“A bullet just above the ear. That’s a bad place. Thank goodness there’s not much blood. Cold water will take it out of the carpet. Not hot. Not hot. Do you want to set the stain?”
“Look here,” Sperry said, looking around the table. “I don’t like this. It’s darned grisly.”
“Oh, fudge!” Herbert put in irreverently. “Let her rave, or it, or whatever it is. Do you mean that a man is dead?”—to the medium.
“Yes. She has the revolver. She needn’t cry so. He was cruel to her. He was a beast. Sullen.”
“Can you see the woman?” I asked.
“If it’s sent out to be cleaned it will cause trouble. Hang it in the closet.”
Herbert muttered something about the movies having nothing on us, and was angrily hushed. There was something quite outside of Miss Jeremy’s words that had impressed itself on all of us with a sense of unexpected but very real tragedy. As I look back I believe it was a sort of desperation in her voice. But then came one of those interruptions which were to annoy us considerably during the series of sittings; she began to recite Childe Harold.
When that was over,
“Now then,” Sperry said in a businesslike voice, “you see a dead man, and a young woman with him. Can you describe the room?”
“A small room, his dressing-room. He was shaving. There is still lather on his face.”