There is No Return (17 page)

“That’s what the professor and I have done,” she said with a shudder. “I let him tamper with my mind to put over a cheap racket and now – and now...” She drew her hand confusedly across her forehead. “And now my mind doesn’t belong to me any more. We let down the bars and she – and she comes in and takes possession whenever she likes. Whenever she likes!” she repeated wildly, her voice mounting to a wail which made the cat in my lap stir uncomfortably, the hair about its neck bristling.

“Such things aren’t possible!” I protested a little frantically.

“You have permitted the professor to tamper with your mind. You have allowed him to break down your resistance to mental suggestion, his suggestion. But whatever it is that has taken possession of your mind, it is not supernatural. You’ve got, as Chet Keith told you, to hang onto that for dear life.”

“But I killed Thomas Canby,” she whispered. “You were all there and you know I killed him, and this morning-this morning I would have attacked Judy Oliver if Chet hadn’t snapped me out of it.”

“There is a great difference between slapping a girl’s face and killing a man,” I said slowly, “and about last night, the room was dark. All any of us can swear to is that you called Thomas Canby a number of hard names before the lights went out.”

Again she drew a long breath. “There were no bloodstains on the handkerchief, Miss Adams, I swear it,” she whispered.

It was heart-breaking to see how eagerly she leaped at even the frailest hope. It seemed to me that I could not bear it if I were unable to find some means of reassuring the poor distraught young thing.

“I’ll put it to you like this,” I said, feeling my way as I went.

“You said yourself that Professor Matthews was a quack, but a harmless one. At least before he met Dora Canby he was engaged in a questionable game, but not a criminal one.”

She winced. “Yes.”

“However, he had not then come up against the temptation of several million dollars.”

She made a wry face. “Until we met Dora Canby there was no money in the racket at all; none, I mean, except what we earned for a third-rate vaudeville act.”

“Just so,” I murmured. Curiously enough, putting it into words had the effect of clarifying my own thoughts. I went on with a great deal more confidence.

“The professor would not be the first small-time crook who lost his head when he saw the chance to put his hands on big money.”

“You mean you think he-he...” She shook her head. “It’s scientifically true, Miss Adams, that you can’t use hypnosis to make a subject commit murder against his will,” she repeated in a despairing voice.

“There’s no proof you committed murder!” I cried sharply. “So far as the evidence goes, anybody in that room, including myself, with access to the light cord could have taken advantage of the darkness and your tirade against Thomas Canby to kill him.”

She stared at me. “You think the professor framed me?” she whispered.

“There was nothing to prevent his staging these Gloria manifestations to put you on the spot, while he did the actual murder himself.”

“Oh!” she gasped, her eyes beginning to glow.

“You’ve been manoeuvred very cleverly into a position where you have not only confessed to murder but believe it,” I said. “Yet it seems to me there is no real evidence that you have ever done anything except carry on like Gloria Canby.”

She drew a long breath, like a sob. “The professor has been praying in his room this afternoon,” she whispered. “I heard him through the bathroom wall, praying for guidance — just that, over and over for guidance.”

It is nothing short of miraculous how one can delude oneself if pushed to it. “The man’s suffering from a guilty conscience!” I exclaimed. “He killed Canby and, being a coward, the professor is afraid for his immortal soul.”

She shuddered “I know, because I have been praying too.”

She got shakily to her feet and gave me a wan smile. “You must know how much you have helped me,” she said unsteadily.

I pressed her hand. “You’ve got to hold onto yourself. You haven’t been convicted of this crime yet and” — I took a weak refuge in the old adage — “murder will out.”

She clung to my fingers. “God bless you,” she said again and walked into her room with a firmer step than I would have believed possible ten minutes before. I brushed my hand across my eyes, and the cat, which had tumbled to the floor when I rose to my feet, mewed softly. He followed close at my heels and I walked over to the window and looked out. The drizzle had thickened to a slow cold rain and the wind was beginning to whine about the eaves of the house, but young Jeff Wayne was still on guard below, hunched into a heavy black raincoat which he must have borrowed from someone, for it was several sizes too big for him.

I glanced at my watch. It was too early to dress for dinner. It was too early to go back downstairs, unless I wanted Ella to know how I hated to stay alone in that room. My head felt thick. After all, I had had very little sleep the night before, and the day had been nerve-racking, to say the least, nor am I so young as I might be. I did not believe I could close my eyes; nevertheless I thought it a good idea to lie down for a few minutes and make an attempt to relax. I was surprised at how good the bed felt, for the inn’s mattresses will never take a prize.

I remember the cat hopping up beside me and turning around several times before curling up in a tight grey ball against my back. I remember telling myself that I should have to make him get down. After all, one doesn’t share one’s bed with a mangy alley cat, although it was oddly comforting to have him there with his loud purr, cosy and warm behind me. I remember telling myself with some chagrin that anything was better than being alone in that dark dreary room with the rain washing against the windows and the wind lamenting outside like a lost soul.

I don’t remember anything else until I awoke, sitting bolt upright in bed, every muscle in my body taut with terror. I did not know what had aroused me, I did not know why I was literally speechless with fright. I simply sat there, the very blood in my body congealing with horror, staring straight before me at the dim grey oblongs which were the windows in a room that had grown pitch dark with the rain and the approach of night.

Then, near me, a door closed stealthily.

I still contend that I cleared the quite considerable space between me and the light switch at a single leap, although Ella persists in saying that is impossible for a woman of my age and build.

The fact remains that scarcely a minute elapsed from the time I heard somebody close my door until I flicked on the lights with a shaking hand. The resultant illumination blinded me for a moment.

Then my eyes adjusted themselves and I saw that horrible thing on the foot of the bed.

It was not quite dead, although it had been completely eviscerated.

As I stared at it, my vocal cord paralyzed with horror, the gaunt green eyes fastened on me in dumb agony and the mangy grey tail lashed feebly while one long thin leg twitched in agony. It even made a frenzied effort, before it collapsed in its death spasms, to crawl toward me. It was then I screamed and went on screaming.

By rights the deputy Butch should have been the first to reach me, but as I discovered afterward he waited to prop his chair, under Sheila Kelly’s door. So it was Ella, of all people, who came to my rescue, bouncing into the room as if she had been shot out of a gun and proceeding to shake me violently before she snatched up the water pitcher off my bedside table and drenched me. I was still spluttering when Chet Keith collided with Butch Newby and Sheriff Latham on the threshold of my room. Back of them I saw Fannie Parrish, her wiry iron-grey hair standing on end with fright, clinging to Captain Bill French, who was furiously biting his moustache.

“Good Lord, Miss Adams, I thought you’d been murdered!” exclaimed Chet Keith, suppressing a grin as he observed the trickle of water meandering down my face from the false curls on my forehead, which had taken the full force of Ella’s deluge.

“We all expected you to have your throat cut,” contributed Fannie Parrish with a nervous giggle.

“What’s the big idea?” demanded the sheriff. “Scaring us out of our wits!”

This time I could not be mistaken about Butch’s remark. “Damned hysterical women!”

It is necessary to explain that in their preoccupation with me nobody as yet had discovered that grisly object upon the foot of my bed. I suppose I should have been flattered at their concern, especially Ella’s, who looked far more shaken than I did and who still clutched the water pitcher and was inclined to brandish it.

“Do put that thing down,” I said crossly. “Aren’t you satisfied with nearly drowning me?”

To my consternation Ella burst into tears. “I twitted you into coming off up here by yourself and if anything had happened to you, Adelaide, I should never have forgiven myself.”

“There, there,” I murmured, patting her arm and feeling very foolish. “I’m sorry to disappoint everybody but I’m all right.”

To my relief Ella promptly reverted to form. “Then what in heaven’s name do you mean, Adelaide Adams, by scaring the daylights out of me?”

I took a long breath and pointed, rather melodramatically I am afraid, toward the bed. I think it was Chet Keith who first brushed by me and stood looking down at that gruesome corpse, his face as white as paper. Then everybody crowded into the room to stare at the mangled alley cat. That is why, later, I could not swear to who was there and who wasn’t and when. I recall Lila Atwood and how expressionless she was except for her sickened eyes, and Judy Oliver, clutching her brother’s arm but gazing at Jeff Wayne, who had run in from outside and looked very cold and wet and tired, and Allan Atwood hovering for a moment on the threshold before he gave way to Coroner Timmons, and Patrick Oliver, great circles under his ingenuous blue eyes, saying his Aunt Dora had sent him upstairs to find out what had happened. Even the woman in the wheel chair refused to be left alone in the lobby and managed to hobble in, supported by Miss Maurine Smith on one side and on the other by the porter Jake, whose face was chalky with fear and who refused even to glance at my bed.

Everybody kept asking me questions. How had it happened and what was the cat doing in my room and why didn’t I know what had taken place? I think I must have explained separately and collectively a dozen or more times that I was as much in the dark as anyone. You would have thought I had deliberately planned the episode to reduce Fannie Parrish and certain other guests of the inn to a more complete state of gibbering panic, if that were possible.

“I don’t know where the cat came from,” I repeated wearily. “It was just here when I came to my room and it was cold and wet and” — at this point my tone bristled in spite of myself — “I let it stay.”

“Of all the silly things to do!” protested Ella, eyeing me sharply.

“It seemed a good idea at the time,” I said weakly.

Hogan Brewster, who had taken Allan Atwood’s place in the doorway, grinned at me. “I don’t suppose you could have taken to walking in your sleep, could you, Miss Adams?”

“I didn’t butcher the poor animal, Mr Brewster, if that is what you mean,” I said with a shudder.

He continued to favour me with his sardonic smile. “It’s a little uncanny, isn’t it, that you were shut in here alone with the beast when it happened. I mean there was a guard outside in the hall and Jeff here was doing sentry duty under the window, or were you?”

Young Wayne coloured angrily. “Yes.”

The deputy sounded slightly nettled. “I was sitting down the hall. I had my back this way, but I don’t see how nobody could have come out of this room without my hearing them.”

My eyes met Chet Keith’s and I knew that he had remembered about unlocking the door into Sheila Kelly’s room the night before.

Sheriff Latham scratched his head and looked at me very hard. “You say just after you woke up you heard a door close, Miss Adams?”

I nodded and again Chet Keith’s eyes met mine.

“The door into the hall?” persisted the sheriff.

“What other door could it have been?” I demanded tartly. “Or do you think somebody is hiding in my bathroom?”

That created a diversion. The sheriff and Butch promptly strode across the room and inspected the bath. They looked both uneasy and crestfallen when they returned.

“It couldn’t have been the door into the adjoining room,” said Chet Keith, wearing his blandest expression. “It is locked.”

He seized the knob and shook it vigorously to sustain his contention.

“Moreover, the key is on this side,” he announced.

I think I must have blinked, but Chet Keith regarded me without batting an eye. There was a key in the lock on my side of the door, but it had not been there when I detoured the sheriff and his henchman into the bathroom.

“As if locks and bars mean anything to that girl!” cried Fannie Parrish, staring intently at the dividing wall between my room and Sheila Kelly’s. “As I’ve said before,” she repeated emphatically, “none of us is safe! Not one! So long as Gloria Canby’s unhappy spirit continues to roam this house!”

Sheriff Latham had a bewildered look. “I don’t take no stock in this supernatural business,” he said doggedly. “If that gal killed the cat, she come out of a door just like anybody else.”

He fixed a piercing glance upon Butch, who coloured darkly.

“I ain’t saying nobody didn’t come out Miss Adams’ door,” he said in a heckled voice. “I told you I had my back turned and I may have caught a wink or two of sleep.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time he’s slept on duty,” I put in with a sniff.

“Just the same,” continued the deputy, looking baited but very certain of his ground, “one thing I can swear to: the Kelly dame never came out her door.”

“When the man’s asleep, you could blow a trumpet back of his ear, without waking him,” said Ella with indignation.

“Oh yeah?” retorted Butch. “Maybe so, but I’ve had my chair tilted back against the Kelly girl’s door for over an hour, and if you think she could move that chair with my two hundred pounds in it without waking me, lady, then there is such a thing as hypnotism and ghosts.”