There is No Return (28 page)

“You fiend!” I gasped, although the sounds which emerged through the gag were unintelligible.

I saw the muscles about Hogan Brewster’s handsome cruel mouth tighten and closed my eyes. I lived years before I drew my next breath, though it could have been only a matter of seconds.

Downstairs I could still hear faint sounds of people rushing about and exclaiming. I knew that Hogan Brewster had taken advantage of the excitement over Chet Keith to return to my room unobserved. I knew he was counting on getting out the same way. It was the identical ruse which he had employed when he killed Professor Matthews. I had been very foolhardy to go back to my room after Butch had been decoyed from his post.

“Not,” I told myself grimly, “that it does any good to recognize my indiscretion now.”

I remember wondering if the authorities would know how to get in touch with my foster daughter Kathleen, so as to notify her and Stephen of my death. I remember feeling very sorry for Sheila Kelly. She was so young to die with, as she believed, multiple murders upon her soul. Then I felt the thin edge of the knife at my throat.

It had never been my intention to submit without a struggle to being murdered in my own bed. I was practically helpless, but I had been gathering my strength and as Hogan Brewster stooped over me I drew my knees up and butted him with all my might in the stomach, at the same time lashing out ineffectually with my bound fists. I did not flatter myself that I could do any material harm, but I had the satisfaction of hearing my assailant grunt as the breath was knocked out of him, and in the fracas he dropped the knife. His face was black with anger as he stooped for it and he snarled something at me, an epithet commonly bestowed on the female of the dog species.

The knife was back in his hand. I saw his arm go up and the blade flashed. It was all over, I recall thinking to myself with a sob, and then something huge and black hurtled through the air and caught the killer on the temple. It rocked him back upon his heels, and for the second time the knife flew out of his grasp. At the same moment Ella followed Fannie Parrish’s umbrella into the room.

“Help! Help!” she shrieked and began to belabour Hogan Brewster with the heavy wooden handles of her knitting bag.

“Murder! Help! Help!” she continued to scream at the top of her lungs while I, to my eternal shame, fainted dead away.

I owed my life to Ella and I would never live it down. I realized that at once. She had arrived, as she expressed it, in the nick of time.

“Simply because I knew that with your temperament, Adelaide, nothing could have kept you away from all the excitement over Chet Keith — nothing, that is, over which you had any control,” she explained, looking very smug.

“Are you trying to pretend that, when you opened my door, you expected to see a murderer in the very act of cutting my throat?” I demanded scathingly.

“Well, no,” she admitted, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

“I should hope not,” I snapped.

“Just the same,” murmured Fannie Parrish, eyeing me reproachfully, “if Mrs Trotter hadn’t got a hunch that you were up to something and gone after you, you would have been killed, Miss Adams.”

We were all together again in the lounge downstairs and I had told my story a dozen times, first to Sheriff Latham and Coroner Timmons, and finally to Chet Keith, who was lying on a settee, propped up with pillows, a bandage tied in a rakish manner about his head, his hand tightly held by Sheila Kelly, sitting beside him.

“So that is really why you came upstairs after me,” I said to Ella. “You couldn’t bear to think I might be into something about which you knew nothing.”

Ella tossed her head. “Well, you were, weren’t you?” she retorted.

Fannie Parrish looked from one to the other of us with a baffled expression. I have no doubt she had expected Ella and me to fall into each other’s arms after what had happened. What Mrs Parrish did not realize was that both Ella and I were badly shaken by the narrowness of my escape, more shaken than either of us cared to admit.

As a matter of record, when I came to after Ella’s brash arrival upon the scene in my bedroom, she was feverishly dabbing cologne upon my forehead with one hand while pleading with Sheriff Latham to do something at once about my prolonged faint, as if he were not sufficiently occupied with Hogan Brewster, who was struggling in the sheriff’s grasp and cursing furiously because with the other hand Ella was still jabbing him in sundry unprotected spots with the point of Fannie Parrish’s umbrella.

“Ruined by two old hellcats!” he kept saying, showing no traces of his former urbanity.

It was Ella who finally remembered to remove the washrag from between my teeth after I had attracted her attention to it by a series of violent “Glugs!” It was also Ella who untied the towels that fastened my wrists and ankles and assisted me to my feet and, no matter what Fannie Parrish may think, Ella and I are fond of each other. It is just that it embarrasses us to betray it.

That is why Ella’s first remark was, to say the least, unsympathetic. “It is exactly like you, Adelaide Adams, to try to get yourself killed, so I’d have it on my conscience for the rest of my life.”

Her caustic tone had nothing whatever to do with the concerned manner in which she was patting my shoulder, and I know she understands perfectly that the reason I barked at her in my turn was because I had to or make a fool of myself.

“Pleasesh put thash bottle of cologne away,” I said haughtily. “You know how I hate to smell like a barber shopth.”

I have not found it necessary until now to explain that I wear a pivot tooth upon a removable bridge in the front of my mouth, the absence of which causes me to lisp in the most disconcerting fashion. I may be wronging Ella to insinuate that she deliberately removed the bridge along with the washrag which she took out of my mouth. On the other hand, it would be exactly like her, for, as she is well aware, nothing so handicaps me as an impediment in my speech. At any rate she was provokingly slow about remembering where she had flung the washrag, and by the time I had recovered it and my missing denture both of us felt more ourselves.

I cannot say as much for Hogan Brewster. He had killed three people and been on the point of two other cold-blooded murders, without attracting suspicion to himself, but he went utterly to pieces when the case broke against him. There is usually a streak of cowardice in such a complex and cruel personality as his. As Chet Keith said later, his sort can dish it out but they can’t take it. On the other hand, Brewster laid the entire blame at my door and Ella’s.

“Not content with butting the breath out of me,” he said bitterly, “they had to batter me over the head with a knitting bag and puncture me from head to foot with an umbrella.”

He did look considerably battered up, even before Sheriff Latham knocked him down with a blow to the chin. There was no fight left in the man when Butch picked him up by the scruff of his neck and stood him on his feet.

“All right,” he said with that smile of his which was now a grimace, “I surrender. Call off your dogs, Sheriff. Hanging’s no worse than being killed by inches, and for God’s sake make that old hellion lay down her umbrella.”

Looking a little guilty, Ella placed her weapon upon the foot of the bed, and I will swear that Hogan Brewster drew a breath of relief. He cast a wry glance at Sheila Kelly when they started to take him out of the room. She had stood there like a statue all during the melee, but I doubt if anything would have convinced Sheriff Latham or Ella of what had actually happened to the girl except the small demonstration which Hogan Brewster then proceeded to put on. It is the only score in his favour among all the black marks against him, although I have never known whether he meant to do anybody a favour or whether it was pure exhibitionism on his part.

The man was theatrical, with a strong appetite for the lurid, just as Ella had predicted.

“Stand up. Sit down. Laugh,” he directed Sheila Kelly rapidly. “Laugh like Gloria Canby, as if you didn’t give a damn for man, God or the Devil.”

It made the hair at the base of my skull prickle to watch her. She stood up, she sat down, she laughed. It was horrible.

Hogan Brewster smiled. “How do you like my robot, Sheriff Latham?” he inquired mockingly.

I am positive that the sheriff had never heard of a robot, but nobody could have watched Sheila Kelly’s performance without realizing that her mind was in complete subjection to that fiend across the room.

“Too bad,” murmured Hogan Brewster, “that there are some things which you cannot hypnotize a subject into doing, such as — murder.”

I have commented before upon his swiftness and I have never blamed Sheriff Latham for what happened. It was too unexpected. Not until Hogan Brewster had jerked away from Butch and scooped up the knife did anybody realize his purpose and then it was too late. He fell at Sheila Kelly’s feet, and to me the most macabre thing about the whole frightful business was that it was not he but she who screamed and clutched frantically at her throat as if it were her lifeblood streaming out, as if it were she, not Hogan Brewster, gasping in his death agony.

“It’s better so,” said Chet Keith when I talked to him later.

I knew he was thinking of Sheila Kelly. She had collapsed after Hogan Brewster’s death. It kept Ella and me busy for an hour, looking after her, for which release I think the sheriff was grateful. However, the girl’s first conscious thought was for Chet Keith. She knew nothing of that grisly scene in my room. The last thing she remembered was hearing the tumult downstairs and shooting the bolt on her side of the door with the intention of finding out, if possible, how badly the newspaperman was hurt. That was still paramount in her mind when she came to. As soon as her fit of hysterics had subsided she insisted on going downstairs and seeing for herself the extent of his injuries.

Chet Keith was disposed to make light of them. “What’s a tap on the head to a he-man?” he scoffed, though he looked very pale, I thought.

I caught his eye. “Let her fuss over you all she will,” I whispered. “It’ll take her thoughts off herself.”

He nodded. “I expect you’re right.”

I knew I was right. Sheila Kelly had been through a hideous experience. Her nerves were on the ragged edge. I thought it would be a long while before she recovered entirely from the degenerating influence which had played hob with her mind, but I was ready to pin my faith upon the old principle that love and time will work miracles, and you had only to watch her hovering over Chet Keith as he reclined upon the couch to know that she was in love with him. I suppose she had been all along, although she had been too proud to admit it.

“We’re going to be married as soon as we can get down off this damned mountain,” he said, and while she caught her breath she did not deny it.

“Yes,” admitted Fannie Parrish when I questioned her, “I saw Hogan Brewster put something in the wastebasket after the chauffeur was killed. It may have been a piece of yellow rubber. In fact I’m sure it was.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I knew that, until I prompted her, Fannie had no idea what she had seen nor the slightest conception of its meaning.

There was another thing which I badly wanted to know. “About those ESP tests which you took in the Canby drawing room,” I asked Lila Atwood, “was Brewster present?”

She shook her head and I frowned. “But he must have heard about them?” I persisted.

Her lips curled. “Oh yes, Aunt Dora told him at great length, although he ridiculed the idea. Nevertheless,” — she turned white — “I caught him several times attempting to worm his way into my thoughts.”

“Without success?” I asked quickly.

“Yes,” she said with a spirited tilt of her head.

However, I reminded myself, as material for Hogan Brewster to try out his embryonic hypnotic powers upon, Lila Atwood was a very different proposition from Sheila Kelly, whose resistance to mental suggestion had been reduced to zero.

“It was nauseating,” Lila continued with a shudder, “feeling him squirming about, trying to get inside my mind. As if he hadn’t done me harm enough when he planted the razor blade in my possession.”

“Have you any proof that Hogan Brewster mailed you the razor blade?” I exclaimed.

She glanced at her husband and he coloured darkly. “I recognized Brewster’s writing on the wrappings,” he confessed, “but when I taxed him with it he convinced me that Lila had helped him kill Gloria. He said if I turned him over to the police he’d name Lila as his accomplice.”

“That’s why you let him hang around?” I ventured. “You didn’t dare kick him out.”

“And have him take Lila to the chair with him!” cried Allan Atwood. “I couldn’t, no matter what I believed about her and him, because-because I love her.”

His wife’s eyes were radiant. “Darling!” she whispered, and this time when she put out her hand he seized it and pressed it tightly.

My own eyes misted. I was glad those two were due for a little happiness at last. It no longer seemed strange to me that Lila Atwood should have fallen in love with her inept young husband. There is a maternal strain in every woman, even spinsters, and she was a thoroughbred if I ever saw one.

It remained for Dora Canby to present me with the most surprising reaction to that night’s work. “I sent for you,” she announced when her niece Judy conducted me into her room, “to ask you one question.”

“Yes?” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

I am still unable to decide whether to feel sorry for Gloria Canby’s mother or just plain irritated with her.

“Is it true that, when my daughter died, she was in love with Hogan Brewster?” she asked.

“Everybody says so,” I replied, pursing my lips.

She sighed. “I never trusted the man. I told Allan that Brewster was a snake in the grass. I told Gloria so too, but she paid no attention.”

She regarded me sharply. “If Gloria was in love with Brewster, she couldn’t have been in love with Jeff, could she?”

I have never known why she seemed to believe that I was familiar with all the inside details of the case unless it was because I was in at the death, so to speak, and I have always known that I had no justification for my reply except my own impression. Nevertheless it does not trouble my conscience.