There is No Return

by Anita Blackmon

  “I don’t get it,” whispered young Patrick Oliver.

  The professor gave him a malevolent glance. “At that we may have company,” he said.

  Allan Atwood laughed unpleasantly. “Take care, Pat, that you don’t get the other half of those scissors in your throat. If I remember rightly our cousin Gloria had it in for you too; something about Judy’s ear, I think.”

  “Gloria did not intend to chip Judy’s ear with the can opener,” said Dora Canby with a shudder. “It was an accident, wasn’t it, darling?” she asked Sheila Kelly.

  The girl quivered all over, though this time she did not protest, and Patrick Oliver flung her a bitter glance. “Sure it was an accident,” he said, “but if I hadn’t jogged her elbow she would have gouged Judy’s eye out.”

  Dora Canby glanced at him reproachfully. “Gloria believed that Judy had stolen Jeff’s heart away from her.”

  Jeff Wayne’s hands clenched. “Gloria was mistaken,” he said, staring steadily at Sheila Kelly. “Gloria is the only woman I ever loved or can love.”

  Judy Oliver caught her breath as if he had struck her, but Dora Canby smiled at her and then at Jeff.

  “I know, I know, my boy,” she said softly. “You belong to Gloria, doesn’t he, darling?” she asked Sheila Kelly.

  The girl flung out her arms in a gesture of despair. “Make her stop!” she cried. “Can’t you make her stop?”

  She addressed Chet Keith, but I found myself unable to keep still.

  “You are labouring under a delusion, Mrs Canby,” I said. “Whatever else she may be, this girl is not the reincarnation of your daughter Gloria. You have been the victim of a cruel trick. The dead do not come back.”

  “Precisely,” said Chet Keith.

  “I think you are the newspaperman whom my husband threatened to kick off the mountain,” murmured Dora Canby. “Poor Thomas, he was always threatening to kick somebody out; first Patrick because he is always in debt, then Judy because she tried to steal Gloria’s lover, then Allan because he will not stop his wife from dragging us all into a scandal, and finally you, Mr Keith, isn’t it? But Thomas will never threaten anybody else. Gloria has revenged herself, haven’t you, darling?”

  “Oh, God!” whispered Sheila Kelly.

  I cannot explain why I was possessed to defend the girl, unless it was because she was so utterly alone.

  “If she killed Thomas Canby she was merely acting under suggestion!” I exclaimed and pointed my finger dramatically at Professor Matthews. “Under his suggestion!”

  To my horror the professor began to weep. “See what you’ve done!” he cried, again shaking his fist in Sheila Kelly’s face. “I tell you we’ll both go to the electric chair!”

  He was a horrible, snivelling object, one that unmanned me, but Hogan Brewster seemed amused at the spectacle.

  “That amounts practically to a confession,” he said.

  “You think so?” drawled Chet Keith. “Why did they do it?”

  “It’s apparent on the face of it,” said Allan Atwood quickly.

  “They have Aunt Dora wound about their finger. She is capable of spending a fortune on them, but Uncle Thomas was going to send them packing, so they killed him.”

  “And what good will a fortune do them in the electric chair?” demanded Chet Keith.

  “Oh, but they’ll never send my Gloria to the chair,” murmured Dora Canby. “You can’t electrocute somebody who is already dead.”

  “Anyway,” I put in quickly, “the girl was hypnotized. She was not responsible for her actions. We can all swear to that.”

  Hogan Brewster gave Chet Keith a triumphant glance. “Turn a good lawyer loose with that defence and plenty of the Canby money and see how far the prosecuting attorney will get with a conviction,” he said.

  The professor was snivelling again. “They’ll say I did it. They’ll say I put her up to it.”

  “Of course you did,” snapped Chet Keith.

  And then the sheriff arrived, accompanied by two deputies.

  I was informed later that Sheriff Tom Latham was serving his third term, and when it came to locating stills in the mountains and breaking up a fight at a country dance he was probably a highly efficient weapon of the law, as were Butch Newby and Mart Butler, his assistants and only slightly less burly versions of the grizzled sheriff. I could picture the three of them wading lustily into a free-for-all and cracking heads and otherwise enforcing the peace in a rural community, but in the complicated and sinister tangle which awaited them at Mount Lebeau Inn on that stormy July night they were hopelessly inadequate without the saving grace of realizing as much.

  It was Chet Keith who again assumed the initiative and gave Sheriff Latham in a curt and succinct manner an account of what had happened. The sheriff interrupted him only once and then to send one of his henchmen to telephone for the coroner. It appeared that the rain was assuming the proportions of a cloudburst, and the sheriff had some uneasiness about the bridge over the Carol River.

  “All we need to make this disaster complete,” I muttered to Ella, “is to have that pontoon bridge wash out.”

  Sheriff Latham gave me a severe glance from under his beetling brows. “We’ll have no whispering,” he said.

  I tossed my head and Chet Keith grinned as he went on with his recital. It was his newspaper training, I suppose, which enabled him to present the facts in the fewest possible words without omitting any of the essential details.

  “Anybody else anything to add?” inquired Sheriff Latham at the end, treating us all to one of his heavy scowls.

  Nobody said anything and Sheriff Latham, chewing his thick under lip, studied Sheila Kelly in silence for a moment.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. “Your real name, not your stage moniker.”

  She flushed. “Kelly is my real name, Sheila Kelly.”

  The sheriff frowned and jerked a splayed thumb in the direction of Professor Thaddeus Matthews. “How long you been teamed up with the old codger?”

  “Six months, maybe a little more,” she said in a low voice.

  “What were you doing before you joined his act?”

  “Starving.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’d been out of work for almost a year,” she said wearily.

  “And before that?”

  “Ask him,” she said, shrugging her shoulder at Chet Keith.

  I thought he flinched as the sheriff whirled upon him. “You knew this girl before?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you didn’t say so?” demanded the sheriff.

  Mr Chet Keith’s usual nonchalance was badly cracked, but he made an attempt at his customary insouciance.

  “I was waiting for the proper moment,” he said airily.

  “This is it,” snapped the sheriff. “Where did you know this dame before and what do you know about her?”

  Chet Keith hesitated, but Sheila Kelly made a small gesture as if relieving him of responsibility. “You may as well tell,” she said. “I’m already in so bad nothing can make it worse.”

  “She was a fan dancer in a night club in Chicago. The joint was raided. I covered the story for my paper.”

  “So you were a fan dancer,” remarked the sheriff in a scathing tone.

  “I had to eat,” said Sheila Kelly.

  “So she said at the time,” commented Chet Keith. “That’s why the judge let her off with a warning.”

  The sheriff’s florid face darkened. “And then you tied up with this fake spiritualist?”

  The girl’s haggard eyes turned to the professor. “It was just-just an act until — I mean, there was no harm in the-the messages, or so he said,” she faltered. “Lots of people were comforted by them.”

  “It was getting money under false pretences, to say the best.”

  She flushed painfully. “Nobody ever gave us money until...” She paused and again glanced at the professor.

  “You are trying to say,” I interposed, “that until you ma
de this connection with Dora Canby it was just a vaudeville turn.”

  “Yes.”

  The sheriff glared at me. “I ain’t asked for your assistance, lady,” he said, then turned back to the girl, his small muddy eyes narrowing. “Vaudeville turns don’t end in murder,” he snapped.

  Her drooping lips twitched convulsively. “No,” she whispered.

  Once more, in spite of the sheriff’s glare, I took a hand in the deal. “You say the professor told you the messages were harmless. Don’t you know?”

  Her thin white hands turned and twisted in her lap. “No.”

  The sheriff wriggled his heavy shoulders. “Are you trying to make out that you was really hypnotized?” he demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “So that’s your story?” he demanded with impressive sarcasm.

  “You was hypnotized and don’t know what you was doing when you killed this man.”

  She started to her feet, her eyes quite wild. “I didn’t kill him! I didn’t!”

  “Thought you was hypnotized?” sneered the sheriff. “Thought you didn’t know what happened while you was in this trance?”

  She was trembling from head to foot. “You don’t remember what you do in a hypnotic trance unless you are ordered to remember, but I-I didn’t kill him! I couldn’t have!”

  “Oh yeah?” murmured Sheriff Latham, exchanging a knowing grin with the younger of his henchmen, the one called Butch, for obvious reasons, or so it seemed to me.

  The girl’s defiant pose faltered and broke. “I didn’t kill him,” she repeated dully.

  “Yep,” said Sheriff Latham, “you killed him, sister. You two saw a chance to feather your nest for life with that poor woman you’ve imposed upon, but her husband was going to show you up for a fraud, so you killed him.”

  It would have been better had I kept my mouth shut, but I didn’t.

  “It is a scientific fact, Sheriff Latham,” I said, “that hypnotic subjects are not amenable to suggestions which are averse to their moral code.”

  The sheriff glared at me again and I do not take kindly to such treatment, so I went on with considerable heat. “I have a book which explains all about hypnosis,” I said and then paused abruptly. “At least I have mislaid the book for the moment, but it leaves no doubt upon this point. A hypnotic subject cannot be made to perform an act which violates his inherent sense of right and wrong.”

  I saw Chet Keith frown, and Ella stared at me curiously. In the excitement of my arrival she had chosen for reasons of her own to ignore the book which was my excuse for being there at all, but by her expression I knew that she was thinking it extremely unlike me to mislay something and say nothing about it.

  The sheriff continued to regard me with pronounced disfavour.

  “I haven’t asked your advice, lady,” he repeated, “but since you seem determined to butt into this business I’d like to inform you that we may live in the backwoods, so to speak, but we wasn’t born yesterday, eh, Butch, and we ain’t having no wool pulled over our eyes.”

  There is on use denying that the man stirred all my hackles.

  “I take it,” I said coldly, “that you put no faith in my theory that it would be impossible for the professor to suggest murder or any other crime to the young lady after he had placed her in a hypnotic trance?”

  Behind me Chet Keith groaned. “Good Lord,” he whispered, “must you provide the professor with an out?”

  The sheriff gave me an acrimonious glance. “I not only don’t take no stock in your theory,” he announced, “I don’t take no stock in hypnotism or any of the rest of this twaddle.”

  “You tell ‘em, Lathe,” murmured Butch.

  “Nevertheless,” said Chet Keith quietly, “hypnotism is a scientific fact and the girl was hypnotized, whether you believe it or not.”

  Sheriff Latham permitted himself a sceptical grimace. “Dress it up as fancy as you please,” he said, “She killed a man with the professor’s help, and I’m taking both of ‘em in for murder.”

  I glanced involuntarily at Professor Thaddeus Matthews. To my surprise he had recovered his composure. He was even smiling. I saw Chet Keith studying him with a frown.

  “You’re arresting Sheila Kelly and the professor without further investigation?” demanded the newspaperman.

  The sheriff nodded. “Don’t need to investigate what happened. It’s as plain as the nose on my face” — which was very plain indeed.

  Sheila Kelly’s face was ashen. I thought she was about to faint, but Dora Canby went over to her and laid her hand on her arm.

  “Nothing is going to happen to you, Gloria,” said Mrs Canby.

  The girl shrank away and covered her eyes with her hand.

  Sheriff Latham motioned to Butch. “Bring them on,” he said. “I want to git down off this mountain while we can.”

  But he was already too late. At that moment Captain French bustled into the room, his moustache bristling with excitement. “The bridge is out!” he exclaimed. “The coroner just called up from a filling station down the road. It went out just after he crossed.”

  I distinctly heard Chet Keith mutter, “Thank God!”

  7

  So there we were, isolated on the top of a mountain with a dead man and two people accused of his murder and no chance to get away until they recovered the pontoon bridge which Captain French assured us was careening at breakneck speed down the Carol River.

  “However, the highway department is on the job,” he said.

  Ella sniffed. “Whatever that may mean.”

  “It means more of the brand of efficiency which we have already seen demonstrated by Sheriff Latham and his yokels,” I said bitterly.

  The sheriff had taken things over with a vengeance. I think he enjoyed the thought of spending a day or two in enforced idleness as a guest of the inn. At any rate he commandeered two of the best rooms in the house for himself and his men, rooms directly across the hall from those occupied by Sheila Kelly and the professor.

  “Got to keep an eye on the prisoners,” explained the sheriff.

  Chet Keith cocked an eyebrow at me. “That puts you right in the front row, Miss Adams.”

  I nodded, but to tell the truth I was not so averse as I might have seemed to occupying quarters in such close proximity to those three burly protectors of the law. While I had no respect for Sheriff Latham’s acumen, and even less for the type of brains exhibited by his sinewy assistants, I did think they possessed a great deal of unimaginative courage and muscular initiative and there was something reassuring about knowing that they were just across the hall when I went up to my room shortly before midnight that night.

  It was still raining furiously, and I have never heard a place so full of odd creakings and rattlings as that old frame building. As Ella said, coming in with me as if she hated the thought of being left alone, you were always thinking you heard something behind you but when you looked there was nothing there. I suppose each of us was painfully conscious, though neither of us admitted it, of that sheeted form which had been locked in the rear parlour after the coroner had arrived and executed what I can describe only as the gesture of an examination.

  The coroner was staying on, so I gathered, there being nothing else for him to do. They were, I understood, planning to hold an inquest the next morning. A mere formality, insisted Sheriff Latham, since in his opinion the case was cut and dried. In the meanwhile Thomas Canby’s body was left to rest in peace upon one of those dreary red sofas in that depressing parlour downstairs from which everybody was to be excluded until further orders.

  “As if anybody would want to look at the horrible place again!” I cried with a shudder.

  Ella nodded. “Do you know, Adelaide, I think that good-looking young newspaperman is in love with Sheila Kelly.”

  I had had somewhat the same idea, but it is second nature with me to take the opposite tack from Ella.

  “Don’t be absurd!” I protested. “He’s the kind that chucks ev
ery woman he sees under the chin if he can get by with it.”

  “I think he’s rather sweet,” murmured Ella.

  “Sweet!” I exclaimed. “You might call him a conceited young upstart who has too much sex appeal for his own good, but never sweet.”

  “Just the same,” pursued Ella, whom nothing ever throws off the track, “he means to get her out of it.”

  I frowned. “I’m afraid that will take some doing.”

  Ella stared at me. “Are you on their side?”

  “I’m on nobody’s side,” I declared irritably.

  Ella did not seem greatly impressed by my vehemence. She has always exasperated me by pretending to believe that my bark is more formidable than my bite.

  “Of course she will have all of Dora Canby’s money working for her,” she said and gave me a significant glance. “I suppose you realize that it is her money now, Adelaide.”

  Ella has a penchant for picking up what she calls wisecracks, but I have as a rule avoided her example, only in this instance nothing else seemed quite apropos.

  “So what?” I demanded.

  “You can’t get away from the strangled canary, Adelaide, and those two mutilated cats.”

  “Are you still trying to tell me that Gloria Canby’s spirit has managed in some way to take possession of Sheila Kelly’s body?” I demanded impatiently.

  “You weren’t at the other séances,” said Ella in a stubborn voice.

  “They started out to be the usual thing. You heard Little Blue Eyes tonight. All the messages were like that at first, as innocuous as new milk. Little Blue Eyes had a message for Gloria’s dear mother. Gloria’s mother was not to grieve. Gloria was very, very happy in the spirit world – that sort of thing. If they had continued in that vein I should never have got the wind up. Please credit me with that much intelligence, Adelaide, difficult as you may find it to do so.”

  I was listening to the muffled sound which was a girl weeping forlornly and very softly on the other side of the partition, and merely shrugged my shoulders by way of reply.