Miss Jeremy did not come to dinner. She never ate before a seance. And
although we tried to keep the conversational ball floating airily, there
was not the usual effervescence of the Neighborhood Club dinners. One
and all, we were waiting, we knew not for what.
I am sorry to record that there were no physical phenomena of any sort
at this second seance. The room was arranged as it had been at the first
sitting, except that a table with a candle and a chair had been placed
behind a screen for Mrs. Dane’s secretary.
There was one other change. Sperry had brought the walking-stick he had
taken from Arthur Wells’s room, and after the medium was in trance he
placed it on the table before her.
The first questions were disappointing in results. Asked about the
stick, there was only silence. When, however, Sperry went back to the
sitting of the week before, and referred to questions and answers at
that time, the medium seemed uneasy. Her hand, held under mine, made an
effort to free itself and, released, touched the cane. She lifted it,
and struck the table a hard blow with it.
“Do you know to whom that stick belongs?”
A silence. Then: “Yes.”
“Will you tell us what you know about it?”
“It is writing.”
“Writing?”
“It was writing, but the water washed it away.”
Then, instantly and with great rapidity, followed a wild torrent of
words and incomplete sentences. It is inarticulate, and the secretary
made no record of it. As I recall, however, it was about water,
children, and the words “ten o’clock” repeated several times.
“Do you mean that something happened at ten o’clock?”
“No. Certainly not. No, indeed. The water washed it away. All of it. Not
a trace.”
“Where did all this happen?”
She named, without hesitation, a seaside resort about fifty miles from
our city. There was not one of us, I dare say, who did not know that the
Wellses had spent the preceding summer there and that Charlie Ellingham
had been there, also.
“Do you know that Arthur Wells is dead?”
“Yes. He is dead.”
“Did he kill himself?”
“You can’t catch me on that. I don’t know.”
Here the medium laughed. It was horrible. And the laughter made the
whole thing absurd. But it died away quickly.
“If only the pocketbook was not lost,” she said. “There were so many
things in it. Especially car-tickets. Walking is a nuisance.”
Mrs. Dane’s secretary suddenly spoke. “Do you want me to take things
like that?” she asked.
“Take everything, please,” was the answer.
“Car-tickets and letters. It will be terrible if the letters are found.”
“Where was the pocketbook lost?” Sperry asked.
“If that were known, it could be found,” was the reply, rather sharply
given. “Hawkins may have it. He was always hanging around. The curtain
was much safer.”
“What curtain?”
“Nobody would have thought of the curtain. First ideas are best.”
She repeated this, following it, as once before, with rhymes for the
final word, best, rest, chest, pest.
“Pest!” she said. “That’s Hawkins!” And again the laughter.
“Did one of the bullets strike the ceiling?”
“Yes. But you’ll never find it. It is holding well. That part’s safe
enough--unless it made a hole in the floor above.”
“But there was only one empty chamber in the revolver. How could two
shots have been fired?”
There was no answer at all to this. And Sperry, after waiting, went on
to his next question: “Who occupied the room overhead?”
But here we received the reply to the previous question: “There was a
box of cartridges in the table-drawer. That’s easy.”
From that point, however, the interest lapsed. Either there was no
answer to questions, or we got the absurdity that we had encountered
before, about the drawing-room furniture. But, unsatisfactory in many
ways as the seance had been, the effect on Miss Jeremy was profound--she
was longer in coming out, and greatly exhausted when it was all over.
She refused to take the supper Mrs. Dane had prepared for her, and at
eleven o’clock Sperry took her home in his car.