The Cat Wears a Mask

by Dolores Hitchens

  “That was you, then.” Gail’s tone was flat, dismal.

  “Didn’t you know?”

  Below, in the dimness of the hall, there was a faint movement, an almost soundless withdrawing. Miss Rachel sensed more than heard the careful step, the soft touch on the knob, the door opening quietly on the outer gallery.

  She realized with a jerk that she had not been alone in listening to Gail’s talk with Ryker. Someone had stood below, practically as close as she herself, his ear only a few inches from the floor of the open, railed landing. She went down quickly, looked into the living room, expecting to see at least a part of the group they had left there. The place was empty. It occurred to her that perhaps the entire group had adjourned to the kitchen to make fresh coffee and drinks—a room that was smaller, snugger, more brightly lighted than the big living room.

  Gail and Bob Ryker were on the stairs now. In event the other eavesdropper had waited for further listening, she hurriedly slipped out through the door into the outer dark.

  She could hear voices and see lights in the kitchen. The gallery was dark, rain-whipped. In the garden was a tossing wetness, black, smelling of torn and broken greenery.

  Someone moved towards her. She saw the shape of the raincoat thrown over his shoulders, the broad and stocky form, and she knew him. “Mr. Emerson?”

  “We were wondering when you’d be down. I offered to come check up. I’ve just come out of the light—I can’t make out where you are.”

  Was he offering this alibi to prove that he was not the eavesdropper? Or was it true?

  “I’m over here.” She stood quiet, trying to see if his gaze fixed on her.

  “Is Gail with you?”

  “No.”

  “She’s with Bob? Alone with him?” He said it sharply.

  “They’ll be here in a moment.”

  He came closer. She caught odors of tobacco and a clean masculine-smelling soap. “I don’t like that—it was Bob, if you recall, who went around impressing everyone with the fact that there was a snake loose in the place yesterday. That could have been an act. A damned clever act—one whose motive I can guess at.”

  “I can guess at it too,” she agreed.

  “Suppose it was important for the rest of us to think that the snake which killed Christine was already here, that it didn’t arrive with one of us when we came back from the Snake Dance.” His face floated mask-like above his dark clothing. Rain made a silver curtain beyond the eaves of the gallery. “If the snake was here—that alibis one of us.”

  She had seen this. She wondered how many others of the group had thought of it. “It clears Zia.”

  “Bob was crazy about Zia when we were in college. He never looked at Christine until a long time afterward—after his uncle had kicked him out of his construction business, and the bottle had begun to look a little too good, and she’d inherited her money.”

  She told him quietly, “You’re building quite a case against them. Zia wouldn’t be as afraid as some people—as the rest of us, for instance—about handling a rattler. And Mr. Ryker could have stolen his own gloves and the feathers off his wife’s hat.”

  He made an abrupt movement of surprise. “Wait. I hadn’t heard about that last.”

  “I met Mrs. Ryker on the gallery this morning, just before we went down to the cars. She told me about the missing feathers—I gathered, a red cluster. I noticed afterward that the priests at the Snake Dance used a feathered wand to distract their charges. It was, I think, the first moment that I began to believe Mr. Ryker’s warning.”

  “Stealing the feathers—I shouldn’t think he’d do that.” Emerson’s tone was worried, half angry, as if in irritation at this item which didn’t fit. “It gives an Indian touch, something I’d think he’d try to avoid.”

  “If Zia was working with him, yes.”

  He averted his face, stared off in the direction of the garden. A light from the kitchen outlined his profile. It was a good man’s face, square, clean-cut, honest-looking. A good mask, too, if he needed it to be. “I guess you think I’m in too much of a hurry to get the thing pinned on someone.”

  “I can understand why that might be.”

  “There was always something—some damned interruption between Gail and me. Her father was sick a lot. She took her writing and painting seriously. Then, when it seemed I might at last have a chance—” He cut off his words, shrugged.

  “Just what did happen under that manzanita tree?”

  His eyes widened; she saw his face clearly, as if it had paled. “How the devil do you know about that?”

  “It was mentioned in Gail’s Kachina letter.”

  He turned away again. “She thought that I humiliated her, that I took Christine on purpose to the place where Gail and I had always met.”

  “And afterward?”

  “I made her go to Christine and apologize for what she’d said to her when she found us together. I was too stupid to see what Christine’s act really was, what her purpose had been in following me up that little canyon, why she thought there was something in her eye and wanted me to try to find it … the oldest trick in the world, I guess, and me the one dope who would fall for it.” His tone was husky with bitterness, with remembering. “Gail apologized. More abjectly than I’d wanted her to.”

  Miss Rachel remembered the Kachina letter: Made you kiss his big black boots …

  He went on: “She seemed so cold, so frozen after that. I could never penetrate that defense. I could look at her, touch her … she wasn’t there.” He ran his hand over his bare head, a puzzled motion.

  “Did you ever tell her that you knew you’d made a mistake?”

  “I tried to—thousands of times. But she’d gone away, moved on—the ears I talked to didn’t belong any more to the girl I’d hurt.”

  There were hollow steps on the gallery behind them. Gail and Ryker had evidently decided to hunt up the others.

  “Will you take my advice, Mr. Emerson?”

  He stood arrested, attentive, hopeful. Hopeful of some secret that would break down Gail’s hatred of him. “Surely …”

  Go away when this is over and leave her alone.”

  He turned his head, disbelieving.

  “You’ve done the one thing she’ll never forget—your being here has only made her unhappy.”

  His voice roughened. “I’ve wasted seven years …”

  “Don’t waste another seven.”

  Gail and Ryker were close; they slowed, then Gail walked on quickly, recognizing who was with Miss Rachel. Ryker paused, peered through the gloom. “Huh? Oh, you, Hal. Well, we found the evidence. Everyone might as well know—Christine had sent those letters.”

  He leaned against a pillar, wearily. “Why should she have been murdered for it? God knows I didn’t enjoy reading mine, but I didn’t intend to kill her for sending it.”

  Emerson moved so that the light from the house was behind him. “I told her yesterday that I was onto her. That’s what the argument was about, out in the garden.”

  Ryker let a moment pass blankly, then shook his head. “Funny. I thought she’d made you that proposition—the one about taking Grubler’s place as her mine supervisor.”

  Emerson’s figure stiffened. “Did she actually think I’d work for her?”

  “She seemed pretty confident. She even had a wacky idea she’d get you pretty cheap.” Ryker was tossing something in his fingers—the key to the room upstairs. Gail must have given it to him to keep.

  “You weren’t supposed to know much about Christine’s business affairs,” Emerson said curiously, “and yet you claim to be in on something she had planned for the future—a never-never future, I might add. I wouldn’t have touched her job with a ten-foot pole.”

  Ryker began to move off towards the kitchen. “She thought she had you sewed up … somehow.”

  They moved in a group towards the light, the men silent, Miss Rachel acutely aware of the tension between them.

  On the surf
ace, the people in the room seemed casual enough. Miss Jennifer, evidently with an idea of getting something good out of the enforced stay, had brought a book with her from the living room—from its jacket, a book about Indian customs of the Southwest. Zia and she were looking at an illustration, seated side by side at a breakfast table. Ilene stood beside the big white range, fussing with a glass coffee-maker in which water bubbled and hissed. A corner cupboard—one with bright blue doors—was open, and Dave Grubler was mixing drinks. He glanced at Emerson and Ryker as they entered; his glance was cautious, noncommittal, searching. When he met Miss Rachel’s eye he smiled gravely.

  “We’re having a nightcap—various kinds of nightcaps—and then taking a vote. Some of us want to turn in and get some sleep. But the way to do that is to do it together, as a group—no stragglers left to scream out in the middle of the night, or to … get into mischief.” His lips twitched with what seemed an ironic desire to smile. “I might add that the nervous element is still determined to stay up.”

  Ilene turned from the stove. Her plain face looked hot, feverish as if with exhaustion. “I’m afraid. I can’t help that. I don’t want to be alone, to lie and look at the dark, to wait …”

  He listened to her carefully, almost as if testing the genuineness of the emotion in her voice. “Why not ask someone else to take you in, then?”

  “You mean …” She twisted her large-knuckled hands together. Her gaze crawled from Zia to Gail, flickered back suddenly to the table, fixed on Miss Jennifer.

  There was no doubt about it, Miss Rachel thought—Jennifer, in her rugged battle-axey style, looked as if she could beat off any murderer alive.

  Ilene said hesitantly to Gail: “If you have an extra cot …”

  “I have several.”

  “And if Miss Murdock wouldn’t mind …” Ilene switched her glance to Miss Rachel. “I could put my cot at the foot of your bed and I wouldn’t be a bit of bother, I promise; I wouldn’t make a sound.”

  Miss Jennifer stared at Ilene across the top of the book with a sort of irritated pity. Jennifer had a certain nightly routine she went through-nothing beautifying or remotely in the line of what she scornfully called “fixings,” but full of elaborate and rather odd stretchings and breathings and supposed to be extremely healthful. This routine might appear quite strange to Ilene; Miss Jennifer knew it. Nevertheless she said with a hint of warmth: “Of course you may sleep in our room. We won’t mind your being there.”

  Miss Rachel had been wearing a freckle mask at night, a face covering of light elastic cloth, peach-colored, with holes for eyes, nose, and lips. She wondered briefly just how Ilene was going to react to Jennifer’s exercises and her own appearance in the mask.… Never mind, she told herself, it’s too late to worry now—we’ve been queer for years.

  When the tea, the coffee, and the drinks had been finished, they went upstairs. Miss Rachel heard Gail instructing Pedro in the lower hall as they went out upon the gallery. Probably Pedro was to keep a watch of some kind. Florencia was by now in bed with her head covered—she had made no appearance in the kitchen.

  Hal Emerson set up the cot at the foot of their bed.

  He paused at the door. “You won’t forget to lock up?”

  He bent, seemed to examine their key rather closely.

  “We won’t forget,” Jennifer promised. She closed the door, turned the key in the lock, took the key and put it under her pillow. “Just in case.” She glanced darkly at Miss Rachel.

  Miss Rachel made innocent sheep’s eyes at her. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”

  They had almost forgotten Ilene, who was sitting on the cot, her figure drooping and shrunken. Now they were startled—Ilene suddenly flung herself on her pillow with a wild, wailing cry.

  Chapter 10

  At the same moment the house reverberated with the crash of thunder—rocked and trembled underfoot and then settled slowly. Beyond the drawn curtains, rain gushed and pounded on the windowpanes.

  Miss Jennifer said sympathetically, “Does the thunder scare you? It does me. When we were small we had a certain closet we hid in, Rachel and I—though of course we don’t have a great many thunderstorms in Los Angeles.” There was the faintest touch of homesickness in the way Jennifer said this last; probably she was thinking at the moment of their big, old-fashioned home in Parchly Heights.

  Ilene raised her face. She was not a woman who could cry prettily—crying swelled and reddened her. She sat up, pressing her knuckles into the flesh under her eyes. “I’m sorry to have lost control like that. I seemed to feel an unbearable tension, an overpowering terror. It wasn’t the thunder …”

  “We aren’t much protection, I’m afraid,” said Miss Rachel. “Two little old ladies … Perhaps you should have chosen someone quiet and calm, like Zia.”

  Ilene’s eyes made a circle of the room, fastened on the door. She licked her lips. “Not Zia. Not any of them …” She repeated, with more emphasis: “It really wasn’t the thunder.”

  “What was it, then?”

  Ilene made a hollow cup of her hands, stared into it as though it held a secret. When her voice came it was flat; she had erased the fear from it. “I’m just being foolish and nervous. There couldn’t be any danger, really. Dave thinks that Christine may have killed herself after all—done it the way she did to bring suspicion and conflict among the rest of us after she’d gone.”

  “That sounds a bit fantastic.”

  Ilene shook her head. “Christine must have been horribly unhappy, almost insane, to be doing the sort of things she was. And her heart was bad … she knew the first touch of venom would kill her, that she wouldn’t suffer the agony of an ordinary person who is bitten.”

  “Mr. Grubler outlined all this to the rest of you?”

  “Yes, and there was something else … he thought that Christine may have known her heart was going to kill her anyway. She’d been selling some of her mining properties—land that hadn’t been proven or that required a lot of investment and supervision to make it pay. She was cutting down, keeping only the best—properties that gave a good income and practically ran themselves. That might have meant that she expected to become an invalid, or even that she was getting the estate into shape to pass it on to Bob.”

  “She was planning to hire Mr. Emerson to help in this, wasn’t she?”

  Ilene’s glance faltered. “I don’t know.”

  “What could she have on Emerson, what hold over him, to make him come to work for her?”

  Ilene seemed to hesitate briefly. “I haven’t any idea. I don’t think she could make him do anything he didn’t want to do,” she said primly.

  Miss Jennifer had been in the bathroom changing into her nightdress. She came out now, bulky in a voluminous wrapping of flannel, drew back the window draperies, pushed up the pane, and began to breath deeply. Rain began to splash in upon the sill. On the third deep breath Miss Jennifer paused abruptly, choked, then sneezed.

  There was a flash of fire outside, a great crackle of lightning that showed the courtyard, the cars drawn up inside the tile-roofed shelter, the glistening adobe walls, the rain-swept bricks, in an unearthly blue glow. Miss Jennifer stiffened, then leaned forward to lay her forehead against the pane. She stifled another sneeze, said curiously, “I saw something down there.”

  Thunder rolled again, jarring the glass so that she drew back.… There was only the black night outside now, anyway.

  Miss Rachel was watching her. “What was it?”

  Miss Jennifer closed the pane, came towards the bed. She was shivering. “I’m not sure. A thing—a brightly colored thing. Indian, I think.”

  “I don’t understand,” Miss Rachel said. “Do you mean an ornament of some kind?” At the same moment she wondered how Jennifer had made out such a small object in that brief flash of light.

  “No …” Jennifer was oddly evasive. She showed no desire to go back to the window to finish her breathing exercises, either. Instead she crawled into bed and huddled
under the covers. “Will you draw the curtains, Rachel? That liquid glitter looks so cold.”

  Miss Rachel went to the window and fiddled with the pull cord there. The draperies were heavy, a thick-woven fabric striped with bright primitive reds and greens. She waited, hoping a flash of lightning would come.

  Ilene was glancing about restlessly. “I’ve been so forgetful—so stupid.” She looked apologetically at Miss Jennifer in the bed, then held out her hand. “I forgot to bring my nightgown and hairbrush. Will you let me have the key?”

  Nothing showed of Jennifer now except the top of her head and her eyes. The eyes, Miss Rachel thought, looked wide and scared—scared for Jennifer, who was usually so fearless because she was almost always so right. Without a word, Jennifer slid her hand under the pillow, then held the key towards Ilene.

  “I’ll be right back,” Ilene promised. She unlocked the door, went out, and closed it behind her swiftly.

  Miss Rachel began unbuttoning her dress. “What was it you saw in the courtyard, Jennifer?”

  Jennifer muttered something under the bedclothes, then sneezed, then said clearly: “Let’s leave the light on all night, shall we? I’m a bit more nervous than I thought.”

  Miss Rachel removed her dress, picked up her nightgown, and retired to the bathroom. When she came out she was as voluminously swathed in flannel as Jennifer; however, instead of plain spinsterish white, she had wrung the concession of getting pink flannel with flowery sprigs of blue in it—a touch Jennifer had sniffed over. “The light might keep Miss Taggart awake.”

  Jennifer shook her head. “She’s as scared as any of us.”

  “I wonder. She wasn’t afraid to go to her room alone for her gown and hairbrush.” Miss Rachel slipped over to the window and peered out. The black pane gleamed under the slash of the rain. “She should be coming back by now.”

  “Let her come back in her own good time,” said Jennifer, obviously unwilling to do any worrying about Miss Taggart. “And you might just turn the key while we’re waiting for her.”