked up at the man whose pale head was bright in the half-lit room. “Did you receive a Kachina letter, Mr. Grubler?”

  He hesitated, glanced at the others. “Is everyone supposed to have?”

  “So far, everyone I’ve asked, except Zia.”

  The Hopi girl turned an expressionless face. “I shouldn’t have lied. I did receive a letter. It made me angrier than I care to remember. It was about a—a squaw who ran away from the reservation, thinking herself a fine lady, and who found out that white people considered her very funny.” Zia had laced her fingers together tightly; there was a drawn look to the skin under her eyes. But her tone remained cool. “I destroyed the letter. I knew that the words had been cut from the literary club’s yearbook, and I suspected at the first that Christine had made it. She had, even in college, a certain knack of finding one’s weak points.” Her voice grew softer. “Mine was always my people. I was an alien in the white man’s school.”

  “Nuts,” said Bob roughly.

  “We didn’t feel that way,” Gail insisted.

  Zia shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m home again. When I return to the reservation from my visit here with you, I’ll probably never leave it.”

  “And your letter, Mr. Grubler?” asked Miss Rachel.

  His mouth twisted. “I was peculiarly vulnerable—if Christine did write those things. I’d done the best I knew how in running a couple of copper mines for her. Profits, of course, rolled in during the war. Afterward, we had to work for our markets. There were times when she may have thought I could have handled things more shrewdly.”

  Miss Rachel was studying him curiously. “Your letter, then, referred only to business matters?”