Page:Weird Tales volume 38 number 03 CAN.djvu/36

 of the bed. My eyes ranged the room warily. Was that a shadow, deeper than the other shadows, over in the corner? Was that my voice calling, "Coralie?"

No answer.

"It is you, Coralie." My head nodded wisely, my voice echoed eerily in the quiet bedroom. "You're trying to play on my nerves, aren't you? Trying to frighten me into confession." I smiled cunningly. "Well, you won't succeed. You'll never succeed." Bravado crept into my voice. "I'm not so easily frightened."

I don't know how long I crouched there against the tufted satin headboard. But reason came back abruptly. I was like one roused sharply from a bad dream, who doubts the dream. Surely I had been dreaming?

But no. The goblet was there, its contents making a gurgling, contented sound in the stillness. It didn't frighten me now. Mrs. Dunnigan, of course! Somehow she had crept back.

I opened the Venetian blinds so the sunlight might pour in, and dressed swiftly. My spirits lifted with the sun, and I could scarcely credit my superstitious terror of the moment before.

Coralie was dead.

It was in a spirit of defiance then that I emptied the goblet and hid it on the highest shelf of one of the cabinets in the kitchen. To make the hiding place doubly secure, I first buried the glass deep in a canister full of flour.

There. Let Mrs. Dunnigan sneak into the apartment again and try to find it. Let Mrs. Dunnigan try— My smile of satisfaction slowly faded! But I'd locked the door of the court cabinet! And the key—the key was with Michael, in St. Louis!

A cold draught from nowhere played against my back. The apartment was quiet, dreadfully quiet.

I was afraid.

ATE that afternoon I had a curious conversation with Dr. Peter Haddon, who'd dropped in thinking to find Michael at home. A conversation that should have been enlightening, but wasn't—plunging me instead into deepest bewilderment.

It must have been Peter who first spoke of Coralie's death. Heaven knows I wouldn't have introduced the subject myself. But as he spoke of her I found myself wondering—had Coralie known, just before the end, that her medicine had been tampered with?

I found myself hoping vindictively that this was so—that she'd suffered bitterly, helplessly in the knowledge, as she had made me suffer.

Had there been a moment, just before death came so swiftly, when she had known from the taste of the drink that I must have given her an over-dose? Or had the stronger solution tasted no different than her usual dose?

So strong was my sudden desire to know that I heard myself saying, "I don't see how she could have forced herself to drink that overdose. Surely those three capsules must have made the drink so unpalatable—"

But I found out something else. Something totally unexpected.

"Three capsules?" Peter questioned. "Three capsules wouldn't have killed her."

That startled me. "But she died! Three must have—"

"How do you know there were three?"

Careful! I'd nearly betrayed myself.