Legacy Of Terror Read Online Free PDF Page B

her way to the nearest chair, by the bed, and sat down.
    “How often was she stabbed?”
    She said, “How could you know she had been stabbed?”
    He made an impatient gesture with his good hand. “I told you that someone was in my room with a knife three weeks ago. I told you and Lee, and neither one of you would believe me. Besides, there's Christmas Eve. I can never forget knives after that.”
    His voice had suddenly become tight, stretched like a rubber band. Although she wanted to know, more than ever, what the Christmas tragedy was all about, she knew it would be a mistake to broach the subject now. Even hinting at it, before the excitement tonight, he had suffered an attack of angina. Her duty was to keep him calm.
    “I think,” he continued, “you should pay especially close attention to those three I mentioned earlier.”
    “You think it was someone in this house? Couldn't it have been a prowler, or a hitchhiker or-”
    He smiled, but it was an awful smile, even though she could not see the frozen half of his face. “My dear Elaine, it could hardly be anyone else.”
    “Someone lurking in the drive,” Elaine offered. “Someone who saw her go out and thought she might be back.”
    “But she did not live here,” he said. “Why should she return? Only the people in this house knew she was to spend the weekend.”
    Elaine said, “A madman, seeing her leave, wouldn't have had to know that she was a stranger. He might have thought she lived here, waited, and struck it lucky-or unlucky.”
    “Simpler answers are better,” Jacob said.
    It was one of her own axioms too, but she did not see that it applied to this. She told him as much. “It is far more complicated to ever imagine that one of the people in this house did it. None of them are capable of such a thing!”
    “Several are,” he said.
    She was suddenly angered by his pessimism and paranoia. The events of the night had broken down her defenses to the point where she could forget her training and speak rather harshly to him. “I don't see how you can say that about your own people!”
    “It isn't easy,” he agreed. “Elaine, I grieve terribly at the thought of it, but I cannot let emotion overrule what I know.”
    “You can't know. Did you see who did it?” “No.”
    “Then-”
    He said, “One cannot evade the truth for very long. Life makes certain that it comes home again and again. And if you choose to ignore it, it only hurts you worse in the end. I've been expecting this for a decade and a half.”
    “Neither Dennis nor Gordon-and not Paul, for that matter-is capable of murder. And, certainly, none of them is capable of such an awful, bloody murder like this.” She corrected herself, superstitiously. Celia Tamlin was not yet dead; it wasn't right to speak of her like that. Thus far, the crime was only intended murder.
    “It is all part of their legacy, Elaine.” Jacob had managed to pull himself up against the headboard, sitting as straight as he could manage, rigid as iron, the feather pillows jammed down between the headboard and the mattress.
    “Legacy?”
    “The Honneker legacy, the one I tried to tell you about earlier in the day.”
    “I don't understand,” she said.
    And that was true. And, being true, it frightened her, because she was accustomed to understanding things. Confusion and doubt were always to be cast out as quickly as possible.
    “Madness,” Jacob Matherly said. “Their mother's grandfather, their own great-grandfather, went out of his mind when he was only thirty-four and was thereafter institutionalized for the remainder of his life. And, more recently, their mother was affected.”
    “Lee's wife?”
    “Amelia,” he affirmed.
    “You can't mean that she was mad,” Elaine said. But she knew quite well what he meant.
    “Oh, yes,” Jacob said. “Mad. Very mad. She was a beautiful woman, tall and stately with a face like a goddess. Lee thought that her flights of fancy and her sometimes hot temperament were intriguing, spice to her otherwise steady personality. At