The Cat Wears a Mask by Dolores Hitchens

Author:Dolores Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

They were all back in the living room, even to Zia and Miss Jennifer and the cat, who had come down from upstairs. The air in the room crackled with tension, with repressed terror. On Gail’s small desk lay the wet cluster of feathers and the heavy driving gloves.

Behind the desk sat Dave Grubler, wearing the stoic imperturbability of a judge. It was he who had arranged Christine’s body decently, put the white sheet back as it belonged, closed the door, and brought the others here and kept them together. The one thing he hadn’t been able to manage was getting Pedro to stay and guard the body; Pedro had tagged along with the rest.

Miss Rachel confessed to herself that he fitted the role of judge well. The white hair, the colorless features gave him somehow a look of age and wisdom. He was not grublike in the face of this emergency; he was a determined, icily angry man.

“This ornament …” He held up the brilliantly colored but bedraggled feathers. “You claim that this is off Christine’s hat?”

Ryker stared sullenly without speaking. He had seemed to resent Grubler’s taking charge, yet he had made no move to rearrange his wife’s body; had instead seemed to feel a sort of horror towards it.

Miss Rachel spoke. “Mrs. Ryker complained of some feathers being gone from her hat, on the gallery, just before we left for the Snake Dance. I hadn’t seen the hat with the ornament on it, but the color looks as if it would match.”

Zia was sitting on a cushion near the hearth, her usual spot. She didn’t glance up at the others, but kept her eyes on the fire which was beginning to flame again under Pedro’s coaxing. “Christine made much the same remark to me, when we met today at the village. She was watching the Antelope priests in the dance. She seemed struck by the wands they carried.”

“Those feather-tipped things?” Grubler frowned, letting the feathers dangle on the long red thread by which they had doubtless been sewn to the straw and by which they had swung from the doorknob. “Do you make any sense of it?”

“The gloves,” said Ilene in a voice that came out all at once as if on a spasm. “She—she wasn’t dead. Not that first time. She had a snake hidden somewhere. She’s put it into one of our rooms.”

Grubler faced her stonily. “Let’s keep the insanity out of it, Ilene. You’re being rather incoherent, and what you’ve just said—”

Ryker interrupted. “You said Christine was dead, Dave. Nobody else examined her after that snake bite … or supposed snake bite.”

Grubler made a gesture of angry helplessness. “Don’t all go berserk on me … and don’t forget, Bob, that you were with Christine’s body for some time, there in the little room with the cot. You’d have known—you couldn’t have helped knowing—if she were still alive.”

Ryker glanced across the room at Gail. “We covered her at once with the sheet. I didn’t keep my eyes on her.

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