The Chuckling Fingers

by Mabel Seeley

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Historical Mysteries; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Rediscover one of the great mystery authors of the twentieth century in this Depression-era tale of a wealthy family's dark secrets turned deadly on their secluded lakeside estate.
 
An urgent note from a friend spurs Ann Gay to visit her recently married cousin, Jacqueline Heaton. Upon her arrival at Fiddler's Fingers, a remote, pine-grown estate on Lake Superior, Ann immediately senses her cousin's fear—someone has been playing increasingly malicious tricks on the Heatons, a proud family of Minnesota lumber tycoons, and worse yet, they seem determined to frame Jacqueline.
 
Ann quickly resolves to take Jacqueline and her young daughter, Toby, away from the danger. But what began as seemingly trivial pranks—ruined clothes, a burnt bed, a smashed boat—escalates to direct attacks and ultimately murder. Dangerous waters crash against the finger-like rocks on the lakeshore, making a sound like a guttural chuckle, one that seems to mock the murder that took place there—but no one is laughing when everyone on the estate becomes a suspect. Potential motives are revealed as Ann learns more about the Heaton family, and with no chance of anyone leaving Fiddler's Fingers until the killer is caught, Ann realizes that the only way to prove her cousin's innocence is by snaring the murderer herself.
 
The trap is set; with herself as bait, Ann's door creaks open in the night as a cloaked figure moves silently toward her bed....

Release date: September 7, 2021

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 336

Sample

1

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 facing the evil of a mind so much more skillful than mine that even the signs we did see—the acid in a bride’s toiletry bag, 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.

 

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 to take adjustments, I thought, 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 in 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 heavyset woman with several 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 silverfish.

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 puffing 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 o’er 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 widened with 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 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 the only words she’d said since we left Grand Marais.

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

Near the gate, round 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 treetops, 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 nay 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 range 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 off 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 freshwater 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 glacial 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 find 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 needlepoint 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 scuttled into the house.

“Loveliest thing about Toby,” Myra said, “she makes life so formal. Goodness, Ann, I’m glad you’ve come.”

Wasn’t there worry at the bottom of her dark eyes, too—a worry she was trying as hard as Jacqueline and Bill to cover? But what was uppermost as she took my hands in both of hers was her warm hospitality and friendliness; impossible not to like and admire Myra. She has some of the Heaton imperiousness—she’s Bill’s cousin—but it’s an entirely feminine imperiousness; she’s so delicate she might have been carved out of crystal by Lalique—white hair braided in a coronet around her small head, wide eyes that are deep and almost black, faintly pink-flushed skin. She’s forty-three, young to be Toby’s grandmother, but then Pat, her son, would have been young to be Toby’s father—if he’d lived.

Young marriages, I’d learned, ran in the Heaton family. Pat was nineteen, a sophomore at the university, when he married Jacqueline after knowing her exactly one week.

Making the best of things is one of Myra’s characteristics.

Goodness knows she must have had long practice of it, being so long a widow and having her sister, Octavia, on her hands. The first thing I’d heard her say after Pat’s marriage was, “Well, I can use more family,” and she’d stretched that to include not just Jacqueline, but Aunt Harriet and me, too.

When Pat was killed that summer at the job he took—a dust explosion in a flour mill—Jacqueline and the coming baby became the core of Myra’s life. Jacqueline is Toby’s mother and has responsibilities such as discipline, but Myra and I just adore her.

Wry recognition of that weakness was in Jacqueline’s eyes now as she glanced once again at Toby laboriously and hurriedly mounting the stairs inside. When she turned back, some of the smile had faded from her mouth.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” she repeated, and it had an emphasis I couldn’t mistake; she was worried and had an anxious hope that now I had come things might be cleared up.

“Not half as glad as I am to be here.” I answered both the open and the hidden statements. I could see now what I must do—I must find out what it was Jacqueline hid before I could do anything else.

I asked lightly, “How’s about helping me unpack?” It wasn’t in Jacqueline, I thought then, to keep anything from me if I got her alone.

But the green-brown eyes just brushed me evasively. “We’ll all help unpack. Toby loves unpacking. So does Bill.” It was quiet, but it held her screened.

“Me, I’m a travel-bag addict,” Bill said behind me, and I looked to see if he were being pleasant or helping Jacqueline evade, but this Roman-coin face didn’t tell. He had one of my bags in each hand—bags he’d tipped a filling-station attendant to lift to the car at Grand Marais.

I’d have to play the game of casualness, too. “Hercules lifted the world,” I said, “the Finns held off brute Russia for weeks,"