"Apparently Reed knows nothing," Nora said. "But the old woman—"
"I'm thinking about the room where Taylor's body lies," Garth replied. "From the first an attempt seems to have been made to color the case with the supernatural. The wording of Taylor's note, for instance. An illusion is furnished us that it was written after the man's death. That is followed by another illusion that his cold hand wounded McDonald with the knife. And this crying! The complete disappearance of the black figure almost under our eyes! I grant you it's a moldy, unhealthy house, but it can't shelter such miracles. These phases are clearly manifestations of some abnormal criminality. I have to work on physical lines. The black figure proves that the woman is actually hidden here. The knife on Taylor's bed means that the murderer was in the room this evening. McDonald's gesture, instead of accusing, probably tried to tell me that; tried to warn me, perhaps, that the murderer would return again to the body. I didn't tell Reed the truth. I am going to that room about which nearly everything centers. Before the night is over it may tell me what McDonald tried to say. There at any rate my mind should be more receptive to that flash of intuition I need to make some theory fit this mystery. Since the house is clearly dangerous, Nora, I want you to go home."
Her laugh was uncomfortable, but Garth recognized its determined quality.
"I'll see it through, thanks," she said. "I want this sense of suffering destroyed. I want—you don't know how anxious I am—to see the case put on a physical basis. So I'll watch with you."
Since he failed to alter her determination, he sent her upstairs to make sure no one was spying, for he wanted their entrance of the room of death to remain a secret. She beckoned him from the head of the stairs, and he went up, and they entered the black room.
Garth closed the door and snapped his light on. Immediately strange reflections played again over the face of the dead man. Its sneering expression seemed to follow Garth as he moved about, searching in the closets and the bath room, looking behind each piece of furniture. Meantime Nora waited, for the moment stripped of her familiar confidence. She watched the dead man rather than Garth. The knife and the revolver, close to the cold and motionless hand, appeared to fascinate her.
"No one," Garth whispered. "No evidence, beyond the knife, that any one has been here unlawfully."
He removed the cushions from a lounge and arranged them in a window recess. He seated himself with Nora there. He drew the curtains so that they would be thoroughly concealed from any one entering the room. Then he snapped off the light.
The vigil, Garth realized nearly at once, would not be comfortable. Nora's obvious tenseness encouraged him to morbid fancies, to formidable premonitions. The heavy black silence of the decaying house became more oppressive. The near presence of the soulless thing on the bed, which had yielded to him the puzzling note, seemed through the night capable of a malicious and unique activity. Garth, in spite of himself, became expectant of some abnormal and impossible movement in the room. Nora, he knew, listened with him. Once she whispered:
"Haven't you a feeling there is some one here who laughs at us?"