There is No Return (9 page)

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 made 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!”

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 every 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.

“I still say,” insisted Ella, “that the first time this new personality shoved Little Blue Eyes off the scene Professor Matthews was flabbergasted. It was exactly as if Charlie MacCarthy had suddenly come to life and started kicking Eddie Bergen around.”

“The girl was in some sort of trance,” I declared. “I said I’d swear to it and I will.”

Ella paid no attention. “The professor is as crooked as a pretzel. I think he’d stoop to anything to turn a dishonest penny for himself; anything except murder. I don’t believe he has either the intestinal fortitude or the ingenuity to concoct so elaborate a plot as this.”

“That rounds out the circle,” I commented sourly. “You don’t think the professor put Sheila Kelly up to murder, but you do think she killed Thomas Canby while temporarily under the spell of his dead daughter, and you base your preposterous theory upon two disembowelled cats and a strangled canary.”

Ella tossed her head. “You can make it sound as ridiculous as you please, Adelaide, but something gets into that girl and it’s something devilish.”

“Poppycock!”

“You saw her tonight in the dining room. Do you think she knew what she was doing when she spoke to Hogan Brewster? Do you think she remembers a word of that tirade against Thomas Canby? Any more than she was able to recall what had happened when she came to in her room yesterday afternoon with the dead canary clutched in her hands.”

“So it must have been a phantom,” I said with appreciable disdain.

Ella got angrily to her feet. “I should know better by this time than to argue with you. Thank heaven I, at least, have always had an open mind.”

“Too open,” I retorted, “considering the rubbish you put into it.”

Upon this she flounced out of the room and a few minutes later I heard her door slam. I was conscious of being bitterly tired, yet as I began my preparations for bed I realized that I had never been more wide awake in my life nor less anxious to be left alone with my thoughts and the sound of that forlorn weeping in the next room. When I heard the rap at the door I was positive it was Ella, returning as usual for the last word. I did not replace the row of false curls which I wear across my forehead, Ella not harbouring any more illusions about my physical shortcomings than I do about hers. However, when I opened the door it was not Ella.