Nebulon Horror (16 page)

"It's in the bedroom; I'll get it," she said. But he followed her in and opened the newspaper on the
bed, and after showing her the picture of the lamp he had bought, took her in his arms for a moment of loving. He knew she liked the lamp. She had stopped to admire it one day when they were shopping for something else.

They returned to the living room hand in hand and Olive abruptly halted. "What's that smell?" she said. She turned toward the kitchen and saw her daughter standing at the gas stove, holding something over a blazing burner.

"Jerri!" She raced in and grabbed the child's arm, pulling her away. "What do you think you're doing?"

The child held a flaming photograph but dropped it as the line of yellow fire reached her thumb and forefinger. Stepping back from it, she began to tremble. Her hands shook wildly. Her Cupid's-bow mouth would not be still. All the color had vanished from her face.

Suddenly a scream burst from her lips and she ran from the kitchen. She fled screaming into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

Olive and Vin looked at each other. Vin bent his knees and tried to pick up the burned photograph, but his fingers only reduced the remains to black powder. As he and Olive hurried to the bedroom, he snatched up the photos left on the table in the living room and quickly scanned them.

"She only burned one," he said. "Not the footprints. Not the kitten. Only the one of the diagram. Now why do you suppose she wanted to destroy that?"

I
t was out of the question for Jerri to go to school the next day. At Olive's urging she got up and ate a breakfast, sitting at the table with her mother and Vin. Vin had stayed all night for the first time and slept on the sofa in the living room.

The child lost her breakfast before she could reach the bathroom. When carried back to bed, she broke
out in a cold sweat. Olive telephoned Doc Broderick. Vin called Keith Wilding to say he would be late to work.

After burning the photograph last night, the child had been hysterical. She lay face down on the bed, sobbing and screaming. She stopped only when exhausted. Olive and Vin had put her into bed and tried to talk to her. Vin especially.

He sat on the bed and soothed her with his voice. What was his little girl afraid of? Why had she burned a picture of a drawing that did not mean anything? "Why did you do that, baby? Tell Vin, please."

She had finally sobbed herself to sleep without telling them a thing.

Doc Broderick examined the child with care and said to Olive, "Put another blanket on her bed, then come out and shut the door." In the living room he sat scowling at her and Vin for a moment. "It's emotional. She's scared of something. If you ask me, it's probably tied in with the rest of what's been happening lately."

"It began last night when she saw a photo I had," Vin said.

"What kind of photo?"

Vin told about the uprooted exotics, the dead kitten, the diagram. "That is what did it, the diagram. She waited until our backs were turned for a moment, then dashed into the kitchen and burned it."

"Burned it?"

"Turned on the gas stove and burned it," Olive said.

"What kind of diagram are you talking about? You remember it well enough to sketch it for me?"

"There is no need for that. I have the negative." Vin took the photo-shop envelope from his pocket. "I suppose when she ran to the stove with the print, she did not know that we could make more of them from the same negative." Finding what he wanted, he handed it over.

Holding the oblong of film by a corner, Doc carried it to a window and spent a long time examining it, "Have you any idea what it is?" Vin asked.

"Never saw such a thing before. How do you know it means anything?" Doc answered his own question with a shrug. "May I borrow this? Like to show it to Chief Lighthill."

Vin hesitated. "I would rather not, Doctor. It is not mine to lend. Shall we say that if the chief wants it, he can get it from Keith? Anyway, there is another just like it. A sketch, not a photograph."

"Oh?"

"Willard Ellstrom's wife found one scratched in the school yard the day after the Hostetter boy behaved so strangely. He did it; she saw him. She copied it."

"The day after, eh?" That would explain why the Ellstroms had not mentioned the diagram when he called on them, Doc thought. "Does she still have the copy?" According to the morning news, Raymond Hostetter was missing again. Doc had been about to call the family and ask for details when Olive phoned him about Jerri. This time the boy had been missing all night.

"Well," Vin said, "it was Willard who told me about it when he handed me these pictures. So I suppose she still has it."

"You've tried to find out from Jerri what this means, of course."

"Both of us," Olive said. "She won't discuss it. Ask her why she burned the photo, she just looks at you."

Doc remembered the day Jerri had almost told him something about a door, only to pull back at the last moment. He wondered whether the strange symbol in the negative, all those squares and circles and triangles, had anything to do with that.

Still on his feet after studying the negative, he turned and looked toward the bedroom. Would a psychiatrist question the child at this point? He didn't know. He was not a psychiatrist. That reference to a door had been puzzling him, though. A question or two now, backed up by this business of burning the photo, just might produce results.

He reached the bedroom door in two strides and opened it. Tried to open it. It thumped against something inside and there was a cry of pain. Doc put his head in and looked down. Jerri Jansen was on hands and knees, peering up at him.

He bent over and took her under the arms, setting her on her feet. Her eyes were not quite right, he noticed. They didn't just look at him; they stared and were tinged with red. Maybe the door banging into her...

"You're supposed to be in bed, young lady, not snooping. Come on. Back you go." She crawled into bed by herself, and he smoothed the covers over her as Olive and Vin came in to see what was happening. "You feel all right?" he asked the child. "Or did the door give you a knock?"

She turned her face away.

"Want to ask you something," Doc said. "That photograph you burned last night . . . did it have something to do with the magic door you were telling me about?"

He had a hand on the bed when he put the question. He felt her small body stiffen and remain rigid under the covers. He waited for an answer but was given none. Ah, well . . . probably a psychiatrist would not have asked such a question.

He gave it one more try. "Don't want to talk?" Getting no answer to that either, he turned to Olive and Vin, shrugged, and went back into the living room. There he said, "It looks as though it was the photo that upset her, all right."

"And me telling her she didn't come straight home from school," Olive said. "But, you know, that isn't the whole of it, either. She was upset over something when she got in from school, Mrs. Trevett told me."

"Did you call the school to find out if anything happened there?"

"No. I guess I should have."

Doc nodded. "All right. Keep her in bed a couple of days. I'd say keep her out of school the rest of this week too, in case the trouble is something there. Can you get a few days off from work, Olive?"

"Yes."

"Better do that. And I'll be looking in. So long for now."

Doc drove to the police station and found Lorin Lighthill at his desk.
 
He sat.
 
“No word yet about the mayor’s boy, Chief?”

“No word,” Lighthill said, looking and sounding as though he had not been to bed last night.

“I may have a lead for you.” Doc told him about the burning of the photograph and why Keith Wilding had taken the pictures in the first place. He went on to tell Chief Lighthill about the diagram scratched in the school yard by the missing son of Mayor Hostetter. “I haven’t any idea what the design might mean,” he admitted. “But don’t you agree it’s mighty queer that two kids of that age are able to draw the same complicated diagram? I wonder who taught them, and why.”

“How do you know the same kid didn’t do both? Nobody actually saw the Jansen girl do the one at the nursery you say.”

“Well, Mrs. Ellstrom saw Raymond do the first one and when number two was drawn, he was at home. He didn’t leave the house all week.”

“You sure he didn’t?”

“That’s what Mrs. Hostetter told me.”

“Let’s go have a talk with Ellstrom,” Chief Lighthill said. “It can’t do any harm.”

They found Willard Ellstrom sweeping the sidewalk in front of his studio. “Oh-oh,” he said when the chief finished telling him what was wanted. “I gave Lois’s sketch to a friend in Miami.” He told them about Professor John Holden and Holden’s interest in the drawing.

“You suppose you could phone him, Willard?” the chief asked. “If he’s had time to look into it, he may be able to help us. Apparently this drawing or diagram, whatever it is, means something.”

Saying, “Come along and talk to him yourself,” Willard led the way into his studio.
 
He looked up the number in an address book and dialed it, calling Professor's Holden's Coconut Grove apartment. Getting no answer, he called Holden's department at the university.

A woman answered.

"Professor Holden, please," Willard said. "This is Willard Ellstrom in Nebulon. It's quite important."

"I'm sorry. Professor Holden is not here."

"'Where can I reach him?"

"I'm afraid I don't know. He is to attend a conference at the University of Oregon next week but he is driving out there. I'm afraid there's no way you can contact him."

"Oh Lord," Willard said. "Is there a chance he might call you, do you think?"

"Well, he might. But I really don't know why he should."

"Will you take my number in case he does? It's very important."

"Of course, Mister—"

"Ellstrom. Willard Ellstrom in Nebulon. He'll know what I want if you'll just tell him it's urgent." He gave her his number, thanked her, and hung up. To Chief Lighthill he said, "You heard?"

"Enough. Just what did this man say, Willard, when you showed him the diagram in Miami?"

Willard had to think. "Well, he was astonished that a seven-year-old had done it."

"What else?"

"I told him our Miss Peckham at the library had said it was just childish doodling, and he certainly disagreed with that. I remember he said these esoteric things—I believe that was the word—can lead one along some pretty dark byways, or something to that effect."

"Did he use the word cabalistic?" Doc Broderick asked, frowning.

"I don't believe so."

"I'm thinking of that room you told me about, Chief," Doc said. 'The books."

"You really do have dark byways in mind, don't you?" the chief said, struggling to get his 290 pounds erect. "Well, thanks for trying, Willard. Call me if you hear anything? I've got to get back to old Tom Ranney and a missing boy."

15

I
t was the beginning of a bad time for Lorin Light-hill. First, Nebulon's police could not find out who had cut the throat and gouged out the eyes of old Tom Ranney. They searched his shack. They examined the weed-grown lot for footprints. They learned nothing.

Robbery could not have been the motive; the man had owned nothing worth stealing. So far as was known, he had had no enemies. People had pitied him, not hated him. At one time or another almost every citizen of Nebulon must have seen him snoring away on a park bench. When he took off the ragged cap he always wore and laid it upside down beside him, some dropped coins into it.

Chief Lighthill clung to the belief that Raymond Hostetter was the murderer. But having no evidence and valuing his job, he kept his opinion to himself.

There remained the matter of the fingerprints on the handle of the knife. If they could be matched with Raymond's, they might prove something. But Raymond remained missing.

He had disappeared Wednesday, presumably on his way home from school. By Friday the police were desperate, the Hostetters were all but out of their minds with dread, state agencies and the county sheriff's department had been appealed to for help, and the whole town was putting forth theories.

Ruby Fortuna had kidnapped or killed the boy for accusing her of drowning her baby, some said. She had been let out of the hospital Tuesday night and must have been lying in wait for him when he left school Wednesday.

The same person who killed Tom Ranney had killed the youngster and hidden the body, said others. Probably a stranger just passing through town. Somebody not right in the head.

Leonard Quigley, the motorcycle cop, had his own theory. "You know what I think?" he snarled at Chief Lighthill. "I think we ought to investigate that Otto guy, the one who tried to feel up the little girl at the concert. I'll bet he has a thing about little kids. You just turn me loose on him and I'll get you some answers."