The Avenger 36 - Demon Island by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page A

maybe have to talk to somebody.
    Maybe that Dr. Winters. He was supposed to be an expert on the occult.
    Whoa now, old girl, she said to herself. Why’d you think of him? A ghost doctor isn’t what . . . but it is.
    Yes, that was it. Fanny was certain—well, nearly certain—that what was happening to her involved . . .
    “Darn it.”
    Every time she got close to putting a finger on what it was, she lost it.
    Fanny moved slowly across the room toward the door.
    Something had a hold on her. Something that could take her and make her get up and go out of the castle and . . .
    “My lord!” She found it difficult to breathe.
    She’d seen a man’s face in her memory. A man choking and gagging his life out.
    A man with her hands around his throat.
    She swayed. Knocked against a rack of costumes and set them to rattling on their hangers.
    Then she ran to the door and got out of the shadowy room.

    Terence O’Malley was sitting in a wicker armchair, making notes in the margins of the next day’s shooting script. “Oy,” he said, “are we ever running behind schedule. And if I shoot the chase stuff out in the forest the way I want to, I’ll really go over budget. That’s the trouble with being a true artist in a junk business.”
    He rested the script on his knee, looked up at the beamed ceiling of his room, and thought, I wish we’d find Cole. His being lost, maybe dead, is my fault really. If I hadn’t invited him to tag along on this excursion . . . well, the Avenger will find him. That Nellie Gray is sort of cute. I wonder how she’d test?
    He picked up the script again and turned a page.
    “Hey?”
    A clattering noise. Somewhere near.
    O’Malley went to his door and pulled it open.
    The corridor was empty.
    At its end he noticed that the door of the wardrobe room was standing open. That wasn’t open the last time I went by, he thought, and I don’t think anybody’s working on costumes this late.
    Tossing aside the script, O’Malley stepped out into the dim corridor.
    There were no lights on in the wardrobe room. He felt around and located the switch that turned on the temporary lighting.
    Once when he’d done an Egyptian epic somebody had swiped a casket full of fake jewelry. But there wasn’t much from this flick worth swiping.
    He crossed the threshold, head craning from side to side.
    Nobody in here now. What was that smell?
    Two smells, my dear Watson, he corrected himself. One was the smell of wet ground. The other was . . . perfume. A sharp, wildflower scent.
    He saw the dress next.
    It had been dropped on the stone floor near the thin window. Beside it on the floor was one damp footprint.
    The bare foot of a woman.
    The dress was one which was used in the picture. Fanny Fiddler wore it. The hem of the dress was ripped in several places and stained with grass and mud-colored splotches.
    And that perfume is Fanny’s, too, he remembered.
    Brushing off the front of the dress, O’Malley hung it back on its rack.
    He left the wardrobe room and closed the door.
    He went back into his room. He wanted to think about what to do next.

CHAPTER XIII

Concerning a Dead Man
    A dozen seagulls were parading around the parking lot. From his desk in the San Amaro police station Lt. Bonner could see them clearly. There wasn’t much else to see out there. The gray-surfaced lot was walled in by the rear of the city hall, a supermarket, and the back of a bank. There’d been a little flurry of activity in front of the market about an hour ago. Word had gotten around that they were going to get a shipment of butter in. That proved only a rumor and the fifty housewives who’d lined up before the store opened were mad for a while.
    Lt. Bonner was a thin, wiry man of fifty-one. He liked to wear whipcord pants and shirts on the job. Suits and ties annoyed him, made him uncomfortable.
    His phone rang.
    He answered it with, “Bonner here.”
    “This is Richard Benson,” said a strong, clear voice. “I’m calling you