Chapter XXXIII: The Final Explanation

Aunt Mary McGregor lay quietly in her bed, propped with pillows. Her drawn face wore a look of sweet resignation; she was gazing absently out of the open window. The place was so still, so peaceful; the old lady’s expression was so calm; the illusion of a quiet sick room was so complete that I almost doubted what my eyes and ears had just told me.

Only the ragged hole in the window screen, through which that charge of bird shot had just poured, and the drifting, pungent cloud of black powder smoke, which still filled the air, convinced me that I had not dreamed. The shotgun was nowhere in sight.

As we burst in, Anne Christie was just emerging from her inner room, struggling into a bathrobe, so quickly had we come. Aunt Mary turned at our entry, her thin eyebrows raised, as for a patient rebuke at this disturbance. Then she saw Somers. She stared at him dumbly for an instant, with bulging eyes and horrified, unbelieving face. _“You!_” she exclaimed. “You!”

Somers nodded brusquely. “Quite so! You see, I wasn’t in bed when you came in last night.”

The old lady wet her colorless lips. “I--I d-don’t understand,” she whispered. “What--what does this--this impudent intrusion mean?”

It was a weak attempt at bluster. The physician ignored it. “It’s no use, Aunt Mary,” he replied almost kindly. His eyes pitied her. “You can’t get away with it this time. I saw you myself, and Uhlman, here, saw you, too. We saw you get out of bed and go after that gun; we saw you shoot out of the window at the quail.”

“Gun?” asked Aunt Mary, stubbornly uncomprehending. “What gun? I was asleep. There’s no gun here.”

By this time Peter was pounding in, Dorothy at his heels. “What now?” he demanded.

“Oh, what is it?” asked the girl. “Has anybody been killed this time?”

With one backward-flung hand, Somers gestured for silence. His gray-green eyes were steady upon the old lady.

“No use,” he repeated inexorably. “The gun’s right in this room somewhere; you didn’t have time to take it out again. It’s hidden here; in your bed, perhaps. Shall I find it, or will you?”

Aunt Mary’s black eyes fell before his steady gaze. “Spare me that, at least!” she said petulantly. “You may burst in on me as you did; I can’t prevent that, helpless as I am, and my own flesh and blood”--with a vicious look at poor Peter--“won’t even try to save me from such insolence! But you needn’t go further; you needn’t search my bed!”

Leaning forward she reached a slim, veined hand beneath the covers to bring out Rufus Wakefield’s battered shotgun, still smoking faintly. A fresh reek of burned powder filled the room.

We all gasped, staring at her with shocked incomprehension. Even now the thing seemed incredible!

“Aunt--Ma-ry!” whispered Dorothy. “How--what have you done?”

The old lady began to weep helplessly. “Nun-nothing!” she wailed. “Dorothy--Peter--will you stand there and see your poor, paralyzed aunt insulted like this? Send this insolent person out; make him let me alone!”

Somers shook his head. His dark face was very pitiful; I think he felt for this poor old wretch even more than did the rest of us.

“Come,” he urged. “Don’t make this any harder. Let’s get it over with! You were the Poltergeist, weren’t you?”

Aunt Mary only sobbed.

“Weren’t you?”

Dropping her hands, she disclosed a haggard, tear-streaked face, as she turned upon us, not without dignity. “If you must have it--yes!” she said. “Yes! I was the Poltergeist. It was easy, so easy! You were so stupid, all of you; you never even guessed. And this stupid, sleepy, worthless nurse”--with a bitter glance at poor Anne--“lay there and snored and never knew! I slipped in and out--I broke dishes--I ate my fill from the pantry. None of you cared if I was hungry; not one of you would offer me a bite to eat! I helped myself.”

“Why, Aunt Mary!” said Dorothy. “You know we just begged you and coaxed you, and you always said your appetite was so delicate! All the pies and cakes and jam and candy--did you eat them, too?”

The old lady swept on, unheeding. “No one in this house ever paid me the attention I deserved. That was my revenge; I served you out for neglecting me! Where’s your wedding finery now, my girl? Ha, ha, ha!”

She gave a wild, screeching laugh; it made me shudder. Surely this was a maniac who confronted us, hunched there on the bed, her shaking hands playing about the stock of a shotgun!

“I made a fine ghost!” she exulted. “It was sport--such sport!”

Doctor Somers groaned aloud. “Poor thing, oh, poor thing!” I heard him whisper. And then aloud he asked: “And you shot Doctor Gaskell, didn’t you?”

Her head went up and back in that old, proud gesture. “He--he insulted me--insulted a poor, helpless paralytic! He laughed, and I told you. I just begged of you to drive those miserable quail away. I told you they would set me crazy; and Peter paid no attention. Nobody paid any attention at all. Doctor Parker promised to shoot them, but I knew he didn’t mean it. Why, that morning they whistled and whistled for hours! I waited and waited; nobody came, nobody stirred, nobody cared if they drove me mad! At last I got up, helpless as I was and paralyzed.”

She paused abruptly, seeming for the first time to be conscious of the incongruity of a paralytic getting up and walking about.

“I--sometimes my affliction leaves me for a few minutes,” she faltered. “I got up and went out--a poor, helpless old woman--to do what these hulking men should have done for me, if they’d been men at all! Peter’s gun stood on the back porch; I loaded it. Oh, when I was a girl, I used to be a good shot! That was before I was paralyzed.

“I went out back, into the scrub oaks. It was daylight, though the sun wasn’t up. And there I met Doctor Gaskell. He--he insulted me; he laughed! He asked me if I’d recovered from my paralysis, and he laughed! He--he called me an old f-faker! The cad! And I answered him as a high-spirited gentlewoman should answer such an insult!”

She paused, looking down at the shotgun in her lap. All this while she had been handling it unconsciously, as it seemed; breaking its breech, extracting the empty shell, playing with the undischarged cartridge. As she sat there, all hunched in the bed, her thin face distorted with unlovely passions, she looked like a particularly unpleasant old witch. Her cheeks were all sunken; without her false teeth her mouth seemed to have fallen in, so that high-bridge nose and pointed chin almost touched each other.

Then she raised her head to cast an evil glance at Doctor Somers. “I hurried back,” she went on monotonously. “I cleaned the gun--oh, I knew how, well enough--and put it where I’d found it; then came to my room. Everybody was asleep, even this stupid nurse. She hadn’t heard anything; she never heard anything. Blockhead! I was safe, quite safe. Nobody could suspect. It was the birds--devils, rather. They knew; they’d seen it all! And they perched outside my windows every morning before daybreak and whistled, whistled, whistled; they weren’t birds. They were devils, I tell you--devils, accusing me! They have driven me mad at last! And then you had to mix in, you, Somers! Ah-h-h, how I hate you! Sneaking and watching and spying on me! If only I could have killed you in the night, as I meant to! I’d have been safe then. But, no, you had to keep it up, you and those birds. You plotted this against me, you and the birds together. They helped you, I know! I heard them just now, outside my window, mocking me, accusing me, calling you to come and betray me. But you shan’t profit by it!”

As rage overpowered her, she ceased to make any pretense of palsy, but slid her lean shanks out of the bed and stood erect, facing her unmasker, her face distorted with hate. And now, before we could move, before we could cry out, she snapped the breech of the gun she still held, jerked it to her shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

I heard the click of the hammer upon an empty shell, and still we stood motionless, all but Anne Christie. With one smothered scream she leaped wildly forward, threw herself upon Floyd Somers’ breast, shielding his body with her own. She moved with the speed of desperate love. Before we others could intervene, while my arm was still outstretched, and Peter was leaning forward, the second trigger moved. I saw the hammer fall; the bass roar of the explosion, doubly loud in that confined space, rang deafeningly in our ears.

It all happened so swiftly that I must set down, one after another, a dozen things which happened all at once.

Even as the old lady fired at Somers, protected by Anne Christie’s body, the gun seemed to leap in her hands, to break apart. A blinding cloud of blue smoke spurted out from its breach, hiding Aunt Mary from us for an instant. The gun barrels, instead of pointing at her victim, swung downward at a sharp angle; birdshot rolled down them and pattered on the floor. With them came a burning gun wad, upon which Peter trod mechanically. And Aunt Mary, the broken gun still clutched in her blackened hands, dropped back across the bed and lay very still, in a lessening cloud of smoke.

Doctor Somers freed himself gently from the nurse’s swooning grip, set her in a chair, and stepped forward. He leaned over the old lady and touched her left temple with a steady hand. Her face was quite unmarred and very peaceful; only upon the left temple was a little blue bruise. Beside her head lay an empty shell.

“She’s quite dead,” said the doctor softly, and he drew a corner of the sheet over that quiet face.

“She didn’t quite lock the breech,” he went on, picking up the battered shotgun. “I told you last night, unk, it didn’t work properly. When she closed the breech, this catch failed to take hold, and the kick broke it open again, so the shell drove backward out of the breech and struck her in the temple.”

He straightened, sighing deeply. “I want you-all to listen,” he told us impressively, “and remember this, whenever you think about Miss McGregor: she wasn’t to blame! She wasn’t responsible for her acts; she was insane. Think of her as kindly as you can, all of you. Poor soul! She’s dead now; she’s paid for everything. Remember, don’t blame her, any of you--ever! She wasn’t responsible.”

Spoken at that time and place, the words struck deep, as he knew they would, I suppose. And I think that our memories of the poor woman have all been kindlier for them. It was a gentle, knightly speech from the man whom she had tried to murder twice in four hours.

“But--but I don’t understand yet,” put in Dorothy. Indeed all of us shared her bewilderment, I think. “Aunt Mary did it--she shot Doctor Gaskell, I suppose, since she admitted it. But how, why, and how did you find out?”

“Come out into the living room and I’ll explain,” he said. “It’s all clear enough now.”

We trooped out after him; a motley crowd we must have made, too. Somers was fully dressed; at least he wore tennis shoes, an old pair of flannel trousers, and Peter’s jersey, which made his lean torso more unbelievably skinny than ever. But the rest of us were in advanced negligee. I wore trousers; Peter had only a bathrobe over his pajamas; both the girls were in kimonos, with hair in braids down their backs. We were a ludicrous sight, no doubt, but none of us had the heart to laugh.

“As soon as I heard about the Poltergeist,” Somers began, “I suspected Aunt Mary. Such tricks always indicate that there’s an hysterical person somewhere about. This ‘Poltergeist’ stuff and the witchcraft, that dozens of harmless old women were burned alive for, not so many centuries ago--they’re all the work of hystericals. Such cases delight in mystifying people, scaring them, playing queer, malicious tricks on them, and all that. It’s been a well-recognized sign of hysteria for fifty years. So as soon as I heard of the Poltergeist, I began to look for an hysterical, and that led straight to Aunt Mary; she had all the earmarks.

“I concluded right away that her paralysis was hysterical, too, or she couldn’t get about to play ghost. Palsies are common enough in hysteria, you know. I don’t mean that she faked it consciously; she was really paralyzed. That is, she couldn’t move her legs because she _believed_ she couldn’t. She didn’t pretend. At night she’d get out of bed in a state of hysterical somnambulism and go about playing ghost; but, when she got back to bed, she’d forget all about that. When she was fully awake she was paralyzed; she couldn’t move, and I’ve no doubt that she used to believe in the Poltergeist as firmly as any of you.

“She was in the same state, no doubt, when she went out with Peter’s shotgun that morning. The quail disturbed her, and she thought, as far as sleepwalkers do think, she’d only to go out and point a gun to kill them. She knew that shotgun was on the back porch, didn’t she?”

I nodded. “I left it out there for Lewis,” I explained. “He was to come over early for it. And I remember Aunt Mary sent for me, when I was going to bed, to ask where it was, and if it was safe.”

“Quite so.” Somers paused, scowling ruefully. “I’ve been frightfully stupid all through this thing!” he declared. “I knew Miss McGregor was hysterical; why, those ‘knots in her neck’ alone would have proved that. I was convinced she was playing ghost, just as one takes any unimportant thing for granted without stopping to verify it. But it never occurred to me that, if she could get up to play ghost, she could have got up to shoot Gaskell, too. The idea never entered my head until ‘Roaring Lafe’ Rutledge told us about the ‘ha’nt’ he saw. We owe him that, anyhow. And you chaps were pretty peeved with me afterward, when I said I thought it was the Poltergeist killed Gaskell, weren’t you?”

He gave us a fleeting glance and went on. “So Aunt Mary got up very quietly and went out after the shotgun. Your sleepiness, your hypothyroidism, Anne, made it very handy for her; she wasn’t afraid of waking you, and I suppose she was getting bolder. All her ghost tricks had gone unsuspected--who could suspect a paralytic of running about the house of nights?--and she figured she could even go out and let off a shotgun and get away with it; that is, if she thought about it at all, in this somnambulistic state of hers.

“Well, out she went, got the gun, loaded it, and went on into the brush, just about the time Gaskell entered it, I suppose. It must have been then that Rutledge saw her and was scared off. And then she met Doctor Gaskell face to face, out there. I wonder which of them was more startled? The shock wakened her, I suppose, and there she was, suddenly face to face with herself. It’s a terrible thing for anybody, that--to have all one’s little self-deceptions and hypocrisies stripped away in an instant, to see how one’s been fooling one’s self! And it is more terrible still for an hysterical, whose self-deceptions are deepest and most fully a part of the personality.

“There she was, compelled for once to admit to herself that she was an old faker, that she wasn’t paralyzed after all--or how could she be out there, standing up? I don’t know what happened, of course, or what Gaskell said. Something indiscreet, it must have been, or the old lady would have dropped down right there. Her paralysis would have returned as soon as she waked up, and she’d have had to be carried back to bed. But he said something, taunted her, I suppose; told her he knew all the time she was faking and wasn’t really paralyzed at all. And he laughed at her. That was very unwise; if he’d been used to handling the insane he never would have laughed.

“She was holding a loaded shotgun, and there was the only man on earth who knew her secret, who could expose her double life. And to have her secret known would destroy all the sympathy, all the admiration which she’d worked for so patiently these fourteen years and more. And Gaskell laughed!

“Well, anger and excitement kept her up, I suppose, and enabled her to forget her paralysis for the moment. She shot him; raced back to the house, cleaned the gun, and put it where she found it; ran to her room and popped back into bed, with her heart racing horribly, I suppose. And there her paralysis came back. Two minutes later she couldn’t have stood on her feet any more than a real, organic paralytic.

“The thing preyed on her, of course, tormented her conscience. You noticed the change; you all spoke of it, how she grew more irritable, more selfish and exacting, every day. And Lewis’ arrest made it worse, of course. She had a hard time, poor, crazy old woman! But, after she had killed one man to preserve her pitiful secret, one could hardly expect her to betray it, just to save the life of another. She hoped, no doubt, that Lewis would be acquitted; but most of all she hoped that she wouldn’t be suspected. I knew she was uneasy about me; she was afraid I might guess, and you remember what a scene she made when I tried to examine her. She feared I’d discover, as Gaskell had, that she could walk after all. The whole thing preyed on her and made her more restless of nights; it brought on new attacks of somnambulism, and the Poltergeist grew more active. Her fears of me worked on her unconscious mind until last night she tried to kill me with a knife.”

“Ah-h-h!” gasped Anne Christie. For neither of the girls knew of that carving knife which had transfixed Somers’ empty bed. “Ah, my dear!”

The physician took her hand. “I wasn’t there, Anne,” said he gently. “I was up, watching the stairs; I hoped the Poltergeist might make its appearance last night. That’s why I was so rude at supper and told everybody I didn’t believe in it. I hoped that, if Aunt Mary thought me a skeptic, the Poltergeist might come up to convince me. But I hardly looked for a carving knife!

“It worked, though,” he went on. “The ghost walked, but she got away from me. I didn’t know about the back stairs, and she must have slipped down that way, while I ran up the front ones. I nearly had her at that; she dropped your rings, Dorothy, just as she was sliding through the door.

“Well, I had proved to myself, then, that Aunt Mary was the ghost, but I hadn’t caught her. And I knew that, unless I did, it was quite useless to ask for a confession. So I went on with this other plan. You know how the quail annoyed her all along; it was that started this whole dreadful affair. And lately they worried her even more; she thought they were accusing her, as she said just now. So I borrowed this gun and left it on the porch, right where the other had been, and spoke about it at supper, to make sure she knew. Then this morning I hid right outside her window and imitated the whistle of a quail. It was the same situation, you see, and I hoped it might arouse the same reaction.

“It did. You were there, too, Uncle George. I whistled and whistled; at last we heard the old lady call. Anne didn’t answer; she was too sleepy, I suppose. But I told her last night to pretend to be asleep anyway, whatever happened. At last, satisfied that she was safe, Aunt Mary got up and went after the gun, just as I’d hoped she would. She didn’t come outdoors, as I’d expected; she was too upset, too irrational to realize, I suppose, that some one would surely hear if she fired from her window. All she knew was that a quail was just outside, and she must silence it somehow. When she shot, Uncle George and I ran in; you know the rest.”

Dorothy relaxed with a tired sigh. “Oh, dear!” she whispered. “I’m so tired, so kind of stunned and numb! I don’t know what to think. I ought to be sorry, but all I can feel is a sense of relief. Lewis free, no more Poltergeist, and no more Aunt Mary to complain all the time. Oh, dear me, it’s horrid, it’s unnatural!”

Poor child! She had been through so much. This last tragedy had stunned her; she had no emotions left.