There is No Return (22 page)

“So accurate somebody proposed testing her farther.”

“The hell they did!”

“She went out of the room and closed the door while everybody, one by one, performed some small act, such as sharpening a pencil or lowering a shade or straightening a picture, concentrating at the same time upon getting their actions over to Judy out in the hall.”

“Well?”

I deliberately waited a moment, to sharpen his suspense. “Like yourself, Lila Atwood and Patrick Oliver drew a blank.”

“Go on!” he cried when I made another provoking pause.

“They had shown no talent as receivers earlier in the evening. They showed none as senders at this time.”

“Are you trying to tantalize me to death?” he demanded. “Who, if anybody, did show a telepathic talent for transferring thoughts?”

I suspect my voice betrayed some smugness over my discovery. “You’ll be surprised to know that two people out of the group succeeded almost perfectly in getting their actions across to Judy by the telepathic route. They succeeded so well, I understand, that she was sent out of the room a dozen times or more and the experiment repeated and, so my informant tells me, in ninety per cent of the cases she was able to return and repeat in detail the exact actions of these two people during her absence.”

I think I must have been quite pale at this point, for he stared at me and caught his breath. “All right,” he said, “two people in the Canby family have the gift of getting their thoughts across to a receptive subject such as – such as Sheila Kelly undoubtedly is. Now will you stop being tantalizing long enough to give me their names?”

“They were,” I said gravely, “Dora Canby and her least favoured nephew, Allan Atwood.”

“Allan Atwood!”

“And Dora Canby,” I added firmly.

“You’ve narrowed it down to those two!”

“I’ve simply shown you, I hope to your satisfaction, that at least two other people here at the inn possessed the necessary mental equipment to run Professor Matthews a close race when it came to making mental suggestions to Sheila Kelly.”

We stared at each other, and his face was quite ghastly. I think in the beginning he attached little if any importance to my theory.

He had clutched at it, to be sure, as a drowning man might clutch at a straw, but without conviction. Now, however, his attitude suffered a drastic change.

“Somebody has got hold of the girl’s mind,” he whispered, “somebody who stops at nothing!”

“It’s the only sane explanation,” I repeated stubbornly.

“But do you realize what it means?” he demanded, his fists clenching. “She’s been forced to incriminate herself. She’s been brought to the very brink of despair and there’s no telling what else she’ll be forced to do.”

I nodded, feeling sure that my face was as white as his. “I don’t believe she can stand much more,” I said. “That is why I promised her to find out who’s back of this devilish business.”

“Until we do,” he cried in a strangled voice, “she’s at his mercy!”

“Or her mercy,” I felt constrained to point out.

It was Ella who reminded me that I had not had a bite of dinner and the dining room was due to close in a few minutes. I protested that I was not hungry. I even went so far as to say that I didn’t know how anybody in that house had the heart to sit down to a meal after everything that had happened. I might as well have talked to the wind.

“Of course you’re hungry,” said Ella, propelling me bodily across the lounge. “You’ve got to keep your strength up, Adelaide.

There’s another session with the coroner in half an hour.”

“I realize that as well as you do,” I said shortly.

Ella shrugged her shoulders. “Even if you and Chet Keith have had your heads together for the last hour, I doubt if you can pull it off.”

“Pull what off? Our heads?” I demanded.

“You know very well,” said Ella, wrinkling her brows, “that you and that newspaper chap are determined to get Sheila Kelly out of this thing.”

I tried to read her face, but Ella can be inscrutable if she likes.

“Mr Keith is interested, like myself, solely in seeing that justice is served,” I remarked in my most dignified tones.

“Oh yeah?” retorted Ella with her deplorable tendency to pick up current slang.

I could not think of a suitably crushing retort, so I contented myself with compressing my lips and studying the menu. To my relief Ella seemed satisfied to let it go at that. Because of the lateness of the hour we had the dining room practically to ourselves. Only Allan Atwood was at the Canby table, picking listlessly at the food before him, absorbed, as was evident at a glance, in thoughts of his own, painful thoughts to judge by the darkness of his expression.

I was not aware that I was watching him until Ella caught me at it. “He’s maladjusted and awkward and self-conscious,” she said, “thanks to Thomas Canby and his daughter Gloria. I understand they made Allan’s life miserable for years, but do you think a fellow who can’t walk across the floor without barking his shin against a chair could jerk a light cord out and cut a man’s throat in the dark and get back to his place in less than a minute without mishap?”

“I have not accused Allan Atwood of murder,” I protested, although I fancy I looked guilty.

“It’s perfectly apparent,” remarked Ella in scathing accents, “that you and that reporter are willing to pin the guilt on anybody if it will clear Sheila Kelly.”

“Don’t be absurd!” I protested. “I told you we want only to see justice done.”

“You even tried to make out that poor little Judy Oliver was an accomplice,” said Ella indignantly. “As if Patrick isn’t the most transparent person in the world!”

“He did bring the professor here.”

“And look how quickly he admitted it when pressed,” Ella pointed out.

“I don’t believe Patrick is a murderer,” I admitted.

“I should hope not!” cried Ella. “Nor Judy either! Have you any conception how much courage it required for her to confess in front of Jeff Wayne that she is in love with him, after the pains he has taken to deny that he cares for her?”

“He cares for her all right,” I muttered.

“Certainly he does,” snapped Ella, “but he’ll never admit it so long as Sheila Kelly is at large.”

At this point I lost my temper. “While we are on the subject,” I said, “I might remind you, Mrs Trotter, that your own attitude is not in the strictest sense impartial.”

“What do you mean by that crack?” demanded Ella with more asperity than elegance.

“You are perfectly willing to shove the guilt off upon Sheila Kelly, aren’t you? Anything, in fact, so long as it does not involve your pets in the Canby family.”

I should have known Ella better than to arouse her antagonism. I suffered a qualm the minute I did it, but it was too late.

“I do like Judy Oliver and that young scamp Patrick,” said Ella.

“I like Allan, too, if he is a hobbledehoy. I even have a sneaking admiration for Lila Atwood, although she lets Hogan Brewster hang around for no good reason. So what, Adelaide?”

There was a challenge in her eyes which made me definitely uneasy. “So nothing,” I grumbled, “except I claim the same privilege. I like the Kelly girl. At least I feel desperately sorry for her and I do not believe she is a killer.”

Ella gave me a very odd look. “Has it occurred to you, Adelaide, that those two might be pulling the wool over your eyes?”

“What two?”

“Chet Keith and Sheila Kelly,” she explained. “They knew each other before. I thought the first time I saw them there was something between them. I think so still. Isn’t it a trifle peculiar that he happened on the scene at this precise time?”

“What, if anything, are you driving at?”

“Big metropolitan newspapers don’t usually send their ace men to obscure places like this before a murder breaks.”

“I was given to understand,” I announced with hauteur, “that his city editor received a tip, something to do with Thomas Canby, who, I infer, did not have to get himself murdered to be news.”

Ella leaned a little forward. “Suppose Sheila Kelly sent that tip, Adelaide, if such a tip was ever sent. Suppose the whole thing is a frame-up between her and Chet Keith to secure the Canby fortune. Suppose” — there was a note in her voice which made me sit up very straight — “suppose they are just using you, Adelaide, to put the scheme over.”

It was feasible, I could not deny it. Certainly without my cooperation Chet Keith would never have been able to handle the coroner and the sheriff as they had been handled.

“How do you know they aren’t taking advantage of your being a sentimental goose?” demanded Ella.

“The idea!” I gasped indignantly. “I’ve been called an old battle-ax. I don’t deny the allegation, but I vigorously rebel at being referred to as either sentimental or a goose.”

“Bushwa!” exclaimed Ella, whatever that may mean. “You’ve always been a sucker for the underdog, Adelaide. That girl has only to roll her eyes at you and look abused to have you leap into the fray like a flea-bitten old war horse.”

“The idea!” I said again, very feebly, with a paralyzing conviction that Ella had hit the nail on the head, my head.

“It might be different if everybody was on her side,” continued Ella sarcastically, “but you know perfectly well, Adelaide, that you are fundamentally unable to resist an opportunity to be contrary.”

“I have a mind of my own, if that’s being contrary,” I said tartly.

Ella was not impressed. “Use it then,” she snapped and added with a frown, “For all you know, Adelaide, that girl brought Chet Keith down here to help her murder Canby.”

“Nonsense!”

“Naturally they had to get rid of the professor afterward.”

“Why naturally?” I demanded, feeling slightly dizzy.

“He knew enough hypnotism to tumble to the Gloria manifestations.”

“Tumble to them?”

“At first they scared him silly, just as they did me,” she was honest enough to admit. “Then he began to put two and two together and he got an answer that satisfied him.”

“You think so?”

“He wasn’t frightened this morning. He looked like a cat that had located a bird’s nest.”

“I concede the point.”

“He had figured it all out,” said Ella. “I’m convinced of it.”

“Consequently he had to die,” I remarked with what I intended for irony.

“It was that or cut him in on part of the Canby fortune,” said Ella, “so Sheila Kelly or Chet Keith — I give you your choice — killed him.”

I drew a long breath. “I have just recalled that Chet Keith could not have killed the professor, Ella. It cannot possibly have been done except during the time the deputy Butch was in my room.”

“Nobody disputes that.”

I felt a great deal better. “I can take a solemn oath that Butch and Chet Keith entered my room at the same moment and, while I cannot swear to who all came in and out during the confusion of the next few minutes, I do know that Chet Keith never left the room again until we all streamed out together into the hall after Butch gave the alarm about the professor.”

“Then,” said Ella with so much conviction my heart sank, “the girl killed him.”

“It was brought out at the investigation this afternoon that she could not have got out of her room,” I faltered.

Ella gave me a long look. “Chet Keith brought it out,” she snapped, “just as all along he has been confusing the issue where Sheila Kelly is concerned.”

My guilty knowledge was not the most comforting companion and I realized that my voice was by no means as confident as I could have wished. However, I attempted to carry the battle into Ella’s own camp.

“I thought you believed the girl was actuated by Gloria Canby’s dead hand,” I stammered.

I was disconcerted to have Ella bestow upon me a pitying glance. “You are hard put to it, Adelaide, if you have to take refuge in that argument,” she said.

“I take it you have abandoned the idea?”

Ella sniffed. “An idea at which, until this moment, you have seen fit to scoff, if not sneer, Adelaide.”

“I never have believed that the dead can return,” I said stiffly.

“I-I don’t believe so yet.”

Ella nodded her head. “It’s been too pointed,” she said, “or too theatrical if you like, the way dead cats have been found lying around, and amber-coloured hair pins such as Gloria Canby used to wear.” She frowned. “I can’t quite see a phantom taking care to leave such obvious clues to itself, can you, Adelaide?”

“I can’t see a phantom at all,” I confessed ruefully.

“The build-up has been too elaborate,” complained Ella, “precisely as if somebody with a rather lurid taste in fiction had set out to lay the horror on with a trowel. The bats, for instance, and that horrible laugh which Sheila Kelly gets off in the person of Gloria Canby, and the way she has changed her hair-dress and her makeup this past week to increase her resemblance to the dead girl.”

I shifted uneasily in my chair. “Are you now trying to make out that Sheila Kelly has deliberately cultivated her resemblance to Gloria Canby?”

“A police reporter and a former fan dancer in a night club might be expected to go in for lurid effects, mightn’t they, Adelaide?”

“I have no idea,” I said tartly.

Nevertheless, as Ella had pointed out, the build-up had been elaborate. Whoever had framed Sheila Kelly had taken the greatest pains with details. I did not doubt, although she could not remember it, that she had been told to dress her hair differently and there had been something extremely theatrical both in her gestures and her choice of words when she was impersonating Gloria Canby, exactly as if she had been rehearsed by somebody with a strong leaning toward the melodramatic.

“I wouldn’t worry so,” Ella continued with a sigh, “if I weren’t obliquely responsible for your being here, albeit against my will.”

I felt decidedly nettled, an effect which Ella and I often have upon each other. “I can look after myself,” I said haughtily. “I always have.”

“So thought the professor,” Ella reminded me. “He thought, no doubt, that he had stumbled upon a little private mint, but look at the shape he’s in now.”

“Are you trying to frighten me, Ella?”