“Dead, ain’t they?” she said, with a grieved intonation that robbed her words of curtness. “What happened to ’em?”
The simple question roused them all. What had happened? What had killed two strong, well, able-bodied people at the same moment, and that the very moment said to be fatal in that dread house?
“I believe,” said the Professor, dropping his face in his hands, “I believe now in the supernatural. Nothing else can explain this thing.”
“Of course not,” and Eve solemnly acquiesced. “There is no possibility of anything else. What could kill them, like this, at once, and at four o’clock exactly, except a supernormal agent?”
“But that seems so impossible!” and Tracy’s practical, matter-of-fact voice did indeed make it seem so.
“What else is possible?” broke in Landon. “It isn’t suicide, it isn’t murder. It isn’t death from natural causes,—at least, it can’t be in Vernie’s case,—I suppose Mr. Bruce might have died from heart disease.”
“That’s why we want a doctor,” said Eve. “We can judge nothing until we know the immediate cause of death.”
“I wish we were in the city,” Tracy said; “the doctor will be nearly an hour getting here, I suppose.”
“Did you tell him all?” asked Eve.
“No, I didn’t. It didn’t seem wise to spread the news in that way. I told him to get here as soon as he possibly could,—that it was a matter of life and death.”