Hair. The game is winding down now, and Marian wonders whether David has had a good birthday. He appears to be engrossed in the game; he studies his cards intensely, continually makes marks on his pad, shakes the die over and over in his fist, flings it vigorously onto the board. He is taking on some of Jacob’s characteristics, as he sometimes does: when he flings the die onto the board he gives his wrist a twist that is Jacob’s, and he talks to the die in Jacob’s voice: come on baby, three baby, three big ones for Brother Dave. Jacob has thrown himself into the game; his excitement, which has infected David, makes Marian uneasy. There is sweat-shine on Jacob’s cheekbones and on one side of his nose; his thick hair, ruffled by his thrusting fingers, has sprung out of place. David’s hair has always been different: straight and pale brown, it falls slantwise across his forehead almost to his eyes. From time to time he sweeps it up with a hand, leaving a few long hairs fallen. Marian looks across at Susan, startled by the beauty of her hair. Marian has always been troubled by the thick abundance of her own hair, which breaks the teeth of combs. She remembers David’s childhood hair, silky and brown, the fineness of it, and the sweetness of his scalp’s smell. Susan looks tired. She is far from home, in a strange house. She too is part of David’s birthday. “Susan,” she says, reaching for the bowl of potato chips and realizing that it’s the first time she has said the name aloud. “Can you use some more of these?”
In the darkening corridor. In the darkening corridor Mr. Green stands with his hand on the turned doorknob. It seems to him that he hears dim sounds from deep within the dangerous BALLROOM, but the sounds are so faint that they may be nothing more than sounds of the house itself. The house is full of sounds: loose window sashes knock in their frames, water pipes mutter, floorboards creak, the very walls seem to breathe and sigh. The memory of his discovery in the shadowy corner, and of his awkward, guilty retreat, is so vivid to Mr. Green that he cannot continue his arrested motion. With alarm he realizes that his current posture is no less dubious — anyone happening along the corridor might well mistake him for an eavesdropper, for his hand is on the knob, his forehead is bent forward almost to the wood of the door. Indeed, it would not be difficult to imagine that he harbored a weapon in his waistcoat. Mr. Green looks stealthily over his shoulder: no one. He is alone. He thinks of the quiet arbor in the garden behind his mother’s house, of the well-worn leather of the armchair in his room. His mother had been right: he would not enjoy the weekend.
The Black Hag. The Colonel, at the instant he enters Miss Scarlet, begins to lose interest in her. Miss Scarlet has exhausted her purpose as prey; her remaining usefulness is severely limited. The Colonel prides himself on not being a sentimentalist. His interest, he reflects, will steadily diminish as his thrusts increase in intensity until, at the famous moment, Miss Scarlet will become superfluous: and the Black Hag, bending over him with cold fingers and heavy-lidded eyes, will claim him once again.
The die. The die is a translucent red cube with slightly rounded corners. The spots are sunken, opaque, and white. It is difficult to tell whether the spots are small holes in the surface that have been painted white, or whether they are small white plugs that have been set in holes in the surface. Through any of the six translucent sides, other spots are visible as little reddish lumps shaped like the heads of bullets.
Poor thing. Miss Scarlet slips nimbly from her body and takes up a position not far from the window seat, where she observes with interest the scene before her: the Colonel’s pale, well-muscled, heaving buttocks peeping out from beneath his agitated shirttails (the Colonel is naked only from the waist down), the young woman’s raised knee pressed back against her ribs by the Colonel’s splayed hand, a tangle of pink and white at the ankle of the other foot. The young woman’s visible arm is stretched out, the hand limp at the wrist; her face is turned to one side and her eyes are closed. She looks for all the world as if she has been slain — only, from time to time, a barely perceptible tremor passes over her body. Poor thing, Miss Scarlet thinks.
Stunning. Susan is not deceived, by Marian’s gesture, into sudden intimations of intimacy. She is grateful anyway. She sets down the bowl beside her glass of wine, bites into a saddle-shaped chip, and looks directly at Jacob’s sister, whose face is already turned toward David. At that moment, in that light, at that precise angle, Marian’s unlovely face is stunning: her high cheekbone shines, the tide of her hair rolls along her face and dashes down on her shoulder, the sharp proud line of her forehead and nose slashes across the dark green blinds like a blade of light. Susan’s hair has been admired since early childhood, but she feels that its straightness shows lack of character. She has always been attracted to forceful, intelligent, unbeautiful women stronger and bolder than she. In high school her best friend had wild hair and braces, wore torn jeans and floppy lumberjack shirts, practiced the violin three hours a day, and once punched a boy in the mouth when he refused to stop torturing a cat. Susan is willing to be proud of her hair because Jacob adores it, but if she were Jacob she would be more critical. Jacob is stern when it comes to her taste in literature (Faulkner is a gasbag) and music (rock music is what Yeats meant by “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”), but he is reverent toward her body, which makes him seem careless. If she were a man, she would want to plunge both hands into Marian’s torrent of hair. If she were a man, she would reject herself and choose Marian.
Mrs. Peacock and Mr. Green. Mrs. Peacock cannot endure the presence of Mrs. White for another second: the slumped shoulders, the dark eyes glistening with desolation, the hands moving helplessly, the air of dazed bewilderment, all these inspire in Mrs. Peacock a sense of suffocation. She must escape from this room that is filling up with grief, a grief that rushes outward in all directions, pushing down everything in its path, pressing against the walls, hurting her skin. “Yes yes, dear,” Mrs. Peacock says, “it will be all right,” and escapes from the desperate gaze, the inconsolable bulk of flesh. She makes her way down the corridor toward the DINING ROOM, passing on her way the corridor to the BALLROOM, where she is surprised to see Mr. Green standing with his hand on the doorknob, his head half bowed. At the sound of her footstep Mr. Green whirls to look at her, gives a gasp, then fumbles at the door and thrusts it open, disappearing within. A queer one, Mr. Green. One might almost think he was afraid of her.
Endgame. David knows that the murder was committed by Mrs. Peacock, with the Candlestick, in one of three rooms: the BILLIARD ROOM, the DINING ROOM, or the BALLROOM. The game is winding down now; it is simply a matter of moving his piece across the board from room to room, eliminating the incorrect ones. Although Susan’s guesses have grown more skilful, she does not appear to know either the murderer or the room, but David is less certain of Marian and Jacob. Jacob almost never loses at Clue; his logic is flawless, his instincts sure. Marian, in her quiet way, is a dangerous player who can never be ruled out. David knows, from his system of checkmarks and X’s, that Jacob has identified Mrs. Peacock and the Candlestick; he is almost certain that Marian knows both, though he can’t be sure about the weapon; all three of them are moving from room to room, searching for the final clue. This part of the game always draws attention to another disturbing flaw in the game’s design: although play is supposed to be based on logical inference, it admits a high proportion of sheer chance, since each time a player’s token is accused of the murder it must be moved to the room in question. One is continually being whisked away, to the wrong part of the board. Jacob is known to absorb this whimsical element of the game directly into his strategy, and to make a useless Suggestion deliberately, for the sake of removing a token as far as possible from its apparent destination. He has already pulled David across the board to the STUDY, which he knows David holds in his hand, thereby delaying David’s progress and wasting a move of his own; the result is to give Marian an advantage in the race to new rooms. The game cannot last much longer. David is pleased to see Jacob bending intensely over his Detective Notes, trying to wrest an additional secret from his complex system of marks; Jacob seems in a better mood, he has been drawn into the game. David wonders what will happen next. Will there be another game? It’s almost one in the morning. Will Susan retire and leave the three of them together, to talk in the living room? Marian seems tired; perhaps she too will go upstairs. Will Jacob want to stay up till dawn? Will they walk to 7-Eleven and buy Cokes at four in the morning? Will they go down to the beach and walk out to the end of the jetty and sit looking across the black Sound toward Long Island? The foghorns are silent now; maybe the sky has cleared. Will Jacob want to talk? Will he talk about Dad? About Susan? His writing? David hopes he can somehow let Susan know that it’s all right for her to be here on his birthday. He shakes the die in his loose fist, enjoying the tension of the game, holding back, savoring the moment when he will suddenly open his hand and watch the red die tumble across the bright, loud board.