Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, February 1974

“I don’t want to look.”

“Now, Myra. Please come along.”

We entered the study. She moved around the body, and leaned against my desk.

“Is that the man?” I asked her.

She nodded. “Yes. Oh, my God, Harry, you did kill him.”

I smiled. I dropped the P-38 on my chair, and leaning by the body, picked up the .45 automatic the man had carried.

“Well, Myra,” I said. “I always lived alone, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I was never really happy with you, but you had all the money. I admire this house, and with you around, I couldn’t put it to best use.”

“What do you mean, Harry?”

“This,” I said. I shot her just once, carefully. A red blossom appeared on her white nightgown. She looked startled, wide-eyed, as she collapsed on the floor quite dead.

“Don’t you see, Myra?” I said. “I could never really trust you again, after this. The intruder, whoever he was, shot you. And I shot him. It’s perfect, Myra. Now I’ll be alone. But I’ll be quite happy. I apologize, Myra. Really, I do.”

The mansion was quiet, but she felt the presence of someone else in the room — and then a bony hand reached out to touch her, as cold as the grave...

As Eleanor’s cream colored convertible emerged from the stand of pines she braked it to a halt.

There, silhouetted against the bright reds and yellows of the early autumn sunset, was the cross — just as Clara had foretold it earlier in the day.

For long seconds Eleanor sat frozen behind the wheel of her now stationary car, while waves of panic raced up her spine. There it was, the crucifix, with a human figure on it, set at a slightly drunken angle against the sky. Impossible, incredible, waiting there for her arrival at Birch Lake exactly as Clara had said it would be.

Not until a vagrant breeze caused limp coattails to flap lazily against the afterglow did understanding come to Eleanor. Understanding and with it relief that was almost more sickening than the terror it replaced. It was a crucifix, certainly, but it was also a scarecrow, arrayed in the battered top hat and tails of men’s evening regalia a generation ago.

Still, it had been a narrow-rattling experience, the more so because it had been so clearly predicted.

Eleanor mentally retracked the other predictions Clara had offered her over the creamy chicken hash with madeira at the fine old Boston restaurant.

Number one had been the cross, of course, and it was now fulfilled. What had been the others?

She recalled a tunnel of darkness, an image of evil in the night, and a dangerous visitor against which her weapons would prove useless.

It had always puzzled Eleanor that her former stepmother should have a firmly established reputation in Boston, of all places, as a foreteller of things to come. During the brief years of her marriage to Eleanor’s father, Clara had proved herself to be the epitome of the hard-headed, efficient, materialistic, well bred New England woman of sense.

Her invitation to lunch had come out of the blue. It had been months since they had more than conversed over the telephone, and then only over family matters, mostly concerned with the management of Eleanor’s father’s estate, of which they were co-trustees. Since Eleanor, despite the difference in their ages, was also — strong and hard-headed despite the disaster of her own brief marriage to Alan Herrick, a not unnatural coolness had sprung up between herself and her mother.

Not until the Turtle Soup Olerosa was finished and the chicken hash half consumed had Clara mentioned the matter of Eleanor’s projected trip to Birch Lake. Even then, it was to urge her strongly against going.

Eleanor, who was more than half minded to put off the drive to New Hampshire and the old summer estate she had inherited when Alan died, had been startled by Clara’s intensity. Not unnaturally, she had asked her former stepmother why she was so against it.

Clara, a handsome golf-tanned woman who wore her half century jauntily, looked long at Eleanor before replying. Then she said, “Eleanor, you know I have never troubled you with the professional side of my life. You have never indicated the slightest interest in the so-called supernatural.”

Eleanor shrugged, said, “I’ve never had a trace of a psychic experience in my life, Clara. How could I be interested?”

“Your father respected it, Ellie. I don’t know whether he ever told you, but he followed Gerard’s advice on his investments for the last five years of his life.”

Her stepmother’s “Gerard,” she well knew, was her regular communicant with what Clara invariably referred to as “the other side.” Eleanor had always suspected that the sizeable sum her father left in their charge would have increased with or without “Gerard’s” handling but had no desire to argue the matter.

Since Clara said nothing, Eleanor said, “I take it Gerard is against my going to Birch Lake.”

“Dear me, no! ” The older woman laid down her fork. “Gerard is never for or against anything. He simply is as knowledgeable about time future as he is about time present and past and, through me, he communicates fragments of his knowledge.”

“Has he ever been wrong?” Eleanor asked.

“Never.” The reply was unequivocal.

“And what does he say is going to happen if I go?”

Almost matter of factly, Clara had told her of a crucifix, of a tunnel of darkness, of an image of evil in the night, and a dangerous visitor against which her weapons would prove useless.

Well, Eleanor had thought as Gerard’s warnings continued from Clara’s firm and well cut lips, she’s trying to scare me off!

From that moment of realization on, the proverbial wild horses could not have kept Eleanor from making the trip to Birch Lake. Nor was it mere Yankee mule-headedness that impelled her to defy all esoteric warnings. An aroused curiosity lay equally strong within her.

She had inherited the Lakeside property without strings of any kind when Alan disappeared, presumably drowned in the lake itself. The seven-year wait demanded by law had ended six months earlier, the demands of the probate court had long been cleared. No one — no one — had the slightest right to prevent her selling the ramshackle old mansion with its outbuildings and four hundred acres of surrounding farm and woodland if she chose to do so.

She had expected protest from her former father-in-law, Alan Herrick, Senior, when the resort development corporation first indicated interest in the Herrick property. She had sought to forestall his objections by making a rent and tax-free residence for the elder Herrick an integral part of the deal — and she had been scrupulous about keeping him fully informed as to what she was doing. She had even arranged quarters and employment for the Patons, the mother, father and daughter, who “did” for Alan, Senior as their fathers had “done” for an older generation of Herricks before them.

But no objections had come, nobody had tossed any sort of monkey wrench into the deal. Eleanor’s final trip to Birch Lake was more formality than necessity, an in-person check on the spot the attorneys of both sides insisted upon.

No motes, no beams, no hand-sized clouds on the clear horizon — until Clara and her unseen communicant sprang their bombshells over the chicken hash at Locke Ober’s...