There is No Return (18 page)

“You’d think,” interposed Fannie Parrish, “that all this commotion next door would have aroused her.”

The sheriff scowled. “We’ll just see what she has to say for herself.”

“The door’s bolted on her side,” I put in hurriedly.

Hogan Brewster frowned. “How do you know, Miss Adams?”

He had a talent for disconcerting me. “I happened to hear her shoot the bolt,” I said, conscious of the sheriff’s stare.

“The partitions between these rooms aren’t soundproof,” interposed Ellen with suspicious quickness. “From my bathroom I can hear Adelaide every time she washes her hands.”

The sheriff again transfixed Butch with a glance. “You’ve got the key to the Kelly girl’s room. Go around by the hall and open this door between. I want to see her face when she discovers the cat.”

Butch saluted smartly and strode out. I remember holding my breath. I had a horror of meeting Sheila Kelly’s eyes, of watching her come into that room before all our staring eyes to be confronted with that limp, bloodstained thing on my bed. I noticed that Chet Keith’s hands were clenched. I have an idea that he, too, was holding his breath. However, although it was merely postponing the inevitable, Sheriff Latham was not destined at that time to have his promised interview with Sheila Kelly. Butch suddenly reappeared in the doorway. He looked as if he had taken a punch in the jaw.

“Something’s wrong,” he said hoarsely.

“What the hell!” exclaimed the sheriff, taking a step toward him.

The deputy actually cowered. “The professor’s door is standing wide open,” he croaked.

We must have all stared at him incredulously, for he went on insistently. “The key’s still in my pocket,” he said, “but his door’s wide open and-and ...” He swallowed. “There’s a little stream of blood creeping down the hall.”

Again there was a period of confusion during which I cannot be positive of anybody’s movements, not even my own. I have a dim recollection of everybody crowding out into the hall, just as formerly everybody had crowded into my room. I remember Ella holding onto my arm convulsively and gulping as she stared over my shoulder at that prostrate figure beyond the open door down the corridor. I distinctly remember Fannie Parrish’s teeth chattering in my very ear and Judy Oliver beginning to sob loudly while Jeff Wayne took her hand and cradled it against his cheek and begged her not to be frightened because he would protect her with his life. I remember Chet Keith muttering over and over, “God! Good God! But I warned him.” And I shall never forget Sheriff Latham, after a moment’s hesitation, going into that room and kneeling down to murmur, “He’s dead! Dead as a doornail!”

As if he needed to tell us that after we had one glimpse of Professor Thaddeus Matthews’ contorted and livid face, grinning above the gold handle of the scissors which protruded from the wet red gash in his throat.

“You have refused from the first to put any credence in there being something supernatural about this business, Sheriff,” Chet Keith kept hammering in. “From the beginning you have persisted in taking a common sense attitude toward the situation, in which you are quite right, according to your lights, but you can’t eat your cake and have it too.”

It was some time later and we were all herded again into the front parlour downstairs, all of us, that is, who had attended the séance the night before. The folding doors into the rear room were closed, but Thomas Canby’s dead body no longer rested there alone.

Another of the hard red sofas had acquired an occupant.

“The girl killed him,” said Sheriff Latham, although his voice had lost its belligerence.

The man actually seemed dwarfed in size, and while Coroner Timmons was once more putting up a pretence of conducting the investigation, the sheriffs muscular hands were not now operating the strings, or if so, very feebly.

“You can’t have it both ways,” insisted Chet Keith. “You don’t believe that Sheila Kelly is possessed of a ghost which is able to pass through locked doors and solid walls at will, do you?”

“No,” growled Sheriff Latham in an unhappy voice.

“But by the evidence of your own man she never left her room. Or are you going to turn around and say now that there is such a thing as hypnotism and she hypnotized your deputy Butch into removing both himself and his chair from her door without either his knowledge or consent?”

“Nope,” said the sheriff doggedly, “she never got past Butch.”

“Then she didn’t kill the professor!” exclaimed Chet Keith. He did not look at me but he was perfectly conscious of what I was thinking, I feel sure. “And if she didn’t kill the professor she didn’t kill Canby!”

The girl, sitting between the two deputies, did not lift her head.

She had not looked up since they brought her into the room, quite a while after the discovery of the professor’s dead body. I had dreaded seeing her. I had wondered how on earth I could meet her eyes, knowing what I knew. It was all very well for Chet Keith to bulldoze the sheriff, but he could not deceive me. The door into her room had not been locked on my side when I went to sleep.

“Or don’t you believe that the two crimes are connected?” demanded Chet Keith.

The sheriff wriggled his burly shoulders. “They’re connected,” he admitted miserably, “though danged if I know how.”

“It’s plain enough,” said Chet Keith quickly. “The professor knew something. If you want it in words of one syllable, he knew who murdered Thomas Canby and he paid for his knowledge with his life.”

“Might be,” muttered the sheriff.

Chet Keith’s face was pretty white. “As a matter of fact,” he said without any signs of happiness, “I signed the professor’s death warrant when I warned him in the presence of everybody in this room that I was going to get his secret out of him.”

“You’ve been entirely too buttinsky in this whole affair,” said Sheriff Latham with a scowl.

It was his last spurt of rebellion against allowing matters to slide out of his hands, and Chet Keith knew it.

“You’re over your head, Sheriff,” he said, not unkindly. “You have been all along.”

The sheriff was a bigger man than I had thought. He was big enough to acknowledge his limitations.

“All right,” he said in a muffled voice, “this thing has got me beat. If you can do better with it, help yourself.”

Chet Keith needed no second invitation. There was a set to his jaw which indicated that he had determined to take over the situation and a glint in his eyes which said it would be unfortunate for anybody who tried to side-track him.

“Sheila Kelly could not have killed the professor,” he repeated. “She could not have got out of her room. When Butch wasn’t propped up against her door, his chair was wedged under it.”

“That’s right,” said Butch in a dogged voice.

Still Sheila Kelly did not raise her eyes.

“What about the amber hairpin which the professor was clutching in his hand?” asked Allan Atwood with a sullen frown.

I caught my breath. I had not known till then that the dead man had held an amber-coloured hairpin in his hand when discovered.

“Yeah,” put in Patrick Oliver resentfully, “what about it, Keith? Sheila Kelly’s the only woman at the inn with long blonde hair.”

The sheriff took up the point with eagerness. “You wear hairpins like this, Miss Kelly?” he asked and held out another of those cheap celluloid pins which I had seen before.

She stared at it and I saw the cords in her throat work, as if she were trying to speak, but no sound came.

“Certainly she wears them,” interposed Chet Keith smoothly.

“She has a couple in her hair now.”

Everybody leaned forward, the better to see, and there they were, neatly pinning that pale coil of golden hair on the nape of her neck.

“Let’s see one,” snapped Sheriff Latham.

She put up her hand with a dazed gesture and removed a hairpin. It was a mate to the one which the sheriff had laid on the table beside him.

“Might be its twin,” muttered the deputy Butch.

“What of it?” I demanded tremulously. “You can buy a card of them in any dime store for ten cents.”

Coroner Timmons frowned. “But it was clutched in the dead man’s hand.”

“On the contrary,” said Chet Keith quickly. “If you remember, I called it especially to your attention, sir. The pin was not clutched in the professor’s hand. It was merely resting between his fingers on the floor and they were perfectly relaxed.”

“What’s the difference?” demanded the sheriff. “He had it, didn’t he, and it’s our only clue.”

Chet Keith continued to address the coroner. “You’re a doctor,” he said. “You know that at the moment of violent death the extremities of the victim undergo what is called a cadaveric spasm.

This causes the fingers to close tightly upon whatever is held in the hand, so tightly it is almost impossible to loosen them. It is a condition which nobody can simulate.”

Coroner Timmons nodded reluctantly, and the sheriff gave Chet Keith an impatient scowl. “What of it?” he asked again.

“The pin was placed in the professor’s hand after death.”

“Why should the girl put one of her hairpins in his hand after death?” scoffed Sheriff Latham.

“She didn’t,” said Chet Keith. “The pin was put there by the murderer to incriminate Sheila Kelly.”

His eyes travelled slowly over the circle of faces about him.

“Somebody in this group killed Canby and framed Sheila Kelly for the murder,” he said, “but the professor knew the truth and he was weakening. If he had lived, sooner or later he’d have told everything, so one of you killed him.”

I think we all gasped and it seemed to me for a moment that everybody there looked both guilty and apprehensive, a reaction which even the innocent are apt to show to such an accusation.

“Aren’t you covering a lot of territory?” demanded Allan Atwood savagely. “You and your cadaveric spasms! How do you happen to know so much about that sort of thing?”

Chet Keith’s mouth tightened. “I’ve been a reporter, a police reporter, if I must be exact. I’ve watched the best detectives in the business work. There’s not much about crime I don’t know.”

“Oh yeah?” muttered Patrick Oliver.

Chet Keith turned upon him so suddenly the boy involuntarily drew back. “You’re due for a little explaining, Oliver,” said Keith.

“Oh yeah?” muttered the boy again, but I saw how white he had become and his sister saw, too, for she moved closer to him.

“You admitted at the inquest this morning that it was you who brought the professor into your aunt’s life,” said Chet Keith sternly.

“I believe you expressed it that you put up a job on your Aunt Dora.”

Patrick Oliver was trembling. “It was-was just a joke,” he stammered.

“You and your eternal horseplay!” exclaimed Jeff Wayne bitterly.

“I’d never have thought of it,” said Patrick, directing a glare at Sheila Kelly’s averted face, “if it hadn’t been that she looks like – she reminded me of Gloria.”

He mopped his brow with a shaking hand.

“You saw the professor’s act and you saw a way to put over a hoax on your aunt,” said Chet Keith, looking very grim, “so you called the professor and made an appointment to talk business with him.”

Patrick Oliver had a hunted look. “There wasn’t any harm to it,” he mumbled. “I swear I didn’t mean any harm. I thought it would-would make Aunt Dora feel better to have a message from Gloria. That’s all it was supposed to be, just harmless messages, saying Gloria was happy and Aunt Dora wasn’t to worry.”

“So that’s all it was to be, according to your story,” murmured Chet Keith. “Just an innocent prank to comfort your Aunt Dora.”

The boy looked at him helplessly, then he glared at Sheila Kelly.

“She threw us a curve. Me and the professor too,” he said thickly. “That pretending to be Gloria wasn’t in the act. She thought it up herself to get her hooks into Aunt Dora’s money.”

“Your bargain with Professor Matthews did not include the Gloria manifestations?” inquired Chet Keith with a sceptical grimace.

“No!”

“They were a surprise to you and also to the professor?”

“Yes.”

“But you did give the professor the data for the Gloria messages?”

“For the Little Blue Eyes messages, yes,” said the boy sullenly.

“I had to make sure the old codger could deliver the goods.”

“Just so,” assented Chet Keith and glanced at Sheila Kelly. “You don’t remember afterward what has happened when you’re in a trance?”

She shivered. “Not unless I’m told to remember.”

The girl was all to pieces. Chet Keith realized that as well as I. That is the reason, I am confident, that he avoided questioning her, as much as possible. He was afraid that at any minute she might blurt out the truth about the door between her room and mine.

I fixed stern eyes upon young Oliver. “I suppose you realize that you and you alone had the opportunity to frame this business?” I inquired coldly.

“I didn’t! I didn’t! Everything I told the girl to say was harmless. The professor knows. He heard every word.”

“Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for you, the Professor’s knowledge died with him,” said Chet Keith gravely.

“You can’t even prove I ever made a deal with him.”

“No,” said Chet Keith, “I couldn’t have proved it. That was a leap in the dark, but it worked. You admitted that you and the professor used Sheila Kelly to play a hoax upon your aunt.”

“I never put her up to pretending to be Gloria!” insisted the boy. “The first time she did it I was scared to death and I’ve been scared ever since.”

“Nevertheless last night when Sheila Kelly wanted to back out of the séance you insisted that she had to go on.”

The boy’s shoulders sagged. “There wasn’t anything else to do,” he stammered. “Uncle Thomas was here. To have run out at that stage was as good as admitting it was all a fake. I thought the only thing to do was to bluff it out. You’ve got to believe me. I never dreamed it would end in murder!”

His voice rose to a scream and Judy put her arm about him.

“You haven’t any right to torment him like this,” she protested with a sob. “Patrick didn’t mean any harm. He was-was just trying to-to help me.”