There is No Return (15 page)

Sheriff Latham rallied. “You’ll step down,” he said to Chet Keith, “and you’ll keep out of this business from now on.” He scowled at me. “That goes for you too, lady.”

“I doubt it,” murmured Chet Keith jauntily.

Nevertheless he did return to his former seat behind me, and I thought his debonair attitude was more bluff than anything else.

Apparently Sheila Kelly thought so too, for she sagged back in her chair, her face deathly white.

“She’s fainted!” whispered Maurine Smith.

She was mistaken. Sheila Kelly had not fainted. She was pulling herself painfully to her feet. Her eyes had a dazed look. She put out her hand as if she were feeling her, way through a fog, but there was nothing vague or indecisive about the voice which came through her bloodless lips.

“You thought I was dead,” she said. “You all hated me and you thought I was out of the way. But I found the way back. Damn you, I found the way back!”

“Gloria!” cried Dora Canby, holding out her trembling arms, but the girl in the centre of the room was staring at Judy Oliver.

“You double-crossing little sneak!” she said and drew back her hand.

She intended to strike the other girl in the face. Nobody there had any doubt as to her intention. It was Jeff Wayne who, his face ghastly white, jerked Judy backward out of the way while Chet Keith cleared the room with one bound and caught Sheila Kelly’s lifted arm.

“Sheila!” he cried. “For God’s sake!”

He shook her violently, so violently she moaned and looked up into his face piteously. “What is it?” she gasped.

Judy Oliver was clinging to Jeff Wayne and sobbing. “She would have killed me!” she wailed.

“You shouldn’t flirt with Gloria’s sweetheart behind her back, Judy,” said Dora Canby fretfully.

Sheila Kelly was trembling from head to foot. “What is it?” she asked again.

“You were about to attack that young woman,” said the sheriff in a shaken voice.

“You tried to strike Judy, you-you...” Jeff Wayne’s voice trailed off as if he did not trust himself to go on.

It was Allan Atwood who fairly flung himself upon the sheriff’s attention. “She used her right hand!” he exclaimed. “Did you notice, it was her right hand she drew back!”

As a matter of fact it was Sheila Kelly’s right arm to which Chet Keith was still holding. He dropped it instantly, but to no avail. Everybody there had seen her draw back that right hand. It was indelibly stamped upon all our minds.

“She didn’t know what she was doing,” I stammered, my heart in my boots.

The girl’s eyes widened in her drawn face until they seemed to drown it. “I killed him,” she said. “I must have killed him!”

“Sure you did,” said Sheriff Latham.

The jury’s verdict was no surprise. Even before Sheila Kelly’s outburst the conclusion was foreordained. After her confession it was inevitable. It was found that Thomas Canby came to his death as the result of a wound in the throat from half of a pair of scissors wielded by Sheila Kelly, and it was recommended that both she and Professor Matthews be held in custody, subject to the action of the local grand jury.

“Though,” said the sheriff reluctantly, “I ain’t as sure as I was that the professor had anything to do with it.”

The inquest had been adjourned. The prisoners had been returned under guard to their rooms, Sheila Kelly in a condition of utter despair, or so it seemed to me, the professor looking rather thoughtful. The rest of us were gathered in the lounge, waiting for the dining room to be opened for lunch, though none of us, I think, had much appetite for food. Certainly I hadn’t. I couldn’t rid myself of that girl’s tragic face.

“How can you be so dense?” I asked the sheriff indignantly. “It is perfectly evident to anybody with a grain of perception that the girl is a victim.”

He grinned at me indulgently. “I don’t know about perception, but it is mighty evident to me that this trance business is a stall first to last. In the first place there ain’t no such thing as hypnotism. In the second place the gal’s been making her living for six months or more putting on that sort of act. Why shouldn’t she be good at it by now?”

Chet Keith, who had been standing at the window, staring moodily out at the thin watery clouds which lay like a fog over the landscape, turned around and scowled at the sheriff.

“Do you actually believe that she was putting on an act there at the inquest?” he asked incredulously.

Sheriff Latham nodded. “Yep, she was putting on an act all right. I reckon she figures, as Mr Brewster said, that Mrs Canby will get her a smart lawyer. I reckon the Kelly girl has heard of insanity pleas.”

“So she incriminated herself just to put on a smart act,” said Chet Keith in a tired voice.

“Incriminate herself? You mean the confession? That was sort of forced out of her.”

“I mean the way she used her right hand,” snapped Chet Keith.

The sheriff smiled smugly. “I reckon it’s like Mrs Trotter pointed out, the girl’s ambi-ambi-”

“Dextrous, for heaven’s sake,” I put in crossly.

“I reckon,” the sheriff went on with complete imperturbability, “she was so busy putting on a good act, she forgot she was supposed to use her left hand. I reckon that’s how come she went to pieces there at the last and spit out the truth.”

“You and your reckons!” said Chet Keith explosively.

“Nobody so blind as he who will not see,” I marked in my most acid manner and stalked into the dining room.

To my annoyance Fannie Parrish was sitting at my table with Ella.

“Isn’t it terrible?” Fannie asked me as I pulled my chair out and settled grumpily into it. “I mean, such a young girl to be a murderess and all that!”

I ignored her but I was not to be permitted to ignore Ella. “I think even you must admit now, Adelaide, that something very strange is going on here,” she said severely, “something you can’t pooh-pooh in your usual fashion.”

I sighed. “No, nobody can pooh-pooh murder.”

“The girl was in some sort of trance,” said Ella.

“Yes.”

Fannie Parrish gave us a baffled glance. “But Professor Matthews admitted that he was a fraud. He-he said none of his messages from the spirit world were authentic!”

Ella shrugged her shoulders impatiently. “I tell you I have attended every séance, and when the Gloria personality crowded Little Blue Eyes off the scene nobody was so astonished as Professor Matthews, astonished and, if you ask me, petrified with fear.”

“He was anything except petrified this morning at the inquest,” I protested.

Ella frowned. “Just the same,” she said stubbornly, “he isn’t responsible for what Sheila Kelly does when she is possessed by-by Gloria Canby’s malignant spirit.”

Fannie Parrish’s eyes rounded to horrified exclamation points.

“Goodness, Mrs Trotter, do you really think that-that dead girl comes back and takes possession of Sheila Kelly?”

“Dora Canby thinks so,” said Ella, “and so does Jeff Wayne. Have you noticed how he looks at Sheila Kelly?”

“He hates her and he’s afraid of her,” said Fannie, who never missed anything. “But aren’t we all?” she asked with a shudder.

“If only they’d get that blasted bridge fixed!” groaned Ella. “Before something else happens!”

I stared at her. “Don’t be so jittery, Ella!” I said angrily. “Why should anything else happen?”

“Thomas Canby wasn’t the only one Gloria Canby hated,” said Ella solemnly.

“The girl’s dead,” I said.

Ella merely raised her eyebrows. “Did you know she was having an affair with Hogan Brewster when Lila Atwood came on the scene?” she asked.

“No,” I said in a nettled voice, “and I’m not interested in gossip of that nature.”

“Everybody’s interested in gossip,” remarked Ella dryly. “The more they deny it, the more they’re interested as a rule, and you’re no exception, Adelaide.”

I shrugged my shoulders, so, looking very smug, Ella went right on. “She was engaged to Jeff Wayne. She intended to marry him, but that didn’t keep her from playing around.”

“I heard Lila Atwood and her husband having a terrible quarrel yesterday afternoon,” volunteered Fannie. “At least he was quarrelling. She never answers him back, have you noticed?”

Ella frowned. “They’ve never got along, so Judy says. Right from the first they’ve been at daggers’ points, or he has. Everything she does rubs him the wrong way.”

“That’s what they were quarrelling about,” announced Fannie eagerly. “He said she had made her bargain with his Uncle Thomas and kept it, in spite of hell, but she couldn’t keep him from hating both of them.”

None of us had heard Lila Atwood come up behind us. We all started at her luscious voice. She was smiling, and I thought again what a beautiful woman she was, with more poise than anyone I had ever seen.

“You mustn’t take everything my husband says seriously, Mrs Parrish,” she murmured. “Allan is frightfully impetuous, poor dear.”

We had no way of knowing how much of our conversation she had overheard, and I had the pleasure of seeing Fannie Parrish shrink practically to the vanishing point under Lila Atwood’s level dark eyes. I should have been content to let well enough alone, but it has never been my nature to overlook a challenge and I had no intention of allowing Lila Atwood to reduce me to speechlessness.

“So your husband never forgave his uncle for arranging your marriage,” I said, “but then, I dare say you never forgave Thomas Canby either.”

Our eyes clashed but I stood my ground, and to my perturbation Lila Atwood’s lovely mouth quivered. “I hated Uncle Thomas, if that is what you are determined to find out,” she said, “but not, as you seem to imagine, because he arranged my marriage to Allan.”

She hesitated and I was forced to prompt her. “No?”

She gave me a rebuking glance. “I can take what is coming to me, Miss Adams. I was brought up that way, you know, not to buck my fences and above all not to whine over a skinned elbow. Thomas Canby and I did make a bargain. It was perfectly straightforward and I never held it against him. What I have held against him...”

She paused again, and for the second time I prompted her. “Yes?”

“He short-changed me,” she said, her lips curling.

“Short-changed you?”

She made a singularly helpless gesture with her shoulders. “He led me to believe that Allan understood the transaction.”

She glanced across the room where Allan Atwood was sitting at the same table with Hogan Brewster and Patrick Oliver. Brewster smiled at her and beckoned, but young Atwood merely scowled.

“Your husband didn’t understand until afterward that your marriage was a dollar-and-cents proposition between you and his uncle?” I asked.

It seemed to occur to her at last that I had no right to be delving into her private affairs. Lila Atwood was perfectly capable of keeping her own counsel. I suppose it was only because of what my foster son Stephen calls my goading powers that she had been betrayed into saying so much.

“If you don’t mind, Miss Adams,” she remarked with her serene smile, “I’ll keep the rest of my family skeletons to myself.”

She would have moved away, but Ella halted her. “It was Gloria Canby who told Allan, wasn’t it, right after you were married?” she demanded.

Lila Atwood turned perfectly white. “Yes,” she said, “Gloria told him. The house was full of wedding guests. I was still wearing my wedding veil. Gloria thought it was funny. She laughed and laughed.”

“It wasn’t funny to you?” I asked.

She looked at me. “No,” she said, “it wasn’t funny to me.”

And then she turned and walked away. Hogan Brewster jumped up to pull out a chair for her. Her husband did not move. He did not even look up when she leaned toward him and spoke in that gentle tone which she seemed to reserve for him.

“Is your headache better, dear?” she asked. “Did you take an aspirin?”

“For God’s sake,” cried Allan Atwood in a surly voice, “can’t you let me alone?”

Fannie Parrish nodded. “That’s what he said over and over yesterday,” she explained. “’Can’t you let me alone? That’s all I have ever asked of you, just let me alone.’ It’s rather pathetic, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said curtly but I have an idea we were not referring to the same thing.

Judy Oliver did not appear in the dining room for luncheon, and Mrs Parrish explained that Judy was lunching with her aunt in Mrs Canby’s sitting room. Chet Keith also did not put in an appearance. When I returned to the lounge he was still staring out the window, his brows gathered in a dark frown.

Ella nudged me. “I told you he was in love with the Kelly girl.”

“He’s been flirting with Maurine Smith ever since he got here,” protested Fannie.

I scowled. “It must be wonderful to be so omniscient.”

“Er-yes,” admitted Fannie dubiously. “At any rate she says he’s simply fascinating, and I know he’s spent hours hanging over her switchboard. That reminds me,” she said, trotting over to Captain French, who was staring gloomily out at the weather. “About the bridge, Captain. What is the latest report?”

I doubt if there was any interval of ten minutes duration during this period when Captain French was not confronted with that question. No wonder he looked jaded.

“I understand the highway commission hopes to have the bridge back in place and open for service by tomorrow morning,” he said.

Fannie gave a little squeal of dismay. “Not before morning! Oh dear, do you mean we’ll have to go through another horrible night cooped up in this place in fear of our lives?”

“I assure you,” said Captain French as he had been assuring panic-stricken guests for the past twelve hours, “there is no danger; the officers have the situation well in hand.”

As I found out from Chet Keith, it was not only the sheriff and his two deputies who had taken over the task of guarding the prisoners. Jeff Wayne had announced that it was not sufficient to have somebody stationed in the hall outside Sheila Kelly’s room. He pointed out, which was true enough, that the room had windows as well as doors, so he had delegated to himself the responsibility of doing sentry duty under Sheila Kelly’s windows.

“You can see for yourself if you care to look out,” muttered Chet Keith with a grimace. “He’s pacing up and down in the drizzle like the quixotic young fool he is.”