Doc Rennie turned to the three of us. We could hardly hear him. “If one of you so much as whispers,” he said, and his look was bitter cold, “you’ll regret it as long as you live.”
And with that he opened the door a little more and stuck his game ankle inside and went in after it. And there we stood, looking through the crack at the mirror. We saw his lank, square-shouldered figure appear, in the mirror, at the foot of the bed.
Julie Welch looked up at him. Oh, but she was a beautiful woman! We heard her little cry of surprise. My hand shut down like a vise on Fillmore’s wrist as I felt him move.
“I am Dr. Rennie,” we heard. “I’m a friend of Sheriff McKay. I’ve come to talk to you about your sister.”
“My sister!” In the mirror her eyes opened wide, her hands went to her mouth. She glanced around the room. “Where’s Johanna?” Her voice hit a high, almost hysterical note. “Where is she?” She was swaying.
“Where is she?” repeated Julie. Her hands were massaging her cheeks now, passing up over her temples, in a strange frantic sort of way. “Has something happened to Johanna?”
A prickling sensation crawled up the back of my neck. The hysterical note was gone from Julie’s voice and the last words were delivered in sort of a flat hush, like you get before a storm.
Doc Rennie just stood there, looking at her. I could see his profile in the mirror: no expression at all. Just watching her.
Julie’s hands came down. “You said something about my sister?” The hysterical note was creeping back.
I stole a look at Hi Fillmore’s face. Fishbelly white it was, and his eyes seemed to fill the thick lenses of his spectacles. The wrist I held was limp.
“You are in love with Mr. Fillmore, are you not?” Doc Rennie asked the question in an ominous voice that I spotted for acting.
What with being up all night and not eating, I was getting kind of sick at my stomach. Doc Rennie was deliberately torturing this girl.
“Your sister,” he went on, shifting his attack like a boxer, “has been murdered. You will never see her again. Never again, as long as you live. She has been murdered, do you understand?”
Julie disappeared from the mirror. I could see by the half turn of Doc Rennie’s body that she had gone toward the dressing table near the head of the bed. There was a sound like running feet. I pushed Hi Fillmore aside and peered around the door.
Julie Welch was running around in little circles in front of the dressing table in a kind of horrible dogtrot, and she was making soft moaning noises. Her hands were outstretched, groping blindly.
Doc Rennie raised his voice. “You’ll never see your lover again, either.” Then, even louder, “We’re taking your lover away from you. You’ll never see him again.”
I couldn’t stand it any longer. Doc Rennie was inhuman. I dropped Fillmore’s wrist and stepped into the room, knees nearly buckling under me, but determined to stop this awful business even if I had to throttle Doc Rennie.
It was just as well I stepped in when I did, for at that moment Julie Welch, face contorted, snatched a big, silver-mounted hand mirror from the dressing table and flung herself at Doc Rennie in a crazy rage.
Up went Doc Rennie’s long arms to cover his face. The crutches fell. He took three or four smashing blows from the mirror on his forearms before his bad ankle gave way and he went down with a crash. In another second I had come to life and caught Julie from behind.
She paid no attention to me. She was trying to fling herself on Doc Rennie as he lay sprawled on the floor.
Julie Welch’s strength was that of a crazy person, and all the while she was slashing the air over Doc Rennie with that mirror. Even as I braced myself my mind registered, in all that welter of emotion and shock, that she was swinging that big hand mirror exactly like a...
I went dead inside. It was all over.
Exactly like a hatchet! Exactly as she must have swung that hatchet at her sister’s face...
Then Hi Fillmore came to his senses and ran in to help. Together we managed to fling her to the bed and hold her down, which took some doing. Gradually her struggles died down. Finally she relaxed like a tired child and closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed down to the heavy breathing of sleep.
I couldn’t make myself look directly at Fillmore. He was standing by the head of the bed. Out of the corner of my eye I could tell that his whole chunky frame had drawn into itself.
At my shoulder I heard Doc Rennie’s breathing. I could look at him, and I did. He was watching Julie Welch again and his expression, in spite of his sunken eyes and gray cheeks, was professional, strictly professional.
Chapter Six
Escape Into Life
I thought I’d had my fill of horrors for one day, but there was one more to come.
There was a click behind me as Doc Rennie took something from the black leather case he’d put into his pocket at the Inn. His long frame bent over Julie Welch, and his long fingers drew up a curve of the fine white skin of her arm.
Her eyes opened as Doc Rennie, with that underhand motion doctors use, jabbed the hypodermic needle into the white skin and drove his thumb against the plunger.
Julie’s glance fell on Hi Fillmore. Her smile was puzzled.
“Hi, darling,” she began, “what in the world...?”
Doc Rennie twitched the needle out and turned away quickly. I did the same. A rustle and thump told us that Fillmore had dropped to his knees.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “You mustn’t be afraid.”
“Afraid?” Julie Welch’s voice, her chuckle, were sane as her eyes had been when they opened. “Afraid?” She chuckled again. “With you here?”
At this point she must have seen us. “What’s happened, Hi?” She was more curious than alarmed. “Did I faint? How silly of me! Where’s Johanna?”
A ghastly silence.
“My,” — long, drawn out — “my, but I’m sleepy.”
There were no more questions, thank heaven. I think we barely breathed until Julie Welch was asleep, which was a minute later.
Hi Fillmore heaved himself to his feet and came over to us. Twice he opened his mouth to speak, and twice something stopped the words in his throat. But I could read the question in his mind a full five seconds before it came out.
“They can’t do anything to her, can they? She was crazy when she killed Johanna — stark, staring crazy.”
That was when I realized for the first time that it was my duty to arrest Julie Welch for the brutal hatchet murder of her twin sister.
Doc Rennie’s voice jarred us both.
“Get out of here,” he told us.
I stared at him, amazed. He tottered over to a chintz-covered rocker. He just made it. Automatically I shoved a straight chair forward for his bad ankle. The sunlight, striking in through the open window, picked out the hollows in his cheeks and around his weary eyes.
Doc Rennie was cracking up. One lean, freckled hand shot up to shade his eyes. But he wasn’t through.
“Get some sleep,” he ordered. “And listen: don’t either of you leave this house, or tell anyone what happened in this room this morning. And don’t let that old crone in the hall get out or telephone anyone. You understand?” His hand came down and he squinted at us. “Now beat it.”
We almost fell over Ma Thoroughgood in the hall. Apparently she’d fainted early in the excitement.
I almost laughed out loud as we picked up her skinny old body and put her on a bed in the next room — and locked the door. But something warned me that if I started laughing I might not be able to stop, and I had no intention of making a holy show of my nerves before Fillmore.