Read Online The chuckling fingers by Mabel Seeley - Free Book Online Page A

bed, a pink puddle among the blue tufts of the candlewick spread. The questions to ask were the reasonable questions. Who had been in my room, and why? I hadn’t been injured; I hadn’t been touched. Quickly I fingered over my clothes in the closet, the dresser. Nothing else had apparently been touched. Why cut that robe?
    It must mean something. What? A warning to leave? But I was leaving… .
    Bill and Myra knew, but others didn’t. Fred didn’t—Fred, who might certainly want Toby and Jacqueline gone.
    I tried as I zipped on a sweater to think of Fred up to this subtle, menacing trick. Fred was a horned bull, determined but clumsy and blundering. Phillips might be subtle… .
    Suddenly I didn’t even want to know the answer. I just wanted to get away, taking Jacqueline and Toby with me. As I sped down the hall the morning chill seemed a part of some unwarming chill inside me. Octavia’s door again was closed, but both Myra’s and Bill’s were open on empty, tumbled beds. In the bathroom the shower was running, an odd, ordinary sound.
    Jacqueline’s door, too, was open, the room empty, the blankets tucked around the hollows in the beds.
    “Jacqui!” I called as if I expected no answer, but her voice came back from the bathroom.
    “Ann? I’ll be right out.”
    I took a deep breath, settling myself. No use going into a panic; we’d soon be out of the way. I called again, casual this time.
    “Where’s Toby?”
    “Didn’t she come in to you? She started for your room.”
    At the head of the stairs I called, “You down there, Toby?”
    “I eat now!” came instantly and loudly.
    “She’s waiting breakfast for you.” Myra’s voice came up too. “Don’t be long.”
    Smell of frying sausages and buckwheat cakes, sound of Toby’s running feet. Again I felt dissociated. That was the way the world was; it couldn’t be that other way, with Bill asking about insanity, and my bathrobe slashed.
    But it was the other way.
    Jacqueline was still in the shower. Impatiently I went about her room, pulling up the blankets on the beds, hanging up Toby’s sleeper, straightening the dresser top.
    In the mirror, strangely, appeared my face. It might have been the face of a stranger’s ghost—the ghost of a tall girl, thin and brown, staring at nothing out of brown eyes, her one hand hovering over the dresser top.
    Then slowly I looked down again to what I’d seen. Jacqueline’s manicure scissors. Caught where the blades joined was a tiny tuft of salmon-pink silky wool.
     
    * * *
     
    Jacqueline’s voice behind me. “Admiring yourself, darling?”
    She stood smiling at me through the glass, her hair the color of walnut wood sparked with light, her brown-flecked green eyes morning fresh, her blue robe that was the twin of my pink one snugly belted around her waist. Affectionately she brushed her cheek against my shoulder.
    She must have felt then that I was trembling.
    “Ann! What’s the matter?”
    I swallowed hard, fighting. “Your family all right” —it was a whisper in my ears to which I couldn’t listen.
    “Look.” The word came harshly, because what I wanted to do was traitorous—I wanted to tear out that wisp of silky wool and roll it in a ball and not tell her, ever, about my robe. “Last night while I was asleep someone came in my room and cut my bathrobe to ribbons.”
    She said, “Oh,” retreating, closing up, her face becoming a mask from which the eyes stared at me blankly. Then after a long time and as if the movement hurt she looked down at the dresser top.
    She said, “Your pink robe,” and with one quick gesture caught up the scissors and ran to my room where she held the scissors against the slashed fabric, her hands shaking so the scissors shivered against the pink. There couldn’t be any doubt; the fuzz in the scissors was from my robe.
    She dropped robe and scissors both, turning to me weakly, helplessly.
    “Ann, I can’t remember. Do you think I’ve—gone insane?”