Legacy Of Terror

her back.
    Two other wounds were centered in her abdomen. But when Elaine felt for a heartbeat, she discovered there was one. Feeble, but regular.
    “Someone call an ambulance,” she said.
    No one moved. The rain had stopped, now sprinkled them with fat droplets, a new prelude.
    “Hurry!” Elaine snapped.
    “You mean she's alive?” Dennis asked.
    “Yes.”
    Gordon turned and ran for the house to call the hospital.
    Although she was a trained nurse and supposedly accustomed to grisly scenes, as she had told them, she wanted to get away from this place, this body, this spreading crimson puddle. She had encountered bloody illnesses while in training; she had even dealt with beating victims and gunshot wounds. But this was something else again. This was the work of a sadist, not the violence of heated passions. The wounds- five, she now saw-had been carefully placed where they would do the most damage. Too, Elaine could see that Celia had not screamed when the first one or two thrusts of the blade had been delivered; she must have stood dumbly while the murderer worked on her, too surprised to scream as soon as she should have. Her assailant had, therefore, gotten in a few more blows.
    The ambulance arrived in less than ten minutes. The attendents were efficient and gentle. In two more minutes, they had bundled her inside the white van and lurched back down the drive with Dennis accompanying them in the patient area in the back of the vehicle.
    “You'd better see about my father,” Lee Matherly said. He appeared to have aged ten years in less than an hour. His face was lined, his eyes weary, his complexion sallow and unhealthy.
    “Of course,” she said. Anything to get away from that red puddle and the memory of Celia's wounds.
    It was as if the house lay miles and miles away rather than just a few hundred yards. All the shadows had assumed sinister proportions. Each wind-shaken branch of a tree or shrub was like a thrusting hand that made her jump and then walk faster. She tried to shame herself out of her fear, but she could not. Perhaps that was because the source of the terror was irrationality, a murder of whim. And whims were things which she had never developed an understanding of. You could lump them under the term “insanity,” but that did not explain them.
    Old Jacob Matherly was awake, sitting up in his bed; he had turned the lights on. He looked at her with evident relief and said, “I was afraid it was your scream.”
    “It was Celia,” she said.
    Then she realized that she should not have said anything. What had come over her? She was losing control of her common sense and bothering her patient with bad news when it would have been best to pass the incident off as meaningless for as long as possible. Until he could be prepared for it, anyway.
    “Is she dead?” he asked. Clearly, he expected that she would be.
    Elaine stammered over her answer. “Not yet,” she said at last.
    “Chances don't look good, eh?”
    She made her way to the nearest chair, by the bed, and sat down.
    “How often was she stabbed?”
    She said, “How could you know she had been stabbed?”
    He made an impatient gesture with his good hand. “I told you that someone was in my room with a knife three weeks ago. I told you and Lee, and neither one of you would believe me. Besides, there's Christmas Eve. I can never forget knives after that.”
    His voice had suddenly become tight, stretched like a rubber band. Although she wanted to know, more than ever, what the Christmas tragedy was all about, she knew it would be a mistake to broach the subject now. Even hinting at it, before the excitement tonight, he had suffered an attack of angina. Her duty was to keep him calm.
    “I think,” he continued, “you should pay especially close attention to those three I mentioned earlier.”
    “You think it was someone in this house? Couldn't it have been a prowler, or a hitchhiker or-”
    He smiled, but it was an awful smile, even though she could not see the frozen half of his face. “My dear Elaine, it could hardly be anyone else.”
    “Someone lurking in the drive,” Elaine offered. “Someone who saw her go out and thought she might be back.”
    “But she did not live here,” he said. “Why should she return? Only the people in this house knew she was to spend the weekend.”
    Elaine said, “A madman, seeing her leave, wouldn't have had to know that she was a stranger. He might have thought she lived here, waited, and struck it lucky-or unlucky.”
    “Simpler