Words came from her almost unmoving lips: “I am getting vibrations for someone who has suffered a loss. If the bereaved person is among us, let him listen…”
Silence again.
Finally, from high in the room a thin voice came, nearly inaudible at first, but gradually growing louder: “Daddy… Daddy… Daddy…”
Shayne felt both Clarissa and Percy Thain tighten their fingers on his.
Percy said, “Jimsey!” in an agonized voice.
“Do you hear me, Daddy?” The thin spirit voice spoke again.
“I hear you, Jimsey! I hear you, son! Who killed you?” The words were wrenched forth in almost unbearable anguish.
The child voice continued: “I am strong enough to tell you now… I was murdered, Daddy. She did it…”
“Who is she, son?” Thain whispered intensely. In wan and dreary complaint, the voice went on. “She was driving on the back road… She was going fast… She killed me, Daddy, and she deserves to die.” There was a long silence. Then, “Let her admit her guilt now and clear her soul.”
Abruptly, the green light in front of Madame Swoboda went out.
In the new and total dark, everyone was completely blind. The circle broke. Chairs scraped as they were pushed back. Bodies bumped into bodies, hands brushed faces, shins knocked against chairs.
Percy Thain, at Shayne’s left, jerked back and rose from the table, but Shayne still held his finger-grip with Clarissa. For an instant the redhead speculated on the sheer animal terror which pervaded the room, then he put his arms around Clarissa and pulled her with quick force from her chair. Alarmed, she cried out. Shayne clamped his big hand over her face and gripped her firmly as she struggled against him.
At nearly the same instant at his near right, there was a curious “punging” sound, and then a small clatter.
He made an exploring sweep with one arm in the darkness behind him, but he was hampered by Clarissa’s closeness. At the end of the long table a match was struck and the tiny flame of a candle grew in the dark.
Madame Swoboda screamed. Mouth agape, she stood in the flickering light beside the opened door of the cabinet, her eyes fixed on the candle in a catatonic stare.
It was black.
A black candle was for death.
Shayne’s glance slashed around the room. In the candle’s first morbid glow everyone stood as though impaled. To his right, at the place where Clarissa had been sitting, a knife lay on the table. The point of its blade was broken off and embedded near the table edge.
A black candle was for death… and someone, tonight, had meant death for Clarissa!
Now they were all looking at the broken knife. Someone screamed again, and someone whimpered. In a moment of unified, breathless horror each viewed the instrument of intended death, and then seemed to shun knowledge of it-as if to admit its existence would be to invite it to fulfill its purpose on him.
Mabel Thain stood beside her shaken husband, tears starting from her eyes as she stared at Clarissa. Clarissa’s face was like parchment, her expression dazed and disbelieving. Dan Milford bent over her where she had slumped into Shayne’s chair, his eyes wild and desperate.
Shayne barked, “Don’t move! Everyone stay exactly where you are!”
He walked to the end of the table, picked up the flickering black candle and carried it back to set it beside the knife.
“Who lit that candle?” Milford demanded hoarsely.
“It was a mistake,” Madame Swoboda said. “I couldn’t see which one I took in the dark.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Shayne said. “Someone tried to kill Mrs. Milford with a knife, not a candle.”
In the uncertain light, the redhead looked at the knife. The handle was bound in gauze; no fingerprints would show. From its shape, he judged it to be a common kitchen knife, the size between paring and carving-not too short a blade to reach the heart, not too large to be easily concealed. The point was broken off two-thirds of the way down. Had it been thrown or thrust?
Shayne straightened, his hard, appraising glance moving from face to face. Everyone looked shocked and guilty-even Lucy. Mabel Thain was sobbing openly, her arms around Clarissa, her face buried against her sister’s shoulder.
His glance held on Madame Swoboda. “Where’s the fuse box that controls the lights in this room?”
“In the basement, on the left beside the stairway.”
Tremblingly she took another candle from the cabinet and lit it, careful this time to select a pink one. She met Shayne with it halfway around the table. “You can get there through the kitchen.” She had mastered her first fright and uncertainty. Her voice was firm.
“You show me. I want you to come with me.” Shayne paused at the sliding doors. “I’m putting Mr. Rourke in charge to see that no one leaves.”
He waited a moment to let the words take effect, then followed Madame Swoboda down a narrow hall. The candle threw guttering shadows about them. They passed a wall telephone and came to the kitchen. On the hall- side an apparently new ornamental grillwork had been fitted into the wall above the kitchen door. Inside the kitchen, Shayne frowned as his gray eyes ranged bleakly around the shadowed room. His knobby hand jerked toward a padlocked cabinet high against the ceiling on the other side of the grillwork.
“What’s in there?”
Madame Swoboda hesitated for only a second before she opened a drawer, took out a single key and handed it to him. An open household step-ladder stood in a corner by the stove. Shayne strode over and scraped the short ladder across the cracked linoleum to the kitchen doorway.
Standing on the second step of the ladder, he unlocked the cabinet door. Inside was what he had expected to find-a tape recorder placed in front of the open grillwork to let sound issue into the hall, and from there into the seance room through another grillwork against the ceiling.
“The source of your astral voices?” he asked wryly.
Madame Swoboda nodded, opened her mouth to speak and then seemed to think better of it.
Shayne stepped off the ladder and ran taut fingers through his wiry hair.
“It wasn’t the tape I prepared for tonight,” Madame Swoboda said suddenly.
“Whose tape was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you trying to make me believe the tape we heard tonight was substituted for the one you prepared, and you don’t know who did it?”
“Yes. Don’t be too smart for your own good, Shayne. What possible reason would I have for accusing a client of murder? I’m in this to make a living.”
“Who said it was a client who was accused?”
She stared, visibly disconcerted. “Why-I don’t know. It seems obvious, though. Someone did try to stab Mrs. Milford.”
“We’ll come back to that. Where are the stairs to the basement?”
Holding the candle high, she led the way through a door and down a sagging flight of stairs. A darkness pervaded the air. At the bottom, she stooped and pointed to the fuse box.
The redhead walked over. On a short wire leading to the fuse box a small, square metal box had been inserted. Dropping some melted wax on a shelf, he made the candle secure and examined the small box. It was a timer set to break the electrical circuit at eight-twelve. A simple mechanism, but dependable. Whoever had put it there knew Madame Swoboda’s promptness in starting the seances. Whoever had put it there wanted the inky darkness upstairs at exactly eight-twelve.
Carefully, using his handkerchief to minimize the smearing of any fingerprints that might be on it, Shayne removed the timer and reconnected the wire to the fuse box. As the electricity went on, he heard the slight rasp of the tape recorder near the head of the stairs in the kitchen. No more voices were issuing from it.
He turned. “Who put this timer on the fuse box?”
“I’ve no idea,” Madame Swoboda said tautly. “I don’t even know what a timer is.”
“It’s what made the lights go out.”
“Well, I didn’t do it certainly, for the same reason I didn’t record that tape that came on tonight. I like to
