“Good evening, little Bright Eyes,” he said. “How’s everything in the
happy hunting ground tonight?”
“Dark and cold,” she said. “Dark and cold. And the knee hurts. It’s very
bad. If the key is on the nail--Arnica will take the pain out.”
She lapsed into silence. In transcribing Clara’s record I shall make no
reference to these pauses, which were frequent, and occasionally filled
in with extraneous matter. For instance, once there was what amounted
to five minutes of Mother Goose jingles. Our method was simply one
of question, by one of ourselves, and of answer by Miss Jeremy. These
replies were usually in a querulous tone, and were often apparently
unwilling. Also occasionally there was a bit of vernacular, as in the
next reply. Herbert, who was still flippantly amused, said:
“Don’t bother about your knee. Give us some local stuff. Gossip. If you
can.”
“Sure I can, and it will make your hair curl.” Then suddenly there was a
sort of dramatic pause and then an outburst.
“He’s dead.”
“Who is dead?” Sperry asked, with his voice drawn a trifle thin.
“A bullet just above the ear. That’s a bad place. Thank goodness there’s
not much blood. Cold water will take it out of the carpet. Not hot. Not
hot. Do you want to set the stain?”
“Look here,” Sperry said, looking around the table. “I don’t like this.
It’s darned grisly.”
“Oh, fudge!” Herbert put in irreverently. “Let her rave, or it, or
whatever it is. Do you mean that a man is dead?”--to the medium.
“Yes. She has the revolver. She needn’t cry so. He was cruel to her. He
was a beast. Sullen.”
“Can you see the woman?” I asked.
“If it’s sent out to be cleaned it will cause trouble. Hang it in the
closet.”
Herbert muttered something about the movies having nothing on us, and
was angrily hushed. There was something quite outside of Miss Jeremy’s
words that had impressed itself on all of us with a sense of unexpected
but very real tragedy. As I look back I believe it was a sort of
desperation in her voice. But then came one of those interruptions which
were to annoy us considerably during the series of sittings; she began
to recite Childe Harold.
When that was over,
“Now then,” Sperry said in a businesslike voice, “you see a dead man,
and a young woman with him. Can you describe the room?”
“A small room, his dressing-room. He was shaving. There is still lather
on his face.”
“And the woman killed him?”
“I don’t know. Oh, I don’t know. No, she didn’t. He did it!”
“He did it himself?”
There was no answer to that, but a sort of sulky silence.
“Are you getting this, Clara?” Mrs. Dane asked sharply. “Don’t miss a
word. Who knows what this may develop into?”
I looked at the secretary, and it was clear that she was terrified. I
got up and took my chair to her. Coming back, I picked up my forgotten
watch from the floor. It was still going, and the hands marked
nine-thirty.
“Now,” Sperry said in a soothing tone, “you said there was a shot fired
and a man was killed. Where was this? What house?”
“Two shots. One is in the ceiling of the dressing-room.”
“And the other killed him?”
But here, instead of a reply we got the words, “library paste.”
Quite without warning the medium groaned, and Sperry believed the trance
was over.
“She’s coming out,” he said. “A glass of wine, somebody.” But she did
not come out. Instead, she twisted in the chair.
“He’s so heavy to lift,” she muttered. Then: “Get the lather off his
face. The lather. The lather.”
She subsided into the chair and began to breathe with difficulty. “I
want to go out. I want air. If I could only go to sleep and forget it.
The drawing-room furniture is scattered over the house.”
This last sentence she repeated over and over. It got on our nerves,
ragged already.
“Can you tell us about the house?”
There was a distinct pause. Then: “Certainly. A brick house. The
servants’ entrance is locked, but the key is on a nail, among the vines.
All the furniture is scattered through the house.”
“She must mean the furniture of this room,” Mrs. Dane whispered.
The remainder of the sitting was chaotic. The secretary’s notes consist
of unrelated words and often childish verses. On going over the
notes the next day, when the stenographic record had been copied on a
typewriter, Sperry and I found that one word recurred frequently.
The word was “curtain.” Of the extraordinary event that followed the
breaking up of the seance, I have the keenest recollection. Miss Jeremy
came out of her trance weak and looking extremely ill, and Sperry’s
motor took her home. She knew nothing of what had happened, and hoped
we had been satisfied. By agreement, we did not tell her what had
transpired, and she was not curious.
Herbert saw her to the car, and came back, looking grave. We were
standing together in the center of the dismantled room, with the lights
going full now.
“Well,” he said, “it is one of two things. Either we’ve been gloriously
faked, or we’ve been let in on a very tidy little crime.”
It was Mrs. Dane’s custom to serve a Southern eggnog as a sort of
stir-up-cup--nightcap, she calls it--on her evenings, and we found it
waiting for us in the library. In the warmth of its open fire, and the
cheer of its lamps, even in the dignity and impassiveness of the butler,
there was something sane and wholesome. The women of the party reacted
quickly, but I looked over to see Sperry at a corner desk, intently
working over a small object in the palm of his hand.
He started when he heard me, then laughed and held out his hand.
“Library paste!” he said. “It rolls into a soft, malleable ball. It
could quite easily be used to fill a small hole in plaster. The paper
would paste down over it, too.”
“Then you think?”
“I’m not thinking at all. The thing she described may have taken place
in Timbuctoo. May have happened ten years ago. May be the plot of some
book she has read.”
“On the other hand,” I replied, “it is just possible that it was here,
in this neighborhood, while we were sitting in that room.”
“Have you any idea of the time?”
“I know exactly. It was half-past nine.”