And One to Die On(46)

“What are we supposed to be doing down here?” Richard Fenster asked. “Is this some kind of treasure hunt? Are we supposed to be discovering something?”

“We’re supposed to be making idiots of ourselves in a very public manner,” Gregor told him. Then he turned to Geraldine Dart. “Why don’t you go get us those flashlights now? We’re going to need them if we ever intend to get the power back on.”

“You mean you want to go down to the basement to fuss with the fuse box right now?” Geraldine asked.

“No, not right now,” Gregor said. “Right now I’m going to go looking around in the library, which is the next logical place to look.”

“Oh,” Geraldine said. “I don’t know if I could let you do that.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Kelly Pratt said. “You said that guard went off duty at eleven. It’s got to be nearly one now. Any one of us could have come down here in the last two hours and stolen every single piece on those tables.”

“Well,” Geraldine Dart said.

“It’s too bad you don’t keep a flashlight in your bedside table,” Gregor said blandly.

Geraldine Dart blushed. “All right,” she told him. “I’m going. I’ll be right back. But for God’s sake, don’t touch anything.”

Geraldine half ran out of the room, heading toward the foyer, and Gregor found himself shaking his head. Then the cackle started up again, and he sighed.

“The House on Haunted Hill,” Gregor said again.

“That’s the name of a movie,” Bennis told him.

“I know,” he said. “You’ve watched it at least three times in my presence, with Donna Moradanyan and Tibor. You ought to pay more attention.”

“You mean that laugh we hear is from a movie?”

“From a tape made from the movie, I think. Somebody just got a tape recorder and recorded all those laughs at the beginning and the end over and over. Can’t you hear that thing repeating itself?”

The cackle came again. Everybody was still. Finally, Richard Fenster said, “He’s right. It is repeating itself.”

“But who would do something like that?” Lydia Acken demanded. “It’s terrible. And those two old people upstairs. They could be frightened into strokes.”

“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “In fact, I think they’re probably in on it. That’s why they haven’t come downstairs yet.”

“If this is some kind of setup and they really are in on it,” Mathilda said, “there’s going to be some serious trouble.”

“But why would they do something like that?” Lydia asked. “Why? What’s the point of all this?”

Gregor had a few ideas as to the why and wherefore of all of this, but they were complicated. Instead of answering Lydia’s question, he went into the library. It was as unchanged as the living room had been, which was what he had expected. He left it and came back to the rest of them.

“All right,” he said. “I think we can be confident that we’ve done everything that we could be expected to do. The lights ought to come back on any minute now.”

“This is incredible,” Kelly Pratt said.

Gregor thought this was more than incredible. He thought it was execrable. As soon as they all calmed down, he was going to get Geraldine Dart in a corner and take her apart at the seams. He would do the same to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, but he was afraid that the sound of his voice at full volume would frighten them to death. They deserved to be frightened to death, he thought. This was the worst kind of practical joke. And it wasn’t funny.

Above their heads and on the side tables, the lights flickered. Gregor had forgotten that he had left them all on when he had come to bed. He checked his watch and saw that it was one fifteen. There was nothing more in the way of hysterical, sinister cackles.

“There,” he said, when the lights stopped flickering and came fully on. “That’s the end of that. I think we can probably all go to bed now.”

“You go. I’m going to have a drink.” Mathilda Frazier sounded irritated.

Then Geraldine Dart came running into the room, carrying a handful of flashlights and completely out of breath.

“I did it,” she exclaimed triumphantly. “I went all the way down to the basement by myself and changed the fuses, all by myself. What do you think of that?”

Gregor was about to say that it was the least he would have expected of her, but at that moment a woman’s voice came at them from out in the foyer, and it stopped him dead.

“Ger—ald—ine?” the voice called out in a singsong. “Geraldine?”