The Abandoned Room | Page 4

Miss Katherine! What's the matter? You look like death."
"There's death," she said.
She indicated the door of the enclosed staircase. She led the way with
the candle. The panelled, narrow hall was empty. That door, too, was
locked and the key, she knew, must be on the inside.
"Who--who is it?" Jenkins asked. "Who would be in that room? Has Mr.
Bobby come back?"
She descended to the library before answering. She put the candle
down and spread her hands.
"It's happened, Jenkins--whatever he feared."
"Not Mr. Silas?"
"We have to break in," she said with a shiver. "Get a hammer, a chisel,
whatever is necessary."
"But if there's anything wrong," the butler objected, "if anybody's been
there, the other door must be open."
She shook her head. Those two first of all faced that extraordinary

puzzle. How had the murderer entered and left the room with both
doors locked on the inside, with the windows too high for use? They
went to the upper story. She urged the butler into the sombre corridor.
"We have to know," she whispered, "what's happened beyond those
locked doors."
She still vibrated to the feeling of unconformable forces in the old
house. Jenkins, she saw, responded to the same superstitious
misgivings. He inserted the chisel with maladroit hands. He forced the
lock back and opened the door. Dust arose from the long-disused room,
flecking the yellow candle flame. They hesitated on the threshold. They
forced themselves to enter. Then they looked at each other and smiled
with relief, for Silas Blackburn, in his dressing-gown, lay on the bed,
his placid, unmarked face upturned, as if sleeping.
"Why, miss," Jenkins gasped. "He's all right."
Almost with confidence Katherine walked to the bed.
"Uncle Silas--" she began, and touched his hand.
She drew back until the wall supported her. Jenkins must have read
everything in her face, for he whimpered:
"But he looks all right. He can't be--"
"Cold--already! If I hadn't touched--"
The horror of the thing descended upon her, stifling thought.
Automatically she left the room and told Jenkins what to do. After he
had telephoned police headquarters in the county seat and had
summoned Doctor Groom, a country physician, she sat without words,
huddled over the library fire.
The detective, a competent man named Howells, and Doctor Groom
arrived at about the same time. The detective made Katherine
accompany them upstairs while he questioned her. In the absence of the

coroner he wouldn't let the doctor touch the body.
"I must repair this lock," he said, "the first thing, so nothing can be
disturbed."
Doctor Groom, a grim and dark man, had grown silent on entering the
room. For a long time he stared at the body in the candle light, making
as much of an examination as he could, evidently, without physical
contact.
"Why did he ever come here to sleep?" he asked in his rumbling bass
voice. "Nasty room! Unhealthy room! Ten to one you're a formality,
policeman. Coroner's a formality."
He sneered a little.
"I daresay he died what the hard-headed world will call a natural death.
Wonder what the coroner'll say."
The detective didn't answer. He shot rapid, uneasy glances about the
room in which a single candle burned. After a time he said with an
accent of complete conviction:
"That man was murdered."
Perhaps the doctor's significant words, added to her earlier dread of the
abnormal, made Katherine read in the detective's manner an
apprehension of conditions unfamiliar to the brutal routine of his
profession. Her glances were restless, too. She had a feeling that from
the shadowed corners of the faded, musty room invisible faces mocked
the man's stubbornness.
All this she recited to Bobby when, under extraordinary circumstances
neither of them could have foreseen, he arrived at the Cedars many
hours later.
Of the earlier portion of the night of his grandfather's death Bobby
retained a minute recollection. The remainder was like a dim, appalling

nightmare whose impulse remains hidden.
When he went to his apartment to dress for dinner he found the letter of
which Silas Blackburn had spoken to Katherine. It mentioned the
change in the will as an approaching fact nothing could alter. Bobby
fancied that the old man merely craved the satisfaction of terrorizing
him, of casting him out with all the ugly words at his command. Still a
good deal more than a million isn't to be relinquished lightly as long as
a chance remains. Bobby had an engagement for dinner. He would
think the situation over until after dinner, then he might go.
It was, perhaps, unfortunate that at his club he met friends who drew
him in a corner and offered him too many cocktails. As he drank his
anger grew, and it wasn't all against his grandfather. He asked