“Don’t bother about your knee. Give us some local stuff. Gossip. If you can.”
“Sure I can, and it will make your hair curl.” Then suddenly there was a sort of dramatic pause and then an outburst.
“Who is dead?” Sperry asked, with his voice drawn a trifle thin.
“A bullet just above the ear. That’s a bad place. Thank goodness there’s not much blood. Cold water will take it out of the carpet. Not hot. Not hot. Do you want to set the stain?”
“Look here,” Sperry said, looking around the table. “I don’t like this. It’s darned grisly.”
“Oh, fudge!” Herbert put in irreverently. “Let her rave, or it, or whatever it is. Do you mean that a man is dead?”--to the medium.
“Yes. She has the revolver. She needn’t cry so. He was cruel to her. He was a beast. Sullen.”
“If it’s sent out to be cleaned it will cause trouble. Hang it in the closet.”
Herbert muttered something about the movies having nothing on us, and was angrily hushed. There was something quite outside of Miss Jeremy’s words that had impressed itself on all of us with a sense of unexpected but very real tragedy. As I look back I believe it was a sort of desperation in her voice. But then came one of those interruptions which were to annoy us considerably during the series of sittings; she began to recite Childe Harold.
“Now then,” Sperry said in a businesslike voice, “you see a dead man, and a young woman with him. Can you describe the room?”
“A small room, his dressing-room. He was shaving. There is still lather on his face.”
“I don’t know. Oh, I don’t know. No, she didn’t. He did it!”
There was no answer to that, but a sort of sulky silence.
“Are you getting this, Clara?” Mrs. Dane asked sharply. “Don’t miss a word. Who knows what this may develop into?”
I looked at the secretary, and it was clear that she was terrified. I got up and took my chair to her. Coming back, I picked up my forgotten watch from the floor. It was still going, and the hands marked nine-thirty.
“Now,” Sperry said in a soothing tone, “you said there was a shot fired and a man was killed. Where was this? What house?”
“Two shots. One is in the ceiling of the dressing-room.”
But here, instead of a reply we got the words, “library paste.”
Quite without warning the medium groaned, and Sperry believed the trance was over.