Legacy Of Terror Part 3

Although she was a trained nurse and supposedly accustomed to grisly scenes, as she had told them, she wanted to get away from this place, this body, this spreading crimson puddle. She had encountered b.l.o.o.d.y illnesses while in training; she had even dealt with beating victims and gunshot wounds. But this was something else again. This was the work of a s.a.d.i.s.t, not the violence of heated pa.s.sions. The wounds- five, she now saw-had been carefully placed where they would do the most damage. Too, Elaine could see that Celia had not screamed when the first one or two thrusts of the blade had been delivered; she must have stood dumbly while the murderer worked on her, too surprised to scream as soon as she should have. Her a.s.sailant had, therefore, gotten in a few more blows.

The ambulance arrived in less than ten minutes. The attendents were efficient and gentle. In two more minutes, they had bundled her inside the white van and lurched back down the drive with Dennis accompanying them in the patient area in the back of the vehicle.

'You'd better see about my father,' Lee Matherly said. He appeared to have aged ten years in less than an hour. His face was lined, his eyes weary, his complexion sallow and unhealthy.

'Of course,' she said. Anything to get away from that red puddle and the memory of Celia's wounds.

It was as if the house lay miles and miles away rather than just a few hundred yards. All the shadows had a.s.sumed sinister proportions. Each wind-shaken branch of a tree or shrub was like a thrusting hand that made her jump and then walk faster. She tried to shame herself out of her fear, but she could not. Perhaps that was because the source of the terror was irrationality, a murder of whim. And whims were things which she had never developed an understanding of. You could lump them under the term 'insanity,' but that did not explain them.

Old Jacob Matherly was awake, sitting up in his bed; he had turned the lights on. He looked at her with evident relief and said, 'I was afraid it was your scream.'

'It was Celia,' she said.

Then she realized that she should not have said anything. What had come over her? She was losing control of her common sense and bothering her patient with bad news when it would have been best to pa.s.s the incident off as meaningless for as long as possible. Until he could be prepared for it, anyway.

'Is she dead?' he asked. Clearly, he expected that she would be.

Elaine stammered over her answer. 'Not yet,' she said at last.

'Chances don't look good, eh?'

She made her way to the nearest chair, by the bed, and sat down.

'How often was she stabbed?'

She said, 'How could you know she had been stabbed?'

He made an impatient gesture with his good hand. 'I told you that someone was in my room with a knife three weeks ago. I told you and Lee, and neither one of you would believe me. Besides, there's Christmas Eve. I can never forget knives after that.'

His voice had suddenly become tight, stretched like a rubber band. Although she wanted to know, more than ever, what the Christmas tragedy was all about, she knew it would be a mistake to broach the subject now. Even hinting at it, before the excitement tonight, he had suffered an attack of angina. Her duty was to keep him calm.

'I think,' he continued, 'you should pay especially close attention to those three I mentioned earlier.'

'You think it was someone in this house? Couldn't it have been a prowler, or a hitchhiker or-'

He smiled, but it was an awful smile, even though she could not see the frozen half of his face. 'My dear Elaine, it could hardly be anyone else.'

'Someone lurking in the drive,' Elaine offered. 'Someone who saw her go out and thought she might be back.'

'But she did not live here,' he said. 'Why should she return? Only the people in this house knew she was to spend the weekend.'

Elaine said, 'A madman, seeing her leave, wouldn't have had to know that she was a stranger. He might have thought she lived here, waited, and struck it lucky-or unlucky.'

'Simpler answers are better,' Jacob said.

It was one of her own axioms too, but she did not see that it applied to this. She told him as much. 'It is far more complicated to ever imagine that one of the people in this house did it. None of them are capable of such a thing!'

'Several are,' he said.

She was suddenly angered by his pessimism and paranoia. The events of the night had broken down her defenses to the point where she could forget her training and speak rather harshly to him. 'I don't see how you can say that about your own people!'

'It isn't easy,' he agreed. 'Elaine, I grieve terribly at the thought of it, but I cannot let emotion overrule what I know.' know.'

'You can't know. Did you see who did it?' 'No.'

'Then-'

He said, 'One cannot evade the truth for very long. Life makes certain that it comes home again and again. And if you choose to ignore it, it only hurts you worse in the end. I've been expecting this for a decade and a half.'

'Neither Dennis nor Gordon-and not Paul, for that matter-is capable of murder. And, certainly, none of them is capable of such an awful, b.l.o.o.d.y murder like this.' She corrected herself, superst.i.tiously. Celia Tamlin was not yet dead; it wasn't right to speak of her like that. Thus far, the crime was only intended intended murder. murder.

'It is all part of their legacy, Elaine.' Jacob had managed to pull himself up against the headboard, sitting as straight as he could manage, rigid as iron, the feather pillows jammed down between the headboard and the mattress.

'Legacy?'

'The Honneker legacy, the one I tried to tell you about earlier in the day.'

'I don't understand,' she said.

And that was true. And, being true, it frightened her, because she was accustomed to understanding things. Confusion and doubt were always to be cast out as quickly as possible.

'Madness,' Jacob Matherly said. 'Their mother's grandfather, their own great-grandfather, went out of his mind when he was only thirty-four and was thereafter inst.i.tutionalized for the remainder of his life. And, more recently, their mother was affected.'

'Lee's wife?'

'Amelia,' he affirmed.

'You can't mean that she was mad,' Elaine said. But she knew quite well what he meant.

'Oh, yes,' Jacob said. 'Mad. Very mad. She was a beautiful woman, tall and stately with a face like a G.o.ddess. Lee thought that her flights of fancy and her sometimes hot temperament were intriguing, spice to her otherwise steady personality. At first, he thought that. Later, he learned they were symptoms of a deeper and more dangerous malady.'

'Are you all right?' she asked. His color was bad, and he was trembling.

'I'm fine,' he croaked. But he had begun, ever so silently, to weep, tears glistening on his leathery cheeks*

Chapter 4.

Although grief-stricken by the memory of that long-ago tragedy, Jacob Matherly did not seem in danger of becoming overexcited by it as he had earlier in the day. She felt there was little chance that he would aggravate his angina, and she decided to let him go on with it, in his good time, until she had-at last, at last! -heard the story of Christmas Eve, the story which seemed to bind this entire household under a black and unbreakable spell.

Just when he was beginning to find an end to the store of tears in himself, just when Elaine thought that he might now continue and unburden himself, thereby enlightening her, a knock came at the door. She answered it, reluctantly, and found Jerry standing there, like a bird in human clothes, sharp and frail, quivering slightly.

'What is it?' she asked.

'The police,' Jerry said.

She supposed they had had to be called, though she had never given it a thought until now.

'They would like to talk with you, downstairs,' Jerry said.

'I don't know anything about it,' she said.

'They're talking to everyone.'

She sighed. 'Very well. I'll put Mr. Matherly back to bed and be down in a few moments.'

Jerry nodded and hurried down the corridor towards the stairs, his spindly legs like the legs of a crab or insect 'I guess you heard,' she said, closing the door and turning back to old Jacob Matherly.

The tears were gone altogether, and his stony composure had taken over once more. He said, 'If they want to talk to me, they'll have to come up here.'

'We'll fix it so that you don't have to talk to them,' she said. She got another sedative from the medicine chest, poured a gla.s.s of cold water from the ice-filled pitcher next to his bed, and watched him take the tablet.

'Thank you,' he said. 'I had enough of policemen the last time, enough of their snide remarks, their brutal questioning. I think, sometimes, that the police can be nastier with the rich than with the poor. They let their envy push them a little further than it should.'

'You sleep now,' she said.

'I'll try.'

He closed his eyes and folded his hands across his chest as she turned out the lights. She looked quickly away from him, for he had looked, in that instant, like a corpse in the casket, ready for the funeral.

In the hall, she found that someone had turned the light out. A blanket of shadows had been thrown over the length of the corridor until, by the head of the stairs, thin light filtered up from below. And voices. Voices wafted to her as well, distant and rumbling, the words they spoke indistinguishable. They could have been ghosts, moaning in the walls as easily as people engaged in normal conversation.

She went down the steps, making a conscious effort to slow the beat of her heart. Foolish fears. Childish fears. 'Elaine,' she chided herself, 'you're becoming as rococo as this house, as silly as Dennis Matherly.'

Nevertheless, when she reached the bottom of the stairs and old Jerry stepped out of an alcove to escort her to the police, she was so startled that she leaped and gave a tiny yelp of fear. He took her hand and patted it and told her he knew how she felt and that he was sorry to have frightened her.

She followed him to the den, through the door into a bright pool of yellow light, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the change. She saw that they were all there: Lee, Dennis and Gordon, Paul Honneker. There were also two policemen, a tall, broad-shouldered man about forty years old who was introduced as Captain Rand-and a shorter, darker, quicker detective named Holcombe who looked-if one were used to old movies on television-more like a villain than the upholder of justice.

'Please sit down, Miss Sherred,' Captain Rand said. He smiled, showing perfect white teeth. Elaine recognized it as a professional, not a genuine smile, a relative of the smile she learned to produce when she needed it in her job. She supposed there were times that a policeman, just like a nurse, had absolutely nothing to smile about but was forced to for the benefit of those around him. It was difficult to smile and be cheerful to a man dying of cancer when he was ignorant of his deterioration, but it was necessary. For Captain Rand, it must have been unpleasant to smile in the face of blood and a badly wounded girl and knives and darkness and unexplained madness. But it was expected of him, and he smiled.

She sat on the couch, next to Gordon Matherly. It was an unconscious move that she could not have explained. There were other chairs available. She just felt safer safer beside Gordon. beside Gordon.

'Miss Sherred,' Captain Rand said, 'we've heard everyone's account of what happened this evening, except yours. We'd like you to tell us what you remember of the-uh, the incident.'

'There's really little to tell,' she said.

'Nevertheless, we'd like to hear,' he said. He smiled again. Smiled with his lips. His eyes were hard, perhaps hardened by too many years of this sort of thing. 'It's always possible that one witness will have noticed something none of the others did, some bit of a thing which will make all the pieces fit together.' But his tone of voice, the infinite weariness behind that smile, said he didn't hope for any such miracle.

She told him the story, up to the point where she left the scene to check on Jacob Matherly. She did not feel it was her place to add Jacob's story of family madness, partly because she was not of the family and did not have the right to talk about them and partly because she did not yet know how much of the old man's tales to believe.

When she finished, Rand said, 'When you heard the scream, did you think there were words to it?'

'It was just a scream,' she replied.

'Think hard, Miss Sherred.'

'Just a scream,' she repeated.

'Often,' Rand said, pacing back and forth before the a.s.sembled witnesses, 'a victim will p.r.o.nounce the name of his attacker at the last moment. Could the scream have been a drawn out name, a Christian name or perhaps a surname?'

She thought about it for a moment. 'No. Definitely not.'

Rand seemed disappointed. For a moment, his calm expression and the gentle, professional smile slipped away.

In the pause, she asked, 'Is Celia still alive?'

'She's comatose,' Rand said. 'She lost a great deal of blood and suffered severe shock. The lining of her stomach has been twice punctured, though no other organs received the blade. A vein in her thigh was severed. They've already begun work on that and on the abdominal wounds. She's still in surgery and will be, I'd say, for some time yet.'

In the easy chair next to the desk, Lee Matherly leaned forward and cupped his face in his hands. He did not say anything.

'Did you see a knife anywhere near the body, Miss Sherred?' Captain Rand asked.

'Not that I remember.'

'Anything like a knife-a letter opener, a gardening tool?'

'No.'

'I believe you were the one who elevated the girl's legs and tried to staunch the blood flow from her abdomen.'

'I'm a nurse.'

He nodded, aware of that. 'Did she, while you were attending her, ever regain consciousness?'

'She was too weak,' Elaine said.

'She did not speak even a word?'

'Nothing.'

'You would have noticed if she had opened her eyes? You were not too distraught to fail to notice a moment of sensibility in her?'

'I'm a nurse,' she said. 'I do not become distraught over illness or injury or death.' She was beginning to dislike the way Captain Rand was questioning her, forcing each point again and again, as if she were a child who could not be expected to remember properly, except with prodding. She supposed that it was necessary for him to be this way and that he was only doing his job, but she didn't like it and wanted to tell him so.

Fortunately, her reference to her professionalism seemed to appeal to him, and he nodded what she took for apology and respect. He said, 'I am sorry that I forgot to consider that, Miss Sherred.'

She smiled her acceptance of his apology.

Then, abruptly, she discovered that her hand was enclosed by Gordon's hand. His warm, dry fingers enfolded her own and held them with a gentle pressure. She was surprised, because she could not remember having reached for him-or feeling him reach for her. But, sometime during the questioning, they had sought comfort and had found it together.

Elaine blushed, but she did not withdraw her hand. It was nice having her hand held, being accepted by Gordon as something more than the family's latest domestic servant.

'Well,' Rand said, 'let's look into some other aspects of this thing.' He withdrew a notebook from his hip pocket and thumbed it open. Pages rustled abnormally loud in that silent room. 'Celia Tamlin was an interior decorator looking over your house prior to making suggestions for renovation. Is that correct, Mr. Matherly?'