Dance with the Devil

it were greased, a good day all-in-all, one that made her glad she had not opted to leave Owlsden the previous day.
        She did not dream but slept so deeply that she might never have awakened-except for the scream of agony that echoed through the house at shortly past two in the morning. It woke everyone and caused the owls to begin hooting in panic above her head…
        She was out of the bed and into her slippers and robe before half a minute had passed, though she made no move to unbolt the door.
        A moment later, someone rattled the knob, then knocked.
        “Who is it?” she asked, having a distinct feeling of deja vu.
        “Katherine?” Lydia asked.
        She went quickly to the door, threw the bolt back and opened it. Lydia was standing in the well-lighted corridor, wearing a flowing yellow bedgown, her face weary and lined more than it appeared to be in daylight. Alex stood behind her in a lounging robe and pajamas, his dark eyes swiftly assessing her condition and the state of the room beyond.
        “What was the scream?” Katherine asked.
        “I thought perhaps it was you,” Lydia said. She took Katherine's hand and squeezed it. “After that warning on your door last night…”
        Alex interrupted, speaking in a clipped, nervous tone. “I told you, Mother, that it was a man's scream.”
        To the left, Patricia Keene and her husband appeared, blinking sleepily, attired in nightclothes. “Is everyone all right?” she asked.
        “Fine here,” Lydia said. “What was the noise?”
        “Someone screamed,” Patricia Keene said. Her husband nodded.
        Alex said, “Where is Yuri?”
        “In his room?” Lydia suggested.
        As a group, they went down the corridor and knocked at his door. When he did not answer, they opened it and looked in. He was not there or, as Alex reported, in his private bath either.
        “I think the scream was downstairs,” Mason Keene said. His voice sounded thick, as if he had been drinking and was still a little tight, despite his sleep. Was that something else about Owlsden that had been hidden from her?
        “I'll go look,” Alex said.
        “No,” Lydia said. “We'll all go look.”
        In a close train, they went down the grand staircase and found, almost immediately, that the front door was standing open, a furious whirl of snow pouring in on the foyer carpet. Alex went and closed it, came back and said, “There are footprints in the snow, leading away from the house.”
        No one said anything until Katherine finally asked, “What next?”
        “We check the rooms down here,” Alex said, leading the way.
        They all knew what they were going to find. It was not any special extra-sensory perception, Katherine thought, not something you could call pre-cognition or “fey,” just a deep, animal dread that went even beyond the level of instinct.
        In the main drawing room, the furniture had been pushed back to make a circle for the ceremony. The wine-colored carpet was now marked with a number of chalk designs, and several thick, black candles burned on endtables all around. Yuri lay at the edge of the markings, sprawled on his face, his hands outstretched in front of him as if he were desperately reaching for something. He was clearly dead.
        Patricia Keene began to scream…

CHAPTER 11
        
        “And then you found the body?” Cartier asked.
        Alex said, “Yes.”
        “Where it lies now?”
        “Yes.”
        “You didn't move it at all?”
        “I didn't even touch it.”
        Constable Cartier consulted a small, black notebook which he had been glancing at throughout his interrogations of the people gathered in the library. Once, when he passed Katherine's chair and was holding the book lower than usual, she saw that it did not contain any writing at all, that his long and thoughtful glances at the supposedly incriminating list of facts it contained were nothing but staged expressions, phony. Ordinarily, she would have been amused by this, but she could not find a smile as long as Yuri was lying dead in the drawing room, currently guarded over by one of the two deputies that Cartier had brought with him.
        “Have you ever seen the knife before?” Cartier asked.
        “No.”
        “It is an antique knife, as you could have told from the handle, very ornate and lovely,” Cartier said. He looked in his notebook