Legacy Of Terror

thought of the feline corpse which she had seen lying in the garbage bag. It had been stabbed repeatedly with a sharp knife, then slit down the stomach as a final gesture. It had lain in that plastic sack all morning while Bess made breakfast, concealed by other pieces of trash which had been neatly wrapped around it. If the blood had not soaked through and collected in a puddle in the bottom of the bag, and if Bess had not noticed it and begun to empty the sack to discover its source, it would never have been found.
    She did not know whether it was a good thing that Bess uncovered the cat's corpse or whether it would have been better all around if the cat had simply disappeared. It proved, in a gruesome way, that the killer was indeed a member of the Matherly household -if one could make the police see that there was a connection between the attempted murder of Celia Tamlin and the brutal slaying of the cat. On the other hand, having seen the mindless violence vented upon the cat, how could any of them think clearly enough to deal with a crisis if one should arise? Any fears that already plagued her-she knew-had begun to grow like cancerous cells, and she imagined the same would be true for everyone in the house.
    “Perhaps we should call Captain Rand,” Elaine said.
    “Won't do no good.”
    Bess dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
    “But you said that someone in this house was responsible. It seems very possible that the same person took a knife to Celia, someone deranged enough to-”
    “I said it was someone in this house, in a manner of speaking,” Bess corrected her.
    “I don't understand.”
    “It wasn't no one living here,” Bess said.
    Elaine could not understand what point the old woman was trying to make. “Just the same-”
    “Let's go tell Jerry about Bobo,” Bess said. “He'll feel just so terrible awful about it.”
    It seemed to Elaine that they should call the police first, but she was a nurse who always put the values of her patient first-and Bess had become a temporary patient in her grief.
    Jerry and Bess lived in an apartment over the garage, separated from the house by only a few steps. At the top of the outside stairs that led to their back door, Jerry came out to meet them.
    Inside, while Bess tearfully related the tale of the discovery of Bobo's mutillated body, Elaine looked about the large, poorly lighted front room, fascinated by, at first, the singularly odd collection of furniture and, later, by the unusual volumes which filled the wall-sized bookshelves behind the sofa. The chairs were a mixture of padded, reupholstered monsters with heavy arms and high, deep backs, and heavy, unpadded rocking chairs which bore the scars of long use. All the lamps were floorlamps, the last having been bought no later than the late 1940s, a silk-shaded thing with gold tassels hanging around its rim, catching the light like hair and diffusing it. Some of the other pieces were Victorian, some early American and some in styles she could not identify. The room had the look of an auction platform in the country or perhaps the look of a room wherein each piece holds family memories and has been handed down from generation to generation for sixty or eighty or a hundred years. She supposed this last was true, since Bess and Jerry were surely paid enough to afford whatever they might wish. Obviously, they spent a handsome sum of money on books. And such strange books…
    She walked along the shelves, her head tilted as she read the titles: The History and Practice of Magic by Paul Christian, The Paganism in Our Christianity by Arthur Weigall, Natural Chiromancy by Rampalle, the two Pennsylvania Dutch hex books, The Long
    Lost Friend and The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a number of collections of unexplained, possibly supernatural events edited by Frank Edwards or Brad Steiger, The Study of Palmistry by Saint Germain…
    She looked up suddenly, aware that Jerry had addressed her.
    “Excuse me? I was absorbed in looking at your books.”
    “I asked if you were aware of the ghost,” Jerry said.
    He was standing beside his wife where she had settled into the musty embrace of a large and utterly unattractive easy chair.
    “What ghost is that?”
    “The Matherly ghost,” he said.
    “Amelia's ghost,” Bess added by way of further clarification.
    “I don't believe in ghosts,” Elaine said.
    The old couple looked knowingly at each other, then looked back at Elaine-as if they pitied her ignorance.
    “No, really,” Elaine said.