Read Online Call After Midnight by Mignon G. Eberhart - Free Book Online

seemed to be wads of cotton in her ears. Through them Jenny heard Cal. “It’s no use, Peter.”
    “She can’t be dead!” Peter cried wildly. “She can’t be! Fiora—”
    “Don’t, Peter. Look. One shot, that one hit high, this one must have got her heart. She lived just long enough to scream.”
    “Call the doctor!”
    “It’s no use, Peter.”
    “Hurry—”
    Through the wads of cotton Jenny heard Cal’s footsteps, running across, into Peter’s room.
    She lifted her head cautiously. She twisted around on the step as Blanche struggled to sit up. Cal’s voice came from Peter’s room. “Operator—operator, this is emergency—”
    Blanche dragged herself upright, holding the newel post. She started down the hall toward Fiora’s room. Jenny couldn’t follow her; she couldn’t move, she was weighed down. She put her head sickly against the wall.
    She did know that Peter must have followed Cal to the telephone in Peter’s room. She heard Cal’s voice. “No, it’s not suicide. There’s no gun …Somebody was in the house. He can’t have had time to get away. He’s still here somewhere—A gun? Yes, we’ve got a gun.”
    Somebody in the house, Jenny thought, somebody in the house.
    Blanche’s green silk wavered out of Fiora’s room and into Peter’s room. Jenny followed her without any consciousness of moving. “Don’t go in there!” Blanche said hoarsely. “Don’t look—I shouldn’t have seen, I shouldn’t have gone—” She stumbled to the bed and dropped down into it, her face in the pillows, her hair a black mop against the white.
    Cal put down the telephone. “They’ll be here in five minutes.”
    Peter looked white and dazed as if he were drunk. “Cal, he’s in the house! We’ve got to find him!”
    “Yes, I’ll get your gun.”
    “It’s not loaded.” Peter thudded out the door, after Cal.
    Jenny thought distinctly, and with horror, suppose it was Peter’s gun. This time it was murder.
    Blanche dug her head into a pillow and gave a retching sob.
    But it wasn’t Peter’s gun. The gun was still in the hall table; Peter loaded it and he and Cal began a useless search. There was nobody hidden in Fiora’s room, nobody hidden in the house. They had not really finished the search when the police arrived.

Chapter 6
    S IRENS SHRIEKED AGAIN IN the night but there were several police cars this time. Lights flared all over the house and grounds. There were the local police; there were state police. There were police everywhere and great floodlights upon the shrubbery.
    When the technicians began to bring cameras and mysterious cases along the corridor to Fiora’s room Jenny pulled Blanche up. They inched along the wall past policemen who gave them abstracted glances, around the corner and into Jenny’s room.
    Footsteps thudded in the attic over their heads. Somebody shouted, outside, down by the sea wall.
    “I expect we’d better dress,” Jenny said after a while.
    “Yes,” Blanche said.
    Neither of them made a move.
    Sometime or other, though, Jenny went to the window. A pallid light was streaking over the lawn and sea wall and the gray Sound.
    Blanche sat and stared at nothing with eyes from which all the color seemed to have faded. At last a knock on the door brought Jenny’s pulses leaping in her ears. She said, “Come in.”
    A young policeman entered, cleared his throat and said that the Captain would want to see them soon. He then stood in a soldierly posture in front of the door until Jenny told him, absently, to sit down. He hesitated and sat down. He looked wistfully at a package of cigarettes on the table. “Cigarette?” Jenny said.
    But he was staunch. “No, thank you, miss.”
    After another age someone knocked again; the young policeman sprang to the door, there was a murmured word or two, then he turned back, “Miss Fair, first, please.”
    Blanche pulled herself up like an old woman and went out. The young policeman closed the door after her and with a