And One to Die On(75)

“I don’t understand it,” he said, as Gregor came into the room. “I just don’t understand it. Tash is under this sheet?”

“Would you like me to take the sheet away and show you?” Gregor asked politely.

Cavender Marsh walked over to the couch and took a deep and audible breath. He seemed to be trembling, but determined.

“No,” he told Gregor. “No, I’ll do it myself. You are telling me that she’s dead, aren’t you?”

“Yes, she’s dead.”

“Well, all right. She was ninety-nine years old. It’s not as if she hasn’t lived a full life. It’s not as if dying at ninety-nine should come as such a shock.”

Gregor said nothing. Cavender Marsh put his hand resolutely on the linen sheet and drew it back. He moved more slowly than Gregor had ever seen him move, drawing out the effect. Tasheba Kent was lying a little on her side, so that all that could be seen of her head at first was the part that wasn’t damaged. Her eyes were closed and her lips were slack, but they would both have been just like that if she had been nothing worse than asleep.

Cavender Marsh relaxed a little and squared his shoulders. “All right,” he said. “That’s not too bad. She looks very peaceful.”

“Yes, she does.”

“I don’t like the way she’s lying, though. She never sleeps on her side. She finds it uncomfortable. She says it makes her arm go to sleep.”

“I don’t think it matters to her now, which way she’s lying,” Gregor said.

“Of course it doesn’t,” Cavender Marsh agreed. “It’s silly to think it does. But I can’t help myself, you know, after all this time. I’ll always think of her as still alive.”

“That’s probably very natural.”

“So I’ll just move her around a little so that she looks comfortable,” Cavender Marsh said.

He put his hands on the shoulders of Tasheba Kent’s corpse, and Gregor did not try to stop him. He moved the body around until it was lying on its back and then stepped back to admire his handiwork. The rigor was wearing off. Tasheba Kent’s body was much more flexible than it had been, but not yet as flexible as it would get. Her head lolled gently back and forth on the stalk of her neck.

“There,” Cavender Marsh started to say, and then he stopped, and frowned. “Wait a minute… what’s this?”

Cavender Marsh leaned forward, grabbed her face by the jaw and twisted it until he could see the side of her head that had been hidden from him.

“She’s been hit,” he exclaimed in stupefaction. “She’s been hit. Somebody murdered her.”

“It does look like that,” Gregor told him.

Cavender Marsh jumped away from the body. “This is terrible. This is terrible. There must be some kind of maniac in the house.”

“Do you think so?” Gregor asked. “I dealt with maniacs for ten years, and this just doesn’t have that kind of feel to me.”

“You must be joking.” Cavender Marsh was a tower of fury. “This is a hundred-year-old woman we’re talking about here. There can’t be any reason to murder a hundred-year-old woman. It’s insane.”

“I thought so myself in the beginning,” Gregor said judiciously, “but I’ve changed my mind. I can think of a couple of perfectly good reasons for murdering this woman.”

“Name one,” Cavender Marsh demanded.

Gregor could have named two, but he didn’t get the chance. The house was suddenly torn apart by a giggle and a laugh, and then a scream rent the air, powerful and piercing.

“Oh, my God,” Mathilda Frazier said from outside in the foyer. “It’s back again.”

“What is that?” Cavender Marsh had gone white.

“That’s your ghost,” Gregor told him. “Last night it was doing the sound track from The House on Haunted Hill. Tonight I think we’re doing The Conqueror Worm. It might be The Tingler.”

Bennis stuck her head into the television room. “Gregor?”

“I’m coming,” Gregor said.





3


The first thing Gregor Demarkian noticed when he got out to the foyer was Geraldine Dart. She looked like a character in a Twilight Zone episode or a child playing statues. Her eyes were wide and wild. Her mouth was open. Her hands were out in the air in front of her, stiff and useless. Gregor went past her and out toward the front door. The sound was louder there and the light was better. It didn’t take him very long to find what he was looking for. Up at the top corners of the front door, imbedded discreetly in the walls, were two tiny speakers for an intercom system.