“I suppose her husband shielded her as much as possible from the truth,” Ella went on, “which is what makes the present situation so dreadful.”
“What is the present situation, Ella?” I demanded with asperity.
“Do you realize how you are hemming and hawing?”
“It must have been sheer accident that Dora Canby came across Sheila Kelly and the professor,” muttered Ella, paying no attention to me, “or was it an accident?”
“What professor and who is Sheila Kelly?” I asked crossly.
“Professor Thaddeus Matthews is a fraud of the cheapest rank, of that one thing I am convinced, explain the rest of it as you will,” snapped Ella. “He pretends to be a spiritualist – messages from the other world and that sort of thing. You’ve only to look at the man to know that the only spirit he ever contacted intimately was liquor. That is what makes it all so inexplicable.”
“All what, Ella?” I asked, praying for patience, a commodity of which I have never possessed an over abundance.
“I told you,” said Ella wearily, although she hadn’t. “The professor has been conducting séances for Dora Canby. The girl Sheila Kelly is his stooge or medium or what have you. The idea has been to get in touch with Dora Canby’s dead daughter, as you might guess.”
I made a grimace. “As I remember Mrs Canby, she is exactly the material to be victimized by that kind of drivel.”
Ella looked relieved. “It is all drivel. It couldn’t be anything else,” she said as if she were trying to convince herself.
“The dead don’t return,” I said harshly.
There was a flash of lightning, so bright as almost to blind me, and the light in the chandelier above our heads flickered wildly.
Ella clutched my arm again.
“Even a perverse mad spirit like Gloria Canby cannot come back to carry out its evil designs,” she whispered. “I can’t, I won’t believe it!”
I stared at her incredulously. “What sort of tommyrot is this? Of course there isn’t any return!”
“You haven’t attended the séances, Adelaide. I tell you there is something. The way that girl looks, the way she’s changed, even in the week I’ve known her, and you can’t-can’t get away from the cats!”
“Are you trying to make out that —”
Ella interrupted me. “The girl herself is terrified. She had hysterics yesterday afternoon when she found the canary in her room.”
“Canary?”
“Dora Canby’s pet canary; it had been strangled.”
“Strangled!” I gasped, beginning to feel like a well-trained parrot myself.
“During Gloria Canby’s lifetime,” said Ella in a shaky voice, “Mrs Canby never dared have a bird. You see, her-her daughter had a mania for wringing their necks.”
I took a firm grasp upon my sanity and Ella’s left wrist. “Just exactly what are you trying to intimate, Ella?” I demanded in my sternest voice. “That this charlatan of a professor and his stooge, as you call her, have succeeded in raising Gloria Canby’s unhappy spirit from the grave?”
My manner had a salutary effect upon Ella. She drew a long breath and looked more like herself than she had since I arrived.
“It’s preposterous,” she said.
“Of course!”
“It is so perfectly apparent that it’s all a cheap trick to get money out of Dora Canby.”
“I should think so,” I remarked indignantly.
“She’s practically keeping the professor and the girl.”
“The woman must be a fool!”
“Oh, she is,” assented Ella, then she frowned. “But still ...”
She was glancing over her shoulder again, and outside it had begun to rain in torrents accompanied by a wailing wind. “I was prepared to laugh at the whole business, Adelaide.” She shivered.
“Well, I’m not laughing.”
“No?”
She clutched my arm. “I tell you the girl is terrified and so, I sometimes think, is the professor. I believe they started out with their customary bag of tricks and then-and then ...”
She paused and regarded me intently. “Did you ever hear, Adelaide, that suicides cannot rest in their graves?” she whispered.
“You’ll be telling me that you believe in vampires next!” I scoffed.
Ella turned white. “I killed a bat in this very room yesterday,” she announced in a sepulchral voice.
I simply stared at her and she winced.
“I know I’m talking like an idiot,” she confessed, “but-but supposing, Adelaide, that-that the professor and this girl started out to work upon Dora Canby’s credulity and-and something-something over which they have no control took advantage of their pretence at bringing Gloria Canby’s spirit back to earth and now-now they can’t control the force which they have let loose?”
“If I supposed anything of the kind I’d be a greater fool than Dora Canby,” I said, getting briskly to my feet. “The dead don’t come back, Ella. Make up your mind to that. Whatever may be going on in this mildewed house, it is not the work of the undead, rest assured of that.”
I was thinking of the cold chisel which Chet Keith had found on the side of the mountain that afternoon, and of the amber-coloured hairpin which had been lying beside it.
Ella patted my arm. “I can’t tell you how glad I am you’re here,” she said in a husky voice.
I was touched and, never having been very eloquent at putting my softer emotions into words, was at a loss what to do about it, when somebody began to pound upon the door.
“Mrs Trotter! Mrs Trotter!” cried an excited voice. “Do let me in!”
“It’s Judy Oliver, Dora Canby’s niece,” murmured Ella and opened the door.
The young woman who entered was too perturbed to recognize my presence. She was a slight young thing with short black hair, cut in a fringe along her forehead, and brown eyes that were now enormous.
“Uncle Thomas was nearly killed this afternoon!” she cried in a choked voice. “But for the fact that Jay had to slow down to pass the bus, the car would have gone over the side of the bluff. Oh, Mrs Trotter, what does it mean? What can it mean?”
The girl’s teeth were positively chattering, and for the second time Ella tottered to a chair and sat down. I stared from one to the other, and Ella made a feeble gesture in my direction.
“This is my friend Adelaide Adams, Judy,” she said, and the girl turned sharply and caught her breath.
“The one who’s bringing the book?” she faltered.
I nodded and Judy Oliver made an effort to recover herself.
“There must be some sane explanation,” she stammered.
She sounded as if she badly needed reassurance. “Of course there is an explanation,” I said, though by no means certain of what.
Ella drew a long breath. “You see, Adelaide, last night when Sheila Kelly was in her trance she-she said ...” Her voice trailed off and Judy Oliver took up the thread.
“It was horrible!” she whispered. “She looked like Gloria, she talked like her. I could have sworn it was Gloria, and she-she said that she couldn’t rest because Uncle Thomas was still alive. She said that she never would rest in her grave while he is alive.”
“I suppose Gloria Canby had long hair and wore amber-coloured hairpins,” I remarked sarcastically.
Judy Oliver stared at me with startled eyes. “Yes,” she said, “she did. How did you know?”
I tried to answer but my breath had deserted me, and to my relief somebody outside the door called Judy’s name.
“It’s Jeff,” she said, blushing delightfully. “We always play a game of Russian bank before dinner.”
She ran on out, and I looked at Ella and shrugged my shoulders.
“A woman can never mention her beloved’s name without giving herself away,” I said.
Ella gave me an odd look. “Jeff Wayne is Gloria Canby’s fiancé, not Judy’s.”
“You mean he was her fiancé. The girl is d
ead.”
“You think so?” murmured Ella in a voice I did not like.
I got impatiently to my feet. “I’m going to my room,” I said. “I have just remembered that the door has been unlocked and open all this time. That’s what comes of taking this sort of rubbish seriously. At your age you should know better, Ella.”
Ella tossed her head. “Far be it from me to expect you to take an interest in any theory of mine,” she said tartly. “You always have to be the belied cow or nothing, Adelaide.”
I felt better. I was much more accustomed to being snapped at by Ella than to having her weep upon my shoulder.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” I said curtly.
“Don’t trouble yourself on my account,” remarked Ella and, picking up her knitting bag which she is seldom without, though I never knew her to finish an article, began to knit with elaborate unconcern.
The door to my room was ajar, just as I had left it, my travelling bags piled up where Jake had deposited them in the centre of the floor. I remember grumbling to myself that he might have left the dressing case right side up, although nothing was spilled except my handkerchief case, which had got a little mussed. I was annoyed.
I had placed the spiritualism book on top of the case to hold it solid. It was then I realized that the book was not there. It was not in any of the other bags either. For the first time it occurred to me to wonder if, after all, that boulder on the road had been intended for Thomas Canby.
“Don’t be a fool,” I scolded myself angrily. “You’re worse than Ella.”
I still contend that I was not frightened when I saw the bat clinging to the side of the wall, just above my shoulder. I simply do not like bats. They are nasty, slimy things. I did not, as Ella Trotter, persists in claiming to this day, lose my head and try to brain myself. I merely struck at the horrid creature with my clothes brush. It was pure accident that it flew right at my eyes, so that I had to duck and succeeded in winging myself on one temple.
Naturally I screamed. Somebody jerked the door open behind me and the bat darted out.
“For Pete’s sake, Miss Adams,” muttered a sarcastic voice, “are you doing a war dance or what?”
I did not realize until that moment that I was jumping up and down, flourishing the clothes brush wildly in all directions, with my skirts clutched tightly about me.
“Young man,” I informed Chet Keith coldly, “there was a bat in the room.”
“A bat?” he murmured softly and picked up something from the floor at my feet.
It was an amber-coloured hairpin.
3
The dining room at Mount Lebeau Inn was inadequately lighted and much too large for the handful of people which drifted in to dinner that stormy July night. There seemed to be an endless procession of vacant tables stretching into the shadowy recesses of the room, away from the one at which Ella and I were seated. It may have been the effect of the huge central chandelier, which had a green shade, but it seemed to me that everybody, including Ella, had a strained look about the eyes. At any rate none of our fellow diners were in a convivial mood, that is certain. Glancing around me, I thought I had never seen quite such a haggard gathering.
As the porter had admitted, the inn was not crowded and, thanks to Ella, I was able to identify the guests at the next table. The girl Judy I had met already, but not Jeff Wayne, who had been engaged to her cousin. He was a clean-cut young chap with fair hair and ingenuous blue eyes, I thought, only he had a worn expression about his mouth, as if he suffered from nerves, which seemed to me absurd at his age. I noticed that he ate practically nothing and kept his gaze upon his plate. Once when Judy addressed him he started violently and sloshed the coffee in his cup.
Ella gave me what I feel sure she intended for a significant glance. “The boy’s haunted,” she whispered.
“Don’t be silly,” I snapped.
Ella compressed her lips. “Judy is always trying to call him back from somewhere.”
“Men have died...but not for love,” I quoted rather sourly.
“I dare say the young fool is young enough to think the bereft lover is a romantic role.”
“But that’s just it,” said Ella. “It seems he wasn’t in love with Gloria Canby, not toward the last, anyway. He was afraid of her. If you ask me he still is.”
“Tommyrot!” I exclaimed, and then something occurred which gave me a turn.
Judy Oliver was speaking and she leaned slightly nearer and put her hand over Jeff Wayne’s where it was lying on the edge of the table. I saw his fingers tighten on hers, then he seemed to shiver and looked over his shoulder. Instantly he released Judy’s hand, as if it had stung him, and his face suddenly appeared quite ghastly in the dim glow of the green chandelier.
“You see,” murmured Ella at my elbow.
The boy was afraid all right, I could not deny that. In that unguarded moment before he remembered to lower his gaze I had read terror and something else, very like horror, in his eyes.
“And that, I suppose,” I said, following his glance, “is the professor and his assistant.”
Ella nodded. Under pretence of observing the rain which was streaming down the windowpanes, I studied Professor Thaddeus Matthews. He looked exactly what he was – a charlatan of the first water. You have seen him or his like on cheap vaudeville stages all over the country before vaudeville went out, a tall, portly old man with sagging jowls and a large nose veined in red and protuberant black eyes beneath a shock of greasy black hair, patently dyed. He was wearing a rusty black suit, a high stock collar and a limp black string tie. He looked pompous and a little apoplectic and distinctly shifty, but on his left hand he wore a handsome cabochon ruby in a massive, old-fashioned gold setting.
Ella saw me staring at it. “The gift of Mrs Canby,” she explained with a shrug.
“The pickings seem to have been remarkably good,” I said, staring at the string of green beads which Sheila Kelly was wearing around her neck.
Like the professor, she was shabbily dressed. I felt sure her white chiffon evening gown had been part of her stage act. It looked wilted, as if it had cost too little in the first place and been packed into too many theatrical trunks in the second place, but the string of jade about her throat was genuine, I’d have staked my life on that.
Ella nodded. “No wonder Thomas Canby thought he’d better come and look into things.”
“Is that why he came?” I asked, still watching the Kelly girl.
Like Jeff Wayne, she was merely toying with her food, and her face, too, was drawn.
“Of course that’s why he came,” snapped Ella. “That’s why they are all here.”
“All?”
She made an impatient gesture toward the others who were sitting at the table with Judy Oliver and young Wayne. “They’re Dora Canby’s natural heirs, her nieces and nephews. They wouldn’t like to see her divert all those millions to a cheap trickster and his stooge.”
“The woman may be a fool, but hardly such a fool as that,” I said, “even if the professor has convinced Mrs Canby that they can bring her messages from the dead.”
“You don’t understand,” said Ella. “Dora Canby doesn’t think they bring her messages from the dead. She thinks that Gloria Canby has come to life again in the body of Sheila Kelly.”
I made a grimace, but the protest into which I was about to plunge was forestalled by an exclamation from the handsome young woman sitting beside Jeff Wayne.
“Hogan!” she cried with, it seemed to me, genuine astonishment.
A man had come into the dining room, a good-looking, debonair young man with a desiccated face and extremely sophisticated eyes.
“Hallo, everybody,” he murmured, making straight for Lila Atwood.
Even then I noticed what a striking couple they made, sleek dark Hogan Brewster and Lila Atwood with her shingled, blue-black hair and brilliant dark eyes above a restrained though sensitive red mouth.
“Darling,” she murmured, “ho
w ever did you find us?”
He grinned. “I put the bloodhounds on the trail,” he said. “How are you, Allan?”
For a moment I thought Allan Atwood was going to strike the other man, then he seemed to make a terrific effort to pull himself together.
“I’m all right,” he muttered. “Have you had dinner? Will you join us?”
“Will I?” exclaimed the other, laughing as he pulled out a chair. “If you don’t think it was a nightmare driving up that mountain in this storm, you’re loopy. A dozen times I thought I was a goner.”
“Yes?” murmured Lila Atwood’s husband. He did not add, “No such luck,” but he looked as if he wanted to, and I raised my eyes at Ella, who nodded.
“The old, old triangle,” she said. “The affair has been an open scandal for months.”
She went into some detail on the subject while I covertly watched Allan trying with poor success to act as if he were unaware of Hogan’s bold flirtation with Lila under her husband’s very nose.
According to Ella, Dora Canby had had two sisters, both now dead.
Judy Oliver and her brother Patrick were the children of the younger sister, Allan Atwood the only child of the elder. Thomas Canby had had his wife’s niece and nephews about his neck for a number of years or so I gathered. At any rate he had given them a home and educated them and taken both the boys into his business in a minor capacity.
“One of those fifth or sixth vice-president affairs with which rich men take care of their ineffectual hangers-on,” explained Ella.
There was something ineffectual about Allan Atwood’s face, I thought to myself, although he was rather attractive in a vague way.
He had regular features and thick, slightly curly brown hair, and a cleft chin, but he gave the impression of being too loosely knit, as if he might ravel under strain. Even the movements of his well-kept hands were uncertain, and his grey eyes were slightly bloodshot.
There was nothing vague about his wife. She had been a famous beauty, so Ella said, and she had all the poise of a woman accustomed to being singled out for her looks. She belonged to a blue-blooded Maryland family, one of those aristocratic branches which, while run to seed financially, manage to cling to a place in the social register. Ella said she was supposed to be a superb horsewoman, and I could easily imagine Lila Atwood with her long limbs and straight back putting a thoroughbred at a five-foot fence without batting an eye.
There is No Return Page 3
