There is No Return

by Anita Blackmon

  “Thanks for the favour,” I said in grudging accents.

  He grinned. “Don’t mention it. The sheriff pressed me into service because he is short a deputy.”

  “Short a deputy?”

  “One of the cast seems to have taken a vanishing powder.”

  “Would you mind speaking English?” I inquired coldly.

  He chuckled. “Your friend, Mr Chet Keith, has been missing for an hour, and the sheriff has sent out a searching party.”

  “They think something has happened to him!”

  It had not until that moment dawned upon me to feel uneasy about the reporter’s prolonged absence.

  Hogan Brewster shrugged his shoulders. “I think myself the fellow has beat it, for reasons best known to himself, but that porter Jake, or whatever his name is, came in a while ago with a cock-and-bull story which has the sheriff all worked up.”

  “What sort of story?” I demanded in an agitated voice.

  Hogan Brewster laughed. “You know how these ignorant fellows are about ghosts.”

  “Ghosts! What has that to do with Chet Keith?”

  “Nothing, I feel sure, but it seems that Jake claims to have seen Keith go into a shack across from that old deserted cemetery down the road over an hour ago, and according to Jake nothing has come out except a huge black bat.”

  “A bat!” I repeated, catching my breath. “In the hut by the cemetery!”

  He nodded. “The sheriff has sent a deputy to investigate.”

  I felt shaky and upset. I remember reaching out to steady myself against a chair and then the commotion broke out downstairs. A great many people appeared to be shouting and running around. Hogan Brewster and I stared at each other and as if by common consent turned to the door which I had left slightly ajar. Butch was standing right outside peering toward the stairs.

  “What’s the matter down there?” he yelled.

  “They’ve found Chet Keith,” somebody called up, I think it was Captain French, “and he’s been knocked in the head.”

  “Good Lord!” exclaimed Butch, and I remember Hogan Brewster making some similar exclamation.

  They both started for the head of the steps, and I was right behind them when I recalled that newspaper-wrapped bundle which I had placed on my bedside table when Hogan Brewster handed it to me. I still contend, no matter what Ella says, that I had no choice except to go back for it. It is true that I nearly paid for my foresight with my life. Nevertheless I went back and in spite of those dreadful ten minutes which followed I would do the same thing all over again if the same circumstances arose. That, I suppose, is what Ella means when she says that I cannot be trusted to mind my own business, even if there is a murder going on at the moment.

  At any rate the tumult downstairs was still proceeding in fine style when I re-entered my room. I did not close the door behind me. I intended to seize the book and be back in the hall within a minute. I did not expect to be more than a few steps behind Butch, whose hoarse voice I could hear bellowing out from the top of the stairs. I could even distinguish his progress as far as the landing halfway down, where he seemed to be hanging over the banisters, carrying on a loud and incoherent conversation with Sheriff Latham.

  “Is he hurt bad?” was one of the things he shouted.

  “Got a crack on the head, knocked him out,” came the reply.

  I remember saying, “Tut! Tut!” to myself and feeling a little sick. Although I had not stopped to take it into account until that minute, I seemed to have grown quite fond of Chet Keith. I distinctly recall picking up the newspaper-wrapped parcel off the table and thrusting it under my arm. I even remember noting absent-mindedly that the string was carelessly tied, so that a bit of the book cover showed. I was in the act of turning to the door when it happened, that grating sound which was the bolt sliding back between my room and Sheila Kelly’s. It stopped me dead in my tracks. I stared at the connecting door. The key was on my side. The sight of it steadied me. I recall drawing a long breath, then I went rigid again.

  The disturbance downstairs was still going on. I could hear the rumble of voices, but they sounded very far away. The blood left my heart. For a minute I could not move. I could scarcely breathe. The door to the hall was no longer open. I knew it, though to save my life I could not bring myself to turn around and look. Somebody had stealthily closed the door behind me. Somebody was standing at my back, breathing hard. I can’t tell how I knew it was the killer, but I did.

  In my panic I must have made some small involuntary sound, although I failed to hear it because of the frantic pounding of my heart. Maybe I merely stiffened and so warned him that I was aware of his presence. I shall never know. I dare say he was afraid I would scream and arouse the house, which was not part of his horrible plan. At least I was given no chance to scream. He struck like a spitting cobra. One moment I was standing there, paralyzed with horror. The next moment his hands were about my neck, choking me into unconsciousness.

  The wonder is that he did not kill me then and there, except of course strangulation was not part of his plan either. When I knew anything again I was lying on my bed, trussed up like a fowl for market. My wrists and ankles were securely bound with towels from the bathroom. My eyeballs felt as if they were about to burst from the pressure which he had exerted upon my windpipe. There was a washrag thrust between my teeth, so that I could only gag and mouth inarticulately as I watched Hogan Brewster turn the key between my room and Sheila Kelly’s.

  “Come,” he said and opened the door.

  She had her hands before her, feeling her way. Her eyes were dazed, her face ghastly. She lurched a little as she walked into the room.

  “You are going to kill yourself,” he said softly.

  It was then I saw the knife in his hand, an ordinary silver table knife, but even at that distance I could see that the blade had been filed to a sharp edge.

  “After I have cut Miss Adams’ throat, you are going to lock the door behind me and wake up,” he said. “Understand?”

  His voice was perfectly expressionless, a monotone. He kept his gaze fixed upon the girl. Her eyes were wide open but they had the blurred look of somebody walking in his sleep. Nevertheless she slowly nodded her head.

  “You will not remember that I was here,” he said. “You will find yourself alone in a locked room with a murdered woman. You will believe you killed her. You won’t be able to go on living. Understand?”

  Again she nodded and I tried to throw myself off the bed, succeeding merely in wrenching my thigh almost out of its socket.

  Hogan Brewster looked at me. “You would nose into things that don’t concern you,” he said and glanced at that newspaper-bound parcel upon the table, “you and Chet Keith. He doesn’t have to die because I didn’t give him time to discover anything incriminating in the hut, but you are different. The Parrish woman caught me disposing of some scraps of yellow rubber tonight. She didn’t know what they meant. With you gone, she never will know.”

  It was maddening to lie there helpless and listen to him. Like a drowning man, I lived an eternity in a minute. All the events of the past two days whirled through my mind like a kaleidoscope with vertigo. It was Hogan Brewster who had killed Thomas Canby and the professor and Jay Stuart, and now he was preparing to kill Adelaide Adams and Sheila Kelly.

  I should have known Brewster was the murderer the moment I saw the face upon the yellow balloon. It was a work of art, however gruesome, and I had been told that he boasted artistic talents. Two things had kept me from connecting him with the plot. Since he was not at the inn when the Gloria manifestations started, I had supposed he could not be responsible for them, and I had not been able to supply him with a motive. I knew now that he had the most powerful motive in the world — self-preservation.

  It was Hogan Brewster who killed Gloria Canby.

  He killed her to make way for his infatuation with Lila Atwood and tried to pass his crime off as suicide, but her father was not deceived. He was dete
rmined to bring his daughter’s murderer to justice, and Hogan Brewster did not want to die in the electric chair. He had lied about the time of his arrival on the mountain. It was he who had been hiding out in the hut across from the cemetery.

  Patrick Oliver had admitted that he was in the habit of meeting Professor Matthews down the road every night for a surreptitious conference in connection with the hoax which they were playing upon Dora Canby. Brewster had undoubtedly eavesdropped upon these conferences and that is how his own desperate plan came into being. Having waylaid Sheila Kelly near the hut, he succeeded in hypnotizing her. Too late I recalled that, when I questioned her about the first unauthorized trance, she spoke of seeing tombstones and remembering nothing else, poor child. She had been no match for Hogan Brewster. The man was a rabid egoist and a killer. He had taken complete possession of the girl’s mind and he had been directing her ever since, like a puppet, toward her own destruction.

  He must have read the horror in my eyes, for he laughed softly. “Strange as it seems,” he said, “it isn’t going to be as hard to slit your throat as it was to mutilate those cats. I rather like cats. Kindred spirits, I suppose.”

  There was something feline in his movements as he came toward me, something of the padded grace of a huge and lecherous tomcat. I had not realized before how swiftly and noiselessly he could move when he pleased. He was still smiling. I wondered how I could ever have thought that smirk was flippant.

  I tried to writhe away from the hand which he put out toward me, and the girl Sheila Kelly stirred and moaned.

  “Keep still,” he said to her.

  For a moment I thought she was going to be able to throw off the stupor which he exercised over her will. There was a flicker of intelligence in her eyes as she tried to free her gaze from his, but he made a weaving motion with his hands in front of her face.

  “You are going to do as I say,” he murmured. “It is useless to struggle. You will lock the door of this room behind me when I go out and you will forget I was ever here. Understand?”

  I recall trying to project my mind in opposition to his. I remember frantically attempting to suggest to Sheila Kelly that she scream for help before it was too late for either of us, but I have never had any hypnotic powers and I might as well have saved myself the strain. With a heavy sigh the girl’s shoulders dropped. Her face took on a dulled apathetic look, and I sank back upon the bed, cold sweat standing out on my brow.

  Hogan Brewster laughed. “Wonderful thing, this mental suggestion business, Miss Adams,” he said. “My only regret is that I didn’t discover the knack sooner and that Lila Atwood doesn’t seem receptive, at least not to my brand of mesmerism.”

  I glared at him. No, in spite of all he had done, Hogan Brewster had not been able to win the woman he loved away from her husband. It was then I realized that Brewster had planted my book in Allan Atwood’s travelling bag.

  “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.

  19

  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 t
o 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.”