The trouble at Pinelands A detective story
are for bed yet, except, maybe, Uncle George here.” He eyed my face,
which was haggard enough, I suppose, with compassion. The familiar name
came from his lips with such unaffected kindliness that I warmed to him
again. “You’re done out, Uncle George; better get some rest. We young
folks can manage.”
I shook my head. Between curiosity and stubborn pride, I was bound to
remain. “I’m not superannuated yet,” I told him tartly. “What are you up
to now?”
Somers laughed, and it was a friendly sound. “Oh, just a little
relaxation after our late excitement,” he replied, unwrapping his
bundle. “Peter, get ink and some pens. Dorothy”--and again the first
names came so naturally, with such unassuming intimacy, that we could
not but be softened--“you get your list--the addresses of all the people
to whom you sent invitations. You saved it, didn’t you?”
“Why, yes,” said Dorothy, wondering. “What of it?”
Somers smiled at her rebellious glance. It was as if he had elected
himself a member of the family and therefore ignored such little flashes
of pettishness, as, I began to see, he expected us to ignore his
brusqueness, his irritability.
“We’ve got to address all these notes,” he explained, “so they can be
mailed in the morning. It’s pretty late, of course, but I hope most of
your guests will get them in time. Don’t you see”--as the girl still
looked at him blankly--“your wedding’s got to be postponed?”
“Oh-h! I f-forgot.”
A sudden light struck me. I stared at our amazing visitor with my mouth
wide open. “Is that what you wanted the paper for?”
“Of course! I’ve done a hundred and four. Better write fifty more, to be
safe.” He unfolded a note and handed it to Dorothy.
“‘Miss Mary McGregor regrets,’” she read, “‘that the marriage of her
niece, Dorothy May, must be postponed indefinitely because of a serious
accident.’”
“The wording may not be exactly right,” Somers apologized. “I didn’t
have a chance to consult you about that. I thought it was as well to
make the explanation rather vague.”
“Why, you wonderful man!” Dorothy beamed on him, holding his long, bony
hand in both of hers. “It’s just perfect! How did you ever think of it?
We--we’ve all been so upset.” Her lips quivered, and her soft eyes
filled with tears. It was a dreadful situation for the poor child; no
wonder she had forgotten this detail.
But my mind was filled with a wondering admiration for this lank, bony
alienist. He had seemed brusque, casual, culpably indifferent to our
troubles; yet it was he whose ready wit had saved my nephew. And it was
he who, in the hurry and excitement of planning a defense against a
lynching party, had yet found time and forethought to buy this note
paper and, while waiting on the jail steps for an angry mob, had coolly
phrased this unexceptionable announcement and had written it over and
over, more than a hundred times!
I opened an envelope at random and glanced at the note which Dorothy
still held; then I picked up the last note, still unfolded and only half
written. All were done in the same flowing, copperplate script; they
seemed facsimiles, each of the other. Not a letter was misformed, not a
comma out of place; “postponed,” the last word of the unfinished note,
was as carefully written as any, and the pen had not trembled or made a
scrawl, as he laid his writing by to face the mob. Truly this Somers was
a remarkable man, and I resolved that hereafter no mannerisms of his
should irritate me.
Dorothy ran upstairs, to return presently with a long list of names and
addresses. Somers divided the pile of envelopes, gave us each pen and
ink, and set us to work around the library table.
“Working together we ought to be able to finish in two hours,” he
declared. “When does the morning train leave? Eight-ten? I’ll take them
down and get them stamped in time for that.”
Silence fell, broken only by the scratching of four pens.
It might have been an hour later--the hall clock had just struck
two--when Miss Christie appeared in the doorway. Her eyes were heavy,
her round face was flushed with sleep, and I noted for the first time
how thick and glossy was her fine, fair hair. She was muffled to the
chin in a shapeless, woolly bath robe; she yawned, shielding her mouth
with a slender, well-modeled hand.
“Miss McGregor can’t sleep,” she explained in her pleasant, throaty
drawl. “She sent me out to ask if you-all aren’t ever going to bed?” Her
eyes widened a little; they were beautiful eyes; and a demure smile
tugged at her mouth corners. “She says nobody thinks about her any more;
and she wants to see you, Miss Dorothy. She says she just knows
something underhand is going on in this house, and everybody’s trying to
keep it from her.” And then, with a flash of curiosity unusual in her,
normally the most incurious of women, she asked: “What _has_ happened
anyway? And why are you-all sitting up so late?”
“Doctor Parker was nearly lynched to-night,” said Peter. “But it’s all
right now; and Somers can prove he couldn’t have killed Gaskell
anyhow--that the body was cold before he came out.”
“Oh-h-h!” Miss Christie’s cheeks went white, and her violet eyes opened.
Again a sudden shock had brought startling beauty into her dull face.
After a breathless moment she disappeared.
“Go see to your aunt, Dorothy,” said Somers, his eyes still fixed on the
waving portières. “We’ll finish these up.”
When she had gone, he sat for a moment, staring absently at the doorway.
“Hypothyroidism,” he murmured vaguely. “You know, Uncle George, that
girl’s got the makings of a raving beauty in her!”
“Who, Dorothy? She’s a beauty now,” I replied.
“Huh? Oh, she’s well enough, but I meant the other one, Miss Christie.
Wait till I’ve treated her a while, and you’ll see what I mean.”
He sighed, passed a lank, bony hand across his eyes, and picked up his
pen once more: “Mr. and Mrs. R. Lawton McGregor, 42 Bank Street,
Toronto, Canada.”
CHAPTER XIV
THE POLTERGEIST AGAIN
It must have been half past three when I stumbled up to my room at last,
stripped off my clothes almost automatically, and fell into bed. I was
asleep in two minutes.
It was the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion, from which one does not
wake immediately, with every sense alert. No; I must climb, as it were,
up from the very bottom of a black abyss of unconsciousness, a sea of
oblivion, struggling with infinite pains back toward the light. For
hours, as it seemed, I fought my way stubbornly through a welter of
half-seen dreams, in response to some imperative summons whose nature,
even, my sleep-drugged senses refused to grasp.
At last I came out from sleep into wakefulness suddenly, as a train
whizzes out of a long tunnel into the daylight. I sat up, blinking. It
was still dark; somewhere in the distance a rooster crowed. That did not
aid me in fixing the time, for in North Carolina the cocks crow all
night; but now I saw that the east was faintly gray, and I heard the
first shrill whistle of an early-rising quail.
By that I knew dawn must be near at hand. But why had I waked so early?
What was the insistent call which had dragged me back from deep slumber?
I blinked bewilderedly.
Then suddenly a chill swept over me; an eerie horripilation crept up my
spine and plucked at the short hairs of my neck. As I shivered with
actual, physical cold, I saw that some one or something had drawn back
the blanket, so that I lay uncovered almost to my knees. Then, as I
leaned forward, clutching after the coverlets, they moved beneath my
hand, as though by their own independent volition!
I gave a strangled gasp; perhaps I cried aloud. I am not sure, for the
thing shook me. At any rate, in the pale gray light of coming dawn, I
saw my blanket creep swiftly, silently, over the foot of the bed and
move toward the door.
No one was in sight. My eyes, from which sleep was miraculously purged,
raced about the empty room and saw its every detail distinctly. There
was the dresser, the rocking chair whereon hung my clothes, the corner
table, every familiar furnishing. Beyond the foot of my bed the door
stood half open, and through it my blanket and counterpane were moving
in a white, undulating mass, that seemed curiously and uncannily alive.
And still there was no sound, no stir.
I grew cold and rheumatic. Perhaps I hesitated for an instant, daunted
by this mysterious phenomenon. But it was not more than three seconds, I
am sure, before I was out of bed and standing at the door, ready
for--for whatever cursed thing might lurk there.
There was nothing. The hall stood empty and still, as commonplace as at
high noon. I ran to the head of the stairs and leaned over the
balustrade. The broad staircase stood empty, also, and the lower hall,
as far as my eye could reach. Everything was very still, so that I heard
the loud ticking of the grandfather clock below me. But of my nocturnal
visitor, if visitor there had been, and of my coverlets, there was no
sign at all. Both had vanished.
A door creaked, and I spun about, nerves tense as fiddlestrings. It was
Doctor Somers, more lathy and slender of limb in his pajamas than by
day, if that were possible.
“Nightmare?” he inquired sourly. “You yelled horribly.”
Peter appeared beside him, dwarfed by the other’s lank height; and
Dorothy’s smooth black head peered from her door.
I blushed hotly. I must have made an extraordinary racket, to wake all
these tired young folks! “I’m sorry, people,” I said apologetically.
“Either I’ve had a nightmare, or it was the Poltergeist again.”
“Humph!” said Somers and looked at me queerly. “Poltergeist?”
“I don’t know. Either I dreamed it all, or my blankets just climbed over
the footboard and walked away by themselves. They’re gone, anyhow.”
Dorothy came out, wrapped in her fuzzy blue robe, hair hanging in two
sleek braids to her knees. “Oh, dear!” said she and peeped into my room.
“Yes, they’re gone. That best white wool blanket, Peter, and the
crocheted counterpane. It must have been the Poltergeist!”
“I’m c-cold,” I muttered, suddenly conscious of my thin pajamas.
“Poor old dear! You climb right back into bed and let Peter tuck you in.
Here!” Dorothy opened the linen closet at the end of the hall and
dragged out more blankets. “Cover him up, Peter; we’ll look for the
other things in the morning. No telling what the Poltergeist has done
with them!”
“Humph!” repeated Somers. He cocked his head on one side, and, in his
pajamas, whose wide stripes, running up and down, accentuated his height
and lankiness, he looked like some new variety of long-legged bird--a
striped crane.
“Humph! Poltergeist! That’s interesting.” His tone held an impersonal
enthusiasm, as of a surgeon confronted with some new and rare disease; I
was reminded of the manner in which he had pronounced Miss Christie’s
sleepiness due to “hypothyroidism,” whatever that may be. “A
Poltergeist! Then such things have happened here before?”
Dorothy nodded. “Yes, the nasty thing’s been hanging round for a year,
almost, playing tricks like this, breaking dishes, yelling through the
halls, and everything.”
“Humph! Well, let’s get back to bed. I’ll look into this later.”
“Ask Aunt Mary,” suggested Peter grimly. “She’ll talk your arm off about
spiritism, if you once get her started.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your aunt yet,” replied Somers.
Then he yawned and went back into his room.
I went back to bed, to shiver beneath my new blankets. It was not really
cold, but I was chilled through. And what with fatigue and excitement
and the honest fright of watching my blankets creep away in that eerie
fashion, I could not get to sleep again. Moreover, bobwhite had tuned up