Читать книгу The Disappearance of Anne Shaw - Augusta Huiell Seaman - Страница 9

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KENNETH did not get home from his fishing excursion down the beach till late that evening. It was after nine when he came in, weary and ravenously hungry, for he had taken only a few sandwiches with him for the noon meal. But he had a basket half full of striped bass and was jubilant at his success.

“Hauled in a whopping big sting ray too!” he announced. “And say, but that corker put up some fight! He pretty near got me with his tail too, once, and it would have been all up with yours truly if he had. Have to know how to handle those busters or they’ll get you.”

“Oh, Ken, I hate to have you doing such dangerous things!” shuddered his sister. “Some day you’ll get horribly hurt. But come and get your supper now. Mrs. Matson has been keeping it for you.”

While he ate, he went on busily recounting his day’s adventures and Mercedes let him talk it out, knowing full well she could not get his undivided attention for other matters till he had. But at last he sat back, content after his meal and quite at the end of his own recital. And it was then that his, “Well, and what have you been doing with yourself all day?” brought out his sister’s tale of her own involvement with the curious tangle at the Shaw place.

When she had finished Ken sat back, thrust his hands in his pockets, and whistled softly. “I’ll say this looks mighty peculiar!” he vouchsafed at last. “What does Captain Matson say about it?”

“Captain Matson’s off on liberty for two days. He was gone when Sanford and I got back this morning. Sanford decided not to say anything about it to Mr. Yates, the Number One man, but to wait till his father got back and you and he and I could see if we could dig anything else out of it in the meantime. But I don’t like the look of things at all, Ken. Between the old lady’s disappearance and that strange cry I heard and these queer-looking finger prints, I’m afraid something awful has happened. What do you think we’d better do?”

Ken thought it over carefully and in silence, balancing a spoon on the edge of his drinking glass the while. Presently he let it fall with a clatter and rendered his decision.

“I think Skinny’s right. There’s no use getting the whole place stirred up over a matter that may turn out to be nothing out of the way at all—just one of her usual eccentricities. And if the C. G.’s couldn’t make anything out of it they’d have to get the local constable from Orrstown down, and maybe the state police—and there’d be the dickens to pay, perhaps all over nothing. No, better wait for the Captain to come back. But I will say that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look into it further—we three. Some things about it do look shady, I’ll admit. To-morrow I’ll take the day off and we’ll go over the whole thing with a fine comb.”

“How about starting in right off—to-night?” suggested his sister. “Sanford was saying that all the queer things about it seem to happen at night. Nothing at all goes on during the day. If you weren’t too tired, we might all go over there to-night and just lie low and see what happens—if anything does. Sanford was over about eight and fed the chickens and cow and got things settled for the night. He said everything was just the same then. He’s over at the Station now, but he said he’d be back very soon.”

Even as she spoke the screen door opened and Sanford came in, inquiring what luck Ken had had in fishing that day. And there followed ten minutes of enthusiastic and technical description from Ken, little of which was understood by Mercedes. But presently he switched to the subject uppermost in her mind.

“Let’s go over to the Shaw place, Skinny. Mercy has been telling me what you two unearthed to-day. Queer bit of work, I’ll say! Maybe the circus isn’t over yet. I’ll take my flashlight and you take yours. Mercy has a little one, too. We’ll lie low outside of the house for a little while and see if there’s anything going on.”

There was a pale streak of afterglow still in the west, over the Bay. They could see it as they came down the lane between the tall huckleberry and scrub cedar bushes. All about them were faint chirpings and rustlings and night noises, and above it all the boom of the surf as the tide rose on the beach beyond the dunes. There was not a light or a sound about the old Shaw place except the faint mewing of one of the many cats calling a stray kitten back under the house.

They had not flashed on their lights in coming along, and, by common consent, they had been very silent. Now, by whispered arrangement, they circled the place and decided to settle down for their watch on the side steps of the broad veranda, where they would be practically out of sight themselves but could see and hear advantageously.

It was a long vigil and a silent one. They did not dare to exchange many remarks, and when they did, it had to be in so low an undertone that they could scarcely hear one another. Once they thought they detected faint pattering sounds from within the house, but decided in the end that it must be either mice or a rat, and concluded not to go in to investigate. A cottontail rabbit hopped out of the woods on its way to the garden in search of young lettuce, and passing them sitting there immobile, rose up on its haunches and sniffed in their direction suspiciously, but, finding them inert and apparently harmless, went on about its own affairs into the garden. After that a whippoorwill began to call from a near-by cedar tree. Mercedes counted the calls—forty-nine “whip-poor-wills” without a single cessation, and she felt as if her nerves would snap under the strain if the bird uttered one more call. But he flew away after the fifty-first, and there was deathly quiet following his departure.

Suddenly Sanford sat up straight, leaned over, and touched Ken’s knee. “I hear something inside!” he hissed. “Rustling—and steps. It isn’t mice—this time. Don’t turn on your flashlights—yet. I’m going to sneak around to the back door and see if anyone’s around.”

He slipped noiselessly from the porch steps and disappeared into the darkness. The two waited for his return in breathless silence, straining their eyes into the darkness and listening with every sense alert. But the moments passed and he did not come back. Presently Ken began to grow uneasy.

“I don’t like it!” he whispered. “Skinny ought to be back by now. What’s keeping him? I think I’ll just go and see.”

His sister clutched him in wild terror. “And leave me?” she gasped in a whisper. “Don’t you dare, Ken Haynes! I won’t stay here one minute alone. If you go, I go too.”

“All right. Be quiet and we’ll wait a little longer,” he conceded. “I suppose I oughtn’t to leave you alone. But I wish he’d come back.”

They continued to wait, and the silence continued unbroken. What could Sanford be doing? After what seemed an untold age, they heard a very faint crunch of footsteps in the sand and Sanford emerged out of the gloom from around the corner of the house.

“Don’t make a sound if you can help it,” he whispered, “but follow me—quick! There’s something I want you to see.”

They rose as noiselessly as possible and tiptoed after him till they came to one of the dining room windows where the shutters were closed, but where some of the slats had dropped out and left apertures wide enough to see through conveniently. Sanford uttered not a word, but ranged them so that they could peer through one of the wider apertures and muttered: “Now watch. Nothing may happen for a few minutes but it will—that is, if it does as it did before.”

So they stood, peering into impenetrable gloom. For a while Mercedes could make out absolutely nothing but an opaque blackness. But presently dim shapes began to stand out in the room—the back of a chair was silhouetted against another window, the heavy bulk of the sideboard against the white wall, a long mass in the center that was the dining table. But there was nothing else. At last Mercedes could stand the suspense no longer.

“What is it, Sanford?” she breathed. “What’s the use of standing here?”

“Look!” he hissed fiercely. “Over there—the other side of the table!” She looked where he indicated, and a long shiver shook her from head to foot. A wavering shape, gray, all but invisible, appeared to be hovering behind that table, weaving slowly back and forth, almost as indeterminately as smoke blown in the wind.

Even as they watched, spellbound and cold with terror, the eerie thing vanished as inexplicably as it had appeared. And though they waited and watched for a long time afterwards it did not come back again.

“Come!” whispered Sanford. “It’s gone for good now, I guess. Let’s go sit down on the steps again.” They tiptoed back to the porch steps and sat there, staring at one another, almost doubting the evidence of their senses.

“Did we really see anything?” demanded Mercedes, the first to break the silence. “Did you see it too, Ken?”

“Of course I saw it!” he whispered back a trifle irritably. “Looked mighty spooky, too, but yours truly’ll have to see that ghost a little nearer to believe in it. What did you make of it, Skinny?”

“Couldn’t make anything of it at all,” muttered the younger boy. “I saw it two separate times before I called you, and it was always doing the same thing. Seemed to vanish into nothing each time and appear from nowhere afterward. It’s got me, I tell you. I was sure I heard footsteps when I first went around there. But apart from that queer affair there wasn’t anything around. And you can’t tell me that made the footsteps!”

“Where did you see it first?” demanded Ken under his breath.

“I opened the kitchen door and went in. Didn’t flash on my light but was just feeling my way around. Then I saw this queer gray-looking thing sort of drifting through the door into the dining room. It didn’t make a sound. I didn’t dare to follow it, but ran outside and peeked in through the dining room window. Then I saw it again. And after that I called you.”

Again they sat in silence mulling over the peculiar occurrence. And Mercedes secretly reflected that she had always wanted to have some ghostly or inexplicable experience of this kind, but that, now that she had it, she didn’t really relish it at all.

“What shall we do now?” she whispered at last.

“Stay here a little longer and see if anything else happens,” decided Ken. “It’s too interesting to leave just yet. I want to sift this thing to the bottom.”

And so they continued to sit in the darkness. Moments passed. Ten minutes. Twenty. There was little sound now save the constant wash of the breakers on the beach. Once or twice Sanford tiptoed off to reconnoiter at the dining room window, but came back to report no new developments.

Then, without warning, the stillness of the night was suddenly broken by a weird, unearthly cry—not loud or piercing, but low, prolonged, and penetrating. And it came singularly enough, not from the direction of the house, but from the barn, which was located two or three hundred yards away and was now almost invisible in the darkness. Mercedes clutched her brother in an agony of real fear, and all of them rose suddenly from their seat on the porch steps.

“By golly!” muttered Ken. “That’s something real enough, all right! And it came from the barn. Hurry up! We’ve got to track this thing down now!” Together they sprang down the steps and flew across the garden to the barn—all three flashlights turned on to facilitate their flight.

The big double doors were shut but only latched, and Sanford swung one side open with a single pull. Three flashlights illumined the dusty depths of the old building, bringing into sharp relief the decrepit wagon, the ancient farming implements, the empty stalls. A hurried search revealed the place empty of anything that could possibly have caused the unearthly sound they had heard. Even the loft that had once been a haymow was bare of anything but dust.

They stood by the open door in bewildered uncertainty. “Can you beat it?” cried Ken in sheer exasperation. “Something’s causing all this mix-up. What is it? I vote we go back to the house and go in and give the place a thorough once-over. I can’t go to bed to-night leaving this Chinese puzzle as it stands. What do you say?”

Half eagerly, half timidly, the others agreed with him, and they closed the barn door and went back to the house. Hesitating no longer, they boldly entered at the front door and made a tour of the entire establishment, even ascending to the tower, where Ken examined with deep interest the finger prints on the floor and wall. But nothing was changed. It was all exactly as it had been earlier in the day. No trace of ghostly visitant revealed itself in any manner, and, thoroughly puzzled, the three returned to the dining room, where they had seen the wraithlike shape through the window.

“Well, this has sure got me buffaloed!” exploded Ken. “Of all the ridiculous——”

But at this point in his tirade Mercedes suddenly pulled him round and pointed to the table.

“There’s something different there, anyhow!” she cried triumphantly, pointing to it.

“What?” demanded the two boys in one breath, staring at it uncomprehendingly.

“Why, don’t you see? The spectacles!—They’re gone! They’re not there any more!”