The Room with the Tassels

“That’s as may be. Only I advise you to investigate with a little common sense and not too much blind faith in your spook visitors. Now, Mr. Landon, I take it you’re boss around here.”

“I’m responsible for the house rent, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, that’ll do. Now, sir, there’s got to be an inquest. I expected, of course, to hold it on the two bodies, but since one’s gone, we’ll have to do what we can without it. I don’t deny that this case is beyond all my experience. I’ve sent for a detective from New York, and I’ll get all the other help I need. But I’m all at sea, myself, and I make no secret of that.”

“I thought you suspected Eli Stebbins.”

“Not of murder! No, sir! Me’n Eli, we ain’t good friends, haven’t been for years, and I wouldn’t put it past him to play ghost to scare you city people, but murder! Land, no, I wouldn’t ever accuse Eli Stebbins of goin’ that far!”

“Have you any definite suspect?”

“I don’t say as I have, and I don’t say as I ain’t. Truth is, I’m all afloat. I don’t know which way to turn. Every thing’s so awful unbelievable, – as you might say. Now, there’s them two Thorpes. Good, steady-going New England people, they are, and yet, if I had any reason to suspect ’em, I can see myself doing so. But, land, there ain’t a shred of evidence that way. Why, they wasn’t even in the room when the two of ’em died!”

“Wait a minute, Doctor Crawford. Nobody was in the room at the time of those two deaths, but our own party. You don’t suspect one of us, do you?”

“No, Mr. Landon, I don’t. You ain’t a gay crowd, nor yet a fast or a common crowd. You’re all high-toned, quiet, law-abiding citizens, – as I size you up. To be sure, decent citizens have committed murder, but I can’t connect up any one of you with crime in this case. I know Mr. Braye will inherit the money that old Mr. Bruce left, and I know that you’re related there, too, but I haven’t seen one iota of reason to suspect any one of your crowd. If I do, I’ll let you know mighty quick! Nor can I hang it on the Thorpes; nor yet on those girls they have in to help. And that’s what the inquest’s for. To bring out, if possible, some evidence against somebody, so’s we can get a start.”

“I fear you can’t get that evidence, Doctor, for if there were any we would have found it ourselves. You have my good wishes, for if it is a case of murder, committed by a living, human villain, we most assuredly want him apprehended.”

“He will be, Mr. Landon, take it from me, he will be!”

CHAPTER XI

The Heir Speaks Out

The days that followed were like an awful nightmare to the people most interested. But at last the inquest was over, the body of Gifford Bruce had been sent to Chicago for burial, and a strange quiet had settled down upon the household at Black Aspens.

No new facts had transpired at the inquest. Though the police tried hard to fasten the crime on some individual, there was no definite evidence against any one. All those who had been present at the mysterious death hour, told their stories straightforwardly and unshakably. All agreed as to the circumstances, all remembered and related the story of the Ouija board, which foretold the death of two of the party at four o’clock.

“Who was pushing that board?” the coroner asked.

“Miss Reid and myself,” Tracy spoke up. “We had been playing with it for some time, and having had only uninteresting and trifling results we were about to lay the thing aside, when the message came that two of us would die the next day at four o’clock. Miss Reid seemed frightened, but I thought at the time she had spelled out the message, herself, to get up a little excitement. However, I took the board away from her at once, feeling that she was carrying a jest too far. I think now, that she was innocent in the matter – ”

“Well, I don’t,” said the coroner. “If that girl made up that message, she had a reason. Probably she was responsible for both deaths.”

“Impossible!” cried Tracy, shocked at this theory. “Why, she was but a child, she had no thought of suicide or – or murder! If she faked the message, it was merely in fun, and because she had tried all evening to get some message of interest. It is quite possible she made up the message, but it is not possible that she did it otherwise than as a jest.”

“A gruesome jest!”

“As it turned out, yes, indeed. But either it was in jest, – or – the message was from a supernatural source.”

Tracy’s eyes were deeply sorrowful, and his face expressed a sort of awed wonder, that made many who were present, think that after all there might be something in these occult beliefs.

But not so the coroner. He refused to consider the Ouija message with any serious interest, and continued to ply his witnesses with questions both pertinent and wide of the mark.

Elijah Stebbins was put through a grilling inquiry. His manner was that of a guilty man, but no proof of crime could be found in connection with him. The day and hour of the two deaths, he was proved to have been at his home in East Dryden, beyond all doubt. Even granting that the Thorpes, one or both, were in his employ, there was no reason to suspect them. If they had put poison in the cakes or in the tea, it must have been done in the kitchen, and therefore would have affected the whole supply. Suspicion must fall, if anywhere, on the members of the house party who were present at the hour of four o’clock on the fatal day.

But these, as has been said, gave so clear a statement of the actual happenings at that hour, that there was no loophole for suspicion to enter. Moreover, the fact that the deaths occurred simultaneously, and just at the foretold hour, seemed to preclude all possibility of any human means being employed. It did look like a supernatural occurrence and many who would have scorned such a belief, were inevitably led to agree that no other theory could explain it.

Yet the coroner and his jury were unwilling to admit this, and the verdict was the one most frequently heard of, murder by a person or persons unknown.

Indeed, what else could it have been? A coroner’s jury can’t accuse a nameless ghost of two murders, by poison. They pinned their faith to that poison, discovered in the stomach of the body of Gifford Bruce. They assumed that Miss Reid died from the effects of the same poison, but how administered or by whom, or what had become of the body of Miss Reid, they had no idea. But of one thing they were sure, that all these things, and all parts of the complicated crime, were the work of human hands and human intelligence, and that for the reputation of their village and their county and their state, the murderer must be discovered and brought to justice.

But how? How find a criminal who gave no signs of existence, and who was, by those most closely concerned, denied actual existence?

The detective, one Dan Peterson, proceeded on the theory that a closed mouth implies great secret wisdom. He said little, save to ask questions of everybody with whom he came in contact, and as these questions merely carried him round in a circle back to his starting point, he made little progress.

There were also, of course, many reporters, from the city papers, and these wrote up the story as their natures or their chiefs dictated. Some played up the supernatural side for all it was worth, and more; others scorned such foolishness, and treated the affair as a desperate and unusually mysterious murder case. But all agreed that it was the most sensational and interesting affair of its sort that had happened in years, and the eager reporters hung around and nearly drove frantic the feminine members of the house party.

At last, Norma and Milly refused to see them, but Eve Carnforth continued to talk with them, and imbued many of them, more or less, with her occult views.

“There’s something in what that red-headed woman says,” one reporter opined to his fellow. “She puts it mighty convincing, – if you ask me.”

“Yes, and why?” jeered his friend, “because she’s the man behind the ghost!”

“What! Miss Carnforth! Guilty? Never!”

“I’m not so sure. You know as well as I do, that spook talk is all rubbish, but she’s so bent and determined to stuff it down everybody’s neck, I think she’s hiding her own hand in the matter.”

“You do! Well, you’d better think again, before you let out any such yarn as that! Why, she’s a queen, that woman is!”

“Oho! She’s subjugated you, has she? Well, look out that she doesn’t convert you to spookism, – you’d lose your job!”

Other curious people journeyed up to Black Aspens for the pleasure of looking at the house where the mystery was staged. If allowed to enter they walked about, open-mouthed in admiration or wonder.

“Stunning hall!” exclaimed one young man, a budding architect, who examined the old house with interest. “Look at those bronze columns! I never saw such a pair.”

“I’ve heard the first Montgomery brought those from Italy or somewhere, and put up a house behind ’em,” volunteered another sightseer. “Ain’t it queer, the way they’re half in and half out of the front wall? Land! You wouldn’t know whether you was going to school or coming home!” and the speaker laughed heartily at his own wit.

But at last, the sightseers were refused admittance to the house, and the remaining members of the party gathered in conclave to decide on future plans.

Professor Hardwick was the one who showed the calmest demeanour.

“If there was a chance of a human being having committed these crimes,” he said, “I’d be the first one to want to track him down, and send him straight to the chair. But nobody who has thought about the matter can present any theory that will account for the human element in the cause of the tragedy. Therefore, feeling certain, as I do, that our friends were killed by supernatural influences, I am ready to stay here a short time longer, in hopes of convincing the authorities up here that we are right. Moreover, I planned to stay here a month, and we’ve been here but little more than a fortnight.”

“I’m willing to stay for the same reason, Professor,” and Eve Carnforth’s strange eyes glowed deeply. “I too, know that no living beings brought about the deaths of Mr. Bruce and little Vernie, and I will stay the rest of our proposed month, if the others will.”

“I am ready to stay,” said Milly Landon, quietly. “I’ve gotten all over my hysterical, foolish fears, and I want to stay. I have a good reason, and if I hadn’t, I’d be willing to stay to keep house for the rest of you.”

“Let’s consider it settled, then,” said Landon, “that we stay a couple of weeks longer. The astute detective, Mr. Peterson, thinks he can round up the villains who did the awful things, and if he can, I’m ready to appear against them.”

“We’re all ready to do that,” agreed Mr. Tracy, “and I’ll stay a week or so, but I want to get away by the middle of August.”

“That’s nearly two weeks hence,” observed Norma, “I’d like to go home about that time, too. And all that’s to be discovered, which, I suppose, will be nothing, ought to be found out in that time.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me to have some further spiritual manifestations,” the Professor stated, with a deeply thoughtful air. “I don’t know why there wouldn’t be such.”

“Not with fatal results, I hope,” and Mr. Tracy shuddered.