There is No Return (29 page)

“She was never the least in love with him,” I said.

The light in Judy’s eyes was my reward.

Dora Canby frowned. “Then I suppose it is foolish for him to stay single on Gloria’s account.”

“It is extremely foolish,” I said firmly.

She gave Judy a petulant glance. “You want to marry him, don’t you?”

The girl flushed painfully. “He doesn’t care for me.”

“Nonsense!” I cried. “He is desperately in love with you, child.”

“You think so?” she faltered, her lips quivering.

“I know it,” I snapped and this time I was not forced to tamper with the truth.

“Then,” said Dora Canby in her fretful way, “they had better get married at once, don’t you think?”

“The sooner the better,” I said fervently, feeling touched at the passionately grateful glance which Judy bestowed upon me.

“Even Patrick is deserting me,” murmured Dora Canby mournfully. “He wants to be an aviator and I have promised to buy him a plane.” She frowned again, then went on quite brightly, “At least I know that my darling Gloria is at peace at last, now that Thomas is dead.”

I simply stared at her. “But you must have realized, Mrs Canby,” I said in a feeble voice, “that all those-those messages from your daughter were faked.”

“How absurd, Miss Adams!” she replied coldly. “Of course I realize nothing of the sort.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it. I felt completely uncertain of my ability to disabuse Dora Canby of any conviction upon which she had set her heart. As I have said, for all her timidity, she was as stubborn as a burro and fully as exasperating in her cerebral processes.

“Naturally,” she continued, her weak mouth setting in obstinate lines, “I shall see that that girl comes to no harm.”

“You mean Sheila Kelly?” I faltered.

She glanced at me with a trace of impatience. “I mean the envelope which my daughter Gloria deigned to occupy for a time,” she said with so much finality I was silenced.

Judy followed me to the door and squeezed my hand. “Thank you,” she whispered and added guiltily, “It was because of Lila I didn’t expose the professor after I caught him and Pat in the act.”

I must have looked puzzled, for she hurried on. “That girl — she threatened if I told Aunt Dora to have Lila arrested for murder.”

“You also believed Lila killed your cousin?”

“Gloria said so — I mean that girl said so, and-and Lila has always been kind to me, about Jeff, you know. She even begged Uncle Thomas to give Pat a break.”

“So that’s why you kept still.”

Her lips quivered. “I couldn’t betray Lila. What if she had killed Gloria? It was no more than we’d all been tempted to do.” She swallowed painfully. “You were right,” she said, “but for Pat and me, none of this would have happened and I don’t know how I can ever forgive myself.”

I had not even seen Jeff Wayne until he glared at me over Judy’s shoulder. “Don’t be silly!” he protested. “Nobody who matters a darn blames you for being the most loyal person in the world!”

With another defiant glance in my direction he took Judy into his arms. As I walked away she was clinging to him with a blissful smile upon her face while he kissed her very thoroughly and murmured small endearments into her ear. Needless to say, the sight met with my full approval, in spite of the resentment which Jeff Wayne appeared to nourish in my regard. I’m afraid to him I shall always be a nosy old maid with an unholy talent for prodding him into unhappy disclosures.

When I returned to the lounge it was almost two o’clock in the morning and everybody had settled down with pillows and blankets and overcoats to pass the remainder of the night upon the leather settees and in the deep armchairs which were scattered about. The death of Hogan Brewster had not removed the aversion with which we were all filled for the second floor at the inn. At least nobody showed any disposition to retire to it, not even Sheriff Latham, who was snoring away with his feet up on a windowsill, and least of all Butch, asleep in a straight chair by the desk, with Miss Maurine Smith’s head coyly resting upon his burly shoulder.

Sheila Kelly was sleeping too, huddled down on the couch beside Chet Keith, but he looked up at me with a faint smile. “The bus will be here at five o’clock,” he said. “The highway department telephoned Captain French.”

I glanced across the lobby to where the manager of Mount Lebeau Inn was reclining upon one of the stiff settles, his toupee slightly off centre where it had slid over one ear. Clinging to his arm, even in his slumber, was Fannie Parrish, silent practically for the first time since I had met her.

I suppose I must have looked scandalized, for Chet Keith chuckled. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody’s ship home,” he remarked. “They are going to be married.”

“Fannie and Captain French!” I exclaimed.

“The inn is done for, I’m afraid,” he explained, “but Mrs Parrish has quite a neat little income of her own, or so I understand.”

“What about her poor dear Theo?” I inquired with a sniff.

Chet Keith chuckled again. “As she reminded us a while ago, we all heard the message her poor dear Theo sent her. He wants his Little Butterfly to be happy.”

“Fannie Parrish knows as well as I do that those spirit messages were a fake!” I cried indignantly.

Chet Keith grinned. “People have a great facility for deluding themselves if it is to their advantage to be deluded.”

I borrowed one of Ella’s wisecracks. “You’re telling me,” I said and repeated for his benefit that amazing conversation which I had had with Dora Canby.

He drew a breath of relief. “It will be a great deal simpler with Mrs Canby taking that attitude,” he said with a wry grin, “and who am I to quarrel with what the gods provide?”

I dare say I looked a little blank, for he went on to elucidate. “The sheriff is convinced, you are convinced, everybody here is convinced that Sheila was the victim of that devil’s machinations, but it is going to be a lot easier to get her out of this business if Thomas Canby’s widow refuses to prosecute.”

“Hogan Brewster pointed out from the first that, with the Canby fortune behind her, Sheila Kelly would never be convicted,” I reminded him.

His face darkened. “I should have known he was our man. The clue was right under our noses all along. I don’t doubt that is what put the professor wise.”

“What clue?” I asked in a startled voice.

“Brewster said himself that he alone knew Gloria Canby’s nickname for him, yet Sheila called him by that name the night he was supposed to have arrived at the inn for the first time. She could have learned it from no one else.”

I recalled the scene distinctly, there in the dining room.

“The idea even occurred to me,” continued Chet Keith, “but I was obsessed with the notion that Thomas Canby’s millions were the motive for the crimes and, Lord knows, Brewster had money enough of his own.”

I sighed. “What put me off was having every reason to believe that he did not arrive at the inn in time to be responsible for the Gloria manifestations, which were the cornerstone of the entire plot.”

He nodded. “I think he had been hiding out somewhere in this vicinity the whole week. I don’t believe the telegram which he claimed to have received was ever sent. In my opinion he followed the Atwoods down here — trailed them, in fact.”

I was prepared to go a step farther. “Like most murderers, he was a self-centred brute,” I said. “He realized, when the others left Long Island in a hurry, that something was up and, no doubt, he believed the exodus concerned him. I don’t think it improbable that, having a guilty conscience and a wholesome respect for Thomas Canby’s pertinacity, Brewster even went so far as to believe that Canby had secured the evidence for which he was seeking.”

“Probably,” agreed Chet Keith. “At all events we know from Jay Stuart’s report, which Jeff Wayne overheard, that Brewster spent a lot of time in the hut across from the cemetery before he let his presence on the mountain be known. I suspect in the beginning he hid out in order to spy on the situation. Then he met Sheila and concocted his devilish plan and, concealing his presence until after Thomas Canby’s arrival, was an essential part of it.”

“Of course Brewster was responsible for the rock in the road,” I remarked, knitting my brows. “Though whether he uprooted it himself or forced Sheila to do so we’ll never know,” said Chet Keith quickly.

I shook my head. “He could not force her to commit murder, but she might have been persuaded to dig up the rock, just as he persuaded her to appropriate Dora Canby’s scissors, without her realizing that the act had criminal intent.”

He winced. “I know.”

“She told us herself that when she came to that afternoon she had dirt on her hands as if — as if she had been digging in the ground,” I faltered and then I drew a long breath. “But I prefer to believe, and I shall steadfastly maintain if asked, that he made her dig up a — a flower or something, so as to leave her with soiled hands and the conviction that she alone had been guilty of the attempt upon Canby’s life.”

“Oh, sure,” muttered Chet Keith, his arm tightening about the girl beside him, whose face looked like an uprooted flower itself, a drooping, haggard flower with a broken stem.

“He must have killed the chauffeur to prevent his telling about the hut,” I continued with a frown, “but if the cigarette butts and car tracks had been removed, as Stuart claimed, I don’t understand why Brewster believed the hut would incriminate him.”

Chet Keith felt gingerly of his wounded scalp. “Jay Stuart was a square-dealer, according to his somewhat sinister code. He tried to the last to earn the thousand dollars he had been paid. In other words he lied when he said the hut had been cleaned up. At least it hadn’t been when I got there tonight, although Brewster went over the place with a fine-tooth comb after he knocked me out. Nevertheless, in spite of his elaborate and drastic precautions, he overlooked this.”

He held out a fragment of black cloth.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A piece out of an opera cape which the sheriff uncovered a while ago under the mattress in Brewster’s room. He must have caught it on a splinter and torn off this bit without noticing. Anyway, I found it clinging to a rough spot in the door of the hut.”

“What on earth did he want with an opera cape in this benighted spot and at this season?” I exclaimed.

“There was a skeleton key in the pocket,” remarked Chet Keith significantly. “Although we’ll never know all the truth, I don’t doubt that Brewster employed the key to his advantage with nobody the wiser, worse luck. He was probably here, there and everywhere when least suspected, and the cape must have been extremely useful when he wished to get about unobserved. It is black and, you might say, all-enveloping. I am certain he was wearing it when he attacked me tonight in the hut.” He gave me a rueful glance. “At least if I had had to go into court I should have been forced to testify that the thing which set upon me came out of that old deserted graveyard and resembled nothing so much as an enormous bat.”

“A bat!” I exclaimed. “Brewster was the ghost which the porter said he saw again and again on the second floor!”

“The man was an athlete,” Chet Keith reminded me. “It would be no feat on his part to shinny in and out of windows in this old barn. I don’t doubt he did so freely whenever it suited his purpose. There were the cats, you know.”

I shuddered. Jake had declared that he saw a big black bat hovering over the body of the first disembowelled cat, but he had gone on to contend that it was a vampire, in possession of Sheila Kelly’s body, so his story was disregarded.

“No wonder,” I said weakly, “we were always thinking we heard something sneaking up behind us on the second floor. Even Butch saw the bat and took it for Jake’s ghost.”

He nodded. “Brewster was plenty active all right,” he said grimly, “and what he couldn’t manage himself he forced Sheila to do for him, such as the amber-coloured hairpins which were scattered about in all the suspicious places and the book which was abstracted from your luggage.”

I frowned. “How did he know about my book? It disappeared almost as soon as I got here.”

“We have to guess at a lot. Thank God, Sheila remembers none of it. However, I think there is no question that he made her meet him every afternoon at the hut. He had to rehearse her in the role of Gloria Canby, you know. He may even have slipped up to her room whenever he got the chance, damn him! One thing you can bet on. He picked her brains from start to finish about what was going on at the inn. Sheila knew about your book, didn’t she?”

“I think everybody in the house knew about it,” I said tartly, “thanks to Ella and Fannie Parrish.”

He grinned. “And Mrs Trotter, I hear, gave everyone emphatically to understand that with the book as authority she would be able to expose the professor as a fraud. Beyond a doubt Sheila transferred that impression to Brewster.”

“And he couldn’t afford to have the séances broken up before he had a chance to murder Thomas Canby,” I deduced excitedly.

“Exactly, so he took the book or had Sheila take it, though Lord only knows why he waited till tonight to plant it on Atwood.”

I had an inspiration. “Brewster’s original plan revolved about the fake spiritualistic act and so he expected to implicate nobody except Sheila and the professor, but things were getting too hot for him there at the last. Don’t you agree that he must have been badly rattled to attempt the balloon trick, with me knowing what I did? He never intended for us to learn that Gloria Canby was murdered. When that came out he lost his head. All he could think of was framing yet another suspect to stand between him and his crimes.”

“And for obvious reasons he picked on Lila Atwood’s husband?” murmured Chet Keith. “I’m sure you’re right.”

I sighed. “Nobody paid any attention to Jake’s tales, because he is a superstitious man, and there really were bats in the house.”

“I think we can thank Brewster for that too,” said Chet Keith with a wry smile. “I found traces of bats in the hut. I’d like to wager that he turned one or two loose in the inn, maybe to add to the horror atmosphere which he was building up for the Gloria manifestations, maybe to cover his disguise after Jake saw him.”