The trouble at Pinelands A detective story
The old lady swept on, unheeding. “No one in this house ever paid me the
attention I deserved. That was my revenge; I served you out for
neglecting me! Where’s your wedding finery now, my girl? Ha, ha, ha!”
She gave a wild, screeching laugh; it made me shudder. Surely this was a
maniac who confronted us, hunched there on the bed, her shaking hands
playing about the stock of a shotgun!
“I made a fine ghost!” she exulted. “It was sport--such sport!”
Doctor Somers groaned aloud. “Poor thing, oh, poor thing!” I heard him
whisper. And then aloud he asked: “And you shot Doctor Gaskell, didn’t
you?”
Her head went up and back in that old, proud gesture. “He--he insulted
me--insulted a poor, helpless paralytic! He laughed, and I told you. I
just begged of you to drive those miserable quail away. I told you they
would set me crazy; and Peter paid no attention. Nobody paid any
attention at all. Doctor Parker promised to shoot them, but I knew he
didn’t mean it. Why, that morning they whistled and whistled for hours!
I waited and waited; nobody came, nobody stirred, nobody cared if they
drove me mad! At last I got up, helpless as I was and paralyzed.”
She paused abruptly, seeming for the first time to be conscious of the
incongruity of a paralytic getting up and walking about.
“I--sometimes my affliction leaves me for a few minutes,” she faltered.
“I got up and went out--a poor, helpless old woman--to do what these
hulking men should have done for me, if they’d been men at all! Peter’s
gun stood on the back porch; I loaded it. Oh, when I was a girl, I used
to be a good shot! That was before I was paralyzed.
“I went out back, into the scrub oaks. It was daylight, though the sun
wasn’t up. And there I met Doctor Gaskell. He--he insulted me; he
laughed! He asked me if I’d recovered from my paralysis, and he laughed!
He--he called me an old f-faker! The cad! And I answered him as a
high-spirited gentlewoman should answer such an insult!”
She paused, looking down at the shotgun in her lap. All this while she
had been handling it unconsciously, as it seemed; breaking its breech,
extracting the empty shell, playing with the undischarged cartridge. As
she sat there, all hunched in the bed, her thin face distorted with
unlovely passions, she looked like a particularly unpleasant old witch.
Her cheeks were all sunken; without her false teeth her mouth seemed to
have fallen in, so that high-bridge nose and pointed chin almost touched
each other.
Then she raised her head to cast an evil glance at Doctor Somers. “I
hurried back,” she went on monotonously. “I cleaned the gun--oh, I knew
how, well enough--and put it where I’d found it; then came to my room.
Everybody was asleep, even this stupid nurse. She hadn’t heard anything;
she never heard anything. Blockhead! I was safe, quite safe. Nobody
could suspect. It was the birds--devils, rather. They knew; they’d seen
it all! And they perched outside my windows every morning before
daybreak and whistled, whistled, whistled; they weren’t birds. They were
devils, I tell you--devils, accusing me! They have driven me mad at
last! And then you had to mix in, you, Somers! Ah-h-h, how I hate you!
Sneaking and watching and spying on me! If only I could have killed you
in the night, as I meant to! I’d have been safe then. But, no, you had
to keep it up, you and those birds. You plotted this against me, you and
the birds together. They helped you, I know! I heard them just now,
outside my window, mocking me, accusing me, calling you to come and
betray me. But you shan’t profit by it!”
As rage overpowered her, she ceased to make any pretense of palsy, but
slid her lean shanks out of the bed and stood erect, facing her
unmasker, her face distorted with hate. And now, before we could move,
before we could cry out, she snapped the breech of the gun she still
held, jerked it to her shoulder, and pulled the trigger.
I heard the click of the hammer upon an empty shell, and still we stood
motionless, all but Anne Christie. With one smothered scream she leaped
wildly forward, threw herself upon Floyd Somers’ breast, shielding his
body with her own. She moved with the speed of desperate love. Before we
others could intervene, while my arm was still outstretched, and Peter
was leaning forward, the second trigger moved. I saw the hammer fall;
the bass roar of the explosion, doubly loud in that confined space, rang
deafeningly in our ears.
It all happened so swiftly that I must set down, one after another, a
dozen things which happened all at once.
Even as the old lady fired at Somers, protected by Anne Christie’s body,
the gun seemed to leap in her hands, to break apart. A blinding cloud of
blue smoke spurted out from its breach, hiding Aunt Mary from us for an
instant. The gun barrels, instead of pointing at her victim, swung
downward at a sharp angle; birdshot rolled down them and pattered on the
floor. With them came a burning gun wad, upon which Peter trod
mechanically. And Aunt Mary, the broken gun still clutched in her
blackened hands, dropped back across the bed and lay very still, in a
lessening cloud of smoke.
Doctor Somers freed himself gently from the nurse’s swooning grip, set
her in a chair, and stepped forward. He leaned over the old lady and
touched her left temple with a steady hand. Her face was quite unmarred
and very peaceful; only upon the left temple was a little blue bruise.
Beside her head lay an empty shell.
“She’s quite dead,” said the doctor softly, and he drew a corner of the
sheet over that quiet face.
“She didn’t quite lock the breech,” he went on, picking up the battered
shotgun. “I told you last night, unk, it didn’t work properly. When she
closed the breech, this catch failed to take hold, and the kick broke it
open again, so the shell drove backward out of the breech and struck her
in the temple.”
He straightened, sighing deeply. “I want you-all to listen,” he told us
impressively, “and remember this, whenever you think about Miss
McGregor: she wasn’t to blame! She wasn’t responsible for her acts; she
was insane. Think of her as kindly as you can, all of you. Poor soul!
She’s dead now; she’s paid for everything. Remember, don’t blame her,
any of you--ever! She wasn’t responsible.”
Spoken at that time and place, the words struck deep, as he knew they
would, I suppose. And I think that our memories of the poor woman have
all been kindlier for them. It was a gentle, knightly speech from the
man whom she had tried to murder twice in four hours.
“But--but I don’t understand yet,” put in Dorothy. Indeed all of us
shared her bewilderment, I think. “Aunt Mary did it--she shot Doctor
Gaskell, I suppose, since she admitted it. But how, why, and how did you
find out?”
“Come out into the living room and I’ll explain,” he said. “It’s all
clear enough now.”
We trooped out after him; a motley crowd we must have made, too. Somers
was fully dressed; at least he wore tennis shoes, an old pair of flannel
trousers, and Peter’s jersey, which made his lean torso more
unbelievably skinny than ever. But the rest of us were in advanced
negligee. I wore trousers; Peter had only a bathrobe over his pajamas;
both the girls were in kimonos, with hair in braids down their backs. We
were a ludicrous sight, no doubt, but none of us had the heart to laugh.
“As soon as I heard about the Poltergeist,” Somers began, “I suspected
Aunt Mary. Such tricks always indicate that there’s an hysterical person
somewhere about. This ‘Poltergeist’ stuff and the witchcraft, that
dozens of harmless old women were burned alive for, not so many
centuries ago--they’re all the work of hystericals. Such cases delight
in mystifying people, scaring them, playing queer, malicious tricks on
them, and all that. It’s been a well-recognized sign of hysteria for
fifty years. So as soon as I heard of the Poltergeist, I began to look
for an hysterical, and that led straight to Aunt Mary; she had all the
earmarks.
“I concluded right away that her paralysis was hysterical, too, or she
couldn’t get about to play ghost. Palsies are common enough in hysteria,
you know. I don’t mean that she faked it consciously; she was really
paralyzed. That is, she couldn’t move her legs because she _believed_
she couldn’t. She didn’t pretend. At night she’d get out of bed in a
state of hysterical somnambulism and go about playing ghost; but, when
she got back to bed, she’d forget all about that. When she was fully
awake she was paralyzed; she couldn’t move, and I’ve no doubt that she
used to believe in the Poltergeist as firmly as any of you.
“She was in the same state, no doubt, when she went out with Peter’s
shotgun that morning. The quail disturbed her, and she thought, as far
as sleepwalkers do think, she’d only to go out and point a gun to kill
them. She knew that shotgun was on the back porch, didn’t she?”
I nodded. “I left it out there for Lewis,” I explained. “He was to come
over early for it. And I remember Aunt Mary sent for me, when I was
going to bed, to ask where it was, and if it was safe.”
“Quite so.” Somers paused, scowling ruefully. “I’ve been frightfully
stupid all through this thing!” he declared. “I knew Miss McGregor was
hysterical; why, those ‘knots in her neck’ alone would have proved that.
I was convinced she was playing ghost, just as one takes any unimportant
thing for granted without stopping to verify it. But it never occurred
to me that, if she could get up to play ghost, she could have got up to
shoot Gaskell, too. The idea never entered my head until ‘Roaring Lafe’
Rutledge told us about the ‘ha’nt’ he saw. We owe him that, anyhow. And
you chaps were pretty peeved with me afterward, when I said I thought it
was the Poltergeist killed Gaskell, weren’t you?”
He gave us a fleeting glance and went on. “So Aunt Mary got up very
quietly and went out after the shotgun. Your sleepiness, your
hypothyroidism, Anne, made it very handy for her; she wasn’t afraid of
waking you, and I suppose she was getting bolder. All her ghost tricks
had gone unsuspected--who could suspect a paralytic of running about the
house of nights?--and she figured she could even go out and let off a
shotgun and get away with it; that is, if she thought about it at all,
in this somnambulistic state of hers.
“Well, out she went, got the gun, loaded it, and went on into the brush,
just about the time Gaskell entered it, I suppose. It must have been
then that Rutledge saw her and was scared off. And then she met Doctor
Gaskell face to face, out there. I wonder which of them was more
startled? The shock wakened her, I suppose, and there she was, suddenly
face to face with herself. It’s a terrible thing for anybody, that--to
have all one’s little self-deceptions and hypocrisies stripped away in
an instant, to see how one’s been fooling one’s self! And it is more
terrible still for an hysterical, whose self-deceptions are deepest and
most fully a part of the personality.
“There she was, compelled for once to admit to herself that she was an
old faker, that she wasn’t paralyzed after all--or how could she be out
there, standing up? I don’t know what happened, of course, or what
Gaskell said. Something indiscreet, it must have been, or the old lady
would have dropped down right there. Her paralysis would have returned
as soon as she waked up, and she’d have had to be carried back to bed.
But he said something, taunted her, I suppose; told her he knew all the
time she was faking and wasn’t really paralyzed at all. And he laughed
at her. That was very unwise; if he’d been used to handling the insane
he never would have laughed.
“She was holding a loaded shotgun, and there was the only man on earth
who knew her secret, who could expose her double life. And to have her