Legacy Of Terror

when the scream came, I was in the kitchen, having a glass of milk.”
    “Alone?”
    “Yes.”
    Elaine expected Rand to pursue it further, but he did not. Instead, he turned to Gordon. “And where were you, again?”
    “In my room, reading,” Gordon said.
    “What were you reading?”
    “A suspense novel.”
    “Alone?”
    “Yes, alone.”
    Rand turned to Paul Honneker. “You?”
    Paul was as disheveled as he had been at supper, perhaps more so. The clothes hung on him as if he were nothing more than a chair they had been thrown across. His collar was open an extra button. His beard had darkened and prickled his face like black wire. There were bags under his eyes and a drawn look to his normally jolly face.
    “I was sleeping,” Honneker said.
    “You slept through the entire incident,” Rand said. “Through the scream as well?”
    “I didn't hear any scream,” Paul said.
    “When was the first you knew what had happened?”
    “When Lee came to tell me. Just before you arrived.”
    “You must be a heavy sleeper.”
    Hesitantly, sadly, Paul Honneker said, “I'd had a drink or two.”
    “Just that?”
    “Maybe a few more,” he said.
    Rand looked at him a while, abruptly dismissed him. He saw the same, sorry lack of initiative and aimlessness in Paul which everyone else came to see eventually.
    The probing questions continued, with little else of interest developing. The only moment when Rand seemed intrigued was when Dennis mentioned the fact that Celia often picked up hitchhikers. “She trusted everyone,” he had told Rand. “Often, she lent money to the most untrustworthy borrowers and never saw it again. That never dissuaded her. She continued to lend money like a bank.” At last, sometime after one in the morning, they were excused. Rand, apparently, was going to push a search for any hitchhiker who may have been seen in the area before or after the murder.
    Before she went to bed, Elaine stopped by to see how Jacob was reacting. She found him as she had left him, in the funeral pose, breathing lightly, sound asleep.
    Jacob would not believe the hitchhiker story.
    But then Jacob was old and ill.
    For something to do, she took his pulse.
    It was normal.
    Ought to go to bed, she thought.
    She opened the medicine cabinet and took out one of Jacob's sedatives. It was the first time in her life she had ever had need of such a thing.
    She went to her room, and she locked the door this time.
    Her second floor window was a good distance above the ground, but she locked that as well.
    She did not feel the least bit foolish. There was something quite concrete to fear now. This was no longer a fantasy of a dear but doddering old man. One must take precautions.
    She said a prayer for Celia Tamlin, then took the sedative. She did not sleep entirely in the dark, but let one bedside lamp burn throughout the long, uneasy night.

Chapter 5
    Elaine slept later than she had in years, but woke feeling as if she had just put in a hard days work. She showered, applied what little makeup she needed, dressed and went to check on Jacob. He had already had breakfast and was sitting in one of the easy chairs in his room, reading a popular novel.
    “You look very pretty this morning,” he said.
    She was dressed in a lemon skirt, brown blouse, lemon hairband, and she wore a simple brown bead choker at her neck. Lee Matherly had made a point of the fact that he did not wish her to wear uniforms, for that would only depress his father.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “Were I, say, forty years younger, I should surely be courting you, young lady.”
    She laughed as she got the instruments to take his blood pressure, temperature and heartbeat. She pulled a chair next to his, rolled up his pajama sleeve, and wrapped the pressure cloth around his withered biceps.
    “Indeed,” Jacob said, grinning at her with the good side of his face, “it's a miracle you aren't married already!”
    “Marriage isn't for me,” she said. “At least not for a long while.”
    “Don't bet on it,” he said, patting her hand.
    She said, “Have you heard anything about Celia yet?”
    He frowned. “Lee says she made it through the operation. She's still in a coma and still on the critical list, however.”
    “If she makes it, she can tell us who it was,” Elaine said. “Then this terrible expectancy will be over.”
    His face was stony now. “Captain Rand believes it was a hitchhiker. He says only Dennis knew the girl, and therefore only Dennis would have a motive. But Dennis doesn't have one that