Legacy Of Terror Read Online Free PDF

as if he had been drinking. She knew that could not be the case, for even if he had been drunk he would have been shocked into sobriety.
    Before anyone could stop her, she went and looked at the body. Celia was lying on her side, one hand clutching her stomach, the other thrown out by her head, as if she were grasping for some handhold on life. The ground around her was thick with blood, so much blood that she could hardly have been alive.
    “Get away from her, Miss Sherred,” Lee ordered.
    “She may be alive.”
    “She isn't,” Dennis said, his voice weak. “She couldn't be.”
    “Have any of you checked?”
    “No,” Lee said. He seemed resigned, as if none of this were very unexpected, as if he had been preparing himself to face a similar scene at some future date, had been preparing himself for years.
    “You should have. Maybe there's something I can do.”
    She stepped between them, to the body, and knelt beside the girl. Careful not to disturb the one or two wounds she could see, she rolled Celia onto 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