While I wrestled with that one, he said, "Maybe I could be a trifle more explicit."
"That would help."
His bright little eyes got even brighter. "Do you know, by chance, of the Reamer mansion over in Carleton?"
I certainly did. It was some thirty miles from Patterson, but as a child, I'd visited the place. All children within the radius had visited the Reamer mansion at least once. It was an ancient fifteen room cockroach trap with such a history of death and violence behind it as to cause the kids to walk on tiptoe through its silent rooms. I told the professor I knew about it.
"It has been vacant for fifteen years," he observed.
"And will be vacant for twice fifteen more, I imagine."
"That's just the point. Superstition. Otherwise solid and sane people wouldn't dream of moving into the Reamer mansion. And it's so silly."
"It is?"
"Of course. And that's why I'm here. I intend to prove, so the most stubborn will understand, that the house itself has nothing whatsoever to do with its own grim past; that the people who lived in it are to blame."
It was a dull day and he was such an apparently sincere little man that I decided to keep the conversation alive. "I'm afraid you'll have a hard time proving it. Let's see—the first one was old Silas Reamer. He committed suicide there. That was sometime around 1925. Then—"