There is No Return (16 page)

“It has begun to drizzle, hasn’t it?” I said. “That makes it just too lovely.”

“Doesn’t it? Of all the dismal holes!”

He shivered and I glanced at him sharply. He looked almost as jittery as Ella, which I am positive was new in his experience.

“Why quixotic?” I asked sharply.

His thoughts were far away, for he started, then grinned ruefully.

“Young Wayne, you mean? Of course you know what ails him?”

I shook my head and he laughed bitterly. “He’s scared to death that Judy Oliver will be the next victim.”

I stared at him in astonishment. “The next victim!”

“Gloria Canby hated Judy,” he said.

I could scarcely believe my ears. “I didn’t expect you to endorse this hand-from-the-grave stuff,” I said sternly.

“I’m only telling you what young Wayne happens to believe,” he said shortly. “He’s in love with the Oliver girl.”

“That’s why he avoids her,” I remarked with what I intended for irony.

“Naturally,” snapped Chet Keith. “He’s afraid. Haven’t you noticed how he glares at Sheila?”

He stammered slightly over the name and gave me a thoroughly miserable look. “What in the devil is going on here, Miss Adams?” he asked in a stifled voice.

“Have you tried — I believe you called it turning the professor wrong side out yet?” I countered.

His blue eyes sharpened. “You believe she killed Canby at the professor’s suggestion?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” I confessed unhappily.

I was not alone in that predicament, as I discovered when I circulated about among my fellow guests. The parlour doors were again closed and locked with Thomas Canby’s body inside. The lounge was neither comfortable nor cheerful that gloomy afternoon, with the rain whispering against the windows and everything damp to the touch. Nevertheless no one showed any disposition to go off by himself. Everybody hovered disconsolately in small groups in the lobby, talking in low tones or staring blankly at the floor. As I made it my business to find out, it was the consensus of opinion that Sheila Kelly had killed Thomas Canby. There, however, all agreement ended.

Quite a few, noticeably the men, believed with the sheriff that the girl was a designing adventuress. They were convinced that she was making a desperate play at Dora Canby’s fortune. They did not put any faith in the theory that she was or ever had been in a hypnotic trance. They pointed out that the professor was an obvious quack. They said the girl was a clever actress, and why not? Hadn’t she been on the stage for years? The fact that she had previously been arrested in a raided night club told against her.

“Just a bad egg,” they remarked with that concerted masculine piety which always annoys me.

“She was acquitted,” I said angrily.

“So that reporter says,” I was reminded, “but he’s obviously determined to get her out of it by hook or crook. I suppose he’s counting on a slice of the Canby millions.”

Others were just as positive that Sheila Kelly was guilty of the fatal blow, but they were by no means disposed to absolve the professor of complicity. It was their opinion that Sheila Kelly had not been putting on an act when she went into the alleged trance. They said the girl could not have been faking during that remarkable demonstration at the séance. They argued that it might be a deep-laid plot against the Canby fortune, but if so the professor was the manipulator and Sheila Kelly only his tool. To this I found myself subscribing.

The third group, which included Ella, though she declined to enter into the general discussion, insisted that Sheila Kelly killed Thomas Canby, but declared that the professor had nothing to do with it. They said she was actuated by Gloria Canby’s malignant and revengeful spirit. They talked with bated breath of other supernatural occurrences of which they had heard, occurrences where the dead returned to contact the living, usually with hair-raising results.

“I never listened to such balderdash!” I protested indignantly. “Did you ever see a ghost? Or you? Or you? Of course not! You heard about someone who did.”

A large elderly woman sitting in a wheel chair undertook to set me right. “Many phenomena of this nature have been vouched for by unimpeachable witnesses, Miss Adams.”

I sniffed. “Seeing’s believing,” I snapped.

Ella regarded me in a most unfriendly manner. “I wouldn’t tempt fate too far if I were you, Adelaide,” she said. “After all, your room adjoins that girl’s.”

“I’m not afraid that Gloria Canby’s phantom will come through the door and cut my throat, Ella, if that is what you mean.”

Ella shrugged her shoulders. “I notice you haven’t retired to your room as usual for your afternoon nap.”

As a matter of fact I had had no intention of doing so, for several reasons, but Ella has always been able to taunt me into action.

“I’m going shortly,” I announced in my loftiest manner and then rather spoiled my own effect by adding, “Anyway, the door between my room and Sheila Kelly’s is bolted.”

“As if bolts and bars mean anything to the undead!” exclaimed Fannie Parrish dramatically. “I wouldn’t be alone in that room for-for...” She paused, unable to think of anything emphatic enough, and finished with a defiant flourish. “I wouldn’t be alone anywhere in this awful place. I intend to spend the night right here on this settee.”

The woman in the wheel chair glanced uneasily over her shoulder. “I don’t think any of us look forward to being alone as long as that girl is here.”

I lost my temper. “Why should she bother you or me?” I asked.

“Granting that she did kill Canby. We’ve done her no harm and she stands to gain nothing from us. I think you are all a little out of your mind about this thing.”

Ella frowned. “Dora Canby’s canary hadn’t done any harm either,” she said, “and heaven knows, there was nothing to gain by strangling it, but it was strangled.”

Fannie Parrish lowered her voice to a whisper. “Gloria Canby was a thoroughly vicious person,” she said. “Did you know she drowned Jeff Wayne’s pet pup? Held its head under water till it died. It had been a present from his mother, her last present just before she died. He was awfully attached to it — the dog, I mean.”

I gave my shoulders a little shake. “The girl is dead,” I said.

I meant my voice to ring with conviction, but it must not have quite come off, for Fannie Parrish went right on.

“It’s all the professor’s fault,” she said, “though I don’t believe he intended anything like this. He did, however, tear the veil aside.”

“What veil aside from what, for heaven’s sake?” I demanded impatiently.

“It’s just as you said,” pursued Fannie, knitting her brows. “The professor has been weakening Sheila Kelly’s resistance to mental suggestion for months, so she was ripe for that other to take possession.”

“Tommyrot!” I protested and turned away.

I did not know that Ella had followed me until she put her hand on my arm as I reached the foot of the stairs. I was more nervous than I realized, for I started violently and then turned very red.

“What do you mean, creeping up on a person like that?” I demanded angrily.

Ella for once in her life failed to take umbrage. “Don’t go off to your room alone, Adelaide,” she said so earnestly that I was touched. “I tell you it isn’t safe.”

“Nonsense!”

“Fannie Parrish is right. The professor has been tampering with forces he can’t control and he’s let loose a devil in this place.”

“Preposterous!”

“I don’t like to think of you upstairs next door to that unfortunate girl.”

Ella and I are fond of each other in our way, but we do not make a habit of displaying our affection and we were both embarrassed by Ella’s very evident concern. I patted her arm clumsily, not being any more adept than she at tender gestures.

“Aren’t you forgetting that there is a deputy on guard in the hall, to say nothing of young Jeff Wayne outside under the window?” I asked. “I’ll be all right.”

My voice was a little gruff and Ella sighed. “Do, for heaven’s sake, Adelaide, keep that door locked.”

I looked at her sharply and wondered again if it was possible that Ella had recognized the voices in my room the night before.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Of course I’ll keep the door locked.”

It took me a long time to climb the stairs, longer than I can lay to my arthritic knee. I had the queerest feeling that something was tugging back upon me. I told myself it was all Ella’s fault. I had forgotten until she reminded me that the door which opened into Sheila Kelly’s room from mine was not locked, but bolted on her side. I had never felt in the least drawn to Butch. Nevertheless he was an extremely welcome sight, tilted back in his straight chair against Sheila Kelly’s door.

He cocked an eyebrow at me when he recognized me. “You’d think there was smallpox on this floor, the way people are staying away from it,” he said.

I had an idea that he himself was none too comfortable at his post. At any rate he was disposed to be conversational, but I cut him short for the simple reason that I much preferred staying there in the hall talking with him to entering my own room and I have never believed in indulging my weaknesses. I thought Butch stared after me wistfully as I grasped my doorknob and firmly turned it.

I still insist, in spite of Ella’s jeers, that it was the presence of the alley cat, not Sheila Kelly, which made me shriek. “Many people have a horror of cats,” I have repeatedly told her.

“I never heard of your being one of them before,” retorted Ella.

Unfortunately this was true. I have never felt the aversion which is said to overcome certain persons at the glimpse of a cat. Nevertheless when I walked into that dingy, ill-lighted room on the second floor of Mount Lebeau that afternoon and saw that gaunt, green-eyed alley cat rearing its hackles and spitting at me from the windowsill, it did give me a turn.

“What is it?” shouted the deputy on the other side of the door.

“What’s wrong, Miss Adams?”

I swallowed hard. Sheila Kelly was standing in the centre of the floor, staring at me, her knuckles pressed against her quivering lips, the door into her room open behind her.

“Nothing,” I said after a long pause. “Nothing at all. I-I merely stumped my toe on the rug.”

I heard the deputy mutter something which sounded suspiciously like “Damned fool hysterical women!” Then he shuffled heavily back down the hall to his chair.

“God bless you,” whispered Sheila Kelly and, sinking into a chair, covered her face with her shaking hands.

I should, of course, have put the alley cat out. There were several things I should have done when I discovered Sheila Kelly in my room, such as informing the deputy, if not the sheriff, of her presence. However, I had taken my stand and there was nothing to do except live up to it, or so I thought at the time, though had I foreseen... But it is too late now to wonder whether I could have changed the dreadful sequence of events if I had not lied to Butch Newby, if instead I had thrown my door open for his inspection.

I did lie — that remains unalterable — and I put neither Sheila Kelly nor the cat out. Once I had recovered from the initial shock I felt equally sorry for both of them. It was, as I have said, a very gaunt, miserable-looking specimen of alley cat. Its ribs showed through its mangy grey coat. It was depressingly dirty and wet and one of its paws had been injured, so that it limped slightly. Like all strays, it was embarrassingly grateful for the smallest attention.

“Here, puss, here, puss,” I murmured, as much to give myself as Sheila Kelly a breathing space.

An invitation was all that Mr Tom required. I suppose it had been a long time, if ever, since he had had a kind word. Rubbing against my ankles, he purred loudly.

“There’s nothing wrong with his motor at any rate,” I said and sat down rather limply in a chair.

The cat promptly jumped into my lap and, still purring loudly, stretched luxuriously before cuddling down with every appearance of having settled in for the winter.

Sheila Kelly looked at me, her lips quivering. “I’ve got to talk to you, I’ve got to talk to somebody,” she whispered.

She was at the breaking point, I realized that at once. I suppose that is really why I lied to Butch. The girl looked so desperate and forlorn, as if, like the cat, she hadn’t a friend in the world.

“But maybe you’re afraid of me,” she said. “Maybe you’re scared to be alone with me.”

I cannot describe the horror with which she managed to invest these words. I realized that the hand with which I was stroking the cat was trembling visibly. I tried to hide it, but she saw and shivered.

“I did it,” she said. “I killed a man! Cut his throat! Oh, God!”

By my sharp revulsion of feeling I knew that, like the others, I had gradually arrived at the decision that Sheila Kelly was guilty, in spite of how I had felt about it the night before. Only, face to face with her, it did not seem possible. “She is no killer,” I remember saying to myself quite fiercely. I leaned a little forward and the cat squirmed, then accommodated himself to my new posture after a reproachful glance up into my eyes.

“The professor is back of it,” I said. “He must be!”

She caught her breath. “If only I could believe it!”

I made my voice as stern as possible. “The dead do not return. Remember what Chet Keith told you. The dead cannot come back to torture the living.”

The girl had more pluck than I imagined. “Neither can you hypnotize a person into committing murder against his will,” she reminded me in a low voice. “Don’t you see? That is what is driving me crazy! Even if he-he wanted to, the professor couldn’t make me cut Thomas Canby’s throat in a trance. It’s something-something else that-that gets into me, Miss Adams, something horrible!”

The wind was rising, and behind me something creaked. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I stated sharply. Nevertheless I could not keep from glancing over my shoulder, and Sheila Kelly saw and smiled bitterly.

“Isn’t there a place in the Bible that puts a curse upon you for tampering with the unknown?” she asked.

“I dare say you are referring to the incident of the Witch of Endor,” I stammered.