There is No Return (3 page)

“I should think I could have a room on the ground floor,” I observed.

Jake shook his grizzled head. “First floor all reserved, ma’am.”

“Reserved?” I protested. “I had no idea the place was crowded.”

“No ‘m, ‘tain’t crowded, that’s a fact,” he admitted. “Ain’t hardly nobody here, but the first floor is reserved for-for…” He gave me an odd look. “For Mrs Canby and her doings.”

“Doings!” I repeated sharply. “What on earth do you mean?”

But Jake could keep a still tongue when he liked.

“Here you is, ma’am,” he said, exactly as if he had not heard me, and conducted me into a large, bilious-looking room at the back of the second floor.

He hastily deposited my travelling bags beside me and made off so hurriedly I followed a sudden impulse and pursued him as far as the head of the stairs. It was my intention to insist upon an explanation, but as I reached the steps I glanced downward and was just in time to see Mr Chet Keith chuck the young woman at the desk under the chin, at the same time managing to steal a kiss.

“I thought he was a fast worker,” I said to myself. “The disgusting young whippersnapper!”

At that moment he glanced up and caught my eye, but instead of appearing in the least abashed by his conduct he had the audacity to wink, a piece of flippancy which I accepted with a disdainful snort. However, almost instantly the smile died upon his lips and he glanced past me, his handsome, insolent young face flushing darkly.

I turned to look over my shoulder. A girl was standing at my very elbow, though I had not heard her approach, a slim, rather frail-looking girl with pale gold hair knotted in a coil on her neck, and a slender, oval face, dominated by a wistful mouth and two enormous grey eyes. There were dark circles beneath the eyes, and one hand was clenched at her side as she stared past me at the young man in the lounge.

The next minute she was gone, and down the hall a door opened and I heard Ella Trotter’s voice call out. “Adelaide! Thank God you have come!”

Before I could recover from my astonishment Ella bustled into the hall and seized me by the arm. You would have thought from the feverish manner in which she clutched at me and drew me into her room after her that I had arrived in direct answer to prayer. I was so overcome by her unexpected reception, I am afraid I merely gawked at her, and she had the grace to blush.

“I was never so glad to see anyone,” she said.

I drew myself up to my full height, which is not inconsiderable.

“Seeing that you took every possible means to keep me away,” I began haughtily.

“That was yesterday,” interrupted Ella and then she clutched my arm again and glanced over her shoulder. “What was that?” she whispered.

“It sounded to me like a cat squalling,” I snapped, beginning to wonder if Ella had gone into her dotage.

She turned so white, I thought she was going to faint. “A cat! Oh, Adelaide!” she cried and sank down into a chair as if her knees would no longer support her.

“For heaven’s sake!” I exclaimed crossly. “What on earth has put you into such a stew? You’ve heard alley cats squall before.”

Ella was trembling and I saw a little row of sweat beads on her upper lip. “They’ve found two cats in two days,” she said in a breathless voice. “Dead!”

“And what of it?” I demanded impatiently.

“You don’t understand, Adelaide,” quavered Ella. “They were were – their stomachs were ripped to pieces.”

At that moment there came the first roll of thunder. I found myself clutching Ella’s arm quite as tightly as she had clutched mine the moment before.

“Well,” I said, striving to throw off the eerie chill which persisted in playing up and down my spine, “cats have clawed each other to pieces before this and will again, I dare say.”

Ella was whispering, and there was something about the way she kept glancing over her shoulder which made me nervous.

“There was no sign of claws,” she said. “They-they’d been cut, Adelaide, cut all to pieces with a sharp knife and left to die like that in agony.”

Her voice cracked on the last word, and for the second time I thought she was going to faint. I went over to the door and closed and locked it. Then I got myself a chair and sat down across from Ella.

“You’d better tell me all about it,” I said.

Nothing could better illustrate the state to which Ella had been reduced than the docility with which she accepted my suggestion.

As a rule one has only to offer Ella Trotter advice to have her fly off in the other direction.

“How much do you know about Thomas Canby and his wife?” she asked, still sounding very tremulous.

“I know what everybody knows,” I said curtly. “Thomas Canby started with nothing and built up a fortune.”

“You knew their only child died last year?”

“I heard so this afternoon. She was very young to die.”

Ella shivered. “She didn’t just die, Adelaide.”

I glanced at her sharply. “It isn’t like you to beat about the bushes, Ella,” I said. “For goodness’ sake, what’s wrong?”

“I wish I knew,” said Ella with a gulp like a sob. “Anyway, Gloria Canby killed herself, Adelaide.”

“Killed herself!” I ejaculated. “A young girl like that, with everything to live for!”

“She opened her wrists with a razor blade.”

“Good heavens!”

“She was quite dead when they found her.”

“It must have been terrible for the mother,” I murmured. “I recall how devoted she was to the child when they stayed here at Lebeau Inn twenty years ago.”

Ella gave me a look that startled me. “They say Dora Canby’s devotion to her daughter was almost an obsession,” she whispered, again glancing over her shoulder, although the door was locked.

“What ails you, Ella?” I demanded.

Ella’s lips were actually quivering. “The dead can’t come back, can they, Adelaide?”

“Are you crazy!” I exclaimed.

“I’m beginning to think so,” said Ella wearily and then she got to her feet and, going over to the dresser, took a folded newspaper, out of a drawer and handed it to me.

“I ordered this from an old news dealer,” she explained. “It came out at the time of Gloria Canby’s death.”

The headlines marched clear across the page. GLORIA CANBY, THE POWER MAGNATE’S DAUGHTER, COMMITS SUICIDE, they announced. There was a picture, blurred like most newspaper cuts, but I could make out the features well enough.

“I saw that girl not five minutes ago on the stair!” I cried, feeling grateful for the chair under me.

Ella shook her head. “You saw Sheila Kelly.”

“Sheila Kelly?”

“The resemblance is marked,” said Ella, “but that isn’t what makes it so uncanny.”

“Do stop talking in riddles, Ella,” I said as severely as possible.

“The thing that is so awful,” whispered Ella, “is that Sheila Kelly looks more like that-that terrible girl than she did a week ago, than she did even this morning.”

“What terrible girl?”

Ella drew a long breath. “Gloria Canby was a very unpleasant person, Adelaide. She was never quite normal, I think.” She shuddered.

“They say even when she was a child she used to pull wings off butterflies and stick pins into puppies just-just to see them suffer, and once-once when she was only ten she-she cut a kitten’s stomach all to pieces.”

There was another rumble of thunder, so close I flinched. Ella leaned nearer to me and again she lowered her voice. I had to bend down to hear.

“Gloria Canby killed herself because her father was about to have her committed to an institution, or so she believed,” she whispered.

“An institution!”

“She-she tried to kill him.”

“Her own father!”

“Made an attempt to poison him, or so they say, although every effort was made to hush it up.”

“The girl was mad!”

“Of course,” said Ella, “that’s why her father was having her put away.”

“Only she killed herself first?”

I found myself glancing over my shoulder, as if it were contagious.

“Poor Dora Canby!” I sighed.

“But that’s just the trouble,” said Ella. “Dora Canby never realized that the girl wasn’t – wasn’t right. She seems to have been able to close her eyes to every bit of the evidence. You know how stubbornly blind foolishly doting mothers of problem children can be.”

“I know,” I admitted grimly, thinking of more than one such phenomenon which I had witnessed.

“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?”