“But why should Carlos want to do such a despicable thing? We’ve never done him an injury. Why, we never even spoke to him except on that one morning when we tried to get him to tell us about Las Golondrinas.”
“We can’t possibly know yet what his object may be. We may be doing him a wrong by suspecting him. Just the same, he’s the only person we have any reason to suspect.”
“He might have done it to get even with us because Mab asked him if Rosita was crazy. I’ve always heard that Latins are very vengeful.”
Racking her agile brain for a motive, Patsy now advanced this theory.
“Let’s go back a little farther,” replied Bee. “Carlos is old Rosita’s grandson. Rosita must hate us or she wouldn’t have called us names and treated us as she did. Granted, she hates us. Maybe Carlos hates us, too. We know he doesn’t like us. He showed us that much and very plainly.”
Bee paused, mentally trying to fit Patsy’s theory to her own.
“There’s more to it than spite because Mab asked Carlos whether Rosita was crazy,” she continued reflectively. “Now I believe I begin to see. Neither Carlos nor Rosita wants us to live here. Why wouldn’t that account for this ghost affair? Carlos might have done it to scare us, believing we wouldn’t stay in a haunted house. He frightened Mammy Luce out of here. I’m sure if Emily or Celia had seen——”
Bee’s low-toned discourse was suddenly interrupted by a wild shriek of mortal terror from somewhere below stairs. It floated up to the two girls through the half-open door, echoing and re-echoing through the corridors. It was followed by a succession of shrieks, each rising a trifle higher than the preceding one.
“Come on.”
Leaping out of bed, Bee snatched her kimono from a nearby chair, slipped her arms into it and darted, bare-footed, from the room.