Legacy Of Terror

bed, and watched him take the tablet.
    “Thank you,” he said. “I had enough of policemen the last time, enough of their snide remarks, their brutal questioning. I think, sometimes, that the police can be nastier with the rich than with the poor. They let their envy push them a little further than it should.”
    “You sleep now,” she said.
    “I'll try.”
    He closed his eyes and folded his hands across his chest as she turned out the lights. She looked quickly away from him, for he had looked, in that instant, like a corpse in the casket, ready for the funeral.
    In the hall, she found that someone had turned the light out. A blanket of shadows had been thrown over the length of the corridor until, by the head of the stairs, thin light filtered up from below. And voices. Voices wafted to her as well, distant and rumbling, the words they spoke indistinguishable. They could have been ghosts, moaning in the walls as easily as people engaged in normal conversation.
    She went down the steps, making a conscious effort to slow the beat of her heart. Foolish fears. Childish fears. “Elaine,” she chided herself, “you're becoming as rococo as this house, as silly as Dennis Matherly.”
    Nevertheless, when she reached the bottom of the stairs and old Jerry stepped out of an alcove to escort her to the police, she was so startled that she leaped and gave a tiny yelp of fear. He took her hand and patted it and told her he knew how she felt and that he was sorry to have frightened her.
    She followed him to the den, through the door into a bright pool of yellow light, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the change. She saw that they were all there: Lee, Dennis and Gordon, Paul Honneker. There were also two policemen, a tall, broad-shouldered man about forty years old who was introduced as Captain Rand-and a shorter, darker, quicker detective named Holcombe who looked-if one were used to old movies on television-more like a villain than the upholder of justice.
    “Please sit down, Miss Sherred,” Captain Rand said. He smiled, showing perfect white teeth. Elaine recognized it as a professional, not a genuine smile, a relative of the smile she learned to produce when she needed it in her job. She supposed there were times that a policeman, just like a nurse, had absolutely nothing to smile about but was forced to for the benefit of those around him. It was difficult to smile and be cheerful to a man dying of cancer when he was ignorant of his deterioration, but it was necessary. For Captain Rand, it must have been unpleasant to smile in the face of blood and a badly wounded girl and knives and darkness and unexplained madness. But it was expected of him, and he smiled.
    She sat on the couch, next to Gordon Matherly. It was an unconscious move that she could not have explained. There were other chairs available. She just felt safer beside Gordon.
    “Miss Sherred,” Captain Rand said, “we've heard everyone's account of what happened this evening, except yours. We'd like you to tell us what you remember of the-uh, the incident.”
    “There's really little to tell,” she said.
    “Nevertheless, we'd like to hear,” he said. He smiled again. Smiled with his lips. His eyes were hard, perhaps hardened by too many years of this sort of thing. “It's always possible that one witness will have noticed something none of the others did, some bit of a thing which will make all the pieces fit together.” But his tone of voice, the infinite weariness behind that smile, said he didn't hope for any such miracle.
    She told him the story, up to the point where she left the scene to check on Jacob Matherly. She did not feel it was her place to add Jacob's story of family madness, partly because she was not of the family and did not have the right to talk about them and partly because she did not yet know how much of the old man's tales to believe.
    When she finished, Rand said, “When you heard the scream, did you think there were words to it?”
    “It was just a scream,” she replied.
    “Think hard, Miss Sherred.”
    “Just a scream,” she repeated.
    “Often,” Rand said, pacing back and forth before the assembled witnesses, “a victim will pronounce the name of his attacker at the last moment. Could the scream have been a drawn out name, a Christian name or perhaps a surname?”
    She thought about it for a moment. “No. Definitely not.”
    Rand seemed disappointed. For a moment, his calm expression and the gentle, professional smile slipped away.
    In the